harpies froze you out. I knew what Holland was doing to you. And it was obvious that you wanted to belong.” He nudges my shoulder until I meet his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I break eye contact.
“I realized it was Becca spreading rumors,” he says. “A girl in my class overheard her and told me. It was the end of my senior year, when I really started paying attention. I couldn’t believe that I’d missed it. You avoided walking through halls where certain girls had their lockers. You never came into the quad. You ate lunch in the library. If I touched you, you jumped away. You dropped astronomy second semester; you were a freaking nerd for astronomy. Then I saw you hurrying out of the classroom on your last day. Your face was red and Ford was on your heels, sneering at you. He was in that class, and you hated him more than you loved astronomy.” Hearing Ben recount these times I made myself small makes me feel even smaller.
“I kept waiting for you to come clean. To ask for help. It was obvious you didn’t want me to know. And then I graduated and I hoped that would make it easier for you.” He wasn’t wrong. Once Ben had graduated, it was harder for those girls to make my face red. Ben couldn’t overhear any of it, and a large portion of me stopped caring. Carolynn had been mostly ignoring me, Becca may have continued spreading lies without me knowing, and girls who just liked spreading rumors didn’t see the sport in teasing me if I didn’t give a crap.
“And then Maggie,” Ben groans. “You don’t know what she said. We broke up, last September, and she told some underclassman stoners she smoked with that she broke it off because you kept making passes at me. She said . . . she said some really screwed-up stuff.”
I cover my face for a moment. Ben was gone from school, I was good at making myself small, and yet for a week kids were snickering when I walked by. Fragments reached me: Desperate Lana . . . naked . . . in Ben’s room . . . Maggie walked in.
“I confronted her. She was manipulative.” He laughs bitterly. “She kept saying that maybe it was true. Why else would I be pissed that she told people? She said she knew you were the reason I kept breaking up with her. I don’t know. I lost it.” His hands drift to his forehead as he shakes his head, regretful. “I looked at her then, and I hated her because she wasn’t wrong. Jesus, Lana, I wanted to hurt her in the way she’d been hurting you. I told her she was right. You were who I wanted. I lied, Lan.” He stares wearily at me, chest heaving. “Not about wanting you. I lied and told her we’d been screwing all along.” I swallow. Ben’s eyes flick to my throat.
“She went nuts. She said she’d tell everybody—she’d tell Cal. I freaked. I begged her to forget it. I was a lying shit. She took me back, but I don’t think she ever believed me.”
Things changed their second year dating. If I entered the room, Maggie would find a seat in Ben’s lap, rock her hips, make me squirm. She spent the night. I slept with a pillow over my head to block out her giggling. If Maggie and I were in a room alone, she’d obstinately kick the chair I was in or slam the fridge in my face as I looked inside. Obviously, I hated her for having Ben and for despising me for no reason. But there was a reason. She had what I wanted and I had what she wanted.
“It wasn’t the Maggies of the world or those bitchy girls at school or that loser Holland. There’d be more of them,” he says. “It was that you weren’t yourself and you were letting them change you. The Lana I knew would have flipped those girls off. She would have kicked Holland in the balls. It was killing me to see you like that. You made me brave once. I thought I could do it for you.”
“Lana the brave,” I say. How comic it sounds.
“You needed an out.”
“I didn’t need you to rescue me,” I say firmly. “I wasn’t an eagle in a cage.”
“No, you needed to rescue me. I wasn’t trying to change you, just . .