One Year (New & Lengthened Edition)

by Charlotte Byrd

  “Oh my God, Alice! Oh my God! What were you thinking?” He gets up and starts pacing around the room.

  I want him to sit down, but I’m afraid to reach out to him. Afraid that he’ll push me away and never talk to me again.

  “I wasn’t,” I say. “I was really upset about us. I wanted to let out some steam. So we all drank a little too much. And I got really drunk.”

  “Yeah, everyone drank too much, but it was only you and Dylan who got married and slept together. Why? Why did you do that?”

  Tristan’s eyes search my face. I see longing and desperation in them. I want to make it all go away. But I can’t.

  “And you know what else, you were never going to tell me about this, were you Alice?” he asks. “If I didn’t see this stupid postcard, you and Dylan were just never going to tell me. You were just going to go on and pretend like nothing had happened.”

  “No…we weren’t,” I lie.

  “Yes, you were!” he yells in my face. The hair on the back of my arms stands up.

  “And what about Juliet? Does she know?”

  I don’t reply. I simply look away from him.

  “Oh shit! Juliet knows, doesn’t she? She knows?” Tristan says and goes back to pacing. “So, what do you all do? Do you all joke and laugh about this behind my back when I’m not here. Is that what you do?”

  “No, no,” I say. Before I can get a hold of myself, I run up to him and throw my arms around his shoulders. “No, I’m so, so sorry, Tristan. You have to believe me.”

  “Get the fuck off me!” He pushes me away. Hard. I lose my balance and fall to the floor. “I can’t believe you, Alice,” Tristan says, shaking his head. “I poured my heart out to you. I apologized for just flirting with Kathryn. And you just went out there and married our roommate. My best friend. What the fuck, Alice? Who the hell are you?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. All I know is that I’m not the person that I once was and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be her again.

  “Are you okay, Alice? What are you doing on the floor?” Dylan walks into the living room.

  “You!” Tristan yells. I don’t see him run past me, but suddenly he and Dylan are intertwined and withering around on the floor.

  “Tristan, stop. Please,” I yell, but it’s to no avail. He punches Dylan in the face. He tries to punch him again, but Dylan blocks the second punch. And instead, knees him in the groin.

  “Tristan, Dylan, please stop!” I yell at the top of my lungs. But no one is listening to me. They’re back at it again. Pushing. Tussling. Fighting. At one moment, Dylan’s on top. But at the next, Tristan is. And then Dylan, again. And back to Tristan. Finally, I manage to grab someone’s shoulders. I pull as hard as I can. But he hardly budges.

  BAM!

  Everything turns to black. I can’t see anything. My whole face is tingling and throbbing. When I grab my nose to try to numb the pain, I feel something hot and sticky. I pull my hand away and see that I’m covered in blood. My nose is bleeding. I can’t see out of one eye.

  “Tristan, what the fuck are you doing?” I hear someone say somewhere very far away. I recognize the voice. It belongs to Dylan. But he’s speaking in slow motion.

  “Are…you….okay?” Dylan asks me. I see him above me. He’s still talking incredibly slowly. I try to say yes, but nothing comes out. My blood over my body is freaking me out. My heart starts to beat faster. My breaths get shallower. My hands and legs go numb. And everything turns blurry.

  “Alice? Alice?” I hear someone’s voice somewhere above me. It’s a female voice. I try to open my eyes. But I only manage to get one open. The light from the lamp causes me great pain and I shut it quickly. The other one doesn’t open at all.

  “Oh my God, Alice,” I hear the girl say again. “What the fuck is wrong with you two?”

  “It was an accident. He didn’t mean to elbow her,” a guy says.

  “I don’t care. You shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place,” she says. Juliet. It’s Juliet, I decide.

  “He started it,” the guy says. And suddenly, everything starts to come back to me.

  Tristan finding the postcard. Telling him about the accidental wedding. Dylan walking in. Tristan and Dylan fighting. Trying to stop them. Getting elbowed in the face. My nose bleeding. I don’t remember this, but that’s probably when I must’ve passed out.

  I sit up and look around. I can barely see out of my left eye. The eyelid feels incredibly heavy and I don’t have enough strength to lift it. All I can make is a little slit.

  “You need to put some ice on that,” Juliet says. She goes to the refrigerator and gets me a bag of frozen berries.

  “Here. We don’t have any peas, but this should do.”

  “Where’s Tristan?” I ask, taking the berries. I press the bag onto my eye. It relieves some of the pain from the swelling but brings about more of a different kind of pain from pressing something so cold onto such a sensitive surface.

  “I don’t know,” she says with a shrug.

  “He’s outside,” Dylan says.

  “What the hell happened, Dylan?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, what the hell happened to you? You weren’t supposed to tell him anything! Or don’t you remember that little promise?”

  “I wasn’t going to. But that stupid hotel sent us a postcard thanking us for getting married there, with some sort of discount for future stays. He saw it,” I say.

  I point to the dining room table where the postcard, which has ruined my life, lies innocently.

  “Shit,” Dylan says, picking it up. “Why would they do this?”

  No one says anything for a few moments.

  “It’s probably for the best,” I finally say. “He was going to find out anyway.”

  “But not like this,” Dylan says.

  Dylan goes to his room. And then comes out with a concerned look on his face.

  “Do you know where my phone is?” he asks. “I just had it.”

  “I saw it earlier,” Juliet says. “It was on the floor when you two were fighting.”

  Juliet helps Dylan look for his phone while I continue to sit motionlessly in a daze.

  “It’s not here,” Dylan says. His voice is getting frantic. What’s the big deal? I wonder. Who the hell cares about a phone right now?

  “It’s not here, Alice,” he says.

  “So?”

  “So? So? Don’t you know what this means?”

  “What?”

  “Tristan must’ve took it,” Dylan says. His face drains of all color. I stare at him.

  “Why would he want your phone? He has his own.”

  “Because his has Peyton’s number on it,” Juliet says quietly.

  Oh no, I think. I shake my head.

  “But Tristan wouldn’t do that,” I say slowly.

  “Of course he would,” Dylan says. “He’s really pissed at us.”

  “Do you know her number?” Juliet asks. “You can use my phone.”

  Dylan walks around, trying to remember. No, he shakes his head.

  “I used to know her old one, but she recently got a new one with a New Haven number,” he says.

  “Wait, I called her a few weekends back. I think I can find it. What’s the area code?”

  “203,” Dylan says.

  Juliet scrolls through her phone. Eventually she finds it and hands Dylan her phone. He’s about to dial it. But then hesitates.

  “I can’t,” he says, shaking his head.

  “You have to know,” Juliet says.

  “But how will I know? Do I just ask her?” he asks.

  “You won’t have to,” Juliet says. “If he called her and told her…you’ll know right when she answers.”

  Dylan breathes in deeply. I look at Juliet. We both seem to hold our breath.

  “Peyton?” Dylan says after she finally picks up. “Hey.”

  His face simply grows white. All blood drains from his cheeks and his lips turn almost blue. Dylan
’s shoulders slouch and he drops down to the couch as if his legs can’t hold him up anymore. Without saying a word, he looks down at the phone.

  “She hung up,” he says, even though no explanations are needed. Juliet and I both know that Peyton knows.

  ***

  A week passes. My eye manages to heal somewhat, not look so black and blue. I can see out of it again. Unfortunately, my life is a little harder to heal. Tristan doesn’t return any of my calls or texts and he refuses to talk to me. One day we ride the elevator down together. No matter how hard I try, he ignores me. I’m not even a stranger to him anymore. I’m worse. I’m a ghost. He doesn’t even acknowledge my existence.

  And the worst part? I know that I deserve it. I should’ve just told him the truth right away. I shouldn’t have led him on and acted like everything was fine when he made up with me. I shouldn’t have done a million things, but if I were to do it again, I would. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to be with him. If only one last time. Looking back now, I wonder if I knew that it was going to be our last time together. Maybe that’s why I went along with it. Seized the day, so to speak.

  I made an unusual discovery this week. I didn’t know how difficult it was to explain why I had a black eye and make someone believe that it was an accident. For some reason, I came up with a ridiculous story—that I fell into a corner of a bookshelf. It seemed so reasonable, but when I ran it by a few people who asked me with a concerned look on their face what had happened, I could tell right away that, though they nodded and said they were sorry, none of them believed me. Luckily, my eye started to heal and fewer and fewer people asked me about it as time passed.

  Outside of my roommates, the only people who know the truth about what had happened are Tea and Dr. Greyson. They were the only ones with whom I actually talked about all this in detail and told the truth. When I talked to Tea about it, she acted like a good friend. She didn’t make judgements and she didn’t give me advice. I messed up so much that I’m beyond advice. I don’t want to hear it. I can’t take any of it in. I just want to run away screaming whenever someone (like Juliet) offers it up. Dr. Greyson, on the other hand, isn’t much of an advice giver. But when I talked to her, I got the impression that she actually thinks that I secretly want my whole life to fall apart. Like I’m on some sort of mission to destroy my life. And I’m not. Not really. At least I hope not.

  But honestly, talking about it doesn’t help much. Instead, it makes me feel like I’m dwelling on something that I can never get over or change and that makes me feel like crap. So recently, I’ve come to a decision. I’m not going to talk about it anymore. And I’m not even going to think about it. If Tristan doesn’t want to talk about it, then why should I? What’s done is done. It’s over. It was a terrible mistake. All I can do now is try to move on. If only the legal system understood the urgency with which I wanted to move on…

  18

  The legal system moves at its own pace. And it cannot be rushed no matter how hard you try. And dealing with it is an exercise in patience. What I find out from Dylan and later confirm on my own by researching the topic online is that an annulment is incredibly difficult to get in the state of New York.

  I’ve heard the word “annulment” many times before, but I didn’t actually know what it meant. Apparently, an annulment is a finding by a court that a marriage is invalid or void and this finding allows the court to make it as if the marriage never occurred. This is what both Dylan and I want, but it doesn’t look like it’s something that can happen.

  “I can’t believe that we can’t get an annulment,” I say. Dylan is sitting on the couch texting someone.

  “We’ve been over this already,” he says without looking up.

  “I know.” I sigh. “But what if…”

  “Look, here, let me read it to you,” he says, cutting me off.

  He already told me this and I read a lot about it already online, but I still feel like there must be a way. Dylan searches for something on his phone and clears his throat.

  “There are various grounds that allow either spouse to bring the action to annul the marriage,” Dylan reads. “These are the grounds. Either spouse had not reached the age of legal consent, 18 years of age. That doesn’t apply to us.”

  I nod.

  “Either spouse is incurably incapable of having sexual intercourse. Either spouse has incurable insanity for at least five years after marriage. Either spouse could not give actual consent to the marriage (could not understand the effect, nature, and the consequences of marriage).”

  “Oh that’s us!” I say. “We were drunk. We didn’t actually understand the effect and consequences of marriage.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” Dylan says. “Either spouse could not give actual consent to the marriage, could not understand the nature, effect and consequences of marriage, as a result of some mental incapacity or deficiency.”

  “We were drunk,” I say.

  “That’s not a mental incapacity,” he says.

  “Are you serious? We got married and didn’t remember. If that’s not a mental incapacity or deficiency, I don’t know what is.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “But that’s not what it means legally.”

  Dylan turns back to his phone and continues to read.

  “Either spouse consented to the marriage as a result of force or duress of the other.”

  “Again, I was drunk, I consented as a result of duress,” I say.

  “Again, this doesn’t apply,” Dylan says. “Force in legal terms is a really high standard. It’s as if I held a gun to your head to get you to marry me.”

  “And finally, either spouses’ consent was obtained by fraud,” Dylan reads. “The fraud must go to the essence of the marriage contract, and then only the injured spouse can obtain the annulment.”

  “So none of these will work?” I ask. He shakes his head.

  “So, what do we do now?”

  “We have to get a divorce,” Dylan says.

  “And what does that entail?” I ask. Dylan shrugs.

  “I have no idea. But I’ll ask our family attorney.”

  So, this is certain now. An annulment is not an option. We can’t just make this marriage go away and pretend that it never happened. We have to get a divorce. A divorce. Divorce. That word is so strange, I can barely comprehend its meaning. After we get a divorce, will I be a divorcee? Some sad, middle-aged woman who’s bitter about men? No, of course not. I’ll still be a 19-year-old girl who made a terrible mistake. But it still doesn’t sound pleasant.

  Dylan and I don’t say a word to each other for a while. He hasn’t talked about it with me yet, but I heard from Juliet that Peyton refuses to talk to him. He hasn’t seen her since Tristan told her, even though he went to her dorm on two separate occasions to try to explain. She flat out refuses to see him. And Tristan and Dylan? They’re still roommates, but they’re also ships passing in the night. Tristan is barely home and when he is, he’s usually asleep. I’m not sure they’ve spoken since the fight either.

  “We really fucked up, didn’t we?” I ask when I turn to Dylan and see that we were thinking about the same thing.

  “Big time,” he says quietly.

  “Do you think they’ll ever forgive us?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he whispers. The thought of that sends shivers up my spine.

  * * *

  The party for that Friday night had been planned a long time ago and we can’t cancel it now. It was Dylan’s idea, but we have all invited people and asked them to bring people, so there’s no way to let everyone know it’s off. The only thing is to go through with it and host it. Dylan gets the alcohol and the cups and Juliet and I get the food and the decorations. Juliet actually seems excited and gets a little carried away in the party favors section.

  “Are you sure we need so many?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says, throwing more into the cart. “I’ve been living in the middle of a war zone for a couple of weeks
now and I need to let loose. At first, it was fiery and exciting, so that was fun. For me. But now, the whole place has become some sort of Cold War zone. No one talks to anyone anymore. It’s boring. And tense. And this party is exactly what we need to move on with our lives.”

  “Move on?” I ask.

  “Listen, you and Dylan act like you’re the only people in the world getting a divorce. But you’re not. Lots of people do it. And they don’t mope around like you two. So you made a mistake? So what? Nothing too terrible has happened. It’s not like you killed someone.”

  “You definitely have a way of putting everything in perspective,” I say sarcastically. “I mean, I guess I should be glad that instead of just ruining my life, I didn’t actually kill someone.”

  But the sarcasm is lost on her. She either doesn’t get it or chooses to actively ignore it. Instead, she goes to the next aisle over and drops a few more decorative banners into the cart.

  19

  Later that night, our dorm is flooded with people. Everyone is standing around, drinking, laughing, and having a good time. Two separate beer pong games form and Dylan is only too happy to organize and oversee both. He’s a beer pong king and is quite a stickler for rules and regulations. While he is taking advantage of the party as an excuse to get plastered, I decide to not drink at all tonight. Nothing good has come from my drinking this semester and I need a break. I pour myself another cup of soda into a red plastic cup and try to join a conversation about the Oscars. Who is nominated. Who isn’t. Who should’ve been. But I can’t follow what anyone is saying. I know what they’re saying, but none of the words are making sense in sentence form. My mind is wandering. I can’t focus on anything.

  “Don’t you think so, Alice?” the girl next to me asks. I have no idea what she’s talking about. She lives down the hall from me. I’ve seen her a million times before. We’ve exchanged pleasantries in the elevator. I know that she’s majoring in dance, but I can’t even remember her name.