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“Well, no, but—”
“Exactly.” I cross my arms over my chest as I watch the shame bloom on his cheeks.
At least he’s squirming about what he’s just done.
Patrick sounded so nonchalant about it at first, I almost believed it was an off-the-cuff remark. But I’m an actress, one of the best, and I’ve been fooled by even better actors. Men with no morals who can lie so well, you don’t see it coming even when it whacks you like a two-by-four.
Teenagers can, too, but every kid who has gone through all twelve grades knows that. My parents divorced when I was five, just as I was starting kindergarten. Mom took me to the city and enrolled me in a public school there, and that’s where I went from kindergarten to fifth grade, until she married Dennis. My stepfather is a high-powered lawyer in Philly, and our lives changed overnight when she moved into his penthouse and we acquired all the finer things.
But by the middle of eighth grade, I was so done with private school. I begged Mom to let me go live with my dad during the week so I could attend Hope Crest for high school. Every other weekend, I’d take a town car out to my dad’s, provided by my stepfather, so my parents would never have to see each other face-to-face. I always preferred the small town to the city, and its idyllic community that I wanted so badly to be a part of. Finally, she relented on some conditions I can’t even remember now, but I do remember thinking she was happy to have more time for herself and Dennis.
We all won. Or so I’d thought.
“Listen, I’m just trying to be an ally here, to give you time back that you’d waste on the house. This is an out, an easy one. You should take it.”
This coming from the guy who just kissed me and threw a wrench in everything. How long have I thought about what a kiss from Patrick would be like? When I was a teenage girl, it consumed me.
I throw my head back and laugh, the past sweeping in like a dust cloud and ransacking my senses. “You did not just say that.”
“What?” Patrick blinks, thrown off.
“An ally? You do remember the last time you said that to me, right?”
The man looks like he’s searching the files of his memory bank, blue eyes shifting left then right.
“I’ll help you out. The last time you told me you’d be my ally was right after I’d gotten off the back of that thing.” I point to the ATV. “A week before I turned fifteen and was starting freshman year at Hope Crest. You told me you’d look out for me if I didn’t make trouble, that you could be my ally. You have no idea what that meant to a girl whose father was loathed by everyone in town. That allyship didn’t last long, though, did it?”
“Cassandra …” I’m not sure whether Patrick’s tone is an apology or a warning.
“You let your friends put rats in my locker,” I deadpan.
The first two months of school had been uneventful. I was just another new kid, keeping quiet and trying to make friends by being helpful and amiable in classes. Then someone found out who my dad was, what he’d done, and I was immediately blacklisted. Pranks started, little ones like calling me names or tossing my lunch tray. And then one day I opened my locker and …
“I didn’tletthem do anything, but I am damn sorry about that. I feel sick anytime I think about it.”
“Well, that’s good, because I was actually physically sick over it.”
Where they even got that many dead rats, I’ll never know. I know why they were put there. A week before, my father had ratted out one of the local businessmen who was trying to get a better deal on supplies, and that businessman got blackballed from both suppliers who lived in the area. As a result, all three of those affected men were pissed at each other, and guess whose daughter went to school with their kids? The ones who heard from their parents how big a piece of shit my father was.
My father was a rat, but he hadn’t undercut those businesses. He was simply sharing the slimy truth about another person. And I got caught in the crosshairs and took the brunt of the retaliation.
Do you know how long it takes to get the stench of dead rat off your backpack? Neither do I, because I had to trash every single thing in my locker. There were maybe two dozen of them, blood and feces marking everything. I remember the janitor begrudging me as he tried to clean the putrid stall.
But what I remember most is the laughter. The fingers pointing at me as if I deserved it. Patrick’s eyes fading in with the crowd, never standing up for me. Up until that point, I’d gotten friendly waves or smiles in the halls from him, and I thought maybe it would evolve into more.
I learned that day that he was the opposite of my ally. His silence was a worse betrayal than the rats that made me run to the bathroom and lose my lunch. We hadn’t exactly been friends, but his silence felt like a knife in the back.
“That was a horrible thing they did, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry you left after that, it was unfair and awful.” Patrick’s words don’t mean much in this day and age.
“What was unfair and awful was that you and everyone else knew who did it, yet never gave them up.” No one was punished in the locker scandal.
But I did end up going back to Philly because of it. Too traumatized and rattled, I let my mother enroll me in private school again. At least there, I knew the score, who to avoid, and how the hierarchy went. At Hope Crest, I’d been completely blindsided by cruelness, and it was clear there was no coming back from that. So while I still visited my father and saw people from time to time before I got that first movie role, this place had never been the same for me.
Patrick, to his credit, hangs his head. “I made a lot of idiotic mistakes back then. What those kids did to you waswrong. And you’re right, I should have said something. I should have made sure you stayed.”
I don’t hold a grudge against Patrick Ashton. Or those other boys, for that matter. I’ve matured, I’ve moved on, healed from that past, and made peace with the fact that my father played a part in his exile from this town.
Bitterness is a taste I usually shy away from because it poisons you more than it does the people you’re angry with.
