Dear Scott

Prologue

The city lay illuminated by streetlights in front of us, waiting to be torn up by Tyler’s enraged driving. 

“I thought you knew!” I screamed as he squinted towards the road ahead of him. 

“Obviously not, Missy,” he snapped back at me, pain filling his voice and ringing through my ears. Had I kept my mouth shut, we could’ve avoided all of this.

The car jolted forward as he sped through another yellow light. I held on tight to the door handle on my right, my nails digging into the worn plastic. I could feel each of my toes as they curled under in my tennis shoes with fear. Picking up speed after each stoplight he raced to beat, Tyler seemed to hardly notice my presence.

Moments early, the calm night rustled outside the car windows as we drove along the freeway, music humming softly through the car. Twisting my rings around on my fingers, I waited anxiously, debating whether or not to interrupt Tyler as he sang along to the radio with the question that had been lurking in the back of my mind the entire evening. I reached forward, making the decision to turn down the radio before turning to face him, the question at the back of my mind then pushing its way to the tip of my tongue. "Tyler?" The way I had so cautiously began my line of questioning was still fresh in my mind as the tires squealed beneath us. He smiled gingerly at me, oblivious to the conversation that was about to fill the car. "What if I said that your best friend, Scott, slept with the girl you've had a crush on since your freshman year?" I could have come up with another way to ask. Perhaps approached his fragile feelings with a bit more caution rather than diving into something that I knew would tear apart that teddy bear of a senior boy.

His smile faded, the corners of his mouth curling down into the top layer of his facial hair. "What?" His breath barely escaped his chest, his question a soft whisper as I nodded my head in confirmation. "No, Miss," he shook his head.

I nodded again. "Yes Sweetie, I'm sorry."

Silence took the car then, his mind processing my words before he began to stutter a jumble of confused thoughts and feelings. “I was with them yesterday, Missy. I slept over at Scott’s house last night," he swallowed hard. "And when I asked him about him and Jean, he promised me nothing was going on. We had a heart to heart, we spent hours on the floor of his attic, just talking.” he closed his eyes briefly as we stopped at the light at the bottom of the off ramp. "He spent all that time assuring me they were just friends," his eyes fluttered open again, his long dark lashes gracing his flustered cheeks. "He just… he never told me," he spit out before racing out into the intersection, seconds after the light changed to green. 

“Tyler, you knew. You wouldn’t have asked him about it if you didn't feel in the pit of your stomach that something was going on between them,” I insisted. I knew he suspected something all along. I could tell in the way he looked at Scott, his trust in his best friend dwindling with each word the two exchanged.

“So what? So I suspected it! He lied to me,” I could hear his anger turn to hurt as he refused to make eye contact with me at the next stop light that had caught him. “My best friend lied to me.”

The light changed from red to green and he slammed down on the accelerator, sending us off into the night once again. I could hear the January wind nipping at the car windows as it whistled over the hum of the engine. I felt out of place as the passenger of the car. Normally I was the one driving, in control of the path and destination, but also completely in control of the car's speed. Now, everything was in the hands of a teenage boy, livid with distain, disgust, and pain. 

The car raced on into the night as I thought back on what I might have changed about the words I so carelessly let slip from my lips. I could have eased him into it, could have prepared him for the truth bomb I was about to throw into his lap. Better yet, I could have kept that secret to myself and left it to Scott to share the intimate details of his personal life with his best friend. But the moment had passed, I had opened Tyler's eyes to the lie that was casting a dark shadow over the friendship he shared with Scott Sharpe, something I really had no right to do. 

Guilt began to fill my veins, my mind torn between praising myself for telling the truth and hating myself for inflicting such pain on a person I cared so much about. I knew nothing would be the same after that night, after those fatal seconds in which I shared a secret that was never mine to share.

“You know what I don’t understand?” Tyler began, interrupting my thoughts as he began to confide in me for the first time. “He’s my best friend. He’s like my brother and has been for years. And he lied to me, Miss. Do you understand what that means?” I glanced over at him, his sky blue eyes shining as they began to gloss over with tears. “My whole friendship with Scott has been a lie,” he whispered.

“No it has not! This was one time Tyler! One little thing, and he didn’t want to hurt you,” I said. Scott thought no one knew about his intimate night he so foolishly spent with Jean. But, like every young woman driven by the roller coaster of emotions that one experiences while engaging in teenage romances, Jean felt compelled to confide in a friend or two. One friend confides in another and another, until one friend along the way confided in me. Until that moment in the car, I hadn’t told anyone. I had locked their secret deep inside for weeks, walking between Scott and Tyler in the halls, knowing the secret that hung between the two of them, too afraid to say anything. It wasn’t as if Scott was out to get Tyler when he began to have an eye for Jean as more than a friend. In all honesty, Scott and Jean having a thing was hardly Tyler’s business, let alone mine. It didn’t directly affect either one of us, yet somehow, we both made it about us.

“I wish you hadn’t told me, Missy,” Tyler stated flatly. At that moment, I wished I hadn’t either. I dreaded the painful days that I knew would follow. Tyler's future actions were unpredictable, the very idea of him acting on his feelings sent waves of panic through my chest. I wished I hadn’t gone to dinner with him that night, that I had faked a cold or something. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I knew it would come out in the car, like word vomit produced from the worst flu induced by high school drama. 

“I have to tell Steven,” he blurted out.

“You cant!” My voice shook, weak with fear. No one was supposed to know. I told Tyler and beyond that it should have died with us, not spread to more people. I didn't want Scott to know that I had known for so long; that I had gone about our daily routine of chatting and never said a word. I could just imagine it then, the long line of people this information would spread to before it got back to Scott that I was the one who stupidly told Tyler. 

“He has a right to know, Missy,” he had his mind made up already, I could feel the firmness in his voice. 

In the impulsive moment when I reached forward to turn down the radio, or in the short moments before then while I tried to gather my thoughts to tell Tyler, I had failed to think past telling him. Failed to think my plan through to the end, to what would happen after Tyler knew about Scott and Jean. In the moments that followed my word vomit filled with truth, I hoped and prayed that he would just blow it off and act like he didn’t know the next day at school. But Tyler Douglas was not that kind of person. He would throw a fit. He would wave his hands in the air and he screamed at the top of his lungs to call as much attention to the situation as possible. 

Just minutes after ignoring me protest his idea to tell our other friends, he had a general plan for what came next; he knew which way he was steering his car, while I just sat there, useless. His life was headed straight on for the faltering wall that was his friendship with Scott. Fueled by rage and betrayal, he was ready for each and every brick that supported their friendship to come crumbling down.  A passenger to all that was set to unravel, I attempted to brace myself for the rapid falling-out that was sure to occur in the days that followed. I had no idea what would come next, where my life would go, but I knew it was changing course before my eyes as the young men in my life took the wheel.