Rebels Like Us

I wave and keep my head down and grit my teeth as Ansley flies by in her Jeep. Today I may have let her take Czechoslovakia, but I’ll be damned if she marches on to Poland. If she wants a war, I’ll lead her right into the bowels of Russia in the dead of winter.

Yes, I have only the foggiest idea of what my World War II analogies mean. But I do know that a confrontation with Ansley may be inevitable, and I’m going to fight smart.

Or get my cavalry rolled under by Ansley’s tanks.

On a brighter note, even if I wind up committing social suicide, I’m definitely going to ace history this year. Mom would be so proud.

SEVEN

I scroll through Ollie’s Instagram feed and try not to let jealousy eat me alive when I see yet another picture of her laughing with friends at the new chocolate bar she and I were supposed to check out together. I want her to have a great senior year, but here’s another way moving sucks: I’m scared I’m losing Ollie.

Not losing her like we’re not friends anymore. Losing her like our friendship is diluting.

Which isn’t as dramatic as it sounds because we’ve always been a superconcentrated twosome, twined around each other for years. Conjoined, even. Ollie is pretty much reason number one that I dragged my feet over leaving Brooklyn.

Sometimes I feel like I should have just stayed.

But there was this whole other thing.

It revolved around Ollie’s lifelong dream to go to Oberlin, this rad college with an intense music program located in the bowels of the godforsaken Midwest. The thing was, we’d also discussed staying close, geographically, so we could visit each other through college. Freshman year, our plan felt solid, but as high school went on and my life fell apart and my distaste for ever going to a college anywhere near Ohio became clearer, Ollie switched gears and started talking about Juilliard so she could be closer to me if I got into NYU, my dream school.

Now, no doubt Juilliard is freaking amazing and it’s right in the city. But Ollie had done a million hours of research and Oberlin was her nest, not Juilliard. A few weeks before it all went to hell at my place I stumbled on her early acceptance letter to Oberlin hidden under her mattress. It had been stuffed there for over a month. She never said a word to me about it.

I wasn’t sure if she thought I wouldn’t be happy for her. I don’t know if she thought I needed her too much, what with my life falling to pieces and everything. But, as far as I was concerned, Ollie and her bassoon were going to Oberlin, no questions. I pulled her mom aside and spilled about how I was afraid Ollie was settling and then I totally sold her on encouraging Ollie to go to Oberlin. Then I picked up and left for Georgia. I needed to show Ollie we could love each other from afar. That she had to go wherever she needed to go, and I’d be there for her no matter what.

Only I guess I kind of thought it would all stay the same. And that’s exactly why it’s so brave and noble to sacrifice for the person you love—because it hurts like hell. Things change. And they may not go back to the way they were before.

Ever.

My mother comes in from work as I’m simultaneously hashing through all of this, listening to angsty, dark music, and contemplating the intolerable stupidity of my day at school.

“Hey, honey.” She cracks the door of my room open. “You want to grab a bite?”

“Nope.” It’s rude, but I have to put on a happy face for so many people all day long, and last night’s spat left a dull ache in my head, like a hangover headache.

“You know, we have a couple episodes of our show waiting, and I’m kind of dying to see what happens with coma guy.” She leans against my door frame, but I can tell she’s working hard to look like she’s at ease. “I finally read the article you tried to show me. The one about the fan theory where the coma patient is—”

“It was a dumb theory. So wrong. Spoiler alert—coma guy is one of the armed robbers who held up the bank across from the hospital. His crew dumped him because they thought he was dead and never told anyone. The head nurse helps him escape, but she doesn’t make it to Mexico to meet him because at the last second they bring in the victims of the horrible car crash and her ex-fiancé is one of the patients.”

My mom’s face goes through a few expressions as she processes the information: shock at the twist, curiosity about how I know, disappointment over the fact that there’s no reason for her to watch it now. I realize I’m the worst kind of troll. Only a very messed-up person spoils three of five episodes in a series’s final season.

Part of me takes sadistic delight in hurting my mom like she hurt me. Part of me wonders what kind of terrible, petty jerk I’m turning into.

“I didn’t realize you watched the episodes. Well, at least one of us got to enjoy them.” She already looks sufficiently bummed. I could stop there. A good person would.

“I didn’t watch,” I blurt out. It’s almost involuntary, like I’m possessed by the vengeful spirit of a chronic television drama spoiler. “I just read about it.”

“You never look at spoilers.” I try to interpret the wrinkles in my mother’s forehead like fortune-tellers read palms. I realize there’s no secret mystery, just the stress-induced skin creases that come from dealing with a belligerent teenage daughter.

“I do when I don’t really care about a show. It was getting so stupid.”

Eight seasons. One hundred twenty-four episodes. Three flus, a few dozen snow days, rerun marathons during heat waves and summer vacations at my maternal grandparents’ lake house, episodes with pints of ice cream to forget boy problems, low-key birthday celebrations just the way we liked—One Hundred Thousand Beats had seen us through it all, and this is the way I honor my old faithful medical drama?

“Okay, enough.” Mom presses her fingers to her temples like she’s trying to ward off a migraine with her bare hands.

“Enough what?” I will her to fight, to explode, to tell me why she chose that gross man over me.

“Of this attitude all the time. I’m not some monster who ruined your life. You keep pushing me away, but—have you spoken to your father?” Just before she really lays into me for being a jerk, she flips and brings up my dad.

“I texted with him last night.” It’s not a lie. He sent me a bunch of screenshots from this site that puts witty text on famous art. I know it was just a ton of crying cat emojis from me and stupid art jokes from him, but it counts as talking. Sort of. “Why are you bringing Dad into this?”

“You...you really need to set aside some time and talk about what you’re feeling with him—” Mom says in her best teacher voice.

“Why? Because it’s too much trouble for you to have an actual conversation with me?”

“When are you going to stop punishing me, Agnes? I’m human, you know. I mess up too.” She clutches the door frame with a white-knuckle hand, her hazel eyes blinking too fast because she’s getting teary.

I debate asking. Or just telling her how I feel. Instead of vulnerable honesty, I choose caustic sarcasm.

“You sure do!” I exclaim with a big, fake smile. “And now here we are, in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. I’d love to talk about how unfair this is to you, but I don’t want to fail my classes on top of having the entire school hate me, so I better hit the books... You can go whenever.”

I wait, breath held, for her to morph from the sad little rag doll’s shadow she’s been and fly at me like the raging Irish-tempered harpy she always turned into when I put a toe too far over the line before. I half salivate for her to come at me, my ears pricked to hear her screaming that I “better learn some respect” and that she’s “not one of my little friends.” I want it to be like old times, the way we were before, even if that means enduring a screaming fit.

But she doesn’t raise her voice.

The hot mix of adrenaline and hope seeps out of me as she turns on her heel and pads back down the hallway. I’d bet a round-trip ticket to JFK that she’s opening a bottle of merlot and flipping to the melancholy Celtic mix on her iPod. Boo frickity hoo.

Maybe she should have dated one of the thousands of nice, normal single guys who chased her all over the place instead of getting low-down and freaky with a married coworker whose wife aired their dirty laundry far and wide across the five boroughs. Maybe she should have told her only daughter what was going on instead of shutting her out until things were too screwed up to fix.

Just at the moment when my brain cannot handle one more pulse of confusing information, my phone rings and Lincoln’s gorgeous, traitorous face lights up the screen. It’s like he has a timer set to know when my emotions are most jumbled. I clutch the phone to my chest, and my body crumples around it.

I should have deleted this picture of him from my phone when my hate was surging and made me strong. He sent it to me long before I suspected him of screwing me over. His dark hair is plastered to his head and he’s holding a surfboard. There’s sand all over his dark brown shoulders, and he’s smiling so wide, his eyes crinkled, his white teeth bright against his wet skin. His index finger points to the Saint Christopher necklace I gave him before he left.

He claimed that he sent me the picture because he missed me, and he said he was pointing at the necklace because he was telling his cousin about his wahine purotu who gave it to him for safe travels when he went back to New Zealand over the summer so he and his father could participate in a Maori leadership convention. Which was all so sweet when I thought I was his only “pretty girl.” But now I look at that picture and wonder if he was with other girls on that trip—girls who could flirt with him in Maori, with sweet, sexy laughs, girls who could surf in water swarming with sharks without squealing with fear.

Girls who weren’t me.

“Screw you, Lincoln,” I whisper to his picture, which sweeps off my phone and disappears after the final ring, replaced by a generic voice mail notification.

My ears burn, wanting so badly to hear his cocky voice, even though I know it would probably be roughed up with his tears. My traitor heart pounds, wondering will you, will you, will you?

I pick up the phone and swish my thumb back and forth across the glossy black screen.

Will you, will you?

When I toss my phone on the bed, it lands in the navy bowl of Doyle’s cap. I finger the rough canvas and rub a thumb at the frayed edge of the brim. Holding the hat works like magic to set my head straight, and it radiates goodness and confidence through me the same way finding a copper penny on heads used to when I was a kid. The hat helps remind me that I have no need for people who use and abuse me when there are people who like and respect me.

Decision made.

I will not.

But I will call Ollie to calm the last of my battered nerves.

“Did he call you?” she demands before I can say hello.

“Yes.” I pace my room, which is an exemplary pacing space, since there’s hardly any furniture in it.

“Coño.” Despite being crazy upset, Ollie’s occasional DR swear always makes me smile. “He tried calling here too. And screw him!” I hear her pound her fist on her desk. I imagine all the famous composer bobble heads in her collection nodding along with her righteous anger.

“Should I just pick up? It’s not like I can go see him, right? It’s not like I’ll get sucked back in, so why not hear him out? Right?” I feel jazzed up, like that time Olls and I sucked down an entire netted bag of those fluorescent-colored freezer pops that come in the plastic tubes.

“No!” She’s ferociously adamant. “What will he say? What could he say that wouldn’t be a complete waste of your time?”

“Okay. Can you...can you distract me? Tell me about anything. Your day. Not that that would only be a distraction. I mean, obviously I want to hear about your day anyway.”

“Um, I bought these fierce-looking beads, the most beautiful pewter color, and they went berserk and the color all chipped off them before lunch. I had to refund twenty-five percent of my day’s profits and redo so many seventh graders’ bracelets, I wanted to scream.”

“Damn those bead criminals,” I growl sympathetically.

But from a thousand miles away, I can’t see the shimmer of the beads or the intricate knot design, and I’m pissed at how unfair it is. I thought I’d take the gold in rocking my senior year, but it winds up I won’t even get a participation ribbon.

“And the second chair cellist from Javier wrote a duet for his senior project. He needs a bassoonist, and, um, he asked me.”

Even though we’re not FaceTiming, my mind’s eye imagines Ollie’s smooth skin blushing pink, and I know she’s twirling a piece of her long black hair like some hip Vietnamese American version of a Valley girl.

“Is this the skateboard guy?” I squeal. Ollie’s had a revolving door of crushes the last few months, many of them from afar, so we don’t always have names to work with, and I’m not always the best at keeping them straight. Name or no name, dissecting these crushes always takes top priority.

“No.” I picture how she ducks her chin whenever she does that shy little laugh. “Skateboard guy is first chair, Thorton’s. This is the guy with the pretzels at the fountain that time, remember? Before the symphony?”

“Romantic.” The word floats out on a sigh. “You’ll send me the demo? And some pictures of him? I think I’m thinking of skateboard boy but putting a pretzel in his hand.”

“I will,” she promises.

But I won’t be around to sit on her bed while she practices her bassoon for a jillion hours and obsesses for twice that long over Pretzel Boy’s every word and look.

Missing that will mean missing the meat of the entire experience.

Our friendship can get by on the scraps, but I would rather it was fat and healthy.

“So have you seen my idiot brother’s Instagram?” The best way to feel better about anything, ever, is to rag on my brother with my best friend.

“You mean the dark, broody black-and-white pictures of half-eaten croissants and close-up eyeballs? I have no clue if it’s an art project or real life, since he captions everything in French, and mon français n’est pas bon.”

“He’s so pretentious. I think he’s embarrassed to let anyone know he ever lived in the United States, let alone that he’s a US citizen,” I say in a horror movie narrator voice.

“I’m not saying we have to, but a throwback pic of him might be a fun thing...” I hear what sound like thumps and grunts and am willing to bet Ollie is under her bed. “Ah! A little dusty, but I found that picture from the Fourth of July. The one where your mom bought Jasper and your dad matching American-flag shorts and they both had that weird haircut like the guy from House Party.”

I howl. “The Kid ’n Play classic!” Underneath my unholy laughter at that memory is a little sting. Maybe it’s partially that I brought the whole senior nostalgia thing on early by switching schools midyear, but bittersweet is my constant emotional jam. I miss the way things were—I miss my family being whole and unpretentious and happy. I miss my best friend. I miss having a boyfriend I trust.

I push through it because what else is there to do? Ollie is the best shoulder to cry on ever. She’s better at long-distance best friendship than most people are at the one-on-one, everyday kind. I’m thankful our best friendship is still awesome and loving, but I’m pissed circumstances have forced it into a blurry copy of what used to be so sharp and bright, and that aches.

When we get off the phone, I feel hollowed out. If I was back in the city, tonight would be my life art class at Mom’s college... The one we were attending together, the one where our folders with half-shaded legs and feet and other things are probably still leaning against the cluttered shelf. In the fall, I joked that the hot male model was kind of checking my mom out. But at Thanksgiving, I stopped making her blush by pointing out that kind of stuff (even though ninety percent of straight dudes check my mom out...that’s just my life) because every sign pointed to her and my father reconciling. Maybe that’s why the whole affair blindsided me so hard. Maybe I still feel cheated out of that naive Parent Trap dream.

Jasper so would have been London Lindsay Lohan in that alternate reality.

There are no art classes here. I could join a club, but every club has its hierarchy all set up by now, and it’s not like I’ve made many friends. My Brooklyn neighborhood was full of coffee shops and bookstores I’d wander through with Ollie in our downtime. We prided ourselves on finding the best hole-in-the-wall food places. I went to musical reviews and art shows with Ollie and her parents, helped Mom organize student events at the college, rocked the vote, volunteered at soup kitchens, headed committees... My life back home was full to bursting, to the point where I’d dream about slowing down, taking time to do more nothing.

Now that I have all the downtime I could want, I also have a nasty case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for slap back.

In this new, boring version of my life, I do homework. I try to nap with no success. I scroll through playlists I instantly hate. I poke around in my unpacked boxes, but I find too many items that make me feel starved for a life that’s washing away too fast. I decide to distract myself with a life-form more pathetic than I am in my current state, so I water Doyle’s tree and imagine Ollie lounging on the beach chair next to me with a stack of paperbacks and a pitcher of her famous lemonade nearby. I imagine my abuela swatting flies, pruning the already-tended bushes, squatting down to save soggy, drowning dragonflies from the pool while we yell at her to relax a little even though we know she is physically unable to do that. I imagine my brother, dressed to the nines in a seersucker suit and poring over Mom’s old copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, impervious to heat and tedious literature. I imagine Mom and Dad, maybe fighting, maybe kissing... They did those two things so often, I’m having a hard time assigning them any other activity at this pitiful imaginary pool party.

And, though I fight it, my sappy brain imagines Lincoln, bouncing off the diving board, tucking his knees to his dark, muscular chest and flipping in a few tight circles before he breaks the calm surface with a splash so big, it disrupts everyone. We’d all be annoyed until his head pops up and he dazzles us with that irresistible smile.

That smile got him out of so much trouble. That smile sometimes made me scared I’d never be attached to another guy, because I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

I know I was wise to put a thousand miles between me and it. Me and him.

“¿Qué lo que carajito? I feel like you’re not even trying,” I scold the sickly little tree to divert my attention. “Trust me, I get how hard it is to be a transplant, but you can’t go down without a fight. You’re here now. You might as well attempt to thrive.”

So I’m talking to plants now. Doyle really is rubbing off on me.

Despite my pep talk, the tree looks zero percent better this mosquito-filled, muggy evening than it did yesterday, and I’m willing to bet that’s a trend that will continue for weeks on end. The gusts of rain that blew through and chilled things for a nanosecond this afternoon are long forgotten, and the leaves sprouting out of this poor excuse for a tree look parched and overly delicate. While the hose soaks the earth above the tree roots, I wander to the edge of the pool and drop my feet into the still water, then lean back on my arms and tilt my head up. I’m attempting to untangle the few constellations I know when a voice on the other side of our white picket fence makes me jump.

“Stargazing?”

It’s a romantic word anyway, but twisted around his drawl it sounds delicious.

“What exactly did you do before I moved here, Doyle? Because it seems like I take up a lot of your time.” I watch as he climbs over the fence and jumps into my yard without asking permission, his legs stretched long and sure as he walks my way.

“You’re gettin’ ahead of yourself, Nes. I’ve spent a grand total of maybe two hours with you, not countin’ English class, which is required.” He kicks off his boots, throws his socks on top of them, cuffs his jeans, and slides down next to me so that we’re shoulder to shoulder, our feet nearly touching under the water. “Know any constellations?” He juts his chin up.

We gaze at the black sky dotted with a few pale white stars, and I try hard to ignore how much I want his arm around me—both because he’s got beautiful, muscled arms and because the reality of Doyle’s arm will blot out the memory of Lincoln’s.

“I know the big ones. The Dippers and Orion. And...that’s all, I guess. Can you enlighten me?” I covertly side-eye him, but he’s looking at me.

Coño. Caught!

“Nope. Now, if you wanna know the plants growing ’round here? Or the bugs? That I can help you with. But when I look up, I don’t see nothin’ in particular.” His foot brushes mine under the water, and a chill swims up my back.

“You mean you don’t know Shark Attack on a Half Shell?” I point, and he leans over to get a better look, his ribs pressing tight to my back. I move from word to word carefully, because my brain is mushy when I’m this close to him. “Those three, see, are sort of like a shell, if you squint when you look, and that kind of triangle—”

“Maybe more like Rabid Goldfish Attack on a Plank?” He wraps his arm around my shoulder and points to the left, pulling me closer as I tilt my face to the sky. “And that one? I’d say Four-Wheeler Running over a Hog.”

I laugh because I’m supposed to, and I train my eyes at the stars in the sky, but I’m not sure all the beauty I see overhead is strictly astronomical. Some of that sparkle has to be because of my close proximity to Doyle. I swear the sky wasn’t exploding with all this gorgeous light before he sat down next to me.

“Why are you here?” I blurt out. He drops his arm, letting it graze my side.

“My grandfather needed me to check up on the pecan orchard across the street. They’ve got weevils—”

“You’re seriously trying to tell me that I’m just a side visit after you took care of pecan weevils?” His face is Norse-hero handsome in the moonlight.

“Hell no.” His grin tentacles around my heart, squeezing tight. “Truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever run out of excuses to get over here and see you. The Dickersons think they might have a spider mite infestation in their cotton, but their fields are fifteen miles in the other direction. I convinced my cousin to take a look at them.” He brushes the hair from my face with the back of his calloused hand. “I came here to see you, and I’ll keep doin’ it till you’re back in New York City, forgettin’ this all like it was a bad dream.”

He slings my own words at me like the nasty slap of a rubber band on my skin. I pull back from him. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” His voice never loses its evenness.

“Bring on the guilt. I mean...it’s stupid.”

We just met, he has no right. But if that were true, it would be simple to blow him off. So why isn’t it?

The truth is, something stuck fast the second I met him. He walked up, and I had this feeling like, oh, there he is, that person I just met, but who I’ve been waiting for. Like I’d always known he was coming, and then—there he was.

Here he is.

But that’s just a weird gut feeling, probably intensified because I’m so damn lonely and out of place right now.

“We don’t even know each other,” I muse, half-surprised to hear myself speak the words out loud.

“We could fix that. We should. Right now. We never even met properly, what with you bein’ all flustered by my manly pecs the other day.” My laugh skips over the pool water and echoes back at me in a friendly way. He faces me and holds out his hand. “I’m Doyle Ulysses Rahn. Pleased to meet you.”

My mouth swings open like my jaw is set on faulty hinges.