“Hey, Linds.”
“Hey, yourself. You will never believe what I just heard.”
Olivia tenses. It’s already out there, it’s too late to contain it. Their lives, upended, ruined. “What did you hear?”
“Perry is coming home.”
4
THE PAST
Nashville, Tennessee
April 1999
“He’s here, he’s here. Oh my God, wait until you see him, he’s gorgeous.”
Olivia’s mother drops the curtain and flits around her bedroom like a demented butterfly. Her father is downstairs, waiting with the camera for Olivia to make her grand entrance.
“And so are you, my darling girl. You two will be the talk of prom.”
Olivia smiles, swallows back her nerves, and gives her nose one last sweep with the powder brush. A few grains fall onto the strapless bustline of the pale chrysanthemum organza, and she carefully brushes them away. Prom. Rite of passage. She will be going through many rites of passage tonight. First corsage. First black-tie event. First time.
It’s been planned for weeks. They have a hotel room—ostensibly, the whole crowd is going to be there, but they’ve managed a suite with an adjoining bedroom, so they’ll be able to sneak off for privacy once people start passing out. She’s not nervous to lose her virginity, not to him. They’re going to be together forever, she knows this in her heart. They have a tie that will see them through everything, a link that’s been in place since the day they met. The day the Benders moved to town, and she saw the boys across the street for the first time, she’d felt it, that zing, an invisible thread that crossed the street and tied her to him. He’d seen her lingering on the porch, threw up a hand in a jaunty wave, already so comfortable with his new surroundings. Then he punched his brother in the arm—she knew it was his brother, they looked alike, not exactly, but they were similar in the ways that counted—and the other boy made brief eye contact with her, then looked shyly away. The girl, younger, pretty, had come tearing around from the side yard screaming about a rope swing, and the three of them had disappeared through the hedge without a word. But the moment was ossified for her, clear as amber in her mind’s eye.
And here they are, six years later, vivacious, elegant Olivia Hutton and studious, athletic Park Bender, the most popular couple in school, about to embark on the most important night of their lives, the night that will change everything, and they both know it. Not just know it, accept it, encourage it, relish it. They’ve been counting down the months, weeks, days, hours—and now minutes, and it’s finally here, the life-altering moment has arrived in the back of a limo with his brother Perry, flying solo despite myriad options, and two other couples, and she’s never been more ready for anything in her short seventeen and a half years on this earth.
The night does not go as planned.
Oh, it starts well enough. The photographs are perfect, Olivia sweeping down the grand staircase (she’s always wondered if her mother insisted on buying the house in preparation for this moment). Her mother cries a little. Her father looks ridiculously proud. Park charms them both, and they sign the pledge that they won’t drink and drive—a family tradition before every date—even though they’ve paid for the limo for the whole night and the following morning.
Thank heavens there are no more pledges to make to the parents. If they knew what was planned...
They arrive to the adulation of their friends and teachers—their clique mobbing them like typical adolescent sycophants, with squeals of admiration and high-fives and knowing looks.
The band is great, they dance and take photos, and someone manages to spike the punch so they’re all too merry and the teachers are pissed off.
No, it doesn’t start to go south until it’s time to crown the King and Queen and Perry Bender is named Prom King instead of Park. He was on the court, sure, of course he was, but no one expected it. Park is the King of the school. Everyone knows it. Perry hadn’t even bothered with a date.
So it is Perry standing next to Olivia in her gaudy store-bought crown being photographed and cheered, looking both thrilled and bashful and not a little shocked, while Park storms from the gymnasium with a scowl, followed, as Olivia catches out of the corner of her eye, by Alison Banks. Alison is moving surreptitiously, as if heading toward the bathrooms but instead ducking left at the last moment, out the door Park slammed through.
It is Perry who kisses Olivia’s hand gallantly to the cheers of the student body, who takes advantage of the King-and-Queen dance to hold Olivia in his arms in the most confusing way. Perry has been as much a brother to her as Lindsey has been a sister, and suddenly, he is taller than Park, leaner; his arms are strong and warm and feel similar to his brother’s but different, too. He smells of cedar and woodsmoke, so alien in this proximity. He’s always been a handsome boy, but tonight he looks rakishly charming in his tuxedo, his too-long hair in a tight ponytail at the nape of his neck, his braces recently expunged from his bright white teeth, and his eyes, gray with the barest hint of blue around the edge of the iris, heavily lashed—staring deep into her own in ways that make her stomach twitch. When had he gotten so good-looking?
She’s never seen Perry in this light, never.
It was her fault, of course. She should have shunned the dance, escaped after Park immediately, smoothed over the ruffled feathers, abdicated, perhaps, to someone else on the court, but something about how Park handled the situation, not with good humor or even begrudgingly, but throwing a small tantrum and stalking out, does not endear him to her at this moment. Yes, it was a disappointment, but still, she’s been crowned Queen, and he could at least acknowledge this coup de grâce for her.
When the dance is over, Perry stops staring soulfully into her eyes, squeezes her arms, and returns to his regularly scheduled brotherly state. “He’s pretty pissed. Let’s go talk to him.”
And it is the two of them—Olivia and Perry—who seek out Park. The two of them who find Park with his hand up Alison Bank’s slinky black dress, her hair spilling out of its hundred-dollar updo and her eyes clenched in ecstasy.
The two of them who flee—Olivia first, Perry right after her, with Park stammering and calling, and Alison stamping away unfulfilled—to the parking lot, where Olivia breaks down, and is comforted by Perry, Perry the second brother, the friend, the witty jouster of puns and illicit six-packs, who tells her the affair has been going on for a month at least and holds her in his arms as she weeps.
It was inevitable that he would brush away her tears, inevitable that he would run a finger across her lower lip, inevitable that he would kiss her.
Inevitable that they would lose their virginity to each other in the back of the limousine—Olivia in a sheer, unadulterated rage fuck, Perry in something else, something deeper and quieter, but no less intense, no less strong.