Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(21)
My eyes began to burn and I scrubbed my hands down my face. “Sorry. I’m not trying to throw myself a pity party, here, really I’m not. It’s just hard to stop once the subject comes up, because taken by themselves, the individual scenes don’t really demonstrate anything except a moment of questionable parenting, but—”
“Taken together, it becomes a pattern. A very large, complex pattern of them penalizing you for so-called feminine pursuits, and pressuring you toward things that would be considered more masculine.”
“Yeah. That. Thank you. They just . . . they couldn’t let me be myself, you know? They had to try to force me to be who they wanted me to be.” Fuck, I was getting mopey again. I dug into the plate of lasagna he set before me, then smiled with delight at the first bite. Nothing like good food to flip a mood around. “This is delicious. Oh God, you put spinach in here! Yes!”
He laughed and, goddamn, his teeth were amazingly straight and white and hellllooo to the smile lines and whoops, there went my schoolgirl crush again. I felt like Hermione in the presence of Gilderoy Lockhart.
“I’m glad you like it.” We ate in silence for a moment, and then his hand settled very lightly on my forearm. “They were wrong, Topher. You know that, right?”
I do, I thought, paused in winding a long string of mozzarella around my fork.
Except when I didn’t. Except when I looked at all the times that everyone I knew—every relative, every friend of the family—believed my aunt and uncle were blameless because they seemed so damn kind and reasonable and perfect to the outsider. High school sweethearts, homecoming queen and king, graduated summa and magna cum laude from college, respectively, in addition to being the first college graduates from their families. Successful careers, beautiful children, gorgeous home, lots of friends. Clearly they were doing everything right, so if there had been a problem, it must have been totally on my end. They were right and I was wrong. Full stop.
“Well, yeah, I know. That’s why I’m having my birthday dinner here tonight instead of with them.” I smiled bravely at Brendan and began turning my fork again, trying to break that gentle, lingering touch on my arm that meant nothing but kindness and quasi-paternal support from him but sent all the wrong misguided, self-serving signals to me. “I think I came to that conclusion—that they were wrong, I mean—somewhere in high school. I won’t say I was an easy kid to live with; I know I wasn’t. I had plenty of damage from my mom’s alcoholism and my unstable early childhood, not to mention bullying and puberty on top of that. They put me in therapy again to fix me, but eventually I realized I wasn’t the only one who needed fixing. We needed fixing, but they wouldn’t own their share of that.”
“Were they ever physically abusive?”
I shrugged, squirming at the word choice. “No. No. Not— No. I mean . . . I— I got my face slapped once in a while, and my aunt had this habit of digging her nails in when she grabbed my arm or my jaw. But not like . . . you know . . .”
He didn’t say anything, but merely watched me, and for some reason—probably that gentle understanding of his—I kept on stammering even when I probably should have shut up.
“I started feeling really anxious when they did that, and when I was about seventeen, my therapist suggested I choose a nonconfrontational moment to calmly and rationally explain to them how it made me feel when they grabbed me, and ask them not to do it anymore.”
“Did you?”
I nodded, my mouth pulling down. “I waited for a calm moment, and asked my aunt if they could please not do that anymore because it freaked me out. I told my therapist I’d done it and she thought I’d done a really good job.”
“Did they respect that?”
“No.” I shook my head, my eyes beginning to burn again. I was too humiliated by what had happened then to even tell the rest of the tale—how, the next time they were yelling at me, my aunt had grabbed my arm. I had jerked it out of her grasp and said, Don’t touch me, but she grabbed me again, digging her nails in. And I jerked away again and said, Don’t touch me!
Jesus. My heart was racing even at the memory. My hands shook so hard that my fork clattered against my plate and I had to put it down.
Next thing I had known, my aunt had me by my hair, on my knees—I wasn’t fighting back, I was just curled in a ball trying to protect myself as she pounded on my back with her fist. With me screaming, Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! over and over. Finally my uncle had intervened. He’d tossed me over his shoulder and carried me to my room, thrown me inside and slammed the door, all while I was screaming for them not to touch me.
The recollections were so vivid I might as well have been there on that floor again. It kept playing on instant repeat in my mind, the cringing and shouting and hitting. I wiped away a tear I didn’t even realize I’d spilled, and turned my attention back to my lasagna, picking at it listlessly. I couldn’t tell Brendan any of that. “No, they ignored my request and it led to a really bad scene. That’s what I got when I tried to reason with them like an adult, and asked them to treat me with respect. But, I mean, did they abuse me? No. No. They didn’t, like, beat me or anything. Not, like, you know . . . real abuse.”
Brendan sagged a little, pushing away his plate as if he’d lost his appetite. So had I, for that matter.