What We Saw(72)

Yesterday, when I got home from Ben’s, I told Mom and Dad everything. We showed them the video. I told Dad that I knew he didn’t want us to get involved and started to explain why I had to. He stopped me with a raised hand, closed Will’s laptop, and picked up the phone to call Deputy Jennings.

I texted Ben this morning on the way to the station. I told him what time we’d be here and asked him to join us. Will and the detective start and stop their way through the video, pausing it every so often as he points out people, and she writes down their names. My phone vibrates in my hand, and I glance down at the screen, swiping open the message with my thumb to reveal Ben’s response: I love you. Please don’t go.

My eyes fill up and I hear the video come to an end.

“Any idea who this guy is?” the detective asks Will, pointing at the screen. As my brother turns to look at me, she follows suit.

“His name is Ben Cody,” I say.

“You sure?” she asks. “Just the back of his head.”

“He has a scar behind his ear.” I point it out on the screen.

The detective squints as she leans in. The closer you look, the more you see.

“Oh yeah,” she says, writing down his name. “Must know him pretty well to catch that.”

“We’ve been friends since the day I gave it to him.”

“When was that?” she asks with a smile.

“We were five.” I can’t keep the tears out of my voice. The detective looks up at me, then pulls a tissue out of a box on the table and hands it over.

“You’re doing the right thing,” she says.

“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.