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“You said we were engaged, and that’s clearly not true.”
“I jumped the gun a little on the timeline because I think it should be true.”
“Bowie—”
His features set into an expression that I recognized as stubbornness. “Listen to me, Lissa. We should be engaged. We should get married. It will solve all of these problems.”
“A fake marriage wouldn’t solve anything!” I protested. “It would create a ton more issues, like, when we got divorced, or had it annulled or whatever? What do you think would happen then?”
“I wouldn’t want to do that. This would be permanent for me.”
“What?” I wasn’t understanding him, obviously, because it had sounded like…
“I would want a real marriage, and I wouldn’t want to get divorced or have it annulled. Unless that’s the only way you’d be willing to do this.”
“You have to be kidding me,” I burst out. “Are you seriously saying that you’ll marry me so that I won’t get fired as a cheerleader? It’s not worth that, Bowie! It’s not worth you sacrificing that much. I absolutely did not follow the Woodsmen rules, and I absolutely understood that I could have been fired for breaking them. And I got caught, and that’s something I’ll regret but I’ll also have to suck up and deal with it.”
“It’s not just about cheerleading, and you know it,” he said. “What about that guy?”
“Ward won’t be deterred by a ring on my finger,” I answered, although I wasn’t sure if that was true. I let hope flare up for a moment before shaking my head. “Even if he would be, I can’t do that.”
“Because you still love him.”
The words hung there for a moment and I thought about them. Did I? How could I love someone who scared me, who mistreated me?
“I was with him for a long time and it wasn’t all bad. I’m not saying…” What was I saying? “Mostly, I’m afraid of him.”
“So, you don’t love him.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. The feelings I had were very confused, just as they had been from the moment Ward first backhanded me, all those years ago when I was fifteen. I had believed him when he’d said that it wouldn’t happen again and that it had been a mistake, but I’d made him so mad…why had I made him so mad? There had been love back then for sure, but also fear and then guilt that I’d forced him to act that way, that I’d caused the violence. Somehow, I’d already known that no one was going to be able to get me out of it and I was hopelessly ensnared. But I loved his parents, too, and I did love the good parts him, and I had a contrary hope that he would be able to stop like he said he would, that he really was sorry.
“Lissa?”
I opened my eyes and Bowie looked so concerned.
“Just think about it,” he said. “It’s a serious offer. It would be a real marriage and it would be for life. My life and yours, together.”
“Why would you do this?” I asked, but I already knew. He was exactly the person I’d thought he was: a knight. He was the kind of guy who would want to rescue you, just like when I’d been hurt—no, I needed to admit what had happened. Ward had purposefully pushed me off the loading dock at Aubin’s wedding. This marriage idea was part of that same pattern of him helping me when I needed him. He was a good man, one with so much human decency. He would sacrifice himself, even marrying someone, in order to save her.
I put my hand on his face, not to feel for fever this time, but to cup his cheek. He placed his palm over mine to keep it there, and we sat for a long time, both of us quiet in the safe room, in the safe apartment.
What was I willing to do to keep myself here? How far could I let this go? I looked into his blue eyes and didn’t have any good answers.
∞
“I think you better tell me what’s going on,” Danni said. “The other girls are upset and we deserve to know if we’re in some kind of danger. The rumors going around the locker room are sooo crazy. Actually, as of today, we’re not in the locker room again because there’s some kind of issue with the varnish they used on the woodwork in there. I guess it’s all made of lead or asbestos or something, so they can’t do any more renovations until that’s all abated. Which means they can’t fix the toilets that don’t work or the outlets, and the sinks may be running on toilet water and I’m not sure if they meant clean or dirty toilet water…” She stopped. “I think you better tell me what’s going on.”
“Um, ok. First, I don’t think anyone else is in danger and I wouldn’t have kept coming to the stadium if I believed that. Ward only wants to hurt me.”
“Ward, your boyfriend?” she asked doubtfully, so I had to give her a version of the same story I’d told everyone else. Danni cried, because she was very tender-hearted, and she said the same thing that Sam had: “I wish you’d told me.”
“I should have,” I agreed. “I should have told someone the first time it happened. There were people who cared about me, like my teachers and my neighbor, other parents at dance or gymnastics. I should have but I didn’t. In my family, we never told anything that was really going on. It was just one more secret to keep.”
“And now? Now you’re done with him and you and Garrett Bowman are engaged?”
Bowie and I had talked about this, about what to say to people, and I’d practiced it with him just like I’d rehearsed my speech for my sister’s wedding. “It happened very quickly,” I stated. That was one of the things I had worked on saying, because it was true. I’d walked into that conference room a single woman with no boyfriend, and walked out with wedding plans.
Not that I’d agreed to marry him. I’d made him take a nap but unfortunately, the first words out of his mouth when he’d woken up were, “Let’s get a marriage license.” That wasn’t happening but I felt that I did need to explain it to people, particularly my teammates who were affected by this. I needed to explain it in a way that didn’t make Bowie sound like a lying lunatic or me like a cheating wimp.
