can really make this right.
It’s been so long since that night. It’s hard to remember much aside from sitting in the head of school’s office at one o’clock in the morning, higher than a kite and terrified. I never told Alice what happened that night—I was too embarrassed—but Alice told me everything.
I open my DMs with Alice—Rhodes, I’ll never get used to calling her by her real name—and scroll back as far as I can go. The time stamps read November, then October, then September, then August.
July.
June.
It feels like it was an entire lifetime ago.
I-Kissed-Alice 6:51p: One day I’m going to write a book called “The Seven People You Meet in Rehab.”
Curious-in-Cheshire 6:51p: lol
I-Kissed-Alice 6:52p: It’s family weekend. This lady brought her baby, and they’ve been feeding it Dr Pepper and Moon Pies since they got here four hours ago.
I-Kissed-Alice 6:52p: these people are why stereotypes about the South exist
I keep scrolling. My heart bottoms out.
I-Kissed-Alice 10:09a: what do you do when you know you hurt somebody, and they were just, like, collateral damage?
I-Kissed-Alice 10:10a: this entire thing is a frigging mess, and I found out today that I probably ruined somebody’s life
I-Kissed-Alice 10:10a: I don’t know how to live with myself anymore
I remember this conversation now.
I was convinced she was being DramatiqueTM at the time—how can a teenager ruin somebody’s life in any real, tangible way? Particularly someone as kind and noble-hearted and wonderful as Alice? It’s so easy to say third-period French, or your curfew, or even the bitch in Drawing III who doesn’t know how to leave you alone is “ruining your life.” Never in a million years did I believe that Alice ruined someone’s life in a literal sense.
But Alice is Rhodes, and now I know differently.
Alice—Rhodes—was talking about me.
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:10a: you didn’t ruin somebody’s life
I-Kissed-Alice 10:10a: no, I really did
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:11a: well, I mean. You just have to do your best to make it right.
Curious-in-Cheshire 10:11a: And give them space—don’t hurt them and then ask them how to fix it.
The time stamp is June 23. On June 26, my brother called home to tell me that Rhodes’s parents had paid off the school to handle things in-house rather than press charges. Nicky spoke up on my behalf with the school, and rather than being expelled, I spent the summer cuddling with kittens and scooping dog poop from stalls at the Greater Birmingham Humane Society.
The only thing I would never get back was my Savannah College of Art and Design scholarship. She did the very thing I’d told her to do, and irony of ironies, that very thing is the one reason I’ve always hated her.
I honestly believed that she was too spoiled to face any real consequences on her own—which, to be realistic, her money and social status does give her a level of power I’ll never have—when at the end of the day, she had done exactly what someone in her position should do: She used her privilege in a way that ensured we were all treated by the school equally.
It wouldn’t have happened that way if her parents had only looked out for her and Griffin—neither my family nor Sarah’s could afford the palm-greasing necessary to make drug use on campus go away.
And now, after that night, we’re all still suffering.
Neither Rhodes nor myself know what our futures look like anymore—me, because of the scholarship I lost, and Rhodes, because of the way the past several months have affected her ability to create art—and yet all we’ve done is continue to fight each other.
I can’t help but recognize that so much of what Rhodes is experiencing might actually be my fault. She’s suffering now because of my behavior as Cheshire.
Things could have been so different right now if I’d just told her who I was the night we were supposed to meet.
I close my laptop.
The house is quiet. I slip my arms into my sister-in-law Whitney’s old housecoat and pad out of my room, down the carpeted stairs, and into the hall. Mom is already sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the window and smoking a cigarette.
I jump at the sight of her, and she jolts at the sight of me.
We stare at each other for a moment, clutching at our chests, mirror images: wild frizz scraped into half-assed piles on top of our heads that still manage to somehow hang over our ears. Big dark eyes (hers flanked with heavy crow’s-feet, mine still edged with the liquid liner I didn’t wash