Sebastian was giving me the cold shoulder, and now I had to spend the rest of the weekend hanging out with my ex-boyfriend and his perfect family, pretending, always pretending.
I curled up on the bed and fell asleep listening to the waves.
Saturday afternoon, I left the beach early to get ready for babysitting. I’d been reading all day, and Chris had been playing a lot of Frisbee with Joseph. We tried to make things as normal as possible without having to touch each other or talk much.
Darren had said he might want me to take Avery down to the beach while he and Kevin got ready for their party, so I kept my bikini on. It was orange like the one I wore when I first met Sebastian—when I’d left him to go swimming with Scott. The orange no longer made me feel brave like a lifeguard, though. I threw a beach dress on over the suit and went outside to wait for Darren.
When he drove up, I had just closed my eyes to the sun, allowing the smell of the pine trees to lull me into a false sense of okay. I got in the car.
“You having a good time?” Darren asked as I buckled my seatbelt.
I nodded.
“Liar,” he said.
“Chris and I broke up.”
“Sorry,” he said. “That’s rough.”
“He’s my best friend.”
Darren nodded. “I know how that goes.”
When we got to his house, my jaw dropped. The house was amazing and completely original. It rose out of the dune like a rocket, almost cylindrical. Inside the house, I twirled around like a little girl in a chocolate factory, taking in the curved walls, the painted pale gray floors, the living room and kitchen that seemed to be one giant window looking out onto the bay.
“Wow,” I said, because words had abandoned me.
“Thanks,” Darren said. “We still have a bit of a punch list, but for the most part, it’s finally done. I’ll give you a tour in a bit.”
Kevin lay on the couch, his foot covered in a soft cast, resting on a pillow. He had a large hardcover book opened on his chest. Avery was kneeling at the coffee table in front of him, concentrating on coloring.
“Hi there,” Kevin said to me.
Avery didn’t look up.
Kevin nudged her.
“Hi, Macy!” she said.
“How’s your foot?” I asked Kevin.
“It’s getting better. But I can’t stand being a cripple. Right, Dar?”
Darren rolled his eyes. “More like I can’t stand him being a cripple. He’s a giant child. Like it isn’t hard enough having two.”
“Well,” Kevin said, pulling himself up so that he was sitting. “At least I was able to get the hors d’oeuvres done.”
I sat on the floor next to Avery, watching her draw a person. She was very precise about it, choosing her colors carefully.
Darren turned to me. “The guy who designed the house is one of Kevin’s best friends from Berkeley, so we’re hosting this shindig. Maybe drum up some business for him.”
My ears perked up. Berkeley? As in UC Berkeley?
Kevin held up the book on his lap. “This was my student directory at Berkeley. We called it The Facebook. Isn’t that funny? Before the dawn of all things social media, Facebook used to actually mean this!”
“So, you went …” my voice cracked a little, so I cleared my throat, “to Berkeley?”
Kevin looked at me curiously. “Mmmhmm. Are you applying there?”
“It’s my reach school,” I said, probably beet red. “The architecture school, actually.”
Kevin lit up like a firecracker.
“My goodness. That is what I call kismet. Seth Peters, as you can see here, is an architect of the genius variety. And, as it happens, he was my roommate at Berkeley. And I’m going to talk to him about you, and I’m going to help you with your essays, and we are going to do this thing. Oh, thank god, I needed a project this summer. And pretty girl, you are it.”
Darren shook his head. “I think we can let Macy decide if she wants to be your project.”
“I can use all the help I can get,” I said. “I’ve got decent grades and test scores, but no experience.”
“I’ll let you know how tonight goes,” Kevin said, getting up and hobbling to the kitchen. “Darren, you’ve been dying for a swim. Take Macy down with you. I’ve got Ave—she’s so busy. And Ben’ll sleep another hour. Sorry we brought you over here for nothing really, Macy. We thought we’d have so much more cooking to do, but we got most of it done already.”
“No problem,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go down? I can stay with the kids.”
“Not with this thing,” Kevin said, pointing at his foot. “Besides, Avery’s drawing me, and the model can’t really just leave!” He hobbled back to the couch and gave Avery a kiss on the top of her head.
“Okay, then,” Darren said. “Let’s go.”
We walked down the steep stairs to the beach.
“Do you think Kevin can really help with Berkeley?” I asked. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I could feel them rising, my chest expanding with possibility.
“Kevin gets pretty much anything he sets his mind to.” Darren winked at me. “Don’t let him bully you into anything, but if you really want it, he’ll make it his life’s mission. Just be prepared—he’ll work you like a dog. You’ll rewrite your essays a thousand times until he’s happy with them. If he thinks you can do better on your SATs, he’ll tell you to take them again.”
“That’s good. I think I might need that.”
I’d been studying the Berkeley brochure, but I hadn’t even thought about what it would take to actually put the application together. I needed this.
We stepped onto the sand, which felt so soft and warm on my feet.
“Every time I come here, I can’t get over it,” Darren said. “Like how can the sky really be that blue? Is it that blue at home? I don’t think it is.”
“It definitely seems brighter here.”
“I love it. It feels like vacation. Everything just washes away.” He swept his hands down his body like a squeegee, wiping the dirt away from a window.
I tried to make everything wash away, but my dirt was stubborn, ground in until it had become a stain. Out, out, damn spot.
I stood at the water’s edge while Darren ran in and dove—carefree, childlike.
The water lapped at my feet, teasing my toes, making my feet sink deeper into the sand. I wanted to go in, to glide in the smooth bay water. I wanted to get my hair wet, hold my arms up to the sun and let it dry them off. I reached down to scoop up some of the cool water and sprinkled it on my arms. I took a few more steps into the water so that my ankles were covered and the little waves brought salty drops nearly up to my mid-calf.
“It’s soooo refreshing,” Darren said, floating on his back, letting his toes bob out of the water. He turned over, swam a few strokes, and then started walking toward the shore, the sandy bottom of the bay exaggerating his footsteps. He stood next to me.
“You seem sad,” he said. Something about the way he said it took my breath away. Yes, sad. I’d thought I was anxious, overwhelmed, even angry. But I was sad. I nodded.
“Anything you want to talk about?” he asked gently.
“I don’t know. I guess college applications and stuff,” I lied. “Talking to Kevin got me thinking about how much I have to do. Overwhelming, you know?”
“And breaking up with Chris?”
“Yeah, of course. Chris. It sucks.”
Darren sat down in the sand. I sat next to him.
“Is there anything else?” he asked. Again, gently, innocently, but like Sebastian, it felt like he knew.
He put his hand on my arm.
“Believe me,” he said. “I won first place at pretending A-okay. You know how long it took me to come out to my parents? I see that look in you that I had, the covering up. But you can tell me anything. I’m listening.”
That was it. My eyes stung; the tears were coming. I looked down.
“Something happened,” I said, breathing rapidly. “I didn’t think it was a big deal, but lately it’s been bugging me out, and I can’t stop thinking about it. But I don’t think I should say anything.”
“Sweetheart, I’ve known you a long time. Anything you tell me stays right here.”
If I told him, he’d know. The idea was both a relief and completely frightening. I’d already told Sebastian, but maybe I needed an adult to know. Maybe I needed to see if he agreed with Mom and Dad—that it could just be forgotten like it was nothing—or if he thought it was really something.
“Um,” I said. How was I going to say it? “Scott and I used to do stuff together. Sexual stuff. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but I guess it kind of was.”
Darren drew his breath in quickly. “Scott molested you, Macy?” He said it harshly, clinically, like Sebastian had. And again, it didn’t fit right.
“I … um, I don’t know if I’d say that. I mean, he didn’t rape me or anything. I never said no.”
Darren’s eyes were serious. Gray, like the stones at the edge of the water.
“He’s what? Seven, eight years older than you? It doesn’t matter what you said or didn’t say. Whether it was violent or not.”
“I know but—”
“When did this start?”
“I was seven,” I said, quietly.
“Seven? Oh god,” he said, putting his head in his hands and then looked at me. His jaw was clenched tight. I picked up a shell and made circles in the sand next to me. I concentrated on the circles, making them smaller and smaller.
“I guess it made me feel grown-up. He usually ignored me, but when we were doing stuff, he was paying attention to me. I liked that. And,” I looked down at my feet in the sand, embarrassed, “the stuff he did felt good.”
Darren nodded. “Yes, but you were too young to understand those physical feelings.”
He stayed quiet, so I kept talking to fill the silence, to let the information belong to someone else.
“I remember not wanting to do it sometimes, but doing it anyway. It wasn’t really that I thought it was wrong; it was more like, if I was reading and he came into my room, I was kind of annoyed. And sometimes I felt like I wasn’t doing it right. I was worried I was disappointing him.”
Darren shook his head now. “Sitting duck,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“You were a sitting duck in your own home. He could come to you anytime anywhere and you’d have to do what he wanted, even if you were busy. Right?”
“Well, I was just a kid. How busy could I be?”
“Yes, that’s the point. You were just a kid. You were a kid who was reading, playing, doing age-appropriate stuff. And he took you away from that. At his will.”
“But Chris and I checked each other out and stuff around then too,” I said, blushing.
“That’s different. Kids the same age. Curiosity. I think you know that,” he said. “But Scott was what? Fourteen? Yes, he knew better than to touch a seven-year-old girl. Even if you think you were a willing participant, you were not old enough to agree to any of it. He had all the power, and you had none. You really had no choice to make.”
I understood what he was saying, but I still couldn’t feel it.
“Listen, Macy, I’ve been working with kids for a long time. And I’m a father. And I love the shit out of you. You did nothing wrong. Everything that happened was because Scott forced you to do it. I know you don’t think you were forced. But you were. I knew you when you were seven. You were playing catch and watching cartoons. You knew nothing about sex and you shouldn’t have—not for a long, long time. You loved him, and you wanted to make him happy. Those feelings are all normal. But what you had to do to get attention from him was not normal at all. He took advantage of you. You may love him in many ways and you may feel like you want to protect him, but what he did was plain wrong. He harmed you. In fact, if it continued after he was eighteen, it’s a felony. He could go to jail. Do you understand?” He looked fierce now.
I nodded. But, holy shit. He was my cousin, not some random child molester who should be in prison. I shook my head back and forth.
“Mace, honey,” he said, more quietly now. “I’m not saying you have to press charges against him. Even though he was old enough to know better, he may not have been aware of the effect it would have on you. I’m just saying you have a chance to make things right now. With your family and with yourself.”
It all seemed like too much work. Fixing things with my family sounded impossible and exhausting. I didn’t even know who my family was anymore.
“I will never forgive myself,” he continued. “I should’ve known. I knew something was going on with you. How could I not have seen it?”
“What do you mean?”
“At camp. Some days you were happy and open, and some days you wouldn’t say a word. You’d sit in a corner and just watch everyone with these eyes. And some days the counselors would tell me you didn’t eat anything at lunch. Or you were overly flirtatious with the boy counselors. Or sometimes you were, I don’t know, just different. You were so erratic, but I thought—I didn’t know what to think. I was an idiot in those days. But now I have a daughter. Everything is different.”
He ran his hands through his damp hair.
“But, Scott!” he said. “I definitely knew something was wrong with Scott. He had this attitude. He didn’t care whose feelings he hurt, what rules he broke. There was no disciplining him. I told your mom. She got defensive. That’s when things started going bad with our friendship. Dammit, I should’ve known.”
I stared at a seagull with beady eyes perched on a rock. A few moments passed.
“I’m glad you told me,” he said.
“I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about it so much lately,” I said, scraping all my circles clear with the shell, like I was erasing a chalkboard. “I guess just watching these kids at camp, seeing how young they are. It made me realize how young I was. And I get really pissed. But on the other hand, he was never forceful.”
“He seduced you. He manipulated you.”
“But he’s not an evil person,” I said. Why was I defending him? Just like with Rebecca.
“What I know is that you are not a bad person, Macy. And I know that a good person can be tempted to do something horribly wrong like hurt an innocent child, but he or she resists doing it.”
“But I’m sort of okay, you know? I’m not like a total screwup. I do okay in school, I have friends, I have a boyfriend—or I did, anyway. I’m not like whoring myself out on the street for my next fix.”
Darren sighed.
“All despite what happened to you,” he said. He wasn’t letting up. Did I want him to?
“I can’t help it. I mean, I know what you’re saying is true. But sometimes it feels like it’s not that big a deal. It’s Scott. It wasn’t my dad or dirty old uncle. And we didn’t really have sex. Maybe it was just experimentation too.”
He sighed again. He was getting frustrated with me.
“You’ve trained yourself to think that as a defense mechanism. If you realized how horrible what he did was, you wouldn’t have survived as well as you did. And because he’s young and handsome and charming, it’s easier to believe that it was nothing. That’s why he’s gotten away with it. But I’m telling you that it is not okay. It never was. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, putting my chin on my knees.
“You know you have to tell your parents,” he said. “I can be with you when you do, if you want. I know your mom. When she finds out this went down in her house, watch out. She’s a mama bear if I ever saw one. She’ll make it right.”
Clearly Darren knew a different Deb Lyons than the one I knew. He assumed Mom and Dad didn’t already know. I considered whether to tell him that they did, and just didn’t do anything. But, despite everything, I couldn’t sell them out like that.
I stayed quiet, digesting what Darren had said, watching the wa
ter sparkle like tiny stars.
“I haven’t been in the water since I was twelve,” I said suddenly.
“I know.”
“Will you come in with me?” I asked, surprising myself.
“Of course,” he said, standing up.
I stood, took off my cover-up and threw it behind me.
We walked into the bay. Darren waited patiently as I got used to the water—my thighs, my hips, my stomach, my chest. My breathing became shallow. I tried to block out the memories of water pouring into my lungs, losing consciousness, knowing that everything had changed forever. I took one breath and dunked my head under the water, jumping back up and shaking my wet dreads everywhere.
Darren, his face dotted with droplets from my hair, laughed. “Good god, you’re worse than a goddamned dog!” And then he hugged me so tight I thought he might squeeze the shame right out of me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Chris drove me back on Sunday. Joseph was in the backseat, reciting lines from his favorite movies, so we didn’t talk much. It was probably for the best. We’d said everything we needed to say for now.
Thankfully, no one was home when I arrived, so I dropped off my bag and got right in my car. I was dying to see Sebastian. The urge to tell him my feelings was overwhelming, and I wanted to get to him before I lost my nerve.
I drove straight to Sebastian’s house as fast as I could without risking a ticket. I pulled up in front of his house and ran up the steps. I pounded a little too hard on the door. After what felt like forever, but was probably thirty seconds, his mom opened the door.
“Hi, Mrs. Ruiz,” I said, breathing heavily. “Is Sebastian here?”
She smiled. “Sebastian is not here. He’s gone to the diner. I’ll tell him you came.”
“Thanks.” I ran back to the car.
There weren’t any parking spots in the diner lot, so I circled around the block until I found one on the street. I was a mess—my hair was all over the place and I still had sand in my toes. I opened the door to the diner and there he was, sitting at the same table where we’d had lunch. He was reading a book. I was dying to run to him, but I didn’t want to cause a scene, so I walked as calmly as I could.
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