Chapter 3

The two of us walked to the car in silence and mercifully rode home the same way.

When we got home, I hesitated to get out of the car. I expected everyone was waiting to say their piece. I finally set my jaw and got out. Mom led the way and I soldiered onward. I wasn’t surprised when the living room was full. I was surprised when Tabby and Collie were there. I took it all in and walked across the room and down the stairs to the basement. I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t stop when someone called after me. I closed the door behind me and turned the lock before going to my desk and pulling out my laptop. I opened it up and logged into Skype. I opened up a chat window to Emma, ignoring the other message requests for now.

“Out of the big house a day early. Now behind enemy lines in hostile territory. Pray for your fiance =D”

She sent a quick message of a pair of lips and it made me smile.

“Lunch tomorrow?” I sent. “I could use the escape. The vultures are already circling.”

“Sure. Pick you up at noon?”

“Perfect! I owe you so much for this weekend.”

“At least three kisses. Good luck with everyone tonight.”

“Thanks. I expect a knock on my door any second now.”

“LOL. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Stay strong. You can sleep in to avoid them.”

“Night and thanks again.”

I logged out and shut the laptop. I looked around the room and considered what I was going to do when there was a knock at the door.

“Fuck off!” I demanded refusing to even get out of the chair.

“It’s Patty,” she said from outside.

I got up and unlocked the door to let her in. For a wonder, she was alone. “Managed to shake the rest of them? You’ll have to teach me how. I can’t seem to get them to fuck off.”

“You have every right to be angry. It all came out when Dr. Spencer was here,” she said. “You’ve been treated very poorly.”

“More than you know unless Mom was bragging about her handiwork upstairs.” It was half questioning.

She shook her head and took a seat on the bed while I pulled up the chair. I told her about the accusations I’d gotten from Mom and the last-ditch attempt to justify what had happened.

“This morning, the thought of losing my family put me into tears,” I said sounding like I was old beyond reckoning. “Tonight, I realized that I already have lost my family. Lana and Beck are always going to hold me apart from you and Dan now. I can’t ask you to choose and I can’t stay with them here. Mom wanted to believe the worst in me so hard, she fought to ignore what I told her. She finally had to face it when I pointed out that I was laid up with the ankle when I was supposed to be taking her around to abortion clinics. Lilly knew I didn’t know that girl and she never said a word. ‘Oops! I forgot!’ might be an excuse when you’re six, but she’s not six and she didn’t forget something small. I’m not safe here, Patty. I trust you and I trust Dan. The rest of them? Not in the slightest. If I knew how to use one, I’d sleep with a knife close at hand tonight.”

“I don’t think it’s all that bad,” she said dryly. “Maybe not all that far off, but not yet to the point that you need to arm yourself at night.”

“Six weeks ago, we’d have scoffed at the idea of the girls turning on me. Whose idea was it to have the four of them here to ‘welcome’ me home?” I asked dryly.

“Lana called them,” she told me. “They all feel terrible about what they did.”

“Zero fucks were given in the making of this statement,” I said flatly. “For six weeks they tortured me every chance they got and four girls that pledged themselves to me turned their back on me over a rumor. LET them feel terrible. I don’t wish them any harm, but they walked out on me. They don’t get to be the sympathetic figures in all this. They made me a pariah at the school. I don’t particularly care for their personal guilt.”

“I know and I don’t blame you, but they want to make it right.”

I got up and got a pencil off my desk. It was the cheap kind that you get for next to nothing at the start of the school year. “Break that for me,” I said, passing her the pencil.

She looked at me curiously, but dutifully snapped it in two.

“Now apologize to the pencil for breaking it,” I directed her.

She said the words, starting to clue in to what I was saying.

“Did that fix the pencil?” I asked, making my point.

“Of course not. People are different though. People heal.”

“People heal over time. The apology needs to be accompanied by good will on both sides. I ran out. The last scrap of it was to bare my throat to Lana and ask her to end my suffering in front of 50 witnesses that would swear I begged her to do it. That was her chance to make things right.”

“By becoming a murderer?” Patty pointed out.

“Not a murderer. An angel of mercy. I told her there was only one end to my pain. When I was suicidal over what happened with Miranda, it was the girls that anchored me. I couldn’t leave them. I loved them too much to put that pain on their hearts. I was strong enough to bear MY pain so it wouldn’t BECOME theirs. Now, I don’t have anything. They took that away from me. Lana believed a lie that couldn’t possibly be true. She spread it to the rest of the girls, my sister, my mother, the school at large. Yesterday was the end. There’s nothing left for me to hold onto. I have no friends, I have no lovers, I have no family. All I have left is the study. Carl and Victoria and Emma are the only three people I can depend on to be there for me. That’s really fucking pathetic. One of those three is paid to talk to me, one of them is hoping to make groundbreaking discoveries through me and the third is campus famous because of me.”

“Don’t talk that way, Champ. You still have your family. We still love you,” she said, pulling me into a hug.

“I love you too, which is why I’m telling you to choose Lana and Beck,” I said, my voice thick with emotion. I could feel my throat constricting and I swallowed reflexively to try to keep it from cutting off my voice. “They need you.”

“What are you planning?” she asked, taking my head in her hands to look at me, her expression terrified. “Do we need to call the doctor back?”

I shook my head. “Swear to me that it’s just between us. No one else hears it from you,” I said seriously and waited for her to agree before I told her. “I told Charlotte that I wanted half the money and to never hear from anyone again. I’m trying to get into on-campus housing. That’ll solve the problem of emancipation to some extent. I’ll still see people at the school. It’ll be a little harder for me to travel, but I’ll make it work.”

She sat and looked at me for a long time and frowned. “So she’s Charlotte now?” she said sadly. “I’d hoped it wouldn’t ever come down to that.”

“She accused me of everything all over again because the girl I was supposed to have been with remembered me from playing baseball. Doesn’t matter that Beck was with me in baseball. Doesn’t matter that I had a sprained ankle when I was supposed to be taking her to abortion clinics. Doesn’t matter that I never had her over to the house or that Lilly didn’t know anything about her. Someone she didn’t know said a thing and she believed it more than she believed me.”

Patty sighed and buried her head in her hands before running them through her hair. “What a perfect fucking mess. I’m going to kill them. Alright, I promise, I won’t tell anyone about your plans. In return, I want you to keep me and Dan in the loop. Tell us what you’re up to. We love you, Matt. If we can’t live like this any more, we still want to be involved. You’ll be on Dan’s commute to work. Let him take you for groceries or whatever shopping you need. Let us stop in to see you and make sure you’re doing okay. No one else has to know where you are or what’s going on in your life, but don’t shut the two of us out. We didn’t know what had happened.”

I nodded. “I’d like that. I might even let you bring Lilly occasionally.”

“She believed the lies too,” Patty pointed out. “Does that mean you might find it in you to forgive the others some day?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “But more importantly, I’ll see the rest of them at school. She’d be completely cut out of my life and she’d be the only one. That’s not particularly fair that she be pushed out, but Lana and Beck see me on a daily basis.”

“Once you move out, I’ll let her know. I think she’ll like that. I also think you should know that we’re going to ground the girls for the rest of this year and Lana’s no longer allowed to have contact with Marlene.”

I shrugged. I really didn’t care. “That’s not for me to decide,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll be crushed over missing Halloween. It’s only a week away. They probably have costumes for the school dance already.”

“You saying you want me to wait until after the dance?” she asked, surprised.

“I had no desire to hurt the girls or punish them. I just want them to leave me alone. I don’t want them to apologize. I don’t have so many pencils that I can explain the problem to them all one at a time. I don’t want them to try being nice at school. I just want them to pretend that they don’t know me. Don’t touch me, don’t talk to me, don’t talk ABOUT me, just fuck off and leave me alone. If they want to undo some of the damage they did by telling everyone I didn’t actually do what they said, that’s fine, but after that, I’m dead to them and they’re dead to me. I suspect that’ll be punishment enough.”

“Well, punishment enough or not, we’re still grounding them until January. We’re also taking Lana’s car from her. She can ride to school with Charlotte or take the bus.”

“I’m sure that’ll be a pleasant explanation when she has to tell her friends they can’t have a ride,” I barked a laugh, not really finding it funny, but finding myself feeling a little better for knowing Patty was in my corner.

“Alright. I promise to stay out of matters with the girls and keep you informed. Who else is out there waiting for a crack at me?” I asked.

“They’re all still upstairs. Who do you want to talk to?”

“Dan. I’ll tell him the plans so that he’s in on the ground floor. Then probably Lilly if she looks to you like she’s holding together okay, if not, then I’ll talk to you again and listen to your advice on whether I should talk to the rest of them.”

She nodded and got to her feet, leaning over to kiss me. I didn’t even glance down her shirt as the neck opened up to give a view of her breasts. Sex was so far outside my thoughts right now that I would have had to be reminded it existed.

She slipped out of the room and a few moments later, I had a similar talk with Dan. I told him about the plans to move out and that I wasn’t telling anyone until I was ready to leave.

He took it in stride. “You’ve always made relatively good choices, Matt,” he said. “I wish there was a way to fix things with the girls, but I guess only time and distance have a chance to do that. They want to apologize. I don’t know if you’re ready to hear it. I know you’re not ready to accept their apologies. They hurt you about as badly as one person can hurt another.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “They have. I don’t want to talk to them, but I promised Patty that after I talked to you and Lilly if she’s handling things okay, I’d talk to her again and see what she thought. Might be best to get it out of the way so it doesn’t happen at school. Personally, I’d rather light myself on fire than talk to any of them.”

“That’s probably true,” he said, dutifully ignoring the comment about lighting myself on fire. “Patty and I will make sure you’re doing okay. I know she’ll keep your kitchen stocked and we’ll check on you as often as you’re comfortable with. I hate that this is happening, but I suspected that we were going to get to this point, but I figured you’d have gone to live with Donald.”

“Dr. Spencer and I both recognized that living in Miranda’s old apartment would have been a disaster. That balcony is just too much temptation. Not that I have nearly as much keeping me off the ledge as I had, but I still have people I care about enough to not make it easy for myself.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and I could tell that he was feeling how awful this all was. We talked about the punishments for the girls and he confirmed that they were going to be told tonight when they got home.

“I doubt that either of them want anything to do with Marlene after learning how she’d lied and broke us up so she could essentially pimp them out to her boyfriend’s brother and best friend to cement her relationship. That might sound harsh, but it’s what she did. I personally really don’t care if you two punish them or not. It’s none of my business.”

“It’s pretty harsh,” he sighed. “But I think you’ve earned the right to harbor a grudge against them for this.”

He got up and I did too, hugging him to let him know I wasn’t angry with him.

A few minutes later, Lilly opened the door and came in. She looked miserable. Her eyes were red from crying and she was trembling like she was going to start again. I slipped my arms around her and the dam broke. She was weeping and sobbing and blubbering incoherently as she tried to talk and cry at the same time.

I soothed her and let her cry herself out before I sat her on the bed and took the chair again. I was hollow inside. There were no tears left. I just felt this gnawing hunger to end it.

“I’m so sorry, Matt!” she said, her voice constricted with emotion. “I didn’t even think about whether you knew Tricia or not. If I had, I’d never have stayed quiet. You have to know. I would have told them. I would have told you before it was too late.”

“I know,” I told her calmly. My tears were already wept and I was surprised at how calm I felt. “I’m disappointed, but I know you’d never hurt me on purpose. Still you believed it without asking me. That hurt me a lot. You didn’t cut me out of your life though. I guess that’s better than nothing. That’s why I’m going to tell you a secret. Patty knows and Dan knows. No one else can know. If you don’t think you can keep it from Mom or the girls, then you need to tell me and I’ll keep it to myself.”

“You’ve never kept anything from me in your life,” she said and then looked guilty because this was twice that she’d hurt me by keeping things from me. “I won’t tell,” she promised.

“I’m leaving,” I told her. “I’m looking into whether I can get into on-campus housing at this point at Harvard. I can’t live next door to them and after how Charlotte acted at the hospital, I can’t live with her. I don’t know when I’ll tell them. Maybe I’ll just be gone one day when they come home.”

“So she’s ‘Charlotte’ now?” Lilly said sadly.

“I’m afraid so,” I told her in detail what had happened and she broke down all over again. I moved over to the bed and held her. It was the first time I’d even sat on the thing since the girls left and my skin crawled. Finally when she was calmed again, I returned to the chair.

“Are you still mad at me?” she asked, watching me settle in the chair.

“No, but ... that’s the first time I’ve touched that bed since they left. I ... I can’t. Come here.” I held my arms out to her and she crawled into my lap, curling up against my chest.

“Where do you sleep?” she asked, confused.

“On the floor or in the chair. Too many memories in that bed. I can still smell them there. When I leave, I’ll probably leave them behind and get something else. I dunno. Maybe I’ll take them and just leave the sheets and pillows. I guess it’ll depend on what my new place is like. That’s the other thing I want you to know. You’re gonna get to see my new place when I move. Patty and Dan will bring you. No one else is invited. Just the three of you.”

“Not Mom or Dad?” she asked confused.

“Nope. I’m sure Charlotte’s going to have to see it to fill out paperwork or possibly I can get away with Donald. Of the two, Donald is higher in my good graces right now and probably for a long time.”

She nodded. “Did you really call Lana and Beck whores?” she asked, looking up at me.

I nodded. “I told Dan that Marlene had pimped them out so she could date Patrick. He said I’d earned the right to hold a grudge.”

“Wow. Things are never going to go back to the way they were, are they?” she asked sadly.

“No,” I admitted wearily. “All we can do is hope that what we end up with is better than what it was, even if it sucks right now.”

“Dr. Spencer said that you might start dating men. Is that true?”

“I dunno. Every woman I’ve ever taken to bed is sitting up in the living room. Patty’s the only one of them that I trust and I didn’t feel even slightly attracted to her when she was down here earlier. I don’t feel attracted to Dr. Spencer any more. I think I need time to let this calm down. Then I’ll figure out how I feel about girls.” It wasn’t untrue, but I felt that I stood a better chance of picking asexual rather than gay or bisexual. It wasn’t a stigma I attached to those labels, but I felt the same way about cocks that I thought gay guys must feel about pussies: a little grossed out by the thought of kissing one.

“Man that sucks!” she said, hugging me tighter.

“I know. Believe me, I know. I just don’t know that I can trust a girl to be with her that way. I may just give up sex altogether. At this point, I can’t even imagine what I’d jerk-off to. None of it seems to matter. But that’s not your problem. That’s not even my problem right now or at least it’s a problem I’m not interested in tackling.”

“Are we going to be okay?” she asked in a small voice.

“I think so. I trust you enough to want to stay in contact, letting you visit with Patty and Dan when they come. That’s more than Lana or Beck are getting, but they’ll see me at school so they’ll know I’m still alive.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“I know. In time, it’ll be better. Right now, I’m giving you everything I can. I need you to believe that.”

“I do,” she said and hugged me tight again.

I hugged her back and then nudged her to get up. “I should probably talk to Patty again,” I told her. “Just remember, not a word except to Patty or Dan.”

She nodded and got out of my lap. She kissed my cheek and thanked me for understanding. She left the room with a bounce in her step and I smiled a little at what the others would think of that. I could imagine the four of them starting to feel hopeful at seeing her in such a different mood than when she came downstairs.

Patty came in and closed the door behind her. “Well, whatever you said to Lilly certainly had an impact. She’s practically bouncing off the walls she’s so relieved.”

I nodded. “I told her about the move and I told her that she could visit, that I thought we’d be okay eventually, but that right now I was giving her everything I could just to keep an open mind. I’m sure the girls noticed.”

“There were some cautiously optimistic looks passed back and forth between them. I think they might be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.”

“That light’s been known to be a train,” I reminded her dryly.

“Planning on running them over?” she asked calmly.

“I haven’t decided,” I admitted. “I have no intention of ever taking them back and forgiveness is an uphill climb. I think I could manage to listen to them, but they’re not welcome in this room any more. If you think I should listen to them, we should do it upstairs.”

She nodded. “I think we should have it out. All of it. I think you should tell them you’re leaving even if you don’t tell them where you’re going and how you’ll manage.”