Random Acts of Love (Random #5)

by Julia Kent

  I could feel her eyes roll. “Fine. Do what you want. But I felt you should know. Some part of you still loves him.” Click.

  Too many truths. Too many absurdities. Too many loose ends.

  And way too many damn chickens.

  Trevor

  I was in bed, in my apartment, when my phone lit up next to me. I opened one eye.

  HLS Dean, the screen read.

  Why was the Harvard Law School dean calling me at—shit—eight a.m. on a Wednesday morning, after school was out?

  I answered it. You don’t let a dean’s calls go to voice mail. No matter how hung over you are.

  “Hello?” I said through a throat that felt like it was coated with lizards.

  “Trevor?”

  “Yes.” Either this was a call to congratulate me for some award or internship opportunity, or—

  “Are you free for a nine a.m. meeting?”

  I shuddered. Whew. Whatever this was, it was big.

  “Uh, yes. Of course.”

  “My office. See you then.” Click.

  I jumped out of bed and regretted it instantly, my head pounding. Joe had retrieved me yesterday from the jail in Nashua, bringing me a set of clothes, my phone, and my wallet. I was starting to enjoy the orange jump suit they gave me, though I didn’t appreciate how they confiscated Mavis and then served fried chicken for dinner.

  The guards thought that was fucking hilarious.

  Joe barged into my bedroom, his hair standing on end. He’d crashed on the couch last night after getting Mavis back from some animal rescue the police gave her to. His mom had threatened to press charges against me but his dad put a stop to that.

  “Who called?”

  “My dean.” I shuffled to the dresser and began pulling out khakis and a polo shirt. Got to wear the up-and-coming law partner uniform.

  Even as a rising third-year law student.

  Joe let out a low whistle. “You’re fucked.”

  My stomach dropped a few floors. “What do you mean?”

  “Trev, that video is everywhere. I’d be surprised if they aren’t playing it on gas station screens at the pump.”

  “Oh, please.” I walked past him into the bathroom and turned the shower all the way to high. I stuck my head in and three minutes later, climbed out, clean and hopefully half awake for the train ride into Cambridge.

  “Here,” Joe said, handing me a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks, sweetie.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “More like it. I don’t think you’ve ever made me coffee before.”

  “Seems only fair to do something nice for a guy before he marches off to his doom.”

  I gave him a sour look and took a sip. With a suspicious glare, I asked, “You didn’t spike this, did you?”

  He seemed genuinely offended. “No fucking way!”

  “You spike everything else you cook, so don’t act like I’m the unreasonable one.” I ran a hand through my hair and took another sip. The coffee didn’t taste weird, but...

  “I wouldn’t do that to you when you’re meeting with the dean.” His voice was soft. Offended. He walked out without another word. Two minutes later I heard the shower go on.

  Great. The guy saved me (again) and I’m the douchebag. I’m not used to being the douchebag when it comes to our relationship.

  What relationship? Who were we to each other now that we didn’t have Darla as our romantic glue? Were Joe and I back to being just friends? Had we ever been more than friends? We didn’t touch during sex, other than occasionally banging into each other. That was inevitable when you literally shared another woman’s body, but we didn’t cross swords. Didn’t have a desire to be more intimate with each others’ bodies.

  And yet I loved him...like a brother.

  Whatever. It was too early to think these deep emotional things when I still owed him bail money and had twenty minutes to get out the door and catch the train.

  I fished around in the fridge and found a cheese stick and some blueberries. Ate them. Drank another cup of coffee.

  And then I headed out, wondering what could be so great that the law school dean would need this emergency meeting. I already knew I was law review co-editor. Had my summer internship lined up. Maybe I was being fast-tracked for a master’s program? Or got an early law clerk spot with the Supreme Court?

  My little stunt with Mavis was a blip. The charges had been dropped. No one would ever really care about it. Whatever this summons was, I was sure Joe was wrong.

  * * *

  “And so,” the dean explained, his long fingers pressed together, tapping on his pursed lips, “we think a year off would do you some good, Trevor.”

  Fuck.

  The worst part wasn’t being told I should take a year off for mental health reasons.

  It’s that Joe was right.

  “I, uh, well..sir, you see, it was a prank.”

  “A prank?” His eyebrows went as high as Harvard’s endowment.

  “Yes. A joke.”

  The dean took out his smartphone and tapped on the screen. I heard my own voice as a video started.

  We watched it together.

  When it was over, he looked at me with great care. “I can see why some might consider it to be a joke, but the hiring manager at the firm where you have your summer internship does not think this is funny.”

  Fuck.

  “They...called you?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. I wanted that internship. Everything worked out perfectly for the summer. Internship, fall Law Review editor, and—

  The only thing that didn’t fit was the concert tour. I had a couple of weeks to sign the contract.

  Suddenly, all the careful puzzle pieces of my law career felt like they were being upended and separated by a seismic event.

  One caused by me.

  “Yes. The head of the internship program expressed concerns about your mental health and commitment to the legal profession. Apparently, she learned about your music career as well, and mentioned something about a snake eating a chicken on stage and your role in helping the chicken to survive.” He held up the smartphone and shook it in his hand. “That led to my little trip to YouTube, and, well, Trevor—you seem to live quite the double life.”

  Double life.

  “Are you telling me that because I’m a musician, and because our band is on the rise, I’m kicked out of law school?” My voice was cold steel. This was not happening. I had not lost the love of my life, three days, a chicken and my law career in one week.

  “Absolutely not.” He frowned and leaned forward. “But I do think laying low for a year could do you some good.”

  “Is that an order?”

  He made a huffing sound. “No. I can’t make you take a leave of absence. But I will tell you that the internship coordinator has expressed such concern that she may withdraw her offer.”

  Double life? Double fuck.

  “And if I stay in school?”

  He shrugged. “I think your prospects would be better if people had a year to forget about your naked escapade at the New Hampshire rally. You chose a Republican event for your...stunt. And while Mavis has an eclectic platform, declaring that chicken-man love should be legal really didn’t help your case when I was on the phone with a very angry woman.”

  All the air escaped me.

  “Try to see this from my perspective, Trevor. You’re bright. You’ve been chosen for co-editor of law review. You’re a rising star in law. You had a break of some sort—a mental one, triggered by stress, or, who knows?” He gave me an expectant look, like he wanted an answer.

  “My girlfriend dumped me.”

  His mouth pursed and he nodded, his eyes changing from evaluation to sympathy. “I see. That explains so much. The stress of exams, your love life falls apart...” He blathered on about some similar story in his own life and I tuned out.

  This was not happening.

  “...and so, I can contact the registrar and we c
an code this as a gap year. Not medical. We’ll find a way to make sure this doesn’t mar your record at all, and when you come back you’ll be fresh. No one will remember any of this.”

  I looked at him, stood, and shook his hand. I left his office.

  I would remember this. Forever. The system I’d rebelled against two years ago became the system I embraced, and now—because I’d colored outside the lines—it was ejecting me. Rejecting me. Telling me I wasn’t good enough and needed to be purged, or put on ice for a year, so my reputation could be rehabilitated.

  So I could come back and fit neatly into a box.

  Except real life, outside the narrow walls of this elite world, didn’t work that way. I knew that now. Understood it intuitively. Viscerally.

  And I knew exactly what I needed to do next.

  Darla

  I spent the next two days going through everything I owned in the trailer and my little purple palace, and by Thursday morning I felt like I’d passed out and spent my unconscious time having my entire life flash before my eyes, only full of dust and mouse droppings and regrettable notes passed in class to boys I had crushes on. Man, I kept some weird shit from my childhood and teen years.

  Two troll dolls with penises drawn on. Wut?

  A Barbie with the eyes painted over and redrawn like a clown.

  A cigarette butt left by a guy at the gas station who looked just enough like Colin Farrell to make me come home and save it. And maybe put my mouth on it. And lick it.

  A chunk of my long-dead guinea pig’s fur, taped inside an envelope.

  A color printout, long faded, of some friends dressed as Juggalos. Don’t judge. I may or may not be in the picture.

  A ticket from a monster truck rally Uncle Mike took me to when I was twelve. Mama won tickets on some radio show. It was awesome.

  A small album filled with pictures from before the car accident.

  That last one caught me by surprise. Josie had made it for me for my high school graduation. She’d taken all the pictures she could find in her house that had my daddy in them, copied them, and given it to me as a present.

  My eyes teared up as I opened the cracked vinyl cover and there he was.

  Daddy.

  Charlie Jennings. Charles Elwood Jennings, to be exact.

  My fingers traced his face. Mama said I took after him, with blonde hair and green eyes. Mama was darker, more like Marlene and Mike and Josie. I never quite fit in among them, a bushy blonde in a field of mousy brown.

  He looked like something so far in the past, the picture a real one from a camera and not an image snapped with the tap of a finger on a glass screen and then printed at a drugstore. Mama said back then, you took film out of a camera and had it developed, and the pictures came out like this. Glossy.

  Everything from the early ’90s seemed so old. I’d seen pictures that were even older in Mama’s albums, pics that were in black and white and with a thin, white border around them, the date stamped at the bottom. How much had changed since Mama and Daddy were born.

  How much had changed since I left for Boston, two years ago.

  Mama had given me Daddy’s guitar to give to Trevor back then, on that fateful trip when I found him on the side of the road. I had, and Trevor still had it in his closet back in Boston. My heart seized for a second at that. While Mama had given it to me as a present for Trevor, I felt conflicted suddenly. It was one of the only pieces of Daddy I really had.

  And I’d given it to one of the men I loved more than anything.

  I had loved.

  Aw, fuck. I still loved.

  I sniffed and laughed, a tear falling on the cellophane-covered photo, remembering Joe playing Daddy’s guitar, naked by the side of the road. I’d gone to a hotel with the two of them on their last night here and oh...we’d connected. Then I’d woken up to $600 in a stack on my nightstand and one hell of a pissed off chip on my shoulder.

  But they’d stayed in town after all, a series of second thoughts making Joe throw caution into the wind and strip naked like Trevor. I’d found them and moved to Boston and changed everything in my life to be with them.

  Everything.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized how little they’d changed for me. I became their band manager. I never asked them to stop law school. Never asked them to move across the country. I’d taken Joe’s long distance relationship requirement in stride. I’d helped them book concerts, got to know the band members’ girlfriends (and treasured them as friends). I rolled with the punches and the victories, but I hadn’t actually asked them to change one fucking thing about the structure of their lives.

  The reality of that hit me like a slap.

  The air rushed out of my lungs and I blinked, over and over, stunned by my own realization. Holy motherfucker. That was the truth. The truth. I’d changed everything for them and they had changed nothing. I was expected to tuck myself into their lives and...that was that.

  I could love them and ache for them and need them with a bleating desperation that felt like it would ring in my ears for centuries, but in the end they expected me to do all the bending.

  And I’d finally broke.

  I could change and adapt a whole fuck of a lot, but I drew the line at being something for them to be ashamed of. Yeah, I know—I ain’t much better, ’cause look at me not tellin’ Mama the truth. But I suppose I’m a hypocrite, and yet I always felt like I’d tell Mama someday. But she didn’t invite us over for dinner.

  Trevor’s parents did.

  And the way Joe raced over and crashed the dinner party just so no one would spill our dirty little secret...that made it all dirty.

  Filthy.

  Like I was a mess you hide because you’re embarrassed to let anyone know you made it.

  No.

  No fucking way. So sure—I shoulda told my parent, too. I know that. And I can hold that truth inside me and realize it ain’t all Trevor and Joe’s fault.

  But I never paraded them around in front of her after we were a threesome and pretended one of us didn’t exist.

  The really sick part is that I wasn’t the one they excluded. I had to pretend to be Trevor’s girlfriend. And yet, it was Joe who guarded the secret the most. The guy who was a ghost. The jealous one in our triad.

  Think about that for a minute.

  The angriest, most jealous person out of us three was the one who moved heaven and earth to make sure we weren’t outed.

  A psychiatrist could make enough to buy a yacht off that one.

  I didn’t know what to feel as I pored over the little photo album. What would my daddy think of all this? Mama said he was a good ol’ boy who liked to drink and fish on weekends, and who loved me like I was the sun in the sky. She said they had wanted more kids and expected more. I wasn’t meant to be an only.

  A lot of the ways life turns out weren’t meant to be. Weren’t intended. But if the road to hell is paved with good intentions, I guess the road to heaven is paved with fear.

  People don’t take any risks if they’re worried about making a mistake. And if that’s what it takes to be good, I don’t wanna be good.

  I wanna be real.

  I wiped my eyes and pulled my hair back in a scrunchie and got down to work, sorting shit into categories. Keep. Trash. Thrift Shop. Ask Mama.

  Within a few hours I had all the Keep set aside, the Trash out in the dumpster, the Thrift Shop boxes and bags on the porch and I walked into the trailer with a smallish box called Ask Mama. She was sitting on the couch, watching some reality television show about storage lockers and pawn shops.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to get my stuff out of here, Mama,” I said, genuinely contrite, setting the box on the dining table. “I meant to come back here more, but there was always something.”

  “There’s always something,” she said, taking a long drag off that glow stick e-cig thing. It looked like a bastardized version of a light saber. She stood and ambled over, looking more like Josie t
han she had a right to.

  Well, that’s not fair. She’s her aunt. Genetics. A pang of jealousy rang through me. Josie looked more like Mama than I did. It felt like I didn’t belong anywhere.

  “True enough. It was more important to send you money than to spend it on visiting,” I said in an airy voice, trying to cover up my pain.

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  Ouch. “I just got so busy with the band, and my new job, and with—” I was about to say Trevor and Joe. My throat tightened. I couldn’t say that any more.

  I also couldn’t say it at all.

  “I know. You been busy with them.”

  Them?

  I said nothing. Silence wasn’t exactly one of my character traits, so the longer I kept my mouth shut, the more the unease between us built. Mama could wait me out. I was freaking out on the inside, second by second.

  This was one of those moments when I had a choice. I could have told the truth. I could have cried my eyes out about the breakup and said something. It would have helped Mama to understand why I had been gone so much. Why I’d—

  “I been busy, yeah.” I started breathing hard, little puffs I couldn’t control. Lots of things I couldn’t control seemed to be converging, all caving in at once. Like my chest, right now.

  “Busy,” she snorted.

  That upped the ante. The silence ticked between us like land mines triggered by gnats.

  Finally, just to stop the pain of the gaping quiet, I said, “I don’t know.”

  “I may be country, but I’m not stupid, Darla Josephine,” Mama said with a snarl. “I know damn well what you’ve been doin’ with those boys—both of ’em—in Massachusetts.”

  “What do you think I been doin’, Mama?”

  “Lovin’ them.”

  Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

  The tears came back now. Hard. I couldn’t speak a single word, and you know something’s got to be big when I am struck dumb.

  I kept my head down and listened to the rhythm of her inhales, through three, four, five or more of them, until finally her hand reached for mine. She squeezed, hard.

  “Darla Jo.”

  I couldn’t even look at her.

  “You look at me.”

  I just couldn’t.

  She laughed through her nose. “You’re acting like a shamed little girl.”