Page 185 of The Exit Strategy

“I bore the brunt of her sadness. Her pain. Her anger. I took the verbal hits and called them hugs. I took her rants and called it love. Because that’s what good girls do. Right?

“When she finally died, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I no longer had to witness her pain. I no longer had to carry her scars.”

I ball my hands into fists so tightly that the blood flow constricts.

She took the hits and renamed them hugs. She was sixteen! Sixteen and sitting in the same kitchen with me, and I didn’t know how bad it was—with her mother, with Natalie. I didn’t see it. I thought I was witnessing her grief, but I was really watching her survive.

Nana Mae releases a broken sob and doesn’t apologize for it.

Fen, Hudson, Nolan, and I all hold our collective breath. This is a failure for us all. But I was closest to her. I should have known. I should have seen.

“At sixteen, I didn’t know what to do with these inconvenient truths. I didn’t have any friends. I had a bully who made sure of it. Natalie has always moved in shadows.”

The sound that escapes my lips is more animal than human, and Nolan presses his hand to my shoulder. Solidarity.

“But I had my brother and his best friends. They took care of me and shepherded me the best way they knew how. My brother mostly kept his protective big brother persona. One of his friends became the enforcer—he made sure I didn’t color too far out of the lines. One friend became my biggest cheerleader—he instilled questionable amounts of self-confidence in a girl who had never been shown her worth. The other guy, well, he became my best friend. My confidant. My first love even before I knew what love truly felt like.”

The room falls into a stillness only known in death.

Hudson’s the first to speak, his words thick and broken. “I’m the enforcer.”

Fen’s even quieter. “I’m the cheerleader.”

Nolan doesn’t have to say anything.

My eyes can’t leave the video, but my heart has left the scene. It’s floating somewhere outside of myself, searching for the one who can stop the bleed.

Nana Mae clutches my forearm. She’s wedging herself between me and Hudson on the sectional, and I hadn’t even seen her move.

“But they were young, with lives of their own. They had classes, and girlfriends, and stressors. It’s where my bully thrived. While smiling at the boy I loved and tormenting me behind his back. Then, she drew a line in the sand that changed my found family forever. It ripped us apart. It broke my eighteen-year-old heart.”

A numbness creeps over my limbs, making everything cold and uncoordinated.

“I learned at a young age that spite was a quick remedy for pain, and I leaned on it often. When the world first learned who I was, it was during my second heartbreak. I’d just learned my best friend, Grace—my only friend, really—was having an affair with my boyfriend. Trust has never come easily to me, and you saw me choose spite because they had ripped apart my spirit in ways I didn’t know it could tear.”

Fen spliced the video here. It’s a montage of video clips showing Junie and Grace’s friendship over time. Then it cuts again to Junie on the bar top, a bottle of liquor in her hand that she’s pretending is a microphone. He cut it down to twelve seconds, but it’s twelve seconds too long.

“Mother of God,” Mae murmurs. “Look at her face.”

I did. It’s burned into my memory for all time.

“Then you saw the aftermath. The I’m not sorry versus I am sorry without ever having the full context. Social media spins in favor of beauty and lights and smoke and mirrors. Not the broken girl with the broken heart who wasn’t mature enough to simply call out bad behavior and move on. So I did what I do best—I hung on to my anger. I ran.”

She ran to me.

“I fell in love with my brother’s best friend all over again.”

“Oh, fuck.” It slips from my mouth because every ounce of anger I’ve been holding onto evaporates with that one line.

“But sadly, this isn’t the brother’s best friend story many of us love to read. This is real life, with real villains and real hearts.”

What? No! No, no, no. We don’t end here. We can’t.

I hadn’t realized I’d stood until Nolan’s loud exhale is muted by Hudson’s louder growl.

“Suddenly, I’m filling your screens again, only this version of me is that scared sixteen-year-old who had just lost her mom. That version of me was used to create a new narrative of spite. But in my story, I was taking something stolen and returning it to its rightful owner.”

She just repositioned herself from someone who chooses spite to someone who chooses what’s right.