Читать книгу Rebels Like Us - Liz Reinhardt - Страница 14

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.

He ducks his head and squints my way. “Yeah, it’s weird, right? My granddaddy’s side always middle-names every second son Ulysses after some Confederate soldier who saved our family farmstead during a Civil War battle... It’s a long story.”

I press my palm against his, squeeze hard, and shake. “Well, Doyle Ulysses Rahn, I’m Agnes Penelope Murphy-Pujols.” I wait for it...

“Pretty.”

“Pretty?” I shake my head. “Doyle, I’m middle-named after Penelope. From The Odyssey.”

His face blanks, then lights up with recognition. “Uh, okay. I remember that one. Where he goes home after all those years, the bow, the crazy ladies who drive sailors wild with their singing, and the cyclops and the special bed, all that? We read that back in junior year.”

“Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus.” The look of pure adoration that splits across his face makes my skin tingle and itch all at once—hives of feeling.

“Holy hell. Your brain works overtime, don’t it?” He rubs his thumbs over my knuckles. “So you’re saying you and I have these weirdo middle names that connect us? Like maybe it was fate that we were meant to get to know each other?”

“Don’t read too much into it. You didn’t even get the reference until I explained it to you.” My voice is too breathy to be convincing, but Doyle doesn’t buy into my protest anyway.

“That’s the beauty of it though. You teach me about things I don’t know about, like old Greek books—”

“Roman books. You know the Greek version.”

“Right. You teach me about the ancient Romans and all that nerd stuff, and I make this year better than purgatory until you’re gone for good.” He slides one hand over my knee, and my breath hitches. All I can see are his eyes, deep as wishing wells. “I get that you’re gonna leave when this is all over. Hell, I respect it. But I think you might wanna reconsider forgetting everything just because a few people are total assholes.”

“Maybe.” The word is meant to be a lazy brush-off, but there’s something about the starry sky and the quiet croak of the frogs that makes it hard to turn my brain on autopilot and go cold. “Can I tell you something weird?”

It pops out, before I can think it through.

“I love weird,” he declares. I let the tips of my fingers brush over his forearm and like the way he sucks a quick breath in. “You gonna tell me you turn into a mermaid during a full moon or something?”

He looks so hopeful, I laugh. “Nope. Not like ‘boy fantasy’ weird. Weird like ‘crap I don’t talk about to anyone except my best friend.’”

I stop and reconsider my path. Once someone knows things about you—things you’ve never told anyone else—they can choose to use them against you. Not that I think Doyle would...but I’d have to move my trust in him from hypothetical to actual, which is a huge step.

“I know how to keep my trap shut.”

He’s not flirting or teasing. I bet Doyle is one of those true Southern gentlemen who lives and dies by his word.

“We moved to Savannah because my mom got into this crazy situation with her coworker—” I don’t get any further because the words petrify in my throat. Before I can get up and flee back into the house, where I can safely avoid any more intimate human interaction, Doyle squeezes my knee gently, like he’s steadying me. He speaks, quietly. Slowly. Like maybe it’s as hard for him to talk about his feelings as it is for me.

“When I was in fifth grade, my mama finally came back again—she left the day before summer break my third grade year, and she was only around real spotty when I was in fourth. ‘Figurin’ her life out’ is what she said she was doing. Never made sense to me, ’cause she had a life at home with all of us, so what the hell was she figurin’ out?”

When he breaks off, I give the weakest verbal comfort. “That blows, Doyle.”

It’s a pathetic attempt at sympathy, but he gives me a half smile before he finishes.

“Back then, my father still had a job at the paper plant, but life was kind of fallin’ apart ’round our ears. Lee and me and Malachi were goin’ to school half-starved and stinkin’, the house was always a mess. My parents weren’t ever real great at the whole responsibility thing, but my daddy made money and my mama kept things pretty clean and took care of us, mostly. When she was gone, we were barely holding down the fort. Anyway, she came back, and I thought for sure life was gonna be all right. Maybe they’d let me get this pup I had my eye on that was jest born at the farm down the way from our place. But she only showed up to give him divorce papers.”

His voice doesn’t hitch or wobble. It’s relaxed, like he’s reciting a story that sort of bores him. Which is crazy because the frantic throb of his carotid artery makes me scared he’s about to have a panic attack.

“When my daddy signed ’em, it was like he signed away the lot o’ us. My mama walked out on us, and my daddy checked out. Wasn’t a year later he was fired from the plant. Went in one day fallin’-down drunk and punched the foreman when he told Daddy he wasn’t in no condition to operate big machinery.”

Doyle dips his head and presses his mouth tight to the side, like that’s the end of the story.

My own life problems suddenly come into harsh perspective. I’ve never been abandoned, hungry, or dirty. Sure, Mom drinks a little too much some nights, but it’s nothing like what Doyle is describing with his dad. And my parents, though they’re no longer a couple, have never stopped being there for me and Jasper.

“What did you guys do?” I realize a second after I ask the question that I’m butting in where I might not be welcome. “Sorry. If you don’t want to answer, that’s cool. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Nah. It feels pretty good to tell someone the whole story, even if it is all ancient history by now.” His fingers squeeze my knee a second time, but now it feels like he’s holding tight to calm himself down. I cover his hand with mine, and he attempts another weak smile. “Anyway, there ain’t much more. Daddy lost his job and never has found any kind of regular work since. Child Services came knocking on our door when it was so bad our teachers were asking us all sorts of questions every day. That’s when Daddy finally let my grandparents take us in. Pride’d been holding him back from asking for any kinda help, and by the time he bothered, it was too late. He was so far gone, and we were all done dealing with his crap anyhow. So trust me when I say I get what it’s like when parents screw up.”

He clears his throat, then gives me a nod, like it’s my turn to spill.

“My story is nothing like yours...” I throw my hands up, guilty over whining to him about my life when his problems are so much bigger and scarier.

“I never figured you and me’d have identical stories.” He licks his lips and takes a deep breath. “Pain’s pain, and what hurts hurts, no matter if you think you got it better or worse than the next guy. It ain’t a competition.”

Doyle has a way of laying out the obvious so plainly, it can’t be denied.

“Okay. So my mom and dad... They’ve always had a weird relationship.” I lift one foot, then the other, watching droplets of water splash back into the pool. “And it got a whole lot worse when my father landed this huge book deal a few years ago—”

“Your daddy’s a writer?” Doyle looks impressed.

I roll my eyes. “Not like Stephen King or something. He mostly writes boring academic stuff, but he wrote one book about growing up in Santo Domingo—he meant for it to be a cultural study, but it wound up turning into this really interesting memoir... I mean, I guess it’s interesting. That’s what all the book reviewers say anyway.”

His eyes crinkle when he laughs. “You tellin’ me your daddy wrote a book about his life and you never read it?”

I blow out a long breath. “Ugh, I’m the worst. I should, right?” I squint at him guiltily.

“You should do whatever you wanna do. All I can tell ya is, if my daddy wrote a book about his life, I’d be so curious, Satan ’imself couldn’t stop me from tearin’ through that thing. Don’t you even wanna see if you’re in it?” His eyes shine when he asks, like he’d be curious to flip through to those parts—if they existed.

Thank God they don’t.

“The book only goes up to his undergrad years, so I know there’s nothing about me in it,” I say to definitively shut down any possibility of Doyle combing through my father’s weird memoir for tidbits about me. “I guess I never read it because I kind of hate how it messed things up for my family.”

“How’s that?” Doyle leans in, intrigued like he’s about to hear some twisted Gone Girl insanity. In fact, it’s a boring story of a family that quietly fell apart.

“My dad got famous, in his own nerdy circle at least. And my mom got left out in a huge way. She took a hiatus on her PhD studies—which she’d been busting her ass on—so he could go on these worldwide tours and give lectures. Then he got offered a visiting professor position in France, which had been his dream job forever. When his guest semester was up, they offered him a full-time spot, and he wanted us to join him. But we had a life in New York, and I definitely didn’t want to go. My brother did apply to college in France without telling our mother, and it sent her into this depression for a while when he left. She thought he was going to Harvard, so it was a huge shock when he told us he was actually headed to the Sorbonne.”

I kick at the water, the silky splashes deeply unsatisfying. I want to break something, smash something, do anything immediate and violent to help me forget that bleak time when my family splintered apart quickly and permanently.

“That must’ve been hard,” says Doyle Rahn, the guy who watched his mother walk out of his life before middle school and his father descend into violent alcoholism. When I snort, he raises his eyebrows in this no-nonsense way that would make Lovett proud. “Sometimes it’s harder to deal with things fallin’ apart when you feel like you had some say in it.”

I never thought about it that way. I never considered that I might blame myself for dragging my feet about going off to France. I think Mom wanted to stay in New York City too, but what if I hadn’t pitched such a fit? If I’d been down to go, would she have gone too? Would I be there right now, smoking a cigarette, dressed in black, scowling outside my beautiful French high school with my cool French friends because Mom and Dad wanted me to pick up fresh sheep intestines for our highly dysfunctional family dinner?

In other words, would my weird family unit have remained intact if I wasn’t such a whiner?

“Some days I think if the boys and I’d been better at keeping house, kinda took up where our mama left off, would my daddy have gotten so bad so fast?”

Doyle muses his what-ifs out loud, while I keep mine locked in. But, where my what-if scenario casts me as a bratty villain, his is so noble, it dips its toe in martyrdom.

“Doyle, you know it’s not your fault your mom left. You know it had nothing to do with how clean the house was or how you and your brothers behaved. Your mother’s reasons for leaving had everything to do with her. And it was her fault. Her loss.” I nudge him with my shoulder.

“That all makes sense to me now. But the little kid in me still don’t listen to reason.” He bumps me with his elbow. “So you were hell-bent on staying in New York instead of going to Paris, but you up and left for Georgia?” His laugh is rusty. “I mean, I like it here fine, but it’s sure as hell not Paris.”

I tilt my head back and direct my attention to the big, shiny moon. “It was more a lack of any other decent choice that landed me here. Like I was saying, my mom had this gross affair with a married guy she worked with. His wife found out, and it was basically hellish for my mother to go to back to work with all the office gossip. Everyone was giving her crap, all this stupid passive-aggressive high school drama BS. Which is kind of insane. I mean, he’s the one who actually cheated on his wife. My parents aren’t even...”

I stop short because it’s easier to give up trying to explain than it is to untangle the knot that is my parents’ crazy relationship.

“Married?” Doyle fills in, the word delivered softly. Helpfully.

“Yep.” I was actually going to say “in love anymore,” but I’m not sure whether or not that’s a fact. It is definitely a fact that my parents are no longer joined in holy matrimony, no matter how lovey they acted during our Thanksgiving in Paris. “It’s just... Their whole thing is complicated. Always has been. Sometimes I think about how much easier my life would be if my parents had managed to keep their crap together.”

“I hear that.”

Doyle’s pain is on a different spectrum than mine, but our frustrations run parallel. A sweet relief spins through me as we sit side by side, our confessions laid bare between us. Ollie would be proud of all the sticky feelings I dredged out tonight.

“I don’t hate it here,” I confess over the rising chorus of frog croaks. “I mean, I wasn’t excited about coming here, and I miss home, but this place isn’t all bad.”

“Not all bad?” He shakes his head. “Pretty weak. No worries though. I plan to pull out all the stops to make this year better than you’d ever have expected.”

“What exactly does that entail?” I arch my back as his thumb arcs along the soft skin above my knee, inside my thigh. “Four-wheeling and hogs?”

“You wanna go four-wheeling?” He leans closer.

“Hmm. I’ve never been. Is it fun?” I try to rein my voice tight. It’s just his hand. On my knee. It’s just an invitation to ride an all-terrain vehicle. No big deal.

“I think you’d like it. You busy next Saturday?” His other hand cups my shoulder, pulls down to my elbow. His fingers are sparks, my skin is a river of ethanol.

“I’ll have to check my planner. I’m pretty popular around here, you know.” I slide one hand onto his leg, and I can feel the muscles through his jeans. It lights up something in me, and I want him. My breaths burst in and out, and my head spins as he leans closer.

I want to kiss him, just so I have one kiss notched in my belt from lips other than Lincoln’s.

Ollie’s warning about comparing Doyle and Lincoln flops around in my head. I bring my hand up to Doyle’s chest and force us to keep those few inches of distance.

I lie back on the patio, and he lies next to me, silent.

The water laps on the sides of the pool, as measured as Doyle’s breathing. It’s peace.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but suddenly Doyle is shaking my shoulder. “Hey. Nes. Hey. Your feet are all pruney. You need to get some sleep. In a bed.”

“Okay.” My voice is groggy. “Are you leaving?”

“Are you inviting me to stay?” The backs of his fingers brush my cheek.

“Mmm.” I sit up and blink sleepily. “I kick in my sleep.”

“I can take a beating.” It’s a joke, but something fierce in his eyes punches through the lightness.

My instinct is to stomp out that frantic look. Why? Because I’m protecting him? Or maybe it isn’t that noble of me. Maybe I’m just avoiding anything complicated?

“I’m like a mule. On ’roids. Go home, Doyle. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”

He stands, pulls on his socks, hops into his boots, and holds out a hand to tug me to my feet. “How ’bout breakfast first? I know a place, best cheese grits around, and they open at six.”

“Grits, huh?” I wrinkle my nose. “Is this part of your plan to convince me stay? I do love breakfast foods...”

He raises his blond eyebrows. “I jest might be trying to convince you to stick around, and I’m willing play dirty. I’ll use every weapon in my arsenal, cheesy grits included.”

I poke a finger into his chest. “All right. Don’t get cocky though. I come from a place where breakfast foods are like a religion.”

He maneuvers so that his lips are a hair away from brushing mine, then boomerangs back, with a grin so adorable, I have to roll my eyes to fend it off.

“I’ll pick you up.” He walks over to the hose and turns it off, then braces one foot on the fence and gets ready to jump.

“I want to drive myself.”

He looks over his shoulder and tilts his head like he’s considering my statement.

“Nope. Tomorrow, ten to six, be ready.”

“Ten to six? That’s too early!”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I like to take my time over it.” He jumps. I hear the thump of his boots and, a second later, the rumble of his truck’s engine.

On my way in I pick up my phone and notice I have a new text from “Ulysses.”

Penelope, thanks for watering our tree.

“Dork,” I whisper to my screen, but something deep in me flutters so hard, I’m vibrating.

I flop onto my bed and sink into a sleep so deep, the world is soundless and pitch-black until the blare of my phone alarm drags me into the early dawn light.

I have fifteen minutes before Doyle gets here. I sprint to the bathroom and take a GI shower, goop on some mascara and lipstick—this is a date, sorta kinda, after all—scrunch gel into my dripping hair, decide I look hevi nais, especially considering my limited time frame, and get ready to grab some clothes. But Mom blocks my bedroom door, her face more stricken than usual.

“Aggie, sweetheart, I have to tell you something.” Her eyes are puffy, like she didn’t get much sleep. Or like she has a wine hangover. She twists her hands tightly. “It’s Lincoln. His parents just called. He was in an accident.”