Page 81 of Purity

His gaze grows unfocused as it roams the surface of the table. “So we’ll meet up again on September seventeenth, and you’ll tell me how you feel?”

“That will be our deadline,” I say. “If I come up with an answer for you before then, I’ll come to you.”

He releases an almost hysterical laugh. “Wow, you really want to torture me, don’t you?”

I smile sadly. “No, I don’t. What I want to do is give you everything you need to make you feel better, but I have to do what’s best for me.”

“I’m glad you’re standing up for yourself.”

He doesn’t sound the least bit glad, and his expression grows so desolately melancholy that I want to set my hand on his arm like I usually do. I may always be this soft on the inside, but I don’t have to let it guide my choices.

Not when my will is iron.

“Why would you wait until September seventeenth if you already know what you want right now?” Mari asks.

“I agree,” Vanessa says, lifting both hands and brushing away the flyaway strands of hair blowing frantically over her heart-shaped face. “The date seems pointless now, like you’re just trying to make Cole suffer.”

I look away from both of them, not ready to talk about this just yet. It’s been twenty-two days since I last saw Cole. Despite my vow to go out and have adventures, these have been some of the dullest weeks of my life—full of morning prayer walks and late-night journal sessions. We were invited out by Travis and a few friends, but I declined. I didn’t want to give him any false hope.

After being with Cole, I realized how impossible it would be to start anything with Travis. There was no spark there, nothing that could ever come close to the inferno that engulfed me when Cole so much as looked at me.

The most partying I’ve done is drinking a bottle of wine with Mari, but instead of going out to the bars afterward, we lay on her bed and binged all the John Wick movies.

It turns out that dullness was what I needed. I don’t need to face the fear of putting myself out there anymore.

That’s no longer my biggest fear.

My purity ring is pinched between my fingers, and I press it firmly into the wet sand, leaving behind a circular imprint.

“Maybe I should bury it,” I say.

Without seeing Mari’s face, I know she’s rolling her eyes at me. “Why don’t you just keep it, since you obviously don’t want to get rid of it?”

“Burying it is a happy medium. I can bury it now and come back in a couple of years and dig it up. I’ll bring some of my old prayer journals and reflect on the person I used to be and how much I’ve changed. I’ll toss it in the water then if I’m ready.”

Mari’s bare feet step into my view. “Do you know how sand works? You’ll never find it again. If you want to be able to dig it up, you need to bury it in your backyard.”

“Or don’t do anything with it,” Vanessa says. “Keep it in your tin box.”

Mari plops down next to me. “I second that. It’s clearly important to you, and why wouldn’t it be? It shaped who you are, and I happen to adore who you are. I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

“I wouldn’t either, Livvy.”

Mari sets her hand on my shoulder. “We don’t get to go and pick and choose the parts of ourselves we want to keep. That’s the shitty part about trauma. It’ll always be with you, even when the pain of it is gone.”

Small grains of sand scrape against my finger as I slip the ring back on. “The sad thing is that I don’t even see this ring as trauma. I know, in theory, those purity conferences were toxic, but looking back, they’re happy memories. Do you feel that way too, Mari, or am I crazy?”

Her brow knits and her gaze grows unfocused. “I hardly even remember them.”

I glance out at the water. “I guess I deal with trauma differently, because I’m getting warm and fuzzy just thinking about them. We’d take the First Covenant bus to LA with the whole youth group. We’d be in those big auditoriums with hundreds of other weirdo evangelical kids, which made me feel way more normal. When I look at it now…” I glance down at my ring. “I feel nostalgia.”

Mari looks at me incredulously. “Which is a positive emotion.”

“Yeah.”

“So why do you want get rid of it?”

“Keep it for nostalgia’s sake,” Vanessa says. “Why bury it? Just put away somewhere and pull it out when you want to do some reflecting.”

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