Page 57 of I Need You to Read This
His laugh is sharp. An act to cover up the anger that she can tell by the clenched palms and snarling mouth has already begun to take hold. He hasn’t changed at all. “Oh, are you? I couldn’t find you to tell you how much I’d changed though. You can imagine how that would make someone crazy.”
“What do you want from me?” Alex asks, unable to sit there listening to him lie.
“I would like an apology, to start. I’ve had to live with some pretty horrible things said about me for the past eight years, you know. The speculation in a small town, it can be quite intense. The way you just disappeared made it hard to set the record straight.”
“You want an apology? After what you did?” Alex says quietly.
“Funny. I remember trying to help a young girl out of a very tricky home situation.”
“Tell her what you told me, Brian,” Lucy steps in, prodding him.
Alex had only met Brian’s Lulu once during their time dating. It was on an incredibly awkward weekend with his parents at their huge, austere lake house. She remembers the mother, vacant-staring, and the father with his face like a brick, how he would slap Brian on the back a little too hard for it to be affectionate. Lulu was there, too, a withdrawn eleven-year-old wandering around the house like a neglected pet. The entire weekend she followed Brian, her eyes round and adoring. It’s the same way she looks at him right now. And just as he did then, he ignores her. He looks down at Alex from his full height now.
“Tell her, Brian. About how bad you felt,” Lucy nudges again. She is standing behind Brian, so only Alex can see his face and the irritation on it, how his neck goes tight, the tendons pulsing.
“Enough,” Brian yells. “Fuck, Lu. Why did you put me in this situation?” From the ground, Alex watches his fists clench. She remembers those hands. They are strong and slightly stubby, the thumbs curving inward. They repulse her.
Alex watches Lucy’s face when he turns on her, how she flinches, hurt, then rearranges her features back to the way they were before he can even see. Alex remembers doing it herself. “You always said you wanted to have a chance to do it right. Remember you said you wished you had been there to help her deal with whatever happened. You told me once how it ate you up inside. I thought if I found her for you, that you could both have a chance to say you’re sorry.”
The audacity of Brian to confuse the story like that, to twist it and misrepresent it as if he hadn’t been there at all, like he wasn’t the one in control of things the entire time.
“God, Lu, you really are a fucking idiot.” Brian rakes his hands through his hair in frustration. He spins back angrily toward his sister. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Well, I thought you two could talk. Alex, she really isn’t so bad,Brian. She is just confused. Tell her what happened that day, how you wanted to save her, to protect her from harm, but she ran away.” Lucy is shrinking into herself.
“Yes, tell me, Brian,” Alex croaks from the ground. “I hadn’t realized.”
He looks back and forth, caught between the two of them. “That’s not going to happen. And anyway, what do I even care? The thing you don’t understand is that I’ve moved on.”
Alex’s terror is displaced by her anger now.Hehas moved on? While she has spent the last eight years running from him, looking out her apartment window thinking that every shadowy figure is there to kill her? She bites her lip to keep from saying something that will cause him to hurt her.
Lucy seems to be trying to salvage the situation. “Well, if you don’t want to have an apology and talk, then we can just let her go. Pretend it didn’t happen. I’m sure she won’t tell anyone.”
Brian turns and looks Alex over, hunched up on the kitchen floor. Not the way he did then, with love or anger or a combination of the two, but perhaps even more terrifyingly with no emotion whatsoever.
“Oh, Lulu. You really aren’t very smart, are you? Of course she’ll tell.”
“I won’t,” Alex says, desperate to convince them. “I’ve gone years and years without telling a single soul.” He looks confused for a moment, as though he might actually be considering it. Alex feels hope flutter up in her chest. She pictures herself escaping, running across the lawn to the neighbor’s house like she should have done to begin with.
“We’ll just deny it,” Lucy agrees, her voice full of panic.
“I can deny it, sure. I have nothing to do with it, nothing anyone can trace to me anyway. But not you. You fucked her up, Lu,” he says, wrinkling his nose as he surveys Alex. “She’s a mess. All covered in blood, look at her.” He waves a hand at Alex like she is a shattered jar of mayonnaise at a grocery store.
“That was an accident.” Lucy’s voice wobbles. “She fell. I didn’t do it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Now she’s tied up. You know what that is, Lulu?”
She shakes her head, eyes wide. He’s enjoying this, Alex thinks suddenly. He’s taking pleasure in tormenting Lucy just like he relishedtorturing Alex when she was young. Brian whistles, shaking his head as Lucy quivers next to him. “The way you messed her up, held her against her will. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s a felony. This kind of shit can ruin a person.”
“What do I do, oh God.” Lucy looks like she might be starting to hyperventilate.
“Let me fucking think,” Brian says sharply. They move to the far side of the kitchen to discuss Alex’s fate. Their voices blend together in a low murmur. It’s incredible to Alex that she once thought of that man as cosmopolitan, that he seemed like any sort of ticket out of her misery. How hard it is to know anything about love when you are young and have no examples to follow, how easy it is to be led astray.
“No! Brian!” Lucy’s sharp cry makes Alex’s blood speed up in her veins. The voices grow lower, and finally she hears Lucy’s mumble of acceptance. Brian’s boots scrape toward her. The light from his flashlight trails along the floor and then his face, that raised scar, appears once more in her frame of vision.
“I was not planning on hurting you. Remember that I had nothing to do with this. This time it is on my sister, not me.” Lucy goes pale behind him.
Alex screams but his hand clamps down over her mouth.
