Chapter Thirty-Two
ANOTHER DAY, another afternoon of homework.
Victor’s father had landed another job and would be gone for hours, so on this day we were studying at Victor’s house.
The days were all running together. Graduation was in sight, and I just wanted to be done.
To get away from here somehow. Away from Peterson. Away from my parents.
And yes, even away from Victor.
I saw him in a completely different light now.
Ever since I started wondering if he was using me, all the things he’d done that had never made sense clicked into place.
My suspicions explained absolutely everything about him.
How fast we fell for each other. How he always made me come around to seeing things his way.
How I’d been so thoroughly enraptured with him that I gave him my best work and let him submit it as his own.
I’d stopped taking my anxiety pills a few days ago. I wanted to see whether they were making me paranoid. And since then I’d felt . . . I don’t know, better. Clearer. Less sleepy. More like myself.
Did I really have anxiety, like the doctor said? Maybe. Probably. But anxiety wasn’t why I’d spent a week in bed. That wasn’t a mental disorder—that was disappointment. Dramatic disappointment, yes. But disappointment nonetheless.
Victor lay sprawled on his bed, history textbook open and propped up on his pillow. His mostly empty bottle of Coke stood on the desk beside him, and he’d taken his glasses off to rub his eyes. I sat at the desk working on math homework.
Victor reached over and patted my knee. Nothing he hadn’t done before and nothing that used to make me uncomfortable.
But now, rather than being drawn to Victor’s nearness, I was almost repelled by it.
The whole left side of my body, the side closest to him, seemed to shrivel and shrink back. The muscles tensed.
Why was this happening? This was Victor. The man I loved.
But this was Victor. The man who might have been pretending to love me.
My brain may not have figured out yet whether I trusted him entirely or not, but my body seemed to have decided.
Nature called, and I stood. “I’m going to the powder room. Need anything? Another Coke? Some water?” Why was I being so nice to him? Must have been like a reflex. Like I’d been programmed somehow.
He put his glasses back on and smiled up at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Another Coke would be great. Thanks.”
He handed me his empty bottle, and I took it to the kitchen and tossed it in the trash, then visited the powder room just off the kitchen. When I finished, I washed my hands, grabbed a fresh bottle of Coke, and returned to his bedroom.
Victor wasn’t on the bed anymore. He’d moved to the desk.
What was he doing? Looking at my math homework? Checking it over to make sure I didn’t have too many wrong answers?
No. It wasn’t my math he was holding.
It was my music notebook.
My blood chilled. “Victor? Wha . . . what are you doing?”
He glanced up, the expression in his eyes stony and cold. “Turnabout is fair play, Iris. I’m doing to you what you did to me last week at Sammy’s when I went to the little boys’ room and came back to find you going through my stuff.”
I set the Coke down with a little more force than necessary, and it thunked loudly onto the desk. “I told you. I knocked your books on the floor by accident. I was checking a math problem.”
He plopped the notebook on the desk and folded his arms across his chest. “The back of my Whitehall acceptance letter is a funny place to look for that.”
I knew it. He knew what Professor Hochsteiner had written on the back of his letter—about my piece. And he hadn’t told me. On purpose.
He hadn’t forgotten. He chose not to tell me, for reasons only he knew.
Something in me snapped. All the frustration of the last few weeks—months, maybe my whole life—balled up inside me, fierce and hot.
Maybe anger, maybe God, maybe a combination of both.
But something gave me the courage to meet Victor Nelson’s eyes and ask the question that had been on my heart since last week.
“When were you going to tell me what Professor Hochsteiner wrote?”
Victor regarded me like I was a fly buzzing around his head. “It was on my acceptance letter. With my name on it. Addressed to me. It wasn’t any of your business, Iris.” He lifted his chin. “Going through someone’s mail is a crime, you know.”
“Only if it’s unopened.” I didn’t actually know that, but I’d bet he didn’t either. “And that piece you sent for your audition was my piece.”
“Which you gave to me, at which point it became my piece. As far as Whitehall is concerned, I wrote it. Professor Hochsteiner thinks that’s my work. That’s what got me in.”
“But you and I both know you’re not the one who wrote it.
” I punctuated my last few words with angry gestures.
“‘A brilliance we rarely see.’ ‘Quite extraordinary.’ ‘Remarkably gifted.’ All that was written about me, Victor. Not you. No one up there knows the quality of your work, because you didn’t send your work. You sent mine.”
He stood, cheeks pink. “And you gave it to me. It was your idea. I didn’t ask you for your piece. I tried not to take it. The only reason I did was because I was desperate. This whole mess is your fault, Iris, not mine.”
I stepped to the side as though to dodge the arrow of blame he’d just shot my way. “What are you going to do when you get to Whitehall and you can’t get any good ideas? Huh? Did you think of that?”
“Of course I did,” he said through gritted teeth. “And you ruined my plan for that too. We were supposed to go together. Compose together. Become Victor Nelson and Iris Nelson. Names in lights, remember?”
Suddenly the plan took a sinister turn. Two names in lights, but would only one have been doing the actual work?
“And if you truly were the genius Hochsteiner thinks you are, then how come you couldn’t do it twice?
How come one of your pieces was ‘a brilliance we rarely see’”—he made air quotes—“and the other one wasn’t even good enough to get you in?
Honestly, Iris. Your ego is the size of Alaska right now, which is exactly why I didn’t show you that note.
This is what I thought would happen. Do you ever think about any-one’s needs but your own? ”
“I’m the one who only thinks about myself?
” If I weren’t furious, I’d have laughed in his face.
“What about you? This whole time it’s been about you, you, you.
Nothing but you. Your family issues. Your draft number getting called.
Your future. Whitehall wasn’t just about your future, Victor. It was about my future too.”
“Oh, please, Iris.” His neck and cheeks mottled a deep red.
“Your family is loaded. You can afford to do whatever you want, whenever you want. And you’re a girl, so you don’t ever have to worry about getting drafted either.
You get all the lucky breaks. You have no idea how good you have it.
You have so much privilege you can’t even imagine what it’s like to be from the wrong side of the tracks. ”
“And yet the things I wanted most in the world, money can’t buy.” My eyes filled with sudden tears. My words were truer than I realized.
I couldn’t make my parents accept me as myself.
I couldn’t make Whitehall see my talent.
And I couldn’t make Victor love me. Not the way I wanted and needed to be loved. I wanted to be loved thoroughly and completely—not for what I could give to someone but for who I was. And nobody in my life loved me like that. Absolutely nobody.
Wait. Someone did.
A gentle rebuke hit my heart, beautiful and bittersweet. Jesus loved me that way. He loved me exactly as I was. So much that he’d given his life for me. And I’d been chasing everything but him. Worshipping the image of what I wanted my future to be.
That was what Victor was. A bronze statue. An idol. Shiny on the outside but hollow on the inside. He didn’t love me. And I’d been foolish enough to love him. To give him my music. Music that had once belonged only to God.
And I’d given Victor my heart too.
Well, I was taking them back. Both my heart and my music. But not to keep for myself.
To give back to the one who gave me those things in the first place.
“I’m sorry, Iris.” Victor reached for my hand. “Forgive me. I’m just a little on edge.”
I pulled my hand away. “Why? Because you’re afraid you won’t be able to handle the high expectations Whitehall has for you?”
Pure rage filled his eyes. His face. It scared me, and I wanted to run, but as soon as it appeared, he tamped it down.
“I wouldn’t be in this mess,” he said, his jaw tight, “if it weren’t for your harebrained idea to give me your piece. Now you have no choice. You owe me.”
I got him out of being drafted, and I owed him? “What exactly do I owe you?”
“Your music notebook.”
The words were a knife to my chest. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s only fair.”
“Fair?” My voice sounded shrill. “What, exactly, is fair about me giving you my very best work, the very best of me, and then realizing you only wanted what I could do for you? You never loved me, Victor. You never even cared about me.”
He looked wounded, but his expression took longer to lock into place than a genuine one should have. “Iris, where is this coming from? I’m hurt. I’m genuinely hurt that you’d think that about me.”
He wasn’t denying it. He was just saying he was hurt.
Once again he’d made it all about him.
“Those pills must be doing a number on you,” he scoffed. “The Iris I know would never be so cruel.”
His accusation stung, but I pressed on. “The Iris you know was a weak little girl who had no idea she had actual talent, and now that she does know, she’s going after what’s rightfully hers.”
He laughed. “Oh, really? And how do you plan to do that, exactly?”
I folded my arms and met his cold-fish eyes. “I’m going to tell Whitehall what we did.”
He didn’t even blink. “No one’s going to believe you.
Think for just a second about how crazy this sounds.
‘Hi, I wrote a piece that got rejected—but this other piece, the one that’s so brilliant you had to write a personal note about it?
Yeah, I wrote that one too, except it just so happens to have my boyfriend’s name on it. ’”
When he put it like that, it did sound a little crazy. Couldn’t let him know that, though. I put on my bravest face. “I’ll never know unless I try.”
“And you’ll forever be branded as someone nobody can believe. Iris, you’re mentally ill. So much so that you need medication.”
“I’m not taking it anymore.”
“And there’s the problem. Right there.” Victor’s voice was calm.
Soothing, almost. “Iris, you need help. And the worst part is that the problem is in your mind.” He tapped my forehead.
“Your brain doesn’t work right. The doctor said so himself.
But because your mind doesn’t work right, you can’t see how crazy you sound right now. ”
No . . . wait . . . I went off the medication because I thought it made me paranoid. I felt clearer now that I’d stopped taking it, yet Victor seemed just as conniving. Manipulative. He . . . he was probably manipulating me right now.
Or was it my brain that lied to me?
“Go home, Iris.” He swept a lock of hair off my forehead, his touch as light and sweet as cotton candy. “Go home and take your medication. You’ll feel a lot better once you do. Trust me.”
Trust him? I couldn’t do that. Not anymore. But I wasn’t sure I could trust myself either.
“This’ll all be better in the morning.” He brushed his lips against my cheek. “You’re lucky I’m the forgiving sort.”
“Forgiving?” I stepped back. “But I don’t need you to forgive me. Because I’m not apologizing. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Sweet little crazy Iris.” His expression seemed almost paternal. “Please go home and take your medicine.”
I nodded slowly, an idea forming. “You’re right, Victor. Of course you’re right. I . . . I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m not in my right mind.”
He smiled. “There you go. See? A couple of those pills and it’ll all be better in the morning.”
“Would you get my jacket?” My voice was honey-sweet. “I think it’s on the hook by the front door.”
“Of course.”
The moment he left the room, I swept my music notebook off the desk and stuffed it into my bag, along with the rest of my homework. Then I headed down the hall to the living room, where he waited for me, my jacket in hand.
“Thank you.” I took it from him and walked out the door, cool as a cucumber, then turned back.
“Oh, and one more thing, Victor. When I write that letter to Whitehall, I’ll tell them I gave my piece to my former boyfriend.
Because I deserve someone who loves me. Not just someone who wants to use me to get ahead. ”
Without waiting for a reply, I took off down the street as fast as I dared. I half expected him to chase after me, but he didn’t. Since his father was at work, the car was gone, and Victor would have had to run.
He hated running.
And I was pretty sure he didn’t care about me enough to chase me down.
Had he realized I’d taken my music notebook back?
Well, even if he had, I was too far away now for him to catch me. And if he came to my house, I’d have Flora tell him to go away. That I didn’t want to see him, now or ever.
Sure. He could have my notebook.
Over my dead body.