Prologue
In my experience, telling the truth very rarely sets you free; it weighs you down with an entirely new set of problems and therefore should be avoided at all costs. But my sister Caroline’s wedding reception and the booze that went with it proved a toxic combo, and here I am seven years later, still reeling from the repercussions of opening my mouth.
If you want you can watch me self-destruct on YouTube. “Trash at the Bash” continues to be very popular, or so I was told in the rejection letter from Holborn Secretarial Services.
Sometimes people ask me why I did it—why I chose Caroline and James’s wedding to divulge my secrets. I never answer them because the truth is...
I did it because it felt good.
Actually, it felt great, but now I would do anything to stop my eighteen-year-old self, hold her down and sit on her because I’m not that messed-up girl anymore.
Unfortunately, I’m still paying the price for her actions.
Revenge is a dish best served cold? What a load of crap. My vengeance against Caroline had been a long time coming but the joy of it lasted only as long as it took to finish my speech. James served his up hot, so scalding it’s seared into my heart and will be for as long as I live. Of course, the whopper I told alongside the truth is probably more to blame for that than anything else, but I figure there wouldn’t have been one without the other. Just saying.
Does my conscience hurt? Like a son of a bitch. But coming clean after all this time would only harm the person I love the most. Luckily, I’ve got a plan that will allow the truth to stay cosily buried and still get me what I want.
If it works.
PART ONE
Chapter One
Mask of Horror
Brighton, 7 years ago
My mother told me the family secret when I was twelve years old, curled up in pain with my very first menstrual cramps. While I lay in bed daydreaming about growing bigger boobs and getting noticed by the older boys, she thought it was the perfect time to shock me with the evils of sex.
“I was a pregnant virgin, Paisley,” she said, her face clenched as tightly as my abdomen. “I was already carrying your sister when I walked down the aisle.”
A pregnant virgin?
One look into her dulled eyes told me she wasn’t joking. “But you said nice girls don’t let boys touch them.”
“Your father lied to me—he lured me into sinful intimacy with promises of marriage.” Her lips twisted with the sour taste of her memories. “He said I couldn’t get pregnant if he pressed his sword into the entrance of my forbidden passage but didn’t go any further. The devil was in me that day and I let him.”
I controlled the urge to roll my eyes. My parents may have been born in the UK but their uptight upbringing had been very much small-town Spain. They’d grown up a part of the tightly knit, ultra-conservative group of Spanish Catholics living in Trenmore Village, Sussex.
Sword and forbidden passage were about as graphic as my mother got, not that she’d ever spoken about such things to me before. I’d been eavesdropping on her conversations with Caroline. At nineteen and away at university, my sister got a lot of lectures on fornication.
“You can’t get pregnant this way, María,” my mother sneered, mimicking my father’s voice. “But as usual, Juan Carlos Benítez was wrong.” She spat his name out like a piece of rotten meat.
Years later I learned the mechanics of virgin pregnancy during a sex-ed class where the boys tittered and the girls tried not to blush. Basically, eager spermatozoids in a man’s sack take a preliminary look before the guy unloads, travelling up in his pre-cum to test the waters. If it’s warm and wet, they can go for the long haul and beat their stronger pals to the prize. Feisty little buggers.#p#分页标题#e#
My father had been true to his word, inserting only the tip before getting himself off. Alas, he left a little bit of himself behind. When my papi Honorio noticed my mother’s expanding waistline he marched my parents to St. Albert’s, where they were romanically and apostolically joined in misery.
Afterward they fled the gossiping tongues of Trenmore for Brighton, where my father still works as a construction labourer and my mother stacks shelves at Asda.
Caroline thought our parents’ past was humiliating but I laughed every time I thought about it, mentally sniggering when my holier-than-thou parents lectured me on morality.
But I wasn’t sniggering now. The Find Out pregnancy test sat in my hand like a piece of lead. Tomorrow was supposed to be the first day of my new, responsible life. For starters there would be less alcohol. No, make that zero booze. And no more ABCs either. Okay, okay, the upper in my pocket was burning a hole, but it would be my last one. My decision had been made: no drugs, no procrastination about college and definitely no self-pity.