DREAMS of 18

by A. Kent, Saffron

  “I was not.”

  “Um, you were. And then, her phone was just sitting there. And this Cooper guy texted. Something like, ‘Hey, wanna meet up before the anatomy class to prep for the test?’” Renn shrugs. “Meet up. Before the class? Duh. What else could it mean? It was a booty call.”

  Willow chuckles. “Not necessarily. It could mean exactly what he said: to prep for the test.”

  Renn frowns at her. “You know, ever since you got married, you’re no fun.”

  Penny acknowledges Willow’s statement with a nod. “Thank you, Willow.” Then she narrows her eyes at Renn. “And now he thinks I’m a perv who sends nude photos to my classmates.”

  Willow and I laugh. Renn throws Penny an air-kiss.

  “You disgust me,” Penny says, turning her nose up.

  “I amuse you. You love me.”

  So, this is our gang: Me, Willow, Renn and Penny.

  I call us The Heartstone Sisters because we all met at Heartstone.

  All of us were in there for different reasons: Willow for her severe depression, Renn for an eating disorder, Penny for her anxiety, and me?

  Well, I was there because I kissed my best friend’s dad and ruined everything. And being a ruiner of lives comes with the consequences of a mental breakdown.

  I’m calling us sisters now, but it took me a while to become a real member of the gang. In fact, for months I didn’t even acknowledge them. Not really.

  After what happened last summer, I wanted to be completely left alone. I didn’t want to be friends with anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. In fact, I didn’t want to utter another word for the rest of my life.

  But I didn’t stick to the plan. These girls didn’t let me, and now, we’re friends. The ones who make a point to meet every two weeks.

  Those are the only times I ever go out, to see the girls.

  Our next meeting wasn’t until the coming week, but I called it early. It was an emergency.

  It is an emergency.

  I have news and a plan.

  “Now, are we done chit-chatting about inconsequential things?” Willow chimes in.

  “Yeah. What’s the emergency?” Penny asks, focusing on me.

  I take a deep breath and sit up in my chair.

  They’re all staring at me and even though they’re my friends and their stares are the ones that I can tolerate, it still makes me squirm in my seat.

  Their stares and the fact that I’m about to tell them.

  I’m finally going to tell someone about my plan. I’ve been sitting on it for the past week, trying to gather courage.

  It hasn’t helped. I’m still as afraid as I was when I thought of the plan a few days ago. But if I can tell this to anyone, it’s them.

  All right.

  “I’m going to Colorado,” I say, just coming out with it.

  There’s a minute of confusion where there’s more staring.

  “What?” Willow frowns.

  “Why Colorado?” Penny frowns too.

  “Yeah. Like, for vacation?” Renn asks.

  I can’t look at them so I stare down at the table, brown and polished and perfect, unlike me. And I just blurt out, “To see him.”

  Him.

  My best friend’s dad.

  The man I kissed on my eighteenth birthday. The man I haven’t seen since.

  “You mean… Mr. Edwards?” Willow breaks the silence after a few seconds, guessing correctly.

  “Really?” Penny goes in an awed voice.

  “You know where Mr. Edwards is?” Renn’s eyes are wide.

  I nod, still looking at the table.

  Again, there’s a few moments of quiet while they absorb the news. I expected as much but it doesn’t make it easier.

  Their silence. The things I know they are thinking. That I can’t do this. That I’m too weak, too ill, too fragile for this.

  “How’d you find out?” Willow asks.

  I sigh and look up. “Facebook.”

  Renn screeches, “You used Facebook?”

  Her voice is high and disbelieving, and I can’t blame her for it. I never had any social media accounts, not even when I was in high school. I never saw any point.

  I didn’t have friends, except Brian who lived next door. There was no one I wanted to keep in touch with or anyone who wanted to keep in touch with me.

  So I was practically non-existent.

  I shrug. “Yeah. I made an account last month.”

  “And you never told me?” She’s hurt.

  “I’m sorry, but it’s not under my real name. That would cause mayhem. Can you imagine? Violet Moore, The Slut of Cherryville, Connecticut, is on social media. Hate emails were enough. That’s all I can deal with in this lifetime.” They all seem to agree. “It’s just a dummy account I made to… well, spy on people.”

  “People like Mr. Edwards?” Penny asks.

  “I can’t believe Mr. Edwards is on Facebook though,” Willow muses.

  “Yeah, Mr. Edwards does not seem the type,” Renn agrees.

  This is not a laughing matter but I can’t help but want to at least chuckle.

  Like me, they all call him Mr. Edwards. Religiously. Without the pronoun.

  He is this great, unknown entity that they’re all afraid of and fascinated with and can’t call by his first name. In fact, I specifically asked them not to when I finally told them the real story as to why I was at Heartstone and what put me there.

  That’s Mr. Edwards to you, he said.

  It’s silly to remember what he said and to actually follow through on his command. Especially when he won’t even know if I broke the rules or not.

  He’s not here.

  But that’s exactly why I can’t say it. Because he’s not here.

  “He’s not. I looked. He doesn’t have any social media accounts whatsoever.” I shrug. “But Brian does and he posted something about doing a cross-country trip with his friends instead of going home to Colorado this summer.”

  Colorado.

  The only thing I know about that place is that it’s full of mountains. Also, that it follows Mountain Standard Time, which I didn’t know existed until I looked it up. They are two hours behind us.

  Now whenever I look for the time, I think about Mr. Edwards and the time he’s keeping. And then, my heart starts to beat really fast. It starts to pound, not in the panic attack sort of way, but like I’m still infatuated with him.

  Like I still dream about him.

  I don’t.

  Not anymore.

  Last summer, I was this naïve little girl who thought that she could take something for herself. She thought that for once, she could dare to touch her dream – something she only saw from afar but never reached for – and no one would get hurt.

  But I was wrong.

  So I don’t dream anymore. I don’t even write in my journals. I don’t read Bukowski, the miserable bastard whose advice I took and ruined everything.

  “Mr. Edwards is in Colorado, then?” Willow’s voice brings me back into the moment.

  “Yeah. I think he’s living in the town he grew up in. Brian used to talk about it, the town, the cabin. I think I know exactly where Mr. Edwards is.”

  “And you wanna go there?” Renn asks, looking so grave, which happens only rarely.

  “Yes.”

  “What about…” Renn pauses for a second. “What about Nelson? And your sessions?”

  “Yeah, you sure you want to put yourself through such stress? I don’t mean to sound blunt or anything, but, Vi, look at the coffee shop you chose,” says Penny.

  I knew it.

  I knew they were thinking I’m not ready.

  “What about it?” I ask, defensively.

  “It’s a hole in the wall,” she answers. “You can’t even see it from the street. There’s no one in here except that weird guy who keeps looking over. And it has a back door and it’s quite possib
ly the farthest away from your house with all the above-mentioned qualities.”

  Okay, so everyone knows how weird I am.

  Everyone knows about my front-door phobia – I can’t get in through the front door; too much attention. I like backdoors and sneaking in. Not to mention, they know about my disguise and the fact that I’m not well.

  But I am well.

  I am. I am handling things my way.

  I narrow my eyes at her.

  I narrow my eyes at all of them. “I’m fine. Everything is fine, okay? I’m handling everything.”

  They don’t believe me.

  It’s okay. They don’t have to. Only I have to believe that I’m fine.

  Positive thinking, right?

  I take in a deep breath – probably my eight-hundredth – and unclench my hands in my lap and bring them up to the table. “And I have to do this. I owe it to him to do this.”

  Finally, Willow asks, “Do what, exactly?”

  “Apologize. For what I did to him. For everything that happened.”

  “For kissing him, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re going to go say sorry?”

  I open my mouth to answer, then close it. I don’t know how to explain it to them. I don’t know how to explain it to myself, even.

  I don’t know how to put into words what I feel.

  Every time I close my eyes, I see him. Not in the way that I used to, through the eyes of an infatuated teenager, but through the eyes of this grown-up girl who has done him harm.

  I see his anger.

  I see his fury just when they – Brian and Fiona – had caught us. I feel it burning hot even through time and space.

  Like it’s happening right now. Right this second.

  His dark eyes are glaring at me. His chest is heaving under that dress shirt he wore. I see his date-shoes that I ruined by stepping on them to reach his lips. I see the scattered, dead roses.

  He looked like I’d ruined his life in that moment, and guess what, I did ruin his life.

  He had to disappear because of me.

  Finally, I manage a few words. “Sorry. Yeah, that’s something to start with. I’m not sure what I’ll do next though.”

  “Vi, you made a mistake,” Willow says.

  “Yeah. It was a mistake,” Renn confirms.

  “A mistake that cost everything,” I say angrily.

  On his behalf.

  I’m so fucking mad, not for myself but for what he went through because of me.

  “You didn’t know what was going to happen,” Penny argues. “You didn’t know someone was going to see it.”

  “And take a photo of it,” Renn goes on.

  “And put it on social media for everyone to see,” Willow finishes.

  That was done by my sister, Fiona.

  Yup, I kissed the wrong man and the whole world found out about it through my sister’s Instagram feed. She never liked me after I became friends with Brian so that was her way of taking revenge, I think.

  It started with Brian and Fiona, who were coming to surprise me with a cake at midnight and they were meeting up in the driveway before going up to my room.

  But then, they saw me.

  My sister has never remembered my birthday. And the one time she remembers, I’m out kissing my best friend’s dad.

  By the next morning, the whole neighborhood knew.

  Slowly, the news reached farther because that photo – as blurry as it might be – got passed around and shared and commented on hundreds, if not thousands of times.

  When one person called me a slut for kissing my neighbor, the coach of our football team, a man eighteen years older than me, ten different people cropped up and called me the same. People would send me hate emails, proposition emails. I got inundated with so many emails from creepy old guys that I had to shut down my email account.

  I couldn’t go out without being recognized. Everyone in our town knew who I was. They’d stop on the streets and ask me if I was really her, the girl who kissed the coach at her school.

  I stopped going out. I stopped even leaving my room. I’d keep my curtains closed, hide myself inside the comforter.

  I’d only come out at night when no one could see me and I could see no one.

  And God, the rumors; I’m sure Fiona was the source of them.

  The rumors that went around. The theories, all the different versions of what happened.

  In one version they said that I’d cheated on Brian who had been my boyfriend of two years. While my supposed boyfriend was about to surprise me with a proposal on my birthday, no less.

  In a different version, he’d already proposed to me and we were keeping it a secret from everyone and pretending to be best friends. But then, he broke off the engagement – obviously – because I was cheating on my fiancé with his father.

  In yet another, very twisted version that came a few weeks later, I killed my fiancé. He was so distraught at seeing me with his father that he smashed his car into a tree and died on the spot.

  Seriously?

  He’s alive, people. He has social media accounts where he posts regularly.

  This last one stuck with me the most, though, as preposterous as that sounded. It stuck with me so much that this is what I told Renn when I first went to Heartstone.

  She kept asking me and asking me and I got fed up. So to scare her away I said, “My fiancé died. I killed him.”

  That sounded so much worse and more tragic than I kissed my best friend’s dad.

  And sure enough, that stopped her. That stopped everyone from asking the questions. Questions about why I don’t talk or why I pull out a chair next to mine: I guess, for Brian; my mind broke down for a while and I missed him so much that I’d pretend he was still my friend.

  Anyway, things got so bad for me on the Outside that one night I got super drunk on piña coladas and tried to run away from the town in my car. Only I lost control of it a few miles down and almost hit a tree.

  That’s when they put me in the hospital.

  They called it a mental breakdown before they gave me a proper diagnosis. It’s a thing. Mostly, celebrities go through it when people won’t leave them alone.

  So, I’m a celebrity now: The Slut of Cherryville, Connecticut and I suffer from Panic Disorder, a type of anxiety disorder.

  I’m not sure how long the silence has gone on but I break it. “No one told me to go kiss him, you know. He definitely didn’t. In fact, do you guys know what he said to me? He told me to go home. Repeatedly. Over and over. He told me, ‘Violet, go home. Violet, step away from me.’ He kept saying it and I didn’t listen. I didn’t care.

  “You know what I was thinking when I went in to kiss him like a crazy person? I was thinking that it was going to be this one kiss in the middle of the night and that’s it. I thought I’d kiss him on the lips and then I’d go home. I thought he wouldn’t even remember it in a few days. Or even if he did, I thought he’d consider it a silly, drunken mistake by a teenage girl next door. The worst-case scenario in my head was he might glare at me the next day or say something mean to me or even tell my parents, who wouldn’t have cared anyway. So yeah. That’s what I was thinking would happen. And through it all, I thought I could just… steal a piece of him for myself. Something that once belonged to this man whom I was crazy about. Something that I could tell my children, even. Something I could laugh about later. I didn’t wanna hurt anyone. I was going to move away and forget all about him. It was just my goodbye. A gift for my eighteenth birthday, along with those roses. That’s all it was supposed to be.”

  I sniffle and wipe off my tears. “But it turned out to be this huge disaster that doesn’t seem to end.”

  “Oh, Vi.” Willow squeezes my hands on the table. “You have to move on. You have to forgive yourself.”

  Renn and Penny are looking at me with concern as well.

  “I can’t. Not
until I know that he has. I have to go see him. I have to make sure that he’s okay. That… he’s moved on,” I insist. “I keep thinking about him all the time. Everything he went through because of me. All the stigma and rumors. I can’t let this go. I-I just have to see if he’s doing fine.”

  Willow nods, although I can still see she’s troubled. They all are. But I know that they’ll support me anyway.

  “Okay, if this is what you want, go apologize. Go do whatever you have to do so you can focus on yourself.”

  Penny nods too, as she warns me, “I don’t think it’s going to be easy, though.”

  Willow agrees. “Yeah, Mr. Edwards does not sound like a guy who forgets or forgives easily.”

  “Yup.” It’s Renn’s turns to nod. “Mr. Edwards sounds like a tough cookie.”

  I know. I’m aware of that.

  I know he’s not going to make it easy for me. He probably won’t even see me if I gather enough courage to go knock at his front door, but I’m doing it.

  I’m going to Colorado and I’m going to find him.

  I’m going to somehow make up for everything that happened.

  Because what he went through was worse than everything I endured.

  The P word.

  There are a lot of words that start with P: pizza – I like pizza; prickles – the start of my anxiety; perv – the guy who was staring at me at the coffee shop a couple of days ago.

  There are a thousand words with P as the first letter. But there’s this particular word that I despise the most.

  I hate to think about it. I especially hate to think about the fact that people used it in relation to him.

  First of all, it’s not accurate. He is not that. He can’t be that. I was eighteen when I kissed him, and he didn’t even kiss me back.

  He didn’t seduce me. He didn’t violate me. He didn’t lead me astray.

  It was a ten-second kiss, for God’s sake. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. It wasn’t supposed to be life-changing.

  It was a stupid drunken mistake. Mistake like my crush on him was.

  It wasn’t supposed to turn me into a slut and him into this vile, defiling, sexual predator.

  That’s what people have been calling him. That and the other P word: pedophile.