Page 92 of All Your Pucking Secrets

Sympathy wells up within me. Somehow, despite our different backgrounds, I’m beginning to believe we might be kindred spirits.

I pack my textbook into my backpack, stand, and sling the bag over my shoulder. “The ice cream place a block over?”

“Perfect.” She grins. “I’m craving their salted caramel swirl.”

We walk side by side in companionable silence. After a few minutes, Soraya glances at me out of the corner of her eye.

“Would you like to hear more about Dad?” she asks.

“Only if you’re willing to talk about him. I know how triggering it can be.”

“It’s fine. He can’t hurt me now.”

Does it make me a bad person that, for a second, I wish I was in the same situation, with Eric Weston dead rather than in prison?

We pause at a crossing and wait for the walking light to turn green.

“As far as I know, Dad was always violent toward Mom,” she says. “When I was young, I didn’t realize that most dads didn’t shout and hit people when things didn’t go their way. I don’t know when it started. Mom doesn’t talk about it, although I’ve been working on getting her into therapy, so hopefully she will soon.”

“Whose idea was it for you all to go to therapy?” I ask, curious.

She flashes me a small smile. “Tyler’s.”

For some reason, that doesn’t surprise me. Ahead, the light changes, and we hurry across the street.

“Dad hit me for the first time when I was maybe five or six. At least, that’s the first time I can remember. It’s strange, but I was so shocked that he’d hurt me, even though I’d seen him do the same to Mom.”

Nausea rolls in my gut. “You felt safe with him. He was your father.”

“I guess. Anyway, he was never as physically violent with Tyler as he was with us. At first, I thought he loved me less, or that perhaps it was a man/woman thing, but eventually I grew to understand that he just didn’t want to jeopardize his chances of having an NHL player son. Injuring Tyler was too risky.”

“He sounds like a real piece of work.”

She nods. “He was. He put so much pressure on Tyler as soon as he realized he had potential. He monitored his food intake and insisted he spend hours training every day—to the extent that his peewee coach banned Ty from extra ice time because he was worried about him. That didn’t stop Dad though. He just came up with backyard drills instead.”

“That must have been hard for Tyler.” And Soraya too. She’d been abused or ignored, while Tyler had been controlled and pushed to his limits.

“It only got worse over time.” Her arm brushes mine and she seems to instinctively put more space between us. Is that an ingrained self-protective habit? I know I tend to do the same.

“How so?”

“He wouldn’t let Ty go out with his friends, and he wouldn’t let up about his grades. Ty did pretty well, considering, but how was he supposed to find the time to study when Dad was constantly hounding him to train?”

“He put him in an impossible position.” I know I’m academically gifted, but even my grades would suffer if I didn’t have any time to do my assignments or prepare for tests.

“It didn’t stop there though. He refused to have any treats in the house. No chocolate or chips. If a game went poorly, he’d break down every single thing he thought Tyler had done wrong and then work him until he puked. He wouldn’t even let him choose what college to go to. He’d already decided that Princeton was the only acceptable option.”

“He told me that. About Princeton, I mean. He didn’t want to go there.”

At the time, I’d had no idea what I could do or say to help. He’d insisted that I not talk to his dad as I’d proposed, and in hindsight, I understood why he’d been so adamant about it.

Someone coming the other way bumps into me, and I shift closer to Soraya.

“What doesn’t make sense to me is why I was such a threat in your father’s eyes that he had to force us apart.”

She glances over. “My guess is that he was worried you’d interfere with the plan he’d set out for Tyler. None of the other girls he’d been with mattered to him, but Dad knew that you did, and he might have thought Tyler would begin pushing back against his orders.”

“I suppose that makes sense.” Oddly, it pleases me to be told that I meant more to Tyler than the others—especially coming from someone other than him.

---