Chapter 12
“Oh, I didn’t get my own pool,” she said when she entered my room and immediately walked outside to my little patio. She lay back on one of the lounge chairs and I lay on the one next to her, such that we were both looking up at the cloudless sky.
“I obviously don’t like to talk about it,” I said, “but I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I know I can trust you because you judge the fuck out of yourself but never really judge other people.”
“Is this about the worst thing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.” I could feel her looking at me now, but I just kept staring at the sky. It looked like a monochromatic painting or something, like it wasn’t really real.
“I guess I got abused in school, by one of my teachers. An English teacher. He was like the folk hero teacher, the one everyone loved. He had a wife and kids and grandkids and everything. Old guy. He was in his seventies. And he…I mean…he said that it was natural. It was natural for special students to fall for their teachers, that Socrates and Plato did it. And it went on for like two years, not all the time, but when he felt ‘weak,’ as he called it. And I knew it was fucked up but I didn’t say no. I liked him.
“Anyway, there were other kids, too, even though he said there weren’t, and eventually one of them said something to the principal, and the guy got arrested and they made me testify against him.
Honestly, that was even worse than all the stuff that happened.
It was what therapists call ‘retraumatizing,’ I guess.
And then he went to prison and his wife divorced him and his kids had to live with it, and I had to live with it, and even though I was anonymous in the trial, everyone at school knew.
He’s dead now. He died in prison. Heart attack. That’s it. That’s the worst thing.”
“I’m sorry, Kai.” She reached across the space between us and wrapped her hand around my forearm, just above the wrist. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
“Ellen found out.”
“Your publicist?”
“Technically she’s the studio’s publicist. She says I should get in front of it, talk about it publicly and put it behind me.
But there’s no putting it behind me. I don’t want everyone looking at me the way people look at me when they find out.
The way you’re probably looking at me right now. With pity.”
“Hey,” she said, and I finally turned from the sky to her and she was not looking at me with pity. She was looking at me with something far more complex. “I don’t pity you,” she said. “I’m angry for you, and I’m sorry, but I don’t pity you. I…love you.”
The way she said it hit a hell of a lot harder than I expected. It took me a while even to speak again. “Well, you’re unusual,” I said at last. “Most people look at me and they either feel pity or they think, Why didn’t he say something earlier, why did he let it happen.”
“Nobody thinks that.” We were still looking at each other, and I just flicked my eyebrows at her, and she said, “Well, nobody should think that.”
“I was fourteen when it started. Old enough to know better.”
“Remember what you told me before, that you can love the girl in our movie in a way you can’t love yourself?
If someone else said what you just said, it would break your heart.
Kai, you were a kid. He was an adult. You trusted him.
You looked up to him. That’s appropriate for a kid.
What he did with that admiration…was awful. ”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
“Ellen’s right,” she said. “You should get out in front of it. It’s better. And most people are nice. People tell me all the time that me talking about my mom helped them feel less alone.”
“It will feel like testifying felt, only every day.”
She still had her hand wrapped around my forearm. Her hands were beautiful. Her touch changed my blood pressure. “I get that it’s a shitty choice,” she said.
We talked for a long time—about why I didn’t want to play Gavinth’s brother, about whether I wanted to act at all. Her hand never left my arm.