Rebels Like Us

by Liz Reinhardt

  I feel a microscopic glimmer of pity for Ansley. I’d never be giddy over anything I thought might hurt Olls.

  Braelynn rolls her eyes and shakes her silky red ponytail. “Whatever, Yank. Obviously we’ve got a different sense of humor here than y’all do.”

  “I don’t think ‘sense of humor’ means what you think it means.” I stare her down, and she half bares her teeth. “I think the word you’re looking for is backstabbing.”

  “Y’know, I was kinda feelin’ bad for how Ansley tattled on you to her uncle and how she’s been talkin’ shit on you all over the place, but now I’m starting to think you deserve it.” She flicks a disgusted look in Doyle’s direction. “I don’t even know who the hell you are anymore. I’ll tell you right now, I ain’t a backstabber, Doyle, and you should know enough to stick up for me and say so. When she dumps your ass and goes back to her precious New York City, your real nonbackstabbing friends’ll be waiting for ya where ya dropped us.”

  “Go bother someone else, would’ya?” Doyle glares as she flounces away.

  “With friends like those…” I mutter, but he leans his head against the side of the truck, and a frown chisels away at the happiness that lined his face preconfrontation. “Ignore her.”

  “Her voice is particularly difficult to get outta my head,” he mutters. “Might be that screechy pitch. Might be she’s a backstabbing asshole, but she shoots from the hip.” His look levels me. “She right ’bout you?”

  “About me what?” I pick flecks of dried mud off my arm and rub at the grayish spots left behind. “Me dumping you? ’Cause, I hate to break it to you, but we’re not dating, Doyle. About me going back to my ‘precious New York City’?” I do my best imitation of her drawl, but Doyle doesn’t even attempt a smile.

  “You know damn well I’m going back. I never made a secret about that. Because, even though I can be an asshole, I also shoot from the hip.” I pop one foot on the edge of the mud-crusted tailgate. “By the way, I’m serious when I say I’m not a backstabber. Ever. I’m just saying, assholes and obnoxiously honest people are kind of par for the course if you want friends who aren’t total wet blankets. But backstabbers? I’d rather be a hermit than hang around with someone who has zero loyalty.”

  When I’m done, there’s still no smile from him, but he’s through pouting, apparently. “You know what would make me happy?”

  “What makes you think I care what would make you happy?” But I let my grin grow.

  “You, swinging over that river, screaming your head off, in a little bikini.” He raises his eyebrows like he loves how much he’s testing me.

  “Sounds like a really bad country music video.” I grimace. “You like me screaming, huh?”

  “Girl, you got no idea.” He lays the drawl on thick, smiling so hard his eyes are slits of electric blue.

  I refuse to go to mush. Refuse.

  But I can’t help if I run hot and my heart rocks around my chest like a truck in a mud pit.

  Ah, the metaphors I’m picking up living in the Deep South…

  “Such a pervert. You’re wrecking every stereotype I had about gentlemanly Southern guys in white suits, smoking corncob pipes,” I gripe.

  I listen to the adorable echo of his laugh as we jump down and stomp off the dried mud. “Looks like they’re ’bout ready to head to the river.” Doyle helps me into the driver’s seat as the engines around us start up. He takes a second to just stare my way before going around to the passenger’s side and getting in. “You’re crazy, girl, you know that?”

  “You know what would make me happy?” He quirks an eyebrow, not even trying to pretend he doesn’t care. “If you swung out and your trunks came undone.”

  “Damn. And you call me the pervert? I could oblige right here.” He lifts his hips and flicks his belt buckle open.

  I scream out an adamant no, cover my eyes, and stamp my feet. “Put it back on! I meant I wanted to see you publicly humiliated, not that I wanted a private showing of your bare ass!”

  “You say potato…” I don’t open my eyes until I hear the clip of his belt buckle. “If you’re nice, I’ll flub the tie on my trunks.”

  “I’m never nice.” I bump my shoulder against his, start the engine, and drive according to Doyle’s verbal directions. “I actually like driving this beast.”

  “Yeah?” He lets one arm dangle out the window. “I was wondering if you’d freak ’cause it’s so much bigger than that windup car you drive.”

  “My car is midsize,” I protest.

  “Midsize my ass. That car’s a roller skate, and it’s gonna make you feel small and sad after you drive this big boy ’round for a while.” He pats the door like he’s petting a beloved dog.

  I feel like I’m driving from three stories up and it gives me a prime view of the turquoise sky, the low, flat salt marshes choked with reeds, and glimpses of the snaking muddy river that winds alongside the road. “You must get, like, a half mile to the gallon. Your carbon footprint is tragic.”

  “I plant things for a livin’. And I recycle. It evens out.” He closes his eyes and the sun glows gold on his face, making his hair look plated.

  Doyle directs me to a clearing near the riverbank where someone already dragged a hose from behind a shed.

  If I thought jumping in the river sounded like a cheesy backdrop for a bad country video, I had no clue what a few Southern kids in mud-splattered clothes with hoses could do—CMT would lose its mind. Squealing, screaming, soaking wet, half-dressed teens run back and forth, sprawl down in the mud, jump into truck beds and roll underneath them, getting dirtier by the second and then blasting the hoses nonstop until all the mud runs clear… The entire scene couldn’t have been more Southern Teens Gone Wild if it had been scripted and choreographed.

  We finally all drip and shiver in front of our clean vehicles, and Doyle points to the river. “I’ll jump first, but all y’all fools better follow!”

  He winks at me, strips his shirt off, drops his jeans, loosens the ties of his swim trunks—every single female catcalls for more naked Doyle—and takes a running leap off the edge of the bank. He barely grabs on to the frayed rope that looks like it’s been hanging off the branch of the Spanish moss–draped tree since the dawn of time, but he manages to hang tight and swing back and forth.

  The shorts do come down. Halfway.

  His ass isn’t tan with freckles like the rest of him.

  It’s bright white. That detail aside, it’s a fine-as-hell, muscled, gorgeous ass. A few girls clap me on the back in envious congratulations as Doyle lets go and sails, bare-assed, into the water.

  “Damn, girl, you’re a lucky one,” a tiny brunette wearing head-to-toe camo sighs.

  The whooping peters out when Doyle doesn’t pop up from the murky depths after half a minute. All conversation comes to a dead stop after another agonizing thirty seconds tick by. We stare at the waves lapping the bank and eye the flotsam whisked downstream by a current that could drag a submerged body fast and far.

  Critter gives an overloud laugh fueled by nerves. “Shit. It’s jest Doyle playin’ on us. He done it every year, and we always fall for it and get scared as hell.”

  Everyone murmurs and nods, but the big group fractures into little comfort knots, two or three friends holding each other or standing shoulder to shoulder as they wait.

  I press both hands hard over my breastbone because I have no one to hold except the one person everyone on the bank is afraid we lost. Weird that it hasn’t even been five minutes since we cheered on the crazy way he embraced life, and now…

  No.

  No, no, no, not Doyle, not today.

  I can’t even process the possibility that…

  No.

  My fingers hover over the screen of my phone, and I’m just about to send a call through to 911 when his idiot head explodes out of the water. I rush the bank ahead of the herd, my feet kicking up furious sprays of sand.

  “What the hell was that?” I scream, becaus
e it’s still too real and raw. I can’t join the laughter that’s already canceled out everyone’s worry. “Are you crazy?”

  “These fools all know I can hold my breath for three straight minutes if I want. They jest like being scared is all. Stop fussing at me and jump, Nes!” Doyle reaches his arms out of the water like he’s offering to catch me. “I let you see my ass jest like ya begged!”

  I try to explain that he’s a raging idiot, but the hoots and whistles drown me out. I shuck off my shirt and shorts, drop my phone on the pile, run as fast as I can and leap out, grabbing the rope like it’s a lifeline. My stomach bucks as I swing. When I’m right above Doyle, I cannonball into the scary, glistening river that churns far below me, screaming the whole way down.

  The river is several degrees colder than I expected. I don’t pinch my nostrils, so I get a stinging noseful of silty water. There are a few frantic seconds where I’m not sure if I’m up or down, but Doyle’s hands reach for me, and he pulls me up and spins my sputtering self around.

  “That was a hell of a jump!” He yells so everyone can hear. The sun shines off his wet skin, and his light hair sticks up off his forehead. Droplets of river water cling to every ridge of his muscles. He pulls me close, so our bodies twine against each other.

  I go tight between my legs, and my body opens to a want I haven’t been able to feel since I found out about Lincoln and his menagerie of girls on the side. Before I think it through, I let my body float right up next to his and pretzel my legs tight around his hips, the way we were in my pool. This time there’s a crowd of girls who admire this incredible guy, and an animal need to claim him as mine rises up in me. He’s tugged his shorts back up, but they still hang dangerously low, and I can see the white sliver of his very fine ass over his shoulder.

  “I couldn’t let you show me up.” I brush my hair back while his hands cradle me at the small of my back.

  “Then you should’ve let your top fly off.” He closes his eyes and nods like he’s imagining it. I unwind my legs, kick back, and splash him full in the face, cackling as he sputters. “Sneaky!” he roars in accusation.

  I shrug and cup my hands at the water’s top again. “Sneaky? We’re in a river. It’s full of water. And you have a face that looks like it needs to be splashed.”

  He raises his eyebrows in warning, gliding his arm across the surface of the river to create a surging tidal wave I won’t be able to escape.

  I use my hands as a defensive shield, a pathetic attempt to catch my breath before he’s got another wave missile crashing over my head. His friends start to jump and dive into the water, one human splash explosion after another, and I give up dodging the chaos and let Doyle wrap his arms around me.

  I press my forehead tight against his chest to create a pocket of breathable air, and listen to the laugh thunking around in his chest. He runs a hand over my wet hair. “Now, now, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Doyle won’t let the mean ole river rats get you.”

  I wiggle out of his arms and contemplate pantsing him, but change my mind fast. That’s definitely one of those ideas that seems super funny, but will probably escalate to me taking an involuntary public skinny-dip while Doyle holds my bikini captive over his head.

  “You have too many inches on me. And your hands are like skillets. Unfair splash advantage.” I pout.

  He floats on his back and clucks his tongue. “And here I thought you were someone I had to fear, Northern Aggression.”

  I snort and float alongside him. “Well, I’m waving the white flag. Consider this your Southern independence from my Northern scourge.”

  A few giant black tubes get thrown into the water. Doyle nabs one and pushes it my way. When I struggle to get in, he hoists me up easily and tickles the bottom of my feet, ignoring my screams of protest.

  “No mercy!” His laughs slide across the water and send me shivering like the soft nibbles of the guppies darting with the current. “You jest surrendered, so I guess that means you’re my prisoner now.”

  Shackle me, Doyle Rahn. I’m all yours.

  FOURTEEN

  Doyle flops into a second tube and yells, “Critter! Send the beer cooler this way!”

  Critter shoves out a tube with a red cooler bungee-corded to it. Doyle paddles us closer, opens it, and pops a tab, then passes a silver can to me. A million dazzling fragments of sunlight reflect off the river, each one dancing directly on my retinas.

  “Jest shut your eyes.” It’s like he can read my mind. “Sun won’t set for a while yet.”

  “I’m going to get burned,” I lament. It took a full week of aloe slatherings to get over the last burn.

  “Nah.” Doyle takes a long drink and leans his head back. “You got a base now. You’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t think it works like that.” I love the silky suck of the current against my fingers and toes.

  “You’ll look like you’re from Brazil or something.” He lifts his head. “Did you tell me you were Dominican?”

  The question hangs like a heavy picture frame on a wobbly thumbtack.

  “My family came to Georgia from England as indentured servants. Prolly a bunch of criminals. So we been right here forever.”

  I think he offers his backstory so I’ll know he’s asking for mine because he’s genuinely interested in me, not just idly digging for information about why I’m kind of black, but kind of white, and maybe something else mixed in.

  “My mother’s family came from Ireland through Ellis Island.” The cool river water drips off my fingers and runs in streaks down my stomach, pooling right next to my belly button. Doyle glances over, then can’t seem to break his attention away. “My father’s family comes from the Dominican Republic. He was born there. My grandfather moved to Brooklyn when my father was a baby, and he worked for years until he could send for my grandmother and father.”

  “But your dad lives in France now?”

  “Yep. He and my older brother live in France because Dad got a professorship and my brother goes to college there. My abuela’s father was French, so she’s fluent, and my dad and brother are too.”

  “You fluent too?” His voice is as lazy as the river that’s barely moving us.

  “Sort of. My dad traveled a ton when I was little, and I cried whenever he came back after a long trip and spoke French to me. He didn’t want to add to my mental torture or whatever, so he stopped. My brother is completely fluent though. My grandmother speaks Spanish to us, so I’m way better with that.” I siphon a tiny sip of beer that’s gathered in a warm puddle around the lip of my can, and Doyle fishes a second can out of the melting ice.

  “Every single thing ’bout you’s different. You ain’t like any other girl I’ve ever known.” Doyle’s smile makes the harshest sunlight feel like shade. “God, I’m glad you showed up this year.”

  “So I’m like your own personal zoo freak? Like the swimming polar bear in Central Park?” I kick water at him hard enough that it gets in his beer can and makes him sputter.

  He claws at the rubber of my tube, fighting to grip the curved side. “Not at all. You’re like this real smart, sexy girl who makes me realize that it don’t really matter if my family’s stayed here for three hundred years, ’cause there’s a whole world out there I gotta go see.”

  “There are plenty of other smart, sexy girls out there in the world, Doyle,” I point out. “One day you’ll go to New York, and you’ll see that I’m pretty average.”

  “You? Average?” He shakes his head. “There’s a helluva lotta words I’d use to describe ya, but average ain’t one of them.”

  It might not be the most romantic thing he could have said about me, but it’s the most romantic way he could have said it, his accent thick like white biscuit gravy, his voice crunched like gravel under truck tires. He only drawls that heavily when he gets so worked up, he forgets himself.

  I lay my neck on the warm tube and relax, hoping the sun doesn’t roast my skin. I doze a little until something br
ushes against my foot and jars me into full panic mode, flailing around to get a better look at what I’m sharing the water with. The cool comfort of the river is a mirage. It’s too murky for me to see if what brushed my leg was an innocent river fish or a turtle that might snap off my toe with one strong-beaked bite.

  The distant echo of the other tubers screaming with laughter carries our way. Doyle cranes his neck, and his eyes bulge before he settles back, jaw set.

  “What is it?”

  My internal alarms sound off one by one. I can’t decide if the screams are fun or panic based. Paranoia and the look on Doyle’s face make me think the latter.

  “Nothing for you to worry ’bout.” But he hooks one foot over my tube to keep me close.

  “Doyle?” I drag his name out in a desperate plea for information, even though I get the feeling I don’t want to know.

  “Jest a teeny, tiny, miniature, little gator.”

  Gator?

  Alligator?

  Images of primordial hunters with ancient scales, slitted gold eyes, jaws that can rip a limb off your body and leave a few bubbles of blood on the surface while they pull you down and drown you in the muck send my amygdala into overdrive. My elbows and knees flail as I beat against the current in a desperate effort to eject myself from this watery grave. My beer can burbles gold liquid into the river like a bitter sacrifice.

  “Whoa, what’re ya doin’?” Doyle yells.

  “A fucking alligator?” I strangle back a screech. “Doyle, I don’t want to die today, thank you!”

  “Nes, I been floating on this river since I was in diapers. Never had a problem.” He jumps out of his tube like some agile merman and follows me into the shallows, beer can in hand. “I’m telling you, you’re safe.”

  I stand with my toes squishing in the mud and crane my neck to see past the bend those screaming tubers curved around, trying to catch a glimpse of evil reptilian eyes or a slashing tail.

  Doyle stands by my side. “I promise, there’s nothin’ to worry ’bout.”

  “Except alligators, Doyle. Alligators. We’re not talking snapping turtles here. These are certified man-eating apex predators.” I drag my tube onto dry land and examine my mud-smeared toes, never more glad to see all ten of them, attached and wiggling.