Goodbye, Rebel Blue

by Shelley Coriell

  “You okay?” Nate asks. “Listen, funerals and deaths do crazy things to people. My Tia Mina laughed for two days when Tio Rogelio died, and two of my mom’s second cousins got into a fistfight at their father’s funeral. They knocked over the altar flowers, and the priest had to break it up. Funerals can bring out strong emotions in people. I’m sure Penelope didn’t mean to sound so harsh.”

  I’m sure she did. Pretty Princess Penelope hated me from the moment I moved into her house. That first week, she glared at me from across the dinner table when Uncle Bob helped me with my math homework. She threw a fit when Aunt Evelyn took me shoe shopping. She threw away my Mason jars of sea glass, and when I beheaded her Polly Pockets in retaliation, she declared war.

  “You need a ride back to school?” Nate is concerned but calm and in control, like a guy you’d want on hand when the Big One strikes Southern California.

  Unlike me. My entire upper body shakes, and the shark teeth on my bag rattle. My skin is hot. And sitting on my toes is that heinous piece of paper. I want to grind Kennedy’s bucket list into the ground, to run after my cousin and scream at the top of my lungs that she knows nothing about me. Nothing.

  You’re incapable of doing good.

  “No. I’m good,” I tell Nate.

  You hear that, Penelope? I. Am. Good.

  Because as I’ve said all along, there’s no such thing as fate or destiny. Life is one big choice after another. I can choose to do good for the entire world to see. I can choose to decorate the gym with toilet-paper flowers for prom. I can choose to save every stupid turtle in the sea.

  I pick up Kennedy Green’s bucket list and look into her heart.

  “Are you sure you don’t need a ride?” Nate asks.

  I unfasten my cargo pants pocket and jam in Kennedy Green’s bucket list. “I’m good,” I say again. And I can choose to prove that Cousin Penelope is dead wrong.

  I POKE MY HEAD INTO THE BIOLOGY LAB. IT’S EMPTY, but then again, it’s 6:30 A.M.

  Throwing my messenger bag onto my lab table, I dig out the small paint scraper I found last night in one of Aunt Evelyn’s decorator-supply tubs. Aunt Evelyn goes nuclear when anyone borrows her stuff without asking. Unfortunately for the fate of the Free World, I did not ask, as that would entail explaining Kennedy Green’s bucket list, which is still in my possession although not because of destiny or juju winds. I’m hanging on to Kennedy Green’s bucket list to prove that Cousin Pen is an idiot.

  You’re a wrecking ball. You cause damage and destruction to everything you touch. You hurt people and kill dreams. You’re incapable of doing good.

  I take great delight in being extraordinarily bad, but Cousin Pen is wrong. I can do good, and I can complete every item on Kennedy Green’s bucket list, including the first: Perform one random act of kindness every day for one year.

  Percy is my first victim.

  I first met him my freshman year during a pep rally when he found me in the maintenance closet near the gym with my hands over my ears. The entire student body had gathered for a mandatory rah-rah session celebrating the football team’s homecoming win. Since I’d been homeschooled and knew nothing about football fever, I wasn’t prepared for shaking bleachers, blaring trumpets, and four thousand screaming classmates. After he found me hiding in the closet, Percy reached into a box on one of the shelves, took out a small plastic bag, and handed it to me. Inside, I discovered a pair of earplugs. “For when you need to turn off the world.”

  I still have the earplugs, because sometimes the world is still too loud.

  The biology room is wonderfully silent as I search under the first stool and scrape off a bulbous pink glob with teeth marks. Stool number two is clean, as are three and four. At chair five I hit the mother lode, four wads, including a minty fresh one. After wishing the owner a root canal for his next birthday, I swipe the gum into my trash bag, but it clings to the scraper.

  “Need some help?”

  I jump, and the scraper falls onto my toe. “Will you stop sneaking up on me?”

  “I didn’t sneak,” Nate says. “I called your name, but you didn’t hear me.”

  “I was focused.” I lift the scraper, and the gum hits my elbow.

  “Let me help you”—Nate wrinkles his nose and then dispenses a crinkly paper towel from the wash station—“unfocus.”

  “I don’t need help.” I shoo him away with the scraper, and a string of gum migrates to my hair.

  “Sure you don’t.” Nate swipes at the gooey chain of gum that had traveled to my knee. Tucking in the paper towel as he goes, he tackles my flip-flop. Even bent over my foot, his wavy hair stays in place. “Did Mr. Phillips get tired of your snarky comments about his ugly ties?” Nate asks.

  My right eyebrow shoots skyward.

  “One of Lungren’s detention assignments?”

  Left eyebrow.

  Nate’s fast, efficient, and manages to get every speck of gum off me and the floor in the time it takes me to de-gum my hair. He wads the paper towel and lobs it into the trash can. Score another one for Nate the Great. He settles his butt against my lab table and stares.

  “Don’t you have hordes of other pretty people to go hang out with before school?” I throw away my gummy paper towel.

  “I’m tutoring this morning.” He stretches out his legs and crosses his ankles. “This is about the bucket list, isn’t it?”

  I duck under the next lab stool.

  “I’m impressed,” he says grudgingly.

  “Don’t be. This has nothing to do with honoring the dead or being moved by destiny.”

  Nate continues to study me, as if I’m a wet bacterial culture under one of Mr. Phillips’s microscopes. He’s probably picturing me blubbering about possessed bucket lists or, worse, remembering Pen screaming. Pen can be annoying and mean, but I’d never seen her so angry, almost out of control. I wedge the scraper against the underside of the stool, and a wad of gum flies across the room, hits the fetal-pig jar, and rolls under Mr. Phillips’s desk.

  Nate reaches into his backpack and pulls out a notebook. “By the way, we’ll meet today at my house at four.”

  I squat before Mr. Phillips’s desk and search for the wad of gum. “I’m currently passing biology with a lovely C-minus, so I don’t need tutoring.”

  “This isn’t about tutoring but making the sea-swallow decoys.”

  “The what?” I grope under Mr. Phillips’s desk, my palm sliding along crunchy, dusty things.

  “The sea-swallow decoys, fake birds. Some of the club members will be painting them at my house after school today.”

  “Club?” The nail on my index finger digs into something squishy. Please let this be a wad of gum.

  “You’re rebelblue@ourworld.com, right?”

  “Yeah. Are you some kind of stalker?”

  “No. I’m the president of the Del Rey School 100 Club, and you e-mailed me last night wanting to know when our next meeting is. We’re meeting at my house to paint bird decoys, which we’ll set up on the beach later in the week. It’s part of our community service project to protect and enhance the swallows’ nesting grounds in Tierra del Rey.”

  Now everything makes sense, or as much sense as anything to do with Kennedy Green does. Item number two on her bucket list is Become a centurion for the Del Rey School 100 Club. According to the school website, the 100 Club is some kind of community service club, and I figured I’d need to pay dues and learn the secret “centurion” handshake. But apparently it also involves going to Nate’s house and painting fake birds. “I’ll have to check my calendar. You know how it is for us social butterflies. I might have, I don’t know, a cotillion or something.”

  With half an eye roll, Nate scribbles on a notebook page and yanks out the piece of paper. “Here’s my address.”

  Oh, goody, now I get to see where Nate keeps his hair gel. I cram the wad of gum into my trash bag and wonder if it’s okay to swear at a dead girl.

  “What’s going on in here?” Mr. P
hillips stands in the doorway, glaring at me sprawled beside his desk. “And what are you doing down there?”

  I lift the bag of ABC gum. “I’m—”

  “Stop!” Mr. Phillips takes a step back. “Put down the bag, Rebel.”

  “Hey, I’m—”

  “And step away from my desk.”

  “What? You think this is a bomb or something?”

  “Keep your hands out front where I can see them. No sudden movements.”

  Nate doesn’t bother to hide a laugh.

  “Dammit, I’m trying to do good!”

  Two months ago, when I turned sixteen, Uncle Bob gave me a motor scooter that once belonged to my mom. Aunt Evelyn threw a fit. “Rebecca could get hurt,” she insisted. “We can’t afford the insurance. That thing is about to fall apart.”

  Uncle Bob is a pasty version of my mother. He has thin, light brown hair pulled over his head in a wispy comb-over, pale blue eyes, and the unassuming voice of a man who’s content to live out his life as an accountant in a tiny cubicle, but when it came to Mom’s Vespa, he wouldn’t budge. “Reb has so little from her mother. She will have the scooter.”

  My mom bought the scooter secondhand three decades ago. Even back then it had an attitudinal starter and stalled at stoplights. I named the scooter Nova. Once Aunt Evelyn accepted the new two-wheeled family member, she reached into her little decorator heart and splurged on a paint job, celestial blue, and bought me a license plate holder with sparkly stars, suns, and comets.

  “Quite fitting for a scooter called Nova, don’t you think?” Aunt Evelyn asked with a clap of her hands.

  At which point I informed her, “No va means ‘no go’ in Spanish.”

  More often than not, Nova sits in the garage refusing to scoot. Today is one of Nova’s good days.

  I love riding. I love the salty wind brushing my face, the blur of colors as I sail down a coastal hill, my legs stretched out, feet lifted. I love the idea that my mom rode this same bike through these same streets. Unfortunately, I’m not thrilled with my final destination: Nate’s house.

  As I putter away from the ocean, I leave the cottages and condos of the coastal hills and enter an older part of Tierra del Rey with run-down houses and weed-choked sidewalks. Somehow, I pictured Nate living in a seaside mansion. I have no problem with this part of town, but I figured a guy like Nate had it all, including money.

  Nate’s house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. The tiny house has a tiny, neat yard. On the porch stands a sculpture of some holy guy with open arms. Before I get a chance to knock, the door swings open, revealing a girl, ten or so, with a long curtain of black hair and an ivory pillbox hat slung low on her forehead. She wears black leggings and a black sweater set adorned with a double string of pearls.

  “I’m here to see Nate,” I say.

  She swishes back the gauzy veil of the hat and squints at me, as if she’s looking into the sun or doesn’t understand English.

  “Nate?” I say louder, adding more slowly, “Is Nate here?”

  “Beautiful,” she says on a whoosh of air. Her breath smells sweet, like cherries.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your hair. It’s beautiful.” She reaches for my head.

  I duck. “Can you get Nate?”

  “How did you get the streaks so blue?” She scrunches her nose and inches closer.

  “Visit from the blue-hair fairy. Where’s Nate?”

  Another girl, this one older than the pillbox diva, joins us in the doorway. A violin dangles from her right hand. “Are you Nate’s girlfriend?” She pushes her glasses to the bridge of her nose. “You don’t look like the girls he normally brings home.”

  “Nope. Definitely not his girlfriend.”

  She taps the violin against her leg. “Do you want to be his girlfriend?”

  “Hell, no!”

  “You shouldn’t swear,” says another little person who appears in the doorway. This one’s a boy, about kindergarten age. He wears underwear covered in dinosaurs.

  “Why don’t you want to be his girlfriend?” Violin Girl asks. “All girls who come over want to be Nate’s girlfriend.”

  I take a deep breath and ask the pint-size trio, “Where’s Nate?”

  “Try the sunroom at the back of the house.” This comes from a gray-haired woman in a red-sequin dress who struts across the entryway in red high heels.

  I escape down a hall painted cheery yellow. Aunt Evelyn would call it something like Sunbeams in a Fondue Pot. In the kitchen I find a boy at the counter, a replica of Nate but three or four years younger.

  “Oh, good,” the kid says. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m here to see Nate.” I need a megaphone, a giant billboard, anything to get my message across to these people.

  “First I need you to try my flan.” Nate the Younger sticks a plate in my face. On it jiggles a flat, cream-colored pyramid oozing with shiny brown sauce. “I’m in charge of dinner tonight.”

  “I don’t eat brown things that jiggle.”

  For a moment he looks heartbroken. Then he slaps his thigh. “Come back next week, and I’ll make you flan with raspberry sauce.”

  Waving off the plate, I wander through a maze of more brightly colored rooms. At last I see a bunch of white plastic birds on a table in a sunny room overlooking the backyard. Another freaky religious statue, this one with angel wings and a large sword, stands in one corner.

  I sit on the sofa far away from the saint and plop my messenger bag at my feet.

  “Nooooo!” The plump, gray-haired woman with the slinky red dress wags her finger at me from a giant arched opening in the wall. “Purse! Get purse off floor. Pronto!”

  I jerk my bag and feet off the floor. “Why? What?”

  “If you keep purse on floor, all money walk off.” She clucks her tongue as if I should know better and walks away.

  I rub the center of my forehead where a tiny ache has settled. This house is strange and the people stranger.

  Finally, Nate strolls into the room but comes to a stop when he sees me cowering on the sofa. “What are you doing?”

  I unfold my body and pry my bag from my chest. “Desperately trying to keep my money from walking away.”

  “You must have met Tia Mina.” Nate chuckles as he tosses a stack of newspapers onto the table. “She’s a character.”

  “Are there any more characters with whom you share DNA that I need to be warned about?”

  “Probably.” He unfolds the newspaper and covers the table. “I have a big family.”

  “Including those little people.” I don’t hide a shudder.

  “My brothers and sisters? I have to keep an eye on them once a week after school when Tia Mina goes to dance class and my parents are at work. Sometimes they can be a little annoying, but they’re good kids.”

  Kids are not good. Aunt Evelyn signed up Pen and me for a course in babysitting when we were eleven. Pen got extraordinarily high marks while I failed everything but finger painting. I think it’s because I was never around other kids growing up.

  I join Nate at the table and pick up a plastic bird, which looks like an anemic rubber chicken without feet. “So for this 100 Club, is there some type of paperwork I need to fill out to officially become a centurion?”

  Nate distributes the birds around the table. “Technically, you can’t be a centurion until you hit one hundred hours of community service for the year, but you can participate in activities and—”

  “Wait.” I aim the bird at his chest. “Are you telling me I need to spend one hundred hours painting ugly birds?”

  “You need to spend one hundred hours doing some type of community service. We have about twenty more hours to get the nesting site ready for the sea swallows. We need to set up the decoys and fencing, prune back vegetation, and make the chick shelters.”

  I scratch my chin with the bird’s beak. “And this is a hard-and-fast rule, this hundred-hour service requirement?”

  “It’s
the only rule.”

  My fingers wrap around the bird’s neck. I’m a girl who doesn’t like rules, but Kennedy does. None of her bucket-list items are of the rule-breaking variety. Most of the items are about do-gooding, so by the time I finish them all, I’ll probably be close to triple-digit goodness. I toss my bird onto the table. “Where’s the paint?”

  As I help Nate set up the paint and brushes, more members of the 100 Club arrive. Most perform a double take when Nate introduces me. Bronson, Nate’s no-neck sporto friend from biology, squints at me, his face morphing from dumb jock to dumb, confused jock. “You realize this is a service club, right?”

  “Oh, no!” I grab both cheeks. “I thought this was the quilting club.”

  The veins in Bronson’s neck bulge. Nate steps between us, handing out photos of a bird with a black cap, gray and white body, and orange bill. “Here’s what the swallows look like. Start painting.”

  Two girls, including one I recognize from AP English, plaster themselves on each side of Nate as he takes a spot at the head of the table. Mr. In Charge and Charming wears an easy grin as they chat about endangered birds and erosion of natural habitats. Bronson tosses his bird onto the table, knocking over a jar of gray paint that conveniently trickles my way.

  I grab the paint before my bird drowns. “Watch it.”

  Bronson plops down on the couch and turns on a small television. “Sorry.”

  The puddle spreads toward the edge of the table. “Come clean this up.”

  “I’ll supervise.” He scrolls through the channels.

  A boy next to me grabs a handful of paper towels and tosses them over the paint, but I wave him off. “Get your ass over here,” I tell Bronson. “You made the mess.”

  “It was an accident.” A baseball field appears on the TV screen, and he sets down the remote. “I’m all thumbs when it comes to artsy-fartsy stuff.”

  “I’m sure you have enough athletic prowess to wield a paper towel,” I say. The chatter around the table stops.