me with his eyes—“you are nobody. You are disposable.” He pointed to the door. “You’ll leave now, or I’ll call the police and have you removed.”
He turned to Benny, and ran a hand over his bald pate, as if testing the shape of his skull. “And you. You will be in my study in five minutes, fully dressed. Yes?”
“Yes,” Benny said, his voice almost a whisper. “Sir.”
His father examined him for a long minute, his eyes running over his son’s long loose limbs and concave chest; and then a little sound came out of him, like a sigh, and I could see something deflate inside him. “Benjamin,” he began, reaching out a hand to his son. Benny flinched. His father stopped, mid-gesture, and rather than leaving the hand hanging there in midair, he instead ran his hand over his pate again. Then he turned and walked out the bedroom door.
We waited until we heard the cottage door slam and then we grabbed for our clothes, scrambling to get dressed as quickly as we’d gotten ourselves undressed. Benny wouldn’t meet my eyes as he yanked his sweatshirt back over his head and tied on his sneakers. “I’m sorry, Nina,” he kept saying over and over. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” I put my arms around his waist but he just hung there limply, as if his spine had snapped inside him; he turned away from me when I tried to kiss him. And I knew then that, even though I’d stood up to his dad, Benny certainly wasn’t going to. No matter how much he pretended to hate his family, if he had to choose between them and me, it wasn’t going to be a contest. I was not a superhero, slaying dragons for him; I was nobody. It felt like a mirror that I’d been gazing into had shattered, and now all that was left was tiny fragments I had no idea how to reassemble.
He didn’t hold my hand as we trudged back along the path to Stonehaven. He didn’t hug me when I turned right to go around the house and he turned left to go up the steps to the kitchen porch. He just closed his eyes tightly, as if trying to see something hidden inside his head, and then he said those words once more, barely audibly—“I’m sorry, Nina”—and just like that we were done.
* * *
—
So then: finals and June commencement, which at North Lake Academy meant that the entire student body spent the last day of school down at the lake, kayaking and waterskiing and barbecuing tofu dogs on the dock of someone’s private beach. I’d only glimpsed Benny a few times in the intervening weeks—a gaunt figure I’d spy sloping through the halls in the distance, as my throat seized up with Pavlovian longing—and I lay in bed at night imagining how we might finally get to talk at the party. How he’d see me sitting on the beach and come over and cry and apologize; and I’d of course forgive him and we’d embrace and then we’d be back together forever. The end.
But Benny didn’t come to the beach party at all, and so instead I spent the day lying in the sand next to Hilary and her friends, listening to them talk about their summer lifeguarding jobs, and trying not to cry.
At one point, Hilary rolled over so that she was facing me, and propped her head up on one hand. “So hey. Where’s your boyfriend today? Off on his family’s yacht or something?”
“Boyfriend?” I repeated dumbly.
She gave me a knowing look. “Give it up, girl. Everyone knows. You’re not that sly.” She smiled. “I knew you two would hit it off. From the start.”
I lay back on my beach towel and squeezed my eyes shut so hard that I saw red fireworks behind them. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “We broke up.”
“Oh. Shit. That sucks.” She flopped over onto her stomach and loosened her bikini strings. “Hang out with us this summer. I’ll find you someone better. That’s the good thing about being a lifeguard, it’s easy to meet guys.”
Any thoughts I might have had about