Page 13 of False Idols

Nevaeh’s eyes are on me and it’s like the first hit of a drug. Like the first sip of liquor after a long fucking day. That burn is perfect. It hurts in the best possible way and I smile at her. She looks like she’s going to throw up.

Good. I hope she fucking gets sick all over her fucking self. The bitch.

She falls back a step and grabs onto the girl walking with her. Nevaeh looks just the way I imagined her. Terrified and trapped. My little liar wants to run, but she’s got nowhere to go. Not in broad daylight with a reporter shoving a microphone in her face and my parents standing with me. Even if we weren’t here, she’d be surrounded. I see the looks from the students that recognize her. The ones that knew me. They look at me with a mix of admiration and pity. I can almost hear their whispers.

“He didn’t deserve that.”

“He was such a nice guy.”

I’m not a fucking nice guy. Not anymore.

I smile at Nevaeh and ignore the reporter that’s firing questions off at her like a sniper. Honestly, I don’t even know what she’s asking Nevaeh, because I can’t look anywhere but at Nevaeh’s face. She’s beautiful. I didn’t think that before, not before I spent hours, days…fucking years, staring at her pictures. I’ve memorized every curve and dip of her. The way her hair looks in the sun, the depth of brown of her eyes, the way she tans in the summer. I know it all.

She’s mine.

But even if I hadn’t, there’s no denying the beauty she grew into from the gangly teenager that used to sweep my floors. She was awkward then, knobby kneed with baby fat on her face and clothes that didn’t fit right.

But now?

Now she’s fresh faced with curves that I want to bruise. She’s fucking perfect.

“Beau?” She whispers and I feel that whisper hit me like a knife to the chest. It’s work to keep a pleasant smile on my face. All I want to do is cross the space between us and shove the reporter and cameraman away from her. I want to drag her inside where no one is going to see us and make her pay for what she did to me, but it’s then that I realize something.

For four fucking years I’ve spent my days and nights thinking about this moment. Staring at Nevaeh’s photo until the after image of it is burned into my eyes. Even when I tried to sleep, she was there. Always, my beautiful, perfect, fucking liar was there, just out of reach. But now she’s not. Now she’s fucking not and something happened to me while I was locked away with the ghost of Nevaeh haunting me, because it really is true what they say.

It’s a thin line between love and hate, and I’ve blurred that line until I can barely see it.

I don’t know if I want to fuck her or kill her.

Motherfucker.

6

NEVAEH

I’ve thought of Beau Du Pont every moment since the day I put him in prison. I didn’t eat for that whole week because every time I thought of Beau, I threw up, which just made me think of that night again. I stopped eating so there was nothing to throw up and it took my mom bringing down the kids from my youth group to pray over me for me to eat anything and keep it down. I really only gave in then because I was embarrassed to see them in my room unexpectedly with pity in their eyes.

I ate then and eventually was able to think of Beau without getting sick. Right now I’m glad I haven’t eaten the pizza we were about to get, because I have zero doubts that I would have thrown up all over Sunny.

“Beau?” I can’t believe he’s here, but there he is. Plain as day and even more beautiful than I remember him. He’s so much more grown up than I remember. Before, he had boyish looks and the kind of charm that a nineteen year old boy had when you were fifteen and didn’t know shit about the world. I thought the sun rose because Beau Du Pont told it to, then. But that never changed. It can’t have, with the way my heart feels like it’s going a million miles an hour.

“Can we ask you a few questions, Ms. Santiago?” There’s a microphone in my face and I jump back in surprise from the reporter that I forgot about for the split second that my eyes met Beau’s. He’s smiling at me. Why is he smiling at me?

I don’t deserve him to be smiling at me with the fall sun high in the sky and making him look like my dreams come true. His dark hair is slightly longer now than the way he kept it when he was in high school, but it looks good. There’s product in it, just enough to keep it swept away from his face. I’d have given anything to touch his hair. His face is more angular now, jawline sharp and strong with a hit of stubble there that wasn’t around before. He’s bigger, too. Beau was always bigger than me, but now?

Now he feels like a mountain with broad shoulders that pull the material of his dress shirt tight and his trousers fit to a tee. Even with the changes that make him look like a man with just a hint of the boy I loved, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

His eyes.

At least…almost. Beau’s eyes are a beautifully clear kind of blue that makes me think of the sea. They look the same, but the longer I stare at him, I see there’s something else there that wasn’t before. A hardness that’s there and gone in a flash when the camera swings his way.

“We are here with Beau Du Pont and his family on Bloom State’s Move In Day, but this day is so much more than that. This perfect autumn day is when Bloom's very own confronts the girl that helped put him away, in a case that rocked our small community and stole four years of his life.”

That’s the bucket of ice water I need to snap back to reality and I fall back a step. Sunny follows close and Pastor Mike comes up to the reporter. “Now, now, miss. I think there’s been a misunderstanding-” he starts, but the reporter isn’t letting up.

“Ms. Santiago, what do you have to say for the role you played in Beau Du Pont’s wrongful conviction?”

“I-I-” I stammer and the words won’t come. I’ve had a recurring nightmare where this happens. Where I’m dragged out in front of everybody and have to account for my sins, but I could never find my voice then and I can’t find it now either. I look at Beau. “I’m sorry.”

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