She held her hands up. “Hey, I knocked, but clearly you couldn’t hear me.”
I sat up. “Yeah. He’s being a dick.”
Shayne frowned. “Ty’s vibing some good stuff.”
Ty? Since when had she been put on the exclusive list of calling Tyson by his real name, let alone a nickname?
“You mean Trice,” I corrected as I stood up.
Shayne shrugged as she followed me out of my room. “Whatever. He doesn’t seem to mind.”
Her confidence grated on my nerves, and I blocked out the annoyance as I went and pounded on Tyson’s door.
He must’ve been ready, because the volume decreased and he came to the door with an easy smile. “Hey, Nan.”
He was doing this on purpose.
“Mind keeping that crap down?” I snapped.
Tyson gestured toward his room, appearing wounded, but only in mock. “That’s not crap.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Actually, I thought it was good. Who was it?” Shayne stepped forth and asked.
Tyson smiled toward my best friend. “OutKast.”
“Oh, I like them!”
“Really, Shayne?” I had the decency not to roll my eyes.
“Yes. They’re good.”
“You really know OutKast?”
“Yeah, they’re the ones who sing that ‘Black Beatles’ song, right?” Shayne’s face fell flat as she let her own annoyance show. “Honestly, Nan, give me some credit.” She faced Tyson. “To be fair, I only know ‘Hey Ya!’ but it’s like the best song ever.”
Tyson agreed. “I dare anyone to listen to it and sit still.”
They shared a smile as if I’d disappeared.
“Scarlett’s going to be so amazing,” Shayne said.
He agreed. “She’s gonna be dope.”
I had no idea who Scarlett was, but the fuzziness between my best friend and the enemy was nauseating. And the fact that they had this inside joke? It was all so stupid.
“Too bad we can’t say the same for Nandy,” Tyson teased with a peek at me.
Oh, now I was allowed to be included in their dumb conversation? “I’m just not a big fan of rap, is all.”
“That’s the problem.” Tyson shook his head and went back to Shayne. “I got the new Lana Del Rey, you should hear it.”
As my mouth dropped open in shock, my best friend practically jumped for joy. “Really? I’ve been meaning to hear that. You gotta come over tomorrow after school and we can jam.”
“Definitely.”
Now Tyson liked Lana?
“Seriously? You like Lana Del Rey now?” I’d played her countless times over the past few weeks, and he’d voiced his opinion against her from the beginning.
Tyson shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, at first it was annoying, but I like her sound. It’s tragic, it would kill over a hip-hop track. Like Dido and Em.”
“Oh my God, yes. Dude, tomorrow we’re gonna chat and make more plans for Scarlett.” Shayne held out her hand, and I watched in horror as Tyson high-fived her, and worse, reached over and gave her a hug.
“Shayne, let’s go to your house. I’m sure your stepmonster’s figured out the childproof lock on the medicine cabinet by now,” I said.
Shayne groaned. “You’re right, let’s go. ’Bye, Ty.”
“Catch you later.” He went back into his room and shut the door, and I grimaced as I led my best friend out to my car.
The whole way to her house, she babbled on about Tyson and how funny he was, how smart he was, how strong he was, and how he just got her.
“Daddy loves him,” Shayne was saying as we walked up to her front door. “He thinks he’s funny and good for me.”
Mr. Mancini was tough on guys—when we were thirteen and Shayne wanted to have a party with boys and girls, Mr. Mancini had wagged his finger and strictly told her, “You are not to think of boys until after med school.” If he liked Tyson, then that said a lot.
I told myself I didn’t care as I stopped in the foyer at the sound of my cell ringing.
Shayne went to the family room, and I sat on the last step on one side of the dual staircase to answer Chad’s call.
“Hey,” I said as I picked up.
I could hear guys in the background. He was somewhere with his friends, probably hanging out and getting amped for the final season of football.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“I’m with Shayne,” I said. To avoid being near Tyson.
“Oh, cool. Speaking of that, my mom wants to know if you’ve got your hair and shit together,” Chad said with mock exasperation.
I’d already gotten my relaxer along with my extensions. Our makeup was being taken care of, and I’d bought the perfect dress. “All’s squared over here.”
“I cannot wait until this hell is over. It’s bad enough we’ve gotta deal with homecoming, the luau, and prom.”
“Don’t you like seeing your girl all dressed up?”
“I saw you dressed up last year, and the year before that,” Chad admitted. “I always see you dressed up for something.”
My mouth fell agape. I knew this was all driving him crazy, but this was my big day. My cotillion.
Blinking, I let it go. “Well, it’s almost over.”
“I’m just hoping when it’s done we can have some fun again.” The tone of his voice oozed with innuendo.
Defeated, I gave in and said, “Yeah.”
“Sweet. Let’s talk later, the guys are getting restless. Love you.”
I mumbled a response before hanging up and staring at his contact photo. It was of us at the beach. He had his arms around me, and I was doing my best to smile despite how cold I’d been that day.
Me and Chad. Chad and Nandy. Nandy Smith and Chad Bradley. “Candy,” as my friends and a group of freshmen took to calling us. There were countless photos of us together online and of me sporting his jersey number and jumping around at games in support. We were ideal. We were perfect.
I found Shayne in the family room on the couch, curled up as she texted ferociously on her phone.
“Let me guess, Tyson says hi?” I said as I went and sat beside her.
It was like she hadn’t even heard me. She was too engrossed in her phone, smiling all big and cheesy.
I hate it.
Shayne soon was busy flipping through the channels on the TV. “Ooh, I like this song! Ty showed it to me.”
On-screen, some guys with dreadlocks were rapping and preparing what looked to be stir-fry. I didn’t admit the fact that the beat was kind of catchy.
Shayne sat back, in awe at the video before her. “We’re just making plans for Scarlett. She’s going to know all genres of music.”
Gritting my teeth, I did my best to calm down. “Who is Scarlett?”
“Scarlett’s the redheaded baby girl Trice and I are going to adopt one day when we’re married,” Shayne explained ever so casually. “We’ll have our own son and name him Dante, because we agree that it’s a good ethnic blend. We’re going to spend our vacations in Italy so our kids can learn their heritage, and Trice can work on his Italian. Now he’s adamant on me being Shayne Trice, but I’m all for hyphens because Daddy only has me, and I like being a Mancini.”
My blood boiled. Not only did they hang out on the regular now, they had gone as far as to make up this fictional future together filled with adopted redheads and baby boys? I hated it.
“Or maybe we’ll have more than two kids. I mean, look at him, Nan, he’s a total babe. We’re gonna have an army of little babies.” Shayne squealed with delight at the idea of birthing Tyson’s future offspring.
Dear freakin’ God.
She was staring at photos on her phone, talking in a dreamy voice about the future of her and Tyson. “What I really like about him is how he can
be soft—he can let his hardness go and just relax. He’s incredible.” She admired a photo in her phone of her and Tyson. Shayne was sporting a bikini, and Tyson was shirtless as they mushed together. Shayne was doing her best impression of a grr face and Tyson had his nose scrunched up. My stomach jolted at the reality of them looking...cute together.
I hated Tyson. I hated how he bonded with Jordy. How he won my parents over. How he cooked for us once a week. How he stole my friends. How he went from laughing or smiling on a rare occasion to doing it all the time with his “friends.” How he had become this totally carefree person. How he was smart, deep, and thoughtful. How that damn haircut had had a major effect on his appearance. How he knew how to get under my skin with just a look or a smile. How the summer before senior year had morphed into the summer of Tyson Trice.
Most important, I hated how he probably knew I held no real contempt against him at all. Not even a little.
“I’m thinking about asking him to be my date for cotillion,” Shayne confessed.
I felt sick. “It’s totally last minute, Shayne.”
“I know, but we can make it work. I never like guys, but I like him.”
My best friend liked Tyson. My Tyson.
I was wrong. I was selfish. But still, he was mine, had been since we were younger. He couldn’t be Shayne’s.
But as I watched her go through more selfies of her and Tyson, it became painfully clear that he already was.
21 | Trice
Lydia wanted to talk to me Tuesday after class let out. I was supposed to go to Shayne’s, but something about the tone of Lydia’s voice and the expression on her face made me think something was up.
After four weeks, my semester of summer school was coming to a close and, according to my teachers, I was doing well, but Lydia managed to unnerve me.
“Something wrong?” I asked as I sat in front of her desk.
Lydia cooled me with a smile. “No, no, everything’s great, actually. I just wanted to talk to you about English.”
I sensed a straight setup. In the beginning of the semester, English had been about book reports and writing prompts. Now, the topics were screaming that we were being watched closely.
I sat back in the hard plastic chair, eyeing the woman in front of me. I was curious as to how long we’d bullshit before coming straight out with it. “Yeah?”
Lydia nodded. “I’m in love with your prose. I love the way you described young boys from your environment and how they feel the need to beat this inferiority complex by proving how tough they are.”
Where I was from, and maybe this went for everywhere, it wasn’t cool to be weak or soft. Boys weren’t allowed to cry or express their feelings. It was about being hard and surviving.
It was this hardness that so many of us radiated that also became our demise, or our fatal flaw. In my latest paper, I’d written about envying women and girls for their abilities to express emotions without shame. I wrote that it wasn’t fair that women were taught it was okay to be human and have feelings, while boys weren’t taught the same. I wrote that teaching boys to be strong and hard was the very trigger ruining a generation.
I didn’t wish to be emotional, but I wondered how many of us from the ’Wood would’ve fared differently if we didn’t go along with the crowd. If we didn’t want to prove we were tough. If we weren’t afraid to say we cared about a girl. With guys like Khalil, it was all about acting tough enough or hard enough, and then you had guys like Money and Pretty, who were so far gone that it was no longer an act but the real deal. Maybe I was somewhere in between. After being in the Hills, I knew that, without the Smiths, I probably would’ve hardened in the ’Wood. I probably would’ve let my flaw eat me alive.
But that was just me writing in English.
I’d known something was up when my English instructor went from asking us to compare the symbolism in the book to our lives to switching it up and having us write about ourselves.
No one else in class had picked up on it, but I had. And here was Lydia, all but confessing.
“You’ve been monitoring me?”
She shrugged, guilty. “We were discussing how the summer semester was going, and you came up. I guess you can say we got greedy for more.”
I lifted a brow. “And now?”
Lydia opened a drawer and pulled something out. She set a brand-new composition book on top of her desk and pushed it toward me.
“Now the rest is up to you. I love your writing, Trice. It’s honest and real. You write about realizing there was no God when you lost your mother, and I found that to be brave.”
Nearly flinching, I played it off with a shrug. While I was growing up, my family wasn’t really religious, but they’d expected or assumed that there was a higher being, as much as my mother spoke about a God. Pops too, and sometimes Prophet would say something about Him as well. After the shooting, I’d known in my heart that I didn’t believe, nor did I want to. “I would rather believe in nothing and die than believe in something and die anyway.”
Lydia bobbed her head. “That’s what I’m talking about. You’re not afraid to say how you feel. So many kids around here are whining about useless social media BS and being cut off from credit cards, and you’ve got something to say. I would love to see you continue, even if it’s just to get this story out.”
“You just wanna read about what happened.”
“I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want to know,” Lydia admitted, “but whether or not you wanna show me is up to you. I just want you to keep expressing yourself in this way. You’re a survivor, and you’ve got a heck of a story to tell.”
I didn’t have to take the composition book, but as I stood to leave, I found myself grabbing it.
In the hall I bumped into Kyle, and we made our way to the student parking lot.
“Hey. Wanna come over and play some games?” Kyle asked.
“Uh, sure. Maybe later, though. I’m supposed to be hanging out with Shayne right now.”
Kyle perked up, shaking his hair out of his eyes. “S-Shayne? My Shayne?” He blinked a couple of times, catching himself. “Well, not m-my Shayne, but... Because you know... Just Shayne, Shayne, you know? Everyone knows Shayne and...” He blinked. “Shayne Mancini?”
This was where things got awkward.
I liked Shayne.
Kyle liked Shayne. Really liked Shayne.
“That’d be the one.”
“Oh, oh, okay. You guys have fun or whatever.” His shoulders slouched in defeat. “I’ll get started on the box.”
“What’s your take on redheads?” I came out and asked.
“I have a few in my family. I’m sure there’s some Irish connection or something, but I’m not partial, why?”
“Just keep that in mind.” I reached out and patted his chest before heading to my car.
Going home wasn’t an option with Nandy probably there. It had been a month, and she had completely flipped the script on me. One minute she was friendly, and the next she acted like she couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me. If she was watching TV in the family room and I came in, she would turn it off and leave. If she was lying out by the pool and I came outside, she would cover up and ignore me. She didn’t invite me to the Hook or the Crab Shack. If Travis wanted to go somewhere and we bumped into Nandy and the gang, she would ignore me.
At first it had been annoying, but the part of me that stopped giving a fuck a week later thought it was cute, and then I began to mess with her just to set her off. I hadn’t done a thing to her, and yet she’d gone back to despising me.
So I started going to Shayne’s after school.
Shayne Mancini had just kinda happened. Once, she’d sought my opinion on this summer blockbuster that was showing, asking if I thought it’d be interesting for her and her dad to see. I’d said yeah, and the next weeken
d she’d come over upset, wanting to see Nandy, because her dad had canceled on her. But Nandy hadn’t been home, so I’d taken her to the movie and we’d grabbed dinner after.
We sorta fell into place after that. I liked Shayne, on a different level than I liked Travis. With everyone else, Shayne was this one way, but with me, she was herself. She was goofy. She was girly. She was stuck-up, but she was smart, opinionated, and so much more than what was on the surface.
It was funny that Nandy had told me to stay away from Travis and Shayne, because there wasn’t a thing wrong with either of them.
Shayne met me at her front door, wearing a bathing suit. It hadn’t taken much time to learn that most girls in Pacific Hills lived in bathing suits. Shayne swore she rarely saw the sense of owning underwear due to the fact that most girls wore swimsuits under all their clothes.
Now, she was wearing a black bandeau bikini top with a pair of jean shorts.
She grabbed a fistful of my T-shirt. “Come on, let’s go out back. I wanna get you topless.”
That was another thing about Shayne—the shameless flirting never ceased. At one point, I’d started flirting back, and the next thing I knew, we’d created this imaginary life together complete with a redheaded daughter and a son with an Italian name and bright future.
I liked that about Shayne. She didn’t push, but she made me think of a future, even if it was just pretend.
In the Mancinis’ backyard, I sat back on a beach chair and Shayne sat between my legs, telling me about her day.
“Oil me?” she asked as she held out a bottle of sunscreen.
I took to oiling her back as she carried on. She was talking about something she’d heard on the news about the water supply in Africa and how she wanted to spend the summer before college going out and helping.
Once, she told me she wanted to join the Peace Corps when she was younger, but then the idea of becoming a doctor had inspired her just the same.
A part of me wanted to visit Africa to find my roots and to connect with my heritage. Shayne wanted to go help. The thought made me smile.
Dr. Mancini came into my line of vision as he stepped out into the backyard. With my hands lathering sunscreen onto Shayne’s back and shoulders, I thought to stop.
A Love Hate Thing Page 17
