Secrets of Southern Girls

by Haley Harrigan

  “Yeah?” she said. I could see the excitement on her face. Sharing secrets does that to her.

  “I met someone. A boy. He comes here…sometimes.”

  “What?” Jules was surprised. She may be an actress, but it’s always been easy for me to read her. She held a bright bowl of artificial daisies and pulled it tight against her chest. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s still really new. And not what you think. It’s, well, it’s something no one else can know about.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “People wouldn’t like it. My father wouldn’t like it. The boy I see sometimes…he’s black.”

  Jules stopped and looked at me, her eyes wide. “A black guy has been coming by the shop? Like, when you’re alone?”

  I nodded, and I could feel the ghost of a smile tugging the corners of my mouth.

  “What? Reba, have you told Nell?”

  I shook my head, my smile disappearing.

  If I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure what bothered Jules more: the idea that I might have had a romantic interest, or that said romantic interest was black. I’ve known Jules all my life, but I’d never thought of her as racist before, even though God knows enough people around here are. Despite her words, the label still didn’t fit. Maybe the truth was a bit more complicated. For some reason, it has always seemed important to Jules that I remain as pure and unblemished as a china doll in a box on a shelf. She can be wild and reckless and free, as long as I’m not. Even when she takes me out of the box and shows me off, like those nights at Southern Saddle, she counts on the fact that everyone will see me for what I am. Untouchable. I always sort of liked it before. But now I was ready to grow up, to break free.

  I won’t soon forget how painfully disappointed I was in my best friend. I shook my head. “You know what? It’s really nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.”

  “No, really, Reba. This isn’t a Penny Decker–type situation, is it? I don’t want you to get in trouble, and I don’t want you to get hurt either.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Forget I mentioned it at all.” That was the first time I knew I couldn’t trust Jules, not the way I’ve always thought I could, not the way she can trust me. She may have been right about one thing, though. This probably wasn’t a path I should have been taking, and I knew it.

  But I chose this path anyway.

  37

  Nell is wearing her housecoat and driving the delivery van with the flower shop logo on the side. When Julie approaches the driver’s-side window, Nell reaches over to the passenger seat and produces a faded and water-damaged lavender book. Reba’s diary.

  “Jules, are you sure you want this? I can promise you that you are not expecting what’s inside. It will change the way you think of Reba, the way that you think of your friendship with her. It will change all of that forever.”

  “Yes,” Julie says with no hesitation at all. The need to hold the book in her own hands is overwhelming, and she reaches for it. Nell looks wary, but releases the journal anyway.

  “Good luck to you, then, honey. I hope you find the answers you’re looking for.” She turns the van around in the gravel lot and drives away, her headlights fading into the night.

  Julie stares at the book in disbelief, the fabric cover and some of the pages wrinkled and stiff, yellowed from water. She runs her fingertips lightly along the front, as though now that she has it, it might fall to pieces in her hands, like the honeysuckle necklace in her dream. She has to fight the urge to untie the ribbon wrapped around the book, to let it fall open in her lap and devour its contents right here in Nell’s gravel lot.

  “I can’t believe it,” August says, looking reverently at the diary.

  Julie looks up at him. “We need light.” She nods toward the stupid, silly park where the field used to be. Except for one burned-out streetlamp, the parking lot of Hobart Park is bathed in false daylight. It’s completely deserted. They leave the car parked on the narrow paved drive and walk. Nell’s shop at the top of the street is dark and quiet now, the alarm finally silenced.

  August takes the lead, and Julie follows him. They’d stopped at the liquor store in Opal on their way to Lawrence Mill—If we pull this off, I’m going to need a drink, August had said—and Julie certainly wasn’t going to argue. She twists the top off the bottle, without even removing it from its brown-bag cloak. She presses her lips deliberately against the mouth of the bottle and swallows. It’s hot, and poisonous, and familiar—whiskey. He was paying attention to what she was drinking last night, and the knowledge adds to the warmth in her stomach. She passes the bottle to August, and they walk on, the two of them, alone in the starless, moonless night.

  38

  Toby spends too much time in this damned bar. When the gallery’s closed up for the night and his loft apartment upstairs feels like it’s going to close in on him, he has to go somewhere. And this is the place. Doesn’t even bother to change clothes, most of the time. It’s a quiet, seedy, workingman’s kind of joint. In his paint-spattered T-shirts and dirty jeans, he could be part of the local construction crew. Most people think he is. He could set them right, but why bother?

  He’s lived in this area his whole life, and yet he doesn’t have many friends here. He could leave in the night, and it would be days before anyone would notice. Nell would probably be the one to discover him gone. There’s no reason he should care about staying, anyway. But every time he thinks of leaving, like Jules did way back when, he feels like his boots are stuck to the asphalt of this shitty little town. The more he thinks about it, the heavier his feet feel, until he knows he’s destined to stay. When he went to New York as part of the Southern Artists’ Showcase, he’d thought, for a minute, that he could stay away forever, that he could leave it all behind. But before long, he felt that pull to get on back, and it’s a pull he can’t fight. His feet would carry him back here, whether he wanted them to or not.

  He knows it’s not Reba’s fault, but she’s trapped him here, sure enough.

  Toby takes a long swig from his beer, one of several that he plans to drink tonight, now that he knows Jules is back in town. It’s making him think even more than usual, making him remember how it all started with Reba.

  He remembers the day he first caught sight of her with the boy. He’d been working for Nell. When that piece-of-shit air conditioner died, he’d gotten stuck moving vases of flowers around the shop. He was pissed about it too, fuming about women, how they tell you they need you for one thing, and then it turns into a hundred. He’d just wanted to get his deliveries done so he could get back home. He’d only let Molly force him into the job in the first place to keep her off his back. Molly didn’t know where he got his money, though he always had some. Something shady was probably her guess, and she wasn’t wrong.

  Toby had just finished loading the flowers into the van, carefully, because he might not have taken that job too seriously, but he knew Nell would have kicked his ass into the next week if something got messed up on the way to a delivery. He was climbing into the van when he saw Reba around the side of the building. Damn, that girl. Off-limits, though. Too pure, too innocent.

  Bet he could turn her wild is what he thought then. He never dreamed he’d actually get the chance.

  What was she doing over there, anyway? It looked like she was talking to someone—a guy.

  Maybe Reba wasn’t as pure as he thought.

  Whatever. He’d cranked up the van and ignored his urge to investigate. Damned deliveries had to get made. He decided he’d have to keep an eye on the situation, though, and find out what sweet Reba was up to.

  He doesn’t know, now, if things would have been better or worse if he’d just minded his own goddamned business.

  39

  REBA’S DIARY, 1997

  It was different than I thought it would be. For starters, the moon wa
sn’t a helpful guide, like I’d expected in my romantic mind. Instead, I have the streetlights to thank for guiding me past David Nickel’s house and out into the fields. And when I reached the fields…nothing. I wore frayed jean shorts, and the tall grass tickled my legs. The loud chatter of crickets kept me company, and I imagined them scattering beneath my feet with each step. I watched for shadows without sources. I hadn’t brought anything that could be used as a weapon, not to protect me from August, but from someone else. Anyone else could have been out there. How was I to know what went on in the forest after dark?

  I was terrified, and proud of myself at the same time. I knew Jules was out with Jake and not home, not looking out her window. But, if Jules had been looking, she would have seen me pushing up my bedroom window with both hands and awkwardly unhooking the screen from its pegs so I could slide one leg, and then the other, out the window. There is a row of hedges below my window, and when I climbed out that first time, their limbs scraped at my calves.

  I could see Nell’s shop in the distance. It was so tempting to walk to the door, to shelter and safety, to give up on this lovely idea. Maybe I’d taken on too much, too fast. But no, I wasn’t giving up. I turned away from the shop and headed into the trees.

  Soon, I heard the river’s mellow gurgle, slow and steady like voices talking, but so low that I couldn’t hear the words. The water glimmered, dark as an oil streak in the nighttime. I stood on the edge of the bank, looking around, my arms crossed nervously.

  I doubted myself again. It was foolish, wasn’t it, to leave the security of my house to wander into the night to meet a boy I hardly knew? It was a page straight out of Jules’s book—not mine. I searched the darkness for any sign of him. What sign would there be when he arrived? If he arrived at all. Go back, a voice in my head whispered, pulsing in time with the veins in my temples.

  I jumped when I heard what could have been footsteps. “August?” The shaky sound that came from my mouth sounded nothing like my own voice. There was no reply, only the continuous step, step, step on the twig-covered ground.

  Finally, when I was preparing to run, to hide, to do something, I heard his voice. “Reba? Are you out here?”

  I sighed, relieved.

  “Reba,” he said again, his voice growing closer.

  “I’m here.”

  “I’m glad.” When he reached me, he touched my arm, quickly and gently. It was more intimate than a handshake and less intimate than a hug, which I guess meant it was his way of saying hello. He lowered himself to the bank and sat, and I did the same.

  “This is probably a really bad idea. I shouldn’t be here,” I said.

  “I know. Neither should I. My mom will lose it if she catches me.”

  “So…what happens now?” Never having found myself in this situation before—never having been alone with a boy in my entire life (except for my daddy, of course, which was a whole different kind of awkward), I had no idea how to proceed. Should we talk? Should we touch? I wanted to touch him, to feel his dark skin under my fingertips. Should we kiss? I’ve heard Jules’s stories before, but those salacious tales seemed to have no relation to what I was doing in that moment. Because I am not Jules, and I am not Penny Decker. I am only myself, and I was there, with him.

  “I don’t know.” In the silence that followed, the slow trickle of the river became a wild rush to my senses, every collision of water and rock pounding in my ears. In the darkness, he was a statue, a work of art to consider. But he finally asked the question I wanted to ask him, would have asked him if, after sneaking out of my house to meet him in the moonlight, I’d had any actual courage left. “So, what’s your story, Reba? Tell me about yourself.”

  So I told him everything I could think of, and most of it was true: that I would be seventeen soon, that I love old books, that I write poetry that no one has ever read (because it’s awful, but I left that part out). That I’m not athletic, but I love the outdoors, even in the heat of summer. That I love rain, and slow music, and that I have a best friend, more like a sister really—a more adventurous sister—named Jules. Even if I can’t trust her like I wish I could, I can’t deny how close we are.

  “Your turn,” I said, when I couldn’t think of anything else he could possibly find interesting.

  “I’m August,” he said simply. I waited for more, and he eventually continued. “Um, well, August Elliott.”

  “Go on,” I said. I learned about his favorite things—photography and football and his little sister, Megan. He’d been a football player back home, at his old school. I wasn’t surprised. I’d already seen glimpses of his muscular arms and legs. I blushed, thinking of him, and was thankful that it was dark out.

  “Wait,” I said. “Where is home?”

  “Richmond, Virginia. I loved it there. I miss it. It’s big, and full, and people are…different there. Normal. Not like here.”

  “You don’t like it here.” I was defensive, I guess. I love Lawrence Mill, loved it even as I was defying its unspoken laws.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  There was a long pause before he replied. “I didn’t have a choice. My dad’s job. He was transferred here.”

  “Transferred?” That word. I’m a smart girl—at least, I think I am—but I hadn’t seen this at all. Were there clues I’d missed along the way? It seemed so obvious all of a sudden.

  This was a thousand times worse than Penny Decker and James Edgemont. My throat was dry, even in the moist heat, and I realized I’d been given a piece of information that I really, really didn’t want. I’d heard that word, transferred, too many nights from my daddy’s mouth over dinner.

  “He was a manager, or something, at the headquarters of this textiles manufacturer. They sent him here to oversee—”

  “The mill,” I interrupted, feeling the familiar mottling of my damned cheeks. With the timing, I should have guessed it from the very beginning, from that first day in the fields. The sound of the river pounded against my ears, angrier than before. “Your dad works at the mill.” I thought about the day I first saw the flash of August’s camera. The same day my daddy was denied the promotion.

  “Yeah.”

  I was afraid. Not abstractly, but literally, absolutely afraid.

  “Why?” August asked. “Is that bad?”

  He settled his hand against my knee, but I jumped involuntarily, my ankle scraping against a rock. I ignored the urge to scramble to my feet. “Nothing,” I whispered, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. “It’s nothing.” I had no idea what to do next.

  My heart—my head too—filled with dread at what would happen to me if I was caught, because my sin had become so serious. Sneaking out of the house. To meet a boy. The son of the man my daddy despises.

  I could tell August felt it when I changed, how I turned quiet and uncertain. Our arms touched, but I hardly spoke again, isolated as I was with so much more to consider. When I left him, I ran faster than I thought I could, wasting no thought on the scratchy tall weeds whipping against my bare legs, my hair lashing against my face.

  He’d put his hand in mine. His eyes had been so hopeful (did I really see that, in the darkness, or was it my imagination?) when he asked to see me again. I’d looked down at my hands, felt his skin against mine, soft and cool. I saw that connection, and I ran. As if my life depended on it. As if his did.

  40

  “Wait, go back,” August says. Julie stops reading. She’s sitting on a yellow curb, and August is pacing back and forth in front of her.

  “It’s too much, isn’t it?” she says. “It’s…it’s…” She trails off.

  “So she tried to tell you about me, early on, in the flower shop, and you reacted that way?” he asks.

  She looks down, embarrassed. “I did.”

  “Which was it for you? Was it a race thing, plain an
d simple? Are you like that, Jules? Or was it what Reba said…something deeper?”

  Julie knew this would happen if they read the book, knew she would have to confirm her own screwed-up notions. “It’s horrible either way, isn’t it? But it was the latter. I needed her to stay innocent. That made it okay, somehow, for me to be…who I was. Like she was good enough to make up for the fact that I wasn’t.”

  “That’s messed up,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.” She stands up from the curb and wanders to the playground. August follows.

  “Why were you that way, Jules? You didn’t have to be like that.”

  “I don’t know.” It’s too much to explain. She’d only really started to understand, during a few months of therapy after Beck was born, that her behavior back then was all tied up with losing her parents early, and not feeling loved by Aunt Molly, and being convinced that she was supposed to be somewhere else, and feeling like nothing she did in Lawrence Mill really mattered.

  She’d had some sort of twisted maternal instinct where Reba was concerned. It was the kind of love you’d get from a mother who relies on you to fulfill her own dreams, who puts you on a pedestal, who has expectations you can never achieve. The worst kind of mother. She doesn’t know why Reba had spent any time around her at all.

  “Those nights with her,” August says. “I’ve never been so afraid, and so excited, and so…happy.” He settles beside Julie into one of the swings on the playground, beneath a large fluorescent streetlamp that illuminates everything like a grotesque moon. They pass the bottle back and forth. “I had no idea she was going to be so important to me. But she was so…” He shakes his head. “She had me,” he says. “I don’t even think she knew what she did to me.”

  “It was mutual, I think.” Maybe she’s trying to comfort him, or maybe it’s true. It seems true, based on what they’ve read so far.

  “Maybe sometimes you just know.”