In Twenty Years

by Allison Winn Scotch

Or maybe not. I like to think we did. But love is never quite egalitarian.

Or at least for twenty years. Besides, twenty years from now felt like forever.

But it didn’t matter. What mattered was the six of us. What mattered was our star. What mattered is that in this moment in time, we were unbreakable. We were light and destiny and a meteor shower of invincibility. We were twenty-one. We were allowed to believe impossible things.

Sometimes it was simply better not to know, not to investigate too deeply into betrayal.

And knew it had been worth it: her silence, her nonconfrontational manner, how she buried his secrets until they became her own secrets too.

that Lindy often has no clue what she wants—or wanted or should have wanted—and spends a lot of time regretting things she was sure she coveted (but didn’t) and things she was certain she should have left behind (and later wished she hadn’t).

This fuck-all sentiment used to be true for her, but now, just for this passing second, she wonders how honest it really is.

she senses a tiny flourish of nostalgia, a pulse of a memory when life was simpler and she—they all—were so happy.

It couldn’t have been so long ago, she thinks. It stings like it was just yesterday.

This is how their fights always start these days—someone misinterpreting something, some tone too harsh, another tone too passive-aggressive.

“Please don’t give up.” His voice broke. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that to me. It’s an insult, and you know it. Like I’d ever give up on anything if I had a choice.”

but Bea didn’t want them to remember her as having suffered, didn’t want them to remember her as anything less than the vibrant, radiant firework she was. Born on the Fourth of July. Indeed.

But he has never said no to her, ever. He knows as well as anyone that he isn’t about to start now.

The strangest thing about returning to an enclave that encapsulated your youth is that you feel like nothing should have changed. Like you still have the right to be twenty and carefree and irresponsible. Like you still are twenty and carefree and irresponsible.

“I think I’ve forgotten how it feels to be twenty. Like, no responsibilities, no worries.

Everyone always says that youth is wasted on the young, but that’s horseshit, she thinks. Nothing is wasted on them. Look at them. Look at how happy they are, how invincible they feel.

Still, though, nearly dizzy with fatigue, she finds herself wishing for solitude again, wishing that maybe she could just have some peace.

He wishes he knew when they took such a strident detour from their happiness.

Rather, because it’s not like there’s one event that imploded them—no infidelity, no betrayal, no awful abuse that he could point to and say, “That’s when we began to sour.”

their contentment just trickled away, bit by bit, as each of them drifted out on their own separate waves, the water lapping beneath their feet, and they each, separately, preten...

She doesn’t like being angry, she doesn’t like these strange roots of fury blossoming into something bigger, something real.

Is forgiveness that easy? Is it easier with old friends because you’ve known them forever? Or is it harder for those same reasons?

she didn’t do much of anything other than wonder why her immense sense of self-satisfaction was already ebbing from her veins, like someone had pricked a finger just microscopically enough to know there’d been a puncture, but not big enough to see the cut on the surface of the skin.

in Lindy’s quest to hurt Annie, she hadn’t considered (of course she hadn’t) how much she’d bruise the others too, and how much it would hurt to bruise them.

wonders what might have happened if she’d made different choices. If she hadn’t screwed Colin. If she’d admitted aloud that she knew Annie was in love with him. If she’d also admitted that she was in love with Annie.

If she’d been honest, would that have changed anything? Everything?

vowed to be the person he thought she was, be the person she really had become now.

He didn’t need to know her secrets; she hadn’t asked him about his own.

There wasn’t any space left for lingering what-ifs. It was time to seal those scars up entirely.

She wants one more moment like this, though, in case it never happens again, just so she can be sure she didn’t dream it.

They’d find him when he was least prepared, when his conscious mind was certain he was over it, but his subconscious mind wasn’t ready to forget.

They set aside their differences, the vast divide between them, the urge to simply leave and return to their safer havens at home,

But that was all so long ago, Catherine reminds herself. Before real responsibilities. Before real problems.

She’s not even sure she needs to rely on him anymore, even though she recognizes the dangerous slippery slope this recognition can initiate in a marriage.

The last time she had honest-to-God girlfriends was, well, here. Back then.

She regrets it immediately—how brittle she sounds, how unkindly she’s behaving. But she’s angry and tired and completely off-kilter here, with visions of her old dependent, sweeter self colliding with her new autonomous but not particularly gracious self, and no idea what to do with either of them.

But even as she tells herself to stop, to bite her tongue, she also feels her anger roiling through her, like a tsunami cresting from the deepest pit of the ocean, and once it’s begun, there’s no way to clamp it down.

“I guess I outgrew all that stuff.” “What stuff?” “Thinking about all the ways things could have been different. At twenty, didn’t it seem like life could go anywhere?”

She’d made do with not a whole heck of a lot back in Texas, and when you make do without a whole heck of a lot, you tend to be more grateful for the good fortune you stumble into.

He was struck by how Bea let her just be. It took a lot of guts, he thought, to just be.

Bea used to say that there couldn’t be secrets between them. That secrets were like walls: you started erecting them and before you knew it, you’d built yourself a moat—you couldn’t jump over it, you couldn’t knock it down. You were stranded on the island without anyone to come to your rescue.