“Doesn’t feel like it.” I wipe my eyes. I am so tired of crying.
She nods, reading back over her list and flipping to a new page in her steno pad. “Sometimes, that’s how you know,” she says without looking up. “That’s how you know.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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forty-three
THERE IS A difference between rejection and betrayal.
To be turned down is a sting that fades away—a scratch that burns, but scabs. You can hypothesize why it didn’t work out, gather evidence, and formulate a theory that explains all of the reasons it wasn’t right—or simply chalk it up as “never meant to be.” After some time, when the scratch heals, it fades away completely.
The thing about betrayal is that it cannot be explained. It would be easier if Ben were evil, I suppose, an angry guy who kicked dogs and sold drugs and hated all women everywhere.
But he isn’t.
In the weeks that followed our visit to the detective, that’s how almost everyone in town was painted. Adele and Ben, Stacey and Phoebe, Dooney and Deacon, me and Will—anyone who’d ever worn Buccaneer Blue—we were all reduced to a cautionary tale again and again, on CNN and Facebook, on thousands of blogs and talk shows, our humanity siphoned off, drained away 140 characters at a time. In the end, you might have forgotten there were any people besides John Doone and Deacon Mills who lived in Coral Sands at all.
By Sunday evening, all four pleas were changed to guilty, and a list of new subpoenas had been issued with Ben Cody’s name at the top. On Monday morning, UltraFEM released a statement instead of the video, thanking those “brave enough to come forward.”
The world at large never had to see those four minutes that changed everything.
Those of us who did tried to make sense of it any way we could. Some wrote it off as boys being boys. People who’d never even been to Coral Sands decided our whole town was evil. Others chalked it up to a mix of hormones and alcohol. They said that this is what happens when teenagers drink. Maybe they’re right about some teenagers. Still there were plenty of us at that party who were just as drunk as our friends in the basement, who could never have imagined the things that happened that night.
I was one of them.
I can’t understand being drunk enough to see that go on and ignore it. How Ben could be in that room and not speak up, I will never know. What I do know is that Ben loved me, but it didn’t keep him from lying to me. One day, I hope to forgive him, but I’ll never be able to be with him again.
The hardest part about betrayal is that as bad as it hurts, it doesn’t stop you from loving the one who lied. In the days and weeks that followed, I was constantly surprised to find that no one had told my heart to cut it out. I kept remembering Ben’s touch and missing his Irresistible Grin. Just as I hadn’t been able to choose who I fell in love with, I couldn’t choose when to stop caring for him, either. The heart is a muscle, it would seem, both literally and figuratively. It does some things like beating and loving from memory, completely on its own.
By lunch on Monday, I had become persona non grata, as invisible as Phoebe and despised as Stacey—a pariah, just like Alfred Wegener. Christy and Rachel were polite and smiled from a distance, but drifted as far away as possible. I kept forgetting that Ben would no longer be sitting behind me in geology and not to look for him on the senior staircase. When he saw me, he would nod, then look away, which was even worse than if he had ignored me completely. Lindsey sat with me at lunch, and on the bus en route to the class field trip the next Friday. To her credit, she really tried, but it’s hard to talk to someone who is always on the verge of tears, and that afternoon I found myself standing alone in the Devonian Fossil Gorge at the edge of the spillway.
I knelt down and ran my fingers along those ancient shapes in the limestone. I tried to imagine these sea lilies and brachiopods, teaming with life in the shallow soup 375 million years ago, but I found that both observation and imagination have their limits. Iowa was once an ocean, yes, but I will never know it any other way than landlocked hills that end too soon and waves of windswept cornfields, rolling out in all directions, as far as my eyes can see.
Even when presented with the evidence itself, there are some phenomena that I will never grasp completely.