Page 66 of The Summer I Destroyed You

“Literal elephant,” I reply as I pad to the bed.

“Don’t do that,” he warns, suddenly harsh. “Don’t use the bullshit people once said about you against yourself.”

I’m on the cusp of arguing when I realize he’s right. I say the mean shit about myself now to beat other people to the punch when maybe what I should have done all along is not surrounded myself with the assholes who’d have said it in the first place.

Sure, I didn’t have a lot of choice as a teenager. But I’ve got all the choice in the world now.

“Fine,” I say warily. “What do you want to know?”

“I don’t understand why it happened,” he says.

“Why I gained weight?” I ask. “I don’t know. I think I was upset about my dad leaving and—”

“No,” he corrects, “I meant why they were so awful. Because kids are mean, but they’re not that mean, so consistently and for so long. And you couldn’t have been the only overweight kid in your school. So why’d they pick you as the target?”

He’s right. And no one was tormented the way I was. “It was Bradley. We were best friends growing up. She just turned on me after my dad left, and they all followed her lead.”

“You don’t think that’s weird?” Liam asks.

“Not especially,” I reply. “Little girls are bitches.”

“I have a sister. I have a niece who was bullied through middle school too. I know little girls can be bitches. But what you’re describing is kind of extreme, even for the worst of them.”

He has a point. I assumed it was because of my weight, because that was certainly what was the most upsetting part to my mother. And little girls are bitches.

But I guess it was still pretty fucking weird.

* * *

Liam calls while I’m waiting at the Nashville airport. I tell him he’s pushing it but wind up talking to him until I’m already on the plane and they’re telling me, specifically, to turn off my phone.

I arrive in Atlanta, drop my bags at the hotel, and head out to meet with city officials about a tract of land we’d like to develop. The only difference between dealing with a big city versus a small town is that there are more asses to kiss and more people you’ve got to buy. It will take me a year or more to successfully get the land zoned for commercial use, and that’s what makes Elliott Springs the find of the century: there’s no delay. For very little investment, Inspired Building will soon be printing money off the businesses we’ve brought to town, whereas we’ll have invested a lot in Atlanta to get only a moderate return. Charles should have promoted me, and I’m angered anew by the fact that he hasn’t, that he’s done his best to keep me small so he can keep stealing credit for all my hard work.

God, I can’t wait to take his job, to watch him being escorted from the building with all his shit in a file box. It’s so close I can almost taste it. So is the destruction of Lucas Hall.

But when Liam calls as I get to my room that night, it hits me deep in the center of my stomach how empty it will be when I’ve gotten everything I want, but I no longer have his voice in my ear at the end of the day.

34

EMMY

My mother is irritated with me when I get home, and not in the normal way she’s always irritated with me. Her shoulders are stiff; her jaw is locked. The sound of me quietly talking to Snowflake as I pour food into her bowl is enough to merit the swift jerk of her head and narrowed eyes. I wonder if she somehow knows I’ve been sleeping with Liam, and if the accusations about this will leap from her mouth later today or tomorrow, fully formed. Entire paragraphs about how terrible I am, all the evidence she’s pulled together to support it. She’d have been a good lawyer if she’d chosen to go that route. She’s able to gather seemingly unrelated facts about me into a cohesive indictment with just a little thought, so convincingly that even I will believe her.

I drive her to physical therapy, and she yells at me for hitting the brakes too hard and accuses me of driving recklessly when I’m only five miles over the speed limit. After we park, I put my hand on the door to walk in with her and she stops me. “You’ll wait in the car if you know what’s good for you,” she says as she climbs out.

It says everything about her that I’m now an adult, and she can barely hobble down a hallway, yet she still thinks she can physically threaten me and get away with it. How many times did I hear that phrase as a kid? She hit me in the face so often—simply for the crime of looking at her—that I still have to force myself to look strangers in the eye.

Or maybe I’m the one it says something about even more, because she treated me the way she did and I’m still here taking it, aren’t I?

I text Jeff after I’ve dropped her off. He and I speak infrequently—my phone history with him is a long record of one of us saying “happy birthday” and the other saying “thanks,” year after year. He’ll always be the person who took my mother’s side against me. Who’d say, “Look how the car rises when Emmy climbs out” when we went somewhere, seeking Mommy’s approval when he was twenty-two fucking years old.

Tell Sandra to rein it in. I’m not staying here if she continues to behave like this.

Jeff

She said you have a bad attitude.

I roll my eyes. That was a favorite theme of hers back when I lived at home. She’d make fun of my weight over dinner until I was weeping and tell me to leave the table if I couldn’t take a joke. She’d say, “What the hell is your problem?” when I walked in from school and then tell anyone who’d listen that I had a bad attitude, that I was a chore to be around. As if a healthier person wouldn’t mind being ridiculed, wouldn’t mind being lashed out at as soon as she walked in the door.

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