My heart splinters at her stricken tone, then cracks in two when I see her eyes. Jesus. She actually believes what she’s saying. She truly thinks of herself as stupid.
“So I went upstairs and grabbed the midterm, and then went down to the sunroom and lit a match. There was a big ceramic bowl on a table under one of the windows. I tossed the burning essay into it.” She sighs. “I honestly thought it would burn itself out. It probably would’ve, if it weren’t for the drapes and the fact that someone left the window open.” She shakes her head in amazement. “Of all the nights for someone other than me to be in there, right?”
I have to chuckle.
“So,” she continues, “the breeze fanned the flames and the drapes caught fire and the sunroom was no more.”
“Did it seriously burn to the ground?”
“No. I mean, the outer wall was completely destroyed and needs to be rebuilt, but the part that was attached to the actual mansion remained intact.” She hangs her head in shame. “When the fire department came, I lied and said I knocked over a candle when I was dancing on the table. Like, ‘Oops, I’m just a drunk sorority girl in a toga!’ They labeled it an accident, my parents wrote hefty checks to the sorority and the school, and I was very nicely asked to leave.”
“Wow.” I sit up against the headboard and pull her toward me. She’s cocooned in fleece, so I run a comforting hand over her scalp. “Let me get this straight,” I say gently. “You’d rather people think you’re a drunk party girl than know that you got an F on a term paper?”
“Pretty much.” She tips her head so she can meet my eyes. “But it sounds really ridiculous when you say it out loud.”
I cup her cheek, sweeping my thumb over her lower lip. It trembles when I make contact with it. “You’re not stupid, Summer. You have a learning disability. There’s a difference.”
“I know that.” The lack of conviction in her tone thoroughly troubles me, but she doesn’t give me a chance to probe any deeper. “There. Now you know something truly embarrassing about me. It’s your turn.”
When I don’t respond right away, she pokes her hand out of the blanket and laces her fingers through mine.
“Share something, anything. You promised me something real, Fitz.”
I did promise. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy for me to give it to her. “I…” I grumble with frustration. “I’m not holding back on purpose,” I tell her. “It’s just…a habit.”
“A habit.” Her forehead creases. “Holding back is a habit?”
“Yes. I don’t talk about what I’m feeling.”
“Why not, though?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I…got used to whatever I said being used against me.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
Discomfort creeps up my spine, until the back of my neck feels cold, tight. The instinct to flee is strong, but so is Summer’s grip on my hand. I draw a breath.
“Fitz?” she prompts.
I exhale. “My parents went through an ugly divorce when I was ten. My dad cheated. Though if you ask him, it’s because my mom drove him to it. Either way, they couldn’t stand each other back then, and they can’t stand each other now.”
“I’m sorry. That sounds rough.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Until I turned twelve, they had joint custody. And then Dad started dating some woman Mom despised, so she decided to sue for full custody of me. Dad got pissed and decided he deserved full custody. And that’s when the head games began.”
“Head games…?”
“The custody battle was even uglier than the divorce. They used me to hurt each other.”
Her eyes widen. “How so?”
“Whenever I was alone with Dad, he’d try to coerce me into saying bad shit about Mom. She did the same thing. If I complained to Dad that Mom wouldn’t let me play ball hockey with my friends until I cleaned my room, suddenly there’d be a social worker coming by and asking me if I felt ‘socially isolated’ by my mother. If I told Mom that Dad let me eat sugary cereal before bedtime, a different social worker would show up interrogating me about everything Dad fed me. It was all being documented too. Every word I said went right back to the lawyers.”
“Oh my gosh, that’s awful.”
“They were throwing out accusations of neglect, emotional abuse, ‘nutritional deprivation.’” I shake my head in disapproval. “And I couldn’t tell them how I felt about it. About anything at all, in fact. Otherwise the blame game would start.”
“The blame game?”
“If I was sad about something? It’s your father’s fault. If I was mad? Your mother’s fault. I was nervous about the school play? It’s because your dad didn’t run lines with you. If something scared me? It’s ’cause your mom’s raising a pussy.” I let out a breath as I remember how exhausting it was to have a single conversation with them. Hell, it’s equally exhausting now.