“Oh, you’re really selling yourself by talking like that.”

Theo groaned to the ceiling.  “I’m sorry.”

“I thought you said you’d stop bothering me about this if I did the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The pictures.”

“Christ, Lake, I can’t jack off every day of my fucking life.”

I stared with true amazement.  “You’re an asshole.”

“And you’re a fucking priss.”

I went to leave at that point but he pinned me to his bed and laughed at how I couldn’t move.  He was a wrestler – he and Callum both – and while Callum was the one going to college for it, Theo was still very much strong enough to immobilize me.  I cursed him out when he finally let me go and stormed out of his house, in tears by the time I got home.  Caroline freaked out, of course, and when she couldn’t get anything out of me, she sent me to Callum.  He flew into a rage when he saw that my wrists were still red.  “I’m going to kill him,” he said, eerily calm.  He was halfway out the door when I stopped him.  I refused to let him go and his stare seared through me.  “Are you going to break up with him?”

“Of course I am.”  I had every intention of breaking up with Theo.  I just couldn’t figure out the best time.  I wanted to not think about it for a little but Callum was so worked up I knew that answer wasn’t going to suffice.

“If you give him time, he’s just going to put his hands on you again.”

“What, you want me to dump him the next time I see him? At Logan’s party?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“I dare you.”

“It’s not your turn.”

“Fine.  Dare me something now so it is my turn.”

I dared him to cut in the second Theo went crazy on me when I ended it.  I was scared about how he’d react – he could get mean in a way I didn’t know how to handle.  Callum was often brusque and blunt but Theo’s brand of anger had him falling still and quiet and lashing out when I least expected it.  He’d gone crazy on me that day for not having sex with him so I had no idea what kind of reaction he’d have to being dumped.  As far as I knew, he’d never been before.  So we devised a signal.  If Theo got in any way threatening, I’d look at Callum, tuck my hair behind my ear, and he’d come right to me.

And that was exactly what happened that night.  I told Theo it was over and he lost it.  He was the one who always broke up with me.  The fact that it was me this time seemed to make it more of a reality for him so he immediately got in my face and said every awful thing under the sun.  It made me wish I’d never told him about Trish’s existence.  I never even talked to Callum about her but Theo saw me messaging her on Facebook one day – I never did it at home – and looked through her photos.  He was delighted to know that I’d come from “trailer park trash.”  It was the only thing he had on me that no one else knew about.  He saw her provocative pictures and guilted me into taking some for him.

“It feels bizarre bringing it up now,” Theo said as we sat in the café, almost a decade removed from the three big incidents in high school.  The fight, the posts online, and then that other horrible thing.  I didn’t know what to call it but it was way too lopsided to be labeled a fight.  When I thought about it, I hated Theo all over again and wondered what the hell I was even doing there with him.  He could see it in my face so his apology came hastily, all at once.  “I’m sorry about everything, Lake.  About the way I treated you, about making you take the pictures and then fucking… posting them.  For Christ’s sake, I can’t even believe I ever did it.”

Callum came between us when my breakup with Theo got predictably hostile.  Theo had thrown the first punch but after Callum pinned him easily to the wall, he begged for a truce – only to slam Callum into a big frame or mirror or something made of glass that ended up slicing up his back.  I tried to pull Theo off but the back of his hand smacked me sufficiently away and for that, Callum knocked him out.  He took one look at the blood on my face and then beat Theo so endlessly that none of us could tell exactly when he fell unconscious.

Our families fell out after that night.  Caroline stopped going to as many charity functions.  She was already losing her place post-divorce but this was the nail in the coffin.  Her son had sent a Spencer boy to the hospital, and all because of “that Lake girl.”  I was liked until I had the gall to break up with Theo Spencer and get him beat up.  After that, I was “trash.”  Theo had seen the way I smarted at the word.  He’d seen the message Trish sent me where she called me “worthless,” a “burden.”  He knew it would hurt so he spread it around.  And to really sell his point, he posted the naked pictures I’d taken for him the year before – online, for all to see.

I was humiliated.  Obviously.  I felt dirty.  But the worst part about that situation was seeing how embarrassed Caroline was.  She distanced herself from me for a couple days but it felt like an eternity.  I knew she didn’t want to think of me as anything but her perfect girl and I felt like the biggest disappointment to her.  I imagined that she was sitting in the dark on her bed and regretting the fact that I ever came into her life.  She gave up so much for me.  She should’ve sent me away when my grandma got sick.  She was just too good of a person to start something and quit halfway.  That was the only reason she kept me around.  I tried tallying up how much money she’d spent on me over the years and figuring out how long it would take me to pay it back.  But it was impossible and I was so filled with true shame that I couldn’t leave my room.  I spent the weekend shut in and skipped Monday at school.  I wouldn’t even let Callum in.  If I had, I’d have stopped him from seeing Theo before school that morning.  He was through with him but agreed to meet because he wanted the pictures taken down.  Tears still burned my eyes shut when I thought about what happened that day.

Damn it.  I stared into my drink, drowning once again in that guilt and shame.  My trip down memory lane had been so nice before Theo showed up.

“It still weighs on me, Lake.  I can’t stand for you to think that I treat women like that.  I was just a teenager then and what I did was… classless, to say the least.  So I wanted to get this apology off my chest.  We should’ve never ended that way.”  I was barely listening.  His words floated meaninglessly through my head as I realized something.  When I looked up suddenly from my coffee, my stare big and unblinking, Theo cocked his head and smiled at me.  “What is it, Lake?” he asked, looking charmed.

“I just realized it was never the pictures that bothered me.”

“What do you mean? Of course it was.”

“No.  I didn’t care about me.  I only cared about him.  What you did to him that morning.”

“Lake.”  He chuckled tensely.  “I was still in the hospital.  Where he sent me, by the way.”

“It wasn’t just some random crime.  Don’t deny it,” I said hotly.  And suddenly, the air shifted.  Theo’s smile started to sag.  It melted like candle wax into a smirk.  He studied the anger on my face and from the way he finally rolled his eyes, I could tell he’d given up on his gentleman act for the afternoon.  Glaring, I remembered exactly why I hated this man.  I could’ve forgiven him in some way if he’d just come clean but nearly a decade later, he was still denying it.  “Everyone knows you were behind it, they just don’t talk about it because of who you are.  But you know it yourself.  You, your brother and whoever was there that day – you guys did that to Callum.  Even if you weren’t one of the ones who hurt him, I know you planned it.  You made it happen.  You changed the course of his life forever.”

“Oh, Christ,” Theo laughed.  His whole demeanor transformed before my eyes as he leaned back and took his time to speak.  “If anything, Lake, you did that.”  He gave a little sniff of a smirk when I failed to come back.  “Callum had a path laid out for him since he was born.  You were the one who screwed that up for him.  For Caroline, too.  Everything was going fine for them before you came along.  But then boom, Grandma gets sick, you move in and suddenly, there’s divorce and fights and all this humiliation.  I didn’t have the power to spring all that on them, Lake, you did.  And to top it all off, you said thank you by bailing on them just like that.”  He shook his head and clucked at me like I was an amusingly disobedient child.  “I can only imagine what kind of trouble you got yourself into these past six years.  Shameful stuff, I’m sure.  So don’t talk to me about denying my past, Lake.  You’re in no place to judge anyone when you are and have always been the worst offender when it comes to keeping secrets and ruining lives.”