Rebels Like Us

I leaf through the tattered pages, hold it up, and attempt one last smile that’s basically just me grasping at straws. “No friend as loyal.”

Mrs. Lovett’s lips twitch, and I curl my fingers around the old misogynistic tale of oceanic triumph and New Testament allusions, waiting to see if her lips will twitch up or...

Up. Smile. Score!

But now that I bought her love back with a cheap quote trick, I have to be on my best behavior while we scribble notes about Hemingway’s boozing and hunting and womanizing—and that means keeping my mouth firmly shut. Because, despite my best intentions, whenever I open my mouth, trouble finds me.

Also, I’m still not sure about the whole ma’am thing.

When we’re finally dismissed, Alonzo drags Khabria over to me.

“Agnes, tell this know-it-all that it hurts your hand to make a snowball.”

“Um, if you don’t wear gloves, it stings,” I admit reluctantly. I’m breaking a deep, unwritten girl code by siding with Alonzo, even on a matter this insignificant, but...

“See! I told you! Ooh, you so wrong!” Alonzo crows, shimmying his arms at his sides and strutting around Khabria in a weird, end zone type celebration dance. “My daddy told me when he was in Lamaze class with my mama they made everybody squeeze an ice cube to let them get a taste of labor pain.”

“Um, it’s uncomfortable, but I don’t think it’s anything like labor,” I cut in, but Alonzo is flapping his elbows like a chicken while Khabria sucks her teeth and sputters. I fear for Alonzo’s life if he keeps poking this very beautiful, probably lethal bear. “I mean, it’s mostly fun, not painful...” I trail off, and Khabria shakes her head.

“Ignore that fool. He actually enjoys being a dumb ass.”

It occurs to me that I could stick out my hand and introduce myself—no! Maybe that’s too weird?—but before I determine if the chance to make a new friend outweighs the incredible social awkwardness, Alonzo’s sauntered up to his group of cronies and Khabria is gliding away to join a clutch of girls wearing navy cheerleading uniforms that match hers—including both plastic airheads from earlier. Ugh, maybe I should be glad social awkwardness won out before I tried to befriend someone who hangs out with the twit twins.

I try to convince myself I dodged a social bullet, but it doesn’t feel awesome to be left hugging my books and wishing I could teleport to my next class so that I won’t have to suffer being the one and only student at Ebenezer High navigating the halls alone.

And then, suddenly, I’m not.

“Hey! Hey, Agnes!” Khabria’s tiny cheerleading skirt swishes around her long legs as she jogs down the hall after me. “I’m your peer guide today.” She tucks a loose red braid back into her updo and gives me a slightly bigger smile than when we first met.

It’s probably just a coincidence that the clutch of cheerleader clones she left down the hall erupts into squawks of laughter at that exact second.

Probably.

Panic feels like quicksand sucking at my ankles and threatening to pull me under. I half choke out my next words.

“Uh, no worries. I have this handy map.” I flutter the wrinkled paper between us like I’m waving a white flag. I surrender to social isolation—leave me alone in my misery. “I’ve been riding the subway alone since I was a little kid. I’m sure I can manage the halls of a high school.”

Khabria nabs my schedule and cocks an eyebrow. “Really? Because your next class is back that-a-way.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder as I grab the map back and try to get my bearings. I usually have a decent internal compass. I guess I’m just off-kilter today.

“Right. That way. Okay. I got turned around, I guess.”

Senior year. I’m supposed to be directing freshman to the nonexistent fourth-floor pool, not getting lost going down the main hall.

“I know it’s not the subway, but finding your way around here can be tricky. Let me give you a quick tour at least.” Khabria’s dark eyes warm with the kind of sympathy I’m used to giving, not receiving. I definitely prefer being in charge, not being led around. But I guess I don’t have much choice now.

“Okay. So...I see my next class from here. After that I have to head across this courtyard...or, wait? Is that a stairwell...?”

“C’mon.” Khabria marches me to my next classroom and bats her lashes at the cute young teacher manning the door. “Mr. Webster, this is Agnes. It’s her first day, and I’m her peer guide. Is it okay if I take her on a quick tour once the halls empty?”

Mr. Webster crosses his arms over his wide chest and sighs. “Ten minutes, Ms. Scott. Agnes will already be playing catch-up.”

“Fifteen? Please, sir?” she says, bartering with a flirty edge to her voice and biting her bottom lip for good measure.

Mr. Webster looks decidedly uncomfortable. He takes off his nerdy-cute glasses and cleans the lenses with the tail of his half-tucked dress shirt. “Fine. Go, quickly, so you can get Agnes back as soon as possible.”

“Thank you, Mr. Webster,” she singsongs. We leave him frowning at his polished shoes.

Khabria whirls me down the hall, giggling the whole way, and I feel normal for a split second. When we’re at the stairwell, she tugs me close, glances over her shoulder, and dishes some seriously crazy gossip. “Webster tries to play it cool, but everyone knows he’s dating a girl who just graduated last year...and they started seeing each other before school was out.” Her eyes go wide and her perfect eyebrows rise up until they almost disappear in her hair.

“Did they get caught?”

There was a rumor about one of the teacher’s aides and a senior at Newington when I was in tenth grade. But the rumor barely had time to circulate before the aide was gone without a word. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if we found out the rumor was true, then passed that aide in the halls every day...

“No, but we all know it’s true. He was at a few high school parties over the summer, always looking like he wanted to disappear. Oh, here are the math labs, and your next classroom after you leave Webster’s class is the middle one.” She waves a hand at a cluster of rooms filled with students silently scribbling complicated geometry equations on whiteboards, then sneers. “I don’t know why he’d risk showing his face where there could be students around. I mean, it’s not like anyone told on him, but someone could’ve, and now he can’t get respect no matter how tough he tries to act because how do you respect someone with that little sense? Last year, he was one of the strictest teachers we had. This year, I think he’s just waiting on us to graduate, so one more class that went to school with his little girlfriend will be gone and out of his hair.”

Khabria’s words cut like a razor through tissue paper, and I realize she’s almost gleeful. I kind of get it. Right or wrong, there’s a certain thrill in holding power over the people who are supposed to be in authority, especially when they screw up.

“Has he ever made a pass at any of the other girls?” I ask. I try my best to avoid gossip for the most part, but there’s something weirdly comforting about it. It gives you the illusion you’re sharing a secret—even if the secret is something everyone in school is talking about.

“Nah. Apparently it was true love with him and that one girl, or whatever. Guidance office.” She points and it’s reassuring to see the familiar “mountain climber with an inspirational quote underneath” poster that must be required decor for every guidance office in the country.

“That’s crazy,” I murmur as I poke my head in and peek at the out-of-date computers and dusty college manuals. “I’d probably quit if I were him.”

“People ’round here are stubborn like that though.” She shakes her braids out with her fingers. “My gram always says people have more pride than sense. They’d rather be miserable than admit defeat. I think some people just like being miserable, period.” We stroll down a back hall. “Food science, shop, child care, music room,” she ticks off.

“I definitely get that vibe from some people.” I decide to test the waters. “No offense if they’re your friends, but those two cheerleaders in our English class seemed pretty bent on spreading misery...at least toward me.”

Khabria’s pace slows and a blush warms the deep brown skin over her perfect cheekbones. “People sometimes forget we’re supposed to be hospitable to newcomers, especially if we’re on cheer. I know the other girls came off badly today, but their bark is definitely worse than their bite. They prolly thought they were being funny or something.” She shrugs. “That whole pride thing. Don’t take anything they say to heart. Maybe it’s a side effect of being squad leaders every year since we were in peewee cheer—maybe they’re just used to ribbing on the new girl.”

“So they’ve always been the queen-bee types?” I can so imagine the Generic Mean Girls as preschoolers with pigtails and bows, lording over the snack table while they nibbled their graham crackers and sipped their juice boxes.

“Ain’t my queens,” Khabria bites out. She sighs and takes it down a notch. “Look, some people are really into cliques here. They have their friends, their jokes, their way of doing things... If you don’t like them, my best advice for you is just stay away.”

I realize I touched a nerve, and I get it. There are girls I would have counted as my best friends in middle school but haven’t spoken a word to in years—girls I’d still defend if anyone else tried to talk crap about them. People—even people you care about—can change so fast, and loyalties get complicated.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.” By now we’ve rounded back to the main hall and Mr. Webster’s class, all the initial closeness we shared over steamy gossip withered.

“Agnes, Khabria!” Mr. Webster pokes his head out the door, calls down the hall to us, and taps his watch in warning. “You’re five minutes late. Let’s hustle.”

“Thank you for showing me around.” I clutch my map in shaking fingers, off-kilter after possibly offending the first person who was actually nice to me.

“You’re welcome. Let me know if you need help with anything else today.” Khabria’s voice runs as cold as the water around an iceberg. She hesitates, then says, “Look, most people here are good folk. We get along, we help each other out. Don’t judge anyone too harshly based on a few minutes of knowing them.”

I watch her skirt flutter as she flounces away before I can answer, and I slip into class. My classmates text on their phones, paint their nails, and chat as Mr. Webster robotically lectures, his body language limp with defeat. I wonder if he regrets anything. I wonder if staying here at Ebenezer was him standing his ground or giving up.

If I stay here, would it be standing my ground or giving up? Bells ring, classes move, and I follow my map like a pro now that Khabria’s shown me the basic layout. For the rest of the day, I’m mostly ignored. Which is fine. I’m only enduring. Just a few months.

Just the rest of my senior ye—

It’s like I accidentally pulled the plug on a hot bubble bath. I search under the suds to plug it back up because if I don’t, every single emotion I’ve kept bottled up will drain, hot and wet and embarrassing.

No girl who grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn (all right...fairly gentrified Crown Heights, but still) is going to cry on her first day of school in Nowhere, Georgia. I’d have to beat in my own ass. It wouldn’t be pretty.

The final bell tolls and crowds press out of doorways and into the hall on every side of me, a tsunami of bodies. I don’t care about being jostled, but it’s weird to not have a solitary soul waiting for me by a locker or gesturing for me to sneak down a back hall and beat the rush.

I sprint alone to my little Corolla—a poor consolation prize from my mother to make up for the dissolution of my pretty rad life because of her screwup—and peel out. I choke on the diesel fumes from the line of lifted pickup trucks that leads home.

Home.

That’s the word on repeat in my head when I veer the car to the side of the road and pull the damn plug, unstop everything I’ve been holding in. I’ve felt seconds away from drowning all day, and now I weep and scream like a banshee on meth in the semiprivacy of my car, letting it all drain out.

“Vete pal carajo, Georgia! Concho hijo de la gran Yegua!”

I curse this godforsaken state at the top of my lungs and beat the steering wheel. I drum my heels on the floorboards. I scream curses over and over until my voice is hoarse. And then I wipe the mascara out of my eyes, blow my nose, take one deep breath, pull back onto the road. “Coño.” Damn. There’s nothing left to say, so I glare at the obstinate sun, and go...home.

God, it would feel good to spill my guts to Mom the way we used to, Lorelai and Rory–style, but the time for sitcom mother-daughter banter is long gone. When I look back at all the times I assumed she was doing something awesome, like tutoring one of her struggling students, and realize she was, in fact, doing something skeevy, like flirting with a married dude, a bone-crushing feeling of betrayal presses onto me. It’s as if I was waiting at Luke’s with my giant mug of coffee, but my mother never showed.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at her and forgive her for selfishly and systematically ruining my life. Ruining our life. All because of a skinny, kinky weirdo with a weasel face and my mom’s very, very poor tech skills.

Word to the wise, kids: don’t be a fat-fingered idiot when you’re sexting with your married coworker. Because you just might accidentally send a pic of your naked ass to the HR secretary instead of your paramour. And said secretary just might be your weasel-faced sex partner’s wife’s yoga buddy. And then you and your innocent daughter will be unceremoniously exiled to the sweltering marshes of Nowhere, Georgia.

TWO

In the quiet sanctuary of my temporary home, all I want to do is forget the total disaster that was the first day of what’s probably the biggest mistake of my life so far. Mom’s teaching a class and won’t be home for another two hours, so I have unsupervised time to kill.

There are very few perks that come with living in Georgia, but a big, refreshing one is the pool in the backyard. I can practically hear the pool pump hissing, “Come swim in me, Nes.”

I tear to my room and rip open a box labeled Summer Clothes, then a box labeled Vacation, then, in a desperate last-ditch effort, I peel back the tape on one labeled Random Fun Stuff. I find a pair of denim overalls I don’t remember buying, some really old family pictures from the summer we went on vacation to some hokey middle-America theme park, and three yo-yos from my brother’s obsessive yo-yo-collecting days back when he was a nerdy middle schooler (instead of a nerdy college sophomore). I get nervous because I’m not sure where else to look for my lone piece of missing swimwear. I own exactly one bikini.

There’s not an especially long swim season in New York, so one will do. But it’s January here. January. The time of post-Christmas blizzards and sticking to resolutions you made for New Year’s, if you’re all about that. And it’s now hotter than it was when we arrived this hellish December.

I may need more bikinis. In the dead of winter. Unbelievable.

Our Realtor said this was an “unusually hot one” as she fanned her sweaty face and bemoaned every house we looked in that hadn’t switched on the central air. I expect bikini shopping and sweltering heat in Santo Domingo over summer break; this is just madness.

I continue to frantically pick through the cardboard box ziggurat in my room and finally snag the stretchy material of my lone bathing suit in a box labeled Underwear. Fair enough. And I can’t even blame the movers’ crazy box identification because I packed that one myself. Just as I’m about to change, my phone rings and I realize I may have to pick up and talk intelligibly to another human being when all I want to do is dead man’s float around the pool and feel sad for myself. The groan I bite back is a knife of guilt that twists in my gut.

Ollie wants to FaceTime.

My bleary, makeup-smeared image reflects back at me on the screen, and I want to sob. Again. But then I’ll look even worse. It’s all pretty chicken-and-egg.

“Olls, I look like a gargoyle!” I screech the second she connects.

Her gorgeous face, moon round and ethereally peaches and cream, takes up the entire screen, and my throat feels all clawed down both sides because I’m not sitting in her parents’ modern, artsy apartment, gorging on the Vietnamese sizzling pancakes Ollie is a genius at whipping up and sneaking sips of rice wine from her parents’ enormous collection before we get down to our homework and daily two-person merengue party.

“Shuddup! You look like a goddess.” She gnaws on her lip. “Hey, I checked your Insta this morning...”

“Right.” I shrug. “Call me melodramatic, but it was surprisingly hard to scroll through all those pictures of everything and everyone I was leaving behind.” I take a second to steady my voice, the same way I steady my raw heart every time I flip through my winter photo folder—which is full of pictures of people and places that are a thousand miles away. “I promise I’ll get a new one going soon.”

I guess Ollie hasn’t checked Snapchat yet, or she’d be calling me out about that too. I deleted my account late last night after getting shocked by another surprise Lincoln cameo in a mutual friend’s post-winter-break video. If pictures are hard for me to look at, there’s no way I can handle seeing and hearing video footage of everything I’m missing back home... Plus Lincoln would be like a ghost haunting every Newington clip.

“You really should. Your Insta pics were goals. Plus I want to know what things look like down there. Are there all those mossy trees like in Scooby-Doo? And plantations everywhere? Are they haunted? Did your mom buy you the Mystery Machine to drive around in? Are you wearing ascots and miniskirts? Did you get a Great Dane?” Before she can yell zoinks, Ollie’s eyes dart over my shoulder and go wide with worry. “Wait. You still haven’t unpacked?”

“It’s ‘asylum chic.’ Like it?” She shakes her head and sighs, so I confess. “Truth? It’s a reminder that I won’t actually have to live here forever.”

I wave a hand at the mattress on the floor, covers and pillows piled on it. That, my docking station, and a few choice boxes with the flaps permanently open make up my entire bedroom decor. The movers put all my boxes in my room for me, but I declined when they offered to put my bed frame together. That felt too permanent. Mom made several passive-aggressive comments about how she wouldn’t have bothered to pay an arm and a leg to move all my furniture if I wasn’t even going to set it up, but I stared at the ceiling until she left me to my misery. She was excited to finally have a space bigger than a couple hundred square feet to decorate, and she didn’t get why I wasn’t revved up to be in a new room that’s almost triple the square footage of my old room.

Because I miss my tiny, cramped, perfect old room.

“I miss your old room,” Ollie admits, echoing my internal thoughts with her freakish bestie ESP. Her shoulders slump, and my heart follows their lead.

“It’s okay.” No one brings out my reluctant optimist like Ollie. I hate seeing her down, so I put on a good game face no matter how crappy I feel. “Mom and Dad had been planning to sell our place when I moved to college anyway, and it went for way over asking price, like, the first week it was on the market. They were pretty psyched about it, and I...I’m trying to accept my fate at this point. You know I’m a ‘rip off the Band-Aid’ type when it comes to dealing with emotional stuff.”

“Um, yeah you are!” she laughs. Then gets dead serious. Lecture-time serious. “Speaking of college...”

“I got all my applications in by the deadlines, I swear to God.” I don’t tell my best friend that I hit Send on my SUNY application literally two minutes before midnight on the last possible day. And I don’t elaborate on the fact that I never took my brother up on his offer to proofread my personal essay. I didn’t have the patience to be ridiculed on my native-tongue grammatical failures by my own trilingual flesh and blood.

“You’ll tell me when you hear back?”

“Of course.” I cross my heart with the hand that’s still clutching my bikini, and Ollie freaks out.

“Are you going swimming?” The screen goes down for a second and her shocked voice floats through the speaker. “WeatherBug says it’s eighty-five in Savannah. How is that possible?”

Her face pops back on the screen, and I roll my eyes. “Because Savannah is actually an outer ring of hell. Don’t be jealous. I spent all day with sweaty pit stains. It’s gross.”

“It’s actually not frigid here. Like we could have watched those hot Puerto Rican guys play basketball from your fire escape if we’d had a blanket. Or three.”

“Are you trying to drive me to suicide?” My voice wobbles like the ankles of a first-time ice-skater.

“Sweetie.” Ollie says it on the longest sigh. I know exactly what direction her lecture is going to take, because she’s given it to me a few dozen times before. “Why didn’t you stay here in the city? With me? My parents love you. Or with your abuela. Even if she would have welded one of those chastity belts on you...it maybe would have been better than getting trapped in Georgia. Right?”

“It’s not chastity-belt bad here.”

“No...?”

I think about how I can go to an Episcopal, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Nazarene, or Seventh Day Adventist church if I walk five blocks from my house, but an Americano is an unknown species around here. I haven’t found a single decent coffee shop.

“You have a point...”

“You could come back.” She makes her voice small, like she’s trying to disguise the hope so that I won’t even notice it. Fat chance.

Not only do I notice it, big and comfy and bright as it is—it makes me ache.

“I know.” I do. I made a huge, complicated pro-and-con list on butcher paper in my room and stayed up for a full twenty-four hours contemplating it the night before I made my final decision. “But she’s still...”

“Your mom.” Ollie nods.

“Yup.” The word swings like a wrecking ball.

She chews on her lip and gives me space to be angry. I’ve needed the geographical equivalent of Russia and most of China in terms of anger space. But all that roaming anger is getting narcissistic.

“And he’s still...” She lets the words hang.

“Olls,” I beg, but she’s relentless in her quest to make me face my emotions.

“He was your first love, Nes. And he broke your heart. He’s a dog, but you can’t beat yourself up because you miss him. You need to let yourself feel everything. Don’t clam up.”

The tears coat my eyes like a hot, glistening windshield. When they plop out and make their pathetic slide down my cheeks, I know Ollie won’t say, “Don’t cry.” I tend to squeeze my emotions into a bitty ball I can ignore. Ollie is a “cry it out” advocate.

“I do miss him.” It’s hard to be honest when honesty makes me feel so weak and stupid.

“That’s okay.” The sound of her voice is a balm to my frayed emotions.

“I mean, he was my best friend other than you. I can’t think about him without remembering how good the good times were—it’s bizarre how it changed so slowly. How did he go from being the guy who could always make me laugh to the guy who pulverized my heart?”

“I know,” she says.

“I was scared, really scared to leave home and Newington and you,” I say as I lick a few salty tears off my cracked lips. “But I was more scared of staying and facing him every day, because what he did to me is unacceptable—but sometimes I forget because I’m busy remembering how sweet he can be. How can he be such a snake in the grass and legitimately one of the most interesting, caring people I’ve ever met? He messed up so badly, but I know he still cares about me. That’s dangerous.” I take a deep breath and look at Ollie’s face, just a screen away. “I was scared of falling for him again after everything he put me through. Because a little part of me is always going to love the goofy, smart, sweet guy I fell in love with two years ago.”