“You really shouldn’t let yourself get so drunk at those barn parties. Anyone could have taken advantage of you.” Everett’s tone is snide, with a side of know-it-all.
There is so much to unpack as his advice blasts me in the face, I’m not sure where to start. When he first approached me at the end of practice, I thought maybe he was going to deliver an apology. For how he’d been treating me. Silly Kennedy, he just wants to further make you feel like shit.
All thoughts of sugarplums and kisses to a slow song on the cafeteria dance floor vanish.
My temper wins, getting the first word.
“Oh, because you’re a choirboy,” I sneer, rolling my eyes.
It’s a terrible comeback, and I sound like a seven-year-old, but his prickly words caught me off guard and my first imperative is to protect my wounded heart.
“I’m not, but at least I don’t pretend to be. I’m not running around here like the teacher’s pet and everyone’s best friends, then tossing back shots and trying to come out of my clothes.”
I swear, if you looked at my cheek right now, it might bear Everett’s handprint. That’s how hard his words smack me.
My voice shakes with anger as I wrench my things away from him, my binder clattering to the ground. “You’re a jerk! A really shitty, disgusting jerk!”
I can’t even get a more coherent thought out there. One second, I’m thinking that Everett is coming to mend fences, to put us on a path back to friendship and maybe even something more. This is what I always do with him. I allow myself to get carried away with the Everett of my fantasies, rather than focus on the real guy standing right in front of me.
He shrugs, a smug grin on his lips. “I’m just trying to prevent you from being assaulted in the woods. Or becoming the next girl with a naked picture texted around the school.”
Pain spreads through my heart like a rapidly moving bruise, and my fingernails dig into my palms. I’m always so quick to give him a chance, to forgive, to bend to the golden boy face and my damsel in distress thoughts. Everett’s not going to save me, please, he barely wants to look at me. He doesn’t now, and he didn’t back then. If he really wanted me, he could have had me at any point. Even before he left for deployment, he kept me dangling on a string as a prospect, while I guarded my chastity like a warrior so that one day it could be his.
The things I wrote in that last letter, the one I should destroy after this encounter, my true feelings … I’m so grateful he never saw it. That he was taken before it could get to him. I remember receiving it back, with Return to Sender stamped in big red letters on the envelope. It would only give him more fodder, more daggers to hurt me with.
I know better now. There was no us. There was no hope. I saw how easily he could turn on me. Finally, some common sense seems to have filtered through the trap he’d set up around my brain.
“You don’t need to worry about me. In fact, I’m not even sure why you’re talking to me. You’ve made it clear you have no interest in anything I do, Everett. So leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone? Sheesh, that’s what I’ve been trying to get you to do to me since I got here.” He cracks, like we’re having some kind of sarcastic rapport instead of his epic rejection of me.
“Just walk away. I’m done with this.” Finally, I unlock my car and begin furiously shoving things in the back seat.
But Everett apparently hasn’t drawn enough blood. “I just wouldn’t want the future homecoming queen to end up puking her guts out on some guy’s lap while—”
“ENOUGH!” I scream louder than the entire band practicing on an adjacent field.
Poking my finger into his chest, wishing it were a dagger, my voice takes on a scary low tone. “You may think you had me on some sort of string back in the day, but we’re done with that now. You can’t control me, drag me along like your puppet, and expect me to put up with all of this. I understand you’ve been through a lot, Everett. Honestly, I probably don’t understand, which is why you hate me so much, right? It’s my fault you were taken prisoner? Is that what you’re going to blame me for next? Go ahead. I’m done caring what you think. You’re the one who showed up where you knew I’d be. You’re the one who followed me out here. What does that say about you?”
Blood whooshes in my ears, tears prick at the corner of my eyes, and my heart is going haywire. I barely register the look of shock on Everett’s face, because I’m too busy scrambling my way into the driver’s seat of my car.
Wrenching my seatbelt on and pushing the damn ignition button, I slam the door without waiting for him to speak.
What I told him is the truth. The strings he wrapped around my heart have finally snapped, tethering me to Everett no more.
13
Everett
I watch from the window as Kennedy and her girlfriends, and their dates, cheese away for the cameras.
Hands on each other’s hips, making kissy faces for the photos, singing along to whatever god-awful pop song one of them is blaring from their phone speaker.
Just looking down on them, I feel myself glowering. I’m so far removed from the juvenile events of high school life that this all seems so trivial. And useless. And fucking fun. Just remembering my senior homecoming dance brings back some of the fondest memories—
Okay, fine. I’m jealous. But just a smidge. While I’m up here in my tower of solace, she’s down there ready to have a fun night with friends and possibly drink some spiked punch.
Kennedy is also going to be crowned homecoming queen and dance with some dickhead. He’ll wrap his hands around her waist, pull her close, all of that swishy maroon material bunching in his fingers …
Fuck. That should be me.
She was in her cheerleading uniform last night when they crowned her senior homecoming queen at the football game. That orange and white skirt hiked up just below her ass, her bright smile dazzling the crowd. On the arm of one of the players I’ve been coaching, she walked through the arch of balloons like her kingdom was receiving her.
Fuck, I hate how happy she is. It pisses me off, that someone who I used to be happy with, used to smile with, flirt with … that she can still find joy in life when I’m so fucking miserable.
The hope in her eyes when I carried her things to the car after my first day of football coaching? I had to dash that. It was a stupid fucking idea to go up to her in the first place. But then she started babbling about homecoming, and I flashed back to the time Rachel told Scott who told some other guys I knew that Kennedy thought I’d ask her to be my senior prom date.
I’d wanted it to be her. I was a moron for not taking her. But I talked myself in and out of it so many times that, in the end, I just chickened out. Me, the future soldier, couldn’t even muster the guts to ask the girl I was desperately infatuated with to prom.
But those memories came slamming back, and Kennedy had looked so fucking pretty in her practice uniform, and my cutting mouth went to work.
What I’d said was awful. I was the worst kind of prick, the kind who slut shamed a girl and rubbed false accusations in her face to soothe my bruised ego. My plan was to drive her away, to make her hurt as much as I did.