1. Stephanie

Ihang my head, my eyes closing in pain as I listen to yet another gossipy headline on the radio about my exploits.

None of it is true but you’d never know it by how they repeat every salacious rumor like it’s fact. Glee stamps every single word and their voices tremble with excitement.

Ugh! This is my worst nightmare. My own personal hell. I stare around my huge home, even the beautiful library within its walls not helping the pain.

The mansion was the first thing I bought, far from the place that I grew up. There are so many feelings that ripple through me when I think about home. The place where I grew up.

The only good thing I remember was Benjie and I close my eyes, smiling when I picture his little gap-toothed smile. He made all the pain worth it most of the time.

I frown. I haven’t seen him since I left home. I think about him every damn day but I just can’t make myself go back there.

My parents are long gone. They passed away while I was in college and nobody was surprised when their deaths were just as scandalous as their lives.

I push those thoughts away with a shiver. I can’t go back there. I just can’t.

But Benjie’s arms? I close my eyes, picturing my best friend all through school. His front gap teeth and the way his brown eyes sparkled behind his big, black glasses.

That was something we both had in common. We both wore glasses. We were both outcasts in town although he had a good family. They were just poor.

Not like my parents. Not like the mess of my whole life.

Not like the mess that I’m currently in.

I shiver angrily when I hear yet another gossipy raking over the coals of me. They loved my book. All of them twittering all over the place about how much they loved hearing about the little town and its overnight antics. The steamy pastimes of the small urban area setting off four-alarm fires in all of their twisted souls.

Until all of a sudden, they decided that it wasn’t enough. All of it was fake and there was no little place like that. And that I was some repressed virgin who was attempting to blacken all those good people’s names and cause trouble for them.

Yeah, right. The main characters were my parents. And I wish I didn’t know some of that stuff, didn’t know how the night life that they lived affected me or others.

But I did know. I knew it all.

And I wrote it and now I was being castigated for telling the truth about the underbelly of Pine Grove. For supposedly lying. Because no place could be that bad.

For telling the fairytale romance that starts my parents’ life together and then the way it all ended. A good journalist could have uncovered the story. But they didn’t want to hear about two crazy teenagers in love who somehow managed to stay together until the bitter end.

They wanted to trash me. They wanted to make believe that I was the problem. Maybe I had been a monster of a child and I messed up their marriage.

It’s fucking wrong. I, the child, was the catalyst that destroyed my parents. Hell, no! I suffered through their highs and lows. I suffered through their good and bad times. Mostly bad times. And then they were gone. And there was nothing left for me in Pine Grove.

And then when I got rich, I ditched all of them.

I did do that. I admit it.

But going back home just hurt so much. Seeing all the places that Rick and Kate fought and made up, then got wasted and woke up in.

Ugh!

I run my fingers through my long hair and pace the living room, the radio bouncing the sound all around me. Piercing my soul. All those nasty shots at my integrity. At my story.

At the wreck of my life that I cried and suffered for every damn word that I wrote down.

And they thought it was okay to just trash the hell out of me.

I sit down on the couch and lean my head back onto the soft cushions. I stare up at the ceiling and try to pry myself out of whatever’s bothering me.

Beyond the obvious. It never feels good to get trashed by people.

I close my eyes and whimper, then open them, staring at my laptop sitting on the desk in the corner. The damn cursor blinks at me, mocking me for my lack of any new writing.

I’ve been trying and failing to come up with even one sentence that I don’t immediately want to delete.

And the publishing house is getting desperate to have something new coming out to show for the shit-show that is my life. To have something to show them that they can tout to kinda counteract the rumors that none of my story is true.

It’s all too real and all too fantastic all at the same time.

And now I’ve got to try and get myself back on track and give my editor something to get excited about. To hawk before he gets down to the brass tacks of what’s going on here.

And hope like hell that it knocks the crap these people are saying about me out of the headlines.

But there’s something else and it stutters along my nerve endings and all I can think about is Benjie.

I haven’t thought about him in so long and it now seems imperative that I find him and talk to him, explain to him what happened and why I left so abruptly and never came home.

And if he’s the same boy that I remember, the only person that I’ve ever fully trusted in this crazy, mixed-up world.

I want to see if he’s missed me as much as I’ve missed him.