Page 99 of Resilience

about 30 mins ago.

You okay?

Noticing the careful phrasing of her father’s text, Athena sent back something equally vague.

I’m okay. Everybody’s

talking about it here.

LMK if you need anything.

Love you.

I will. Love you, too, Daddy.

Within the first hour after the news went live, Athena had gotten texts from Sam and Mom as well, similarly checking in, and she responded with similarly vague assurances that she was okay.

But the day was hard. Her tutoring sessions got virtually no actual work done, and every minute of her little breaks during students’ passing periods was taken up by people wanting to feed on her thoughts and feelings about the sudden death of her recent boyfriend.

Perhaps because she wasn’t actually grieving, Athena saw all these brief encounters with her colleagues—all of whom she was friendly with, though only a few were actual friends—for what they probably truly were. Not real gestures of comfort or support for a woman they assumed was grieving a loss, but a feeding frenzy. They were hungry for the drama. Athena didn’t fret too much about her lack of tears; she had a well-earned rep for not crying. She didn’t even cry during the annual Upper School screening of Schindler’s List.

About ninety minutes before the end of the day, the headmaster cancelled classes and called everyone into the assembly hall. They spent the remainder of the day in an impromptu memorial service, with students, teachers, and staff taking turns offering a remembrance of some wonderful thing Hunter did.

That assembly was the worst of it by far. First was the simple fact that everybody expected her to offer her own remembrance, and each time one person was finished it seemed like the entire school body turned to see if she would be next. She was never next.

For a while, she tried to compose a thing to share, but it all felt fake and infuriating, and she was too angry and emotionally torqued to trust herself not to share something extremely bad—like what that ‘great guy’ who was ‘so nice’ and ‘so fun’ and ‘so helpful’ had actually done. Once she understood that there was nothing that could induce her to stand up and share a ‘remembrance’ of Hunter, she leaned into acting like she was too upset to share.

The really, really hard part about the assembly, though, was all the remembrances that were shared. She sat there as students recalled his unbridled enthusiasm for Field Day, or the way he always did anything he asked them to do in gym class, right along with them. They shared stories of Hunter sitting with a kid whose parents were running extremely late—or who’d straight-up forgotten to pick up their child—and how patient he was with students struggling with a skill.

A whole lot of stories about how great Hunter Cruz was. The image of him constructed in the assembly hall that afternoon was nothing like the guy who’d landed on her sleeping back and forced himself into her while she fought to get free of him, and who’d told all of TikTok that he’d broken up with her and she’d gone crazy when he did it.

But the good-guy image was the man she’d thought he was. Especially back before they’d starting dating, and in the early days of their relationship. Once they’d become comfortably settled as a couple, some cracks emerged in his good-guy case, like the times he’d dumped her, then come running back in a week or two. But most of the cracks were much smaller than that, only hairline fractures. When they’d been together, she’d chalked those cracks up to nobody being perfect. Sam had always maintained that Hunter was a jerk to her, but she hadn’t felt that.

Not until the cabin.

A weird little worm started wriggling around in Athena’s brain, slithering through her memories, making her doubt ... everything. Even the rape. Had it been only a misunderstanding? Had he thought she was into it? In the first days after, when she’d been trying to keep it a secret, she’d explained that things had gotten rough and she hadn’t liked it, so she’d broken up with him—a lie as close to the truth as she could get.

But what if it hadn’t been a lie? What if it had been the actual truth? Had Hunter thought they were just having rough sex? They never had before, but he had been drunk. Maybe he’d wanted to try something new?

Holy shit. Had she gotten him killed over a misunderstanding? Athena’s heart began to thud hard enough to hurt.

No, wait. Wait. What had he said when she’d confronted him the next morning? That she was his girlfriend, so he couldn’t have raped her. His exact words had been It’s not rape just because you weren’t into it.

She would never forget those words, no matter how old and senile she got.

Hunter had raped her, and then he’d tried to gaslight her. Badly, but he’d tried. And then he’d told the world she was the bad guy.

Unable to bear another second of this ‘memorial,’ she and Blanche walked out. Olivia, Kenneth, and several other people—maybe every other person—noticed and watched, but she didn’t care. Let them think she was too upset to stay.

It wasn’t far from the truth.

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

Pulling into the driveway at home that evening, Athena sighed. Aunt Deb’s truck was parked at the curb. The Spellmans and Armstrongs were having a family dinner tonight, and Athena had forgotten.

---