14. Then
D anny arrives home for winter break on my last day of second quarter.
We only go to one Westside party and nothing at the beach at all, which I’m fine with.
There are also no dates, but I guess there never were, aside from when Danny and I first met.
The shit I’ve seen on TV is laughable anyway.
How many high school students are actually enjoying candlelit meals in fancy restaurants or riding in limos like they do on Gossip Girl ? None that I know.
With Luke gone, though, everything is better.
I’m not the third wheel. I don’t feel fake and conspicuous when I help Donna around the house, and I’m capable of at least trying to see the world the way she does, finding comfort in the small joys: a crisp winter night, a roaring fire, the smell of the Christmas tree.
The Allens are content people by nature, and I am not, but if I could even manage to get halfway to where they are, that would be enough.
Life is easier when you’re not wanting more than you have every minute of the day.
The diner closes early on Christmas Eve, so I spend the afternoon helping Donna with supper. We eat in the dining room rather than the kitchen, which Donna and I have set with candles and holly. Christmas music plays softly and the whole house smells like pine.
This is a good life. There’s a spark of something in my heart, a taste of that contentment Donna and Danny find so easily. I silently pray as we start eating, that I can help build that spark into a fire. That I can convince myself it’s all enough.
The pastor talks about the work he’d like Danny to do next summer, his role expanded now from what it was.
I didn’t think of pastoring as a profession you passed down to your son, but the pastor sure seems to be doing his best. Danny would be good at it, too, certainly better than the pastor, but I’m not sure I could ever be Donna—I’d school those bitches who come into the diner so fast if I had half her authority.
“So will Luke be coming home with you next summer?” Donna asks.
I stop chewing, waiting to hear his answer.
“I don’t know,” Danny replies. “The construction firm he was with last summer offered him a bonus to come back, but now he’s talking about staying in San Diego.”
Donna’s brow furrows. “Well, that makes no sense at all. Did he meet a girl?”
Danny laughs. “There isn’t a day that goes by when Luke isn’t meeting a girl. I don’t think that’s it.”
Suddenly, nothing about tonight brings me contentment. The pie crust sticks to my tongue, the air smells sickly sweet, the music is overly sentimental.
It’s last summer all over again. I’m trying so hard to be like the Allens, but somehow, Luke manages to ruin everything for me, even when he’s not fucking here.
* * *
Over dinner on Danny’s last night home, the pastor revisits his thoughts on indulgence. He suggests we all look at 2014 as the year of restraint, the year we don’t give into our whims. I wonder if Danny told him what happened at the sorority house.
And it seems like an easy thing for the pastor to say. He’s an older guy in moderately poor health. He doesn’t drink or smoke and I’m not sure other vices call to him. I’d like to see what he’d do, though, if Donna followed him to the letter and didn’t offer dessert every night.
“I like what my father said tonight,” Danny says later as we walk through the neighborhood, hand in hand, enjoying our last moments alone before he leaves.
I brace myself for another of his mini lectures on how we need to behave—there’ve been several since he got home—and I feel that wedge between us as if it’s palpable.
Is Danny at fault for it because he’s insisting on doing things his way? Am I at fault because I’ve kept so much to myself? Even Luke knows things about me that Danny does not.
“I need to tell you something,” I whisper.
He squeezes my hand, encouraging me to continue.
“Last summer, I told you I had to read for school but I would sometimes…play guitar instead.”
He frowns. “Why’d you lie?”
“Because I thought if I told you the truth, you’d try to convince me to come out with you guys. It felt like every minute of my day was taken.”
His mouth presses tight, his jaw locks. My reasons don’t justify the lie, I guess. Or maybe he just doesn’t like the implied criticism—that my days were too full, that he tends to push me to do things I don’t want to do.
His nod is slow and reluctant. “I appreciate you telling me. But from now on, I just want the truth, okay?”
My breath holds. I hadn’t planned to tell him everything, but maybe this is the issue—that I’m worried he won’t like who I am if he knows it all.
I slowly exhale. “The thing that happened this fall—”
“I know it’s hard, watching everyone else get something you’d like for yourself. I mean, it’s hard for me too. But that’s what will make it so special when—”
“Danny,” I say, cutting him off because I can’t listen to another word of this, “I’m not a virgin.”
We’re nearly back to the house. He comes to a dead stop, staring at me, his face blank with shock.
“ What? ” he asks with a small, nervous laugh.
He wants it to be a joke. He assumes it’s a joke. That makes me feel worse.
“You never asked me, so it’s not like I’ve been lying to you about it,” I whisper. “You just assumed, and I let you assume it because I was worried you’d judge me.”
Even in the dim light, I don’t miss the way his shock is quickly turning to disgust. “With who ?” he asks. “I thought I was your first boyfriend.”
I wince. “You were. You are. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t understand. You were fifteen when we met. How could you have already done that?”
I could probably strip a lot of the judgment from his voice if I told him the truth, but that would just make things worse.
“It’s complicated.”
His eyes flash. “You should have told me. That was a gift I was saving for you, and I thought you were saving it for me too.”
“Danny, I’m not the outlier here. You are. I’m fine we’re not having sex if that’s something you value, and yes, I should have told you, but it’s bullshit for you to act like I’m intentionally depriving you of something.”
He slaps both hands to his face in frustration. “Well forgive me for not handling it perfectly, Juliet. I’ve just discovered you’ve been lying to me the entire time we’ve been together and, yes, I’m mad. It feels like you’ve stolen something that was supposed to be mine.”
Fuck this. He’s mad? Fuck this. “Yeah? Well, it was stolen from me, too, Danny. I’m not thrilled with it either.”
He pales. “You were raped?”
My eyes fall closed. I don’t know. I don’t know if I can call it rape. It wasn’t like something you see in a TV movie. I wasn’t grabbed by a guy in a face mask and dragged into the woods. I don’t know what to call it.
“Sometimes you go along with things because you know fighting back is useless. I was smaller than he was, and I knew he wasn’t going to stop so I just—” I shrug. I gave in. That’s all there was to it. I’d like to claim now that I’d fight, but I probably wouldn’t. I’ve seen how that works out too.
After a moment, he reaches for my hand. “So it was just the one time?”
“No,” I reply, my teeth grinding. He still thinks he’s the one who deserves to be consoled, reassured. He wants to believe that I’m gently used, at most.
“More than once doesn’t sound like rape to me,” he says, releasing my hand once more.
I grit my teeth. “I never said it was.”
“You couldn’t have been all that unwilling if it kept happening. Did you even try to stay out of the guy’s path?”
My shoulders sag. This would be so much easier if I actually believed I was innocent, if defending myself didn’t feel like a lie.
If you say, “No” to someone, again and again, but you sometimes responded to what he did, can you still claim you weren’t at fault?
I don’t know. “You know nothing about it,” I whisper.
“Then tell me who it was!” he shouts. “Tell me how you possibly couldn’t have avoided this guy.”
It feels like the end of everything. This is a closely guarded secret, the thing I hate about myself most. I’m not sure I trust Danny with it, but I’m not sure I trust anyone with it.
“Because it was Justin.”
He goes completely rigid.
“Your stepbrother ?” His mouth falls open, his voice cracking with disgust. His reaction is exactly why I never tried to tell people after that first failed attempt.
When your own mother, the person who’s known you longer than anyone else, suggests you’re a liar or brought it on yourself, you know better than to continue looking for a sympathetic ear.
I nod and he stares at me. “Isn’t he…isn’t he, like, in his late twenties? That’s not even legal.”
A miserable laugh bubbles inside me. “Neither is forcing someone to have sex with you after she says, ‘No’ , Danny.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” he demands. “Why didn’t you tell, like, your mom, or a counselor or someone?”
My eyes sting. I knew this part would come.
“I did tell my mom, and she accused me of making it up. And I didn’t tell anyone else because I figured I’d get blamed for it, just like you’re blaming me now.”
I wait for him to deny he’s doing it. He doesn’t.
“Was it going on when—” He stops, flinching. “Was it going on when we were dating?”
He’s asking if I was cheating on him. Was there more I could have done to stop it?
Maybe. I can’t claim to have exhausted every resource…
I expected the worst of anyone who might have helped me, and I still do.
But the possibility will always exist that I could have stopped it if I’d just done things differently. I’ll never know for sure.
“I didn’t want it,” I whisper. “He was trying to pull me out of the house and I was doing my best not to go when he dislocated my shoulder. I did my best.”
I have to swallow to avoid a crack in my voice. I’m not going to beg for his pity. I don’t want to trick him into feigning forgiveness he doesn’t feel.