On Sunday, as I was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a coffee, I saw Cole’s parents’ Range Rover parked in the driveway, and then they left, and not long after that, I saw Cole bring his bike out of the garage and ride off, looking entirely handsome and very in shape in that brightly-colored spandex riding outfit of his. I had planned to do some stuff around the house, but when Amy texted and asked if I wanted to go to the lake with her, I said sure.
She came over and picked me up, and we stopped at the market first and got some food and a bottle of lemonade to bring with us. As we were setting our stuff up on the beach, I could hear my phone going off, alerting me that I had another text. My mother had sent me several texts already that morning, and I just had a feeling that it was going to be her again. And sure enough, when I looked down at the screen, it was.
I’ll call you later, I messaged back, and then I turned my phone off and tossed it into my beach bag.
“Everything okay?” Amy asked. She was stretched out on her towel, but looking over at me, her sunglasses perched on top of her head.
“Oh, it’s fine,” I said. “Just my mother harassing me.”
Amy laughed. “My mother was harassing me last week; she wants me to do this CrossFit thing with her. She’s always getting onto some new fitness kick and wanting me to do it with her. What’s your mom harassing you about?”
“She wants me to come down to Boston with Cole and Declan. She’s like, really trying to get me to do it. She’s acting like it’s the only thing in the world she wants, and I’m ruining her life by denying her the experience.”
“Oooh, I would love to go down to the city,” Amy said. “I don’t go down there nearly enough. It’s kind of intimidating to me, actually. But it probably wouldn’t be that way if I went down there more often.”
“Boston is a huge clusterfuck,” I said. “So far as cities go, it’s fine, but I grew up there, and I’m not dying to return anytime soon.”
“Even if it’s just for a visit? When my mom starts pestering me about the workout stuff, I usually go to the gym with her a couple times, and then she’ll leave me alone for a while, until she gets on some other kick. It’s not that bad, though.”
“I don’t know...there’s other factors involved.”
“Like what? If I’m prying, you can just tell me so, but I’m kind of an expert when it comes to ways to get your mother to stop harassing you.”
“It’s not really my mom that I have the problem with. We’re total opposites, but we have a decent relationship. It’s my stepfather that’s the problem.”
“Oh,” Amy said. “Stepfathers... I don’t have any experience with them.”
“Well, you’re lucky then. My stepfather tried to sexually assault me when I was a teenager,” I said. “Nothing ended up happening, but it’s basically ruined our relationship, which I think is kind of a given.”
“Have you talked to your mother about it?”
“I tried. And since nothing happened, and because it was so long ago now, she doesn’t believe me. I don’t know if she would have believed if me I told her right when it happened, either, but it makes things difficult. I just have no desire to be around him.”
“That’s understandable. You know, something sort of similar happened to me when I was a freshman in college,” Amy said. “I went to this party, and there was this guy there that I sort of knew from one of my classes. I had a little too much to drink—okay, I had way too much—and he kind of ended up taking advantage of me.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “What an asshole. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I felt pretty messed up about it for a while. I even went to see the campus counselor and everything. For almost six months, actually, but it was helpful.”
“That’s good.” I wondered if maybe it would’ve been helpful if I had gone to talk with someone, if that would’ve helped me move past it. It seems a little late for that now, though.
“It was. And I actually ended up talking to the guy about it. I didn’t feel threatened by him or anything, like he was going to hurt me physically, so I confronted him about it. And he apologized.”
“He did?”
She nodded. “He was drunk, too. I’m not saying that makes it better or anything, but it definitely helped me get over it. Maybe if you talked to your stepfather about it, it might help. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to, either, though. I think it helped me. Confronting him about it.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”
And I did continue to think about it. We stayed at the lake all day, going in for a swim when we started to get too hot, then returning to our towels to work on our tans. The whole time, in the back of my mind, I was weighing the pros and cons of bringing this up with Bill. Would it make things better, as Amy seemed to think? Or would it make things worse? Or maybe it wouldn’t change anything at all.
By the time I got home later, my skin felt warm and tight, and I could tell that my shoulders were slightly burned. But it had been nice to relax all day, to have a girlfriend to talk to. And I’d been thinking about what she’d said and what Cole had said the other night, and maybe they had a point. Maybe I was being too stubborn about this whole thing.
After I took a shower and changed, I called my mother.
“Finally!” she said when she answered. “I was beginning to think that you were ignoring me.”
“I’m not ignoring you. I was at the beach all day with my friend from work.”