The Truth About Keeping Secrets(74)

This wasn’t going to be easy, I realized. Not just in the sense that it wasn’t as simple as going down a line of questions, ticking them off, moving on – for June, this was a catharsis, and for me … well, I wasn’t really sure what it was yet. That depended on what she had to say.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘If we go chronologically – I already told you some of the very beginning stuff. Moving kind of sucked. This place was totally foreign to me. I met him, Heath – I met him at cheer tryouts at the beginning of summer. He was at the school for some student council thing, and it was right after tryouts, and I felt like I’d done terribly and I was so worried that, like, all the girls were looking at me, and I was so homesick … So afterwards I just found this stairwell to go cry in. I felt so pathetic. He found me there. Brushed me down. Made me laugh. And oh my God, Whitaker, I know based on what just happened this probably seems too awful to say, but he was so charming. Seemed so mature. Even when we were, like, what, fourteen? We were dating three weeks later. I was obsessed with him – I felt like I owed him everything after what he’d done for me.’

Her words were already stilted, wavering, and I thought I should touch her, so I reached over and took her hand, the way she had in the car, and squeezed. ‘You’re OK,’ I said.

‘He did everything right. He was so sweet. Considerate. My mom loved him. I loved him.’

She stopped, so I asked, ‘What happened?’ to help spur her along.

June took a shaky breath. I dragged my thumb along the back of her hand and it didn’t make me nervous. ‘It was a year of being, you know, a “power couple”, and having all these friends and this new life and stuff, and I think that was all so exciting to me and that … that was why I didn’t notice there was anything wrong. He, um … it was evident pretty early on that he struggled with stuff. He’d have these sort of … breakdowns, I guess? I don’t even know what to call them besides that. They’d come out of absolutely nowhere and go on for hours, him telling me how I didn’t love him any more, or how he saw me talking to somebody else, or just looking at somebody else. But stupidly, so, so stupidly, I felt … bad for him.’

‘That’s not stupid. It’s your empathy.’

‘No, it was stupid, because it was selfish. Because afterwards he’d always sob, like, full-on sob, and apologize, and in my head I was like, I’m gonna fix this poor, broken boy. He was always so in control of everything, I guess, that having this one thing, having him, like, beg me to forgive him, even after he’d … I felt like I was gonna be the one to mend him. Obviously that didn’t happen.’

‘You couldn’t have.’

‘I know.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I know that now. And even then, a lot of the time, I felt guilty for setting him off even though … I don’t know. I know now it was never my fault. It was never my fault.’

I felt her body change beside me, her stomach sucking in and out too quickly. June was trying not to cry. Fuck my whiplash, I decided, and rolled over on my side to face her, wincing to brace myself from the pain that shot down my spine. I held her hand tighter to make up for the absence of any words; her palm was sweating. ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I finally echoed.

‘He basically started pulling me away from everyone. Friends. He made me quit cheer. All this was, like, under the guise of “helping” him. He said he worried so much about me, that he was so nervous that he always wanted to make sure he was around. Because he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me. He had me get rid of all my social media because it worried him too. I was being caged in and it was so gradual that I didn’t even notice, like, one bar, and then another, and I did it because I wanted him to be OK. And, um …’ June couldn’t even get the words out.

‘What?’

‘Uh, sex stuff too. He … like, I was never trying to fight him off me, or anything …’

‘But did you say yes?’

She shook her head. ‘Sometimes. But other times … I mean, no. No. I didn’t.’

‘Then it doesn’t matter that you weren’t fighting him off. That wasn’t consensual, June. You need to have said yes.’

‘Then …’

I pinched my bottom lip between my teeth until I broke skin. ‘I fucking hate him.’

She sighed this sigh that told me everything I needed to know. ‘I’m learning to.’

God. I wanted to bottle her up and steal her away somewhere safe and beautiful so she’d never be hurt ever again.

‘By the beginning of junior year I felt like I was actually going insane. I was crying all the time. Hated myself. My self-esteem basically shrivelled and died over just two years. I didn’t even … recognize myself. And I had nobody to tell me any of this, you know? Because Heath had isolated me from everyone. So by that point I was like, well, me and him should break up, which was hilarious, because it wasn’t even because of anything he’d done – it was a, like, “I need to work on myself” sort of thing. It was like my body was telling me, you know, we need to get you the hell out of here … I just wasn’t making that connection. So, anyways, beginning of junior year, I did the whole breakup song and dance, like, it’s not you, it’s me, and he freaked out. Cried. Yelled.’ June gnawed on her thumb. ‘And he told me he was going to kill himself. So I dropped it.’