Chapter Text
She acted like she was over it. Like she was totally and completely fine. If she hadn’t, everyone would’ve gone back to acting like she was fragile. Like if they touched her, looked at her wrong, she’d break. She was so sick of being treated like that. So she ignored it. Ignored the hurt of practically everyone she’d called her friend turning on her, lying about her, hurting her, because it was just easier. But she never forgave, and she never forgot. She just kept moving. That was all she could do.
She never got back with Claudio after her birthday. Despite all of his apologies, something about it completely unnerved her. Because even if she had slept with Robbie, she wouldn’t have deserved what Claudio did to her. Every apology he gave felt like he was apologizing for his misinterpretation, not the actual behavior. She tried to be friends with him, for the group’s sake, but they just drifted apart, and she couldn’t say she minded.
At her mums’ insistence, she began seeing a counselor to talk through all that had happened. Apparently being publicly slut-shamed on your birthday and then letting your cousin and her boyfriend fake your almost-death warranted such things. She’d resisted going at first, mostly because it went completely against her everything-is-fine-I’m-fine-can-we-move-on-now mentality. But her mums insisted, and they claimed that the therapist they were sending her to was “highly recommended,” so she went.
The sessions actually really helped. She finally got to actually talk about how she felt, rather than hide it for the sake of everyone else’s feelings. She told Dr. Monroe how she couldn’t look the majority of her friends in the eye anymore. How she couldn’t look at her own brother. She told her how she sometimes hated everyone for looking at her like she was about to break. How much she hated the pity. And Dr. Monroe would listen, and sometimes give advice.
At her suggestion, Hero began to put how she felt into words. First, she wrote letters to them. A letter to her mums, then one to Leo, then one to Beatrice, then to Claudio, then Pedro, then John. She wrote them in a sort of stream of consciousness style, each letter peppered with its own combinations of “I’m sorrys” and “how could yous” and “whys” and each was often spotted with tears. Some she posted, some she talked over with the person instead, but one she kept. John’s.
She didn’t keep it because she felt any particular attachment or embarrassment, or anything that strongly towards John at all, besides a more-than-mild dislike. She kept it because try as she might, she couldn’t finish it, because she just didn’t know him. She didn’t know why. All she did know was the last line she always got stuck on-
I know you had your plans. Your own little war to fight. But I am not collateral damage, I am a person. I am not a pawn in your chess game, a piece to be thrown away. What you did was unacceptable.
She knew she should probably finish it off with a “but I forgive you anyway,” but that just didn’t feel right. She couldn’t forgive because she didn’t know what to forgive, or who she was forgiving.
She talked about that very problem in her next session with Dr. Monroe, who nodded and said, “That makes sense. Hero, your problem here is that you had a sense of everyone else you talked to. You’d known all of them for years. But I don’t think you ever really knew John, correct?”
“It’s not like he tried to make himself known,” Hero said with a shrug. “We’ve been going over to the Donaldsons’ for years, and they always tried to make us be friends since we’re in the same year, but it never… he never spoke to me. I didn’t mind to badly, I’d just go play with Bea and Pedro.”
“That may be so, but the fact that you don’t truly know John, combined with the fact that he orchestrated the events that brought you here, does make him the most difficult to forgive. It’s your choice, whether you think you can.”
That left Hero floored. Could she really just choose not to forgive him? Like it was an option? She processed the idea slowly. Could she really leave that unresolved, knot untied, story unfinished, for her whole life? Could she live with the anger?
“I… I think I want to,” she said, not making eye contact with Dr. Monroe. “I don’t want to hate him forever.”
“Then you’re going to have to start by talking to him. Confronting him, and what he did, and how it made you feel. Also, it looks like we’ve run over. Same time next week, Hero?”
“Yeah, same time next week.”
However, confronting him came a little sooner than intended, because as soon as she stepped out of the office…
Well that explains why Dr. Monroe was “very highly recommended.”