Page 53 of The New Year's Party
How strange that when he dropped her, she was actually crushed. Heartbroken. And Bennett... well, he was ready and waiting to pick up the pieces. She only spoke of her recent breakup in vague terms, but Bennett was so compassionate. So earnest. So soothing to her shattered ego. He was the first boy her own age she’d dated, and he would be the last, because she had found the impossible—a boy who didn’t seem to notice her stiffness, her coldness, her awkwardness—and she’d be a fool to let him go.
The first New Year’s party sealed the deal. Bennett took the train into Chicago, met Olivia’s parents, and then they took the South Shore to Michigan City, where Phelps picked them up at the train station. Seeing Bennett with his friends—with Phelps, and Doug, and Will—and poking their thumbs with the tip of the wine opener while they swore to celebrate the New Year together forever—she’d found her miracle. She belonged.
In successive New Year’s celebrations, the feeling of distance came back. But that first New Year’s... it was like being in love. Even now, when she remembered falling in love with Bennett, it was in the context of this very party. These very people.
Fast-forward to party number eight, with Hellie going on about sexual assault. Olivia was twenty-nine years old, sitting slack-jawed on Phelps’s couch, her breasts tender because they’d left their nursing seven-month-old at home, and listening with familiar numbness as Doug’s wife unwittingly illuminated to Olivia a part of her past that had been comfortably hidden in the shadows. She had not been in a consensual relationship like she’d thought.
The next year was so hard. She turned thirty. She was so depressed she couldn’t make it through a day without crying. Bennett thought it was the adjustment of becoming a mother and losing some independence. But it wasn’t that at all. It was being confronted with the fact that she’d been groomed andraped ten years prior and hadn’t even known it. What else in her life had she misconstrued? What else was she blind to?
Feeling guilty about her unorthodox fling, in a very strange way, had been easier than facing her victimhood. If she was to blame, at least she had agency. But if she was powerless...
She looked at Professor Larkin’s bio on the university website obsessively. He was in his mid-sixties now. Close to retirement.
You should reporthim, her conscience told her. But at what cost? Olivia was now a young mom. She and Bennett were a dual-income family with a complicated schedule. She would just ruin their lives with a legal mess. Be forced to relive one of the most painful experiences of her life in front of strangers. The public would hate her. People would question why she waited so long to speak up. Herparentswould know. Her friends would know. And worst of all, Bennett would know that the “ex-boyfriend” she’d allowed him to think was just another college guy was actually the fifty-six-year-old professor they’d both sat under.
She couldn’t bear it.
The year of the ninth New Year’s party, she had just weaned Norah at nineteen months. It had been a grueling year. Olivia was emotional, weak, exhausted. As the old crew ate and bantered and played a trumped-up version of Pictionary with body paint, Olivia imagined herself banging on the glass wall between her and the rest of humanity.I’m here! Help! I’m trapped!She didn’t normally drink more than a single glass of wine, but that night she needed more.
When her stomach started to protest the whiskey and the beer and the tequila, Phelps offered her his bed to lie down in. Bennett was nowhere to be found, so Phelps stayed to make sure she was okay. He wasn’t doing so well either. He had just lost the restaurant to a freak fire, and Kylie had filed for divorce. They both leaned against the headboard, their handsclose enough to touch. Phelps opened a bottle of cognac and started pouring out his woes. Then he said, “But what do you know of drama, Miss Olivia? You’re like Galadriel, Elf Queen. Above the paltry problems of us mortals.”
Something in her snapped. Someone had to know—someone in this goddamn world—that she was not Galadriel. She was not above them. She wasoneof them. She was fuckingoneof them.
“I’ve had shit too,” she said, beckoning for the cognac.
“You?” said Phelps, disbelieving.
Urgency took over. Sitting in the low lamplight in Phelps’s master bedroom with the mouth of the cognac bottle warm from both their lips, she said, “Bennett doesn’t even know this. There was a professor...”
It all came out. Phelps held her hand as tears poured down her face.
She must have fallen asleep soon after.
Then there was the rhythmic breathing. The groan.
The next thing she remembered was stumbling out of the room, disoriented and confused, right into Jenn. The face of judgment.
“I can’t believe what you just did.”
Olivia was devastated. She’d opened herself up, and look what she’d gone and done. There was a reason for that glass wall. She wasn’t to be trusted.
Two weeks later, she took a pregnancy test. It was positive. Bennett was so happy. Olivia felt cold as ice. She had made an unforgivable mistake, and she couldn’t possibly tell Bennett, and now the rest of her life would be an act of pretending.
The next five years, when things felt desperate, she dealt with it alone. She took up running. Practiced thankfulness. Threw herself into freelance work, into raising the girls, into being someone Bennett didn’t regret marrying, and prayed to a God she didn’t believe in that she would have the strengthto hold her secret until the grave. If that condemned her to unbearable isolation, well, it was her own fault. Her price to pay, and no one else’s.
“Who hasn’t gone?” Phelps was saying, wielding the BB gun. Olivia snapped back into the cold night. “Hey, where’s Bunny?”
They all looked around.
“I’m here!” came Bunny’s voice from a slight distance. She was coming toward the group from a copse of trees, with Will right behind.
“Where were you two?” said Jenn.
“Talking,” said Will.
“About the virus,” Bunny jumped in. “I know none of you want to talk about it, but it might be serious. It’s all over China—”
“It’s going to be just like SARS,” said Phelps in a tired, know-it-all voice. “It won’t make it here.”
