I woke up with the secret today. That is the most important thing. Another day, another step, another heartbreak, another tribulation: but the secret had survived the bond of secrecy through yesterday. So it would surely find the same strength to survive today.

I was particularly optimistic in the mornings.

The paint on the ceiling was probably white at some point, I thought to myself, even though it was now peeling and yellowed from the strongholds of cigarette smoke and time.

I rolled over onto my side with my hands tucked under my head, palms touching as though in prayer. It’s a possibility that I was praying, my custom as of late. I stared out of the lone window. There was barely anything to see, what with the faded, tattered floral curtains protecting me from the outside. I guess their suggestion of worked their purpose on me: I felt the disconnect they enforced between me the rest of the world. Between me and my friends, me and my family. Me and the proper assertion of love.

In the back of my head I was registering that there wasn’t anything to feel between my skin and the bedspread.

I woke up today, though. And I breathed a prayer of thanks to whoever might be listening.

By this time of morning he would already be gone and at work, on some construction project. Or so he said: not that I would even necessarily know for sure. Nevertheless, I was given comfort in the fact that I had the opportunity to reenter the outside world: going home, seeing friends, living life, for another day, under a façade.

So I stepped out of bed and scoured the tiny bedroom, in an attempt to discover the location of the clothes that I last remembered wearing.

I hadn't brought anything with me, I never did, and so, wearing the clothes of yesterday, I walked carefully into the living room, choking on the staleness of the air. The windows didn't open, though. I already knew.

Stepping out onto the back porch was the bravest thing I would do all day. I never used the front door to exit, but the back door had perhaps even more of a risk. His backyard was fenceless, and the only thing segregating his property from the two neighbors was some sparse shrubbery. The irony of the scarce barrier blew my mind. How was it, I asked myself, that the existence and location of a few plants could hide us from everyone? Could hide what we were doing? Could hide the jealousy, the guilt, today and every day? The most likely reason we were so well hidden was because we were so completely in plain sight.

And nothing that Amy or I did was concealed. We practically tossed clues around to our parents and friends, swallowed our alibis, and overused the same two excuses, by the time that the initial thrill of secrecy had more than worn off.

It had already been a year.

I passed four unkempt houses on my short walk down the street and climbed the stairs to my room.

One new voicemail and four texts were awaiting my reply from the night before. First my mother: "What time r u getting home 2morrow." And an accompanying voicemail.

Then Amy, 8:45, "Where are u?? Wanna come ovr?"

9:02, "Heyyyyy, let's get ice creammm"

9:23, "Wtf where r u I wanna go do something"

10:04, "Ok. Well. I'm heading to Kevin's. So lmk if u want me to swing by."

S***. That was a close one. Luckily, an empty threat.

Like the best friends that we were, we had an unspoken understanding that I was absolutely not, under any circumstances, to ever be in Kevin's presence, never mind in his house, without the chastise of Amy's attendance. Not that any of us juveniles were even legally allowed to be there. Of course we hadn't known of his criminal activity before he'd swathed us with charisma and the purely sex driven enchantment of his personality. By the time our mutual friend, Alex, had bothered to tell us that her uncle was a registered sex offender, our ears were much too busy attending to the flimsy promise in his voice to pay any attention to the warning in Alex's.
Don't get me wrong, there were obviously huge red flags that, frankly, scared the s*** out of me and Amy. First off, the sex offender thing. And we paid for it, particularly a 39.99 subscription to obtain the twenty two pages of criminal offenses that were attached to his name. We brushed up on a lot of legal terminology in that first phase of obsession, learning the difference between first and second degree rape, and ultimately defending his crimes by saying that it could be a lot worse.

And it was a lot worse, because there were a lot of things that a criminal report left undisclosed. Like how he had actually killed people. In fact there were a hell of a lot of unsolved murders per year in Rhode Island, and we learned that statistic too.

These were all things that we had attained over a yearlong period of time: none of which was a piece of information heavy enough to break the hodgepodge of a foundation that we had built about the fifty five year old divorcee, some of which we were certain about, some of which we had taken his word for. The, dare I say, love triangle, between the three of us posed a nearly unbreakable bondage.

We saw Kevin every single day that summer. Amy and I lived three miles away from each other on a long stretch of woods, where we would spend long nights tending camp fires next to The Lake. After phoning a band of friends, the majority of these nights consisted of drunken make-outs, the air thick with heat and mingling with the reek of alcohol, sweat, and pot. We were very strange friends.

Around midnight, people would begin the trek out of the woods, of which only I knew the path. And, ever so conveniently, the path led to a trail, which led to a gate directly behind Kevin's house.

Amy and I, of course, our houses within walking distance, were always the last the leave Kevin's.

Or, shall I say, the only ones to stay.

It’s a cliché, I know, but we used the old, "I'm sleeping over a friend's house," excuse. Like I said before, there was no grandeur in our cover-ups. The only thing that separated our parents, (or Alex, for that matter), from the truth, was the fact that no one investigated. We didn't have the kind of parents that pried, and so we never had to sugar coat anything. Amy told her parents she was sleeping over my house, I told mine I was sleeping at hers. And even as I'd probably only slept at my house a collective two weeks that summer, there were never any questions asked.
Simple as that.

The first time we stayed the night, we slept with him. At the same time. Because we always did everything together. At one point I broke into a yell when Amy came aggressively closer to Kevin and me in our moment of intimacy. Her figure, shrouded by the darkness of the morning hours, shrank back onto the creaky twin sized bed, stung by the callous of my words. Feeling immediately guilty, I cooed an excuse: I was just embarrassed and needed a tiny bit of privacy. We both knew the apology was ludicrous, especially in the context of the current situation, and that instead, we had both been struck with the paralyzing force of jealousy. Thankfully, the opaque black of the bedroom masked the surprise that was stuck to my face. I had never been a jealous person.

The next day we woke up next to each other in a tiny bedroom, staring at a peeling yellow ceiling. There was nothing between our skin and the bedspread.

The difference between Amy and me was that I didn't get attached so quickly. With an abusive father, an alcoholic of a mother, and a family that berated her, Amy was always trying to prove to herself that someone cared for her, and so she clung to the thread of "love" that Kevin had offered her like a leech on a dog: blindly clinging to anything with a heartbeat. I, on the other hand, was gaining a sense of clarity regarding the affair. Firstly, it was illegal. Next, Kevin was older than each of our parents, and he was, bluntly, a sex felon who had had relations with his step-daughter, although more than twenty years prior. We would never know the story behind the story, unfortunately. Our criminal reports told us one account, but Kevin another, and neither Amy nor I had the courage to decide which was the truth. Only one thing was for sure: obsession was not even the word for what Amy felt for him, and I was not about to ruin our friendship over a mere guy. We never spoke about the jealousy; it was just something both of us understood. As was the fact that Amy would see Kevin now, and I would not. I would not go to his house, we would not talk on the phone; we would abandon those late-night summer talks about the memories of our existences, huddled around a camp fire in his backyard, shadows bouncing off our features from the flames. And I wouldn't wear his big flannel shirts, either, when the summer nights turned cold.

Certainly, it was established that I would not, by any circumstances, be continuing a sexual relationship with the crime-stained paramour.

But I guess that's the thing with nonverbal agreements: there's no absolute threat of violation.

Anyway, Amy called me today. I answered.

"Hi baby."

"Hi, Liv."

"Whatcha up to?"

The line was silent for a long time.

"He forced me. He literally pushed me down and I was crying and he was mad."

The world stopped. Not the literal world, of course, which never stopped for anyone or anything, but instead hummed along, witnessing the deaths and births of people, relationships, and love. Instead there was a crack in the glass orb that encased me, Amy, and our secret, and the crack was spidering out of control at a scarily steadfast rate.

"Amy. No. What happened. Why were you crying. Were you fighting? What happened? What happened?" My voice started to give way to alarm.

"You know why we fight! Why do you have to make me say it! Do you think I'm stupid? DO YOU? You think I can stand the emotional abuse? Him always telling me how you go over there in secret? I'm in love with him!"

Amy’s voice broke with sobs. I suddenly felt as though I was very, very far away. I could barely hear her screaming voice through the speaker of my cellphone. A tear began its slow, gnawing path of erosion down the skin of my left cheek, escaping through the crack in our little orb, the crack that betrayal had made. It was over.

"It's crazy to love someone who hurt you." I whispered. Amy was silent.

The only thing I could force out of my mouth was a philosophic quote I suddenly remembered reading on Tumblr.

"And it's crazier to think that someone who hurt you, loves you."