“That’s all any of us want.” I give Harmon a pleading look but he’s looking down at his watch.
“I promised Bill Lyman I’d proctor his physics exam at noon so I have to go.” He picks a piece of lint off his tweed jacket and straightens his tie. Harmon is always complaining that students use their phones to avoid making eye contact, but he has his own repertoire of avoidance techniques. He makes me wait several moments before he looks at me. “We’ll talk later,” he says, giving Rudy’s shoulder a squeeze but pointedly avoiding touching me at all.
As soon as Harmon closes the door, Rudy gets up to go too.
“We have to talk,” I say, reaching my hand out to touch his arm.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he says, batting my arm away. “You didn’t just stalk me; you read my texts.”
“How—?” I begin but then I see by the flash of hurt in his eyes that I’ve just admitted to it. “Rudy, you have to understand how scared I’ve been for you. I . . . I saw that name IceVirgin33 on Jill’s Twitter feed and I was afraid of who it might be.”
“Say it,” Rudy spits out. “You were afraid it was my father, who you said was dead. You were afraid you’d be exposed as a liar.”
“I thought he was dead!” I cry, shaking at the confirmation that Rudy has indeed met Luther. “Don’t you remember? When we left the lake he tried to stop us.”
“I don’t remember that,” he says, shaking his head. His hands are balled into fists at his sides, his whole body tense with rage.
“It was awful,” I say, trying to make my voice gentle to soothe him. “Your father . . .” How to begin? “Your father loved you very much,” I say finally, “but he needed us to be perfect and when we weren’t he grew angry and struck out at us. He wasn’t safe to be around then. Whatever Luther has told you about me, or about Lila, you can’t believe everything he says. He’s very good at spinning stories.”
Rudy doesn’t answer at first, but I can see his fists relaxing. He’s nodding, as if he’d already figured out what I’m telling him. Rudy is a smart boy, I remind myself, maybe he’s already seen through Luther’s act.
“Funny,” he says, “that’s what he said about you, that you were good at making up stories. He said that’s what drew him to you in the first place—your creativity and imagination. And for your information, he does blame himself for getting involved with a teenager, but he said you seemed so lost and vulnerable. And then you came and told him you were pregnant. He couldn’t let you face that on your own. Only later did he wonder if you’d gotten pregnant deliberately so that you’d have someone to look after you.”
“That’s not—” I begin but Rudy goes on, and I’m so mesmerized by this alternate account of my life that I can’t summon any more objections. Even secondhand, the story Luther has spun is irresistible.
“. . . By then he was afraid to leave you alone with me. He said you tried to drown yourself when you were pregnant and that you caused me to be born prematurely. He said you were obsessed with becoming a writer and would ignore me while writing in your notebooks. That your imagination, which he’d always admired, had gotten out of control and become paranoia. That you accused him of breaking my arm when it was really your fault.”
“That’s not true,” I object. “He made you climb a tree—he had this idea you should come by all these skills naturally—and you fell and broke your arm.”
“He said that I was doing fine but that when you saw me you screamed and that’s when I fell.”
“I was terrified,” I say, remembering the moment when I walked out of the cabin and saw Rudy stranded high on a shaking branch halfway up the tallest tree on the island. “And so were you.”
“Because you made me scared of everything, just like you do now. That’s why he tried to stop you from taking me away, but then you hit him over the head with an oar.”
“I—” Once more I begin to object but then I remember that this is exactly the story I was going to tell Kevin Bantree. Do I really want to tell Rudy the truth?