“You sure do!” I exclaim with a big, fake smile. “And now here we are, in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. I’d love to talk about how unfair this is to you, but I don’t want to fail my classes on top of having the entire school hate me, so I better hit the books… You can go whenever.”
I wait, breath held, for her to morph from the sad little rag doll’s shadow she’s been and fly at me like the raging Irish-tempered harpy she always turned into when I put a toe too far over the line before. I half salivate for her to come at me, my ears pricked to hear her screaming that I “better learn some respect” and that she’s “not one of my little friends.” I want it to be like old times, the way we were before, even if that means enduring a screaming fit.
But she doesn’t raise her voice.
The hot mix of adrenaline and hope seeps out of me as she turns on her heel and pads back down the hallway. I’d bet a round-trip ticket to JFK that she’s opening a bottle of merlot and flipping to the melancholy Celtic mix on her iPod. Boo frickity hoo.
Maybe she should have dated one of the thousands of nice, normal single guys who chased her all over the place instead of getting low-down and freaky with a married coworker whose wife aired their dirty laundry far and wide across the five boroughs. Maybe she should have told her only daughter what was going on instead of shutting her out until things were too screwed up to fix.
Just at the moment when my brain cannot handle one more pulse of confusing information, my phone rings and Lincoln’s gorgeous, traitorous face lights up the screen. It’s like he has a timer set to know when my emotions are most jumbled. I clutch the phone to my chest, and my body crumples around it.
I should have deleted this picture of him from my phone when my hate was surging and made me strong. He sent it to me long before I suspected him of screwing me over. His dark hair is plastered to his head and he’s holding a surfboard. There’s sand all over his dark brown shoulders, and he’s smiling so wide, his eyes crinkled, his white teeth bright against his wet skin. His index finger points to the Saint Christopher necklace I gave him before he left.
He claimed that he sent me the picture because he missed me, and he said he was pointing at the necklace because he was telling his cousin about his wahine purotu who gave it to him for safe travels when he went back to New Zealand over the summer so he and his father could participate in a Maori leadership convention. Which was all so sweet when I thought I was his only “pretty girl.” But now I look at that picture and wonder if he was with other girls on that trip—girls who could flirt with him in Maori, with sweet, sexy laughs, girls who could surf in water swarming with sharks without squealing with fear.
Girls who weren’t me.
“Screw you, Lincoln,” I whisper to his picture, which sweeps off my phone and disappears after the final ring, replaced by a generic voice mail notification.
My ears burn, wanting so badly to hear his cocky voice, even though I know it would probably be roughed up with his tears. My traitor heart pounds, wondering will you, will you, will you?
I pick up the phone and swish my thumb back and forth across the glossy black screen.
Will you, will you?
When I toss my phone on the bed, it lands in the navy bowl of Doyle’s cap. I finger the rough canvas and rub a thumb at the frayed edge of the brim. Holding the hat works like magic to set my head straight, and it radiates goodness and confidence through me the same way finding a copper penny on heads used to when I was a kid. The hat helps remind me that I have no need for people who use and abuse me when there are people who like and respect me.
Decision made.
I will not.
But I will call Ollie to calm the last of my battered nerves.
“Did he call you?” she demands before I can say hello.
“Yes.” I pace my room, which is an exemplary pacing space, since there’s hardly any furniture in it.
“Coño.” Despite being crazy upset, Ollie’s occasional DR swear always makes me smile. “He tried calling here too. And screw him!” I hear her pound her fist on her desk. I imagine all the famous composer bobble heads in her collection nodding along with her righteous anger.
“Should I just pick up? It’s not like I can go see him, right? It’s not like I’ll get sucked back in, so why not hear him out? Right?” I feel jazzed up, like that time Olls and I sucked down an entire netted bag of those fluorescent-colored freezer pops that come in the plastic tubes.
“No!” She’s ferociously adamant. “What will he say? What could he say that wouldn’t be a complete waste of your time?”
“Okay. Can you…can you distract me? Tell me about anything. Your day. Not that that would only be a distraction. I mean, obviously I want to hear about your day anyway.”
“Um, I bought these fierce-looking beads, the most beautiful pewter color, and they went berserk and the color all chipped off them before lunch. I had to refund twenty-five percent of my day’s profits and redo so many seventh graders’ bracelets, I wanted to scream.”
“Damn those bead criminals,” I growl sympathetically.
But from a thousand miles away, I can’t see the shimmer of the beads or the intricate knot design, and I’m pissed at how unfair it is. I thought I’d take the gold in rocking my senior year, but it winds up I won’t even get a participation ribbon.
“And the second chair cellist from Javier wrote a duet for his senior project. He needs a bassoonist, and, um, he asked me.”
Even though we’re not FaceTiming, my mind’s eye imagines Ollie’s smooth skin blushing pink, and I know she’s twirling a piece of her long black hair like some hip Vietnamese American version of a Valley girl.
“Is this the skateboard guy?” I squeal. Ollie’s had a revolving door of crushes the last few months, many of them from afar, so we don’t always have names to work with, and I’m not always the best at keeping them straight. Name or no name, dissecting these crushes always takes top priority.
“No.” I picture how she ducks her chin whenever she does that shy little laugh. “Skateboard guy is first chair, Thorton’s. This is the guy with the pretzels at the fountain that time, remember? Before the symphony?”
“Romantic.” The word floats out on a sigh. “You’ll send me the demo? And some pictures of him? I think I’m thinking of skateboard boy but putting a pretzel in his hand.”
“I will,” she promises.
But I won’t be around to sit on her bed while she practices her bassoon for a jillion hours and obsesses for twice that long over Pretzel Boy’s every word and look.
Missing that will mean missing the meat of the entire experience.
Our friendship can get by on the scraps, but I would rather it was fat and healthy.
“So have you seen my idiot brother’s Instagram?” The best way to feel better about anything, ever, is to rag on my brother with my best friend.
“You mean the dark, broody black-and-white pictures of half-eaten croissants and close-up eyeballs? I have no clue if it’s an art project or real life, since he captions everything in French, and mon français n’est pas bon.”
“He’s so pretentious. I think he’s embarrassed to let anyone know he ever lived in the United States, let alone that he’s a US citizen,” I say in a horror movie narrator voice.
“I’m not saying we have to, but a throwback pic of him might be a fun thing…” I hear what sound like thumps and grunts and am willing to bet Ollie is under her bed. “Ah! A little dusty, but I found that picture from the Fourth of July. The one where your mom bought Jasper and your dad matching American-flag shorts and they both had that weird haircut like the guy from House Party.”
I howl. “The Kid ’n Play classic!” Underneath my unholy laughter at that memory is a little sting. Maybe it’s partially that I brought the whole senior nostalgia thing on early by switching schools midyear, but bittersweet is my constant emotional jam. I miss the way things were—I miss my family being whole and unpretentious and happy. I mis
s my best friend. I miss having a boyfriend I trust.
I push through it because what else is there to do? Ollie is the best shoulder to cry on ever. She’s better at long-distance best friendship than most people are at the one-on-one, everyday kind. I’m thankful our best friendship is still awesome and loving, but I’m pissed circumstances have forced it into a blurry copy of what used to be so sharp and bright, and that aches.
When we get off the phone, I feel hollowed out. If I was back in the city, tonight would be my life art class at Mom’s college… The one we were attending together, the one where our folders with half-shaded legs and feet and other things are probably still leaning against the cluttered shelf. In the fall, I joked that the hot male model was kind of checking my mom out. But at Thanksgiving, I stopped making her blush by pointing out that kind of stuff (even though ninety percent of straight dudes check my mom out…that’s just my life) because every sign pointed to her and my father reconciling. Maybe that’s why the whole affair blindsided me so hard. Maybe I still feel cheated out of that naive Parent Trap dream.
Jasper so would have been London Lindsay Lohan in that alternate reality.
There are no art classes here. I could join a club, but every club has its hierarchy all set up by now, and it’s not like I’ve made many friends. My Brooklyn neighborhood was full of coffee shops and bookstores I’d wander through with Ollie in our downtime. We prided ourselves on finding the best hole-in-the-wall food places. I went to musical reviews and art shows with Ollie and her parents, helped Mom organize student events at the college, rocked the vote, volunteered at soup kitchens, headed committees… My life back home was full to bursting, to the point where I’d dream about slowing down, taking time to do more nothing.
Now that I have all the downtime I could want, I also have a nasty case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for slap back.
In this new, boring version of my life, I do homework. I try to nap with no success. I scroll through playlists I instantly hate. I poke around in my unpacked boxes, but I find too many items that make me feel starved for a life that’s washing away too fast. I decide to distract myself with a life-form more pathetic than I am in my current state, so I water Doyle’s tree and imagine Ollie lounging on the beach chair next to me with a stack of paperbacks and a pitcher of her famous lemonade nearby. I imagine my abuela swatting flies, pruning the already-tended bushes, squatting down to save soggy, drowning dragonflies from the pool while we yell at her to relax a little even though we know she is physically unable to do that. I imagine my brother, dressed to the nines in a seersucker suit and poring over Mom’s old copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, impervious to heat and tedious literature. I imagine Mom and Dad, maybe fighting, maybe kissing… They did those two things so often, I’m having a hard time assigning them any other activity at this pitiful imaginary pool party.
And, though I fight it, my sappy brain imagines Lincoln, bouncing off the diving board, tucking his knees to his dark, muscular chest and flipping in a few tight circles before he breaks the calm surface with a splash so big, it disrupts everyone. We’d all be annoyed until his head pops up and he dazzles us with that irresistible smile.
That smile got him out of so much trouble. That smile sometimes made me scared I’d never be attached to another guy, because I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life.
I know I was wise to put a thousand miles between me and it. Me and him.
“¿Qué lo que carajito? I feel like you’re not even trying,” I scold the sickly little tree to divert my attention. “Trust me, I get how hard it is to be a transplant, but you can’t go down without a fight. You’re here now. You might as well attempt to thrive.”
So I’m talking to plants now. Doyle really is rubbing off on me.
Despite my pep talk, the tree looks zero percent better this mosquito-filled, muggy evening than it did yesterday, and I’m willing to bet that’s a trend that will continue for weeks on end. The gusts of rain that blew through and chilled things for a nanosecond this afternoon are long forgotten, and the leaves sprouting out of this poor excuse for a tree look parched and overly delicate. While the hose soaks the earth above the tree roots, I wander to the edge of the pool and drop my feet into the still water, then lean back on my arms and tilt my head up. I’m attempting to untangle the few constellations I know when a voice on the other side of our white picket fence makes me jump.
“Stargazing?”
It’s a romantic word anyway, but twisted around his drawl it sounds delicious.
“What exactly did you do before I moved here, Doyle? Because it seems like I take up a lot of your time.” I watch as he climbs over the fence and jumps into my yard without asking permission, his legs stretched long and sure as he walks my way.
“You’re gettin’ ahead of yourself, Nes. I’ve spent a grand total of maybe two hours with you, not countin’ English class, which is required.” He kicks off his boots, throws his socks on top of them, cuffs his jeans, and slides down next to me so that we’re shoulder to shoulder, our feet nearly touching under the water. “Know any constellations?” He juts his chin up.
We gaze at the black sky dotted with a few pale white stars, and I try hard to ignore how much I want his arm around me—both because he’s got beautiful, muscled arms and because the reality of Doyle’s arm will blot out the memory of Lincoln’s.
“I know the big ones. The Dippers and Orion. And…that’s all, I guess. Can you enlighten me?” I covertly side-eye him, but he’s looking at me.
Coño. Caught!
“Nope. Now, if you wanna know the plants growing ’round here? Or the bugs? That I can help you with. But when I look up, I don’t see nothin’ in particular.” His foot brushes mine under the water, and a chill swims up my back.
“You mean you don’t know Shark Attack on a Half Shell?” I point, and he leans over to get a better look, his ribs pressing tight to my back. I move from word to word carefully, because my brain is mushy when I’m this close to him. “Those three, see, are sort of like a shell, if you squint when you look, and that kind of triangle—”
“Maybe more like Rabid Goldfish Attack on a Plank?” He wraps his arm around my shoulder and points to the left, pulling me closer as I tilt my face to the sky. “And that one? I’d say Four-Wheeler Running over a Hog.”
I laugh because I’m supposed to, and I train my eyes at the stars in the sky, but I’m not sure all the beauty I see overhead is strictly astronomical. Some of that sparkle has to be because of my close proximity to Doyle. I swear the sky wasn’t exploding with all this gorgeous light before he sat down next to me.
“Why are you here?” I blurt out. He drops his arm, letting it graze my side.
“My grandfather needed me to check up on the pecan orchard across the street. They’ve got weevils—”
“You’re seriously trying to tell me that I’m just a side visit after you took care of pecan weevils?” His face is Norse-hero handsome in the moonlight.
“Hell no.” His grin tentacles around my heart, squeezing tight. “Truth is, I don’t think I’ll ever run out of excuses to get over here and see you. The Dickersons think they might have a spider mite infestation in their cotton, but their fields are fifteen miles in the other direction. I convinced my cousin to take a look at them.” He brushes the hair from my face with the back of his calloused hand. “I came here to see you, and I’ll keep doin’ it till you’re back in New York City, forgettin’ this all like it was a bad dream.”
He slings my own words at me like the nasty slap of a rubber band on my skin. I pull back from him. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” His voice never loses its evenness.
“Bring on the guilt. I mean…it’s stupid.”
We just met, he has no right. But if that were true, it would be simple to blow him off. So why isn’t it?
The truth is, something stuck fast the second I met him. He walked up, and I had this feeling like, oh, there he is, that per
son I just met, but who I’ve been waiting for. Like I’d always known he was coming, and then—there he was.
Here he is.
But that’s just a weird gut feeling, probably intensified because I’m so damn lonely and out of place right now.
“We don’t even know each other,” I muse, half-surprised to hear myself speak the words out loud.
“We could fix that. We should. Right now. We never even met properly, what with you bein’ all flustered by my manly pecs the other day.” My laugh skips over the pool water and echoes back at me in a friendly way. He faces me and holds out his hand. “I’m Doyle Ulysses Rahn. Pleased to meet you.”
My mouth swings open like my jaw is set on faulty hinges.
He ducks his head and squints my way. “Yeah, it’s weird, right? My granddaddy’s side always middle-names every second son Ulysses after some Confederate soldier who saved our family farmstead during a Civil War battle… It’s a long story.”
I press my palm against his, squeeze hard, and shake. “Well, Doyle Ulysses Rahn, I’m Agnes Penelope Murphy-Pujols.” I wait for it…
“Pretty.”
“Pretty?” I shake my head. “Doyle, I’m middle-named after Penelope. From The Odyssey.”
His face blanks, then lights up with recognition. “Uh, okay. I remember that one. Where he goes home after all those years, the bow, the crazy ladies who drive sailors wild with their singing, and the cyclops and the special bed, all that? We read that back in junior year.”
“Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus.” The look of pure adoration that splits across his face makes my skin tingle and itch all at once—hives of feeling.
“Holy hell. Your brain works overtime, don’t it?” He rubs his thumbs over my knuckles. “So you’re saying you and I have these weirdo middle names that connect us? Like maybe it was fate that we were meant to get to know each other?”
“Don’t read too much into it. You didn’t even get the reference until I explained it to you.” My voice is too breathy to be convincing, but Doyle doesn’t buy into my protest anyway.
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