Dear Amanda,
I know you don’t believe me, but Ethan and
I never hooked up. We never even—
Eventually, out in that field in the county, the sun started getting low in the sky, and Ethan and I both started murmuring about “getting back.” I wondered, What happens now?
But even though I felt like we could talk about anything and everything, I couldn’t ask Ethan that. I didn’t even know what I wanted to happen.
We drove back to town slowly, right at the speed limit. From the moment we got in the car, though, I noticed that something had shifted—things felt off.
For twenty minutes, we were silent.
“Oh,” I said, noticing the gas needle close to E. “I should stop for gas.”
“I should really get home,” said Ethan. “Can you drop me off first?”
“Sure.” I faced straight ahead.
Ethan checked his phone. “Shit,” he said. “It’s dead.”
“Mine too.” I’d noticed that when we were in the field. “They were probably straining to find a signal way out there.”
I looked over at Ethan, but he just frowned and put his phone back in his pocket.
He didn’t put his hand over mine as I shifted gears, he didn’t tell me a story or make me laugh, he didn’t even glance in my direction.
By the time we got back into town, we weren’t even listening to music. Ethan hadn’t started up a new playlist after the last one ended. And as we got closer to home, the car got quieter and quieter.
When we pulled into his driveway, it was almost 8:30 p.m., nine hours after I’d picked him up this morning. I wasn’t worried about Mom or Dad—I was sure they’d think I was out with Amanda, enjoying my first day as an official driver. But I felt a sense of loss as I drove into Ethan’s neighborhood, even before I turned into the driveway and saw them.
Amanda’s car was pulled up to Ethan’s house, and she and Ethan’s mom were sitting on the front porch together. Mrs. Garrison must have made iced tea, because there was a pitcher and a plate of sliced lemons on the small table between them. It was such a nice scene. And it made me feel afraid.
I wondered if something bad had happened to Amanda, if she’d needed Ethan or me for an emergency, but she couldn’t find either of us because we were together. I felt guilt gnaw at my stomach, and my face got red and splotchy before I even got out of the car.
But when we stepped into the driveway, they both waved. No, they were just hanging out, waiting for us to get back because they couldn’t get through to us.
I’m sure Amanda was suspicious about where we were, but we still would have been in the clear, probably, if it hadn’t been for the looks Ethan and I both had on our faces. We were guilty of something. Our hair was rumpled, we had that sheen of lusty sweat clinging to us, and our eyes were darting, shameful. We hadn’t done anything wrong—not really. But we both knew that we had crossed a line, somehow. And it showed.
I could hardly stutter out a “We were driving on these country roads,” as Ethan said, “We got lost,” at the same time.
Amanda—who’d been half smiling and only slightly annoyed that we weren’t back earlier—looked at me, then at Ethan, then at Ethan’s mom, who was standing up to go inside. She knew.
“What’s going on, Ethan?” asked Amanda, almost shouting.
She didn’t pay any attention to me, even as I looked to her for something—I don’t know what. She wouldn’t even make eye contact.
I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t want to lie about anything. So I panicked. I turned to leave, getting back in the Honda. I didn’t look at Ethan, who was walking up on the porch to try to calm Amanda down. I didn’t look at Amanda again, but I heard her yelling and I could tell she had started to cry. I’d never seen her lose control like this.
The last thing I heard as I reversed out of the driveway was, “With my fucking friend, Ethan? My fucking best friend?” And I wished Ethan and I had rolled up the windows on the way back.
“Someone told me they had sex in a field.”
“She did that to her best friend.”
“Amanda’s way prettier.”
I zombie-walked through the last three days of sophomore year. We had exams, so everyone was just going from test to test, but still, I felt like a hollowed-out shell of Clem Williams.
My parents knew something was wrong. After I got home from dropping off Ethan and facing Amanda, I pretended to be sick. Mom brought me soup in bed and I tried not to burst into tears in front of her. She knew I’d been crying, though.
Olive asked to come in and watch our favorite ABC Family shows on the TV in my room, but I told her no, that I might be contagious, and she stayed away.
All weekend I slept and cried. I stayed off-line because I was too afraid to see if anything was going around about me, but I checked my phone incessantly. I was sure Ethan was going to call, tell me what happened, tell me what he’d said to Amanda.
But he didn’t.
I was even more sure that Amanda would call to at least listen to my side of the story.
But she didn’t.
And so on that Monday morning I went through the motions—showering, drying my hair, putting on lip gloss and a little swipe of mascara. Dad made sure I had a good breakfast. “Can’t have you taking tests on an empty stomach!” he said. Then he kissed my forehead and headed to work, and Olive and I stayed at the table to finish our eggs. She chattered on about end-of-the-year cupcakes and asked me if I wanted her to bring one home.
“No,” I said, moving my eggs around the plate with my fork.
“There’s always extra,” said Olive. “Cameron Brown’s mother makes, like, a gazillion because she’s a bored homemaker.”
I looked up at Olive.
“That’s what Mom says, anyway,” she said.
Of course Mom says that. She has lawyer-mom guilt because she leaves early and gets home late and doesn’t have time to make cupcakes for Olive’s class. “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need the sugar.”
And maybe because it was the first time I’d met her eyes since the Ethan incident, but Olive suddenly looked at me like she knew—really knew—that I was not okay.
I saw what seemed like fear and concern flicker on her face, but then she smiled reassuringly.
“Want to borrow my lucky pen for your exams?” she asked.
“No,” I said, grabbing my plate and taking it into the kitchen.
“It might help,” said Olive, ignoring my rejection. She walked to the entryway where her backpack was sitting, and I heard her rifling through the pockets.
I leaned back on the kitchen island and tried to steady myself. I had no idea what I would face at school.
“Here,” she said, coming into the kitchen with a pink pen. It had a feather on the end of it and looked utterly ridiculous.
“Thanks,” I said.
When I got to school, I was gripping the pink feather-pen in my right hand as I walked through the hallways. That’s when I heard the whispers. That’s when I felt the stares.
I knew instantly that even though no one had called me this weekend, there had been a lot of talk. A few people came up to me and said things like “Ethan’s a jerk,” or “Amanda had it coming,” but it’s not like that made me feel better. Actually, those comments made me feel worse. Ethan wasn’t a jerk, I thought, and Amanda didn’t have it coming; that remark came from mean girls, mostly. Despite those wincing moments, though, I didn’t really feel anything at all. It was like I was watching someone else go through this, watching another girl’s life fall apart.
I think Amanda’s therapist mom would call it “distancing”—avoiding emotion so I wouldn’t have to feel the devastation full on.
I kept my head down, walking through the halls with a hunched back and a protective books-in-front-of-chest stance. But when I saw Amanda’s sparkling blue ballet flats coming toward me as pondered where to eat my lunch, I instinctively looked up. I caught her eye. She looked like she’d been crying too.
“Stay away from me,” she hissed.
I hunched back down and waited for her to pass.
I ate lunch in the corner of the library, sneaking bites of the sandwich Dad had made for me and feeling thankful that he was on a PB&J kick—I couldn’t have hidden tuna fish from the librarian who walked the aisles looking for kids breaking the no-food rule. That was mean of her, I realized. Didn’t she know that some people didn’t have any other place to eat where they wouldn’t be exposed for being alone during the school’s social hour?
I stared at the science books in front of me. I had wanted to sit in the fiction aisle, but it was crowded with kids who I guess sat here every day and read through lunch. Maybe that would be my life next year; escaping to another world didn’t sound so bad to me.
I was about to get up and head to the biography shelves when I saw the sparkling shoes appear on the tan carpet.
Amanda knew where to find me. She hadn’t been ready to see me in the hallway, but now she was approaching me fully prepared.
She said my name when she walked up to me.
“Clem.”
“Hi,” I said, pushing out the chair next to me with my foot, knowing this was my chance.
But the thing was, I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t defend myself. “I like Ethan too” just didn’t seem to cut it. It wasn’t as if I’d just been through some trauma—like my mom dying or Olive being sick or even a really bad exam grade—and I needed to be comforted and Ethan was there.
I’d thought of all the excuses that might have made my friends cut me some slack, but none of them were real. The truth was that I liked Ethan, and he liked me. We clicked. That’s it.
It’s a paper-thin reason to start something with your best friend’s boyfriend, and I knew it.
I deserved every whisper in the hall, I deserved Amanda’s scorn and all the tears I’d shed in my bedroom. I deserved to eat my lunch alone in the library. And I deserved the way that Amanda was looking at me.
But it still hurt. A lot.
“You lied to me,” she said.
“I didn’t, Amanda,” I said. “I swear I didn’t.”
“I knew something was wrong,” she said, standing above me with her arms crossed. “I knew it, and you denied it, again and again.”
“There wasn’t anything going on,” I said. “Friday was just—”
Amanda held up her hand.
“I don’t want to know,” she said.
“No,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. “Amanda, we didn’t … I mean, I would never—”
“I thought you would never do anything remotely like this,” she said. “Clem, I believed you.” She paused and bit her lip. “I was even happy that you and Ethan were friends. Just friends.”
“We were!” I said.
“Until you weren’t,” said Amanda.
“It was harmless,” I said, looking down at the maroon-colored table and betraying what I was saying with the desperate way that I said it.
“Stop lying, Clem!” she shouted, and I saw a skinny guy peek around the shelves to look at us. Amanda glared at him and he disappeared. “Ethan told me about how you’ve been trying to start something with him all year, how you flirt with him in class, and even at my house while we watched that movie.”
“That isn’t true,” I said, my eyes pleading with her to believe me. “We were all crammed onto the couch, and so maybe my leg was touching his hand, but it was just that we happened to be close, and—”
“Are you even listening to yourself?” asked Amanda, her volume lower now, pure loathing in her voice.
“Amanda, please,” I whispered. “I even tried to tell him that I thought we were getting too close. I—”
“You took him on a drive way out in the county for the entire day after this year-long back-and-forth that’s been going on under my nose, and I’m supposed to believe that nothing happened?” Amanda leaned in closer to me, leveling me with her eyes.
I shrank back in my chair. “He just texted me back when I asked who wanted to go for a drive. That was all.”
“It wasn’t all!” said Amanda, her voice growing louder. “He won’t tell me what happened, but I know something did—I can tell. And now I’m stuck in the middle of this mess! I have no idea what to do.”
“Trust me,” I said. “Amanda, we didn’t do anything—”
She was smiling at me, and it made me freeze for a moment.
“You never liked Noah Knight, did you?”
I shook my head no, tired of lying.
Amanda let out an odd laugh that sounded like she was in pain.
“Ethan’s saying that you were a big mistake,” she said, and I could see the darkness in her eyes, despite her smile. “He’s begging me not to break up with him.”
I felt a sharp knife in my chest, and I hated myself even more for being upset by what Ethan said about me. I wondered briefly if Amanda was lying, but then I remembered how quiet he got in the car ride home. I shouldn’t be surprised; he was never mine. What right did I have to feel hurt that he was abandoning me now?
“Amanda,” I said. “You have to forgive me, I didn’t mean to—”
“Clem.” She silenced me with the intensity of her low whisper. “I can’t forgive you.”
Tears rushed to my eyes—I couldn’t stop them.
She looked at me, and this moment pained her, I could tell. But she kept a smile plastered on her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You brought this on yourself.”
I closed my eyes and nodded, knowing my face was twisting up into the ugly cry, knowing I’d throw the rest of my sandwich away because there’d be no way to choke it down past the lump of sadness in my throat. Knowing I didn’t deserve even the small pleasure of peanut butter and jelly.
I opened my eyes after a moment, and Amanda was gone. She knew I was leaving for the whole summer, and that was the last time I saw her.