We Are the Ants(46)

“I swore him to secrecy. It’s not the sort of thing I wanted getting around.”

“I won’t tell a soul.” Silence fell, and we both turned our attention to our uneaten cookies. The conversation sputtered along in fits and starts; one second everything was good, the next uncomfortable as the past overwhelmed us. “I’ve missed you, Henry.”

The statement stopped me because I knew she was waiting for me to say it back. To tell her that I missed her, and I had, but it used to be me and Audrey and Jesse, and we were still incomplete.

“What was it like?” I asked.

“What was what like?”

“The hospital?”

Audrey stood and walked toward the parking lot, stopping when she reached the curb. Her shoes dragged on the ground like her feet were too heavy to lift properly. I brushed the crumbs off my lap and followed. I wasn’t sure whether she was going to answer, but I gave her the space to decide. “It was lonely,” she said. “But it was like this whole other world where you didn’t exist and my parents didn’t exist and Jesse wasn’t dead. Nothing seemed real there. Time was blurry, and maybe that was because of the meds they had me on, but I think it was just me. I needed a pocket of space to curl up in and wait out the pain of losing my best friend.”

I leaned to the side, bumped Audrey’s shoulder with my arm to let her know I was there. “I thought you left because you blamed me.”

“I did,” Audrey said. “I mean, I didn’t leave because of that, but I did blame you for a while.”

“Oh.”

Audrey looked at me. The golden hour of the setting sun cast Audrey’s skin in bronze. “Jesse loved you so much, Henry, but he was terrified of never being good enough for you. You told him constantly how perfect he was, but Jesse wasn’t perfect, and he was worried that if you ever saw his flaws, you’d leave him.”

Those words hurt more than being kicked in the testicles in the locker room. “I knew Jesse wasn’t perfect. He exaggerated everything. If he were on the phone with someone for an hour, he’d say it’d been five. If he bought one shirt, he’d tell me he bought twenty. And he had terrible taste in books. He said his favorite book was The Catcher in the Rye, but he had a copy of Twilight under his bed with pages so battered, he must’ve read it a hundred times.”

Audrey leaned her head against my arm, and I didn’t move away. “I know, and I don’t blame you now. I just . . . I had to leave.”

“You didn’t have to leave me.”

“I know.”

“How come you never told me about Jesse hurting himself?”

Audrey sighed and sat on the brick wall of the decorative fountain near the bus stop. I sat beside her. The water gurgled behind us, and wishes glittered at the bottom of the pool. She looked fragile right then in a way I’d never seen her look before. I felt I had the power to break her in that moment, to destroy her utterly. A few months ago I might have done it, but it didn’t seem important anymore. I think Audrey Dorn was punishing herself worse than I ever could.

“Jesse was mine.” Tears rolled down Audrey’s cheeks, but I doubted she was aware of them. “He was mine before he was yours, but he’d never given me all of himself. Then you came along and got everything I ever wanted.”

“You didn’t just love Jesse,” I said. “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”

Audrey sniffled. She dug a tissue out of her purse and wiped her nose. “I hated when Jesse hurt, when he cried, and when he cut himself, but he only showed those parts of himself to me. Oh, I rationalized that I didn’t tell you because Jesse made me swear not to or because I didn’t seriously believe he’d really hurt himself, but deep down I knew it was because I wanted something of Jesse that belonged only to me.”

If Audrey had admitted that immediately after Jesse died, I never would have forgiven her. But the year between us had given me the distance I needed to understand. I even envied a little that she knew Jesse in a way I never did or would.

“Don’t hate me,” she said.

“I think I would have done the same thing.”

“Jesse’s parents hate me. They blame me.”

“I don’t hate you, Audrey.”

Though we weren’t touching, I still felt the tension she’d been holding all those months drain from her body, and I realized how difficult it was for Audrey to admit the truth to me without knowing if I’d ever forgive her. Only, there was nothing to forgive. Audrey may not have told me about Jesse’s troubles, but I had willfully ignored their signs. I’d let myself believe the lies because it was easier than digging for the truth.

“I don’t hate you either, Henry.”

I stood and put my hands in my pockets as the last of the day’s light retreated below the horizon. “Then that makes one of us.”





24 November 2015


Lunch raged around us, but I was too absorbed watching Diego and Audrey argue to notice anything outside of our bubble.

“Only an idiot could prefer Matt Smith to David Tennant.” Audrey was so worked up, her nostrils flared and her eyes had gone full-bore crazy.

Diego remained calm, which only seemed to infuriate Audrey more. “Then I’m an idiot.” He popped a chip into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed, while holding his free hand in the air to let Audrey know he wasn’t done speaking. “I’ll give you that Tennant brought a gravitas to the Doctor that grounded the insanity of the ludicrous situations he got himself into, but Matt Smith didn’t play the Doctor, he was the Doctor.”