Reminders of Him

I’m so nervous I’m shaking.

I look for my parents and find them in the backyard. My father has items from the RV spread out across the grass, and he’s using the water hose to clean them. My mother is sitting in the patio love seat reading a book.

I take a seat next to her. She looks up from her book and smiles, but when she sees the look on my face, she closes the paperback.

I drop my head in my hands and I start to cry. I can’t help it. I feel like the lives of everyone I love are hanging on this moment, and it’s fucking overwhelming.

“Ledger,” my mother says. “Oh, honey.” She wraps her arm around me and hugs me.

CHAPTER FORTY

KENNA

I woke up with a migraine due to how much I cried last night.

I expected Ledger to text me or call me, but he never did. Not that I want him to. A clean break is better than a messy one.

I hate that my choices from that one night years ago have somehow created another casualty all these years later. How long will the aftershocks from that night continue? Will I feel the ramifications forever?

Sometimes I wonder if we’re all born with equal amounts of good and evil. What if no one person is more or less malevolent than another, and that we all just release our bad at different times, in different ways?

Maybe some of us expel most of our bad behavior as toddlers, while some of us are absolute horrors during the teenage years. And then maybe there are those who expend very little malice until they’re adults, and even then, it just seeps out slowly. A little bit every day until we die.

But then that would mean there are people like me. Those who release their bad all at once—in one horrific night.

When you get all your evil out at once, the impact is much bigger than when it seeps out slowly. The destruction you leave behind covers a much bigger circumference on the map and takes up a much larger space in people’s memories.

I don’t want to believe that there are good people and bad people, and no in-between people. I don’t want to believe I’m worse than anyone else, as if there’s a bucket full of evil somewhere within me that continues to refill every time it runs empty. I don’t want to believe I’m capable of repeating behavior I’ve displayed in the past, but even after all these years, people are still suffering because of me.

Despite the devastation I’ve left in my wake, I am not a bad person. I am not a bad person.

It took five years of weekly therapy sessions to help me realize this. I only recently learned how to say it out loud. “I am not a bad person.”

I’ve been listening to the playlist Ledger made me all morning. It really is just a bunch of songs that have nothing to do with anything sad. I don’t know how he managed to find this many songs. It had to take him forever.

I slide Mary Anne’s headphones over my ears, and I put the playlist on shuffle and start to clean my apartment. I want my security deposit back when I figure out where I’m moving to, so I don’t need a reason for Ruth not to refund it to me. I’ll leave the apartment ten times cleaner than I found it.

I clean for about ten minutes when I start to hear a beat in the song that doesn’t belong. It takes me way too long to realize the beat is actually not in the song.

It’s a knock.

I slip off my headphones and hear it even louder this time. Someone is definitely knocking at my front door. My heart rate speeds up because I don’t want it to be Ledger, but I need it to be Ledger. One more kiss wouldn’t break me. Maybe.

I tiptoe toward the door and look through the peephole.

It’s Ledger.

I press my forehead to the door and try to make the right decision. He’s having a weak moment, but I shouldn’t do this. His weak moments will be my downfall if I cater to them. We’ll just go back and forth until we’re both completely broken.

I open my texts to him on my phone and type out, I’m not opening the door.

I watch him read it through the peephole, but his expression is unwavering. He looks right into the peephole and points down to the doorknob.

Fuck. Why did he have to point? I unlock the dead bolt and open the door just two inches. “Don’t kiss me or touch me or say anything sweet.”

Ledger smiles. “I’ll do my best.”

I open the door cautiously, but he doesn’t even try to come inside once I have the door open. He stands up straight and says, “Do you have a minute?”