CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
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2022
Stephen Delaroux being on his deathbed really helped put things into perspective.
For one, it reminded me of how abhorrently selfish of a creature I was for being so preoccupied with myself, my relationship woes, and my personal problems when a close family friend was dying. Even as the days slipped away into memories and March warmed up my weary bones, which should help me feel better, there was no evidence pointing towards a definite recovery—either for Stephen or for myself, but the damage done to both our hearts was vastly different. Though I could argue my heartstrings had been so strained they'd ruptured and suffered potentially permanent danger, I could still go on with my life and appear normal, albeit 'melancholic', according to my parents.
Stephen hadn't lucked out that way.
Second, I spent some time living under the illusion that I could somehow change my perception of reality if I just made the conscious effort to force myself into believing my parents and my best friends. In all honesty, why I had even considered giving them a chance to prove to be right and what had prompted such an impulsive decision out of someone who was as obsessive and prone to rumination as myself, yet there I was.
For a while, at least.
It was a difficult and awkward position to find myself in, to put it mildly.
I was being confronted with two conflicting versions of reality and wasn't sure which of them was the true one—or if there even was a true one. Both of them could easily be false, influenced by whatever the people responsible for them believed and wanted me to believe, and I couldn't help but feel used. I couldn't help but feel like I was being mindlessly tossed from side to side like a tennis ball, requiring other people to tell me how to feel, what to think, what to believe, who to trust, who had been manipulating me all along, because I simply wasn't capable of completing such complicated cognitive tasks on my own.
It couldn't have all been a lie. Some of it, no matter how small, had to have been real, and it had felt real within the depths of my soul. It had always been real to me and from me—I'd been genuine all along, loving Chase like I'd been born to do that one thing right, no matter how idiotic it sounded. I knew it sounded pathetic, like I would never amount to anything if I couldn't have him, if I couldn't love him, if I couldn't believe he loved me, but how was I supposed to reframe and reshape everything I'd believed in for nearly four years in the blink of an eye? Why was I expected to do it with ease, too?
The ruminative, repetitive state I'd locked myself in was exhausting even for myself, the only person who would ever be permanently stuck with my own thoughts, and part of me wanted to find someone else to talk to. However, there was no one out there who would listen how I wanted them to, and I couldn't risk getting someone else involved.
Opening up to the people I had spoken to so far had been the greatest gamble of my life, far more dangerous than pursuing Chase and trapping him in a relationship. I had broken his trust by shattering the vow of silence, risking everything we'd built together, risking his career and reputation, and there was a semblance of comfort in knowing I'd be protected regardless, but it didn't mean I was oblivious to what would happen to him if the truth were to ever come out.
There were sprinkles of it all over my senior project, the one thing I'd found I could devote my heart to when I couldn't do it with and to him, and the words had spilled out of my fingers onto a document before I could halt it. He would read it and recognize himself, recognize us in those words, but I had to present something, and I could never allow myself to conclude my college career without being genuine and faithful to myself. I wasn't great at faking my emotions, even with all the suppression they'd been a target of these past few years, and it would be obvious I wouldn't be speaking from my heart if I chose to pretend nothing had happened.
So, in the morning I typed the last words of my screenplay for a short film I had yet to title and prayed would be enough to get me out of this place as unscathed as possible, I felt numb. The tingling sensation in my extremities was dwindling as I got warmer and slowly convinced myself I deserved to recover from something that went far beyond a simple broken heart, but it was much easier to say that in theory. In practice, the mental dissension was eating me alive.
It seemed so unnatural to even fathom that someone you trusted unconditionally would ever play such an elaborate ruse. They would get inside your head, under your skin, between your bones, bend you at their will, make you question every waking moment, every thought, every memory, every feeling, and steal away little pieces of you, so microscopic at first you didn't even notice until it was too late. That was option number one.
One of the most frustrating parts of my present dilemma was my inability to remember all the ways Chase had hurt me—my mind, my emotions, my spirit, even my perception of reality—just because I was so desperate to hold on to the parts of him that had loved me. In true selfish nature, it made more sense—at least it did so in my mind—to trust option number two, the one where the relationship had simply soured like so many others did, and I'd been the evil manipulator all along, corrupting the reputable man. However, with each passing day, the fog grew clearer on good days and I realized I wasn't thinking that way out of selfishness.
I'd been fooled. I'd been lied to. Even my own brain had attempted to warn me countless times, and I'd refused to listen.
As I stared at my unblinking reflection in the mirror—ghastly pale, with sunken cheeks and dark bruises under my eyes—I forced myself to remember—and, most importantly, to believe—that I was facing the aftermath of the past three and a half years, not just the breakup. It was more than that. It was the aftermath of losing myself along the way, losing my girlhood, no matter how willing I'd been to give it up, and not knowing how to get any of it back.
He'd called me his so many times, and I'd reveled in it, in the feeling of belonging somewhere, to someone, and it was wrecking me from the inside out to have to think about that being the issue. If he had done all of that just because he knew I was living for those fleeting, infrequent moments of absolute devotion and adoration and gave me just enough attention to keep me locked up, how was I supposed to live with that? How in the world would anyone be okay with coming to terms with that? I'd longed to be chosen and, when he chose me, I'd gladly left everything behind to follow him wherever he'd go, under the impression he'd want me by his side.
He hadn't wanted me there. He might never have wanted me there after I stopped being malleable into the person he wanted me to be at any given moment, in spite of all my biggest efforts to learn how to switch between different personas at the snap of a finger. I could only lose what once had been mine and now I wasn't so certain I'd ever had an opportunity to call him that.
I'd been so proud of having been chosen by someone who could have chosen virtually anyone else, after having been overlooked my whole life, and he'd made me feel special. He'd made me feel like I mattered, and then he'd ruined me simply because he wanted to. Simply because he could. I'd never worn the crown or held as much power as I thought I had; it was all him.
I wasn't sure where that left me. I'd been protecting him from the start, but now that there were seeds of doubt blossoming all around me, it was hard to believe he'd do the same for me if we were discovered or if someone chose to look deeper into my screenplay. Could I trust him to let my name stay clean, or would I forever live in fear of being painted as the criminal, as the villain who had been out for blood all along? Only nineteen and so conniving . . .
My stomach grumbled like a thunderstorm just as I finished emailing my screenplay to my father, purely out of habit, as I didn't have it in me to mail it to Chase just yet—Chase, who had once been the first and only person to read anything I wrote. I was long overdue for a snack, preferably something warm and sugary, but Sarah had stopped by for a quick visit, and she was in the kitchen with Ingrid and Savannah, so I'm reluctant to show my face.
This wouldn't be an issue to a normal person who felt completely normal emotions regarding their friends. Normal people didn't spend hours, even days worrying about keeping a huge part of their life a secret from their best friends or pathologically mulling over everything they'd said to or did around them. They didn't feel the need to constantly think before they opened their mouths or breathed, and they wouldn't reassess all of it to justify their thoughts about being hated. Normal people didn't push their best friends away for the sake of a mercurial man that had once felt like the most secure, steady person in their lives.
No matter how badly they had hurt me, I hadn't been a saint. I'd been an awful person, not just by lying to them and isolating myself because I believed they were out to get me and knew a lot more about my secrets than they actually did. Being so proud of being chosen by Chase over them had influenced every single interaction I'd had with them since I wove myself into that relationship; he'd had me convinced they were manipulating me, gaslighting me, and a small part of me had fought back. They were concerned—had been from day one, even when it was just me and Ingrid in that bathroom, engulfed in cigarette smoke—and, even if they weren't going about it perfectly and had said and done questionable things, manipulation and gaslighting were heavier than that. It was a jump he hadn't needed to make, but he'd still crossed that bridge to hammer those ideas on the walls of my brain.
It hadn't been just him. It took two people to play that game, and I'd been a willing participant, after all. In spite of my doubts and occasional reluctance to keep playing the chess game we'd been attempting to play for so long—the game he'd taught me how to play, even—I'd still sat across from him and chose my own moves. Where did that leave me? Grandmaster or not, mastermind behind a devilish plan to ruin my life or not, Chase hadn't done any of it on his own, and I wasn't completely innocent.
The girls were all in the kitchen still, as expected, and they didn't notice me at first. Instead of taking it as a reminder of how insignificant my presence was and how easy it would be for everyone if I spent even more time alone in my room, it mirrored how second nature it was for me to slip into the background and not be noticed by other people whenever I had to sneak around to meet Chase.
I wasn't sure whether his neighbors had ever seen me around with how careful I'd been, waiting around corners and swiftly moving in the dark, not to mention how far I'd parked my car to avoid being spotted near the apartment.
It hadn't even been just the apartment, had it? I'd had to drive there after nights of drinking, either at my loft, at my apartment, or at my parents' house, simply because he'd asked me to and knew I would do it. I'd done it to make up for ditching him for my family or for my friends, terrified beyond belief I'd lose him if I refused; I'd lost him anyway, and he'd never had the decency to pick me up, get me a cab or an Uber, or to even ask if I'd made it okay afterward. When I'd nearly gotten hypothermia at the cabin, he had only thought about the distant possibility of having picked me up after I'd arrived at the front door, chilled to the bone.
I'd had the nerve to feel thankful he had opened the door. I'd had the nerve to feel grateful for the minimum level of human decency. That spoke volumes, both about the little consideration he'd always had for me and the little self-respect residing within me.
"Hey, Penn!" Sarah chirped. "We're baking."
"So I've noticed," I retorted.
Seeing her outside of an academic context still felt a bit odd, as that was technically how I'd first met her, and I'd never forgotten her words. I'd been so ready to fight her over the vile things she'd said about Chase, only for her to end up being proved right, and it just left me wondering how she'd known all along. She'd been the first person in my life to say something that negative about him, with everyone else waxing poetic about him (Ingrid to a lesser extent, but I digressed), and the bitter taste in my mouth was taking my mind places I didn't want it to.
For a brief moment, I almost thought of a scenario where she'd been in my shoes. Not with Chase, though, as he'd struggled to balance life with me in it with everything else going on in his life, and he could never include someone else; besides, Sarah was a lot more self-assured and confident in herself than I could ever aspire to be. She would've seen through the charming sweet talk from the start, and she wasn't pathologically conditioned to shatter herself to be liked by the only person who had ever chosen her.
Maybe she was just smarter. Maybe she had just read between the lines, paid attention to the way he treated other people; looking back on it, I could see where she'd been coming from. Somewhat, at least. He'd never been particularly kind during lectures, hiding mean remarks behind supposed snark we saw as dry, charming humor to make himself look more relatable and palatable to us fellow kids.
I couldn't ask her about it directly without outing myself and Chase, but I could only hope she hadn't ever found herself in something like this. If she had, it comforted me to know she'd been able to get out and identify the warning signs around other people, even if I'd been furious about her trying to act like she knew the slightest thing about me and him.
Everything had been so perfect until it wasn't.
So, before I and my stupid big mouth could ruin something else, I pulled Ingrid and Savannah aside for what I hoped wouldn't be too awkward of a conversation. With graduation looming in the horizon, just less than two months away, and Stephen being in the hospital, I feared I was swiftly running out of time to do everything I needed to do.
And yet, I was still in such a rush to graduate, to leave this place and the painful memories behind. It was no wonder no one ever wanted to stick around with how painfully contradictory I was.
I turned to Ingrid, finally looking at her. With that platinum hair of hers and bone structure so sharp she could slice a diamond in half, she was the most flawless person I'd ever set my eyes on, and it pained me to look at her. She was so perfect, but it was the kind of beauty that felt somewhat threatening, like either of us would shatter into a million pieces the longer we stared at each other. I'd been so horrible the past three and a half years that I feared the cracks I'd left in her had done a real number on her and our friendship.
Savannah, too. She'd been wearing her hair in natural braids a lot more frequently, and she had mellowed out, grown into a kinder, but more assertive version of the girl I'd met during the first week of freshman orientation. She had always been kind, with her doe-like dark eyes and gente smile, but the years had made her grow more comfortable with that side of herself. Even when she thought she looked bad, she didn't; her dark skin was always immaculate and her sense of style rivaled that of people in the fashion industry, even when she dressed down. She worked harder than anyone I knew, and I'd still been so ready to ruin all her efforts purely for self-serving reasons when I should have helped her.
"You look like you're about to burst into tears," Savannah commented, cupping a steaming mug of hot chocolate between her hands. "Did something happen?"
When I raised a hand to touch my cheeks, I did indeed feel those traitor tears marking the corners of my eyes. Why, I wasn't fully certain. "No. I just needed to talk to the two of you in private."
"Well, we're here," Ingrid said, unable to hide the twinge of venom coating her words. Maybe she hadn't tried to conceal it at all; even though they'd been trying to help me ever since that staged intervention, they had yet to forget how needlessly antagonizing I'd been to them, but I hadn't expected them to. I couldn't go through life hurting people left and right and assume they'd be okay with it and be willing to welcome me back with open arms as soon as I started getting my shit together again. "What's up?"
I took a deep breath, slumped on the couch, and tucked my freezing hands between my knees. I even found myself missing the versions of them that incessantly pried into my personal life, reading my mind when I hadn't wanted them to; if they were present now, I wouldn't have to come up with the words myself.
"So, I just finished writing my senior project," I began. That information was a lot more relevant to Savannah than to Ingrid and, as expected, she winced almost imperceptibly. "I haven't mailed it to . . . him yet, but I sent it to my father so he can proofread it before it's fully ready to be printed and sent out. If you guys want to read it too . . ." Their facial expressions didn't soften, but I saw no opposition to my proposal either, which was an improvement from the hypothetical scenario I'd come up with. "I know we still have our finals to go, but it just made me think about how little time we have left of college. It feels like it went by in a blur."
"Not really," Ingrid argued. "I went into burnout halfway through sophomore year and it feels like I'm still stuck in that mindset a little bit."
"Those dang film students and their easy majors," Savannah joked. Ingrid kicked her in the calf. For a moment, we were just girls in their early twenties, untouched by evil men and their entitlement, but that feeling didn't last.
However, neither would the suffering and the heartache. For that to pass, there had to be forgiveness—both coming from them and from me. We'd have to forgive each other, but, most of all, I'd also have to forgive myself for all the mistreatment I'd put myself through. It wasn't easy, nor would it be immediate, and there would be plenty of times when I wouldn't want to do it or even understand why I had to.
But I needed to. The rational side of me knew that, even if it was infinitesimally small at times.
"Realizing we're so close to graduation reminded me we could very well go our separate ways in just a few months, and I didn't want to walk away without apologizing to you," I said. I couldn't look either of them in the eye then, for it was easier to stare down at my knees than feel like I was being judged. "I've been terrible to the two of you since the start. It got worse with time and we've had our ups and downs, but I've been a really, really shitty person overall and an even worse friend. I lied. I hid things from you. To be honest, most of the time I was convinced it would be worth it because, even though I had no friends, I had something better. I thought I'd found unconditional love, and really convinced myself I was writing the greatest love story of all time. Turns out it wasn't great."
"Or a love story at all," Ingrid added, "but that's something I hope you'll be able to realize with time. I'm sure you don't need us to keep hammering it down. I get you're tired of hearing us say the same thing in different ways every single time we try to have a conversation and that what you need is time and space to rebuild an entire way of living, but we've never had bad intentions. You were so ready to gouge Sav's eyes out like we were trying to ruin your life, or something. It wasn't us, Penn. Even if we made mistakes along the way, we've never been the real enemy."
I leaned my back against the couch pillows, remembering why I was always so avoidant. Serious conversations exhausted me more than any workout routine. "You need to understand that you were meddling with the one thing I cared about. It was all I lived for, and I needed it to remain that way. I needed it to stay as the love story I'd always thought it was. Everything I knew, everything I thought, everything I did—it all served one purpose. I wanted to stay there. I wanted to stay in a situation where I thought I was loved because I thought that was what love was. Even if it wasn't, even if it isn't, it was to me, and I'm trying my fucking hardest to recover from it. I wanted to be chosen and wanted. I wanted to be loved."
"What about now?" Savannah chimed in. "Do you still think it was all worth it? The lying, the isolation, and everything else."
"Sometimes. Not always, but it's better than being as oblivious to what I was doing and what I was being put through." She nodded. "I'm not expecting things to miraculously get better right away and I wake up every single day wishing this was nothing but a terrible nightmare I can escape and run back to the only thing that felt right. I have to remind myself it was a terrible thing to do with a terrible person every time I get the urge to hide under those thought patterns, but they're all I've known for the past three and a half years. I felt like I had no one else, and he was making sure I stayed."
I still wanted to go back to him, even then. It was easier to want to go back to the person I'd thought he was than believing I'd been wrong all along—or worse, believing the man I was still desperately in love with was capable of such monstrous things.
Everything they had described to me was objectively heinous, the kind of stuff you wouldn't put someone you loved through, and that was the roughest part. I had to trust their judgment, time after time after time, when they begged and pleaded for me to realize he had done all of those things. Even with me being a willing participant in the relationship and having been the one to pull him down the rabbit hole with me, he'd been in a position of power which he'd abused and used my fears, anxieties, and vulnerabilities against me. That was what I struggled with the most—the restructuring, the rebuilding.
"It wasn't your fault," Ingrid muttered. "There was someone else pulling the strings, and you didn't know."
I sighed. "Some of it was me. I was terrible, with or without his influence."
"You were, but still. There will come a day when you'll be able to see things separately. There will come a day when you no longer have to be the person he wanted you to be." She uncrossed her legs, then leaned forward to gently squeeze my knee. "I've always told you you were better than that. You still are. When that day comes, you'll have us."
"Regrettably, you are stuck with us," Savannah supported. "I think we have plenty of catching up to do."
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it's one chapter before the end of the book so this feels a bit overdue BUT i just wanted to say i'm fully aware of how repetitive penn's inner monologue is. i completely understand it feels tiring to read sometimes (it's a bit tiring to write as well, and i'm me, a lover of character-focused books and long paragraphs), but it's also a stylistic choice entirely influenced by her mind state. like she said, she's repetitive. she's ruminating. she's going back and forth in her head about what to do, what to think, what to believe, and when you've been gaslighted for so long ~
but alas. i digress. one chapter left (and an epilogue) and my therapist from the start of this book is no longer my therapist. more on that later (as in — it'll be part of the final note i'll write for this book. if you care about that part of my life, it might be worth a read)