AIMEE + JARED, pt. 6

a serial short story

Read part one here and part two here and part three here and part four here and part five here.

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My impulse is to hang up immediately. My impulse is to hurl my phone across 1st Avenue, let Ubers and Lyfts and Cabs and Citi Bikes crush it over and over into bits of glass and plastic. Instead, inspired by Tabitha, I keep a cool head.

“Speak,” I bid.

E.J. tells me that Cal had nothing to do with it. E.J. says that his sister, actually, was in the group, and called him, screaming, and he had to call her down.

“But yeah,” E.J. circles back. “Not Cal at all.”

I’m surprised at how little I care about this revelation, almost as if it didn’t matter who did what anymore. I let E.J. wait in my silence while I pull up the voicemail transcription and, sure enough, it’s Cal with the same story, begging for a call back.

“What about the post?” I ask.

Now it’s E.J.’s turn for silence, like he hadn’t considered that I could possibly care about the allegations themselves.

“A lot of them are made up.” I don’t respond. “Pretty much all of them, actually. Or exaggerated, like, this girl, you didn’t meet her but she was insane—”

“Which girl?” I prod. “There are multiple.”

“All just piling on I guess,” he sighs. It turns over in my head: STIs, destroyed my property. “You know the kind a guy I am,” he pushes. “I’m not that kind a guy.”

Call’s calling again; I send it to voicemail, tell E.J. I need to go.

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I spend the night ignoring Cal’s calls, his pleas. Cal is a liberal and a feminist. Cal votes for women and wears leather sandals. Cal has friends who are of many different races and nationalities, who are women—both unattractive and attractive—and platonic boundaries are never crossed. Cal is, as one of his Black female friends called him, A Safe White Man.

And yet.

And yet Cal surrounds himself with guys from college that currently do not resemble him all that much, but maybe once did. Guys in frats playing pong and quarters and flip cup and slap cup. Guys blacked out of their minds, feeling like 20-year-old kings for hosting 18-year-old girls in their dilapidated off-campus houses. I remember him telling me once about how one of the guys used to punch holes in the walls for fun. I wonder if that was E.J. I wonder if they were—if they are—all like that.

Texts from Aimee: downloads on the day’s events. Texts from E.J. looking for closure.

Fuck it.

I need Tabitha’s number, I text, and Aimee shoots it over without question.

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At her recommendation, we meet at a maritime-themed bar in deep Brooklyn—mosaic mermaids on the walls, a steering wheel here, an anchor there. I’m in the back in a garden by a koi pond. Tabitha sees me from the doorframe, beckons me inside. We sit in a dark corner and drink Diet Cokes.

“I have twenty minutes,” she states. “Out with it.”

“You said that you know what Jared does and who he does it with—”

“I’m not interested in talking through the details,” she waves me off.

“Not details,” I clarify, “I’m not investigating. Just, how—” I pause; she looks bored. “How can you trust someone like that.”

For the first time since we’ve met, she looks content. “Mm, I see. Trust issues in your relationship?”

I feel my face get hot and am grateful that, despite the daylight through the stained glass, the pigments in our faces are hard to parse. “Not really, no.” She doesn’t believe me. “I mean, not like that.”

“Trust is trust.” Her Diet Coke is done, makes a scratchy sound as she slurps the dregs. She takes her time with the lime wedge on the rim, squeezing it between her lips and biting down like she’s just taken a tequila shot, then drops it into her cup.

“Let me tell you about my first husband.”

TO BE CONTINUED—