Page 18 of Beast Mode Todd
“I pretty much put it out of my mind until…until your cousin caught me smoking pot. You have to understand back then I was terrified of my parents ever knowing I did such a thing.” She was becoming agitated, so I calmed herdown.
“Finish it.” I kept my voice calm though inside I was a burning cauldron ofrage.
“He said he’d tell them unless I did him a favor. I thought he just wanted me to seduce you or something. I didn’t question his motives, I just didn’t want him to tell my parents. They would’ve killedme.”
“I didn’t want to, but he kinda forced me. I had no choice.” She closed her eyes and a tear slid down her cheek. “After you rejected me the second time he got really mad. I told him I’d done what he asked but he said something like it wasn’t over. I didn’t hear from him for a few weeks after that and then one night he stopped me when I was sitting in the Dairy Queen parking lot. I think he’d been following me or something.”
“I started to tell him that you weren’t interested and it was a waste of time, but he said he wanted me to do something different this time. He just wanted me to tell my friends that we’d had sex. I didn’t think it would get us here. I mean people make up stuff like that all the time and nothing like this ever happened.”
I kept quiet and let it all sink in as the pieces fell into place. “So you told your friends, thenwhat?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. The next thing I knew you were being arrested and my dad was livid. Someone had told him about my lie and by then it was too late. I know now that I should’ve spoken up, that I could’ve ended it all. But then I heard about the drugs and figured they’d forget all about the other. I guess I was wrong.”
“You have to believe me, I’ve been a different person since then. I stopped hanging out, stopped going to parties. I just locked myself away until I went away to college and I’ve been living this way ever since. If I could take it all back I would I promise. I’m so sorry.”
She broke down while I hung my head letting it all sink in. Until she said the words I had held out hope that the conclusions I’d drawn in the early morning hours were wrong. That there was no way the man I had grown up with and treated more like a brother than the distant cousin he was, could do such a thing.
Why? Why had he concocted such evil against me? Was it the business? Money? I couldn’t recall a time when we had been at odds except for the usual childhood run-ins over the years that had never amounted to anything more than a stupid falling out over nothing.
Nowhere in my memory was there anything that would lead me to believe this of him, but I knew it to be true. We didn’t speak for the longest time. There was much to think about, not the least being the fact that I had held her responsible for something that was not entirely her fault.
I understood a young girl’s fear of her parents finding out she was experimenting with weed. Knowing the stigma attached to drugs of any kind in this neck of the woods, it was easy to see how that would strike unreasonable fear in her heart. She fucked up yeah, but in this, she was as much a victim asI.