Chapter Fourteen
Evan
“Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”
Much Ado About Nothing
“Tell me about your parents.”
I shifted in my seat. This new therapist, Dr. Zimmerman, asked a lot of questions, but that was to be expected so early on.
“I don’t really want to talk about them.” I realized how defensive that sounded. “Not because I have any childhood trauma from them. Other than them abandoning me.”
“Oh?” She blinked rapidly, and I realized I was going to have to tread lightly.
“Not really. I mean, they moved after I graduated from college. That was just a joke. I swear I don’t have abandonment issues. The opposite really. My parents were pretty great.”
She tapped her stylus on the edge of the iPad. “That’s good context. We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”
I relaxed.
“So what you would like to talk about?”
I tensed again, unused to controlling the conversation. “My troubles were always more social. Friends, girlfriends, that sort of thing. I mean, I do okay with the few people I trust. But I’ve been lied to or misled, like a lot.”
She jotted something down. “Can you give me an example?”
I blew out a breath. “For starters, the summer before high school, one of the more popular guys on my block befriended me. I was always kind of an outsider, band dork, fat kid, no social skills to speak of. I had friends, but when this guy singled me out, I felt special. He insisted I go out for lacrosse with him and his buddies in the fall.”
“What happened?”
“I showed up for tryouts, but they didn’t.”
She winced. “That’s rotten. How did you respond to that?”
I recalled how mortified I’d been that first day, but then another memory surfaced.
“When I told my dad I was going to try out for the team, he bought all this gear. He’d never pushed me toward sports, and he’d supported me in band or whatever science fair I’d signed up for, but it was like he suddenly had something we could bond over.
I’d crossed into his domain. He spent weeks teaching me how to play.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to try out, but I was enjoying my dad’s attention, and I was hoping to make friends, so I went.
I wasn’t even expecting to make the team. ”
“But you did?” She smiled, like she was proud of this little dork who pulled through in the clutch.
“Yeah. Junior varsity.”
“What happened with the other boys?”
“They went out for football, like they’d probably always intended.”
“Did you ever confront them?”
I rubbed my palms on my thighs, uncomfortable talking about this, even though that incident was only the tip of a very deep iceberg.
“Yeah. I got into a fight with him, but he just gaslit me, told me he’d only wanted to push me to join a team.
” I waved it away. I’d worked that particular hurt out with Dr. Price last year. “It’s just one example.”
“Are there others?”
God, so many.
“I mean, yeah.” I took a deep breath, let it out. “Most recently, about a month ago, I ran into an old friend from school. We reconnected, hit it off, and I went home with her. I thought it was the start of something.”
Dr. Zimmerman leaned forward a hair. “And?”
“Turns out it wasn’t her.” I laughed. “She just made all of it up.”
“Made it up how?”
“Her friend had put her up to a prank. She pretended to be an old acquaintance, and I guess I filled the rest in.”
Saying that out loud, I realized how much I’d contributed to that fiction.
Dr. Zimmerman wrote something. “How did you find out? Did she tell you?”
I inhaled, trying to figure out the shortest way through this. “A mutual friend of ours clued me in.”
“You must have felt so betrayed. Did you confront this woman about it?”
I nodded. “She said she told me, but I was too caught up in an alternate reality and misinterpreted her words.”
“So let’s go back to the friend you thought you were dealing with.”
I squirmed a little. This was a much touchier topic. “Lizzy.”
“What was your relationship to her?”
“She lived nearby. She was like me. Nerdy, bookish, and not conventionally attractive.”
Dr. Zimmerman lifted one eyebrow. “You don’t think you’re attractive?”
“Not then, I wasn’t.” I scratched my neck, embarrassed for some reason.
“Were kids mean to you?”
“Kids were always mean, but I wasn’t much better. While I thought I was getting more popular, I left my middle school friends behind. And then I walked right into my comeuppance.”
“How so?”
“Sophomore year, two of the popular girls invited me on a date on the same night, putting me in an awkward spot.”
“When it rains, it pours?”
“That was exactly what I was thinking at the time. I’d agreed to go out with Meghan when Vicky asked me out. In hindsight, I know I should have turned Vicky down and honored my commitment, but I was fifteen and stupid.”
Dr. Zimmerman’s eyes widened. “Please don’t tell me you tried to go out on two dates at once.”
I shook my head. “No, they were friends, so they would have figured that out. That should have been my first clue something was off.”
“So what did you do?”
I clenched my fists, mortified all over again by a social situation I’d been in no way prepared to handle. “I thought I was doing the right thing by letting Meghan down before telling Vicky yes.”
“Why’d you make that choice?”
“Honestly, I don’t remember.” Though the fallout was etched in my mind. “I guess I liked Vicky more.” That wasn’t true. I wasn’t paying to lie to my therapist. “Actually, I thought she’d help my reputation better.”
“Let me guess. She was more popular?”
“She was a queen bee.”
“What did Meghan say when you broke the date?”
“She told me she was only joking anyway.” Why did that memory always taste like iron in my mouth even after all this time? “She said she didn’t actually want to go out with me.”
“Do you think she was trying to save face?”
“At first, I thought so. I worried I’d actually hurt her feelings.”
“Did you end up going out with Vicky?”
The skin on my neck heated, and I tugged at the collar. “No.”
Dr. Zimmerman tilted her head, encouraging. “What happened?”
“When I went to pick her up, she told me the exact same thing. It had all been a joke.” I swallowed. “She said I was delusional for believing she’d want to go out with me. In a way, it was like the lacrosse tryouts all over again.”
“Oh, Evan.” She reached out and took my hand, something Dr. Price had never done, and that small bit of empathy made me crack inside. “Walk me through how it made you feel.”
“Being rejected didn’t hurt as much as feeling tricked, lied to.” My throat constricted, and I brushed my cheek, catching a hot tear. “At the same time, it felt so deserved.”
“No.” She squeezed my hand. “No, you didn’t deserve their cruelty. That was not your fault. Do you understand?”
“That was just the first of many shitty things that happened my sophomore year, but at least after that betrayal, I was prepared for the abuse. I just kept my head down and tried to ignore them, but it was hard. The worst was that I was convinced everyone hated me, old friends and new. I couldn’t go back, but I couldn’t see a way forward.
I didn’t know how I was going to survive three more years of high school. ”
“So how did you?”
“I did make a few friends, people who didn’t take the low road, who didn’t care about the rumors the bullies would start about me.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Like I supposedly banged seven girls in a closet one after the other, which was hilarious to me because I couldn’t get a date with anyone with my unfounded reputation. Not that it mattered by that point, I’d stopped trusting anyone. Still, the nickname Seven followed me through high school.”
Dr. Zimmerman held up a finger. “Can we go back to the woman you met recently?”
“You see? It’s a pattern for me.” And I hadn’t even scratched on my boss’s wife, the secretly married girlfriend, or less dramatic betrayals I’d endured.
She set her iPad aside. “You mentioned that you felt bad for ditching your middle school friends. I’m assuming that includes this Lizzy you used to know.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you believe you’re being punished?”
“Like karma?” I sat up straighter. “I’m a scientist. A meteorologist to be precise. I believe in chains of cause and effect. I believe that my actions have consequences.”
“Which actions, Evan?”
I weighed the question again. “In this case, betraying people for something as vain as a higher social status.”
Her eyes softened. “When you met this woman, when you thought she was your old friend, what were you hoping to get from her?”
“Absolution.” I said it like the punchline to a joke, but when Dr. Zimmerman wrote that down, I wanted to walk it back.
“Were you looking for forgiveness for being a bad friend?”
I blinked back new tears. “What I wanted was a do-over. A chance to see where different choices might have led.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t get to know that, but how do you imagine your life if you’d never befriended the boy from your block, if you hadn’t gone out for lacrosse?”
I thought about it. “I want to say I would have appreciated my friends and accepted my fate as a loser. But I would have envied the popular kids. And they would have bullied me anyway.”
“What, if anything, would have improved?”
“I would have kept the friends who supported me for who I was. Maybe I’d trust people still. I could have become an expert sax player if I’d stuck with band. I could have become a famous rock star.”
“Didn’t you become somewhat famous anyway?”
I chortled. “Sure. I’m very well-known in some demographics.”
“Now, I want you to compare that imaginary timeline with where you are today. What’s better about this path you took?”
The question shouldn’t have surprised me, but I’d been wallowing in the what ifs and hadn’t considered the flip side of the coin.
“Lacrosse changed my life for the better, helping me build confidence in my body and skills. My relationship with my dad improved. He came to all my games and spent a lot of his time learning about the sport so we could talk about it. And not all of the kids were assholes. I did make some good friends.” I tended to forget that. I’d abandoned them along with the rest.
“That’s all really great, Evan.” She let go of my hand. “It’s okay to question the choices we’ve made along the way. It’s how we grow, how we rectify past wrongs, and how we course correct when needed.”
I hoped she wasn’t going to leave me with that trite advice. “Right. But I should focus on today, on the future.”
She scowled. “I didn’t say that.”
“Sorry. My last therapist was always telling me I needed to find ways to let go of the past because it was ruining my present.”
“Your last therapist wasn’t wrong, but it’s hard to do that when you’re mired, when you feel responsible for wronging someone or you haven’t had closure from those who hurt you.”
That was true. “But what if I want to move on?”
“You’ve already been working on healing through therapy, but if you don’t feel like your personal growth is sufficient to balance out any specific harm you’ve caused, you can be the one to reach out and make amends with your middle school friends.”
“Right.” I thought about how that online chat with Lizzy Grant had ended. “And if they won’t talk to me?”
“Well, your peace of mind should never come at the cost of theirs. You’ll just have to find another way to forgive yourself.”
“How?”
“By understanding the only thing you can control is your relationship with yourself. You do the best you can, Evan.”
I repeated that phrase in my head. Do the best you can. It was so simple, but was that enough? “And am I just supposed to forgive everyone who wronged me?”
“Forgiveness may come in time.” She leaned closer. “But first you need to understand that you are not to blame for other people’s bad behavior.”
Something unknotted between my shoulders to hear it worded that way. “I know.”
“Do you?” She looked at me square in the eyes. “Because I hear you say you’re looking for absolution when you’re owed an apology.”
I released a long sigh. “Can’t both things be true?”
She snort-laughed, then shook her head. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a bit of a devil’s advocate?”
“Yeah, my parents used to tell me I was a little contrarian. I thought they meant because we lived a little bit in the country.”
“Only a little bit?”
“We lived at Lake Monticello.”
“Ah.” She sucked air through her teeth. “I know it well. A suburb surrounded by rural Virginia.”
“Exactly. With Charlottesville so close, we spent most weekends driving in for one thing or another.”
“So you’re a local boy.” She tilted her head. “Now it makes way more sense why you believed you’d run into a past acquaintance. You were probably expecting to.”
“You’re saying I wasn’t totally gullible for falling for a fraud?”
“Not at all. You were behaving as expected. This fraud…” She glanced at her notes. “What was her name?”
“Elizabeth.”
Her eyes widened. “Yeah. You’re definitely off the hook. Elizabeth was operating outside the norms of civil decency. I have no idea if her motives were innocent or malicious, but none of that was your fault.”
I exhaled. I hadn’t known I’d needed that vindication, but I wanted to go find Elizabeth right then and there, point in her face, and say, Booyah!