The Captain's Dirty Little Secret

Three days after Caleb told Roxie that his family considered Angela part of the problem, Angela stopped answering their messages.

Roxie tried to convince herself that she was sleeping.

Angela had barely slept properly since the picture spread, and her mother had already started taking her to the school counselor. Maybe she had finally put her phone away. Maybe she was tired of explaining how she felt every time somebody looked at her too carefully. Maybe she wanted a few hours where nobody asked whether she was okay.

Roxie repeated those excuses to herself throughout the afternoon because the other possibilities made her nervous.

Then Karen called after school and asked if Angela had answered her.

She still hadn’t.

The uneasiness Roxie had been pushing down all day immediately became harder to ignore. She grabbed her things, met Karen outside, and less than twenty minutes later they were standing in front of the Hart house. Roxie had barely lifted her hand toward the doorbell when Mrs. Hart opened the door from inside.

One look at her face made Roxie’s stomach drop.

Mrs. Hart had always been one of those women who somehow looked put together even when people filled her house or Angela dragged half the cheer team home after practice. Today her hair was tied back carelessly, her eyes were swollen, and the skin beneath them looked dark from lack of sleep.

Roxie forgot every reassuring thing she had told herself on the way there.

"What happened?"

Mrs. Hart looked toward the stairs before answering. "Caleb broke up with her last night."

For a moment Roxie thought she had heard wrong. Her eyes went straight to the stairs, almost expecting Caleb to appear at the top of them and prove Mrs. Hart had said something else.

"What?" Her heart started beating harder. "How? When did he break up with her?"

"He came over last night. We heard them arguing in her room, and then he left."

"He said he wasn’t going to leave her."

The words came out before Roxie could stop them.

She remembered Caleb standing in the stairwell only days ago, exhausted but certain, telling them he wasn’t leaving Angela because his family was embarrassed. Roxie had believed him. More importantly, Angela had believed him.

Anger rushed through her first, but underneath it came something heavier.

Angela had already lost control of her own picture. She had lost the way she used to walk through school without thinking about who was staring. She had lost the comfort she once had with her own body.

Caleb had been one of the few things she still trusted.

Now he was gone too.

Mrs. Hart pressed her lips together, and Roxie watched them begin to tremble. "I’m just glad you two are here." Her hand went over her mouth, but she couldn’t stop the sob that escaped. "I can’t bear seeing my baby like that."

Roxie’s own eyes immediately burned.

Mrs. Hart had been trying so hard through all of this. She had sat beside Angela, defended her, taken her to appointments and acted strong every time Angela looked toward her. Seeing her break now frightened Roxie more than she wanted to admit.

She moved forward and wrapped her arms around her.

Karen joined them.

"We’re here," Roxie whispered, rubbing her back. "We’ll stay with her."

She wanted to promise that they would make Angela feel better, but the words wouldn’t come. Roxie had learned over the past few weeks that loving someone didn’t mean knowing how to fix what was hurting them.

Mrs. Hart finally pulled away and wiped her cheeks. "She’s in her room."

Roxie and Karen climbed the stairs together.

Roxie’s chest felt heavier with every step.

She had been in Angela’s room countless times. They had gotten ready there before parties, thrown clothes everywhere before games, laughed until Angela’s mother yelled from downstairs for them to keep it down. Angela’s room had always felt warm and loud because Angela was warm and loud.

When Roxie pushed the door open now, she barely recognized it.

Caleb’s sweatshirt was folded badly beside an open cardboard box. His charger sat near a stack of books. A baseball cap Roxie had seen him wear so many times she had stopped thinking of it as anything separate from him lay beside Angela’s dresser. Movie tickets were scattered near the box along with a shirt, a cheap bracelet from some date Roxie barely remembered and photographs Angela had already taken down from her walls.

Some things had been thrown carelessly onto the floor.

Others had been placed inside the box so carefully that Roxie knew Angela must have held them before letting them go.

Roxie stood inside the doorway and felt her throat tighten.

There was something horrible about seeing a whole relationship reduced to things somebody needed to return.

A sweatshirt.

A charger.

Pictures that had mattered yesterday and now hurt too much to keep looking at.

Angela sat among all of it wearing an oversized shirt and shorts, her knees tucked against her chest. Her eyes were so swollen Roxie wondered how many hours she had been crying.

Angela looked up when they entered.

"You guys came."

That nearly broke Roxie by itself.

Angela sounded surprised.

As if there had ever been a chance they wouldn’t come.

Roxie closed the door behind them and swallowed against the ache in her throat. She wanted to ask why Angela hadn’t called. She wanted to tell her she could have called at three in the morning, screamed into the phone, said nothing at all and Roxie still would have come.

Instead, all she managed was, "Why weren’t you answering?"

Angela glanced toward her phone lying facedown on the bed. "I didn’t want to talk."

Roxie’s heart squeezed.

She wanted to tell her that was okay. She also wanted to shake her and ask why she kept shutting them out whenever she hurt this badly. Both feelings sat inside her at the same time, and Roxie hated that she couldn’t find the right words for either of them.

Karen sat beside Angela while Roxie lowered herself onto the other side.

For several seconds none of them spoke.

Roxie had imagined this conversation on the drive over. She had ran this scenario in her head. She would curse Caleb, tell Angela he was an idiot, say something that made her angry instead of sad.

Now that she was looking at her, every prepared sentence felt useless.

Angela reached for Caleb’s sweatshirt.

"He left this here the first time he stayed over."

Her voice broke.

Roxie watched her fingers close around the fabric and felt tears start burning behind her eyes.

Angela ran the sleeve between her fingers and managed a weak smile. "I kept telling him to take it home because I already had enough of his stuff here. Then I started wearing it, so he stopped asking for it back."

Her smile disappeared.

Roxie knew what was coming before Angela’s mouth started trembling.

Angela tried to speak again, but a sob came instead.

Roxie reached for her.

Angela folded into her before Roxie even had both arms around her, pressing her face into Roxie’s shoulder while the crying came so hard that Roxie could feel every breath shaking through her body.

Roxie held her tighter.

She could feel Angela’s tears soaking through her shirt. She could hear the small broken sounds she was trying to swallow, and every one of them made something inside Roxie hurt.

Angela had always been the softest one among them.

She was the one who smiled first after an argument, the one who cried at stupid movies, the one who hugged people without thinking about it. Roxie hated seeing all that softness turned against her now, because Angela loved Caleb with the same openness she gave everything else.

Karen moved closer and rubbed her back.

"I knew," Angela choked out. "That’s the stupid part. I fucking knew."

Roxie tightened her arms around her. "There’s nothing stupid about that."

"He kept saying he wasn’t leaving me."

Angela pulled back enough to wipe her face, but more tears immediately replaced the ones she cleared away. "Every time his mom called, he told me everything was fine. Every time I asked if they were threatening him, he said he was handling it. Then yesterday he came through that door and I knew before he even said anything."

Roxie swallowed hard.

She knew that feeling.

There had been moments with Zac when she had looked at his face and understood something was wrong before either of them said it. That horrible few seconds where your body seemed to know what was coming while your mind fought desperately against it.

She hated imagining Angela sitting here and going through that alone.

Angela looked toward the bedroom door as though Caleb were still standing there.

"He didn’t sit beside me."

Karen’s hand stopped against her back.

Angela rubbed both palms over her shorts. "He always sits beside me. Even if my parents are here, even if there’s barely enough room, he squeezes himself next to me and puts his hand on my leg. Yesterday he came in and sat across from me."

Roxie’s eyes filled.

Such a stupid little thing.

Where he sat.

Anybody else would hear that and wonder why it mattered but Roxie understood exactly why it did.

Angela had known him well enough that a different chair told her the person she loved was about to leave her.

"I kept waiting for him to come over," Angela continued. "I thought maybe he was just mad. I kept thinking he would get up eventually and sit beside me after we talked."

Her mouth twisted as another sob escaped her.

"He never did."

Roxie reached for her hand because she couldn’t think of anything else to do.

She wanted to hate Caleb completely.

She wanted to make him cruel in her head because then she could tell Angela she had lost nothing worth keeping. But Roxie had seen how he looked when his family called. She had seen him exhausted and scared and still insisting he loved Angela.

That almost made it worse.

If Caleb had never loved her, Angela could eventually dismiss everything between them as a lie.

But he had loved her.

He had simply left anyway.

Angela wiped beneath her eyes. "He kept saying my name like he wanted me to forgive him before he even told me what he was doing. Then he said he loved me."

Karen lowered her eyes.

Roxie’s fingers tightened around Angela’s.

Angela laughed bitterly through her tears. "You know when somebody starts with ’I love you,’ the next thing they say is going to fucking hurt."

Roxie wanted to argue.

She couldn’t.

Angela stared down at their joined hands. "He told me he didn’t know how to do it anymore. He said he tried. He kept saying that. He tried."

Her mouth trembled.

"He said he loved me, Roxie."

Roxie’s own voice came out weak. "I know."

Angela looked at her, and the confusion in her face hurt worse than the crying.

"If he loved me, why did he leave?"

Roxie opened her mouth.

Nothing came.

Because she had no answer that wouldn’t hurt Angela more.

Love could be real and still fail somebody.

Roxie hated that.

Angela pulled her hand away and pressed both palms against her face. "He just told me we were done. That was it. Everything we did, everything we talked about, everything he promised me, and then suddenly we were done."

Her breathing started getting faster.

Roxie immediately moved closer. "Angela."

Angela looked around the room instead.

Some of Caleb’s things had been torn from their places. One photograph near the dresser had been ripped through the middle. Other things had been folded carefully inside the box, as though Angela kept changing her mind between hating Caleb and loving him every few minutes.

Roxie looked at the box and understood exactly why Angela hadn’t finished it.

How were you supposed to decide what to do with things that belonged to someone you were still in love with?