“I know. She was always so level-headed and kind and loving, and until that we never argued about anything, ever. That’s what made it so hard. I didn’t know how to be mad at her; I just wanted to forget it all, to move on. I just wanted her to…to be proud of me. To see how amazing Echo the Stars is. To just…get over it. But she couldn’t. And then she died, and I never got to say goodbye, never got to—” She breaks off and puts her face in her hands, shudders, shakes, weeps.
I pull her against me. “Ssshhh. Echo, I know. I know. I’m so sorry.”
She cries for a moment, and then straightens up and wipes at her eyes. “I think that’s something I’ll never get over—that she died and the last words we had were in anger.” She sniffs, wipes her eyes again. “I think I’m also a lot more angry at my dad than I’ve ever realized. I’ve been talking to a therapist at school, and this is something we’ve just started touching on. He abandoned me. My dad, I mean. I never knew him, never saw a picture of him or knew his name, not until I was a teenager. Mom just never talked about him. I asked, when I was…six? And then again when I was eight, and then ten, and twelve, and she just said it wasn’t a topic she was willing to talk about. Finally, when I was fourteen, I refused to leave her alone until she told me something. I pestered her for weeks about it. Wrote her notes and letters, left them in her purse and in her gym bag, on the fridge, written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror. I never left her alone about it. I refused to eat for three days, too. That was what broke her, eventually, because I refused to eat. She tried to force-feed me, and that…didn’t go well. We both ended up covered in food, wrestling on the kitchen floor, laughing our asses off, and then she was crying, and told me the whole story. I was fourteen, almost fifteen when she told me.”
“Damn. She really didn’t want to talk about it, huh?” I try to insert some humor, but it falls flat.
Echo shakes her head. “No, she didn’t. She never got over it. Or over him. And neither did I. He left us, just…walked out without looking back. I was just a baby, and Mom was…so young, and she loved him so much. I could hear it in her voice when she told me about him. The effect that his abandonment has had on me, to this day is…something I’m still uncovering.”
“Like what?” I ask. I want to delve deep while she’s so unexpectedly opening up.
“Like…god, everything. It’s a large part of the way I am. The one man that was supposed to love me and be there for me…just walked away. Growing up, I always wondered why my father wasn’t around. I invented stories, like girls do about that kind of thing. I think his abandonment instilled in me very early on this innate distrust of men. This just…instinctive suspicion that if my own father would do that, then so would other guys. It also made me needy for male attention. Mom never dated again. Not once that I ever knew of. I told you that, I think. Well, I grew up never having a guy around, except Grandpa, and God bless him, but he’s a cranky old farmer. Gruff, and not real affectionate. The only sign of affection he’s ever shown is calling me ‘sweet-pea.’ And we didn’t see them a whole lot. Mom worked a ton, and they were busy with the farm. So there was Grandpa, but I wouldn’t really call him a father figure.” She pinches her dress, twists the fabric, lets it go, pinches and twists again. “So I started looking for male attention pretty young, is what I’m getting at. I had my first kiss at eleven, started messing around with seventh and eighth grade boys at twelve. Lost my virginity at thirteen to a high school freshman. In his defense, he didn’t know I was thirteen. I told him I was fourteen, and he’d only just turned fifteen. It was downhill from there.”
“Thirteen. That’s…early.” It’s all I can say. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to think.
“Yeah. By high school I already had a reputation for being…easy.” She glances at me, and I see a hint of something wet in her eyes, but her posture is closed off, so I just let her talk. “And I was. All through high school, I had a different boyfriend every few weeks. They knew it was only about one thing, and they never tried to pretend it was anything but sex. Except Steven Diller. He really thought he was in love with me. He wanted to believe my reputation was all just nasty rumors, bless his heart. He was a cute, sweet, earnest kid. I popped his cherry in the back of his soccer-mom minivan, and I think that was when he realized the truth about me. He wasn’t trying to be hurtful, I get that now and I got it back then, too, but the fact that I popped his cherry and then he just dumped me…that hurt. More than I thought it would. Before that he was so sweet and considerate and wouldn’t hear bad talk about me. He defended me to the point of being picked on for it. Until I fucked him, and he realized I really was a skank, and then he just dumped me like a bad habit. He was just a naïve kid, but it still hurt.” She lets out a breath, tents her fingers over her mouth and nose.
“You don’t owe me any explanations, Echo—” I start.
“I do, though. You want to be with me? You think you care about me, or whatever? Then you need to know what you’re signing on for.”
“Where was your mom during all this?” I can’t help asking. “Didn’t she know?”
Echo laughs through a bitter sob. “She was a single mom just trying to make ends meet. She was working sixty hours a week and going to night school, first to get her RN, and then to get her physical therapy degree. I think she knew, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. I was on birth control by fourteen, so I think she did know, but…she never did anything to stop it. She’s…she was my mom, and I loved her—love her? I don’t know—but I feel like I hold her a little responsible for how I am, you know? I can’t blame it all on Dad leaving me. Mom didn’t do anything to try to curb my promiscuity. I mean, in the end, it’s all me, though. It’s my choice to be this way. I put it in the present tense, because it’s how I still am. Not since—not since I met you. I haven’t been with anyone since I met you. You have to believe that. But up until I met you in Texas, I was…I am—” She halts, takes a deep breath and lets it out, and then pivots on the tabletop to look me in the eye. “I’ve always been kind of a slut, Ben. Let’s call a spade a spade, here. Just in the interest of full disclosure, I guess. But after what happened with Marcus, I stopped even trying to pretend to date. I just embraced the one-night stand mentality, I guess.