“It’s not like I never thought about being mixed race. I guess it was just that, in Brooklyn, everyone was competing to be unique or surprising. By comparison, I was boring, seriously. Really boring.”
Culture shock knocks city girl Agnes “Nes” Murphy-Pujols off-kilter when she’s transplanted mid–senior year from Brooklyn to a small Southern town after her mother’s relationship with a coworker self-destructs. On top of the move, Nes is nursing a broken heart and severe homesickness, so her plan is simple: keep her head down, graduate and get out. Too bad that flies out the window on day one, when she opens her smart mouth and pits herself against the school’s reigning belle and the principal.
Her rebellious streak attracts the attention of local golden boy Doyle Rahn, who teaches Nes the ropes at Ebenezer. As her friendship with Doyle sizzles into something more, Nes discovers the town she’s learning to like has an insidious undercurrent of racism. The color of her skin was never something she thought about in Brooklyn, but after a frightening traffic stop on an isolated road, Nes starts to see signs everywhere—including at her own high school where, she learns, they hold proms. Two of them. One black, one white.
Nes and Doyle band together with a ragtag team of classmates to plan an alternate prom. But when a lit cross is left burning in Nes’s yard, the alterna-prommers realize that bucking tradition comes at a price. Maybe, though, that makes taking a stand more important than anything.
Liz Reinhardt is a perpetually homesick NJ native who migrated to the deep South a decade ago with her funny kid, motorhead husband, and growing pack of mutts. She’s a fanatical book lover with no reading prejudices and a wide range of genre loves, but her heart will always skip a beat for YA. In her spare time she likes to listen to corny jokes her kid reads to her from ice-pop sticks, watch her husband get dirty working on cars, travel whenever she can scrape together a few bucks, and gab on the phone incessantly with her bestie, writer Steph Campbell. She likes chocolate-covered raisins even if they aren’t real candy, the Oxford comma even though it’s nerdy, and airports even when her plane is delayed. Rebels Like Us, her latest YA novel, is full of hot kisses, angst, homesickness, and laughs that are almost as good as the ones that come from the stick of a melty ice pop. You can read her blog at www.elizabethreinhardt.blogspot.com, like her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter, @lizreinhardt.
To Steph who refused to answer the phone until I swore this book was done, (despite my charms, pleas, and disgusting levels of self-pity) because she knows the purest form of love is also the toughest.
The world is full of awesome best friendships—Napoleon and Pedro, Claudia and Stacey, Jessica and Hope, Frog and Toad—but “Steph and Liz” is and always will be my fave.
I love you to the best doughnut shop in Brooklyn and back, bestie.
WHO’S WHO AT EBENEZER HIGH
“Several of your teachers mentioned dress code violations. I sense that there may also be an attitude problem.”
—Ebenezer High’s Principal Armstrong
“Agnes? That cannot be her name. That name would be ugly if it were my grandmother’s.”
—Ansley Strickland, reigning belle and Rose Queen frontrunner
“I like to root for the underdog.”
—Doyle Rahn, senior class heartthrob, Southern gentleman, expert mudder and rebel
“Obviously we have a different sense of humor here than y’all do.”
—Braelynn, Ansley’s BFF and second-in-command, and Rose Court nominee
“What I did? Running for Rose Queen? It’s not breaking any rules. But it’s breaking every tradition.”
—Khabria Scott, cheerleader, nontraditional Rose Queen
candidate and rebel
“Be careful ’round here. There’s some areas that aren’t real nice.”
—Officer Reginald Hickox
“I was never good at walking away from a dare.”
—Agnes “Nes” Murphy-Pujols, high school senior, new girl and reluctant rebel
“I ain’t about to retreat.”
—Alonzo Washington, senior class clown, baseball player and rebel
“Thank you for being the kind of daughter who never stops amazing me.”
—Nes’s mom, NYC transplant, nervous rebel parent
“This old town needs to shake some of the dust off.”
—Ma’am Lovett, Ebenezer High English teacher, supporter of the rebel alliance
“It’s funny because based on the tone of your voice, I would assume you’re not seriously considering melding the two most important things in the world—romantic love and social justice.”
—Ollie Nguyen, Nes’s BFF, bassoon prodigy and NYC rebel
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Sartre said hell is other people, but he obviously never experienced a winter heat wave in the Georgia Lowcountry. Six weeks ago, my best friend and I were drinking cocoa laced with swiped rum, huddled under covers on the couch, oohing over the fat, lacy snowflakes that drifted into frozen piles on the sidewalks. Today, I’m trying to resist fainting from the broiler-like temperatures. In winter.
No wonder there are twelve churches within a five-mile radius of my new house. If this is the kind of fiery heat Georgians deal with on a regular basis, the idea of hellfire must be a terrifyingly real threat.
The sun follows me like the creepy eyes in a fun-house portrait as my sneakers sink into the melting blacktop. I hesitate and stare at my distorted reflection in the glass of the school’s double doors. I’m still attempting to decode the movers’ unintelligible boxing system—yesterday when I opened a box marked Art I found my collection of Daler-Rowney watercolor paints tossed in with an eggbeater and a dozen of my mom’s old yoga DVDs—so my antifrizz balm is still MIA. With it, my hair falls into lopsided curls. Without it, I have to deal with my current situation—a dark cloud of frizz with a life of its own. It probably didn’t help my hair’s general health that I guilted Mom into letting me get the underside stripped, bleached, and dyed bright pink before we left the city. I need a hair tie. Or to get out of the pummeling sunshine before it fries my hair beyond recognition. I seriously love my curls, but I do not love what this crazy humidity is doing to them. Before I left the house this morning I decided that, despite my life going off the rails, I looked smoking hot. Now I look like I just made a quick run to the store and back for one of my aunties on a scorching August afternoon in Santo Domingo, even though all I did was walk across the school parking lot in
Georgia. In the middle of winter. The only deliverance from this heat is inside the squat monstrosity that is my new school, Ebenezer High, so I need to make a decision: go inside or die of heatstroke.
“Coño,” I mutter, and it’s like I can feel my father frowning an ocean away. Why is it the only Spanish you ever speak is slang and curses, Aggie?
I shake his words out of my head and take a long look at the place I’m going to call my academic home for the second half of this, my all-important senior year, and I have to wonder if the builders accidentally opened the schematics for a psych ward or a minimum-security prison and didn’t realize their mistake until appalled administrators and teachers showed up postconstruction.
I fill my lungs with a final gulp of suffocatingly hot air, then push into the cool building, cross a lobby showcasing dozens of glittering gold sport trophies, and I’m in a generic front office where a woman with a big smile and bigger hair inputs my information into the computer at a snail’s pace. I heard things are more relaxed south of the Mason-Dixon, but if they’re this relaxed, I may never make it out of the front office.
When my official schedule is finally approved, I’m introduced to the guidance counselor, who leads me into a hallway that smells like yesterday’s cafeteria fries, bleach, and fresh paint. I crane my neck to better take in my new school and wonder if the dingy gray-blue color they’ve chosen for the walls is also a leftover from some institutional torture chamber. I’m used to seeing art displayed on every wall and bright splashes of random colors painted in crevices too small for anything else. This sterility is strangely claustrophobic.
While I’m trying to breathe without the help of a paper bag, I wonder again why I’m even here. My brother, Jasper, told me point-blank that he thought I’d lost my mind the day I announced I was migrating South for the spring term, like some freak-of-nature bird. My father insisted we phone conference half a dozen times so that he could lecture me in Spanish on the merits of a New York City or Parisian education over an education from Georgia—which he insisted was an oxymoron. My abuela says my dad has been manso—very chill—since the day he was born, but talking about my future is the one thing that can make him quillao—super upset. Ollie, my sister from another mister, would have shared her tiny bedroom with me in a heartbeat if I’d asked, but I’d never stoop to asking. I’m well aware my passionate, motivated bestie needs every available inch of room so she can focus on her intense practice schedule and the whirlwind of spring recitals. And Mama Patria, my abuela, has room at her apartment but she lives two subway lines and a half hour bus ride away from Newington—that just wasn’t a commute I could’ve tackled twice a day, every school day, especially during the longest, coldest winter to hammer New York City in fifty years.
As far as Paris goes, I’d never admit it to my father, but my French skills have slipped—a lot—since he and Jasper moved and there was no one to ignore me until I asked for the salt or the remote or the time en français. To say my language skills have rusted would be an understatement—my French is basically a series of crumbling linguistic holes.
On top of all that there was the lingering poison-gas fog from my breakup with Lincoln—my first love and one of my best friends turned mortal enemy—which would have suffocated me slowly if I’d stayed at the private school he and I both attended. Lincoln and I started dating when we were sophomores, the year his parents started an exchange program for Maori soccer players with Newington High, and there are reminders of our coupledom sprinkled around every corner in the school where he was basically treated like royalty. I reveled in the fact that I couldn’t pass the main hall without seeing our entwined initials on the art tile we’d painted, or his gorgeous face—broad jaw, wide nose, sparkling eyes, dark skin, plush kissable lips—on the Newington VIP board in the main hall. Lincoln pulled me close and kissed me for the first time in the courtyard under Newington’s legendary oak while gold and orange leaves swirled around us. I’d never once passed that tree without running my fingers over the bark and smiling—well, I never had before.
The last months of senior year are so useless and so meaningful all at once. Everyone solidifies college choices, skips any day they possibly can, and gets disgustingly nostalgic about the people they’re going to leave behind on graduation day. The last thing I wanted was to spend months dodging the yearbook photo montages and avoiding fondly retold memories that would only reinforce what a total lie my entire relationship with Lincoln turned out to be in the end.
I have to look at my decision to flee less as losing out on the last months with my friends and more as moving on a little bit early. I’ve always had an independent streak, so I might as well run with it. It’s best if I consider my time in Georgia a kind of study-abroad semester before the adventure of college begins.
My tour guide’s bubblegum drawl interrupts the panic that threatens to tunnel me under despite my internal pep talk that this will all be okay.
“It’s wonderful to have you at Ebenezer High. We realize it will take a few days for you to get settled, but we’ll let you jump right in. The good thing is you’ve only missed one day of second semester, so you should be able to catch up easily. First day of a new semester is mostly just the syllabus breakdown anyway.” She gestures to a wooden door, and I peek through the tiny window into what looks like a lab full of students dying from a combination of boredom and heatstroke. “This here will be your first class tomorrow, Agnes. Mr. Hemley, AP physics. At this hour you’d be in the middle of your second class, which is…”
Newington was once some founding senator’s house and had windows so huge, it never even felt like I was indoors. The windows in this school remind me of the slits in medieval fortresses that archers shot arrows out of. What the hell is the modern purpose of windows that narrow? As I pass the classrooms, I see sad ribbons of sunlight, bitterly determined to brighten the gloom.
Give up, sunshine. It’s a damn lost cause.
“…this one right here.” We stop in front of another nondescript door whose tiny window reveals my fellow cell mates. “The peer guide I’ve assigned to help you through the day is in this class. She’ll give you a more thorough tour, and if there are any questions she can’t handle, feel free to stop by my office anytime. The door is always open.” Her silver fillings wink at me from the back of her mouth when she smiles. I can’t remember her name no matter how hard I shake my brain.
“Thanks, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to navigate all right on my own.” I turn the schedule she handed me so that the map printed on the bottom is oriented, and bend my lips up in what I hope approximates a smile.
“Whatever you’d like, Agnes.” She shifts from one sensible pump to the other.
“Okay. Thanks again. I’m, uh, going to class now.” I point to the doorway I don’t particularly want to walk through.
What’s more awkward? Walking into a classroom full of seniors as the new girl? Or standing in the ugly hallway of your new school losing a staring contest with a guidance counselor whose name you can’t remember?
Lamest game of Would You Rather. Ever.
Coño, I have to choose, so I walk backward through the classroom door, keeping that demented smile wide until Mrs. What’s-Her-Face disappears into the shadows of the hallway.
“Good morning. You must be Agnes.” A woman with a no-nonsense voice gives me the evil teacher eye over tortoiseshell glasses that perch on the end of her broad nose. Even with her springy, salt-and-pepper curls factored into her height, she only grazes my chin. But the fact that I tower over her doesn’t stop me from squirming under her laser gaze. She has the same huggable, curvy figure and beautiful, soft, dark brown skin as my grandmother, but I cannot picture her taking a tray of warm coconetes out of the oven. I can picture her silencing a class of hooligans with one fiery look. “I’m Mrs. Lovett.”
“Good morning.” I modify my smile from demented pretend to real. I hate unnecessary authority, but I absolutely love ball-busting, no-nonsense b
itches. I get the latter vibe from Lovett already.
“Ms. Ronston wanted me to let you know your peer guide will be Khabria Scott. Khabria, please raise your hand.” Mrs. Lovett’s voice snaps, and a hand pops up in response. I approve of my tour guide’s bold nails—matte black except for a shiny white ring finger nail, gold fleur-de-lis designs glittering on each one.
Because I’m nervous, I resort to a goofy, toothy smile, and feel extra dumb when Khabria folds her arms across her chest elegantly and gives me a tight-lipped, polite smile in return. She’s got this whole regal Nefertiti/Beyoncé vibe that’s intimidating and impressive all at once.
“You can take a seat second row, fourth desk back, Agnes.” Mrs. Lovett makes a mark in her roll book, and I slide into my chair while too many eyes dart my way, sizing me up because I’m so shiny and new. It’s uncomfortable but not mean.
“Hey. Hey, new girl?” A tall, good-looking guy with a bright yellow basketball jersey sitting just behind Khabria nearly falls out of his chair calling to me and waving his gorgeously muscled arms over his head. “Where you from?”
“Crown Heights.” I watch his face screw up like I answered him in Finnish. “Brooklyn.”
“Where?” He kicks the back of the Khabria’s chair as he tries to settle into a desk that clearly wasn’t designed for people over six foot six. Khabria whips her head so fast her black and strawberry braids are a blur.
She mutters, “Holy hell, you a moron, Lonzo.”
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