I Don't Forgive You

In fact, if a fire destroyed the rest of the house, we could happily live in this one room.
Having the computer in a central place means we can pay bills, check email, or search for a recipe without having to leave Cole unattended. And we can monitor his online activity, which for now consists of watching YouTube videos of other children building complicated structures with LEGOs.
I take my tea and settle in front of the computer, ready for it to give me answers to questions I’m not even sure I can articulate. I don’t even know this Rob’s last name.
Above the computer hangs a poster I’ve owned for ages, a reproduction of a Mary Ellen Mark black-and-white photograph of a reed-thin girl in a black dress, arms crossed, a defiant expression on her face as she peers out from behind a black veil. Mark hates the photo, finds it depressing and spooky. But I hang it in a prominent place every time we move. It reminds me that photography isn’t only for the beautiful. Everyone deserves to be truly seen.
Our home page is Google, and I type in Rob, then Eastbrook, and then Bethesda. What comes back are a jumble of meaningless results. It’s not a surprise that our D.C. suburb is filled with men named Robert. The sheer uselessness of this exercise leaves me defeated.
My fingers hover over the keyboard, reluctant to type the word that has flashed neon in my brain. It’s as if doing so will conjure, voodoo-style, some spirit I won’t be able to rid myself of.
I take a deep breath and type.
Tinder.
I click, but I can’t get far without joining. And it seems that to join Tinder, you have to link your Facebook account, which I am not willing to do, even for purely research purposes.
Instead, I open Instagram and scroll mindlessly through the likes I’ve received recently. I click on a new follower, and it takes a moment for it to register: Rob, the guy from last night.
I curse myself. Why did I tell him to follow me on Insta? He’s gone back through my posts and liked dozens of pictures from the last few months. Mostly cityscapes, but some studio shots that clients have allowed me to post, along with selfies of me in my new surroundings—the neighborhood pool, the Farm Women’s Market in downtown Bethesda. What he did takes time, and it creeps me out.
But it is his comments that make my skin crawl.
Under one selfie I took in front of a fiery red maple on our block, he wrote: Not just beautiful, but talented, too.
And on a shot I took of Leah and me before we headed out for a girls’ night of drinks, he wrote: Sexy Lexi.
I freeze.
There it is again.
That nickname. It can’t be a coincidence, but what connection could this Rob guy possibly have to Overton Academy?
I’ve been careful since I left Connecticut more than sixteen years ago. There’s a demarcation in my life between then and now, and I am meticulous about not letting anything in from the past. I don’t subscribe to any of the Overton alumni stuff, I throw away anything that comes in the mail, and I haven’t stayed in touch with anyone from my two years at that school. If anyone from high school does manage to connect my past name, Alexis Healy, with my married name, Allie Ross, and asks to follow me on Instagram, or tries to friend me on Facebook, I offer the same response: radio silence.
I’m super careful to keep everything under Allie Ross.
Not Alexis, and certainly not Lexi.
Lexi was an experiment my senior year at Overton—a brief and desperate attempt to transform from an awkward scholarship student into someone sophisticated and alluring.
I can even recall the exact moment I decided to start calling myself Lexi. It was a chilly Friday night in late fall, the kind in New England where the wind is sharp and there’s no doubt that a long, cold winter is around the corner. Madeline, my only true friend at the school, convinced me to come with her to crash a house party.
We’ll be sociologists, Madeline said in that way she had of hiding her teenage insecurities behind faux intellectualism. She was one of a handful of African American girls at Overton and the only one in our grade. She often came across as uptight and rigid, unfriendly even, the only child of two stiff academics. She had mastered the art of rejecting the world first, before it got a chance to reject her. But when it was just us two, she was different—wry and vulnerable. C’mon, she cajoled, we can stand off by ourselves and laugh at the sheeple in their J. Crew clothes getting drunk on Daddy’s liquor.
I can see us now—me dressed incongruously in a miniskirt and a hand-me-down men’s parka, and Madeline, her shoulders stooped to minimize her height, dressed all in black—trudging up the steps to the grand Victorian a few blocks from the town square. I remember hoping that the party had reached that tipping point where everyone was too trashed to realize we had not been invited.
It wasn’t long afterward that I was back on the street, pulling my parka tight against the wind, furious at Madeline for abandoning me for the attention of a wasted soccer player, the kind of vacuous bro we always mocked. Her transformation from cynical social observer to desperate groupie had been swift. All he did was offer her a red Solo cup full of beer and recite a few lines from a Dave Matthews song.
Disgusted and betrayed, I headed to the bus stop and settled in for a long wait. I was no stranger to the public transportation system. Unlike most of my classmates at Overton, who lived in the wealthy town in which the school was located, I had a thirty-minute bus ride every day from Norwalk. I would press my forehead against the glass and watch as our neighborhood of