17. Sadie #3
I remember Jayne wrapping her arms around me while I cried, and I felt a rush of appreciation for my sister. My twin.
“I’m so sorry, Dee,” she said. “You don’t deserve to go through this. I wish there was something I could say to make it better.”
“I just can’t believe it. I mean, I believe it, but how could they do this to me? In public?”
“They were both drunk. I honestly don’t know if they’ll even remember it this morning.”
“Who started it? Do you know? Did you see?”
Jayne took a deep breath and pulled away from me, looking me in the eyes. Looking in a mirror.
“I’d say it was Liz,” she said finally. “I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse for you, but she was all over Ben from the minute he came into the room. Obviously, he messed up, but she sure was making it hard for him to say no.”
Then I asked the question I was most afraid of: “Do other people know?”
“Yeah,” Jayne said. “I hate to say it, but I think everyone who was at the party knows. And if they all know…”
“Then by tomorrow the whole school is going to know,” I finished the sentence for her.
This was my literal nightmare.
It was Jayne’s idea that I take the next week off.
I had finally recovered from Covid, but it was a convenient reason to keep staying home.
Jayne said that she was starting to feel sick too, and even though I think my parents had their doubts, they let it slide.
Jayne and I used to be inseparable when we were little, but middle school and high school had changed that.
We just had different hobbies and different types of people we hung out with—I think they figured that, whether we were really sick or not, a little sibling bonding was exactly what we needed.
It took a few days of nonstop carryout and Dawson’s Creek binges for me to feel ready to talk to Liz and Ben about what had happened. Jayne was actually the one who told me not to.
“Let them come to you,” she said. “They probably don’t even know you know. Won’t it be interesting to see which one of them decides to come clean first?”
On the one hand, I agreed with her. On the other hand, I hated the fact that apparently neither of them had thought to tell me right when it had happened. And they still hadn’t said anything. My phone didn’t have a single notification from either of them.
“You’re better off without them, anyway,” Jayne said. “Liz is basically a parasite on this family—I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true—and you can do so much better than Ben Carrera. He’s a big fish in a small pond. Go get yourself a damn whale.”
I had to laugh at that, which seemed to make Jayne happy. Ultimately, though, I didn’t listen. And I think that really ticked her off.
Because a few days later, Liz came clean about what happened.
And then so did Ben. The funny thing is that both of them thought that I didn’t know yet and seemed to be under the impression that even though Jayne knew, she hadn’t said a word to me—in fact, she’d told each of them that if they didn’t tell me, she would.
But she already had… It was one of those moments I sometimes had with Jayne that made me question what was going on in her mind.
Between that and the kind of so-called games she and Evan liked to play, manipulating people into doing things just to see if they could…
I don’t know. I just never understood her.
She was my twin sister, and in so many ways, we could read each other’s minds.
But I felt like Jayne knew everything there was to know about me, yet there was still some part of her that I wasn’t seeing.
Anyway, the bottom line with Liz and Ben was that the more time I spent talking to each one of them, the more I realized that the entire perfectly balanced equilibrium of our social lives depended on my forgiving them.
So I did. It’s not like I was being noble about it.
To be honest, I just decided that I could ditch Liz after graduation if I felt like it, and I figured that Ben’s transgression would just end up being one of those things we talked about ten years from now as the moment he realized I would always be the only girl for him.
And, look, it’s not like he gave me much of a choice when it came to whether or not we were going to stay together.
After we’d talked things out a bit and I told him I wasn’t sure if I would stay with him, he literally started showing up at our house night after night, playing “In Your Eyes” from my favorite eighties movie on an honest-to-God boom box. Where do you even find one of those?
After the first night, I begged him to stop.
I remember being out in the front yard, crying and pleading with him to just leave and give me the time I needed to process everything.
He kept insisting he was out there for me, but it felt like he was really out there for himself, so he could feel better about whatever internal dialogue he had going on to prove to himself that he was the sincere, contrite boyfriend.
And, of course, he totally ignored my boundaries.
In fact, the next night, he just showed up again, even earlier, playing the music even louder.
My parents thought it was a romantic gesture (“He just loves you so much, Sadie. Give him another chance!” I remember my mom saying), and Jayne seemed to think it was hilarious.
I hated that—the way my parents just totally dismissed the fact that I felt like Ben was violating my trust all over again by not listening to me telling him to go.
And the way Jayne just laughed. She told me it was all she could do given the absurdity of the situation, and she told me that I should be laughing too. But I wasn’t.
Anyway, after two more nights of Ben showing up, I finally caved.
It was clear he wasn’t going to stop, and forgiving him honestly felt inevitable, anyway.
Of course we were staying together. We were Sadie and Ben.
When you’re high school sweethearts and you get together so young, you have to expect some ups and downs.
I knew enough about my parents’ relationship to know that there were some skeletons buried in the back of their closet, but I also knew enough not to ask about them.
Whatever those skeletons were, they’d put them behind them. And if Steven and Carly Cooper could do that and go on to build the gorgeous life they had, then I could deal with this, right?
I know I’m all over the place here, but the whole reason I dug into the Liz/Ben thing was because, like I said, meeting Mason suddenly made it a lot easier for me to truly, genuinely forgive Liz.
Because I stopped caring. It wasn’t a gradual thing either.
I kissed Mason Vreeland in that basement hallway, and it felt like a light switch turned on for the first time in a room I hadn’t even known existed.
I could forgive Liz, let go of things with Ben, and just be.
High school isn’t that simple, though, is it?
And, fine, I’ll admit it, I liked having my cake and eating it too.
Things with Ben were intense and definitely not always good, but they were also deeply familiar.
Our fights followed a pattern; our makeups followed a pattern.
It was like putting on an old sweater that might not look good on you anymore, but it’s still the most comfortable thing you own.
So you keep it, even when you shouldn’t.
Mason hated that. I couldn’t blame him, but I also couldn’t let go of the idea of the perfect life I was going to build with Ben.
It would have been a relief to tell Liz about all this.
It’s the kind of thing best friends are supposed to tell each other, and I knew more of Liz’s deep, dark secrets than anyone honestly should.
But I sort of prided myself on not having any deep, dark secrets.
One of the reasons why being friends with Liz was so easy was because our lives were such total and complete opposites.
I always knew I was just a little bit prettier, a little bit smarter, and a whole lot wealthier, and I had this perfect boyfriend too.
Liz just had a series of guys who could be referred to on a scale of “mistake” to “psycho.”
I liked feeling like I was better than her. Sue me.
And cheating on my longtime boyfriend with the hot art kid definitely did not fit into my idea of moral superiority. What would Liz have done, anyway? Given me advice? Thanks, but no thanks.
This was one secret I planned to take to my grave. But then two things happened that changed my point of view.
First, Mason and I slept together.
And second, Jayne asked Mason out.
The idea that Jayne would ask out anyone, at all, seemed impossible to me.
I knew that she preferred college guys, and she had always shown exactly zero interest in anyone we went to school with.
If she were anyone else, I would have written off the “I prefer college guys” line as something that girls say to make themselves feel better about the fact that no one is asking them out.
But I knew Jayne hung out at college parties sometimes, and I knew that when she spent time with Evan at his place, she had her fair share of fun (just not with him, which made zero sense to me).
If anything, her high-and-mighty act just grated on me.
We were literally twins—who the hell was she to think she was too good for guys her own age?
I don’t think she ever would have even told me she’d asked Mason out, but I happened to come home from track practice early one day, and I found her sitting at the kitchen table, looking like someone had just told her she had to stay in this town forever.
In other words, she looked like her entire world had just ended.
“Jayne? Earth to Jaynie?” I remember waving my hand in front of her face and getting absolutely no reaction.
“Hey,” I tried again. “Come on, what’s wrong? You’re freaking me out a little bit.”