to tell you something. Something no one else in this entire world knows—not even my team,” he says, and my eyes shoot to his. He wants to confide in me? He wants to tell me something that he’s never divulged to people he calls his family, people he’s known for a decade or more?
I’m suddenly nervous. What secret could he possibly have that he’s never told a single soul?
“But you have to promise me, goddess, you have to promise never to tell anyone, no matter what, and I pray to God you’ll still see me as your hero when I’m through.” His voice is serious but ends on a note of hope. It’s worrisome, wondering what he needs to tell me, but at the same time I know there’s nothing in the world that could possibly make me look at him any differently.
I nod shallowly. “Okay,” I whisper, as if someone might hear our conversation, this big secret he’s held onto for who knows how long.
He closes his eyes and begins to talk, and I stay there, holding his fist between my hands, watching the emotions play over his face.
He tells me about the girl he fell in love with in the second grade. Shelly. Who brought light into the shy and serious, young Neil’s life like he’d never known before. They were inseparable. Together from elementary school all the way up through high school. And then something terrible happened. Shelly was assaulted at a party while Neil was at home sick.
I listen to his story, tears filling my eyes as I listen to his voice grow hoarse with emotion as he tells me about finding her hiding in the closet when his mom and he got to the house the party was being held at. They’d scooped her up and taken her to the hospital, filed a police report turning in the seventeen-year-old boy who had raped her.
He told me about the trial. How the boy had come from money and the best defense lawyer around.
How the judge had barely given him a slap on the wrist for what he’d done to his sweet Shelly, because he didn’t want to ruin the life he still had ahead of him.
They used the excuse to let him off easy because he was only seventeen, not legally an adult yet.
But Neil doubted, the way everything played out, that if he had been eighteen it would’ve been any different.
Shelly sank into a deep depression that became worse as the weeks went on, having to go to school and endure being in the presence of her rapist every day. And he couldn’t have just bowed out gracefully. Apologized to her for what he’d done. Or just left her the fuck alone about it, period. No, he couldn’t even pretend it didn’t happen for her sake. He gloated. He taunted her with the fact that he’d gotten away with what he did to her, going so far as to threaten to do it again, since she’d been such a good lay. He liked that she’d fought him instead of giving it up easy like all the rest of the girls did.
Of course, he never said any of this in front of Neil.
And Shelly never told Neil about it either.
Neil had no idea any of that was happening. He thought she was slowly trying to get better and heal, since she was going to a therapist specializing in sexual assault victims.
No, young, innocent Neil, the one who had already saved up half the money for the engagement ring he’d give his sweetheart when they’d graduate, who already had his acceptance letter to go to the same college as his girl so they’d never have to be apart, he found out all about the things Shelly kept secret… in her suicide note.
The tears are pouring down my cheeks as he tells me what happened to the girl he thought was the love of his life before. I kneel, sobbing at his feet, my forehead pressed to his fist between my hands as my pretty new shirt soaks up the ink from the pen he snapped in half as he listened to me rant about not feeling like I’m good enough, how I’d never be worthy of a man like him, as his worry about my self-deprecation and low self-esteem and my baggage grew, most likely thinking it would lead me to do something like his Shelly did.
“And that was the catalyst. That was the spark that set