by Randi Rigby
The when was this Friday, when I was supposed to be in school—Dad was going to flip. Kirstie gave me strict instructions to basically not eat anything between now and then (so, no more ice cream) and to work out as much as I could. Oh, and drink more water, which I didn’t think was humanly possible. Twenty minutes later she sent a tersely worded text. EXFOLIATE. MOISTURIZE. WAX.
Good advice. Friday morning I was standing stark-naked and truant in a little booth, being Tropically Kissed by a tanning technician wielding an airbrush. She was very thorough. In her expert hands I wasn’t at all orange or streaked, but had a healthy, coconut-scented glow. I was then wrapped in a robe and sent to hair and make-up and finally, handed a coral-colored bikini I would wear in front of Gran.
The shoot took up the entire day and even went a bit long. By the time I was done, I was rushing through traffic to make Drew’s first home game. The first quarter had already started when I finally found Sam and Landry in the stands. “Westlake is up a touchdown.” Landry gave me the update as they scooted to make room for me between them. “But they had the ball first. You just missed an awesome catch by Drew.”
“Nachos?” Sam said offering his up. “Whoa, Squirt. You look…different.”
“It’s the hair.” I didn’t have time to brush it out so it was still very big with beach waves—and I already had enough hair on my head for two people. “Oh, yeah. I’ve also been Tropically Kissed.”
Sam sniffed at my neck. “You smell like a pineapple.”
“Coconut,” I corrected him as Matt threw a blistering spiral with some serious heat on it to Drew, who rose up in traffic and caught it gloriously at the four-yard line, landing one foot solidly in before being shoved out. On the next play Travon rammed it through for a touchdown and Chris kicked it between the uprights for the extra point. We jumped up and down and hooted and hollered at the top of our lungs with the rest of the MacArthur fans through the entire thing.
“I forgot how much I loved high school football.” Landry’s grin was ear-to-ear as we once again took our seats.
The Knights ended up sealing the win with a last minute, 42-yard field goal. Chris was the hero of the day.
“There’ll be no living with him now,” Striker grumbled as we stood around waiting for the team to come out of the locker room.
“You were AMAZING!” I told Chris, throwing my arms around him the moment he was done high-fiving and fist bumping Landry and Sam. “I was so nervous for you and you absolutely nailed it.”
He blushed. “Thanks Kel. Drew will be out in a sec, Coach is making him ice his ankle.”
“I think we’re going to split,” Sam said, giving me a hug. “Landry’s itching to check out a new bar that just opened downtown.”
“And by ‘Landry’ he means ‘Sam.’” Landry rolled his eyes as he kissed me on the cheek. “I’m on wingman duty. And depending on how many times he gets rejected, possibly designated driver. Tell Drew ‘good job’ for us?”
“I will,” I promised.
I was chatting with Matt and his girlfriend, Ginny, when Travon suddenly picked me up from behind and bear hugged me like I wasn’t an unwieldy 6'2", bruising most of my ribs. “Hey girl! Hmm mmm, you smell good.” He deposited me in front of Drew, who was wearing a fair number of turf streaks on his uniform and even a little blood but was still smoking hot. Sweaty and tired looked good on him. “I definitely got to get me a woman.”
“Good idea,” Drew said. “Because this one’s taken.” I could melt in those eyes. “Hey, beautiful.” He kissed me on the temple as he pulled me close. “Glad you could make it.”
I wrapped my arms around his waist. “Sam and Landry were impressed. They would’ve stayed to tell you that themselves but Sam’s on the prowl.”
“Yeah? What did you think?”
“I think,” I said, wrapping a fistful of his jersey to pull him close and looking up at him through my lashes. “I need a shirt with your name and number on to wear to your games. I want to make it perfectly clear you’re all mine.”
I may not have had a lot of experience with flirting, but I was catching up real fast.
5
“Cause you had a bad day”
Daniel Powter
“Hi, I’m Kel. Nice to meet you.” I slid onto a chair next to Camila, the sixth-grade student I’d been assigned to mentor. She looked me up and down. She wasn’t impressed. I was more than a little intimidated by this twelve-year old jacked with attitude but if modeling had taught me anything at all it was never let them see you sweat.
“You’re…tall.”
I smiled at her. “It’s mostly hair.” Tucked into my notebook case was the list Camila’s teacher just handed me of the assignments Camila was either behind on or needed help with. It was long. “Tell me a little bit about yourself?”
“I hate school. And I really hate that they’re making me do this.” Her arms were crossed and she was already done with this conversation.
“Fair enough. What do you like?”
She rolled her eyes. “Dancing, I guess.”
“Really? What kind of dancing?”
“Hip hop.”
“I’ve always wanted to learn how to dance like that. I did ballet for ten years. They’re complete opposites. I’m not sure I could ever unbend enough to be that loose. You look like you’d be very good at it.”
There might’ve been the teeniest, tiniest, glimmer of movement in my direction. Let’s call it glacial. “You did ballet?”
“I did, in Chicago, before I moved here this summer. Tell me about your dancing? Where do you do it?”
“Mostly with my friends,” Camila shrugged. “My friend Carmen has a really big basement so we all go over there.”
“I’d like to see that some time.”
She didn’t believe me. She leaned back in her chair. “This rich, skinny, white girl thinks she wants to be one of us,” she said in Spanish to one of her friends and they laughed.
I took French because of ballet. It hadn’t proven to be all that useful for anything else, but French and Spanish were close enough that I didn’t need a translation. I considered her for a moment. “I’m going to tell you something about myself that I don’t tell a lot of people.” My voice grew very quiet. Camila had to lean in slightly to hear what I was saying. “My mom was killed in a car accident in January. She was hit head on by a drunk driver who swerved into her lane. Sometimes I think that’s the only way she could’ve been taken off this earth because she was the most alive person I’ve ever known.” I smiled wistfully, that flash of pain never quite went away. “I look at time differently now. I don’t take it for granted. I want to cram as much into my life as I possibly can. Just because I’ve only experienced ballet doesn’t mean I’m done with dance. You know how to do something I don’t. Teach me.”
“You said you didn’t think you could do it.”
I shook my head. “I said it would be hard for me. It’s not the same thing.”
“It would be weird, me teaching you.”
“It would be weird,” I admitted. “But no weirder than me sitting here tutoring you in…” I pulled out the paper. “Whatever’s on this list.”
“Everyone expects you to do that.”
“They do?”
“Yeah. You’re trying to get into some fancy college right? I’m like something you’re just gonna put down on your application so you can get in.”
“If we’re lucky what we’re doing here will get you into a fancy college. The hip hop is strictly for me. Trust me, I don’t understand it either but college admissions boards don’t seem to get the awesomeness of hip hop as a life skill.” I’d laid all my cards on the table. “Come on Camila, school this ballet chica. You know you can’t wait to embarrass me in front of all of your friends.”
She slowly grinned. “I’m pretty tough.”
“Yeah? I believe it. So am I.”
“Okay. You got yourself a deal. When do we start?”
I pushed over
the list. “Right now.”
“So, how did it go?” Becca asked as she dumped her backpack into the backseat of the Mini in the middle of the parking lot at San Sebastian Middle School at the end of our respective tutoring sessions.
“I’ve got a hip hop lesson tonight.”
“What?”
I folded myself into the driver’s seat and buckled in. “Look for it to be posted all over the internet tomorrow,” I sighed. “There’s no way it doesn’t go viral.”
The address Camila gave me was for Carmen’s house, the one with the basement. A short, elderly woman with plump, weathered edges who I assumed was Carmen’s grandmother answered the front door, wiping her hands on an apron as we introduced ourselves. Her graying hair was severely pulled back into a tight, little bun and she gave me a shy smile, but she was shaking her head. “Un momento, por favor, I no speak English.” She waved me in. A bunch of little boys were noisily kicking a soccer ball around the front yard.
I switched to French. Our languages are not the same but close enough that maybe we can understand each other better this way, I think?
She smiled at me and slowly nodded.
“I work with Camila at her school and she and Carmen and some of their friends are going to teach me how to dance like they do. I hope that’s okay with you?”
She grinned and said in Spanish, “If it’s okay with you, it’s okay with me.”
“I know it’s a school night. We’ll try and keep it to an hour. Thank you for letting us do this in your home, Senorita Mendes. It’s very kind of you.”
She showed me the door to the basement, though I could’ve just followed the sound of the thumping music. She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Buenas suerte.” Good luck.
The girls were working on a routine when I walked down the stairs. One by one they stopped, suddenly self-conscious. I could tell by the look on Camila’s face that she was now second guessing her earlier decision. Maybe I looked less intimidating seated. I tossed my backpack aside. “Hey everyone, I’m Kel. You guys look great. Camila thinks you can teach me how to dance like that. But I’ve got these crazy long arms and legs so you’re going to have patient with me. I promise I’ll try and keep up.”
Camila put me in the back row between Eren and Analy. I apologized to both of them in advance and warned them they might want to give me a little extra elbow room. We were pop and locking to Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass. On the wall across from us, lined up close together so you could mostly see yourself between the framed interruptions, were several full-length mirrors. I was so much taller than the rest of the girls it was almost ludicrous.
Camila wasn’t kidding. She was tough. On me. For good reason. When you’d had posture drilled into you your whole life it was really hard to just throw that out the window for the hunched fluidity hip hop required.
“She’s not very good, is she?” Carmen’s little five-year old sister, Zoe, said. Her hands were deep in her chin as she watched us while flopped on her stomach across a beanbag chair.
Carmen blushed and darted a quick glance in my direction. “Go away, Zo.”
I laughed. “She’s just being honest. I’ll get better at this. I have to. I can’t get any worse.”
Camila threw a look at me that said that was debatable. “One more time, from the top. This time, Kel, try and actually get down.”
“So, how did it go?” Drew asked. I had him on speaker phone on the drive home.
“Great. I think I found something else I’m a natural at.”
It was moving day.
Given that the completed house in its entirety was over 7,000 square feet, Dad and Uncle Bryce divided the project into phases. So while all the walls were up and windows were in, the duct work in place, and the house effectively sealed off from the elements—only the portion we were actually living in: kitchen, dining room, laundry room, two and a half bathrooms, two bedrooms, and the great room were finished in this phase. It would mean a lot of sawdust—even with the thick plastic covering separating the two remaining phases—but it was SPACE. So much wondrous, stretched out space.
The family all crowded into the kitchen and great room while Uncle Bryce gave one of his little speeches. The man missed his calling; he should’ve been a politician. “We gather together on this momentous occasion to celebrate a day some of us, I’m sure, were worried might not happen before she had to leave for college.” He raised his glass to me. “Kel, you’ve been a trouper. You can thank me and Shae—okay mostly Shae—for your awesome closet later. Little brother, I’m proud of you. Wasn’t sure if you still had it in you after all these years of just drilling teeth, but I guess once a McCoy, always a McCoy. So, here’s to Lucas.” Everyone raised Mom’s Baccarat crystal to Uncle Bryce’s toast. “You’ve made something incredibly beautiful out of something infinitely bad. And Greer would love it. Cheers.”
As the rest of our furniture and belongings were taken out of storage and brought in and set up, everything felt oddly strange and new in a different space.
“I need to know where your bed is going to be,” Drew said with his half-grin and a raised eyebrow. In his hands he was carrying my headboard.
“Get a good look at it when we’re done, McDreamy. It’s the last time you’ll ever see it,” Uncle Bryce fired back as he disappeared into the great room with Sam and our couch.
Trey and Justin walked by with my box spring. “Seriously Kel, where do you want this?”
Leaving Aunt Jill and Gran to unpack dishes without me, I followed them into my room. “How about centered on this wall? What do you think, Aunt Shae?”
She stepped out of my admittedly dreamy closet, a raspberry-colored sundress on a hanger still in her hand as she inspected the space. “Yes, that’s perfect. I just love your view, Kel. You’ll be able to see the lake first thing every morning when you open your eyes. What an absolutely gorgeous way to wake up.”
Cade and Landry brought in my dresser.
By the time we called it a day, Uncle Nick was manning the boat for anyone too hot and sticky to care about his or her hair, so basically everyone but Shae. Even Pops and Gran jumped in. The only other piece of the project that Dad insisted be done in conjunction with completing our essential living space was his sacred grilling area. He and Uncle Bryce were busy laying out a meatfest that would put Becca into cardiac arrest.
“So this is your mom?” Drew said quietly, sliding his arm around my waist when he felt me draw near. Everyone else had finally gone home. The house was eerily silent and still after so much activity. He was looking at the first day of summer picture of Mom, Charlie, and me I’d held onto in Chicago until the movers came. Trey helped me hang it in my room, just to the side of my bed so I could see her face first thing every morning when I woke up.
“It is.”
“She’s beautiful, Kel. I see so much of her in you.”
“Thank you. I think that might be the sweetest and best thing you could ever say to me.” I’d never meant anything more. “It’s weird, you know? She was such a force of nature. I miss her every day—still can’t quite believe she’s really gone. I don’t know if you ever get over that. Maybe because we’re still trying to figure it out.”
Some days we did better than others. Some days the absolute emptiness felt just as raw and unbearable as when we first got the news.
Drew kissed the top of my head. “I also really like this one.” He grinned, pointing to a particularly telling photo Mom took of me in third grade. I was squatting next to a pond, all elbows and knees in my blue-striped shirt, white denim shorts and bright red rubber boots as I held a little green tree frog captive in the cup of my hands. There was a smudge of dirt on my cheek and a big smile of delight and wonder on my face. Because I did it by my eight year old self, my hair was in two messy, thick, lopsided braids.
“Uncle Bryce calls that my grasshopper stage. Big, buggy blue eyes; long, stick arms and legs; protruding elbows and knees. Actually I’m not sure I ever grew out of it. Sam
used to say if I stood up straight, turned sideways, and stuck out my tongue I’d look just like a zipper.”
“Yeah? Stick out your tongue.”
Making a face at him, I did. Like the rest of me it was very long. I could touch the tip of my nose and the bottom of my chin with it—it was kind of my superpower.
Drew laughed. “That’s disturbing. And strangely sexy.”
“That’s how I roll.”
Love life: Off the charts.
School: In the immortal words of Becca Bryson—sucked.
People liked me. Everything in my life up to this point had taught me that. Don’t get me wrong, my company had never been highly sought after, I’d always been a bit of a homebody and I sort of got pulled into the force of Mom’s gravity so that whatever time wasn’t taken up with school and ballet was often filled buckling in for another of her mad adventures. But I was generally polite and kind and without any grating social oddities besides my tendency towards klutziness. Worked well with others could easily be my epitaph (but I desperately hoped it wouldn’t be). If people thought of me at all it wasn’t usually to spew venom.
So it was surreal that after I missed two more days of school for modeling jobs, one in Florida, the whispering that had followed me around since my first day at Barton blew up. It was suddenly open season on Kel McCoy.
The agency—Kirstie—wanted me to be more active on social media to help promote my brand. They sent me releases from every shoot I did for that very purpose. The trouble was, in my very short career, I’d booked mostly beachwear. Posting bikini shots with a saucy Just LOVE being Tropically Kissed #glowing #whoneedssun #tropicallykissed was way out of my comfort zone.
“Stop looking at the ground Kel,” was Kirstie’s only response.
Reluctantly, I posted a couple of pictures to Instagram the Sunday night after I got back from my Miami trip for all 257 of my followers—most of whom I’d known since pre-school or were related to me. Drew helped me pick which photos to put up after we finished a hotly competitive game of Cheat with his little brothers and sister. Monday morning I woke up to 437 notifications from Instagram and a desperate text from Drew. Call me the moment you get this? Before you do ANYTHING else. I’m up. Please Kel.