Chapter 26 May 20
Dolly Beckett
When I got home from the hospital, I screamed into my pillow and pounded it with my fists until Peanut got so excited she ran around my bed in circles before finally giving in to her own savage nature and biting me.
Then I calmed down enough to put her out before falling back onto my bed, stunned with grief.
There were no words to express the devastation I felt.
It was beyond pain, beyond fury, beyond outrage.
All those things were present, but the raw hurt of the betrayal was too deep to comprehend.
I’d been violated by a man I’d trusted implicitly.
He’d been there for me my whole life, a constant even when Devlin’s love was uncertain.
Now I knew it had all been a lie.
Over the next month, I went back to see Preston every week, first at the hospital and then at his grandfather’s when he went there to recover instead of going home.
Part of me wanted to believe he’d made it up, that the drugs had caused him to say those crazy things, but I knew I was lying to myself.
Things were never the same after that day.
He thought that telling me meant we could be together, but I knew it was the opposite.
We could never be together now. That dream died in a hospital bed with his drug-laced confession.
It was hard to hate a man so broken, though.
I couldn’t change my heart, even knowing he’d betrayed me in an unspeakable, immeasurable way.
My heart, like everything else about me, was too much, too big.
Once I loved someone, the ties I felt to them never really broke, even when they changed.
I wasn’t in love with Devlin anymore, but I was stricken with grief every time I realized I’d never see his gorgeous golden tan, his dazzling smile, his deep blue eyes.
Not because I was in love, but because I loved him as a person, as a part of my history.
Preston was no different. I couldn’t let go of him, either.
He was a part of me, entwined through every memory.
I couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t part of my life, couldn’t imagine a life where he wasn’t included.
But no matter how much sympathy I felt, I could never trust him as long as I lived, could never forget the shocking, blinding pain of the truth he’d spilled that day.
I could never forget lying awake all that night, sobbing and screaming into my pillow at the heartbreak and helpless fury I felt.
He had taken my virginity a long time ago, but his confession took my innocence in a different way.
I lost my faith in him, and if I couldn’t even trust Preston Darling to have my back, who could I trust?
He’d been defending me since we were children, but it hadn’t been enough to keep him from taking what he wanted with no regard for my heart.
Shame burned inside me when I thought of it.
He’s known the most intimate parts of me without me even knowing.
He took my virginity, stole my first time.
Now it was like it wasn’t even mine, like I never got to have a first time.
I only thought I did. But it was someone else all along.
Someone else who had my first time. Someone who took his first time and forced it into me as if it were mine.
Someone who walked around for three fucking years before telling me, probably gloating inside that he’d taken my innocence and I didn’t even know it.
That he’d felt my raw cunt front the inside, claimed the deepest parts of me, cum inside me.
Worse still, I couldn’t quite rid myself of the feeling that he’d chosen his timing carefully, told me when he knew I couldn’t hate him without being wracked with guilt.
So, even though I continued to visit him, I could never look at him the same again.
He was in a huge amount of pain and usually doped up on pain meds, not to mention the rage I could feel shimmering under the surface every time he talked about the Dolce boys.
They had done this to him, but they’d walked free after their arrest. Everyone in town knew their dad had greased a lot of wheels to make it happen, but it was just further proof that everything had changed.
If a Darling could be nearly killed and his attackers face no consequences, how much power did they have?
Besides me and his family, no one seemed to remember Preston existed.
He’d never had a girlfriend or any close friends at school besides his own family.
No one visited him. People mourned Devlin, and by the time they were done, there was nothing left for the boy who didn’t die.
That wasn’t as tragic, as exciting, for our little town.
He wouldn’t have allowed anyone close even if they’d tried.
To tell the truth, the scars on his face were pretty terrible.
He’d always been a little vain, and I knew how utterly devastated he must have been when he saw all that was ruined.
After a month or so, when he finally accepted that I wasn’t going to simply forgive him for the past because of his current situation, he told me he didn’t want me to visit anymore.
He was angry and withdrawn, and I didn’t know how to help him without breaking my own heart, so I respected his wishes.
A few good things happened my senior year, twinkling stars amid the tragedies that blackened the town and the betrayal that crushed my heart.
To anyone else, they may have looked like silly, trivial things, but I held onto their beauty, treasuring them the way I remembered little Preston Darling picking wild daisies like they were as good as any other flowers and not weeds.
Sometimes, you had to look for the beauty in the weeds.
The first thing that happened was that I started gaining more followers on my account on The Tea app.
I reused the pink song on several videos showing my outfits, and one that featured me and Peanut wearing matching outfits went viral.
I woke up one day to hundreds of shares, thousands of comments, and millions of views.
Thanks to the stellar acoustics in my walk-in closet, people were making their own videos with the song, too.
It was one of those things that hit with the right combination of timing and luck.
People were posting their degrees from Georgetown and Yale with their long fake nails; their pink headers for the businesses they’d started themselves; even a few pink trucks, though none quite the color Dad had chosen when he bought me the truck for my sweet sixteen.
Of course there were tons of nasty comments, mostly because I had equated watching baseball to the Bachelor, but there were lots of nice ones, too.
It made me feel good, a tiny bright spot when everything else in my life seemed to be on a slow and steady downward trend.
So I started posting regularly and made a few more songs that people also picked up.
That happened just after Crystal and Devlin disappeared.
We’d become fast friends, and even though that made it doubly devastating when she and Devlin disappeared, she also brought me and my little cousin Dixie together.
I was glad I had someone, even someone I didn’t know well, rather than being completely alone.
Because we hadn’t just lost Devlin into the river that night. We’d lost all the Darlings.
With only Colt left to defend the throne, the Darlings were no longer reigning kings at school. He was too stunned by grief after Devlin’s disappearance to put up much of a fight, and within a month, he’d conceded to the Dolces. He stopped coming to the café for lunch, and I rarely saw him anymore.
Preston tried to come back after spring break, but with his face the way it was, there was no way.
It wasn’t just that he would never be popular.
People couldn’t help but stare. It was human nature to be curious about something so different, shocked even.
And the Dolce boys constantly harassed and provoked him, waving things on his blind side and calling him all manner of despicable names.
Even though everyone was probably as horrified as I was, no one stood up for him.
They went along with the Dolces when they labeled him the school scum.
The fact that he’d gone from untouchable royalty to an untouchable leper in a matter of months made everyone wary and uncomfortable.
After all, if their kings could fall so far so fast, what would it take to ruin the commoners?
Devlin was dead. Colt ate lunch on the bleachers every day.
Preston was a scarred, half blind, shell of the man he’d been.
After a few days, he started eating outside with Colt.
I joined them, but nothing could get through Preston’s wall of despair.
Sometimes, I wondered what would have happened if I’d said yes that day in the hospital.
But mostly, I tried not to think about it.
Preston needed something much bigger than a girlfriend.
A month after returning, he dropped out of school to take his classes online for the rest of the year.
I finished out senior year, cried buckets at graduation, and skipped the parties.
I knew I was lucky—unbelievably, Destiny-in-life-level-lucky—to have walked out of that place as unscathed as I was.
Considering my close ties to the Darlings and the fact that the Dolces regarded me with suspicion since I’d been close with Crystal before her disappearance, I knew it could have been so much worse.
I was alive, uninjured, and thanking the lord on my knees each night that after completing a course of antibiotics to make sure I was healthy after hooking up with the Dolce twins, I had walked away without a scratch.