“And you wanna go there?” Renn asks, looking so grave, which happens only rarely.
“Yes.”
“What about…” Renn pauses for a second. “What about Nelson? And your sessions?”
“Yeah, you sure you want to put yourself through such stress? I don’t mean to sound blunt or anything, but, Vi, look at the coffee shop you chose,” says Penny.
I knew it.
I knew they were thinking I’m not ready.
“What about it?” I ask, defensively.
“It’s a hole in the wall,” she answers. “You can’t even see it from the street. There’s no one in here except that weird guy who keeps looking over. And it has a back door and it’s quite possibly the farthest away from your house with all the above-mentioned qualities.”
Okay, so everyone knows how weird I am.
Everyone knows about my front-door phobia – I can’t get in through the front door; too much attention. I like backdoors and sneaking in. Not to mention, they know about my disguise and the fact that I’m not well.
But I am well.
I am. I am handling things my way.
I narrow my eyes at her.
I narrow my eyes at all of them. “I’m fine. Everything is fine, okay? I’m handling everything.”
They don’t believe me.
It’s okay. They don’t have to. Only I have to believe that I’m fine.
Positive thinking, right?
I take in a deep breath – probably my eight-hundredth – and unclench my hands in my lap and bring them up to the table. “And I have to do this. I owe it to him to do this.”
Finally, Willow asks, “Do what, exactly?”
“Apologize. For what I did to him. For everything that happened.”
“For kissing him, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re going to go say sorry?”
I open my mouth to answer, then close it. I don’t know how to explain it to them. I don’t know how to explain it to myself, even.
I don’t know how to put into words what I feel.
Every time I close my eyes, I see him. Not in the way that I used to, through the eyes of an infatuated teenager, but through the eyes of this grown-up girl who has done him harm.
I see his anger.
I see his fury just when they – Brian and Fiona – had caught us. I feel it burning hot even through time and space.
Like it’s happening right now. Right this second.
His dark eyes are glaring at me. His chest is heaving under that dress shirt he wore. I see his date-shoes that I ruined by stepping on them to reach his lips. I see the scattered, dead roses.
He looked like I’d ruined his life in that moment, and guess what, I did ruin his life.
He had to disappear because of me.
Finally, I manage a few words. “Sorry. Yeah, that’s something to start with. I’m not sure what I’ll do next though.”
“Vi, you made a mistake,” Willow says.
“Yeah. It was a mistake,” Renn confirms.
“A mistake that cost everything,” I say angrily.
On his behalf.
I’m so fucking mad, not for myself but for what he went through because of me.
“You didn’t know what was going to happen,” Penny argues. “You didn’t know someone was going to see it.”
“And take a photo of it,” Renn goes on.
“And put it on social media for everyone to see,” Willow finishes.
That was done by my sister, Fiona.
Yup, I kissed the wrong man and the whole world found out about it through my sister’s Instagram feed. She never liked me after I became friends with Brian so that was her way of taking revenge, I think.
It started with Brian and Fiona, who were coming to surprise me with a cake at midnight and they were meeting up in the driveway before going up to my room.
But then, they saw me.
My sister has never remembered my birthday. And the one time she remembers, I’m out kissing my best friend’s dad.
By the next morning, the whole neighborhood knew.
Slowly, the news reached farther because that photo – as blurry as it might be – got passed around and shared and commented on hundreds, if not thousands of times.
When one person called me a slut for kissing my neighbor, the coach of our football team, a man eighteen years older than me, ten different people cropped up and called me the same. People would send me hate emails, proposition emails. I got inundated with so many emails from creepy old guys that I had to shut down my email account.
I couldn’t go out without being recognized. Everyone in our town knew who I was. They’d stop on the streets and ask me if I was really her, the girl who kissed the coach at her school.
I stopped going out. I stopped even leaving my room. I’d keep my curtains closed, hide myself inside the comforter.
I’d only come out at night when no one could see me and I could see no one.