“How the FUCK did he get your number?”

It was two days after New Year’s, and Alex was fuming. The 5,500 miles between us certainly weren’t helping put out the flames of anger that I saw licking at his cheeks. Even with the Zoom touch up option on (I know Minty had turned it on when we’d done our Christmas Day video call, either that or she found some black market Restylane dealer in Dorset to help her crows’ feet) his fury was crystal clear. “Why didn’t you tell me about the publisher’s letter before? How many bloody times do I have to say to you –“

“No more secrets, I know,” I whispered, feeling far more alone than I’d felt on Christmas itself.

“Hmph,” he grunted, and took a vicious bite out of a ham sandwich. Over his shoulder was the cranberry red accent wall of Sasha’s living room, crammed like an 18th century gallery with framed oil paintings and watercolors and pencil sketches from the hand of one of her brothers. Mikhail wasn’t terribly good — no Fenn, certainly — but what he lacked in talent he made up for in sheer output.

“You would have been asleep when I hung up yesterday. I told you as soon as I could,” I protested.

Alex had decamped the day before from Dorset to Sasha’s empty flat in London, having decided that he needed a week in his adopted hometown before returning to the States. I’d pretended not to sulk at the pronouncement. I also pretended not to gloat when he groused about his unceasing efforts to warm up a cavernous flat that hadn’t been lived in for nine months, and which had only been dusted once a month in the interim.

“Anything else you need to tell me about this?” he said through a mouthful of baguette. “You’re safe, right? Do you need to stay with Rachel for a while?”

“I’m fine. I told him what I thought I needed to say. I’m not going through with anything.”

“Hmph,” he grunted again and wiped a smear of mustard from his lips with the back of his hand. “For his sake, this better be the end of it.”

But I’ve found that with Joshua K. Brookes, there never really seems to be an end to it.

***

Still as adept at reading me over a screen as he was in person, Ben’s first words to me on December 25th after “Merry Christmas, doll!” were “Tell me someone’s not dead.”

“Do I look that bad?” I asked, shoving a morsel of Christmas ham in my mouth. We’d agreed to eat our dinners together, since a meal of holiday food by oneself smacked of the desperation of the shut-in, or the shutter-out. Who makes sausage and cranberry stuffing for herself except for a woman who might consider her collection of porcelain dolls bought off QVC “company”?

Ben raised a glass of red in a toast. “Sláinte, girly. Have a drink, tell old Ben what’s stuck in your craw.”

With a deep breath, I rattled off the holiday calls and Zooms and texts and WhatsApp chains and Facebook group messages and the ping-ping-ping of Slacks that had crowded out any of the restfulness I’d always associated with Christmas Day itself. “Like before, in the Before Times, everything exhausting happened before, and then the day itself was for sleeping and eating and having sex. I mean, all the crazy running around to stores and wrapping presents and baking baking baking and the tree and the decorations and the stupid candles in the window Jules wanted every goddamn year and the parties and the charity balls and the carols and the fucking midnight mass at All Saints, all of that was just… prologue.”

“And now there’s zippo to do beforehand because no one’s around,” Ben ventured, inspecting the Brussels sprout at the end of his fork. “And today was all the hard work of looking happy. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pretend around me. Wanna moan? Let ‘er rip. As long as you’ll sit through me bitching about Yaros and his ‘Is flu, Ben, is only flu’ attitude when my dad was on oxygen last month and he knew that! He even sent my dad an Edible Arrangement!”

I have to give it to Ben — his commitment to calling out coronavirus deniers extended to his love life. They’d met on Tinder and Ben took it as a sign that Yaros was willing to isolate-test-isolate before meeting in person. “I like sex nearly as much as I like Alabama losing to anyone, but I like being alive even more than seeing Alabama lose,” he’d told me back in August, fresh off a hike with Yaros in the Muir Woods. “I want to be alive to watch Alabama lose again, with him on the couch next to me.”

Sometimes there is nothing quite like an hour of congenial moaning with another person. The complaints might run along parallel paths, intersect, curl around each other and spin off on separate vectors. Alex’s tender look at Minty when she held Lucy on her lap on our Christmas morning Zoom had continued to prick at me throughout the day, and Ben quietly munched on a plate of turkey and cornbread stuffing without comment while I rattled through my paranoia that Alex would throw me over if it meant he could have his daughter with him every day. I returned the favor by nodding sympathetically as Ben slammed Trump, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Yaros, his father’s Fox-loving drinking buddy who was the source of Mr. Weston’s COVID diagnosis, and Cesar on Shattuck closing “temporarily.” (I reminded him La Marcha was, in my opinion, superior anyway when it came to tapas in Berkeley and remains very much open.)

By 5 p.m., the ham and casserole dish of stuffing had migrated to the fridge in its shroud of foil, the single plate stood straight in the drying rack, the knife and fork lounged at an angle in the cutlery drain. I settled in for an evening of 90 Day Fiancé and naps-into-sleep, which wasn’t nearly as good as some festive carnal embrace and Wonder Woman 1984, which I’d promised to save to watch until Al returned. (Rachel had blindsided me with the Christmas “present” of an HBO Max profile on Matt’s account, which while thoughtful, really wasn’t as magnanimous as she thought it was. I mean, whose Hulu and ESPN Plus is she using anyway?) The Zodiac Killer voicemail I’d deleted earlier that day was forgotten, lost in an afternoon-into-evening of moody funkishness and After Eights.

By December 27th, I’d stopped Zooming with Alex and was sticking to phone calls. Easier not to see him pull Lucy into the frame, easier not to watch her ask if she could keep Daddy just one more day. (She got her wish — Alex delayed his return until the second week of January.) Easier than pretending it didn’t bother me when Minty pushed a mug of tea in his hand (“you look parched, sweetie”) and patted his head. It means nothing, I reminded myself. They’d been friends before, and who couldn’t support two parents who barely fought with each other?

But I’d be a liar to say I wasn’t smugly chuffed when Sasha reported back on the blazing row Al and Minty had dived into after Lucy’s bedtime on New Year’s Day. Seems the “Lucy needs to be in London if she’s going to have any chance of getting into Oxford” spirit had been summoned once more, and Alex wasn’t interested in having any sort of séance on that topic.

“Mmmm, her point is a decent one,” Sasha said between drags on a cigarette. She was careful not to smoke around Lucy, who found it disgusting anyway (I’d heard her say, “Auntie Sash, you smell like a corpse and NOT in a good way!” on a Zoom) and indulged the habit only in walks down Rye Hill into the village. “Her classmates are pleasant enough, but Lucy needs something better in terms of an education. Lucy’s just like Alex, you know. First class mind, first class pain in the arse.”

“Sasha!” I knew it was true though.

“There, there, Mother Goose, I love your stepdaughter to bits. But I never wanted to be a mum, and here I am, or close enough. At least I get to close my door on her.” She took another deep drag. “Now, I’m going to tell you something, and it’s just between us, all right? Not a peep to Al, and definitely not a peep to Miranda.”

“Oooooh,” I breathed. “Who else knows?”

“Not a soul. You did know Tom Gregory was supposed to be staying for Christmas, right?”

“Ye-es.” According to Will, Tom had blustered about Alex upending his holiday plans, threatening to drive down to Dorset and sleep in the back of his Audi in order to spend the day with the Bosworth-Carr ladies. Seems I wasn’t the only one in the grip of a Alex-Minty reunion delusion but Boris Johnson’s imposition of Tier 4 put an end to Tom’s plan.

Her voice, already a little raspy from a lingering cold as well as the Dunhills she won’t quit, dipped into a whisper. “Well, the reason he was so put out was he was going to propose.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic!” I squealed. It really was fantastic — Alex’s marital support would end when Lucy was 18, or Minty remarried, whichever happened first. Another strong-arm tactic by Minty’s brother Theo.

“You’d think. I was supposed to take Lucy out for the afternoon on Boxing Day so Tom could pop the question. He’d been planning it for over a month and then pfffffffffffft. Alex calls and announces he’s coming and Min tells Tom she’s so, so sorry but can he come in the new year? Tom felt like he was second place, again.”

“Again?” Now this sounded interesting. I pulled Alex’s pungent and tattered wool blanket around my shoulders and settled into his recliner.

Sasha pulled on her cigarette. “Don’t you remember? Oh, sorry. You probably weren’t around when that was going on. Miranda was seeing Tom for a while, and then she dumped him when Alex decided he wanted her back. I always thought Tom behaved beautifully in the aftermath towards Alex. Did you even get a whiff of… I don’t know. Jealousy? Bad blood?”

“Nope. All I knew is Miranda called him ‘that wankstain’ and he’d gone to school with Jamie.”

“Welllll.” Sasha pulled the word out like taffy. “He called it water under the bridge at the time, and stuck to it, even if that probably isn’t completely true. And now here we are, what could look like history repeating itself if Tom didn’t know better. Awful optics, even if it isn’t exactly the same situation.”

“And of course Alex isn’t trying to get back together with Minty.” It all came out in a rush, a little huffier than I’d intended. I’d been flipping through pictures Al had sent me earlier in the day, of the former “wee team of three” posing in front of the Christmas tree, looking all the world like an intact family. Every snap I flicked past slowly ticked up the heat beneath the pot of my simmering jealousy.

“Mel, you’re such a goose sometimes. I know what Al looks like when he’s interested, and that’s not painting the wainscotting in the dining room while he listens to football. I was in Suffolk with you both, remember? You two were like magnets that were struggling to stop from glomming together with all your might. This is a working partnership. As in, Min glides in the room and gives him a new chore to do, and he just grunts, ‘Didn’t know this was a working holiday.'”

I snickered. “Poor Al.”

“Poor Al? Poor Tom! Now he can’t even come here until all the tiers get rearranged, and doesn’t look like that’s likely to happen until February. So when I say no talking, I mean it. I think I only told you because I need to tell someone or I’ll burst, and I don’t trust any of the others to keep their gobs shut.”

“Was that meant as a compliment?” My phone buzzed again with “Flight of the Bumblebee” and I ignored it. It had been the third call that day — the first two I’d sent to voicemail, though the Zodiac Killer hadn’t deigned to leave another message at the tone.

“Definitely.” I didn’t have to see her face to feel her smile. “Now go finish Bridgerton so we can talk about it.”

I was busily shoving Moose Munch in my mouth in between sips of cava while watching the Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton give Baroness Featherington the cut direct (ouch!) when the mystery 818 number again rattled my phone into life. Mmmm, the cava whispered, why not answer this time?

My chocolate-daubed finger slid across the screen, leaving a light smear on its already grubby surface. In Alex’s absence, my well-controlled tendency towards slobbery had forced its way to the surface. “New phone, who dis?” I gruffed with a mouthful of Munch.

“I… I’m trying to reach Melissa. Melissa de — Melissa Carr.”

Fuck. My stomach twisted once, twice.

“Is this the wrong number?”

The bite of salty-sweet popcorn I’d been holding in my mouth washed itself down with the stomach acid that had rushed up to meet it there. “How did you get this number?”

“Melissa!” Josh sounded perfectly pleased with himself. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days — didn’t you get my message? It’s Josh, Josh Brookes.”

Of course I know it’s you. “Who gave you my number?”

“Well, hm. You kind of gave it to me when you signed up for the ‘Daily Themes’ forum. We ask for a phone number in case — you are ‘meldemo,’ right?”

I liked the note of supplication in his voice enough to stop me from ending the call, even if my shoulders pinched and spasmed with anxiety. “Obviously.”

“I knew it!” he crowed. “I’d know your writing anywhere. You can’t quite quit those em dashes and colons, can you? I told Sara — that’s my wife — I knew it was you. That piece about your sister losing out to Talley during the ‘Great Prom Queen Stakes of 2001,’ as you put it, was a deft gem. You’ve done some lovely work, Melissa. Truly good.”

This was going to take far more cava than I had in me. “I don’t really care what you think of my writing, Josh,” I lied before sucking back a large mouthful of wine. The bubbles fizzed and plicked at my tastebuds. “Why are you calling me?”

“I… No, no. Sara said it was better to keep this businesslike. I’ll stick to business. It’s about that letter.” He sniffed briskly and barrelled on. “I never authorized Macmillan to make those kind of threats. Never. I was furious when I found out they’d gone behind my back. It’s my choice what goes in that book, not theirs. I told them, give it one last chance and that’s it.”

“Threats? Julian never mentioned anything more than one of your annual love letters.”

“Your ex, right? He was right to protect you, Melissa. Good man. They had no right to send it, I promise you. As soon as I heard, I called. I called you on Christmas, I was so worried what that letter might have done to you, made you feel.”

I brushed off the ridiculous notion that Josh actually gave a shit about I truly felt. It was never about me, it was only how I reflected him. It was only ever about the control. “What kind of threats?”

“He really didn’t tell you,” Josh marveled. “I’m sorry about all of the letters, to be honest. My old editor at Hachette came up with the idea, and it seemed reasonable. Just ask for a copy of ‘Summer Green’ — I was certain you’d like the idea, getting yourself in print. I haven’t seen the letters in years but I remember some of the words you wrote as if it had only been last summer, not half a lifetime ago.”

“I am going to hang up now, forget –“

“I remember my father banging the old cow bell hanging from the back porch every afternoon, shouting ‘Mail Call!’ loud enough that we could hear him all the way in the middle of the lake. I couldn’t wait to read your letters. Every day but Sunday there was at least one paper gift from you, written only for me, and I’d run off to the art studio to read them. Only place I could get any peace there, tucked behind the potter’s wheel. Only place I could write there, and the only writing I did that summer was to you. I only wanted to give my words to you.”

Be careful, I warned myself. His words were slipping under the door I’d tried to shut, the door to the tiny room where he reminded me of my place in his love, in the world, as a girl. “This doesn’t sound like business to me, Josh.” Rather sterner than I expected from myself, quite good. Strength respects strength.

Josh’s chuckle grated on my nerves. “Sorry, it’s just… I haven’t spoken to you in years. Seeing your face, hearing your voice on that Zoom, hell. Melissa, you… Sorry, I promised Sara. Business. My juvenilia’s due to come out this summer, and you know what the publishers think they need to make it complete. I don’t agree, but I said, one last time. You can try her one last time.”

“And they did. So why exactly are you calling me now?”

Josh paused, another sniff. “I was supposed to have finished writing a sequel of sorts to First Flush this year, 10 year anniversary the other week, did you know?”

“It may come as a surprise to you, Josh, but I don’t mark anything of yours in my calendar.”

Josh paused. Faintly, a child’s voice in the distance, asking where her sneakers were, a woman’s reply muffled. “That’s Violet. She had COVID in July. So did Sara.”

“I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” The sympathy would have been reflexive with anyone, even Josh. Especially Josh.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “I never mentioned it on the podcast. Sara had it mild, all told. A high fever for a few days and a throbbing headache, body aches. It bounced off Violet, hardly a cough at all. Kids, huh?”

“Yeah. I have a seven-year-old stepdaughter, but she doesn’t live nearby.” It slid from my mouth before I could catch it.

“Talley told me about the wedding. Your sister told her she likes your new husband… Alex? I won’t pry about your divorce, but your ex seems like a good man. Enough that he thought he was protecting you. He must love you still to take such a strong stance with Macmillan, even now.”

“Ha!” I spat. “Hardly. It’s business for him. Aren’t we talking business?”

“Fair point. I’ll put it bluntly. COVID turned me into a nursemaid at a time I was under a strict deadline to deliver my First Flush sequel draft. You might have recalled me missing two weeks in August.”

I did. He said it was “the classic fortnight in the South of France. But in the Plague Year, that means a few bottles of Côtes de Provence and a pissaladière consumed en famille in the San Fernando Valley.”

“Sara didn’t bounce back as quickly as she’d thought and I was trying to manage two girls, mostly on my own. I missed the deadline. You know how I am about timeliness, Melissa.”

Oh yes, I know exactly how you are about timeliness. You’re 15 minutes late. Where have you been? What did I say about being on time?

“When I gave my editor the draft of… let’s call it Second Flush, she detested it. ‘Cynical, trite and pat,’ is how she put it. She wasn’t utterly incorrect. But they need a book, so Early Bloom would have to go to press at last. It’s hardly like there is anything left to finish up — they sealed the lid on it years ago. I was only waiting for you to say yes.”

“Except I’m never going to give you ‘Summer Green.’ I should think you would have known by now there was never going to be a yes. It will always be no.” I’d given him so many “yeses” over the years, the “no” was a delicious peach to sink my teeth into. Tart and sweet and juicy.

Josh’s sigh was deep, and he cleared his throat. “Business, right? Fine. The letter your ex-husband didn’t share with you was from the legal department. Now, I didn’t approve this, and it doesn’t have any teeth. They thought they could spook you into handing them over if they threatened a lawsuit.”

“You gave those letters to me. They. Are. Mine.” I ground out each word, my jaw clenching. “I don’t want to share any piece of them with you or your publisher or the world. I don’t want to be identified, I don’t want my name in print. I don’t even want to be talking to you.”

Josh ignored me. “But the copyright’s mine and yours, Melissa. Together. They can’t sue you if I don’t give them permission, and I’ve refused. On principle,” he said firmly. “I can’t say a part of me doesn’t want to see them again, but you must have your reasons.”

“Why are you calling me, Josh?” My voice dipped lower, smoother than before. It was the plum-sweet tone I used on Julian when I was trying to lure him into seeing things from my perspective, an adult-candy tease. “We both know this isn’t about ‘Summer Green.'”

“I-I called to make sure you understood,” he stumbled. “I assumed your ex would have told you, and you would have been… scared. I never wanted you to be scared.”

“Bullshit. Jules got that letter two weeks ago. If I’d really been worried, you would have heard by now.”

“Would I?” he wondered. Such an airy tone to his voice. “I remember you, how you tried so hard to keep things from me that you thought might hurt me. Big things, little things. Things of no consequence. Like that time — do you remember what happened with the ACT? You already had the SAT scores under your belt but you had something to prove.”

Yes, I did remember. The ripping shame of that entire spring still tears through me, day after day. Things like that you don’t forget.

***

My calculus teacher had suggested the ACT, not knowing I had a 1590 SAT score under my belt. Precisely the same score as Josh, who’d already been admitted to Yale, early action. I thought another score in my portfolio could only help, even if Josh scoffed at the idea.

And while Josh’s preferences normally meant every planet and star and hunk of rock in the universe to me, school meant more. Being the best little girl in the world meant more. I knew I wouldn’t be valedictorian — Angela Kim had that one sewed up — but I could be mildly dazzling in every pursuit I set my cap at. Slaughtering the ACT would be another feather in that cap, one that even Josh couldn’t claim himself.

ACT prep, though, meant time away from Josh, time away from the literary magazine. Time he preferred I’d put into any one of our joint projects, my Yale admissions essay being first among them. Even though I knew I’d be going to Brown unless I got pregnant and dropped out of high school (unlikely: I started every morning with a cup of coffee and a dose of Mircette), Josh wanted me to at least try for Yale.

“Humor me,” he’d said, looking down at me with a crooked smile, trailing a finger around the swell of my breast. It had been a boon of an early October Saturday already, an afternoon with no parents, siblings absent at college or work. (Okay, I’ll be more accurate: Rachel was definitely at work, but almost certainly not working. Come to think of it, hardly anyone at Abercrombie ever seemed to be working, so maybe she was actually brilliant at her job.) Three weeks before, right after the first meeting with him at the helm of the literary magazine, Josh had indeed made it perfect for me in the writing shed. Thus indoctrinated into the mystery cult of sexual congress, I wanted to perform its rituals as frequently as possible, with the zeal of a convert.

I made a crack that when it came to college humor, Harvard had the better reputation but it didn’t come out quite right. Still, I agreed to apply. “Dad will kill me,” I groaned. “What if I get in?”

Josh tweaked my nose. “You’ll just have to explain to him how Yale will open so many more doors for you. He’ll understand, I promise.”

By the time I’d decided to take the ACT, Josh had already been admitted early to Yale, and his insistence on me joining him only surged. “You don’t need that test,” he’d scoffed over my shoulder as I pushed my US history textbook in my locker between classes. “Not unless you’re planning on fucking up next year when I’m not around to keep an eye on you.”

I knew the ACT was pointless, but I wanted to do something — one thing — that was my own, that hadn’t been prescribed by Josh or my parents or the school as necessary to get ahead, or “grow as a person,” or push myself into a series of smaller and daintier and more perfectly formed boxes of Josh’s design.

The night before the exam, I’d sharpened ten No. 2 pencils and wound my Timex, laid out the Juicy Couture tracksuit (sky blue) I’d spent some of my summer job savings on, and finished my bedtime call with Josh at 10 p.m. on the dot. I was so focused on annihilating the test that I forgot to work in time for phone sex, and instead of shame at the oversight I felt completely unmoved.

And then I completely missed it. Woke up clear-headed, out of the usual muzzy fog of worry and in the zone. Ready for the kill. I’d thrash this exam like I’d thwacked each other standardized test into submission. I pushed my headphones on, slipped my CD Walkman in the pocket of my pyjama bottoms and pressed play on the “Peanut Butter and Banana Jams” mix Mack had made for me (so, so much Kylie Minogue). Halfway through my morning calisthenics — the only exercise I did with any regularity back then, as I could do it in complete seclusion and without teammates — I glanced at the clock and promptly fell on my ass mid-squat.

Two hours late. Two hours late! I’d been so focused on staying in the tight circle of my killer mentality and Kylie singing about how she couldn’t get some guy out of her head that I’d not even bothered to check the time.

It wasn’t like I needed an alarm anyway — even on weekends, my body stirred at 6:30 a.m., ready to tick each box off. Shower and breakfast and school and the magazine and Josh and writing and dinner and study and phone sex with Josh and bed during the week, or shower and breakfast and Josh and writing and Josh and writing and dinner and phone sex and bed. As simple as sipping in air and letting flow through my lungs to escape once more. Reflexive, instinctive.

Until I broke the pattern by putting myself before Josh. I rarely slept more than five or six hours, the constant chattering beat of anxiety hard to still after I’d turned off the light, and impossible to silence as it fought its way through the sludge of slumber. But I’d slept ten hours.

Panicking, I tore down the stairs to the kitchen in my nightclothes to find my dad and Rachel yucking it up over a Dave Barry column (really?) and some Eggos. Eggos = Mom not at home, so at least sharing my ignominy with her was spared for a few hours.

“Baby,” my dad said as he chomped through a mouthful of toaster-waffle, “aren’t you supposed to be taking an exam?”

Rachel snorted coffee through her nose. (One of the truly terrible habits she’s never ditched from childhood; that it causes her discomfort brings me a little smug pleasure still.)

“Daddy!” I wailed, barely able to keep from dropping to the ground to pound the floor in despair, in embarrassment at my failure to be absolutely perfect, yet again. “It’s starting now! I’m an idiot! An idiot! I’m stupid and useless and awful and I deserve to fail!”

And then I did fall to the kitchen floor, bending over at the waist to touch my forehead, hot with my rage and disgust, to the chill of the terracotta tiles. I didn’t care they both saw me, though those days I preferred to keep my fits of pique and sorrow hidden away in more private climes like my pink and cream princess bedroom. Or the navy blue and forest green of Josh’s room, the seat of so very many of my pleasures and scourgings.

To his credit, after he pushed one more bite of Eggo in his mouth, my dad did join me on the floor to try to stanch the tears. Stroking my hair while I buried my head into the shoulder of his t-shirt, he cooed like I was that nine-year-old in Ms. Olatunji’s office again. “Baby. Baby. It’s just fine. We all mess up once in a while. Right, Rach?”

My sister grunted, a sign of her growing maturity.

“Oh baby. Baby. Don’t cry. You were just doing this for fun, right? What did you call it to me? You had a funny little –“

“I said I wanted to be the Exam Annihilator,” I hiccuped. “The only thing I annihilated was me!”

Rachel clicked her tongue. “God, Mel, are you auditioning for a walk-on in Dawson’s Creek? Sooooo over the top. So you missed something you didn’t even need to do. Big whoop.”

“But it,” I gulped, as how utterly ridiculous my reaction was did start to intrude around the edges of my misery. “But I prepared for it. Mom wrote a check. Josh is supposed to pick me up when I’m done for lunch at the Tam. And I fucked it up.”

“Shhhhhhh.” Dad pushed my hair back over the sweat on my forehead to dot a kiss there. “Everything is fine. Your mom and I don’t care if you miss this one. Now. What are we going to do with you, little girl?”

“Pffffft, Dad, come on,” my sister moaned from the kitchen table. “She didn’t exactly break a bone. She fucked up, she needs to get over it.”

“I am over it!” I screamed, unconvincingly.

My sister’s right eyebrow quirked upwards as she shoved away from the table, still clutching her hot pink mug of coffee. “Sure, loser. Come on, let’s go clean you up. You look like shit and you’re going on a date this afternoon.”

“Oh, thank god, Rach,” my dad sighed, pulling his fingers through his blond hair with one hand while pushing me upwards with the other.

I grabbed the arm my sister offered to help me up hard enough that she winced, and she nearly shook me off before my dad tutted, “Help your sister.”

After bending down for a peck on my dad’s cheek, Rachel shooed me upstairs into her lilac fantasia of a bathroom. Very, very rarely was I permitted in here, the ultimate sanctum sanctorum. It was very like being admitted for a personal audience with the Queen, if the Queen devoted her downtime to bikini waxing and watching Days of Our Lives, rather than messing about with Corgis and Land Rovers.

With no ceremony, Rachel shoved me in front of her bathroom mirror and loomed behind me. At the age of almost 36, and with no real restrictions on spending, I still have never achieved in my own boudoirs the high femme glamour of that bathroom in 2002, with the Hollywood-style ring of Edison bulbs framing the mirror and her cosmetics displayed like totems of a elegant culture’s rites of passage. She grabbed my hair roughly and gave it a yank — ow! — before winding it up in a topknot secured with a scrunchie.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she hissed over my shoulder. “Don’t fucking lie to me. This isn’t about the exam.”

“Tissue,” I sniffed, and she shoved a Kleenex in my hand. After a strong honk which left my nose and eyes a study in scarlet, I squared my shoulders and looked straight into the reflection of her bright blue eyes. “No, you’re right, this is stupid. So I fucked up, big deal. I was taking the exam because I’m vain.”

She returned the gaze to me with a slap of truth. “What a fucking liar you are.” Scorn dripped from each word. “You’re better at hiding shit than lying.”

“It’s not a lie.” I trained my eyes away from hers, onto my own lying mouth. “I let myself down more than anything else. No one else cares.”

“Ha!” Rachel snorted and pulled started poking at the zit on the side of my nose. I’d been doing a decent job hiding it over the past couple of days with the concealer she’d made me buy at the Galleria, but that morning I was fresh-faced if blotchy in the mirror. “Nice try. This is about your loser boyfriend, and don’t fucking lie to me.”

How many mornings — even now — have I woken up wishing to have the poise and the “fuck this” attitude and the goddamn zipping gluttony for life on my own terms that my sister has? She’s always been like this. I cannot remember a single day of being her sister that she ever doubted that what she saw and heard and knew and processed was right, even when that didn’t always bear out.

“Well?” she quizzed me, tapping her foot on the cold white tile floor. She looked furious, her nose crinkled, her arms crossed over the tight ruby red polo that passed for her Abercrombie uniform.

I had a moment, just a brush of the second arm where I thought I could pack it all back inside, all the tears and the pulsating disgust with myself. Just fold it up like a t-shirt, pop it in the drawer. But before I could wave it away with a “you know me, I’m just too sensitive,” out sprang the truth like an ugly jack in the box head.

“How am I going to tell Josh?” I whispered to myself in the mirror, then to her. “How am I going to tell him I missed it?”

“Uh, duh. You say, ‘I overslept and I missed the exam.’ How hard is that?” Rachel turned me around gently by the shoulders before brandishing a strange little metal device with a tiny loop in front of my face. “Now hold still, I’m popping that sucker on your nose.”

“It’s just — OW!” I shrieked, jumping back partly into the open shower stall behind me. Rachel dotted at my nostril with an alcohol-soaked pad. When she passed over the pad to me for inspection, the glob of yellow pus was oddly satisfying to behold.

In the mirror, I saw Rachel grin as she scrubbed at her hands in the sink. “So gross. Stop washing your face with Ivory. Look at how great my skin is,” she said, turning her head from side to side to take in both right and left profiles. “I know Grandma Sullivan thinks Ivory is the shit, but she was our age in the Forties. She doesn’t know any better. We have choices. Not like Grandma.”

I had a feeling this wasn’t actually about soap.

After a much-needed shower to scrub away the flop sweat stench (either that or the garlic from last night’s shrimp scampi), I allowed Rachel to continue prodding, more at my brain than my face now.

“I’m surprised your loser boyfriend allows you to wear Juicy,” she grumbled, pushing my hair into a tiny pompadour secured with three deftly tucked bobby pins. “You look moderately hot in this. I hope you’re dumping him after prom.”

“Why? We’re in love.” At least this is what Josh had told me was true.

“Pffffffff,” Rachel exhaled, pulling her straightening iron over some of the more intransigently frizzy tendrils that framed my face. “You’re 16.”

“Almost 17,” I piped up.

If there’s such a thing as aggressively ironing hair, Rachel seemed to be a master at it and I squealed when she clamped hard on a section of my hair and tugged downward. “I’m 19, and I’m not anywhere ready to know about love. You should just have fun fucking Josh until school’s over and let him go. You know he’ll find some new girl, like, the first week of college anyway.”

“He would never!” I gasped. In the mirror I saw Melissa reflected, perfected in a way I never could at my own hand. Rachel had stroked something called “Beauty Flash Balm” into my skin and the grey tinge of this morning was banished. My cheeks were lit a peachy-pink with a dusting of blush and she’d slicked a rosy balm on my lips. Josh would like it, most importantly. Too much makeup in the daytime looks slutty, and slutty looks better at night, after all. So he told me.

“Please. Your boyfriend isn’t a saint, and you shouldn’t be either. You really think you’re gonna sit around all senior year, waiting for him to come home so you guys can go fuck some more in that weird little writing shed he has, and he won’t have gotten drunk and fucked some other girl? Come on. Maybe he’ll confess to you and I know you. You’ll say ‘that’s fine’ in that meek little voice you use around him and he’ll just keep cheating on you and it’ll destroy you. You’re not like me. It won’t be fine.”

“It’ll only be for a year. I can wait for a year, and senior year is going to be so important. And then I can join him at Yale.” This was the comforting blankety thought I drew around myself when I had worries that paced the lines Rachel was drawing for me.

“Oh yeah, good one, Mel. Like Dad’s gonna let you go to Yale, even if you do get in. Which you probably will, knowing you. You’re 16 –“

“Almost 17,” I reminded.

“Fine. Almost 17. You’re smart and pretty and those weirdos you run around with are good to you. They take care of you and you’re as normal as you’re ever going to be around them. Josh makes you weirder, if that’s possible. He’s kinda hot, I will give you that. Not surprising, he’s Teddy’s brother. If he’s half as good in bed as the Tedster, I say fuck his brains out until he graduates and then –” She drew a line across her long neck and whistled. “Sayonara, sweetheart. He’s holding you back.”

I told her I’d think about it, which is what I’d read in an old copy of Teen People to say when you didn’t feel up to shutting someone down to their face. I did take her advice to pretend I hadn’t missed the ACT at all, just meet him in the parking lot after 12:30 like we’d planned.

“It’s not like he’s gonna demand to see the score to believe you aced it,” she assured me. “Good move staying in the tracksuit, by the way. Makes it look like you had to be comfortable all morning. Just rub your hands through your hair a bit. Rough it up. Like you were fiddling with it all morning.”

It worked, sweet Jesus, it worked! At noon, Rachel slowly rolled past the school while I slouched in the passenger seat of the maroon Volvo, trying to keep my head beneath the line of the window. I didn’t doubt that Josh could tell it was me from one stray hair poking up, and the mini-pompadour just made it that much more visible.

With no dark blue BMW in sight, I bolted up the stairs to the gym and found my way into the girls’ locker room, the scene of many embarrassments, but not today. Today it was a sanctuary for 25 minutes, enough time for my heart rate to drop; the damn thing was about to burst through the blue velour of my hoodie.

At 12:32, I fished one of the No. 2 pencils (pre-chewed and its point worn down, for an extra note of authenticity) out of my backpack, tucked it behind my ear and headed towards the lot. Josh was impossible to miss, as the only teenager in a sea of anxious parents, as the only one pacing briskly in front of the bashed-up back door of the gym. I still see him now, hands shoved in the pockets of his rumpled khakis, dark blue t-shirt spelling out Y A L E in bright white so all the parents could be impressed. I thought he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t still true.

“Josh!” I called out, breaking him mid-stride, and in that moment he was precisely who I’d always wanted him to be. Caught unaware, he’d no time to school his features into the control he struggled with every day. Composed is a word he used frequently — at ease, in power, but also the (unspoken) artificiality of it all. A composition, after all, involves the mind consciously choosing this note to go here in this measure, that word to slot there between that noun and that verb, the nude’s arm to drift tantalizingly over her pudendum in an oil painting of the perfect golden ratio.

But Josh was not composed when he turned to me. Instead his lips pursed with the popped “o!” of surprise, his eyes behind his glasses widened and he threw open his arms for me.

(See, Rach? He loves me.)

“Melissa,” he breathed as I let him draw me close and nuzzle (and completely deflate) the pouf of hair on my crown. He smelled of Tide detergent and bar soap and Axe (it was 2002, in his defense). “How’d it go?”

“Fine, fine,” I breezed. “The morning flew right by.” (Technically true, I’d slept through a big chunk of it.) “But you were right. I didn’t need to take it. Can we get out of here now?” To my right, some of my classmates had started clomping down the stairs from the gym in various states of despondency. “I’m starving.” (Also technically true.)

En route to Atwater Village for lunch (with prom around the corner, it was strictly French onion soup for me), Josh peppered me with questions about the format of the test. Was it harder or easier than the SAT in the math parts? What did I think of the science section? How did the writing portions compare? Having run through three complete practice exams, I knew sufficient detail to fob him off.

But when he started to dig for specific questions, I begged indulgence. “I’m just so tired, and tired of thinking about it,” I whined, flipping down the sun visor to check on the state of my pallor. The blush made me look annoyingly alert. “Can we just leave it at, you were right and I was wrong?”

Josh snorted as we pulled up to the valet station. “What’s that again?” he teased, reaching in the center console to swap his prescription sunglasses for his dark-rimmed specs. “I’m what?”

“Right,” I grumbled, letting the valet hand me out of the car. “Just like always.”

About three weeks later, over our weekly Wednesday family dinner with Josh, the tangled truth unravelled, but not a bit like I’d expected. Since that Saturday morning in Rachel’s bathroom, I’d picked more and more at the scab that had formed where she’d sliced me with the truth: Josh was holding me back, figuratively and literally. I’d trained myself since October to not fight back, not to struggle when he wanted me passive, when he wanted me restrained. Yes, that’s a good word for it. What would it be like to be the goddess Melissa again, back on my plinth?

They were stupid dreams, I knew. Josh and I were going to be married after I finished college, and I was willing to trade my vanity to be his support. Of the two of us, he was the genius, after all. To be his wife would be the reward I craved so badly. To reflect his glory, and be reflected by it, too.

Mom was with us that evening, but not my sister. Though she’d dumped Mr. Hollywood by then, sugar daddies lay thick on the ground for someone like Rachel and she was juggling two along with her new assistant manager role at Abercrombie. If it had been Saturday night, it would have been Mr. Real Estate, a fortysomething Lebanese guy with a thick head of shiny black hair and a white G-Wagon. In his favor, Mr. RE was verifiably single and quite liked parading Rachel in and out of Granita and Nobu, the shorter her skirt the better. Mr. RE was there when she was mistaken for Mena Suvari stumbling out of the Ivy; Access Hollywood had to broadcast an apology the next day. Mena struck up a friendship with Rachel of the back of that incident.

But Mr. Wednesday Night was married, and Rachel was with him strictly for sex and money, she told me. “His wife came in to buy a sweatshirt for their daughter,” she confided in me one evening as she got ready for an evening out with him (really in: four hours at the Beverly Hills Hotel, usually in Marilyn Monroe’s favorite digs, Bungalow 1). “I knew who she was right away when she handed over her credit card. Also I’ve looked her up on the internet, like, a dozen times. She was really polite for such a rich bitch, and ugh, why couldn’t she just be shitty? It makes it too real when I have to meet the wives,” she pouted. “But the money’s too good, so, you know.”

I did not know. But I was fully conversant with not giving up something that I was fully aware was toxic and might destroy me even more easily than Rachel’s casual tartery.

It was Mom’s favorite, chicken cacciatore, on the menu that night. Josh and I usually didn’t fool around much after anything involving garlic, and I sometimes wonder if my parents agreed to serve it as an effective prophylactic. (The stink was mutual between Josh and me; we were still teenagers, after all.)

“So Josh,” my dad said, passing me the garlic bread. (In retrospect, my parents totally knew what was what.) “Big month coming up, Mel’s birthday next week, prom, graduation. How d’ya feel about life kinda… barrelling at you?”

“Good, Phil,” he said, heaping salad on my plate. I’d promised my mom I’d eat one piece of chicken, but there was zero way I was going to fit in my dress in two weeks’ time if I didn’t pay attention to what I was putting in my body. “I got my brother Max to help me find something really special for Melissa. Vintage.”

From across the table, my mom hefted two chicken thighs onto my plate, spooning what looked like a quart of tomato sauce on top. “Something to match that locket from Christmas, hm?”

Other than the scarab bracelet Maman had left me in her will, the Victorian locket Josh had given me the year before was my only piece of “real” jewelry. Max had scared that one up, too — he and his girlfriend Thuy spent their weekends scouring flea markets and junk shops around San Jose and Santa Cruz, looking for overlooked pieces to polish up and sell on Ebay. I wore the necklace most days, and that day was no exception. In only five months, its weight had become familiar; in the very last days I had with Josh, it came to feel like a millstone.

“That would be giving it away!” Josh laughed, running his hand beneath the hem of my skirt under the table. My breath caught as his fingers grazed my bare skin, a reminder of what I wanted from him, when he’d give it to me the way I liked. “But yeah. A lot to do. And the final issue of magazine needs to be put to bed in two weeks. That reminds me, Melissa’s going to need to stay late at school a couple days that week. It’s all hands on deck. Hope that’s okay with you, Mr. — I mean, Phil.”

“Sorry, Daddy, I meant to mention it,” I mumbled through a bite of green pepper.

“Mr. Lasko’s ordering pizza every night, it’s not like we’re going to starve, either,” Josh added. I liked Mr. Lasko, our faculty advisor, but Josh didn’t like how he looked at me so I tried to keep my distance. Josh had only approved me taking over as editor next year because Dr. Beebe — Dr. Jillian Beebe — would be rotating into Mr. Lasko’s role.

My dad pointed his fork at Josh, a move I’d see him use on Alex and Julian both in years to come, as if to say: you know you still have to come through me to get to her, right? Capisce? Good. “Fine, but if you’re going to be later than 9, call me. And while we’re here, there’s the small matter of prom. Or really after prom. Just get her home by breakfast, we have to visit her grandfather in the afternoon.”

“Dad!” I cringed, twisting hard one of the blue and fuschia paisley napkins Aunt Kathleen had gifted us at Christmas. Hideous things, but my mom never worried about stains showing on them, which was a plus.

Reaching across the table to bestow a condescending pat on one of my fists, my mom tutted at me. “Baby, we’re realists. You two are committed and safe, that’s all we care about. Josh, after parties are fine as long as at least one of you isn’t drinking. Preferably both of you aren’t drinking.”

I glanced over to Josh, who was uncommonly quiet. A year of dinners together had brought him close into the family fold, while I felt like I’d completely disappeared inside it. He’d become the son my dad probably wanted — clever and quippy, literate and measured. And dependable. Josh’s very dependability put both my parents at ease: he’ll protect our baby.

“I thought Melissa and I would drive up PCH for a couple of hours, watch the sun rise at Mussel Shoals.” Beside me, Josh blushed — he blushed! There were times like these, times so exquisitely normal between us, full of the awkward bumping along of teenage love (or whatever it was) that I forgot for a while how trapped I felt with him. “No alcohol, I promise you both.”

I swear my dad shot him goo-goo eyes over the chicken and when Josh reached for the pepper shaker, my mom placed it in his grasp with a whispered “thank you.”

“So, Melissa,” Josh asked brightly, mopping up what was left of the garlicky sauce with a morsel of garlic bread. “Shouldn’t you have had your ACT scores by now?”

Though I froze mid-bite of spinach salad, it was not a loaded question. When I’d made it clear I didn’t want to talk about the exam, he’d let it go. I was right, it was a waste of your time, he’d said while I worked to catch up on the short story I owed him. Sorry, I owed the magazine the story for spring publication. It wouldn’t do for the incoming editor to not have ready a minor tour de force, proof that I belonged where Josh would place me.

Just because I was Josh’s girl didn’t mean I was his natural successor at the magazine, and he’d played me off Chris Echols all year. Chris was good, but I knew I was better and as a girl, I knew I had to play even harder. I’d kneecapped Chris at a Valentine’s Day “Down with Love” open mic we’d hosted at The Coffee Bean with the kind of cutthroat ruthlessness I rarely indulged in. But Josh had wanted to show me off, like some sort of teenage literary pitbull, and I’d obliged with a withering, vituperative bit of doggerel about the utter uselessness of boys. When the audience crowned me (literally, there was a 99 Cent Store crown to put on) Anti-Cupid 2002, Chris told me that was it, he wasn’t fighting anymore. (What nerds we all were!)

See? It feels better when you need to fight for it. It was a phrase Josh liked to use in many different contexts.

“ACT?” my dad chuckled, dodging my mom’s attempt to bar him from the salt shaker. “Oh Mel. Don’t tell me you didn’t tell him.”

Josh stopped mid-bite and gulped hard. In profile, this close, his jaw flexed and those soft lips parted as if to speak some word, but nothing came out. Instead, his hand moved under my skirt again, this time to stroke me between my thighs. I choked when he worked his forefinger under the elastic of my underwear but fumbled it a bit into a cough.

“I just…,” I sputtered as his finger crept closer and closer towards where he liked me to beg him to enter, and turned to face him. “I didn’t take it. I woke up late and I… was so embarrassed, and I didn’t want to tell you because I thought you’d think less of me.”

While true, it was the only part of the truth I could imagine speaking before my parents. The subterfuge at the gym came from bitter experience. As we inched closer to graduation, and Josh’s eventual release from “bourgeois Burbank” without me, he’d become more erratic, less in control of the roiling fury he subjected me to when the truth I showed him wasn’t one he fancied.

In March, right after we’d celebrated our first (and only) anniversary with dinner at the Smoke House with our parents, I’d crossed a line I didn’t even know existed. Prof. Brookes had asked me if I was really thinking about Brown still when Yale was a strong possibility for me. I’m certain it was said just to goad my dad into a little cross-college rivalry over our steaks, nothing more, but I said that I would go wherever was best for me, and that might not be Yale or Brown.

“Very politic answer, Melissa,” Prof. Brookes had replied, and the other grownups concurred while I preened a little. Josh said nothing, but I’d promised him that I’d take seriously a shot at joining him at Yale, and that my dad and I would be in New Haven in October on my college tour. There wasn’t much more I could do — ultimately, Mom and Dad would pay tuition, and I knew if I got into Brown, I had no choice in the matter.

The following afternoon, as I struggled in Josh’s writing shed with an assignment on the Arrhenius equation for chem class, he broke his silence. I remember not wanting very much to join him that day, but he’d wheedled and whined on the walk home from school about much he loved me, and soon there wouldn’t be time at all to share.

We still did share so much — it wasn’t always, everywhere, a top-down relationship. He’d known little about art history until he met me, and I delighted in dragging him around the Getty Museum on the weekends, teaching him his Monets and his Manets, his Rubenses and his Rembrandts. He’d hunch his long back over to peer at hair-fine brushstrokes, run his broad hand over my back as I discussed the evolution of history painting in the Enlightenment, slouch next to me on one of the long, low couches to stare at a masterpiece of chiaroscuro. He was so, so beautiful then, his dark hair flopping to one side, his violet eyes taking the whole world in for processing into that sumptuous prose that flowed so fluidly from mind to page.

I was proud of him. I loved him. He told me he loved me, and perhaps he did, or at least some version of me, what I might be like if I’d only behave.

I felt him before I saw him, felt his body behind mine before he reached around my back. With a brisk flick of his wrist, he snatched the gnawed-on pencil from my hand and grabbed me by the forearm, turning me forcefully to face him. His nostrils flared, his pupils dilated.

“You’re not taking this seriously,” he growled.

“Chem class?” I ventured faintly, though I knew it must be some other transgression. “I’m getting an A and my teacher thinks I’ve got a decent shot at a 5 on the AP.” (I did, in the end.)

“Being together after you graduate, you idiot,” he snapped.

With a sharp yank, he pulled me away from the desk and onto the futon, where I landed gracelessly with a thud. It wasn’t the first time he’d thrown me around, but I nearly always felt safe. It was just horsing around, him fake-chasing me around while I giggled, him grabbing me by the waist while I squealed in delight before he threw me on the bed to hover over me and tell me he was going to ravish my hungry body. Sometimes, it felt deliciously naughty. Sometimes, the chittering buzz of my consciousness, the incessant list-making and box-ticking and knuckle-gnawing worry of being alive and being me, faded in intensity when I let him direct it all. I was no thought, only the hot throb of my lust for him.

But this felt decidedly unsexy, to me at least. Josh loomed over me, fists balled at his sides, lightly panting, but not from exertion. “Look at you. What are you wearing? Do you know what you do to me when you look like this?”

The turn of the 21st century was not a good time for teenage fashion. Though I tried to stay in line with Josh’s preferences for my wardrobe (skirts most days, no jeans in the evenings, no purple, black for date nights), there was something I couldn’t resist about a real fanny-scraper of a skirt, as Amanda would later put it. I had the legs for a pelmet skirt, and even the very shortest ones were at least mid-thigh on me, one of the greatest saving graces of being vertically challenged.

This one was by far my favorite, and even Josh hadn’t cocked an eyebrow at its length, or lack thereof: a blue and green plaid run through with a yellow stripe, pleated in the back. I’d worn it at Halloween for our couple costume — Josh was a priest (presaging Fleabag‘s Hot Priest by well over a decade) and I’d gone as a Catholic schoolgirl in that skirt, some kneehighs and a baggy blue sweater. It was to send up our image as being squeaky clean, and we’d won third prize that evening. Quite a coup for two nerdlings, and I’d kept the skirt in rotation.

On that March evening, however, I’d paired it with a slightly cropped, too-tight (in retrospect) navy blue tee and a pair of slides. Thinking back, I probably looked like a PornHub thumbnail for the “Teen” category, especially given the way that I’d tumbled down on the futon, with my skirt rucked over my rear end, exposing the plain black briefs I preferred with the shortest skirts (less chance of complete embarrassment). I reached behind my back to pull down the skirt for a belated semblance of dignity, but Josh reached for my wrist again, squeezing hard, hard enough that I yelped in pain.

“Be quiet,” he hissed. “Not another word from you.”

“But –“

“I mean it.” He hadn’t let go of my wrist while he slipped beside me on the futon, just tugged me up and closer to him so that our noses nearly touched. “When I want you to speak, I’ll let you know. Sometimes my little Scheherazade should have nothing to say. Got it?”

My mouth opened to agree, but the hard glint in his eye reminded me: do what he says. I gulped for air once and nodded slowly. In years to come with Julian, I learned how to maneuver out of these tricky situations, where the threat of violence fizzed like static on a TV screen, a screen you worried might show you some horror if you looked close enough. But I was a child, playing a dangerous game with another child who was old enough to know his power to wound, but not old enough to know how deep.

A hard smile spread over Josh’s full lips and he smoothed my hair with his free hand. “Good. Now I’m going to tell you some things, and you’re going to tell me you understand. Okay?” The jagged edge to his voice had been rubbed away, and I wanted to believe the storm was passing, if not passed. Perhaps being quiet and still had been enough — oftentimes it was — so I bobbed my head twice.

“Now, listen to me. I love you, and I don’t want to be apart from you. Not even a day. You keep me from running off the rails, it’s like… you quiet my mind. Like my mind was running 100 miles per hour from the very first memory I have, and I could never get it to slow down.”

Outside, I heard the revving buzz of next door’s landscaper trimming the hedge that ran next to the shed. Knowing there was someone mere yards away — even if that someone didn’t know of the sad little scene in this small wooden cabin — comforted me. Look for a helper when you need one, baby, my dad’s voice said from the vault of memory. You’ll know when you need one.

Josh’s grip loosened slightly, but he did not drop my wrist, just brought it down for my hand to rest on his chest. “I’d seen you around, of course. Seen you at a couple of the magazine workshops, read the stuff you submitted. It wasn’t very good, at least to begin with, but you know that already.”

Though my jaw clenched in resentment, I forced my mouth into a gentle “you got me” grin. My freshman stories and poems weren’t great art for the ages, but they certainly weren’t trash. In the years that followed my bust up with Josh, I took some grim satisfaction in knowing that I’d won the Senior Poetry Prize with twenty-four lines of blank verse that he’d personally rejected for publication for being “overworked” and “meaningless.”

“And then something changed in you. Not just how you look. I saw it in that story you submitted and I realized: this is the girl. This is the girl who will slow down the whizzing hands on your broken clock enough for you to write. Do you understand?”

I hesitated before responding — was I supposed to speak? “Yes, I understand.” I didn’t really, but I wanted this to be over.

“You are what helped me make the leap last year from scribbling — talented scribbling, I know — to actual writing. The Cape Cod essay you nudged me into writing — I wouldn’t have won that prize. Wouldn’t have got that scholarship. You said something good could come out of ‘Summer Green,’ and you were right.

“And now?” Josh drew a long, slightly hitched breath through his nose. “I told my dad I wanted to defer a year, wait for you to graduate so we can go together. He said to get real. But I am being real!” The slam of his fist on the futon pad was dampened by the thick batting. “You need me as much as I need you, right? Right?“

Glancing down, I watched as his chest heaved beneath his thin grey sweater. “Yes, Josh. You’re right,” I said dully. “I need you.”

Josh’s hand rubbed my bare knee, slowly moving further up my leg with each stroke. Only two days before, I’d greedily welcomed this precise touch, but now there was a menace to it. Now it was a threat, and not a promise, not at all.

His fingers paused at the lace edge of my underwear. “Say it like you mean it.”

“Of course I mean it!” I snapped, slapping him away before any thought of being the dutiful girlfriend snaked through me.

He pulled back from me sharply, his violet eyes widening so, so slightly behind his glasses. “What did you say?” he hissed.

There was no escape, not now. The whine of the landscaper’s strimmer had moved on from the greenery closest the shed. Josh’s mom and dad were both at work; the hum of the electric heater and The Cooper Temple Clause clanging from the stereo would’ve rendered our conversation a muffled mess anyway. They’re good kids, our parents had agreed. We trust them not to be stupid.

“I didn’t mean that, I swear,” I pleaded. “I love you. I don’t know why I said it like that.”

“Not good enough.” Josh folded his arms over his chest, cocked his head to one side, pushed up the glasses that had slid to the end of his nose. “I won’t accept this from you.”

“Please,” I begged. More than his anger, I feared disappointing him. Disappointing him enough that he’d leave me. And him leaving me was as terrifying as it was something I desperately craved. “I’m just tired, Josh. Drama club. ACT prep. You understand what it’s like, trying to get in somewhere amazing.”

“I’ve had enough of this. All these things you’re doing without me. Drama club. The fucking ACT,” he spat at me. “That’s it.”

“What’s it?” I asked, though my question was buried in the sludge of guitars from speakers.

With a crooked grin, Josh shook his head. “I told you a long time ago, I knew you. I know what your problem is. There’s never been any consequences when you misbehave, have there?”

I dropped my gaze to my lap, where I’d been wringing my hands, and pulled at the hem of my skirt. “My parents tell me no. I got sent to my room for fighting with Rachel. I got grounded once.” (That was for when Sean’s dad came out to the garage one December evening to find his son had found the key to the beer fridge and was currently eking out one beer for three inquisitive and slightly disgusted teenage palates.)

“You don’t even know what you need. I know what you need.”

Josh was many things then — a brilliant writer, a giver of luscious kisses, a teenage dinnertime raconteur, a charmer of adults, a slippery lover who left me wanting more while giving me too-too much — but he was not an accomplished athlete. There’s a chapter in Darker Stars, the book Cora and Fenn read for Mary Mackinnon’s book club the other year, where the teenage son of the protagonist tries out for the wrestling team his freshman year. But the kid finds out the hard way that just because he regularly bested his older brother in physical fights, didn’t mean he actually had any skill at the sport.

His humiliation in that gymnasium scene rang true because it was true. Just because Josh beat the shit out of his brother Teddy, as I came to learn, on the regular didn’t mean he could focus his mind to play by the rules on the mat. Coach Figueroa made that clear after Josh slipped up in his third scholastic meet and gave an opposing player a black eye, the desire to win at all costs overtaking him.

But there was still a grace in Josh’s movements, and he’d tipped me at the waist over his knee before I had time to protest. My arms dangled awkwardly down to the floor, fingertips brushing against the blue and cream and grey faux-Persian rug his mom had bought him from Costco. The geometric florals and blocky tendrils of the streams of ferns are burnt into my memory as a crystalline vision.

With one forearm pressing on my back, he pulled down my briefs. The rush of hot air from the nearby heater flicked across my nakedness; I felt the peach fuzz there stand to attention. I knew what was to come, but this seemed to be happening to someone else, some other Melissa. It was inconceivable that anyone would cause me violence; even Rachel never did more than pinch me hard, once or twice. (She was far more clever — she got inside my head, where she remains to this day, reminding me of my failures.)

“This is what you need,” he ground out as the first slap connected with my tender skin.

I was so shocked I didn’t scream. Not at first. Not until the third blow did I make a noise, a low, keening, animal groan. In between each slap, Josh rubbed where his palm had hit, as if to warm up the pulsating skin even more, before blowing on the flesh. The slice of his cool breath did not soothe me, only made me more aware of the agony that throbbed where it passed over me.

“Be quiet,” he growled when I started pleading for him to stop, when I started promising that I’d behave. “You need to know there are consequences for being bad.”

It was on the sixth blow that I stepped outside of myself. Depersonalization, my therapist calls it, very normal in trauma. I watched the scene, much as I peer through the keyholes of the tiny rooms of my memory now. Little Melissa’s face is puffy, a mottled pink; tears drop from between her eyelids onto a cheap blue and cream rug. She doesn’t care, though, there’s not much left to her dignity with her black underwear pulled down, clinging cockeyed to her thighs. Her bottom is scarlet and throbbing beneath the hand of her beloved, a young man so blinded by his struggle to discipline his wild, bad self that he must discipline another.

He stopped on ten. My body tensed for yet one more blow, but none came. Neither one of us spoke; the CD had ended on the ninth blow, as the guitars faded into synthesized strings and keys in a minor key. I took the tenth to the whirr of the heater.

I didn’t dare move, as thought-Melissa slipped back into her body. Beneath my belly, extended over his lap, I felt his erection and would have gagged had my fear not stopped my throat up tight. Had I wanted to speak, I couldn’t have.

Josh stroked the back of my head and cooed. “Please don’t cry. Please. I just… I’ve wanted to do this for so long. For your own sake. I thought it would help you. If you knew. If you knew there were consequences. I’m only doing this to help you. It helped you, right?” His voice cracked at the end. It was so pathetic.

“Yes, Josh.” My own voice was timid and shrunken. “It helped.” I wanted desperately off his lap and out of the shed, and submission was the skeleton key to freedom.

One of his fingers started to trace a figure on my bottom, and I winced in agony. Though his first strike had been an open-handed retort to my supposed intransigence, it was a pale shadow of that tenth, final wallop.

“Oh, you must hurt,” he noted, as if he’d figured out some grand mystery. “It’s pretty red down there. I’ve read that it will probably sting for a while, but ice packs can help. Do you want me to help you pull your panties up?”

I didn’t ask where he’d read that, why he’d read that. And I’ve never been able to forget the humiliation of that very first time I lay across his lap, recovering from his violence, thinking on how I knew within every single proton and neutron and electron in my aching body that this would not be the only time I would know this pain.

But there was no consequence for oversleeping and skipping the exam besides my embarrassment. Josh merely shrugged at the news over our family dinner, pushed another morsel of tomatoey chicken in his mouth and discreetly burped hot garlic into his napkin. (I smelt it, but never would have mentioned it.) “Told you it was a waste of your time,” he chortled. “Serves you right.”

“Josh!” My mom had been passing the pecorino romano to him but quickly pulled it back.

“Sorry, Trish. That came out wrong.” Josh reached across the table and gestured for her to join hands with him. “It’s only because I’m jealous of all the time she got to spend with those stupid prep books instead of me.”

“He’s right,” I piped up. “We just don’t have a lot of time left.”

Taking Josh’s hand, Mom exchanged a look with my dad. “Were we this bad when we were young?”

“Pretty bad.” Dad grabbed another piece of bread from the basket. “Although we were far more mature. How old are you now, Josh?”

“I turned 18 in March.”

“Oh yes,” my mom laughed, patting Josh’s hand. “We were all of 19, Phil. Far more grown up.”

***

I’d never heard another word from Josh about my bungling of the ACT, though I remained on guard for the other shoe — or palm, really — to drop. Not a taunt or even a sympathetic “you could have told me.” It took 20 years for Josh to bring me back to that toxic spring, to when he told me that I was his completely, his possession, his girl, no turning back. I’d signed up for all of who he was, he reminded me. And he was a man who knew that a brilliant but high-strung woman needed a strong man to keep her grounded, keep her in line.

Bullshit. This is 2021 now, not 2002, I thought. I’m done with being kept in line by Josh, or any man.

“Do you blame me for not telling you about things?” I hissed back to Josh over the phone that January evening. “You scared me. But you don’t scare me now.” Complete nonsense, of course, but it sounded great when I said it, to me at least.

“Scared you?” Josh sounded genuinely perplexed. “I loved you.”

“Yeah, right,” I snorted. “Just keep telling yourself that. We’re done.” I took a long swig directly from the bottle of cava.

“Wait! Melissa, please. Please. Just talk to me a bit longer. I want…” His voice trailed off, followed by a muffled shout of “Can you keep Claudia quiet, Sara? I’m on the phone.”

“I don’t care what you want,” I snapped back. A complete lie. I wanted to know exactly what he wanted so I could slap his face with it.

“You know you’re in every one of my books.” His words tumbled out like jacks from a pouch. “Some of you in every one. I can’t do my next one without you. When I wrote First Flush, you were so recent in my existence, you still pulsed through every part of me. And every year that’s gone by, you’ve faded further and further away. I can’t inhabit Wrigley Short again without you.”

“Oh.” The pride of being his muse battled with my scorn for him.

“Listen to me. Can you listen to me one moment? Claudia! BE QUIET!”

There’s nothing quite like listening to exasperated parents to keep the wheel of my birth control dispenser pack clicking one pill forward.

“Oh, do go on,” I drawled. “You sound like you have complete control over the females in your household.”

“I’ll ignore that, because I need something from you. I’ll make sure no one asks you again about ‘Summer Green’ if you help me with this book. No more letters. No lawsuit. You can burn the whole stack of them for all I care, post them on the internet, whatever. Just please. Melissa.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“A credit. I’ll write a whole fucking foreward about how you made me into the writer I am today. We can use your name if you want. I’ll get you an agent. I’ll get you hooked up with an editor who’s serious this time, not like that idiot at Penguin who got fixated on that ex-boyfriend of yours.” (I knew he’d been behind that Penguin overture!)

“That ex-boyfriend is now my husband, and he’s not the quiet and unassuming type, Josh. He knows what you did to me. He’d never agree to this.” I could imagine Alex stomping up and down the living room, practically treading ruts into the floorboards, ranting about how could I ever let a monster like Josh back into my life. (“Jules is one thing, but at least he never laid a fucking hand on you! I’ll tear that weaseling bawbag’s todger straight off if I ever, ever get within 100 feet of him! ” was one of the more temperate things Al had said the afternoon I started telling him about my time with Joshua K. Brookes.)

“Glad to hear you still take counsel from your husband. Guess something I taught you stuck.” I heard the acid in his tone. “But he doesn’t need to know. I know you’re as good at hiding things as telling things, Scheherazade. Twenty years and you’ve never said a word about us, not that we did anything wrong, per se. We were just… curious kids, messing around with power. This can be just another thing between us.”

“Pay me,” I blurted. Where the fuck had that come from?

“Fine. I’ll give you a percentage. Who handles your business affairs?” Josh’s tone slipped easily into a mercantile coolness.

“I… I haven’t needed a business lawyer in this country in a while,” I stumbled. “Julian took care of everything. And I haven’t agreed to help you.”

“Get your ex to recommend someone, and let’s talk some more, Melissa. I think I can really help you, almost as much as you can help me. I need you. I think you’ve always known that.”

An echo of a shout behind him, a thin, reedy tone that reminded me of Lucy: Daddy! Mommy said I can’t watch Elinor Wonders Why! What would it be like to be Josh Brookes’ daughter? His wife? Do they get the dashing or the dastardly Daddy?

“I’ll think about it.” I took another swig from the bottle.

“Good girl,” he whispered, and the words slithered through me as they always did.

As they always would.