Page 33 of Her Property

Why was it coming back to her now? Why, no matter how hard she pushed, wouldn’t the memory stay down? Jake’s trauma must have pried her own out of her, even though it was nothing compared to his. She shouldn’t even care about it now. Hers was a joke gone wrong, that was all.

And yet she couldn’t run fast enough.

A circle of lights lit up in her mind, so bright she squinted, lifting her hands even though they weren’t really there.

The sound of the engines revving filled her ears as Cat burst out into the rocky clearing at the top of the rise. Her chest was heaving so hard she had to drop onto her knees. She bent over, leaning her hand down on the scrabbly rock, taking long deep inhales to try to get her breath back.

When she finally calmed down enough to slow her breathing, Cat looked out over the view in front of her. The hobby farm was down to her left—she could see the white blobs of the llamas in the field. Through the trees a battered red pick-up sat by the field with its driver door hanging open. It must be the farmer woman down there. It’s not the car. It’s not then.

But it felt like then.

Cat rolled onto her back, giving up on fighting the memory she’d been working so hard to forget.

She’d been seventeen. A senior in high school, the year she’d suddenly and inexplicably gotten popular. She could have been one of the girls in the diner yesterday, glowing with her newfound fame. Making eyes at the football star?.

Cat’s rise to popularity had been meteoric and unearned, and had all started when the high school long receiver, Justin Maplewood, had asked her out the first week of school.

It had been completely out of the blue. She’d been in the library doing her history homework with Laura, joking about a French exchange student Laura thought was cute. They were inseparable back then, having grown up nearly next door to each other, gone to the same schools, decided together that they wanted to be high-powered attorneys in New York City after finding Cat’s mother’s pile of John Grisham novels in her basement. They were both applying to Cornell that year. Like Laura, Catherine was a bookworm. The popular kids didn’t know she so much as existed, even though she’d gone to elementary school with most of them.

Justin had sauntered up to their table and told her he wanted to take her for a milkshake. Cat was so shocked she hadn’t noticed his friends hovering on the other side of the library stacks, not even hiding themselves well. Laura had, and that night, she’d called Catherine begging her not to go through with it. It had to be some kind of trick, she said. A dare.

But Cat hadn’t wanted to see Laura’s sense, so she’d gone on that date on Friday, and it had gone well. It had been fun, even, despite her being so nervous she’d hardly been able to talk for the first half of it. They’d gone on another date, and another, and after a couple of weeks, kids started saying hi to her in the hallways.

Justin had turned out to be sweet and charming, and all the things girls dreamed of when they fantasized about getting asked out by the popular boys. Cat saw less and less of Laura that year. She saw less and less of her textbooks too, and when it came time to fill out the applications for Cornell, Cat discovered she didn’t have the GPA for it anymore. She felt guilty for letting her grades slip, for abandoning their dream. For abandoning her friend. But this was her life, she’d told herself. She couldn’t say no to a boyfriend or a whole giant coterie of friends. What kind of life would that be? Besides, Justin was the real deal. He came to her family’s place for Sunday dinner. He took her to prom. He was even her first. She was in love.

Almost her whole family was as wooed by Justin as she was. Her two little sisters practically had hearts in their eyes when he came over. Only her older brother Jude was wary.

What does he see in you, anyway?he’d asked.She knew Jude didn’t mean that in a cruel way. He was just protective. He knew she was a quiet, shy girl. But he was wrong. He didn’t live at home anymore and only saw Justin on the occasional dinner when he came home from Ohio State. He didn’t know the real Justin, Cat told herself.

Then the last day of school came. Finally, after long months of football games and parties and sleepovers at her new friends’ places where they talked about how far they’d gone with their boyfriends; who was sleeping with who and who was waiting; it was graduation.

The ceremony was taking place on a Friday, and the night before there was a tailgate party out in the woods by the high school. Justin picked her up in his truck and they’d driven out to the party together. Cat had been moony-eyed at first, leaning against Justin’s shoulder, talking for the hundredth time about how they’d stay together when they went to college. How they’d write and text every night and it would be just like they were still together.

But Justin was acting strange. He’d been acting strange all week in fact, but that night he was fidgety, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and then rubbing his palms on his thighs. He only spoke in single words and wouldn’t look Cat in the eye. She pulled away from him, her heart thumping. When they finally arrived at the party, he cut the engine and turned to face her, taking her hands in his. His hands were sweaty and shaking slightly.

Thoughts raced through her head. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing. Maybe he going to ask her to marry him. It wasn’t out of the question, it happened sometimes to high school seniors. Especially if he was worried she was going to run off with some college guy. But the way he wasn’t smiling made a wave of panic run through her.

“Catherine,” Jake had said, looking in her eyes for the first time in what felt like weeks. “There’s no easy way to say this…”

That’s when the engines started revving. Everyone else was already there, but it wasn’t the haphazard array of cars and trucks in the field there normally were at a tailgate. The other cars were parked in a circle, lights blaring into the centre.

“What’s going on?” she’d said to Justin. But the engines were so loud. She wanted to clap her hands over her ears, but then she wouldn’t be able to hear him. He leaned towards her. “It was a bet, Catherine. A stupid bet. They dared me to do it…”

The engines roared so that his voice was only a faint sound under it. But she could hear him. She could hear every word.

“…had to pick a girl to date for the whole year… got a car…”

Catherine noticed then, that one of the cars in the circle wasn’t actually in the circle. It was in the center, its lights on, doors open. She recognized the kids hanging out of it. They were her friends. They were cheering and waving, swigging back beer.

“If I lost I would have to sell my truck,” Justin said, his face a vision of pain, like she should understand what big stakes those were for him.

She had been a dare. Worse than that—a bet. She’d been used for acar.

Justin swore he had developed real feelings for her. That he didn’t need the car everyone had to pony up for. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was she’d been a fool. A stupid, unaware, caught-up-in-love fool.

Somehow, she had managed to get home from that tailgate party. Somehow, she had managed to carry on through that summer and into the community college she’d gone to the next year. Some of the kids involved had apologized to her, and she realized she’d ignored their warning signs along the way. They’d all been trying to tell her, and she’d been blind.

She learned one critical and inarguable thing that year through the humiliation of failing to notice: she’d never screw up like that again.

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