Chapter 12
DARCY
Aknot of guilt has been sitting in my chest all Monday morning.
Through first period Fitzgerald and dramatic irony, through thesis-statement workshops, Finn's voice from the parking lot yesterday keeps finding me.
Not the performer's voice. The voice I'd never heard from him before, stripped down to its studs, the one that ran out of jokes and bravado and just said the truth: Not the brains. Not the charm. The disappointment.
Now it's lunch break, and I'm alone at the back table of the school library with my laptop and half a granola bar I don't remember starting, reading an article about adult dyslexia accommodations as though it will do me any good.
The man it's meant for is probably in Manhattan by now.
Probably relieved to be rid of the vindictive bitch who spent a weekend engineering his humiliation and then, as a final act of generosity, handed him a page to read in front of a bunch of kids and smiled while he drowned.
A chair scrapes somewhere near the circulation desk. My hand goes to the laptop lid, half-closing it before I've decided why.
"There you are."
Annie rounds the biography shelf already on a mission. She has been texted back in monosyllables since yesterday afternoon and she has come to collect. Two coffees, her bag over one shoulder, and the prosecutorial opening I recognize from every school play she's ever directed.
"You sent me a photo of a man in pink kitten scrubs yesterday morning," she says, setting a coffee down in front of me.
"The caption read, and I quote, 'justice served.
' And then what did you do? You went completely dark on me.
I had to hear the rest from Jules, who heard it from Cathy, who gave a detailed blow-by-blow of a billionaire, a bulldog's backside, and nuclear-grade secretions that's going to haunt my sleep for weeks.
" She drops into the chair across from me, grinning as she searches my face for a reaction.
"Darce. Why are you back here hiding like a fugitive instead of letting me buy you a victory coffee? "
"You just brought me a coffee."
"That's a search-party coffee. Completely different category."
I should be returning serve. This is what we do. She prosecutes, I annotate, we meet somewhere in the middle over whatever contraband pastry she's hidden in that bag. But today the volley dies in my hands before I can lift it.
"I'm not hiding. I'm working."
Annie tilts her head. She has directed a decade of teenagers who believe they can lie to a woman who teaches lying for a living, and whatever she sees in my posture, shoulders up, screen guarded, serve unreturned, it isn't victory.
"You're sulking. You also look like you haven’t slept. Come on, what's wrong?" She leans forward, straining toward my partially opened laptop. "What are you actually doing?"
I close the lid the rest of the way. The click sounds louder than it should.
Because just for a second, behind my eyes, the whole thing is there. Finn's finger under the line of text, dragging. The sweat at his hairline. The jokes deployed faster and faster until they stopped working and there was just a grown man going under in my share circle, one word at a time.
And after, in the parking lot, his voice stripped to nothing, his arm under my hand, the heat of his skin through the sleeve and the pulse I felt jump against my fingers, and the way every thought I owned went quiet at the point of contact.
I'd meant the touch as comfort. My body took it as an introduction.
I could tell Annie all of it. She would listen carefully and understand.
But I spent eighth grade watching my family's worst year become the town's favorite dinner-table story, my father's abrupt departure whispered about in every kitchen in Mattichogue. I know what it costs when someone's worst hour stops belonging to them.
Whatever Finn trusted me with in that parking lot—his pain raw in his eyes, his voice honest for the first time since I've known him—it's his. Not mine to spend. Not even on my best friend. Not even to explain the guilt that has been pressing on my lungs since he drove away yesterday afternoon.
"I think I went too far." It comes out before I've organized it, heavy and plain. "This weekend. I was cruel, Annie. And he didn't deserve it."
She stares at me.
"I'm sorry." She sets down her coffee. "Did you just say you feel bad? About Finn Bardot? The man you have despised since the seventh grade?"
"I didn't want to destroy him."
She frowns. "You bought him at auction with your dream-fund money, Darce. You marched him through a tango class, a vet clinic, and a drama room, on purpose. You were serving some well-deserved, overdue, perfectly righteous justice." She stops herself. "And now you feel guilty?"
"I was wrong about him."
The sentence sits between us on the table, taking up more room than five words should.
I give her the one piece I can. The remorse is mine; I'm allowed to spend that.
What I can't give her is why it runs so deep.
Can't explain that the whole weekend I designed to crack Finn's polish never cracked it.
He outlasted the tango, the teenagers with power tools, the animal clinic—all of it without complaint and most of it with grace.
The thing that finally broke him wasn't anything on my itinerary.
It was me being careless with the one wound that was never supposed to be part of the game.
He endured everything I did on purpose. It took me being unknowingly thoughtless to actually hurt him.
"Wrong about him, how?" Annie asks, quieter now.
I run my thumb along the edge of the closed laptop.
Beneath it, a tab full of accommodation strategies waits for the bruised man who drove away yesterday and likely isn't coming back.
"He isn't the villain I thought he was when I saw him at the auction.
And the version of him I punished all weekend is one I built, not who he actually is. "
Annie is quiet, studying me the way she studies a student who has finally dropped the rehearsed monologue and started talking.
"You're not telling me everything."
"No."
"And you're not going to, are you?"
I shake my head. "No."
She nods slowly. I can see her choosing not to push, despite that Annie Felder has never once met a closed door she didn't consider a personal invitation. But she reads people better than anyone I know, and whatever she finds in my face right now, the protectiveness in it, she's choosing to trust.
"So the marble statue of vengeance you've been cosplaying since you raised that bidding paddle," she says. "She's retired now?"
"She's having a crisis of conscience."
Annie sighs. "Those are the worst. Much harder to accessorize."
The laugh that comes out of me is small and tired and real, and Annie catches it.
"Can I say one thing?" She waits, hands around her cup. "The Darcy who planned that weekend wanted him to hurt. The Darcy sitting in front of me apparently can't sleep because she won. Both of those are you." She pauses. "And nobody lies awake over somebody who doesn't matter to them."
She's right. The truth lands inside my rib cage, in the place where his voice keeps living, the quiet one, the one that said the disappointment like he'd been reading his own verdict since the fourth grade.
And underneath the voice, with my palm on his forearm, the pulse I felt answer mine.
I touched him to tell a man who was hurting that none of it was his fault.
My hand didn't get the message. My hand stayed warm all the way home, and the rest of me has been trying and failing to catch up ever since.
Here's the part I can't say to Annie, the part I can barely get my own brain to hold still long enough to look at.
I don't think this is new. The guilt is new.
The remorse is new. But this feeling underneath it, the one that put my hand on his arm in the first place and didn't want to take it back, the one that has been pulling me toward that man since I watched him sit in a folding chair and stop pretending?
I think I've been calling that feeling hatred since I was thirteen years old because hatred was something I knew how to carry.
Hatred made sense then. Hatred kept me safe. And I am starting to suspect that I have been wrong about what I feel for Finn Bardot for a lot longer than one weekend.
"I have to get back." Annie gathers herself. "My freshmen are assassinating Our Town at one-fifteen and I promised the stage manager I'd be there to mitigate the carnage." She stands, then pauses at the table's edge. "Don't forget, trivia night on Thursday this week. The pub. Eight o'clock."
I start to shake my head, but she cuts my refusal short.
"Don't say no. We need you. You're the reigning champion, Darce. Besides, it'll do you good to get away from your lesson plans and whatever you're trying to hide from me on your laptop. Put the weekend and your crisis of conscience in your rearview mirror and move on, Darce."
"I'll think about it."
"I'm not asking." She squeezes my shoulder, and her face goes open and honest. "Whatever happened with Finn Bardot this weekend, it doesn't undo the years before. You're a good person, Darcy. He's a grown man. He's probably laughing his billionaire ass off about everything by now."
I really don't think so, but I give my friend a weak nod.
She points at me. "Thursday night. Be there. Don't make me come to your place and drag you there."
She gives me a wink, then leaves. The library settles around me.
Lunch is over. In a minute the bell will ring and I'll stand up and walk back to my classroom and teach literature to teenagers for the rest of the afternoon and I will be fine.
By Thursday night this week, I'll be at the local pub answering trivia questions and drinking whatever Annie puts in front of me, and the weekend will become a story I sand down until it fits in the drawer with everything else I've outlasted.
The problem is, I miss him. And how crazy is that? The boy who tormented me and shackled me to a nickname I haven't been able to shake all these years later is now the man I want to see more than anyone else.
But he's gone.
I tell myself it's for the best. Annie's right. Finn's probably shaken off the weekend already and forgotten about it all. Forgotten about me.
I need to forget about him too.
Something I haven't been able to do since grade school, but now it's for an entirely different reason.
The bell rings and the chaos of student footsteps and conversation jolts my body into action.
Time to get back to real life.