Rumor Has It (Jock Star Book 1)

by Caterina Campbell

  Bristol’s face, taut with irritation, loosens a fraction as Uncle Rodney touches her hand with the bat. “How about you focus all that energy on something useful like, say, finding a good man of your own.”

  She scoffs loudly. “They’re unicorns, Uncle Rodney.” She smiles, batting eyelashes that still look impeccably made-up. “And you’d be the last one if they weren’t.” She kisses his cheek and I wait for her to snatch the bat, but instead she turns her attention to Vance, who is looking at each one of us like we’re glue sniffers. “Although, I wouldn’t mind seeing how you measure up.”

  Uncle Rodney saves Vance from a salivating Bristol. “What did I tell you about pestering my guests?”

  “It’s only pestering, Uncle Rodney, if they object.”

  “He wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t left me at the beach. He objects,” I snap too harshly, and Bristol, usually oblivious, catches my tone, and using her wide eyes to convey I’m out of line, snaps right back.

  “Oh, excuse me for taking too long while the queen of gullibility made excuses for her ass-grabbing boyfriend. Look at him.” She throws her chin up in Vance’s direction. “I think you got the better end of the deal.”

  “I don’t think that’s the question here.” Uncle Rodney tosses a wink to Vance, and I wonder if Uncle Rodney treats all his customers to wide, cheesy grins and winks. “Look,” he says, directing his words to Bristol, “you’re not getting the bat, so take a seat.”

  “Yeah, no. Time to get creative. That bastard isn’t staying the night.” With renewed focus and Vance off her radar, Bristol heads toward the entrance. “I have an idea. Wish me luck.” She waves over her head and leaves the way she came in.

  Uncle Rodney sighs heavily. “That girl is going to do some major damage someday.” He puts the bat back under the bar, shaking his head as he does so. “Lord, I hope I’m dead when that happens.” He swipes his cloth beside Vance’s beer and looks up at him. “Another beer?” He points at the beer Vance is currently nursing his way through. If Uncle Rodney was in love with him earlier, I doubt he is now. According to Uncle Rodney, beer shouldn’t be left long enough to sweat, and Vance’s beer has soaked the napkin beneath it.

  “Uh, no, thanks. I should probably get going.” He stands as he tosses a twenty-dollar bill on the bar.

  I grab the twenty and hold it out to him, but he just tightens his gaze on me and ignores the gesture. “My treat,” I say, waving the bill in front of him.

  “And if it’s not hers, it’s mine,” Uncle Rodney adds, and I shake the bill harder until Vance snatches it from me with a quick hand and a grimace.

  “Can I give you a ride home?”

  “It’s only a few blocks. I’ll be fine, but thank you.”

  “If it’s only a few blocks, let me take you.”

  The ride to my house takes three minutes, but it’s enough to feel how tight his abs are and to smell him again. How is this guy not taken? And if he is, why would she leave him alone? As much as I want to linger on the bike behind him, I climb off, set the helmet on the seat, adjust my old lady beach sheath, and cross my feet at the ankles, facing him.

  Mr. Jones’ dog, Goldie, has made herself at home beneath the tree in our front yard despite having one of her own next door. Between Mr. Jones, who has been our neighbor since I can remember, and his dog, we don’t need a security system because one of them is always watching out for us. They must approve, because she hasn’t moved toward Vance yet and Mr. Jones hasn’t cracked his door.

  Vance kills the bike, and in the silence, watches me, observing my nervous twitches with a keen eye. “Thanks for the beer.”

  “Thank you for the rides.” I finger comb the tousled hair around my face and pick out a strand or two from my mouth. “And for bearing witness to my family dysfunction.”

  “I hardly noticed.”

  “Liar.” I grin, trying one more time to get my fingers through my hair. “I better get going.” I throw a thumb over my shoulder and gesture to my house. “I may be saving more than one person tonight.”

  He starts up the bike and adjusts the handlebars to pull away while I make my way through the opened gate. “Hey, uh, Brenna?” His voice draws me up short, and before the gate closes, I look over my shoulder at him.

  “Um . . .” He looks utterly amused and close to laughter. “Uh . . .” He points at my backside and rubs his upper lip like he’s making a finger mustache.

  “What?” I look, craning my head to look at my backside.

  “Um, you might want to fix your dress.”

  The proverbial light bulb flips on, and I am suddenly draped in its recognizable fiery glow. I smooth a hand down my backside and feel nothing but bare butt cheek. How is it fucking possible I can feel a single loose hair on my shoulder but not the salty breeze on my bared-to-the-world ass?

  The deep breath I inhale tastes like exhaust as I lower the clinging fabric wrapped around my waist to the proper place. “I’m usually not this pathetic.” Unconsciously, I smooth my dress again and groan under my breath.

  “Pathetic isn’t how I’d describe you.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” I say, neurotically smoothing the fabric down again.

  “You shouldn’t be.”

  I grin, laughing as I speak. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “That.” I shake a finger at his face where he’s mastered stoicism.

  “Like I’m trying to figure you out? Because that’s what I’m doing.”

  “There isn’t much to me. What you see is what you get, and unfortunately for you, what you’ve seen tonight is the worst.”

  He tilts his head to the side, eyes pointed directly at mine, “At least you can say it’s real. I prefer that.”

  “Real can be a mess.” I point at my backside as an example, eyes wide for effect.

  “Not from here.”

  My sunburn heats with his seeming acceptance of me. It’s a rarity, and I wish for once that words were a tangible thing I could pull out and handle from time to time. Maybe feeling them in my palm or brushing them against my cheek would make them easier to believe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The roar of Vance’s motorcycle ebbs as I close the front door behind me. The house is dark and muggy, Mom having opted to leave the windows open instead of running the air conditioner. It’s the one thing she has always scrimped on to save her tight budget. I flip the first light switch I come to, and the foyer light illuminates two pairs of flip-flops, my mom’s road-rash purse (none the worse for wear, really, despite being tossed today), and a bag of Cheetos folded over and clipped with a clothespin.

  “Hello?” I holler, flipping on the next light as I step into the extended darkness. It’s the middle of May and I haven’t been inside the house that raised me just as much as my mom did since spring break, and Mom has moved the furniture around so the sofa faces the two front windows and the television hangs on the wall between them. I like it, but I can be inattentive, which makes lighting a requirement until I get used to the new placement.

  “We’re in Mom’s room.” The strain in Bristol’s voice draws a cringe, and though I know I’m already too late to make a difference, I hope it’s at least something I can fix.

  My mom is sitting on the floor, knees bent, head in her hands with her fingers threaded through her hair, which is much blonder than it was in March. I look at Bristol, who looks guiltier than ever with eyes betraying the tiniest bit of regret.

  I don’t have to ask; Mom volunteers it the second she hears my footsteps. “I don’t get it,” she says, looking down into her thighs. “I talked to him a little bit ago. He said he was coming home.”

  “I told you,” Bristol says, sounding too harsh for Mom’s fragile state, “he needs tonight to think. That’s what he said.”

  “Think about what? I told him I’m not mad.”

  Bristol’s eyes and nostrils flare, and she pinches her lips together in frustration, a look I’ve seen a thou
sand times where my mother is concerned. She calms, drawing on some inner chi she relies upon a lot. “He did grab a girl’s ass. It would be okay if you were mad.”

  “I was. I’m not now. I know he loves me. And it’s not like he cheated. He just had his hand somewhere he shouldn’t.”

  “Mm hmm,” Bristol mumbles condescendingly. “How ’bout you lay down. We’ll unpack while you get some sleep. And maybe tomorrow things will be clearer . . . for the both of you.”

  Bristol actually sounds like she knows what the hell she’s doing, and I marvel briefly because consoling my mom is usually my job.

  After taking quick showers and settling for old pajamas that smell like twelve months of abandonment, Bristol and I are alone in the room we’ve shared since we were born. Standing in front of the soft yellow curtains we picked after we were too old for Hannah Montana, Bristol confesses her sin to me. “I pretended to be Mom on the phone when Joe called. I told him I didn’t want to see him again. I told him he was a womanizing pig and I deserved better. Well, ‘I’ being Mom. I also told him to bring back my fucking Jeep. Well, Mom’s Jeep.”

  My mouth drops and nothing comes out of it, shocking us both with the unusual silence.

  “I know what you’re thinking. She won’t do it for herself, Brenna. I had to make the first move.”

  “No. No, you really didn’t.”

  “If you had seen the way she was groveling and apologizing, you would have done it too.”

  I lock the door, a habit formed since Mom started bringing men home who didn’t stay past daylight. It only took the one time – Mr. No Name with the UFO boxers mistaking our room for the bathroom – for Uncle Rodney to exchange our doorknob for one that locked from the inside.

  I sit on my bed, plopping down without restraint. “You can’t control people that way. You can’t run their lives because they aren’t doing what you want. She’s going to be pissed.”

  She lifts a single shoulder, moves toward my bed, and plops down, bouncing us both. “Someone has to adult.”

  I laugh because we’re all in trouble if Bristol is the one playing the adult. “At some point they’re going to talk, Bristol.”

  With an indifferent pinch of her lips, she drops back, laying on her back with her hands on her tummy. “I’ll worry about that then.” It’s just like her. Do now. Pay later.

  I pick a red thread off of her nightshirt and drop it on the carpet. “And you need to take it easy on her. Stop being so critical.”

  “She hasn’t made a good choice since she told Dad to fuck off. And we know how long that took her. God, how many times did she take him back? I’m tired of being her second choice, Brenna. I’m sick of watching her spiral into a spineless, meek, co-dependent, twat who forgets she has kids when she’s happy.”

  “We’re almost twenty-one. We’re not kids. What’s wrong with her being so blissfully in love she can’t see outside of her own heartbeat? Isn’t that what being in love looks like?”

  She coughs a laugh and backhands my arm. “You are doomed to repeat our mother’s mistakes. Listen to you. ‘Outside of her own heartbeat.’” She mimics my words in a slow, dumb voice. “Where were you for our entire life? If there is such a thing as true love, why hasn’t she found it? She’s been searching for that shit since the eighties.”

  “You can have more than one true love. Dad loved her. Tom loved her. Louis, he kinda loved her. He just hated us. I think once you get a taste of love, even if it does fail for one reason or another, it’s a lot harder to live without it. So sometimes Mom settles for close.”

  I can’t see it, but I feel her eyes roll. “I said true love. Dad loved her when they were in high school. No one in high school knows what love is, so it doesn’t count.”

  “He loved her when we were little.”

  “No, he loved alcohol and Peggy Barnes. I also heard through the grapevine he loved Alisha Cortes, Dina Sayer, and Donna D., too. And don’t forget Anna Johnson, who blew our world up with paternity papers and financial requirements. He didn’t love Mom. He stated that in court, remember? My point is, if it’s not true love, why work so hard for it?”

  I shake my head, staring straight ahead at the curtains. Despite my dad’s example, I still believe there are good men. I’m just leery of the packaging, and my mom has to unwrap them all with the hope of finding something worthwhile. Bristol, on the other hand, unwraps them all without a single expectation.

  “Screw it,” Bristol finally says. “It’s not worth fighting over. I’ll ease up on her, but I can’t promise I’ll stand by and watch her delude herself into believing Joe’s her soulmate.” She rolls onto her side. “Will you sleep with me tonight?”

  “Yeah, scoot over.” I shut off the light and climb in beside her, our feet touching. We learned long ago that close proximity brought us comfort when so much around us was in turmoil. Being twins, we’ve always had a built-in friend, confidante, and comfort zone. It’s gotten us through a lot of shit. Being Sloans, God must’ve known we’d need all three, so he made us twins. Sadly, being a twin still wasn’t always enough, and we had to make up mottos, sacred vows, and pinky promises just to ensure our own reliability, too afraid to take chances, even with each other. After being let down by not one, but both parents time and again, you start to wonder if flakiness isn’t somewhere in your genetic makeup too. “We have to work the early shift, so try not to hog the bed so I can sleep too.” The mundane actions of a regular work day sound exquisite, and after Joe’s drama-filled departure today, I’m ready for it.

  Bristol groans softly, pushing her butt toward the wall to allow more room on the twin bed we’ve shared on way too many occasions. Her eyes droop, and in the trail of moonlight peering in through the crack of the curtains, they are dark instead of the vibrant green we share. They glass over in the space between two heartbeats and swell with unshed tears. “Do you think Dad is happy?”

  My throat constricts and then aches as I hold back the tears spawned from hers. “I don’t give him much thought anymore, but no. I think karma has seen to that.”

  Tears absorbed, Bristol sighs. “I hope so. I hope karma has seen to a lot of people.” She blows a piece of hair off of her lips. “How many more bad guys is Mom going to go through before she gives up?”

  “I hope she never gives up,” I whisper, my voice barely audible. “I love that she still believes in love. I worry about the day when she stops.”

  “How can we be so different?”

  “You got an extra cynical gene.”

  She chuckles sadly, wiping her nose with the back of her wrist. “Maybe I did.”

  Seeing Bristol exposed saddens me as much as it relieves me. She’s usually an anchor, an unmoving, headstrong force that breaks even the strongest tide at its peak, but the bravado that has kept her upright through so much of our lives is also what stunts her. I want to save her from herself and show her there are men outside of Uncle Rodney who can love us, and that she can rely on more people than just me. I don’t know if either is true, but sometimes just having faith that it’s possible is enough to push you through.

  “I love you, Brenna. I honestly don’t know what I would do without you. Sometimes, I think you’re the only one I truly believe in anymore.”

  Tears struggle against my restraint. Her hurt runs deep. Mom’s fluctuating affection following Dad’s abandonment has disconnected something in her that only our sisterly rituals seem to reconnect. It’s times like these I’m ever so grateful we have them. “I love you, too. Pinky swear that no matter what happens, no matter who steals, breaks, or runs away with our hearts, they’ll always have to contend with the two of us.”

  “You’re hopeless. You know that?”

  “Hopeless and cynical, yin and yang. Thank God there’s balance. Now promise.”

  We kiss our own pinkies, hook them together, and together we recite the vow we know by heart. “My word is my bond, your trust is key, no matter what, you can count on me.”

  The
slamming of a car door draws us both from the bed and over to our bedroom window. Outside, the street light splashes Joe with its unforgiving yellow glow as he slides into the passenger seat of his fat friend’s blue pickup. Mom’s Jeep is parked at the curb with one tire on the sidewalk.

  “Coward,” Bristol spits out before climbing back into bed. I let her comment be the final word as I’m not really in the mood to rehash Joe’s many flaws, and then I climb in beside her.

  Bristol falls asleep, and I wait for her breathing to even out before I leave her for my mom, whose crying can no longer be heard through the thin walls. When I was a kid the quiet used to soothe me to sleep knowing she was at least, for the time being, cried out. As a teenager, it signaled something much darker, and I would lay awake praying for sound so I would know she was okay. Now, as an adult, I worry that one heartbreak too many will finally break her.

  My bare feet make a tacky noise against the hardwood floors, and in the quiet, it may as well be thunderclaps. I cringe with each step, hoping I don’t disturb the sleeping beauty behind the cracked bedroom door. I peer in, seeing my mom’s prone figure lying on top of her bed covers. She’s changed into shorts and a tank top, and her beach hair is pulled up into a messy bun on the top of her head. All signs that she’s not completely wrecked.

  Sneaking in on tiptoes, I turn off the lamp on the bedside table where her romance book lies with her place marked by an old bookmark Bristol made when she was in second or third grade. It’s ancient and peeling apart, but she refuses to use anything else. For all her faults, not loving us enough isn’t one of them. Even if sometimes I wonder, all of her simple treasures reassure me.

  Mom’s room isn’t big and is made smaller by the clutter she calls mementos. She must have at least six homemade necklaces on her dresser along with the Popsicle stick picture frame that features two toothless girls in pigtails. Her jewelry is in a shoebox covered in scrapbook paper and seashells we formed into a heart on the lid. This is what I choose to focus on when her focus is on the next relationship or the one she’s trying to salvage. This is the real her.