There was no such thing as getting anything less than an A on my final. My GPA was holding steady at 3.8, and any dip might cost me summa cum laude, which wasn’t acceptable if I was going to get one of the top jobs in a New York brokerage.
My phone dinged and it was a welcome temporary escape from the numbers.
Ash: What are you doing right now?
I smiled when I saw the text. I’d gotten them every now and then since I’d gone off to college. Odd times, day or night. Just that one question. What are you doing right now? She said it was important we stay connected when we were separated. I humored her because I knew she spent the majority of her time alone.
Me: Studying. Why?
Ash: I need you to do something for me. This is serious.
I doubted it.
Me: What?
Ash: You need to tell Chris to back off. He’s been harassing me all year, and for the most part I’ve been handling it. But now he’s getting really nasty.
That pissed me off. He’d been harassing her all year and I was just finding out about that now? I knew he’d been talking shit about her the last time I saw him, but I hadn’t been worried about Ash brushing him off. She might have been a loner, but she’d never been a pushover. I knew, because of all the shit I’d given her, she’d never backed down from me.
Me: Tell me.
Ash: He’s telling everyone at school I’m giving him blow jobs. AS IF! Now I’ve got guys lining up at my locker every morning like I’m some kind of hooker. I wanted so bad to go to school and be normal…but here, without you, this kind of sucks. No pun intended.
Me: I’ll take care of it.
I saw the dots on the phone appear and disappear a few times. I knew her too well to know she wasn’t going to question how I was going to take care of it. She would simply trust me that it would be done. No, if she was hesitating about something, I knew what it was.
Ash: Are you coming home after the semester?
That was it. That was what she wanted to know. I wanted to say no so bad, but I couldn’t. For two reasons. One, I’d gotten an internship at a brokerage only an hour outside of Harborview. Which meant I wasn’t going to be able to do the internship and hold down a job that paid enough for rent. So I needed a place to crash and the estate was my only option. Two, I didn’t like the reason I wanted to say no.
I wanted to say no because I had this feeling. In my gut. Like I was nervous about seeing Ash, which was absolutely ridiculous. There was nothing scary about Ashleigh. I’d known her for years.
I just felt like every time we came together now, there was this…thing. In the room with us. A thing I knew would land my ass in trouble.
Call it instinct, but there were times I looked at Ash and it felt like she was going to be my ruin. Which was stupid. She was just a kid. That’s all she’d ever been. Just a stupid, pushy, up-in-my-business kid.
I looked at the phone and considered not answering her. It was nothing to her what I did, or didn’t do, with my life.
Me: Yeah. I’ll be home next week after my last final. I got an internship in the city.
Ash: That’s awesome! And after only your freshman year! I knew it. I knew you would kill it. You can do anything. I’m soooooo proud of you!
What was this feeling? Why did it always happen around her? I shouldn’t care that I’d made her proud. I shouldn’t give a shit what she thought.
But I did.
Because outside of her and George, no one else did.
Me: It’s not a big deal. I’ll be on the job every day, so don’t think we’re going to hang by the pool and swap stories about your boyfriend problems.
Ash: I don’t have a boyfriend problem. I have a blow-job problem. You’re going to fix that.
I was. I was going to call Chris and tell him if he even looked in Ashleigh’s direction again, I was coming to hurt him. I still had enough clout in that town for him to know it was true.
I wasn’t the kid who grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was the kid with the heroin-addicted mom who grew up in a shitty apartment until CPS took me away. It meant I knew how to fight dirty.
Me: Stop talking about blow jobs. You shouldn’t know about shit like that.
Except I’d been the one to teach her about shit like that. Letting her know that horrible night of the dance what I let other girls do to me.
More dots.
Ash: I’m not a kid anymore, Marc. I know that’s what you want to believe, but it’s not true.
It was what I needed to believe. Because I couldn’t have it any other way. It messed with my head too much.
I didn’t answer her. Instead, I ran through my contact list and found Chris’s number. After a short conversation where I’d made myself crystal clear, Ash’s blow-job problem was fixed.
It was time to come to grips with the fact that I was going back to the Landen estate.
Back to Ashleigh.
August before senior year
Ashleigh
I looked out the window situated at the end of the guest wing and saw Marc out by the pool messing with the filter. He’d been right about his internship. I’d barely seen him all summer and, any time he wasn’t working, Daddy had him doing any errand he could imagine.
“He’s a man now. He’s got to earn his board. This isn’t a charity home I’m running.”
I’d tried not to roll my eyes when he’d said that over dinner days after Marc had come home from college. However, it was one of the few times I’d seen my father in months, and I wasn’t prepared to get into any fights with him.
Not to mention, Daddy had been different lately. It was hard to identify the change. Part of me thought maybe he was just getting older, and, because of that, he was getting even more protective of me. As if seeing me grow into a woman was jarring to him, and he wanted to do everything he could to keep me younger longer.
Except I might have believed that he didn’t want his little girl to grow up more, if he’d spent time with me while I was actually growing up.
He insisted I wear dresses that made me look thirteen at dinner. He was a hard no on letting any boys come to the house to pick me up for a date. Not that that was a problem.
And all extracurricular activities had to be run by him. For example, I was allowed to be on the school paper, but not allowed to be on the cheer squad. I was allowed to join the community outreach club—we tutored students in disadvantaged areas of towns outside of Harborview for free—but I was not allowed to join the drama club.
My classes, my extras, my SATs were all selected to present me well to Princeton. Which was great, because I’d be there next year with Marc.
But my father wasn’t real big on activities that might actually be fun.
I’d loved cheering on Marc at his soccer games. Add a few leg kicks and pompoms and I could have been a cheerleader. I wasn’t sure how I felt about acting, but the people who worked behind the scenes on the plays always joked about how much fun it was just to goof around with everyone during rehearsal.
But those clubs meant socializing with the locals, something my father had always frowned upon.
Because of my health.
Or so I’d always thought. My asthma had been manageable since my last bad incident, and at some point my father was going to have to accept I was leaving next year to attend Princeton. Once there, I would be able to do, and be, with anyone I wanted.