Chapter 20
20
Olivia
Will’s face is gushing blood as I push Ben away from him. I’ve seen Will angry before, but the fury that is Benjamin Cabot in this moment is not even comparable. All eyes are on us as other donors have filtered onto our balcony to see what is going on. My voice has gone hoarse with each shout. It’s like he can’t hear me, that or he doesn’t want to.
“BEN, STOP,” I scream, right into his face this time, and finally he sees me. His eyes meet mine and his gaze moves through emotions so quickly it’s hard to keep track of how he’s feeling. I feel the whispers of my peers like hail on my back.
“How could she cheat on Will?”
“What a whore?”
“I don’t blame her. Ben’s hot, but his brother? That’s cold.”
I feel outside of myself as I move through the next motions. I try to help Will up as he spits blood, his eyebrow completely split and needing a stitch or two. He shrugs me off, tears in his eyes either from the pain, the embarrassment, or what he considers my betrayal. I keep my voice low in order to avoid the numerous onlookers.
“Let’s go.” I see Ben flinch, clearly hearing me, but I need to do this before I lose my momentum, before the thoughts of my peers and their impressions of me sway me. I meet Ben’s eyes, but there’s something broken in them, and I feel my throat bob. He shakes his head and turns, Grant clapping his. I feel like I ruined something, but I have to keep moving.
I pull Will through the crowd, grabbing a towel off a waiter's arm and dumping some ice out of the water on a nearby table. I hold it to his face. Once we get to the valet and I pull Will’s wallet out of his coat pocket, his posture relaxes.
“Liv—” his voice is the one he’s always used. Every fight, every time we’ve bickered, when it’s time for me to forgive him he pulls out this voice.
“No— Will. Don’t.” For a second he looks like he’s going to argue, but then he nods once and lets me speak, which is a first in our relationship. “I wanted a break so I could think about things. I didn’t realize this going to be all the time I needed to really know what decision to make.” His posture is rigid again as if he knows what’s coming. It would be surprising if he didn’t after the shit he just pulled.
I take a deep breath, steadying myself.
“This relationship is over Will, and I mean that. It has nothing to do with your brother or the coat check girl, or hell, even Gen. We don’t work Will, we’ve never worked. I am not myself when I’m with you and you are hiding from yourself when you're with me.”
His feet shift as he looks up, tears streaking his face. “I fucked up, Olivia. I’m fucked up.” His voice is filled with desperation as if me giving him a second chance will fix him, fix this. For a second I pause and take in the boy I was head over heels for when first coming to Astor. He’s older now, taller and wider somehow, more handsome, but something changed. We worked against each other; we made each other smaller and smaller until we both disappeared.
“I can’t fix you Will and you can’t fix me.” He meets my gaze, his lips a thinly formed line as if he’s coming to terms with the fact that this is really over just as his car arrives.
“Just come home with me, please. Just tonight.” His eyes brim with tears as he softly grabs my hand and I feel my own tears fall down my cheeks.
“I can’t.” We stand there for a second longer. He finally nods, getting in the car and shutting the door.
It’s Tuesday morning and I just got a text from Ian that there is a “911 Newspaper emergency. ” I stuffed my feet in an old pair of Uggs I had tucked away in my closet and threw on one of my Dad’s old flannels that I sometimes sleep in because they smell like home.
I haven’t heard from Ben in a few days and I’m wondering if I was too forward. Maybe he regrets the things he said, the things he almost did. I clench my jaw trying to quell my embarrassment. I felt so seen when he said all the things I’ve yearned to hear for so long after I confided in him about Lily. About how ordinary she made me feel. After that fight though, with all those eyes on us, it’s like I completely reverted to the girl I described myself as. The pressure I felt from having an audience, to be pretty, to be perfect, to be better . I just wanted their eyes off me. I needed to make the spectacle end. So I left, but not before officially ending things with Will.
I think when we age, we assume the behaviors of our younger years were due to a lack of maturity, and when we no longer behave that way, we attribute it to “changing” or “personal growth” or whatever. That is not the case, at least for me anyway. So much of my adolescence was spent feeling embarrassed, whether it was warranted or not, and lately that feeling has come up more and more. Having a friend who is so enigmatic, like Lily, means that you will at some point feel a flush of shame wash over you when they point out the weird or subpar thing you did. That’s youth, though, I think and yet, that feeling haunts me. We’re all automatically, subconsciously, assessing each other for faults and virtues, usually keeping a quiet score in our head. Lily didn’t have to keep a quiet score because somehow I always came up short and every time she highlighted my faults, I froze, recovered, and brushed it under my rug of resentment.
It feels gross, resenting a dead person, your dead best friend. But last night, when I was tossed back into my eighth grade form in a room of bodies in black tie, the feeling I felt after stupidity was resentment. And maybe that, mixed with the realization that I’ve brushed so much under the rug with Will, too, is why I’m letting the ginger tea I put in my thermos this morning scald my esophagus.
The weather matches my mood, the gray clouds hanging low in the sky seeming to sag with rain begging to be let out. The humidity hits my nose and I'm teleported again to the summer I spent with Lily in the Hamptons. I have a tendency to always think of the beginning of that summer and not the end. I was so excited to be spending a summer with Lily, that she just wanted me to go with her, ignoring the pleas to join her from the rest of our friend group.
I pull the heavy door of the journalism building and find Ian in ‘The Stacks,’ otherwise known as the Astor Hills archives. The mothball scent of old newspapers hits my nose as I observe Ian frantically skimming the papers in row E. If there’s one thing I’ve never seen Ian be, it’s frantic. I’m instantly on edge as I approach.
“Hey…” I say, wearily.
“Hey,” he says without glancing my way, completely focused on whatever task is at hand.
“What, no you look like you got hit by a bus, Olivia?” I attempt a joke and Ian finally glances my way.
He rolls his eyes. “You do look like a bus hit you but that is the least of my worries right now.” He picks up a large bin filled with papers and all but shoves them into my hands. “Look through this and then start rows F and G and tell me if you see any papers from September 2022.”
Holding the large box I look up at him incredulously. He’s basically just asked me to look through hundreds of newspapers for only five or six that have gone missing.
“Why are we doing this?” I ask. My head is pounding from a hangover and lack of sleep. The last thing I want is to sift through old newspapers. He rolls his eyes, clearly frustrated with my questioning. He stands up straighter, assessing me.
“So I take it you made the ‘break’ official?” he asks, sitting on the corner of his desk.
I clench my jaw not really wanting to deal with Ian’s journalistic line of questioning. I used to think it was his convoluted way of friendship, the only way he knew how to communicate. Lately, I’ve started wondering if maybe he’s just always seen me as a ticking time bomb, the next big story to plaster on the front page of the school paper. After what happened at the gala, I wouldn’t put it past him. I set down the bin he basically assaulted me with and begin sifting, averting his gaze.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he says, his tone incredulous, frustrated I’m evading his questions.
“I don’t see how that is relevant to the task at hand,” I say through gritted teeth. It’s not like I expected sympathy from Ian, but maybe a ‘How are you holding up?’ The realization that he’ll ultimately give me the third degree and move on without considering how I feel is grating on my nerves.
“How is this relevant ?” He twists his features in mockery. “Wow, Olivia. One break up and you really have let your journalistic instincts fall to the wayside.” I grimace into the box. He might be right— it’s not like I took the time to stop and think about the significance of the misplaced papers. But on a day like today, it would be nice for him to just spell it out for me. I give him a look that says ‘not today’ and he sighs, giving me what I feel is his version of a break. “Liv, what happened in September 2022?” He raises his eyebrows at me gesturing with his hand for me to give him the response he’s looking for. My anger comes to a boil, knowing exactly what event he’s referencing— Ben leaving Astor.
“Is this really about my story, Ian?”
He rolls his eyes. “You mean the biggest story to come this year? A story that we can’t just not report on because you’ve become entangled in what appears to be a pretty big mess of your own?”
I cross my arms staring at him. I know he’s right— that this is the exact story we should be focusing on. And because he’s already done me a favor by not sending out a breaking news notification to all our online subscribers about the disaster that was the gala, I decide to humor him.
“Okay, so the papers from the month Ben disappeared are missing—” I make a hand gesture as if to imply this is all so spooky. “What's your point— that his parents tried to hide something? That’s pretty obvious.”
“I thought so too, which is why I told you to find out what they were hiding, and yet you fell short,” he says, hands clasped together. “I took it upon myself to begin threading the needle for you, so to speak. Maybe inspire you to, I don't know, do your job?”
I scowl at him even though I know he’s right. To any journalist this would be a significant finding, but still I fail to see this as groundbreaking.
“Okay, so you found some missing papers. How do you know Ben was the reason they went missing? It could have been anything,” I say, doing my best to play along, but still feeling like Ian is shooting blanks.
“Interesting you say that. I asked myself the same thing and I found a rather intriguing through line for you to chew on, maybe explore a little bit, as any journalist probably would,” he says pointedly and I roll my eyes.
“Let’s hear it.” My voice comes out defeated and pissed off, which I can tell irritates Ian, but he lets it go.
“Well Olivia, what else happened in September of 2022? The second biggest story on campus that year?” His eyebrows are raised and I quickly pick up what he’s putting down. My body physically recoils. I’m offended he would even insinuate this, much less ask me to explore it.
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I seethe. “You’re not actually telling me to look into this? You seriously think Lily’s death is at all related to Ben’s absence?” I knew Ian was insensitive but didn’t peg him as completely and utterly tone deaf.
“Listen Liv, I’ll give you some time to decide and potentially find a relation here— if this is out of your depth I’ll give it to someone else, but regardless this story is going to be written.” His tone is straight forward, rather matter of fact, for what is essentially a threat.
I grab my bag and turn to leave.
“Think about it as a journalist, not as Olivia,” Ian calls to my turned back as I march out the doors. Ian’s journalist instincts are good, great even but he typically spirals until he finds an actual “ thread, ” as he put it. I’ve worked on stories with him where we grasped at straws just like this, spinning it in several ill-informed and unrealistic directions until it finally landed. I know this process, I’ve done this process, but I will not entertain this. This idea is too outside the realm of reality and a total waste of time.
I chew on my lip thinking about my night with Ben, how every piece of my life seemed to come into focus in a way it hadn’t before. I smile at the memory, my stomach fluttering with the anticipation of seeing him again. But my brain continues to buzz with Ian’s words about Ben leaving and the realization that I have this well of grief deep inside me that I’ve refused to deal with for the past two years.
I remember Ben’s face the moment I left with Will, defeat so etched in his gaze that it sealed my decision to end things with Will. I push the theories Ian strung out of my mind. There’s only one thing I want to focus on and that's figuring out where Ben and I stand.