Chapter 11 Bennett
Bennett
Grilled cheese turns out to be the truest mender of fences. Well, as much as the fence between Clover and me can be mended.
The next few weeks are … polite. I go home for my birthday.
Tex and Julian join me and my mom for dinner at the Cannon Beach Country Club.
Tex helps me winterize Grandpa Dean’s beehives in advance of a cold front.
I go into Portland with my mom twice and she casually floats the idea of me moving into the penthouse after graduation to take a more hands-on role at the company.
I say sure, because I have no useful skills other than being the only full-blood Graves heir to take over the operation.
There’s Julian, whose mother is my mom’s stepsister, but she’s happy to take her monthly draw and spend her time microdosing psychedelics and handcrafting soaps and candles that are sold (but barely sell) in seaside boutiques at an astronomical price.
And it appears Julian will be following in her footsteps—at least in spirit.
The peaceful balance Clover and I have maintained at the dorm is nice, but I think I’m starting to miss Clover being angry with me, which is probably not what my therapist from high school would refer to as emotionally healthy.
It’s all fine. Everything is fine. She goes to her classes.
I go to mine. She works at the library and then other times she comes home in her catering uniform smelling like cocktail sauce.
It says more about me than her, I know, but I hate that she’s working.
And not just one, but two jobs. I hate that she has to work so hard to scrape by.
I find myself doing little things that mean nothing, really, and are probably the result of sheer boredom since I’m not attending parties or chasing tail like I did last year.
I replenish her granola bars without her noticing.
When I see that her phone charger is fraying, I swap it out for an identical one.
The melatonin gummies she takes at night run low, so I buy another bottle and refill hers, because the label is peeling on her bottle and she would notice if the whole thing was brand new.
They are small, cowardly acts of kindness that I do to assuage my guilt over a history that will never change.
A history that started when Clover and I were still in diapers.
The story goes that soon after my father moved out, Mom was at the grocery store by herself with me and I was screaming my head off. She was looking for baby food. I was the pickiest eater, but carrot puree was always a sure bet.
She says everyone who came down the aisle looked at her like she was the world’s worst mother.
And then came Beth with long blond hair and rosy cheeks, a giggling Clover strapped to her chest. She stopped in front of me and held Clover’s chubby hand up to wave at me, and the tears just … stopped.
Our sleep-deprived mothers became fast friends and when Mom learned how little money Beth made cleaning rooms at the Cliffside Inn, she asked her to move into the guesthouse and hired her as a live-in assistant.
Beth managed to navigate the line between employee and best friend, and my mother would always say they were platonic soulmates and that they could never go back to life without each other.
Clover and I were inseparable from that day in the baby aisle until she was ten and I was twelve.
Mom insisted that Clover and I go to the same schools.
She argued that it was easier, especially when she was on business trips, and that Beth should consider it one of her employee benefits. We were practically family anyway.
Clover was in fifth grade at our elementary school, Bradford Academy, a smaller private school a few towns north.
And I was going into sixth grade, which meant I would attend Calvin Prep, a hybrid boarding and day school for grades six through twelve.
I still lived at home, but I was suddenly in a pool of peers whose parents had the kind of status that could compete with the Graves family name.
Even at the age of twelve, it was very apparent that “friends” were simply future networking opportunities, and as the son of Sydney Graves, I was a hot commodity.
I found myself in a crowd of people that I didn’t particularly like. They were cruel, but I quickly learned that the best way to protect yourself from getting bullied was to be a bully.
Over the course of that school year, I began to resent Clover for being a living reminder of all the ways I had changed.
She knew too much about me. She knew that I sighed every time Beth gave me a hug and that I was secretly scared of bees but could never tell Grandpa Dean.
She knew that I didn’t like people to know who my mom was because what if that was the only reason they liked me? She knew too much.
When Clover started at Calvin Prep the following year, she would try to talk to me about how I was acting different. How I was being a dick. It pained me, but I ignored her and so did my friends.
Sometimes I would hear our mothers discussing the sudden divide between us late at night while they shared a bottle of wine. They chalked it up to puberty. Beth was always saying not to push anything between us and that this was normal. Forcing us together would make it worse.
After a few months, Clover stopped trying. Over the next few years, she would make the occasional friend—usually a kid who stayed for a couple months before changing schools.
I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but I lived for summer.
Because it was a reprieve. Things bounced back a little, like a rubber band returning to its shape.
Our moms would take us on trips. We were never the same Clover and Bennett, but there was always a ceasefire and sometimes things even felt normal.
Sometime around when Clover started ninth grade, everyone at school found out that Beth was my mother’s assistant.
That word was all wrong for what she meant to us and how important—how integral—she and Clover were to our everyday lives.
But Clover went from the quiet thicker girl to having a target on her back, because now they knew she wasn’t one of us.
That April, Clover turned fifteen and was granted the keys to the social media castle by her mom. After school, she would speed through her homework and spend the evenings scrolling on her phone.
I was painfully jealous. All I wanted was to know what she was looking at. What meme or video had her laughing under her breath. But I had no right to know what made her smile on that little screen of hers.
One night, a few weeks before the end of the school year, one of my text threads with some of my friends—if you could call them that—started blowing up.
Val, a vicious girl who could stab you in the back with her eyes closed, sent out a link.
My stomach dropped the moment the page loaded.
It was Clover. A selfie in a patch of clover with the bigger house just behind her and a bee buzzing at the edge of the frame.
The ground was fresh with rain, but the sun had just broken through the clouds and she was squinting into the light with a laughing smile on her lips. The caption simply said: home.
VAL
What a fucking fraud. I can’t believe she’s posting Bennett’s house and trying to pass it off as hers.
She lives in that little pool house, right, Bennett? It’s barely the size of an apartment. Honestly, she has no idea how lucky she is that your mom pays for her to go to CP.
The responses were immediate and furious. Not even because Clover had done anything so wrong, but because no one wanted Val to believe they thought she was anything other than right. And no one had the guts to cross her.
I eventually turned off the notifications on the thread as I scrolled and studied the handful of photos that Clover had posted. My thumb hovered, nearly liking a photo of her with a book open on top of her face. Beneath, the caption said: osmosis.
Then I remembered that I was Bennett, and she was Clover.
I started to imagine it was me who she was giggling over every time she looked at her phone.
Over the next week, I brushed the thought aside, determined not to even entertain the idea.
But I would fall asleep with my phone in my hand, wondering what it might be like if she and I could just start with a clean slate.
What it might be like if I were someone else entirely.
It was six days before I gave in and created a fake profile. I had never done it before, but Val and her friends were always making secondary profiles for snooping on people who had blocked them or doing recon on crushes.
And that’s how Josh happened. Josh went to Cannon Beach High School.
He was going into eleventh grade. He liked sketching, because it was something I was okay at enough to do and post. He used to play basketball, but had quit last year to concentrate on art, because that felt like the kind of fantasy normal teens could have.
He had a mutt named Lucy and two younger brothers. His parents were stupidly in love.
JOSH
hey
The message sat for a week before I got a response.
CLOVER
hi unless you’re an old creep or a bot
JOSH
Ha. neither. You?
CLOVER
not that I’m aware of
that would be bizarre. To be a bot and not know it.
JOSH
or to be an old creep and not know it
CLOVER
JOSH
you live in CB?
CLOVER
that’s a question an old creep would ask
but yeah. U?
JOSH
born and raised. How have I never seen you?
CLOVER
I go to private school
JOSH
the lowly public school kids are missing out on your company
CLOVER
Trust me. I’d rather attend any other school than the one I do.
We talked every day for hours and hours and well into the summer. We shared secrets and talked about big things that felt nebulous, like why the hell do we even exist and how are we supposed to know what we want to do with our lives.
I couldn’t stop flirting simply because I finally could. I couldn’t stop hinting at how beautiful she was and speculating about how she could possibly be single.
She asked for pictures, and I sent her some random guy I found online.
He was good-looking enough but no one I felt threatened by.
I was Josh in so many ways. I told her so many truths that it became easy to convince myself that this was just a white lie.
It was just a name. And a picture. And a backstory.
But I had a hard time with the idea of her falling for anyone who didn’t look like the real me.
When she broached the topic of meeting, I told her I was gone for the summer and that my family rented our house out every year to out-of-towners.
She believed the lie … and so did I.