“He loved you,” she says flatly. “And you used him. You thought you were so cool, and he wasn’t good enough to be anything other than a secret. Don’t think that didn’t hurt him. So, on graduation night? That was me. All on my own.”

One day during the last week of school, Becky just happened to be on the other side of a bathroom stall door, when she overheard me telling Allie that I had chlamydia. While waiting for Dr. Gill to give her a check-up she didn’t need, Becky found my file and snapped a picture of my lab report. She — a vigilante nerd mastermind who loved the guy I’d selfishly screwed over for too many years — put that picture in the slideshow.

With this confession, her colours clear and brighten. But the rosy sheen that envelops her freshly cleared conscience is no match for the eerie bruised shadow blob that still lurks around the edge of my awareness. It grows, smearing itself across her cheeks, her neck, her pregnant belly.

“Crow, are you okay? You are very pale. Was it something I said?”

“Yeah. No. Just tired.”

Becky suddenly looks frightened. As though she can sense the unsettling creep of the invading darkness, too. “I should go.” She gathers her coat tight around her neck, bracing for the chill outside. “Duke will be home at five, and he —”

And right there, I can see the blackened heart of Becky Chickenshit’s rose-tinted life. Why she came here. What she wanted me to see this whole time.

“Becky, he hits you, doesn’t he?”

“I’m not much of a cook, but I’m trying to —”

“Becky, don’t go back there. Not tonight. Please. Here.” I dart over to the cupboard and grab the cash-stuffed ladies’ auxiliary envelope that would have bought my escape to Toronto. I press it into her hands. “Take this. Go stay at a hotel. In Town, Town. You can’t go back there. He’ll hurt you. The baby. Let me take care of Duke. You take care of you, okay?”

She takes the envelope, fingers trembling. Her eyes, her aura, fight to stay steady and sure.

“I knew you’d see it, Crow,” she gasps. “Other people, they didn’t believe me because he’s so charming. He’s always sorry after.”

“Sorry is as sorry does, as my mother would say.” And the next thing I know, I’m hugging Becky Chickenshit and imagining that my own aura is reaching into hers and filling it up with the guts and self-righteousness and curse words she’s gonna need to get through the days and weeks and months to come. “And Duke? He’ll be sorry, all right.”

As soon as she’s gone, I call Willy. To apologize for every moment spent not loving him the way he deserved to be loved. To tell him I want to spend the rest of my days making up for it. Or at least trying to. Right before I hang up, I blurt “Hey, did it ever bother you, being called Gimp?”