Just Listen

by Sarah Dessen

On the way back to our booth, I glanced over at Clarke’s table. She was still there, looking at the stage, but Rolly was gone. Oh well, I thought. I tried.

  “All right,” Owen said as we sat down. From the stage, I could hear the openers winding up their set. “Now comes the real music. You’ll like this.”

  I nodded, leaning back against the wall and tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. When I glanced over at Owen, he was staring at me. “What?” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Something is up with you. What’s going on?”

  I froze. Here it was, the direct question. Maybe I could answer. Just say something, spit it out, finally. Maybe—

  “I mean,” he said, “when have you ever just assumed you’ll like what I like? This could be Ebb Tide Two about to come on here. You have a fever or something?”

  He was smiling as he said this, and I tried to smile back. Deep down, though, I could suddenly feel the weight of all my withholding, so many lies and omissions.

  “I’m fine,” I said as someone played a few guitar chords. “Stop distracting me. I need to concentrate on the music.”

  The crowd was huge now, much bigger than for the previous band, and pretty soon all I could see was backs and shoulders. Owen got to his feet. “You should stand up,” he said.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Part of seeing a band live is actually seeing them,” he said. And then he held out his hand.

  Ever since I’d left the mall I’d been trying to forget about what had happened between me and Emily on the runway. But looking up at Owen, it all came back. Not just the day that led up to this, but all the ones since he’d done this the first time, offering not only his hand but a friendship that had saved me. I’d been so alone and scared and, yes, angry, and somehow Owen had seen it, even when everyone else had chosen to look away and act like it wasn’t happening. Just like I’d done, and was doing, to Emily tonight.

  He was still holding out his hand. Waiting.

  “I’m, um, going to go to the bathroom,” I said, pushing off the wall and out of the booth. “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “Wait,” he said, dropping his hand. He glanced at the stage. “The band’s coming on….”

  “I know. I’ll be right back.”

  Then I started walking before he could say anything else. Mostly because I couldn’t bear to lie again. But also there was that sourness in my mouth, something rising up. I had to get out of there.

  The crowd was impossibly thick now, body after body in my way as I tried to get to the door. Meanwhile, Truth Squad started with a song that, judging by the amount of people who immediately began to sing along, a lot of the crowd knew; the lyrics had something to do with potatoes.

  I kept pushing on, moving sideways through a crowd of people all facing forward, just one profile after another after another, some turning slightly, annoyed as I pushed past, others ignoring me entirely. Finally, the crowd began to thin. I was almost to the door when someone grabbed my arm.

  “Annabel!” It was Rolly. He was smiling, his grin wide, and carrying an armful of bottled waters. “I’m in!”

  I just looked at him as the crowd suddenly burst into cheers and applause. “What?”

  “In,” he said, holding up a water. “I went to get her a drink, even. It’s working! Finally, it’s really happening! Can you believe it?”

  He was so happy, his face flushed. “That’s great,” I managed. “Actually, I was just—”

  “Here,” he said, cutting me off. He stuck one of the waters it in his shirt pocket, another under his arm, and then handed me the remaining two. “For you and Owen. Tell him I said he was right. About everything. Okay?”

  I nodded, then he flashed me a thumbs-up and was gone. As I watched him disappear into the crowd, I wished I’d thought to give him a message for Owen, as well. I looked across the crowd, knowing he was somewhere on the other side, waiting for me. But now the distance seemed so vast and impossible, too much in between. So with my mouth sour and palms wet, I headed for the door.

  Once outside, the cold air hit me like a smack, gravel crunching beneath my feet as I left the building behind me. It was all too familiar, this bubbling up inside me, my throat burning, never enough time to get away. I barely made it to my car before I was dropping to my knees, the waters spilling to the ground as I smoothed my hair back with my hand. This time, though, as I felt my stomach clench, my body retch, nothing came up. All I could hear was the raspy sound of my own breathing, my heart thumping in my ears, and in the distance, barely audible but still somehow playing, music.

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  “Okay,” my mother said, loosening a cart from the row in front of the automatic doors. She set her purse in the front, then pulled out her list, unfolding it. “Here we go.”

  It was the second week of December, and we were at Mayor’s Market, where I’d been recruited to help with the grocery shopping for Kirsten’s homecoming dinner. It was not something I was all that excited about, unlike my mother, who was in full-on holiday mode. But still, as she pushed the cart toward the doors, smiling at me, and they slid open, I tried my best to smile back. It was all about trying, these days.

  The last month and a half had been a total blur. The only thing I was fully aware of was how completely things were back to how they had been when the school year began. It was like the time I’d spent with Owen hadn’t happened at all. Yet again, I was alone at school, modeling even though I didn’t want to, and somehow completely unable to do anything about either.

  The Sunday after that night at Bendo, I woke up right at seven, just in time for Owen’s show. It was only once I opened my eyes that I remembered this morning was different and turned away from the clock, trying to will myself back to sleep. But I could feel some part of myself stubbornly waking up, bit by bit, and then everything was flooding back.

  He had to be furious with me. After all, I’d just bolted, no explanation, nothing. The worst part was I knew it was wrong, even as it was happening, and yet I still couldn’t stop myself. The only way to fix it would be to explain openly and honestly why I’d left, and I just could not do that. Even for him.

  As it turned out, though, whether we discussed that night or not wasn’t entirely up to me. The next day, our first day back at school, Owen made the decision for us.

  I was in my car, having just parked, when he suddenly appeared at my driver’s-side window. He announced himself by knocking: three hard raps, boom boom boom. I jumped, then turned. Once he saw he had my attention, he dropped his hand and started around my front bumper to the passenger door. As he opened it I sucked in a breath, the way they say you should do if your car is ever immersed in water, one last gasp to hold you over. And then he was in.

  “What happened to you?”

  As I’d expected, there was no hello. No stony silence for me to fill. Just the one thing that had been on his mind for, oh, thirty-six hours or so. Even worse, he was looking at me so intently—angrily—that I couldn’t keep my eyes on him for more than a moment. His mouth was a thin line, his face flushed, his unsettled presence filling the small space around us.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and as the words came out I heard my voice break. “I just…”

  This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them. Or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait. So you have to keep going.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I finally managed. “I just…don’t.”

  He was quiet for what felt like a long time. This is excruciating, I thought. Then he said, “If you didn’t want to be there on Saturday, you could have just told me.”

  I bit my lip, looking down at my hands as a couple of guys passed by my window, yelling something about football practice. “I wanted to be there,” I said.

  “Then what happened?” he said. “Why did you
just bolt? I didn’t know what was going on. I waited for you.”

  There was something in these last few words that made my heart just break. I waited for you. Of course he had. And of course he would tell me this, because unlike me, Owen didn’t keep secrets. With him, what you saw was really what you got.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, but even to me it sounded so lame and weak, meaningless. “I just…There was a lot going on.”

  “Like what?”

  I shook my head. This was what I could not do, get into this place where I was backed up to a wall, no choice but to tell the truth. “It’s just a lot of stuff,” I said.

  “Stuff,” he repeated, and I thought in my head, Placeholder. But he didn’t say this out loud.

  Instead he exhaled, turning his head toward the window. Only then did I allow myself to really look at him, taking in all the familiar things: the strong line of his jaw; the rings on his fingers; his earphones, looped loosely around his neck. Distantly, through one of them, I could hear music, and I wondered out of habit what he was listening to.

  “I just don’t get it,” he said. “I mean, there has to be a reason, and you just don’t want to give it. And that’s just…” He stopped, shaking his head. “It’s not like you.”

  For a moment, everything was very quiet. No one was passing, no cars driving up the row behind us. So silent as I said, “It is, though.”

  Owen looked at me, shifting his bag to the other leg. “What?”

  “It is like me,” I said. My voice was low, even to my ears. “This is just like me.”

  “Annabel.” He still sounded annoyed, like this could never be true. So wrong. “Come on.”

  I looked down at my hands again. “I wanted to be different,” I said to him. “But this is how I really am.”

  I’d tried to tell him that first day. I’d said I didn’t always tell the truth, that I didn’t handle conflict well, that anger scared me, that I was used to people just disappearing when they were mad. Our mistake was that we’d both thought I was capable of changing. That I had changed. In the end, though, that was the biggest lie of all.

  The first bell sounded then, long and loud. Owen shifted in his seat, then put his hand on the door handle.

  “Whatever it is,” he said, “you could have told me. You know that, right?”

  I knew as Owen sat there, one hand on the door, he was waiting for me to be the bold girl he’d wanted to believe I was, to just tell him. He waited longer than I thought he would have before pushing the door open and getting out.

  And then he was gone. Walking across the parking lot, his bag over one shoulder, already lifting his earphones to his ears. Almost a year ago I’d watched him this same way, just after he punched Ronnie Waterman out. Then, I’d been awed, and slightly scared, and I felt the same way now as I realized what my silence and fear had cost me, yet again.

  I waited until second bell, when the courtyard was nearly empty, before I finally got out of my car and headed to class. I didn’t want to see Owen; I didn’t want to see anyone. All morning, I walked through the halls in a fog, deliberately blocking out the voices around me. At lunch, I went to the library and sat in a carrel by the American History section, books spread out in front of me, not reading one word.

  As the period was winding down, I packed up my stuff and went to the bathroom. It was empty except for two girls I didn’t know, standing by the sinks, who started talking as I went into a stall.

  “All I’m saying,” one said as a faucet was turned on and water began to splash, “is that I don’t think she’s lying.”

  “Oh, come on.” The other girl’s voice was high, and more nasal. “He could date any girl he wanted. It’s not like he’s desperate. So why would he do something like that?”

  “Do you really think she’d go to the cops if he hadn’t?”

  “Maybe she just wants attention.”

  “No way.” The faucet cut off, and I heard paper towels being yanked from the dispenser. “She and Sophie were best friends. And now everyone knows? Why go through all that for a lie?”

  I froze. They were talking about Emily.

  “What did he get booked for?” the first girl asked.

  “Sexual assault. Or second-degree rape, I don’t know which.”

  “I can’t believe he actually got arrested,” the other girl said.

  “At the A-Frame!” her friend replied. “Meghan said when the cops pulled up, people were running in all directions. Everyone thought it was a beer bust.”

  “Not hardly.” I heard a backpack pocket unzip. “Have you seen Sophie?”

  “Nope. I don’t think she came today,” the other girl said. “Shit. Would you?”

  They were leaving now, their heels clicking across the floor, so I didn’t get to hear the response to this. Instead, I stood in the stall, one hand on the wall beside me, where someone had written I HATE THIS PLACE in blue ballpoint pen. I dropped my hand, then put down the toilet seat and sat, trying to piece together what I’d just heard.

  Emily had gone to the cops. Emily had pressed charges. Emily had told.

  This realization was so big I just sat there, hands locked in my lap, stunned. Will had been arrested. People knew about this. Ever since Saturday night, I’d assumed Emily, like me, had stayed silent and scared, sucked this story in and held it there. But she hadn’t.

  As the afternoon wore on and I actually started listening to the people around me, I got the rest of the story. I heard that Emily was supposed to get a ride from the A-Frame to the party with Sophie, but she’d gotten held up, so Will offered to drive her instead. That he’d parked on the street and then, depending on who you believed, either jumped on her or was surprised when she made a move on him. That a woman walking her dog past saw something happening and threatened to call the cops if they didn’t move on. That this was how Emily had gotten out of the car and, after getting a ride home, told her mom everything. That she’d spent Saturday morning at the police station, filing charges. That when the cops came for Will on Saturday night, he cried when the cops cuffed him. That Will’s dad bailed him out within hours, then hired him the best lawyer in town. That Sophie was telling everyone that Emily had always been hot for Will, and when he wasn’t interested, she cried rape. And that while Sophie was not at school today, Emily was.

  I didn’t see her until just after final bell. I was pulling a notebook out of my locker when I felt a sudden, strange hush fall over the normal end-of-the-day commotion. It didn’t get entirely quiet, just quieter. When I turned my head, I saw her coming down the hallway toward me. She wasn’t cowering or alone. She had two girls with her, one on either side, both of them people she’d been friends with before Sophie. I’d just assumed that I had no one after what had happened, that everyone would just accept Sophie’s side of the story. It hadn’t even occurred to me that somebody would believe mine.

  For the next few days, what happened between Emily and Will remained the hot topic, although I was doing my best not to pay attention to it. At times, though, this was impossible, like the day I was in my English class, doing some last-minute cramming before a midterm, and Jessica Norfolk and Tabitha Johnson, who sat behind me, started talking about Will.

  “What I heard,” said Jessica, who was junior class treasurer and not, I thought, the gossip type, “is that he’s done it before.”

  “Really?” Tabitha replied. She’d sat behind me all year and always clicked her pen, which drove me nuts. She was doing it now.

  “Yeah. There were rumors when he was at Perkins Day, apparently. You know, girls who said similar stuff had happened to them.”

  “But nobody ever had him arrested.”

  “Well, no,” Jessica said. “But it means that it could be, you know, a pattern.”

  Tabitha, still clicking her pen, sighed through her teeth. “God,” she said. “Poor Sophie.”

  “I know. Can you imagine dating someone and then this?”

  A lot of these conversations
I’d overheard came back to Sophie, which wasn’t surprising. She and Will were one of those couples people knew about, if only for their frequently public dramatics. So it was odd she wasn’t at school that first day. If Emily surprised me, though, Sophie did, too. Not only by not showing up, but by how she acted when she finally did.

  She didn’t station herself in the courtyard to make it clear she was unaffected by what had happened. Or confront Emily in public, as she had me. In fact, the first time I saw her she was alone, walking down the hallway with her cell phone pressed to her ear. At lunch, when I glanced out the library window, she wasn’t on her bench—which was populated instead by some sophomore girls I didn’t even know—but sitting on the curb by the turnaround, waiting for a ride. As for Emily, she was sitting at a picnic table, drinking a bottled water and eating some potato chips, surrounded by people.

  So Sophie was alone. I was alone. And Owen was alone, or so I was assuming. Occasionally before or after school, I’d catch a glimpse of him, towering over everyone else as he cut across a pathway or disappeared around a corner. Sometimes when I saw him, all I wanted to do was tell him everything. The thought would crash over me like a wave, sudden and unexpected. In the next moment, though, I’d already be telling myself that he probably didn’t even want to hear it, now. Watching him walking across the courtyard with no expression, earphones on, it was like he was receding, back, back, to the person he’d been to me before all this. Just a mystery, a boy I didn’t know at all, one more face in the crowd.

  If school was stressful, home was not much better. At least not for me. For everyone else in my family, however, things were just great. My mother, next to me, was at this moment pushing her cart through the bounty that was the Mayor’s Market produce department, so happy the entire family was finally getting together. While Kirsten had talked about coming for Thanksgiving, she’d opted instead to stay in the city, ostensibly to work some extra shifts and catch up on schoolwork. Later, though, she’d mentioned eating a turkey dinner with Brian, her TA; however, in very non-Kirsten fashion, she hadn’t offered more details. Now she was finally coming home early for Christmas, and my mom was going all out.