“Awful? You spent every session calling me stupid, calling me every other lousy name you could come up with to let me know you thought I was too ignorant to live. I’d say brutal is more what you were to me,” he said as if she’d unleashed something in him.
Eden hid her grimace by dropping her head and rubbing her forehead. “Okay, brutal,” she conceded, embarrassed and wishing he didn’t recall quite so much.
“You said you were amazed an ignoramus like me could even read,” he continued. “That I had no business in a kindergarten class, let alone a physics class. You asked me if you were going to get honorable mention at the bottom of my diploma because I wasn’t able to get it on my own. You—”
“I remember it all,” Eden said to keep him from going on, shoring up her courage to look at him again. “It’s the one thing that I’m mortified I did. I’d never treated anyone that way before and I never have since.”
“Am I supposed to feel special to have been singled out?” he asked.
“No. But it was special circumstances. And it wasn’t the real me and I’m sorry.”
“Who was it, if it wasn’t the real you?”
“It was a person who was out of her league being a sixteen-year-old senior. A person who was the target of what passed for humor with you older, cool people every day—four-eyes, pizza-face, metal-mouth, pumpkinhead, Halloween-hair, geek-bot, nerd-girl—”
“I don’t recall ever calling you any of that. Or even being aware of you until the tutoring.”
“But your friends, your crowd, did—Steve Foster, Greg Simmons, Frankie Franklin—they were the worst. They never gave it a rest. Even though I tried to keep to the shadows, I was still fair game that whole year. And then I came home from school one day—a month before I thought it was going to end—and my mother told me I had to tutor you, of all people.”
“Because I needed a little help. Kind of like you do right now. But I’ll bet you’re not thinking of yourself as dumber than dirt, are you? And I didn’t need the help because I was too dense to learn the stuff any other way,” he said defensively, as if he’d been waiting all these years to get that in. “I’ll grant you that I wasn’t an A student, but I was average. In everything but physics. Plus I hadn’t given it the time I should have when it came to studying. I thought I could take the easy way out. But did you just look at it like that? Not the almighty Eden Perry.”
“Almighty? That’s the last thing I thought I was. I didn’t have a drop of self-confidence or self-esteem and I was going to have to be alone, in a room, one-on-one with one of the popular people. I would have rather poked my own eyes out. I was so sure you were going to ridicule me, that I decided to—” She tried to think of how to temper what she was going to say. But the best she could come up with was, “I decided to cut you off at the knees before you had the chance to do it to me,” she finished quietly.
“A preemptive strike?” he said as if he wasn’t buying it.
“Yes, a preemptive strike,” Eden confirmed anyway. “So I went in and acted as if I thought you were… Well, you know how I acted.”
“I was already embarrassed that my mother was making me be tutored. By a girl. A girl who was two years younger than I was. But I didn’t go in putting you down. And I’d never called you names before, either, so I didn’t have that coming.”
“I know,” she said, a little amazed by just how furious he was.
“And once you saw that I wasn’t going to do it to you, why didn’t you quit doing it to me?”
Eden made another pained, embarrassed face but this time she didn’t hide it. “It was…I don’t know…I guess there was some payback in it for everything I went through the rest of the time even though it wasn’t you doing it. Plus once I’d started, I was afraid if I stopped I’d really be in for it—from you along with the rest of your clique. And that’s sort of how I am, I guess—once I dig in my heels it’s hard for me to change course.”
“So you kept it up until I felt as lousy as you did?”
Maybe he wasn’t only furious with her.
She’d assumed from his reaction to her since their paths had crossed again that he just didn’t like her. And with good cause. She’d never thought that what she’d done all those years ago might have had more impact than that. Somehow all this time she’d believed that that wasn’t possible. Her goads and taunts had been tossed at someone who she’d imagined couldn’t be hurt. But now she wasn’t so sure.
“I didn’t think anything I said would actually affect someone like you. I was a nothing and you were king of the high school world. I’ve hated thinking back on how I spoke to you, but was what I did even worse? Did I…scar you in some way?”
He didn’t like that question. He stood a little straighter, his chiseled chin raised a fraction of an inch before he said, “You left a mark but I wouldn’t call it a scar.”
Eden was concerned that he was lying. That he was covering up just how much she really had injured him, and that thought made what she’d done seem even worse.
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “I was never proud of what I did—in fact I was so ashamed of it that I’ve never told a single soul, not even my sisters. But I honestly didn’t think it would have any repercussions. I wondered if you’d even remember me today when Luke Walker said you were who I’d be working with.” She paused a moment and then in the name of honesty, added, “Or at least I was hoping you wouldn’t remember me.”
Cam didn’t say anything. He just let his deep blue eyes bore into her and she couldn’t tell what he might be thinking. But she could see now that the same way she still carried the wounds of other people’s words, he carried the wounds of hers and that prompted her to repeat a heartfelt, “I am truly sorry. If I could take it back, I would. And honestly, I knew you weren’t stupid. It was an awful…” She stumbled over the word he’d already found lacking and amended it to, “—a terrible, terrible thing to do and no one should have known that better than me because I was living it every day myself.”
He still didn’t say anything for a while and she wondered if her explanation and apology were too little too late. She wouldn’t have blamed him if that were the case. Certainly if one of her tormentors were standing there saying the same things to her she didn’t think it would make any difference—she still would have disliked them intensely.
But then Cam’s expression seemed to soften slightly—only slightly—and he said, “Metal-mouth, four-eyes, pizza-face, Halloween-hair and what else?”
“Pumpkinhead, geek-bot and nerd-girl, just to name a few.”
“And I got the brunt of you being called all that?”
“You could think of it as taking one for the team,” she suggested carefully, trying a tiny bit of levity to see if he’d respond to it.
And, lo and behold, he did.
He smiled. Only a little. And maybe in spite of himself. But it was a smile nevertheless.
And if he was handsome scowling, it was nothing compared to how good he looked when that face relaxed with amusement.
“Taking one for the team?” he repeated.
“You could factor in that I really was only a scared, insecure kid—not that I’m excusing my behaviour. And that I have regretted it all these years, if that helps any. And really, when all is said and done, can you hate somebody in ducky pants?”
Her second stab at a joke broadened the smile. He glanced down at her pajama pants—brown flannel printed with goofy-looking ducks.
“They’re mallards,” Cam corrected. “And I suppose I’ll think it over while I turn your lights back on.”
It