I tear the envelope open, my fingers shaking, and scan the words.
We’re happy to inform you… It’s our pleasure… Congratulations!
I jump up and down on the patio bricks and scream, “I’m in! I’m in!”
I do a victory lap around the yard, stopping to run my fingers over the strong, green leaves that have pushed through all over Doyle’s tree. I feel like the tree and I are going places—me to a future focused on a top-notch liberal arts college degree, the tree to a future full of photosynthesis and vegetative will to thrive.
Mom laughs and hugs me tight when I race over to her. “I’m so proud, honey. Call your father right now.”
“I’ll try him later, but I have to call Ollie right now!”
“Aggie…” I can tell my mom doesn’t want to spoil the excitement of this moment. “Your dad deserves to hear the news directly from you.”
“And I will tell him. I promise! Just… I have to call Ollie really, really quickly.” Before my mother can protest, I race to my room, lock the door, and allow myself the giddy freedom of yelling and screaming with Ollie over my freaking awesome, fantastic, amazing news.
I mean for it to be only a minute.
Two hours of excited college talk later, she sighs, “So I’ll be at Oberlin, you’ll be at NYU, and we’ll just keep on keeping on with this whole long-distance thing.”
“It’s not so bad, right?” I ask, my voice hitching. “We’ll spend breaks together.” I hope. If Ollie is this tied up in her music now, what will it be like when it’s her major?
“Absolutely. I need to work on my music/life balance. You know it’s bad when even my crazy-strict father is telling me to loosen up and have some fun.”
“Whoa! Have I mentioned how I cannot wait for summer? I miss you so much, Ollie.” My throat squeezes shut.
“I miss you, too. And I’m so proud! Go, call Doyle. I know you want to.”
I do. But Doyle can’t answer when he’s on the job. He can check texts, and I figure that’s an easier way to let him know. He hasn’t given me any updates on colleges, and I’m afraid to ask… What if the answer is radio silence from all of them? I figure when Doyle has something to tell me, he’ll tell me.
I get back an explosion of congratulatory emojis, with promises to meet me for a cheesy-grits breakfast to celebrate in the morning, since he’ll be out late in the fields tonight.
I try to call my father, but by now, it’s dinnertime in Paris. Dad has a strict “no phones at the table” rule. I leave him a voice mail with the news, relieved I didn’t have to listen to him tell me there’s still time to appeal to admissions boards and get into an Ivy.
Other than that one gleaming day of excitement, the rest of spring break is spent idling. I feel like I dived off a cliff into deep water. I keep swimming toward the surface, breath held, but I never seem to break through. And then my “vacation” is over, and I head back to Ebenezer for the final two-month wind down before graduation and the beginning of the rest of my life.
But first I have to make things right where I am now.
*
Newton wasn’t kidding about those laws of motion. Once Doyle and I set a few things rolling, they stay in continuous, crazy motion that tentacles out and creates more motion.
Holy crap. A ton more motion.
School had been creeping toward its inevitable end as winter crept into the unceasing torrential downpour of early spring and then the dull mugginess of full spring.
But it rapidly became less about papers and tests and more about the tradition we’re doing our best to chip away at. The support we wind up rallying is way more complicated than Doyle and I ever expected—and it reveals all the multifaceted ways our peers can be total and absolute morons.
“A’right, I got a list of three dozen yes people, thirty-eight maybes, and seven hard nos.” Doyle drops his lunch tray next to mine and takes out the binder he’s been stuffing full of prom information.
“Good, right?” I toss a grape his way, and he opens his mouth and darts his head to the side, crushing it with his teeth and throwing me a grin.
Dark circles ring the skin under his eyes. Doyle’s been picking up extra hours for his family’s business because Lee’s R & R is almost up and his brother’s busy preparing for another deployment. On top of that, he was only passing calculus by the skin of his teeth when the semester started, so I’ve tutored him late into the night before a big quiz a few times now, but it seems like his mind is somewhere else when we’re supposed to be focusing on delta limits.
This semester has been defined by change, so I shouldn’t be shocked that things with Doyle have turned a weird corner. We lost some of that light breeziness, the easiness that made me fall for him so hard and fast—and I honestly don’t know if it’s ever coming back. But I guess that’s what happens when you finally see someone’s darkness after basking in nothing but their light. It’s chilly in the shadows.
I pulled back Doyle’s mask and saw the face he was desperate to keep hidden. I may be the one person on earth who knows him best, and the one person he’s most skittish around now.
I try not to think about it as losing anything, but I know I got a bum trade. The sweet is gone, but we didn’t gain the deep, so we’re stuck in limbo. As the days flip into weeks, I’m haunted by the fact that the clock is ticking and we’re wasting the stupidly short amount of time we have left.
“I guess. Every no was a crazy long shot anyway. Not ever sure why I bothered askin’ any of ’em. Critter’s only a maybe ’cause his new girl dumped him. He’s holdin’ out hope she’ll take him back, and she has stake in the whole Rose Queen business. But I doubt she will after all the nonsense that half-wit put that poor girl through.” He squints at the list.
“What about the other maybes?” I trail my finger down the names. “Is there something holding them back? Maybe we can organize a meeting and, you know, address concerns or whatever.”
Doyle raises his light eyebrows. “Right. Well, Donnie Ryan’s a maybe ’cause he was dating Danielle Simmons, who’s a senior too—he’s black, she’s white. But then he started goin’ with her sister, who’s a sophomore, and he wasn’t sure what grades were gonna be allowed.”
“Donnie sounds like a douche bag.”
“Yeah, he’s a dog fer sure. But we ain’t in a position to be real picky.”
“You’re right about that. What grades are going to be allowed?” I ask.
“Regular prom—well, regular white prom—invites all seniors, and it doesn’t matter what grade their dates are in, as long as they buy bids. But we may have to extend ours to the junior class if we want a decent showing, which the black prom usually does ’cause of numbers. Our senior class is ’bout seventy percent white, thirty black. Roughly.”
My stomach acids start to churn. I’ve never been to a prom, let alone tried to plan one, let alone tried to buck hundreds of years of antiquated, racist traditions in a new school by hosting an independent alternaprom.
“What are the other maybes worried about?”
“Decorations, theme, food, music, location—people want specifics. They wanna know if there’ll be some kinda pushback from the administration. They wanna know who else is comin’ definitely, how big it’s gonna be, if it’s gonna be the same day as the other proms. They wanna know what bids’ll cost, they’re asking about DJs and bands, photographers, how long it will be.” Doyle drops his head in his hands. “Holy hell.”
I have that specific pukey feeling that always slams over me when I realize I bit off more than I can chew.
“We need someone who’s planned big events before,” I muse, because thinking out loud hushes the panic. “Someone artistic. With passion. Someone like… Holy crap! I know who to ask! I’ll be back.” I throw my bag on my shoulders and dash out of the room, ducking the monitors and sneaking to the outside lounge.
Technically any senior can sign out of lunch or study hall to hang here, but it’s a million degrees and
so muggy, my shirt is already sticking to me, so I’ve got the place to myself. Which is perfect because I need to talk to my bestie in private. I gnaw on my lip as I wait for FaceTime to connect.
“Olls?” I whisper, even though there’s no one to hear us.
Gah, her face! That beautiful, sweet face makes everything feel like it’s going to be just fine.
“Nes!” She glances over her shoulder and grins. “My lips are so chapped from bassoon practice. I wish they were chapped from a serious make-out session, but Thao had some Vovinam tournament in Virginia. And on the subject of making out… What’s up with Doyle?”
“Complications,” I mutter. “We’re working on the alternaprom though.” Best to switch gears before Ollie and I embark on another hours-long marathon dissecting my sticky relationship with Doyle Rahn.
“How’s it going? Do you have a theme? Do you know where you’ll hold it? Did you book your caterer? When is it again?” She flips the phone closer so her face fills the whole screen and my entire heart.
“I was all ‘eff the man’ and ‘let’s rebel’ and now I just wanna curl up and die, because I. Can’t. Do. This.”
“Sweetie, this is why you were always cotreasurer with me,” Ollie singsongs. “Tell me everything.”
It’s an embarrassingly short tale, but Ollie isn’t phased.
“Right. Okay. What we need is to crowd-source the funds so you can solidify some plans. Call your dad and reach out to your mother to see about donors through the organizations they work with in their colleges. Go through your definite yes list and find out who can get you what and how quickly. I’m at my laptop now—your donation and information page will be live in a few hours. Then we open a forum for discussion.”
She’s like the badass CEO of my alternaprom. “You don’t have to do this. I know you’re under crazy amounts of pressure right now.”
“One, you are my best friend in the world. Two, this is, like, a civic duty. Helping to desegregate one of the last segregated proms in the country? It’s my obligation as an American. Oh! I should talk to Ms. Barcella. I bet she’ll drop her Greenpeace lecture next week to showcase this… Where was I? Three, yes, this year has been kind of ulcer inducing, but I’m trying so hard to not stress, and what better way to ignore my senior showcase piece than with some focused procrastination? Okay, I have a banner space, but what’s the theme?”
Ollie waits patiently while I try to get my head to stop spinning because I’ve just fallen in love with my best friend all over again.
“Um…”
“Oh, Nes,” she sighs. “I love you so much. But, seriously, what would you do without me?”
“I don’t even want to imagine an existence where you’re not around.”
“You’re dreamy when you get all Gothic-lady romantic with me. Okay, you know what you have to do. Theme. Make it epic. No pressure. I believe in you.”
“Right.” I try to let that—her belief in me—radiate through my body and give me strength.
“And, Nes?”
“Yeah?”
She presses her lips together, and I break into cold-sweat mode. This is going to be hard to hear, because best friends throw hardballs no one else will, then cheer you on until you get the guts to take a swing.
“There are only a few months—weeks really—left. He’s a really good guy. Whatever you two decide to do or be, don’t waste this time, okay? Love you, gotta go, planning to get it done.”
I’m left taking the long walk back to Doyle with Ollie’s words ricocheting in my brain.
He glances up from across the classroom and the second his eyes find my face, he smiles. As usual, Ollie’s right. No matter how weird things feel right now, Doyle Rahn is pretty freaking amazing.
We don’t have a second to waste.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“So, you callin’ your pops?” Doyle lounges against the door of my car in the school parking lot.
“Why are you bugging me about it?” I grumble, tossing my backpack into the backseat.
“I overheard your mama tellin’ you to call him again when I was helpin’ with the dishes yesterday.” I’m still psyched about the fact that Doyle’s regularly back to eating dinner at my place. “Ain’t you at all curious why your mama wants you to call him so bad?” Doyle shrugs. “Jest, if I had a mama as sweet as yours—”
“Stop. Just because my mom cooks for you and lets you swim in our pool doesn’t mean you know the ins and outs of our entire relationship.”
I don’t say much more because there’s another, sadder component to Doyle’s soft spot for my mother. He looked his mom up on social media recently and found out she’d gone to work in an Alaskan cannery and, I guess, attempted to nab a local crab fisherman. “A guy who brings home a big pot o’ money and is only around a couple months a year? I guarantee my mama decided that was the best deal she’d heard of,” he told me with practiced indifference when we took a break from converting complex numbers from polar to rectangular during a long study session.
When he noticed me eyeing him with concern, he said, “Don’t get all worried ’bout me. I’ll talk to my Al-Anon crew about the whole thing. Who’d a thought I’d like going to meetings and talkin’ ’bout my feelings? I’m even signed up to bring biscuits next Tuesday night. And I’m draggin’ Malachi along. That kid needs to deal with his feelings big-time.”
The downside to helping Doyle get a hold on his problems is that he now wants to help fix all of mine. Between him and Ollie, I’m going to wind up incredibly emotionally stable…or I’m going to run away and become a hermit so I can have two seconds alone with my cold heart.
“All you gotta do is call,” he urges.
“I’ve texted him. Yesterday. Look.” I flip my phone screen to him as evidence, and Doyle’s eyes go wide.
“Why’s that lady got a sword through her neck?”
“Oh right.” I forgot the text before my promise to “call soon” is one of the classical art memes dad loves to send me. He’s even used a few laughing face emojis recently. We’re making a lot of texting progress. “It’s a famous medieval painting of Saint Justina of Padua. She had her eyes gouged out and then she was beheaded, so they paint her with a sword through her neck.”
“I’m not real big into art, but…you guys like that paintin’?” He squirms away, like he’s afraid he’s befriended some kind of insane sociopath.
“No! I mean, we appreciate the art and history and all that…but it’s a meme. See how calm Saint Justina looks, even though she has a sword in her neck. See the text bubbles…the Mother Superior is all, ‘Are you okay?’ and Saint Justina is like, ‘I’m fine.’” Explaining it makes me crack up all over again, but Doyle looks horrified. “Well, my dad and I think it’s a riot. Maybe we just have a weird sense of humor?”
“Maybe y’all need to stop laughing ’bout decapitated ladies in art and you need to call your dad. Memes ain’t gonna help you have any kind of real conversation.”
I fiddle with my phone and sigh. “I’m pretty sure he wants to talk me out of going to NYU this fall, and I really, really don’t want to have that conversation with him. So I’m just going to send him this meme. I think it’s early Renaissance? See this guy has an arrow sticking out of his eye and the guy with the feather in his hat is all, ‘I’m sorry. You’re fine! Don’t tell Mom!’” I show Doyle, and this time he laughs.
“Now that’s funny. I gotta send that one to my idiot brothers.” Then he frowns. “Call your dad.”
It’s useless to argue with Doyle, who thinks I’m a total brat for not being overjoyed that I have two parents who want a relationship with me. He’s right. His family situation has given me a ton of needed perspective.
I’ve made progress. Mom and I had a One Hundred Thousand Beats marathon and gorged ourselves on guacamole and frozen margaritas—virgin for me—with sugar on the rims. Just like the whole Doyle debacle, things with my mother aren’t the same. But, unlike with Doyle, our relationship is get
ting better now that I built an avocado-and-medical-drama bridge between us.
“The truth?”
“I wouldn’t expect anythin’ else from ya.” He meets my eyes for a few seconds.
“I’m scared this call isn’t about NYU. Everyone keeps telling me there’s no problem, but there’s something, and…maybe I don’t want to know. I know this is stupid, but I thought my parents were getting back together. Then, like, a week later, my mom got caught fooling around with a married guy in her department.”
Doyle’s eyes widen. “That was all back when you guys hightailed?”
“Yup. Funny how one bondage snap texted to the wrong number can change the course of your life, right?” I’m trying to joke, but it still weirds me out.
Doyle’s face is on fire. I don’t think he’d be able to make eye contact with me for a million dollars. “Jest… Not that I know about your mama’s, um, personal business…but it seems kinda outta character for her.”
“Well, she doesn’t just cook dinner and swim,” I tease.
“Not that she doesn’t…you know—” Doyle curses under his breath in frustration. “I mean, wasn’t it with a married guy?”
“Yep.”
“Jest seems like there must’ve been somethin’ else goin’ on. Mebbe it was revenge or something.”
“Holy crap.” I was so busy being ragey at my mother, I never thought about that very obvious potential angle. “Hey, I have to go call someone.”
Doyle taps the roof of my car as I get in. “Keep me posted.”
“Okay.” I pause, wanting to relay to him how much it means to have him back in my life as a friend, even if we’re not together. But it’s too much, so I opt for a simple thank-you.
“Anytime.” His smile gives me courage.
I’m glad Mom is out when I get home—the ladies from the Italian department have a bowling league, which seems kind of bizarre, but who am I to judge? Mom’s trying to bowl a three hundred, so I can make this call in private.
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