The Truth About Keeping Secrets(15)

That was weird, right? That was weird.

June was nothing at all like I’d thought she’d be. Who would have thought that she would be the one to laugh at my ‘dead dad’ jokes? I figured maybe she’d just felt bad for me and that was the only reason she’d given me the time of day. A charity case. Maybe I was being delusional. But there might have been some truth to it, considering my first assumption was correct.

It wasn’t inherently strange that she was a patient of Dad’s but the way she’d spoken about him was. She’d said something had happened. What did that even mean? What kind of drama do you have with your therapist? Either way, she had shared something with him, something located on the side of Dad’s double life that I knew nothing about; in a Venn diagram of Dad and me, this girl lived in the intersection. There was something meaningful about that. Something important.

And I wanted to know what it was.

I did eventually end up trying to do schoolwork as per Mom’s request, but worksheets that normally would have taken me five minutes were taking forever. They made no sense, they might as well have been in a different language, and all I could think about was June and this awful heaviness battling a searing lightness somewhere in my stomach. All together, it made me want to puke.

So I flipped open my laptop and searched her name.

Hardly anything came up. No Facebook. No Twitter. Nothing personal at all, actually – just stuff from the Pleasant Hills school district website that I already knew about her: all the academic awards she’d won, the clubs she headed. A few pictures from when she’d been a cheerleader, backlit by the floodlights and beaming out on to the stadium, Panthers uniform and purple pompoms and all.

But Heath’s online footprint was much larger.

He instantly appeared on Facebook. He was irritatingly good-looking, charming even when two-dimensional. His most recent post was about homecoming, a picture of him and June going to the dance in freshman year next to a picture of them being crowned king and queen – a corny ‘look how far we’ve come’ thing, with more than two hundred likes. There was an album of them on vacation in Hilton Head, June sprawled out in a bikini and doing cartwheels in the waves. The posts went back years. There was something uncomfortable about watching a relationship unfold from only one side, but from what I could see they seemed kind of infatuated with each other.

Thinking of infatuation, naturally, made me think of Bea. Why had she been so weird? What was her problem?

Summer. The July before freshman year. Around then, I’d imagined someday being old and shrivelled and having someone ask me about my first love – and it would have been her, all braided pigtails and gap-teeth and the most ridiculous snorty laugh I’d ever heard.

Oh. That’s what this feeling was.

Absolutely not, my own fucking brain. God. What was happening?

The momentary lightness was suppressed by a tidal wave of grief.

Dad. Dad sitting at the foot of my bed with his hand on my ankle, which I can feel, but just barely; my nerves have gone haywire and are now firing at random intervals. How can a body fine-tuned to keep you alive so gleefully tear you apart?

It’s freshman year. My parents have found out. I’m too far gone to ask how, but I know they have, based on the way Dad lumbers into my bedroom like he’s on his way to his own funeral. I’ve spent the previous few days at school being harassed. Pushed. Pointed at. In class a teacher mentioned Lesbos and everyone snickered. It will go on relentlessly for weeks, weeks, until after Christmas break when it’ll calm down, become a weekly occurrence instead of daily, and then they’ll all forget, because Sydney Whitaker is quiet, uninteresting, doesn’t even flinch any more; it’s not fun to terrorize an indifferent mouse.

All I can say to Dad is that I didn’t want it to happen like this. I didn’t want it to happen at all, but especially not like this.

Dad says that my strength is incomparable, but I don’t feel particularly strong; I feel rotten, used, embarrassed. I’m sure that I’ll never feel worse than I do in this moment.

Oh. Just you wait.

I waited until Mom had gone to sleep because I didn’t want her to ask questions about what I planned to do.

I wasn’t going to open it, you know. I was just going to see.

I tugged on the handle of the filing cabinet, but the door didn’t budge, so I rummaged through the other drawers and compartments until I found a key that looked small enough to fit.

The files were organized alphabetically, by last name. There might have been a hundred patients there; I kind of squinted my left eye so as not to see the first names, then found the end of the Bs. Byers. Conley. Copeland.

Opened my eye all the way: June.

I positioned the manila tab between my forefinger and my thumb and traced over Dad’s handwriting, the nearly illegible half-print, half-cursive. I would never open the file. How could I? As I crouched there, Dad was probably slamming his ghost-hands on to my shoulders and wailing, ‘Paaatient confidentiaaality, Syd!’ Just touching the folder made me nervous. But here she was.

I shut the cabinet, locked it again, put the key back where I had found it.

And when I collapsed back into bed, my phone buzzed.

Anonymous. The restricted number.

Them: Your dad deserved it.

Buzz.

Them: And so will you.

Buzz.

Them: Dyke.