CHAPTER FORTY

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2022

          My father decided to be the bearer of good news for once just as March came to a close.

          It had seemed like one of the longest months of my life, dragging on so sluggish it felt like a cruel joke considering how fast the rest of my senior year of college had flown by when I'd been struggling to keep up with my workload and doubting I'd meet all those deadlines. With my screenplay written but not officially submitted—the longer I could avoid talking to Chase about it, the better, or so I thought—all I had left ahead of me were my finals and a few scattered final papers. That I could handle.

          After continuous months filled with nothing but news that wrecked me to my very core, unleashing a kind of emotional exhaustion and distress I couldn't even begin how to explain to someone without fearing judgment ("aren't you supposed to know how to handle the pressure after having grown up in the limelight?" and all those not so kind remarks), I was welcoming any sort of positive influence, no matter how small. With finals right around the corner, if I didn't find an outlet for all the stress I was under, I would never be able to focus on studying, and being held back a year thanks to my unbelievable penchant for self-sabotage would be humiliating.

          I'd grown used to everything in my life being so negative that I couldn't even fault my stomach from sinking the second I noticed he was calling. I picked up the call with shaky hands, praying the floor wouldn't collapse beneath my feet with the weight of whatever it was he wanted to tell me, and, even though the temperatures had increased slightly, violent shivers spread across my spine.

          "Hello?" I answered, heart racing like a speed car in anticipation. To ensure I wouldn't fall in the middle of a crowded hallway, I made the wise conscious decision to lean my shoulder blades against a wall for some support.

          "Cariño, I have good news and great news. Which of them would you like to hear about first? Make sure you're sitting down."

          "I am," I lied, like the liar I was. I couldn't even pretend to be shocked at how easily lies slipped out of my mouth, since that had turned into my new normal, as shameful as it was. For good measure, I looked around for a place to sit, but my only options were the benches scattered outside on the quad, and it was a windy day. After all the hard work I'd put into styling my bangs that morning, I was vain enough to choose to remain indoors in spite of his advice.

          That said plenty about my character, I realized.

          Even when it came to small things such as the visual appeal of my hair, which no one else cared about but me, I willingly ignored advice given to me by the people who genuinely worried about my well-being. I did it because I could, because I was so desperate to prove I had my whole life together (spoiler alert: I didn't), and because the only person I'd listened to and went to for advice for nearly four years had hurt me so deeply, right down to the bone.

          That was me going on a tangent. Somewhat.

          Even after everything, my thoughts were constantly flooded by memories of Chase and wishes of what could have been, of ways it could have worked out for the better, of ways I could have avoided all the suffering. There were times I'd try to protect myself and my ego by convincing myself he, too, was hurting, but that wasn't a fixed, immutable condition anymore. Instead, the rumbling thunder in my head wanted me to never forget he didn't care—if he'd ever had.

          One of the important steps I'd taken ever since the unceremonious breakup had been discovering the love I still hoped had been there had also been conditional, depending on how well I behaved according to his expectations and how willing I'd been to do everything he asked me to do.

          Driving to his apartment while trapped in a borderline hypothermic state, picking him up in the middle of the night after he'd had too much to drink, endangering my life by driving under the influence of alcohol because he'd asked me to—I'd done all of those unbelievable things, and it hadn't been enough.

          If not then, then when? If I hadn't been enough after doing that for him and more, given him all of me without hesitation, when would I be enough? He'd find flaws in the way I'd gone about those things, holding them over my head and warping it in a particular way to make me see the flaws were mine and my fault. I wasn't strong enough, couldn't take criticism, would never survive a day in the industry.

          It hadn't been me having a meltdown after not being praised once. It hadn't been me indirectly calling him a talentless failure. I held the moral high ground, aware I'd never voluntarily hurt him out of spite or because I was lashing out, but what good would it bring me? He'd move on. I'd stay stagnated, reeling as the empty shell hurricane Chase had left behind in his path of destruction.

          As for my father's good news, Stephen Delaroux was improving—slowly, but surely. He was still weak, but the doctors believed he'd make a full recovery as long as he took things slow and remembered his heart wasn't as healthy as it had once been. My father said he thought I'd like to know, and I remembered I did care. I'd grown to care about Stephen almost like family, the friendly uncle you rarely saw but still held dear. 

          That was good. That was more than just good, which felt so diminishing when it came to someone surviving a near-death experience, so I was having a hard time coming up with anything that could be considered great and, therefore, better than that.

          To make matters worse, he was being vague about it, purposefully increasing the suspense levels to keep me on my toes; though it was all in good fun, an innocent gesture meant to be taken lightly, I wasn't much of a fan. If anything, it worsened my anxiety, rendering me nearly unable to process a single word he was saying without my mind automatically clinging to the worst possible scenario, and reminded me I couldn't take a joke to save my life.

          I was too sensitive, too immature. Of course I'd never find success in the film industry if a phone call with my father made me feel that way. Even though he, too, was a part of the industry—like anyone in my life would ever allow me to forget about it—I wasn't certain whether he could separate Penn Romero, his daughter, from Penn Romero, a writer. Maybe he could. Maybe I was the only one incapable of not being biased and not exclusively analyzing people based on their relationships with me.

          "I know this is all very sudden, very new for you, but me and the team absolutely loved your script," he continued. My hands were shaking so violently it looked like I was spasming and, to make matters even more embarrassing for me, I reached out for the first thing my fingers could clench around, which just so happened to be the fabric of Sarah Figueroa's sweatshirt. "Have you officially submitted it yet?"

          "No." I pulled Sarah to me, ignoring her confusion, and appreciated that she was short enough to be used as support. It was what I did, after all—I used people, never bothering to consider their feelings. "I haven't had the courage to do it, but I'll probably do it before the end of the month."

          "Good, good. I wanted to tell you this before you did it just to give you an extra confidence and strength boost. To keep it short and straight to the point, both because there's still a lot to take care of, a lot of bureaucratic crap, really—we're interested in helping it come to life if that's a step you want to take. You don't have to say yes right away or at all, but, when and if you do, we'll be here for you with open arms. We all think it's a very important story to tell, way too important to be archived as a mere senior project. Just think about it, will you?"

          "Okay," I stammered, feeling as though I was so detached from this version of reality it didn't even feel like it was happening to me.

          "And let me know when you officially submit it. I'm certain some people will have plenty to say about it, so remind them of where everything stands. Remind them they're not holding all the cards anymore."

          Once we hung up and all I had was Sarah to comfort me while I apparently looked like I'd just gotten the worst news of my life when it was the exact opposite, I couldn't quite identify the feeling that was overwhelming me the most.

          I wanted to be proud of myself, as something I'd written had been considered good enough to be made into a short film, with proper funding and an actual team backing it up instead of being a simple student film, but there was nuance to it. All my life, I'd been overshadowed by my parents, longing for the day I'd amount to something on my own, the day I'd be able to choose my own path to follow and be celebrated for the achievements I'd gotten on my own.

          Though I'd never stop being grateful for my parents and their unconditional love for me, accepting the offer felt somewhat counterproductive, undoing all my efforts to make a name for myself, and I knew I'd never be able to properly stomach the nepotism accusations. I'd be skipping important steps other people would still have to take and, even while being well aware of the opportunities my last name and social standing allowed me to get, it was a type of privilege that made me feel dirty in a way. It made me feel like I didn't really deserve any of those good things coming my way, like I'd simply lucked out without doing as much work as other people less fortunate than me inevitably had to make.

          The emotional toll that writing the script had taken on me was unbelievably hard to describe, but guilt was settling in, holding me in a chokehold. I couldn't explain to Sarah how much the project meant to me without letting her into the greatest, dirtiest secret of my life, but it was suffocating me by the second, threatening to explode. I was desperate for oxygen, but still kept it vague enough because, no matter what happened, no matter how badly I'd been charred by Chase, I was still jumping at the first chance I got to protect him.

          "I understand your dilemma, but it's too good of an opportunity to pass on," she commented. "Not even nepotism can save bad projects and I'd like to think your father and his crew have been in the business long enough to be able to tell a bad script from a good one they can work with, regardless of who wrote it. You really ought to give yourself more credit."

          "What if it's credit I'm not deserving of? What then?"

          "Why wouldn't you be? It's a script you wrote. It's a script you poured your heart and soul into, and it paid off, regardless of the . . . academic feedback you get on it." Her facial expression darkened and, in that moment, I knew she knew. I knew she knew something, which I'd been suspecting for a while, and my heart even stopped beating with that realization. I hadn't directly spelled it out, but did it matter? I'd let enough information slip out of my stupid mouth for her to put two and two together and deduce. "Don't let this be yet another thing that gets taken away from you. Your health, your happiness, your spirit, your girlhood, and now this? All of that over—"

          "You can't tell anyone."

          "I won't, but I still stand by everything I've said to you about this. That's the kind of person who takes and takes, and never gives you anything in return. There has to come a time when you decide you've had enough. There comes a time when you have to walk away and give yourself everything you've given them. Gain back your life." She stepped away from the wall. "It will never be worth it destroying yourself over someone who will never stop breaking you. You're worth so much more than that."

          If I had to listen to yet another person say that to me, expecting it to be as easy as turning my back on Chase and never caring about him or our history again, I feared I'd have to release a guttural scream. Even though I had the theoretical knowledge to know these people had the best of intentions, the way they were being conveyed felt a bit condescending at times, like I was expected to bounce back from the past three and a half years with a fully reconstructed, rewired brain.

          Maybe I was fundamentally damaged and unlikeable. Maybe the vulnerabilities, inexperience, and naivety Chase had allegedly preyed upon and exploited were character flaws and things that needed change.

          Was that the kind of person who deserved all the healing they preached about, even from the things I didn't speak about? Was that the kind of person who deserved the short film and anny possible acclaim it would get? Or was that the kind of person who had been conditioned to find themselves as undeserving of good things, as someone who thought they had to be blamed for the entirety of a relationship that had never been good or healthy when it hadn't been their responsibility to know better?

          Yes. Yes, it was. And yes, I was deserving of good things. The short film was one of them.

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          The day I decided to officially submit my senior project was proving to be the toughest day of my life by a considerable margin.

          Walking into Chase's office on that gray April morning felt like walking towards a guillotine, mentally bracing myself for my impending execution. Even with my parents, Ingrid, and Savannah (and Sarah, to lesser extent) backing me up, there was still an evil voice prickling the back of my brain that wanted me to believe I would only get burned even further by choosing to fight him instead of fighting alongside him.

          It was the kind of violence I'd gotten comfortable with, all these attacks against me, and I'd never had to think about how to stop, how to escape the cycle because I couldn't tell it existed or how addictive it was. The harsher I acted towards myself, both directly and indirectly, accepting the crumbs of affection I'd occasionally get and thinking that was an appropriate way of being loved, the more I grew used to it, convinced it was the only way I'd ever be wanted. I supposed that was why I'd held on for so long and why the unlearning and restructuring was so hard—the pain was comfortable and safe. The softness and the healing were harder to fathom and describe, and I didn't know what it felt like to not be a burning house.

          So, I'd channeled all those thoughts and feelings into my art, ruined whatever was left of my relationship with Chase for the sake of catharsis and to stop being afraid of choosing myself, and found a title for my short film. I'd entitled it Girlhood, something that kept being echoed every single time his name was brought up in a conversation, and it had felt appropriate in the same way it was safe to let your fingertips brush over an open flame. Whether he'd like it, whether he'd care, whether it would make him feel anything whatsoever, even if it was just aversion or disgust.

          I didn't know why I cared. I didn't know why part of me wanted him to feel negatively about it, as at least he'd be feeling something for me or about something I did instead of treating me with cold indifference. I'd shown up at the hospital like an obedient dog when he called me in the middle of the night, but, with my father keeping us apart at all costs, things were more than over. Whatever warmth he'd still had for me then, it had fully vanished now that it was well cemented in his mind that my parents knew about us.

          Before I could regret a thing, I set the heavy weight of my bound script on his desk. It looked a lot more professional than it was, but I was also petty and hurt enough to relish in the knowledge that I'd gotten an opportunity he had also been chasing, and I'd gotten chosen over him. It was a different type of relevance than the one I'd gotten used to when I was with him, where I'd been chosen over other girls, but this was about my career. This was something he'd thrown to my face, like it had been my fault he hadn't been able to fulfill a lifelong dream.

          "I don't want to see you again."

          The words slipped out of my mouth a lot easier than I'd thought. I hadn't walked into the office with that in mind, not consciously, but it was still something I'd never pictured myself as being capable of uttering. It was one of those things that felt like a fever dream, the kind of speech you wrote down and scrapped because you thought you were too big of a coward to go forward with it.

          Chase blinked, towering over me. He had been standing up the whole time, alone in his fortress, but, this time, I remained firm. "You told your parents."

          "No." There was something stuck halfway down my throat. Fear crept up my spine. During the time we'd been together, I had never been scared of him, but now I was terrified of the repercussions that could come from angering him. Not even of the physical kind—he wasn't violent, not in that sense of the word—but he still had a lot more power and influence than I did. It had already been used against me once, when I wasn't aware of it; now that I was, I wondered if that knowledge would make a difference. "They figured it out on their own. I denied it until the end, but—"

          "So that was it, then? You thought the secrecy wouldn't matter after the relationship ended?"

          I raised my chin. "That was not when the relationship ended for me. It might've been that way for you, but it took me longer than that. It's taking me months to get over it, and it will probably take me even longer to recover from everything else. Everything you did to me, every way you broke me. All of that, and it was still not enough. I was never enough for you."

          He threw his hands up in the air in frustration. "This again, Penelope? I was nothing but patient with you. I tried my hardest to protect you from a world that would have eaten you alive. I sacrificed so much for you, risked my job and my career, and this is how you repay me? By doing the one thing I asked you not to?"

          "It was you eating me alive the whole time. It has always been you, not the world." I balled my hands into fists. "You don't get to talk to me like that. You don't get to drag me back down, not when it was me doing all the giving, not you. Look at how many pieces I had to break myself into so I could give you what I wanted. Look at everything I gave you, even when you didn't ask, and you still needed more. How much more of me would you have needed to ever look at me like I was your equal in the relationship? All I ever wanted was for you to want me, for you to love me, and you've always made me feel like I was asking for too much. You made me feel terrified for having these doubts and negative emotions because it would mean I didn't appreciate you enough, and it would be held over my head. Whatever you thought that was, it wasn't love. I wanted it to be—desperately so. All I've done was defend you and protect you. All I've done was love you, and you weaponized it."

          His eyes were glaciers staring down at me, facial features sharper than knives, and he could slice me open with no hesitation. He'd done it before, not just when he'd broken up with me, and all the micro cuts had never gotten a chance to heal with how frequently they'd been pried open on repeat. We'd pick at the scabbing wounds, both the entry wounds and the exit wounds, and would then convince ourselves those were necessary sacrifices.

          I looked at him, despite knowing how heartbreaking it would be, and it reminded me I loved him. I still did, probably always would, but I knew there would be a day I'd have to walk away from those feelings. I didn't want to be eternally stuck in this loop of remembering I'd lost him and myself in the process, realizing I'd lost myself far earlier than that, and it didn't matter how powerful the love had been—or how powerful I thought it had been.

          I loved him. I had loved him.

          Maybe, in spite of the cruelty and the consumption and the isolation, he had loved me back in his own way, but he had also broken me beyond repair, at least for the time being. At least for the foreseeable future. I would still feel the sick, twisted need to go back to the one thing in my life that had ever felt safe despite the uncertainty, when everything else had been far more chaotic and outside of my comfort zone, even when I knew how soul crushing it had been for me.

          Having him blame me for everything that had gone wrong—with our relationship, with his career, with his reputation—had piled up for months, then years, and I'd begun to believe that was how I'd have to navigate life moving forward. I'd always have to brace myself for an impending catastrophe, brought to life by my insecurities, naivety, and tendency to be overly emotional. I'd always have to obsess over whether what I did or said or thought would ruin everything, whatever everything was in a particular context, and my lifelong struggle with anxiety had taught me just how destructive that was. 

          For my sake, above it all, I needed to both get a grip and get my shit together and to not let myself spiral into those traps. Holding myself accountable for my mistakes was one thing, but I couldn't allow for my insecurities to take the reins and be used against me in that way. There were things in the world that weren't my fault.

          Returning to Chase would be a temptation I'd have to fight for a still indeterminate amount of time and, like with every addiction, there would be triggers. It would always be easier to return to the comforting arms of someone who had always seen me for who I was, who had sensed my potential before I'd even realized it myself, but I would also have to give all of me away even when I didn't have to and get nothing in return.

          Even while no longer having the threat of him losing his career in academia, even if that layer of imbalance were to be removed, I'd still have my memories and my feelings, ones I was still learning to come to terms with, and I feared for what it would do to my psyche if I were to invalidate them all over again. 

          He would still be hesitant to open up, to give me the slightest bit of himself, and he'd just keep on taking and taking and taking pieces of me that I'd willingly break off and hand to him. It was how it had always been—me bending and breaking whenever it was convenient to him, attempting to piece myself back together, and then being brought down by the assumptions, thoughts, and accusations that I was being selfish, manipulative, seeing things that weren't there, and that I was putting words in his mouth.

          "You knew from the start what this would entail," Chase eventually concluded. "You've always known it wouldn't be easy. There would have to be sacrifices."

          "I shouldn't have had to sacrifice myself," I argued. "I pushed you into this, but you knew better. You knew we wouldn't ever be equals. Even now that I'm about to graduate, we still wouldn't be equals because you're incapable of valuing anyone as much as you value yourself. I was nineteen, and you expected me to know—"

          He huffed. "Has this always been about your age, then?"

          "No! It's been about you taking advantage of me when I was vulnerable, when you could tell I wasn't mature enough, something you've been throwing to my face ever since"—a muscle in his jaw twitched and my courage almost faltered, but this was the clean break I needed—"and you knew what I wanted. You knew I was terrified and lonely, you knew the distance I was willing to go to feel wanted, and you just . . . kept taking. You took everything from me—my time, my affection, years of my life I threw away just so I could feel mature enough for you. It has to end at some point."

          He circled the table to stand directly in front of me, then brushed his fingers against my shoulder. My first instinct was to lean into his touch for the first time in months, but I ultimately forced myself to jerk away from him. I couldn't risk a relapse, not when my resolve was already so pathetically weak.

          "I would've given you everything you wanted had you let me," Chase whispered. "You just had to go and ruin it."

          "Then give me what I want now. Let me go. If you ever cared about me, you'll let me go."

          I didn't wait for a verbal answer, mostly because I knew he didn't care. The longer I lingered, the deeper he dug his claws into my brain again, and the harder it would be to walk away. My chest weighed more than the entire world as I spun around on my heel towards the exit, towards the warm light, and it became the most important choice I'd ever made. 

          I would have to keep choosing myself. I would have to mechanically remind myself of doing it, until it became easier, until it became okay, until it became my routine. It was my life now, not his. Not on his terms.

          Girlhood was resting on his desk. My version of girlhood stayed with me. That one was mine—and mine only. He wouldn't get to touch it.

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(not really) (there's still an epilogue left) (but the plot itself is over. the epilogue is just a little bonus thing because i felt like torturing myself further)

this note will be brief, even if this is the final chapter of the book, as there will be an entire story part dedicated to what i really want to say about this book and the journey of writing it. until then, farewell ~ thanks for sticking around until the very end. i'm once again begging you to NOT skip the epilogue and the final note. even if they're extras, in a way, they're still required reading