Chapter 12 #2
“Hang on! You should want to go. You’re giving some award, aren’t you? You’re headlining!”
“I think they’ll survive without me.”
“But you’re the hometown hero! Where’s your sense of duty?”
Jake snorted. “Oh yeah. A weekend of pricks telling me how to do my job, or in bed with the hottest girl in the world. Tough call, Renaldo.”
I laughed. “I dunno. I’ll feel like an asshole for ditching.”
“I won’t. I only wanted to go because I thought someone might know where you’d got to. Now I know exactly where you’ve got to, and I want you all to myself.”
My heart gave a silly little skip. “I’m not saying I’m not tempted, but I made a promise to Cece.”
“Cece won’t mind. She knows the whole thing’s a wank.”
It’s the first time I thought I might love this man.
But I didn’t give him a ‘yes.’ There’s Cece, sure, but there was also something about the way he was pushing that pinged my warning radar.
“Ada?”
Cece’s watching me with concern. “Sorry, a lot on my mind.”
“About Jake?”
“Kind of.” I chew the inside of my cheek. “How would you feel… about me not coming to the reunion?”
She looks like I shot her childhood dog. “Are you kidding?”
“I dunno. Jake wants us to go away that weekend. He thinks me being there might be a bad idea.”
He said no such thing, and I know I’m being a coward, blaming him.
The truth is, I’m starting to think it might be a bad idea.
I won’t be able to pull off anything satanic with Jake glued to my hip, and that just leaves a weekend of trauma flashbacks and bad wine.
But as I look at Cece, her eyes start to shimmer, and I feel like I just shot her childhood dog.
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “I’ll come. Of course I’ll come.”
“No,” she says, wiping her eyes. “You should go away with Jake. It’s so nice you’ve met someone.”
She bursts into full-tilt tears, and I leap up to hug her.
“Fuck Jake. I’ll come. I promised, and I meant it.”
“Really?” she sobs into my shoulder. “I feel so bad! I just know I’ll have the worst time without you. I want to talk to Will, but I need you there too. I won’t feel confident without you. But now I feel guilty!”
A smile pulls at my lips. “Well, now we both feel guilty, so I’d say it’s settled. Let’s fuck up Pukekohe for keeps.”
She gives a watery laugh. “Thanks, Addy.”
“Anytime, baby girl.”
Cece swipes a fist across her eyes. “Can I bum your vape?”
I make a face. “Sorry, I, uh, thought I’d give quitting another try.”
“Oh my God, Addy!”
“Come on, I don’t vape that hard.”
Cece’s eyes dart sideways.
“I don’t!”
“Did you quit for Jake?”
“Nah, unfortunately, he thinks it’s kind of sexy.”
At least he did when he was in a Zoom meeting, and I walked past, vaping in a thong. I’ve never seen a man shut a laptop so fast.
“So, why now?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was just sick of living in fear of quit campaign ads aimed at sixteen-year-olds. The gum’s okay. At least it’s stopping me from getting vape rage like the last time I went cold turkey.”
The door to Stabbies opens, and a hot goth pushes a pram inside. My stomach drops. “Shit. I think Betty’s here.”
The hot goth scans the bar, and I get to my feet. My knees feel like water.
“Hey, Betty?” I call.
The hot goth looks at me with Rhys Muldoon’s pale green eyes. She gives me a wry smile and heads toward me.
“Ada?” she says, parking her pram beside the booth.
I think I might be sick. “That’s me. How… How are you?”
“Fine.” Her eyes drift to Cece, still standing beside me.
“This is my mate, Cecelia Taylor,” I volunteer. “She owns this place, and she’s from Pukekohe. Do you guys know each other?”
Betty nods. “I think we played netball together once.”
I study Rhys’s sister as she and Cece talk.
Her eyes are pure Rhys, but that’s where the resemblance ends.
Rhys had rusty brown hair and the kind of acne that makes people wince, but Betty is porcelain-skinned, and her shoulder-length curls are jet black.
She’s three years younger than Rhys and I, and ran with the alternative crowd in Pukekohe who were still way too cool for us.
“She won’t even look at me when she’s with her friends,” Rhys used to mutter whenever we spotted her at lunchtimes.
Cece coos over the pram then heads for the bar. Betty returns her full attention to me, and I fight the urge to run.
“Cute baby,” I say, and instantly feel like an idiot.
Betty looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Yeah, he is.”
I nod toward my playpen. “Shall we?”
We sit on opposite sides of the booth, sizing each other up like boxers about to get in the ring.
A thousand unspoken accusations seem to emanate from Rhys’s eyes.
She clearly doesn’t want to be here, and I wouldn’t have asked, but yesterday I was doom-scrolling the Pukekohe reunion Instagram account, and I stumbled across a monstrosity.
The Cunt At Large herself, Jenny Wallis, had posted a photo collage calling all graduates to come ‘Celebrate 100 Years of Smiles!!!’
One of the photos was a class picture that included Rhys, his face half-hidden behind his fringe. The caption read:
Let’s go, Pukekohe crew! These were the best years of our lives!
The comments were all brain-dead affirmations. Except one. @BettyMDunes wrote:
Take this fucking post down. I didn’t consent to having my dead brother used for nostalgia porn by the bitch who made his life miserable.
An hour later, the post had vanished, but I’d already DMd Betty asking her for a coffee and a chat. Not that she seems like she wants to chat. She eyes me, her expression cold, and I have the distinct feeling I’m failing a test I didn’t know I was taking.
I clear my throat. “Thanks for coming. Can I get you a Coke, or a latte, or a drink?”
She shakes her head.
Straight to it, then.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but Rhys and I were…”
It’s hard to find the right words. ‘Old school friends’ would be the simplest, but it feels wrong.
Rhys hardly ever came to school. Most days, he wagged to play PlayStation at home while his mum worked.
We hung out whenever he did turn up, but he was hard to talk to most of the time.
We got along best when we were playing World of Warcraft online.
Still, he gave me my first cigarette and introduced me to Brand New, the band that still defines my teen years.
He meant something to me, and I want Betty to know that, but I don’t want to dress it up in Jenny Wallis puke pastels just because he’s gone. I give up on a defining label.
“I’m not sure if Rhys ever talked about me,” I say. “But we used to hang out.”
A flicker of a smile touches Betty’s crimson lips. “I remember.”
The statement does nothing to reassure me that this is going to go well. I swallow, desperately craving tequila. “I’m not gonna pretend we were super close or anything, but he was good to me at school when no one else was, and I’m really fucking sorry about what happened.”
Betty exhales slowly. “Thanks. For being honest.”
I wonder how many people fed her trite bullshit once Rhys did what he did. If she came here expecting another round of it from me. I grasp for what to say next. “You seem like you’re doing okay? From social media, I mean?”
She gives me a tired smile.
“Sorry. I’m terrible at this. Talking. Especially when it matters.”
“It’s not that. You just… remind me of him.”
My dry throat contracts. “You too. Your eyes.”
We sit in silence for a moment, feeling the weight of the man who isn’t here.
“It was fucking brutal,” Betty mutters. “The way it happened and the way everyone acted after. All these people saying they really liked Rhys. Acting like they cared. It was awful.”
“I believe it.”
“So, why’d you want to talk to me? Really?”
My respect for her climbs another rung. I shove my trembling hands under the table. “I was thinking about doing… something to the people who fucked with me and Rhys back then. You know the ones.”
Her gaze sharpens. “Why?”
“Because I fucking hate that they got away with it.” The words come out too shrill and too fast. The voice of an angry teenage girl.
I drive my fingernails into my thighs. “It wasn’t just kid shit.
Some of it was actual crimes, assaults, harassment, things that should’ve gone to the cops. The school knew, and they ignored it.”
Betty lifts her chin. “So why am I here?”
“I’ve got records.” I pick up the manila folder from the seat beside me and slide it across the table.
“Emails, DMs, old Facebook messages. Threats and lots of references to stuff that happened in real life. It’s probably too late to press charges, but I was thinking I could email a ZIP file to everyone at the reunion or something. ”
Betty opens the folder and flips through a few pages, her expression unreadable. “I can’t look through Rhys’s old accounts for you. I wiped his inboxes after he died. My mum kept going through everything. Looking for answers. I didn’t want her doing that to herself.”
“Shit. Sorry. But yeah, that makes total sense. Of course.”
Betty stares at me as if she’s assessing the state of my soul. I get the feeling she’ll be disappointed.
“You can go if you want?” I offer. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Did you know Rhys was bipolar?”
Fucking hell… I drive my nails harder into my skin. “No, but I’m Autistic. I always felt like me and him… understood we weren’t wired like everyone else.”
“So why do all this now? After all this time?”
“Because I’m here, I guess?”
It sounds lame, even to me.
Betty smiles coldly. “That’s right. You left. Before school ended?”
I nod.
“And this is your first time in New Zealand since?”
I release my nails, scared of drawing blood, and instantly want to drive them back in. “I’ve come back once or twice, but never for more than a few days. There’s not much of a job market for flute players down here.”