6
There were so many horrible things about the way it all played out on that day.
The way my dad’s face fell like a crushed paper bag when he flung open the door and found Beckett Lane with his hand up the shirt of my Christian school uniform, his pants down, my plaid skirt up, and our bodies pressed against each other.
My father roared in this angry kind of way I hadn’t heard before or since, and my mother clasped the doorway as though it was her life that was about to be torn apart.
Beckett was ripped off of me and shoved to the other side of my bedroom, and then Maryanne filled the doorway.
She and I held eyes, and I wondered how this would go—what direction she might play this. There was a fraction of a second when her whole face was calm, and then like a switch was flipped, she launched at me.
Even then, before I knew about anything or understood any of what I do now, I knew the way she got angry in that moment was strange. She called me every name and cuss word under the sun, lunged for me again.
Beckett grabbed her, pulled her out of my bedroom, begging for her to forgive him, it wasn’t his fault, she knew that, right? She was crying these incredibly believable tears, and I remember wondering even then, what she was crying about—? I don’t even know if those tears were real. They looked real—they weren’t instant how they often are when someone’s putting them on. Was she sad? Had this hurt her? Had I hurt her? Beckett—he was shaking his head wildly, saying everything he could to keep her on his side—he never meant to hurt her, he just got seduced by me—I don’t think he needed to try that hard, as I suspected, actually, she was always on his side…
I remember Maryanne sort of collapsed into his arms, wailing like her heart was broken.
“God, Mer, I’m so sorry—I don’t know what came over me. It’s her—you know that, right?”
Little old me. All of fifteen years old. I did bear the weight of that for a long while, that it was me… My fault, I did it, I seduced him—
My dad was absentmindedly taking off his tie, sitting on my bed, staring off into the distance the way you might expect a man to do when he’s just seen his kid getting fucked in the bed he built her. I didn’t like how he looked—it scared me, the detachment, how quiet he was.
But not my mother. My mother rushed me.
“How dare you,” she spat.
I remember what she was wearing; it’s one of the most vivid things about that night, actually. A salmon pink boatneck dress. I hate that color now. I don’t even really like to eat salmon, if I’m honest.
She grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to the bathroom, shoved me toward the sink.
“How could you, Georgia?” She was horrified, truly, properly horrified. “How could you do this to her?”
I wasn’t sure why we were at the sink. I’m still not really sure.
She ran the tap too hot and washed my hands with soap, both hers and mine, like it would make me clean again, and her by proxy. Then she shoved me into the shower and turned it on—cold. I don’t know whether that part was on purpose.
“This is unforgivable—”
Oliver rushed into the bathroom, eyes wrought with confusion and fear and maybe, in retrospect, probably a hint of betrayal.
I used to tell Oliver everything—why wouldn’t I have told him this?
“Oh my God.” Oliver blinked, staring at me blankly as I shivered and cried silently in the shower.
She made me stand there for probably half an hour.
Oliver sat on the sink, watching me, waiting for me, and even though Mom told him to go, he wouldn’t.
Maryanne was wailing somewhere in the background. I heard things in my room smashing. I knew even then, whatever was breaking was exclusively the things I cared about most at the hands of my sister who cared about me the least.
My mom banged the faucet off and flung a towel at me. “Get out.”
She grabbed my brother by the hand and dragged him out with her, slamming the door to my bedroom behind them.
They stripped my bed that night. All the pillows, the fitted sheet, the flat sheet, the quilt cover, and the comforter, strewn in a pile on the floor.
They left the window open, airing out my sins, I think.
That night I slept on my bare mattress in my wet school clothes because all my drawers had been emptied.
When I woke up the next morning, my bags were packed and waiting by the front door.
It happened silently.
No one said a word.
Maryanne stood at the breakfast counter, both hands gripping the marble, eyeing me down in a power stance. Tennyson leaned against the fridge, watching with a slight frown on his face, and no one woke Oliver. He’s always had to be woken up. Alarms don’t work for him; he sleeps too deeply. He was completely out to the world, and it all happened so quickly.
I don’t know how I knew before I’d spotted the man I didn’t know out front, but I did. There are bounty hunters for teens, did you know? Wayward teens, which I was, apparently. Maybe my family were too still, and it made me nervous. I don’t know—but I had a feeling something was amiss.
I tried to run up the stairs to Oliver and I made it as far as the hallway we shared, but my dad caught me and scooped me up in his arms, lugging me toward the door, and I screamed out Oliver’s name.
He didn’t hear it the first time, but the second time he came barreling down the stairs. He tried to grab me from our dad, but my dad pulled me harder and shoved me backward into the Escalade that neither of my parents were in.
Oliver ran after the car, crying.
I banged the windows, crying for him.
My parents stood there, watching, arms around each other, stolid and assured in their decision. My sister stood in the doorway, and maybe it’s my mind embellishing it over time, but I swear to God, there was a hint of a smirk. I’d swear it.
I was taken to a private plane where I was flown to Gatwick Airport. I cried half the way there, mourning no one but Oli.
Tennyson’s godfather was the principal of Cawthorne. He was doing my dad a favor when he took me on as a boarder.
I cried a lot at first. I didn’t really know where I was or what was happening, but Cliff was a good man, and patient in a way I’d never really experienced. I think he expected me to be a troublesome student, the menace my mother had surely painted me to be, but I thrived there and he gave me room so I could.
It’s a funny part of growing up, actually… Accepting that things that are better for you, healthier—they can still be painful. That the worst, most shameful day of my life to date would in turn become the most defining.
***
There’s a knock on my bedroom door and I sit up bolt right, my reverie completely interrupted.
It’s the same bedroom they dragged me out of ten years ago. They put me back in here like nothing happened at all. Like there aren’t still the indents of my nails on the doorframe from when they began to drag me away.
It’s the dead of night, about 2:00 a.m. I grab a nightgown and throw it over myself and scurry to my door, heart pounding and racing because I don’t have a good association with people who arrive at my door. I creak it open and peer out.
Sam Penny.
I relax a little and open the door a bit more.
I’m so glad to see him—like, so glad. Gladder than I want to be. Because I was so mortified at dinner, and I liked talking to him and I liked him being attracted to me, and I don’t want that to stop because he heard a botched-up version of a story that happened a decade ago.
I raise my eyebrows, waiting like I’m annoyed that he’s there because I want to throw him off. “Yes?”
“Well, hi to you too.” He smirks.
I purse my lips and smile at him, even though I’m not sure that I should. “Hi.”
“Lord Byron,” he says, pointing at me, then nods, pleased with himself.
“What?” I blink.
He shakes his head at himself. “It was tough—that was pretty sneaky of them—”
“Of who?” I frown.
“You’re named after Lord Byron,” he tells me.
“How?”
“Well, Cambridge…” He gives me a look. “His name wasn’t Lord—it was George Gordon Byron.”
I squint and smile at him, a little in disbelief.
“That’s who you’re named after.” He shrugs like it’s absolutely true. He flashes me this look—he’s proud of himself, and he wants me to be proud of him too. I can tell in the squaring of his shoulders. “You’re all named after poets.”
I sigh and roll my eyes. “That’s just a coincidence.”
He snorts a laugh at my apparent silliness. “Your brother is called Tennyson.”
“Do you know how many Jacksons and Braxtons and Masons there are in the South?” I fold my arms over my chest. “The South loves a ‘son.’”
“Know a lot of other Tennysons?”
I pinch my eyes, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a “no” aloud, and Sam Penny smiles, once again pleased with himself, as though he’s won the argument—if that even was an argument.
“I just wanted to tell you,” Sam says, tilting his head to catch my eye. “Because I was pretty sure you’d be awake, obsessing about which poet was your namesake.”
I give him a smarmy look. “Well, you were so—”
“Yes.” His face softens a little as he nods once. “I was.”
He stares at me for a long few seconds, and fuck—I like him how he is. In the dead of night, in a white T-shirt and black Calvin Klein pajama pants. A bit disheveled, a lot perfect.
Sam swallows once and it’s heavy, his pupils dilated again now, and I want to reach out and take his pulse, but that would be weird if I did, and no one likes to feel see-through, particularly when you’re in your pajamas, so I try my best not to feed the dragon in my mind that sees everything no one wants it to see. It’s hard not to feed him, though; he’s learned to live off the crumbs of people, and people leave crumbs everywhere.
“Are you okay?” Sam asks as he watches me. I don’t answer immediately—not because I’m trying to be mysterious, but because I am, in fact, trying not to feed the dragon at this very moment, trying my absolute best not to let the dragon know that he’s just pushed his hands through his hair (again) or that our proxemics are way off for two people who only met today—but in doing so, I don’t answer, and so he tilts his head, makes us eye to eye, and the way his brows pull together into a frown, his bottom lip puffing out—God, he’s so sincere, and it’s so sweet.
“Yeah.” I nod (lie), and then I feel something wet slip from my eye. I wipe it away quick.
His frown spreads and he tilts more. “Are you crying?”
I breathe out a tired laugh. “Yeah.”
Sam nods to my bedroom behind me.
“Do you want me to come in?” he asks, eyebrows up, hopeful. Still sincere.
Do I want him to come in?
Him with the eyes that look worried for me and about me, him who’s been lying awake at night at two in the morning to solve a riddle that he invented about my family in his mind, him who’s kept my brother sober and safe—yes, I want him to come in, because look at his eyes in the moonlight. It somehow seems to shine on him from nowhere—there are no curtains open, he’s not under a skylight—my bedroom is barely lit by a lamp from Pottery Barn’s 2014 fall catalogue, and yet his blue eyes look iridescent. And don’t even get me started on the angles of his nose.
“Yes,” I say. It comes out all solemn.
His cheeks twitch—AU 12—it’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pulling of his zygomaticus major muscle on his left-hand side—which is all to say…he’s pleased.
“Okay.” He goes to move toward me, but I block the door, shaking my head.
“But you shouldn’t,” I say, because I’m worried that this room is cursed.
His bottom lip tugs downwards now in disappointment. “Why not?”
I try to keep it light, flash him a playful look. “You’ve got Catherine on your arm already, you don’t need a Georgia—”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs, holding my gaze. “I could need a Georgia.”
“Trust me.” I lift my eyebrows. “You don’t. They’re not worth it.”
“I’m pretty sure they are,” he says, but in the context of everything, I’m pretty sure they’re not, so I just give him a tired smile that matches how my heart feels.
“Good night, Sam.”
And fast as anything, the inner corners of his eyebrows draw in and then go up—he’s disappointed—but then he smiles at me anyway.
“Good night, Lord Byron.”