“Bitch.” Gus nips at Via’s lips one more time before he jumps to his feet, grabbing his varsity jacket from my lilac bed bench and storming past me, his shoulder brushing mine.
I continue standing at the door. I’m not even going to touch the subject of them making out on my bed with a ten-foot pole. It makes me want to throw up in my mouth, and I’m mad about it, but not as mad as I am about her sleeping with the enemy—quite freaking literally.
Via huffs and gets up, about to leave, but this time, I’m the one to close the door behind me and push her back onto my bed. “Sit.”
“Give me one good reason to.” She makes a move to stand again.
“It’s about your brother, and if you care about him at all—which you haven’t shown any signs of doing in the past four years—you will listen.”
I settle next to her on my bed. We’re both staring at our feet. I feel tipsy and frustrated with the past few days. Just when I thought I was making real progress with Penn and Mel, Via came back and screwed up everything.
“What’s going on with you and Gus?” I demand.
“As if I’ll ever tell you anything.” She sulks. I peek at her from my peripheral vision, and tears are brimming in her eyes. It must be so hard for her to see all this and know it wasn’t a part of her youth. That it never would be. She can’t get her high school years back.
“Have you ever been kissed before Gus?” I trail my linen with the tip of my finger, trying another tactic but also genuinely curious.
She snort-laughs through her tears. “Get to the point, Daria. We’re not friends, and this is not a heart to heart.”
“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “I just want you to know the whole picture before you date Gus or even mess around with him. He and your brother have an open beef. I heard there was mad trash talk the day the Saints beat the Bulldogs on the football field when the season started. Penn came over to our school a few days before that to try to patch things up with Gus, but it didn’t work. Penn thinks Gus cheated somehow in order to win,” I explain, manically trying to convey to her the level of hate these two share. “And every single time I see them in the same vicinity, Gus is trying to throw Penn off-balance.”
Via takes a deep breath and closes her eyes.
“I feel like Penn gave up on me the moment I ran away, and that nothing I can do will ever narrow the abyss between us,” she admits. I perk up, looking at her cautiously. This sounds a lot like an admission. And an admission is better than an attack, which is what I’ve been getting since the day she came to live with us.
“How so?” My voice is so small and encouraging, barely a whisper.
“Penn is being weird with me. Not exactly hostile but…distant. I feel like I’ve let him down so much by leaving. As if I had a choice. I thought Rhett was going to kill me at some point. And Penn, no matter how much he loved me and was there for me, he was still only a child himself. He couldn’t protect me. I realize that I’m the only one to blame—”
“No, you aren’t,” I cut her off. “Rhett is to blame. Your late mom is to blame. Your school, and the system, and to an extent, even my mother for not noticing. But not you.”
“Penn isn’t to blame,” she stresses. “And he is the one who got hurt the most.”
Now I have my own admission. The truth is clogging my throat, and the alcohol begs for me to let it loose. It’s a confession. A difficult one. But one that would make her let go of her inhibitions and guilt, and maybe start building a strong bridge to cross that gulf.
“Penn and I are also to blame,” I admit quietly.
“What?” Her eyes shoot to me. “What in the hell are you talking about? You didn’t know each other back when that happened.”
I tell her everything about that day. Rehashing the entire thing from the moment I stood at the door and prayed not to see her to the moment Penn gave me my first kiss. And all the horrible things in-between. The letter. How he tore it. The glee I felt when he did. How I wrote about it in my little black book that same evening. How the book got thick.
“He tore it, but he didn’t know. He didn’t know, Via. He didn’t know,” I keep repeating.
After I’m done, I feel out of breath. As though I just ran a marathon. I shift my entire body on the bed so I can look at her better. She is shaking, and tears stream down her face. I realize my mother never told her that she got into the Royal Academy. And why would she? It’s cruel, bittersweet news. I try to hug her, but she shoots up to her feet. I do, too.
“There wasn’t one day in my life I didn’t think about the letter, and about you, and about what a horrible person I am,” I confess, tears blurring my vision. It’s true. Even when I hated her, I hated myself more for what I did. I still do. This was when Mom became Mel. When my downfall started. “Please, believe me.”
The slap comes out of nowhere. Sharp as a knife and full of heat. I feel her palm on my cheek long after she withdraws it and instinctively raise my hand to rub it.
You just got slapped. My brain is screaming at the rest of my body, an echo ringing between my ears. Ad infinitum.
“And that makes it okay?” Her entire face twists. “You and my brother ruined my life. Rhett was an abusive jerk. Mama was unresponsive and passed out eighty percent of the time, and your mom was pushing me away because you couldn’t handle us being close and she didn’t want to upset you,” she tells me, and I choke on my breath. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know Via and Mom weren’t super close. “I would have never left had I known I got in! I would have made it through, Daria.”
“I know.” I’m sobbing, bracing my hands on my knees and shaking my head. The tears burn where she slapped me, but drunk and armor-less, I acknowledge that I deserved it. “God, I know.”
My shoulders are shaking as the sobs flow through me. I advance toward her, planning…I don’t know, even to go down on my knees if I have to, but she backs up again. Her legs hit my nightstand, and she picks up the first thing she can get her hands on—a golden alarm clock Luna brought me from her family trip to Switzerland a few years ago—and aims it at me.
“Stay away from me, Daria. I mean it.”
“Please don’t think any less about your brother. That wasn’t my intention at all. I just wanted you to know that everyone was to blame for what happened four years ago. But now you’re back, and we can make up for that time.”
“You can’t make up for that time!”
She is screaming at the top of her lungs, hunching her body from the effort to produce such a profound yell. We’re lucky the music is deafeningly loud outside. “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell is playing, and I can’t help but agree with the sentiment.
Love is so contaminated. It tarnishes all that is beautiful and corrupts the soul. Love is so much uglier than hate because when you hate, you’re not confused. When you’re in love, you’re dumb.
“You can’t turn back time. I was miserable and abused in Mississippi, only in a different way.”
“So why did you give my mother trouble about coming back?” I’m trying to gain control over my voice, my muscles, my heart. “Why did you want to stay there when Mel begged you to come back?”