“Mike,” Damon says.
I sit up, swinging my legs off the couch, letting the ball fall to the floor so I can run both hands through my hair. “It’s fine. He’s allowed to leave. He’s not my prisoner. I just think it was objectively, a pretty fucked up way to do it.”
I stand up to pace in front of the coffee table. “Like, if you’re gonna break my heart, you could at least do it to my face. Basic human decency and all.”
“Maybe he’s going through something,” Zara starts, standing up to put a comforting hand on my arm that I shrug off.
“Everyone is going through something.” I turn toward her. “Do you think I’m not going through something every single day? I still don’t pack my shit and ghost the person who—” I stop, before I cry in front of everybody, pressing my hands over my eyes, with a frustrated growl.
“Fuck you, Alex Wesley!” I shout to the ceiling.
Damon’s girl looks up from her phone, tuning in for the first time since I started talking. “Wait,” she says, with an odd look on her face. “Sorry, I’m not trying to—” She pauses. “Did you say, Alex Wesley?”
I stare at her, no idea where this is going, but I nod. “Yeah.”
“He’sthe roommate you were seeing? Please tell me you didn’t try tofuckAlex Wesley.”
“Uh…,” I say slowly. “Why?”
She looks at Damon and then back at me, shifting in his lap, visibly uncomfortable. “We went to school together,” she starts, pausing until I wave at her to get on with it.
“I was a year under him,” she continues, choosing each word carefully. “So I didn’t know him personally. But it was a big deal. His brother is the football coach, won the state championship that year. And I think that’s why they covered it up. Out of respect for him or whatever.”
“Coveredwhatup?” I ask, a dread I haven’t felt since I woke up without my parents, settling into my heart before she even says the words.
“Alex was—” She pauses. “He was in the hospital. It wasreallybad.” She looks down at her manicured nails, at Damon, anywhere but me. “It was a guy from the football team.”
“He like—raped him.” She whispers, the word too big to say out loud.
I hear them.
I understand what they mean. But I stand in the middle of my own living room, my hands hanging limp at my sides, staring at my best friend’s girlfriend, and I cannot, for the life of me, make the words connect in my brain.
“What?” I croak out. Hoping and praying this is some kind of fucked up joke, my friends decided to pull. Why they would do that, I have no idea, but the alternative—
“You didn’t know,” she says, giving me a sad smile and turning to Damon to apologize, and he says it’s okay, and I don’t answer her.
Someone raped Alex.
He was in the hospital.
MyAlex.
Who couldn’t stop looking at me that first day, who slept next to me every night, who looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was real.
Who was going to—
Who said—
I’m not gonna let you rape me again.
Again.
He said again.
It was right there the whole time. He was terrified, and I thought he was being dramatic. I was angry at him for acting like it was a big deal when—
Oh god.
