Rebels Like Us

by Liz Reinhardt

  “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.”

  EIGHT

  “What?” My fingers bite into my towel and my eyes swim. “Is he…is he…”

  “He’s at the hospital right now. He’ll be okay. He fell from a fire escape, honey. His mom and dad wanted you to know.”

  My mom looks at me like she doesn’t know what to do, and I know we have this entire moat of complicated, bubbling anger and resentment separating us, but this is Lincoln. My Lincoln. Lincoln, who patiently showed me how to play pool like a pro and bluff through many hands of poker. Lincoln, who stayed on the other end of the phone until 3:00 a.m. whenever I felt like talking about anything and everything under the sun, no matter that he had to be up at five for soccer practice. Lincoln, who taught me one of the hardest lessons of my life so far—that growing up sometimes means growing apart and losing someone you thought would be by your side forever. I press myself into Mom’s arms. She smells like vanilla and musk, scents that are netted around all my childhood memories.

  “He called me.” My voice is dull. I should cry, but I can’t. It feels unreal. “He called me, and I ignored it.”

  She smooths her hand over my damp hair. “This has nothing to do with you. From what I can gather, he’s been drinking more than he should. His parents have been worried, and they’re committed to getting him help. He’s going through a lot right now, I guess.”

  I stiffen against her. My mother knows Lincoln and I broke up, but she doesn’t know why. Before this winter she would have been the first person I told after Ollie. Now I’m choking on this acidic hatred because she doesn’t know, and even though it’s my own fault for not telling her, I can’t damn up my anger and redirect it.

  “He’s been drinking for months. His parents never took it seriously when I tried to talk to them about it.”

  It had gotten so bad, I’d had to lie to my mother so that I could stay at random houses where he’d passed out so completely I couldn’t shake him awake. I’d be huddled next to him, worried he was going to choke on his own vomit in his sleep or just never wake up. I’d keep my eyes screwed tight and pray no one messed with me while I shivered the night away under a thin throw blanket on someone’s couch or curled on the floor next to his sprawled body, my arm pillowed under my head. Of course, Lincoln usually apologized when he first opened his bloodshot eyes, confused about where he was and how he got there. Every single time that confusion scared him, but when I suggested he cut back, he morphed from sorry to nasty and said I should drink more—enough so I’d stop being such a nag.