“Can I ask what happened your junior year?” The question left my lips before I could stop it, making Holland’s eyes go so wide with surprise that I followed up with, “You don’t have to answer if you’re not comfortable.”
“No, it’s… okay,” she replied genuinely, though she was still staring somewhat stunned at me. “I’m not… not comfortable. It’s just Adam never even asked. So I guess I’m surprised you want to know.”
I was too.
I’d gone a long time being content with the picture I had of Holland Maxwell. It was by no means complete, but it was clear enough, so I never wondered at length about the missing puzzle pieces. They had never really bothered me. Until now.
“Okay, so I will happily go into that mess,” she started humorously before leaning across the counter to place my elaborately plated French toast in front of me. “But you have to take a bite of this first, because it’s still warm and it’s really good and it’s technically your birthday gift from me.”
I smiled at the look on her face—confidence mixed with excitement as she watched me take a bite.
And pause immediately, because holy shit.
I looked up at her so fast she snorted, biting her grin back as I kept my eyes on her through my second bite, trying to figure out what was so good about what I was tasting. “You changed something,” I finally said.
“Mm-hm. Still exactly the same and yet completely different, right?”
“Exactly. What did you add?”
“It’s a secret,” she grinned. “And by that I mean the answer is right in front of you. You just have to look.”
I narrowed my eyes, squinting at her then my plate. But when I looked back at her, she laughed.
“It’s okay, don’t hurt yourself,” she said, reveling in the dry look I shot her as she folded her arms and leaned against the counter. “Anyway. Getting into the story of junior year…” she started, sounding much brighter than I would have expected given the topic. “As you may know, my mom was a bit of a smotherer.”
“In an understatement.”
“Mm-hm. I definitely spent a lot of my teenaged years begging her for chances to do the same things my friends and classmates were doing. Like going to movies without parental supervision. Halloween parties. Dances. She said no to all of it, obviously, and by the end of sophomore year, I had my best friend Kelsey and her mom helping me beg my mom to let me do something special, because everyone in town knew how tight a leash she kept me on,” she said, reminding me of something Adam had once told me—that their neighbors used to call her Rapunzel for how seldom Jeannie let her out of the house.
Christ. I shook my head with fresh disbelief of her mother as Holland went on.
“So, since our family had been close to the Shaffers for like, ten years, and Mom actually liked Kelsey’s mom, we finally wore her down, and she agreed to do a mother daughter cruise with them to the Bahamas. And me, Kelsey, and Kelsey’s mom were so excited for months, but then the time came for the trip and Mom came down with some stomach bug, so she said we couldn’t go. But Dad had already paid for it so he convinced her it’d be fine. That Kelsey’s mom was just as strict. That she’d take good care of me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Somehow I doubt that Kelsey’s mom was just as strict.”
“Oh, Kelsey’s mom wasn’t strict at all,” Holland snorted. “She just used to pretend she agreed with all my mom’s ranting and raving, because that was the easy thing to do. But really, she was like everyone else in town. Thought my mom was over-the-top. Bit of a nut. She raised Kelsey with tons of freedom, so when we got on the cruise, she let us room alone and she didn’t check on us after bedtime, so of course, Kelsey decided to go out one night and meet the other young kids on the ship that we’d seen around…” Holland trailed off, cringing at herself for a second as she used her fork to cut a piece of her toast. “And I was super nervous, but I just felt like this was my one and only chance to be like every other girl my age. So basically, despite my very high discomfort levels, I followed whatever Kelsey did that night. When Kelsey flirted with a boy, I flirted with his friend. When Kelsey went to make out with the boy, I went to make out with mine. But once we were alone, it just… escalated. Fast. To a point where I couldn’t just go along with it anymore…”
She trailed off again, suddenly looking down at my chest and my arms, alerting me to the fact that my every muscle had gone rigid.
“You look like you’re going to punch a wall,” she frowned.
“I’m not. What did he do?” I asked.
“It’s not what you think,” she assured me. “He… put his fingers inside me. I yelled for him to stop, Kelsey came running, and then it was over,” she said hastily. But then she tilted her head with a bit of a wry look. “Well. I guess that was actually just the beginning.”
“Your mom found out,” I presumed.
She winced and nodded. “I was so off when I got home. And I was a terrible liar, so she knew something happened. And she went looking for my diary while I was in the shower.”
Of course she did. “I take it she went a little crazy?” I guessed as Holland popped a blueberry in her mouth.
She shook her head, taking her time to chew and swallow before she answered. “Fucking nuclear.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well.” Holland straightened up and took a deep breath, as if this part of the story took a little more out of her. “She started by telling everyone she could about what happened. Like it wouldn’t humiliate me. She was ‘warning them,’ she said. She even went to the school about it. Wanted them to know ‘what kind of person’ Kelsey’s mom was, since she was involved with all the school events and volunteering. She
sent emails. Literally sent emails detailing what happened to me on my summer vacation. To all the parents she knew,” she said, looking up at my reaction, which I assumed was the facial equivalent of Jesus fuck because she nodded as if to say yeah. “She wanted everyone to see Kelsey’s mom as a criminal. She did everything short of going door to door with flyers about how terrible the Shaffers were. Throwing around words like ‘child abuse.’ She picked me up from school one day and screamed at Kelsey in front of all our friends.”