Rebels Like Us

by Liz Reinhardt

  “Honey, you’re half-Irish. Sunscreen is nothing but a cruel joke.” She runs her fingers over my tender skin. “Come in. I have aloe. And I picked up Chinese on the way home.”

  How many times have I had to explain to my more clueless pale friends that dark-skinned people can and do burn? What’s that saying about heeding your own advice…?

  “I don’t get it. Why do my genes put me through this trial by fire every summer? Jasper can be out in the sun for hours and this never happens to him,” I growl, limping in and sitting on a stool at the counter. Maybe my skin is reacting so badly because it wasn’t expecting this kind of sun exposure in January. I say a silent prayer it won’t be blotchy and peely tomorrow.

  My mother pushes a carton of cooling Buddha’s delight my way. We’ve already eaten at the one and only Chinese food place in a thirty-mile radius so often, they can recite our phone number from memory based on the sound of our voices when we call to order.

  “You aren’t in New York anymore, Aggie. As far as your brother’s ability to endure the sun goes, I actually wish Jasper was more careful with sunscreen. Just because he can be out for hours without it doesn’t mean he should. Skin cancer is nothing to play around with.” My mother dabs aloe on my skin, and I suck air through my teeth to manage the pain that stings through the cool. “Plus you freckle.”

  I know the go-to image of an Irish lass centers on a redhead with alabaster skin and cinnamon freckles in a wool sweater standing by the Cliffs of Moher, but…

  “Right. I’m Irish,” I say through a mouthful of overcooked vegetables I just slurped off my chopsticks.

  “But my family is bone-white pale, not freckly. I think your freckles are from your Dominican half.” I look down at my mother’s pale fingers tangled with my dark ones. I love that we have the same oval-shaped nails and double-jointed thumbs. I love what I inherited from her, and I love what’s different about us. And that makes me miss how close we used to be. How close my whole family used to be.

  When I was a kid I used to spill out my colored pencils and hold them close to my family members so that I could get the color of their skin just right in my drawings. After a long, dark New York winter, mine would mellow to a dark golden tawny, a few shades darker than my mother’s at the end of summer. By contrast, after a summer spent at our communal family beach house in Santo Domingo, my skin would be a light sepia with a spattering of umber freckles. I’d admire myself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom I shared with half a dozen of my girl cousins, each one of us a different shade of gorgeous and proud to announce it. One of the first slang phrases I picked up in the DR as a kid was hevi nais, which my cousins said about anything and everything—cute new outfits, beautiful hairstyles, too-tall sandals, our sun-warmed skin. It basically means “very nice,” and it’s the kind of casually confident phrase that still makes me feel beautiful and strong in my own skin. I loved the fact that while everyone else in school had their twenty-four pack of Crayola colored pencils, I had my set of seventy-two Prismacolor Premiers with a range of russets and taupes and ochers for my family pictures.

  “Can’t a girl define her own cultural heritage?” I snap, annoyed that nothing feels easy with my mother anymore. Not even a conversation about something as simple as freckles.

  “Oh, there’s no denying you got plenty of my genes. Even if the freckles are open for debate, you have an Irish temper just like your mother.” I want so badly to smile back at her, but my heart is a cold, congealed pile of old tofu. “You and Jasper might look more like Dad at first glance, but there’s a lot of me mixed in there too.”

  “Huh, I’m kind of surprised you even remember how Jasper looks,” I bite out. “We barely see him or Dad anymore.”

  “Ag, we were just in Paris this autumn—”

  “About that.” I interrupt before she can go into professor mode. My mother is a champ at talking for forty minutes straight at a clip and barely pausing for breath. “I thought you and Dad were making up or something. But you and that guy you worked with had…whatever gross mess going on, and you kept it up after we got home. I still don’t get it.”

  Am I accusing my mother of cheating on my father? That makes no sense. They’ve been divorced for years…but the boundaries of their relationship weren’t always crystal clear. I know more about their up-and-down, back-and-forth, off-and-on relationship than I should because our apartment was tiny with very thin walls. Sure, I could have been thoughtful and put on headphones or something when Mom called her best friend, but sometimes I got tired of being surprised by my mercurial parents and their chaotic relationship.

  “Okay, this is not a conversation I can have with you right now. Or probably ever, if you want the truth. I know you’re not a baby anymore, but that doesn’t mean you’re privy to every detail about my marriage to your father, okay? Frankly, it’s complicated and it’s private, how your father and I—”

  “What? Screwed up your marriage and all our lives in the process?”

  My words skid to a stop like a dog that finally caught the car she’d been chasing for miles and has no freaking clue what to do with it.

  The tendons in Mom’s neck bulge when she swallows. She squirts more aloe on her fingers and rearranges her features until they’re her best estimation of calm. I prime myself for her raging Irish temper, but she talks in this infuriatingly measured way.

  “Agnes, I know you’re angry. I know you blame me. I know you want answers that will help this make sense, but you’re old enough to know that there aren’t always easy answers in life. There are things you can’t understand—”

  “I bet I could.” My knees knock under the counter because the little I do know has made me so angry. What if I find out more? What if things between us get even worse? “We used to talk. You used to let me know what was going on with you.”

  “It hasn’t always been easy to know when to tell you things.” Mom takes a deep calming breath, one her yoga gurus would be proud of. “Have you spoken to your father?”

  “I missed his call from before. I’ll call him later.” I’ll try anyway. I love my father, but our phone calls are always awkward and stilted. We communicate mostly through text, and that’s basically comprised of sending each other funny memes or links to interesting NPR articles. Not exactly deep, but it works for us. “Why are you asking?” She’s avoiding eye contact like it’s her job.

  “You…you just need to talk to him. That’s all.” Her words are like a judge’s gavel hitting the bench.

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “There are some things that aren’t open for discussion.” The words are quiet but firm. “I try to respect your privacy, baby. But you have to understand that I need that back from you, even when it’s hard.”

  “When respecting my privacy means you lose everything you care about, get back to me, okay?” I shift back and bump my shoulder on the wall behind me and bite back a scream.

  “Let me see,” Mom offers, sounding worried again.

  I’m torn between wanting to soak up that worry and wanting to throw it back in her face.

  “I’m good.” I bite the words out and turn my shoulder, so she’s left with a goopy blob of aloe dripping down her fingers.

  “Sweetie, you’re in pain. Let me at least spread this last bit—”

  “I said I’m good,” I growl, sliding off the stool, a carton of cooling Chinese food crushed in my fingers. I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and call out, “I’m going to eat in my room!” Any residual guilt I had about ditching Mom this Friday has evaporated completely.

  “Agnes? Agnes! Please come here!” Her words shake, but she stands perfectly still behind the counter.

  I stalk down the hall and slam the door to my room. I instantly hate being holed up in this still-unfamiliar space, alone.

  When my mother’s sordid tale first started making the rounds in her gossipy department after we got home from our annual Thanksgiving in Paris, it was just a rumble under t
he surface. TAs would stop whispering when I walked into the office, and I’d hear only my mother’s name and the snapped-off end of a sentence that was definitely filled with dirt. When I went to the bookstore to grab an order for my mother, the snide clerk gave me major side-eye and suggested Madame Bovary as an add-on to the pile. I didn’t get his passive-aggressive dig until a week later, when I realized it wasn’t only the stress of grading fall semester research papers that had her so tense.

  There were mysterious hung-up phone calls at all hours of the night. Staff meetings she came home from in tears. I found her laptop open with an updated résumé on the screen, and her friend from college had sent an email titled Unexpected Spring Semester Opening… You Are a Shoo-In! So the clues were blaring in my face like a full-blast neon sign for weeks, but I was dealing with my own drama.

  Apparently Lincoln interpreted I’m going to see my family in Paris for a week as Do whatever you want with as many girls as you can while I’m away, and one of those girls contacted me as soon as she realized the guy she was falling for was already someone’s boyfriend. A few hours before the call, Ollie had brought over dozens of nail polishes and painted intricate designs on my fingernails and toenails, then Lincoln’s, then her own, then we rubbed every bit of it off and started all over again, the smell of nail polish remover burning our throats. My last coat wasn’t even dry when the girl’s voice cracked across the line. There’s something you need to know about your boyfriend.

  Lincoln.

  Was it irony that, while I was loathing my mother for leaving some poor yoga-loving blogger home wrecked, my own boyfriend was screwing half the girls’ tennis team?

  He cried—actually he sobbed—when I confronted him and then, exactly three weeks later, whoosh, my mom threw our life into chaos with her announcement that she’d been Skype interviewed for a fantastic spring semester position in Georgia and she got the job. We were moving. Everything went really fast after that. Our apartment was almost empty in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and we had a tree so pathetic, it made Charlie Brown’s look like the one at the Rockefeller Center. While the rest of the world was celebrating peace on earth and goodwill toward humankind, it was dawning on me that I’d really have to say goodbye to the only home I’d ever known and my best friend, beloved school, and Mama Patria. It wasn’t so much that my mother forced me to go—it’s that I had no other choice. Saying goodbye to the people I loved wasn’t easy, but I took some comfort, knowing I’d dodged a big, emotionally draining bullet by not going back. I didn’t have to figure out what to do or say the next time I ran into Lincoln because instead I’d put nearly a thousand miles between us.

  So I made my decision and left Brooklyn, but I never really got to resolve…anything. About Lincoln, about life, about Mom’s actions and her lies, about school and what I wanted from any of it. That’s partially why I’m still directing so much fury at Mom. She messed up. So did Lincoln. But I have only her here, so she gets the brunt of all my swirling hate.

  FaceTime beeps through on my phone. My pride has taken enough of a beating that it sits back and lets me sob openly to Ollie this time.

  “Babydoll,” she cries when she sees my face, already streaked with a few tears. “Grab Mr. Kittenface.” She crosses her arms and waits for me to grab my old, sweet-faced teddy. “Hug him so tight.” I do, laughing wetly at myself and us. “That’s my girl. That’s how hard I’d be hugging you if I were there. Tell me. Everything.”

  I nestle Mr. Kittenface in my lap, tugging on his ears while I blubber about Ma’am Lovett, the Southern kids whose shoulders are as icy cold as their climate is tropical, my mom fury, my Lincoln fury… I let it all stew and bubble until we’re both crying.

  “Whew. Holy shit.” Ollie unleashes a shuddering sigh. “What a day. You’re wrecking me, you know that, right? And you have every right to cry over every one of those things, but please never, ever speak that asshole Lincoln’s name again.”

  I whimper. “Remember when—”

  “No.” She pulls the phone close to her face, so she’s one gorgeous, blurry eyeball and a perfect swoop of winged liner. “No, no, no. We’re not going down the LiNeOl road again.”

  LiNeOl. Ollie’s nickname for the three of us since we were assigned to the same science group in eighth grade. After years of being our friend around school, I was scared dating him would be a disaster for everyone, but Lincoln was that amazing boyfriend who jumped from friends to more and never let it get weird. He never treated Ollie like a third wheel. He knew her favorite candy was Nerds when we went to the movies and got her purple tulips on Valentine’s Day when she didn’t have a boyfriend.

  Ollie used to say she wanted to find the Lincoln to her Nes.

  He had sex with five other girls. That I know of.

  Five that he confessed to. And there had to be some times when he came back from one of their beds and climbed into mine, whispering about how much he wanted me, how beautiful I was, how we were so perfect together. He threaded his fingers through mine and pressed himself deep inside me, listening to me moan after he’d probably done the same things, heard the same things from another girl’s mouth in another girl’s bed.

  Did I ignore the smell of other girls’ perfume and the vague explanations of where he’d been that made no sense? Was I as dumb as the wife of the weasel my mother was having a torrid affair with?

  “I…I just never got to really figure it all out. He’s called. I haven’t answered. Yet. But sometimes…I want to,” I confess, hanging my head in shame. I’d never confess that to anyone but Ollie.

  She blows out a long breath. “I know. He asks about you. Constantly. But listen to me—the truth is, he is sad he lost you. He is. Because he’s not a complete idiot. But he used you, Nes. He disrespected you. And I will never, ever forgive him. He lied to both of us, and we can’t trust him. Ever. Again.” She tucks her shiny black hair behind her ears and gives me a hard, dark-eyed stare. “You are gorgeous, inside and out, and you deserve so much better. You hear me? He was your first, Nes. Not your only.”

  She looks so sad, like she thinks I’ll get off the phone with her and call him. So I confess something else, something so new, I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. “I did get asked on kind of a date today.”

  “What?” she screams, almost dropping the phone. I watch her orange walls and Karen Geoghegan poster swirl in the background. “Are you kidding me? Tell! Tell me every damn detail now!”

  I grab hard on the tail of her laugh and fly with that happiness. I don’t skimp on details, and Doyle is even more attractive in my retelling. If that’s possible.

  “That’s retro hot!” she gushes. “Baseball date? So adorable. I’m happy. I wish I could come and bat or umpire or whatever.”

  Her words cause a patch of thorns to bloom in my throat. I miss her so much. “Me too, Olls. Me too.”

  “Hey.” She changes the subject before we get murky with sadness. “Just…don’t compare him to Lincoln, okay? I know he was your first love and all. But Lincoln only seemed perfect—he was actually a huge, gaping asshole. Remember that,” she warns.

  I do. I will. I promise her three times, and I’m still not sure she believes me.

  Later, after Ollie and I have gabbed late into the night and my Chinese food has congealed into a cold lump of tofu and water chestnuts, I creep out to the living room. Mom isn’t sleeping on the couch with an empty bottle of wine rolling on the floor like she’s been doing about once a week lately, so that’s good. Her bedroom door is shut though, and I half want to go in and sit on the edge of her mattress so we can chat like we used to. There are four episodes of the stupid medical romance she and I are obsessed with rotting on the DVR, but neither one of us has invited the other to watch.

  The last episode we watched together was the night before she got a barrage of intense and threatening emails, phone calls, and even a delivered package from the scorned wife, who was close friends with half the office staff my mother depended on t
o keep her department in line. My mom had a few options: stay and push back against a possibly unhinged woman whose husband she’d slept with, in hopes said furious woman would stop the harassment and not deliver any more “anonymous” boxes of shit (yes, literal shit, hopefully animal) to our apartment; endure “lost” memos, meetings that the scheduler “forgot” to mention, and general iciness from the office staff who were solidly loyal to the guy’s wife; or hightail it outta Dodge.

  Only a moron would have gone for anything other than door number three. Mom gave her notice the morning after I found an obviously fake “STD Home Testing Kit” left on our mat, which I assumed was a lame prank that wound up at the wrong address.

  I press a hand on her door and slide it to the doorknob, then stop and pad away. I should go to bed, but I head outside instead and drag the hose over to the sad little twig dying in our backyard. I turn the hose on and sit with my feet in the pool, swatting mosquitoes and looking at the fat pearly moon while the water gurgles. For the first night in years, I distract myself by thinking about a boy who’s not Lincoln, and it feels like fraud. And maybe a little like hope.

  FOUR

  While Ma’am Lovett scrawls Bible verses that correspond to the old man’s fishing trip in dusty chalk on the old blackboard before the bell, I palm a guava, working up the nerve to let it wobble in the center of her desk.

  “Agnes?” She puckers her lips at the bobbling fruit.

  “We were out of apples.” I wave to her with my book, and she dusts the chalk off her hands and takes the guava.

  She presses it to her nose and inhales deeply, eyes closed, lips pursed. “Heaven.”

  “Well, I have been called an angel. Now and then.”

  Ma’am Lovett shakes her head somewhat lovingly before she goes back to the blackboard. The Generic Mean Girls from yesterday snort and whisper on cue, like they’re literally working off some D-list high school movie script on how to be total sociopaths, and then there’s a laugh that sounds sweet and warm, like taffy left in the pocket of your shorts at the shore.