I Was Here(23)

             But I don’t. “Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask. Now it’s my voice that sounds like a growl.

             Ben’s pack of cigarettes sits on the table, and in lieu of smoking one, he clicks the lighter on and off, the flame hissing each time. “You seemed like you needed to know.” The way he says it sounds like an accusation.

             “Why are you telling me this?” I repeat.

             Ben’s eyes are momentarily illuminated by the flame. And once again, I can see there are so many shades of guilt. Ben’s, like mine, is tinged with red-hot fury, hotter than the fire he’s toying with.

             “She talked about you, you know,” he says.

             “Really? She didn’t talk about you.” Which is untrue, of course, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she had a moniker for him. Anyhow, turns out that he wasn’t the tragic one.

             “She told me how at one of your cleaning jobs, some guy tried to grab your ass and you twisted his arm so far behind his back that he yelped and then upped your pay.”

             Yeah, that happened to me with Mr. Purdue. A ten-dollar-a-week raise. That’s how much an unwanted cop of my ass is worth.

             “She called you Buffy.”

             And more than the thing with Mr. Purdue, that’s how I know that Meg did tell him about me. Buffy was her nickname for me when she thought I was being particularly kick-ass, à la Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. She called herself Willow, the magical sidekick, but she had it wrong: she was Buffy and Willow, strength and magic, all folded into one. I was just basking in her glow.

             It feels wrong that he knows this about me, like he has seen my embarrassing baby pictures. Details he has no right to. “She told you a lot for a one-night stand,” I say.

             He looks pained. What a good faker he is, that Ben McCallister. “We used to be friends.”

             “I’m not sure friends is the word for it.”

             “No,” he insists. “Before it all shot to shit, we were friends.”

             The emails. The banter. The rock talk. The sudden change. “So what happened?” I ask, even though I know what happened.

             Still, it’s shocking to hear him say it, the way he says it: “We fucked.”

             “You slept together,” I correct. Because I know that much. I know that Meg, after what happened to her that other time, would not have done that with someone unless she was into him. “Meg wouldn’t just fuck someone.”

             “Well, I fucked her,” Ben repeats. “And when you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.” He flicks the lighter on and lets it go dark again. “I knew it would, and I still did it.”

             Now that’s he’s being honest, it’s both repellent and magnetic, like a terrible car crash you can’t help rubbernecking, even though you know it’ll give you nightmares later. “Why would you do that, if you knew that it would ruin things?”

             He sighs and shakes his head. “You know how it is, when it’s in the moment and it’s all happening and you don’t think about the day after.” He looks at me, but the thing is, I don’t know. It would probably shock people to learn, but I’ve never. When you are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap. Most of the time it seems inevitable anyway. Still, I didn’t need put a nail in the coffin by screwing any of the losers in Shitburg.

             I don’t say anything, just stare at the empty playground.