I take a turn down a winding side road. In moments, the golf course comes into view. Rolling hills of too-green grass give way to a large clubhouse. I slow and turn up the driveway to this place where I don’t belong.
To my right, a man knocks his ball into a sand trap and throws his club. How bourgeois of him.
I park and grab my ratty old backpack from the car, swinging it over my shoulder. Traipse up the stairs and into the magnificent lobby, full of polished wooden panels and polo-shirted girls.
“Can I help you?” the girl at the front desk asks.
“Deck,” I tell her, shrugging my bag higher onto my shoulder.
With a big fake smile, she points to a door at the far end of the lobby.
“Thanks!” I yell behind me, heading in the direction she indicated. If only a funeral dirge were playing. There goes the last of your pride, Olivia.
Whit is sitting at the table nearest the course. I navigate through rows of wrought-iron tables shadowed by brightly colored umbrellas and fall dramatically into the seat across from him, letting my bag plop onto the ground. “Hey,” I say.
He turns his head from the green to look at me. “You’re on time.”
“Well spotted,” I say, icy, reaching into my bag to pull out my prep book. “Make me smart.” I toss the book onto the table. He slides it toward him, opening it up in the middle to read. I reach across and pull it back. “Over here.” I point at the spot next to me.
He sighs as if the world were against him but begins the loud process of scraping his chair across the deck to sit next to me. He leans over my shoulder. The proximity makes me feel totally uncomfortable and useless, and I have no idea why. Whatever I thought I was doing, it backfired.
“Can I get you a drink?” someone whisper-asks behind me, causing me to jump around in surprise.
It’s Vera from English. When she sees me, she turns the color of her red polo. I go into Bitch Olivia mode. “Pardon?” I say, even though I heard her.
“You want something?” Whit asks for her. “You can put it on my parents’ tab.”
I frown at him. “Lemonade, I guess. If you have it.” Vera scampers off as quickly as possible. Whit turns back to the book. “What highly confused person made her a waitress?” I ask him. “She can barely make eye contact in one-on-one conversations.”
“She doesn’t usually waitress,” Whit says. “They must be short-staffed.” He isn’t looking at me—not at all. “And the problem is you, not her.”
“What does that mean?”
“You. Even the way you ordered lemonade is like you’re so superior. She’s terrified of you and you enjoy it.”
“You’re not,” I say.
“Why would I be?” he replies, flipping over a page and scribbling on it. Watching him, I almost want to do something bad to him, to go after him like Adrienne and I used to do, feel the angry fire burning through my veins. Something alive hits me that moment in a way it hasn’t in months.
Not since Ryan died.
I know it’s totally irrational. Something about him accusing me of being a bad person makes me want to be a bad person. “You’re not invincible, you know,” I warn him. “And if you’re not careful, you’re going to find out exactly how not invincible you are.” If it sounds over the top, then that’s the point. We’ve really messed shit up for people with more solid social standing than Whit DuRant. I have to keep reminding myself that he is helping me.
His eyes slide up from the book. “Are you threatening me?”
“I’m warning you. You’re on Adrienne’s radar now that you’re helping me.” I cross my arms. “Some people would consider it helpful advice.”
He looks at me incredulously. “If I’m on Adrienne Maynard’s radar, it’s because you put me there with your bullshit. Is this always your thing? Putting people into your orbit of idiocy and then acting like you’re helping them by warning them?”
My defenses go up. “I’m not like her.” I lose a little bit of my fire then, diminish slightly. “She’s gone to war with me, but I need this so I can escape. I want to get out of this orbit, okay?”
“Then why did you say that?” he asks, his stance still casual.
“I don’t know.” I push my hair behind my ear. “I know you’re helping me. I was trying to look out for you. Maybe this situation would be easier if you pretend for five minutes that I’m an actual person.”
He shakes his head, watching me. Sighs. “Why else would I be doing this?”
“Here.” Vera sets a glass of lemonade between us.
“Thanks,” I say to her fleeing back.
“Verbal reasoning,” Whit says loudly, pointing to the page. I scoot a little closer to him.
About an hour later, I’m taking my last watered-down sip, pointing at the book with my straw. “I don’t even know what any of those words mean. Like the words in the sentence.”
“You can use context clues there, though. Like, okay, you know what severance means.”
I shrug.
“Don’t you?” he asks, looking at me.
“Kind of.”
He tosses his pencil up and it cartwheels through the air. The abruptness of the motion startles me. “Try, Olivia. Just try.”
“I am trying,” I tell him, my temperature rising again. “I’m trying, and it’s so obvious you think I’m stupid—”
His face changes, softens slightly. “I never said that. Look—” He grabs his pencil back up, leaning in closer. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it, you know? You’re going to get that score on the SAT and do whatever it is you’re trying to do. Or prove what you’re trying to prove. This isn’t going to be some failed experiment, okay? I don’t fail.”
He doesn’t fail. There is a fervent expression in his eyes, as if success were a religion and he worshipped at the altar. I’m not sure if it’s inspiring or concerning.
I stare at the paper in front of me. It’s funny, I think. I’m not used to someone expecting anything intelligent to come out of my mouth. Telling me I need to try. Ryan was the one always attempting to pull me kicking and screaming through the completely dull construct of the public school system. Since he left, Mom had made it clear slightly below average did not bother her, but of course not much did. “Yeah, fine, I know what severance means.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says, scratching awkwardly at the piece of paper like he can use his pencil to dispel the tension in the air.
“Yeah, motherfucker, nailed it!” some obnoxious guy screams from the last hole. We both look up, startled, as the guy slides his putter against his side like it’s a sword.
The boy on the course high-fives his partner and congratulates himself again.
“Dick,” Whit mutters, and I giggle.
“Who is that?” I ask, surveying the boy and his bright orange pants with interest.
“I have no idea. We need to get back to this.”
“Whit!” the boy shouts, pointing his putter toward the deck. “Did you see that?” And he’s bounding over, up the deck stairs in his muddy golf shoes, stopping in front of our table. His eyebrows go up in clear amusement. “Who is this?”
“Olivia,” I say, smiling in greeting. Ethan always said I looked the most innocent when I smiled.
“Aren’t you friends with Adrienne Maynard?” he asks me. “I remember you from the JV cheerleading squad.”
I try to place him. “Something like that,” I say.
The boy has this mischievous grin on his face, like he’s seen something naughty and can’t wait to tell. “What are you two doing?”
“SAT prep.” I point at Whit, and then look pointedly at him, because this is so nothing but tutoring, just like he wants. He ignores me.
“Tutoring,” the other boy says. “Right. That makes sense.” He shakes his head. “What’d you hit?” he asks Whit.
Whit shrugs. “I don’t know. I think it was seventy-something. I’m working on this new mid-range shot.”
“That isn’t
going to get you a starting spot. Not even close.”
“I’ve got this season to worry about first,” Whit replies, pretending this whole conversation isn’t bothering him and doing the worst acting job of anyone I’ve ever seen.
“You want to beat my record?”
“I don’t know, Cason. Do I?”
There it is. Cason DuRant, Whit’s older brother. He graduated from Buckley two years ago and now golfs for Duke. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize him before—he and Whit are nearly mirror images of each other, Whit a bit taller, Cason with auburn hair. And yet, it works so much better for Cason. He was always known in school as being good-looking, popular, charming, and smart. He was Whit with a cherry on top, always dating some pretty girl and running some mischief at school. Nothing that ever got him in trouble, of course, but enough to make him important.
Something his brother is not.
Cason laughs. One loud ha! before slapping Whit on the shoulder. Then he’s studying me again, that amused look on his face. “Aren’t you one of the girls that was always causing trouble with the underclassmen?”
I am both ashamed and proud, the emotions combating each other in my stomach. I was powerful; everyone knew who I was. It was so comforting, but what I did to get there—it wasn’t worth it. I think.
Whit is looking at me, all see, you’re a bad person. “Trouble is relative, I guess.” I swish my straw around my empty glass.
“Whit never gets into any trouble,” Cason goes on, taunting his brother. “I’d like to keep his robe white and all, if you catch my drift.”
Whit turns noticeably red. “It’s just tutoring,” he says.
Cason laughs again, kind of obnoxious. “Like I don’t know that. If you managed something that interesting, everyone would die of shock.” Again, his eyes go to me, all over me on interesting, and as easy as I can take the attention, I wish I weren’t here. As far as sibling rivalry goes, this is a little much even for me.
Whit turns to his brother, his shoulders back and proud. “Kiss my ass.”
“I’ll let you get to your … ah, tutoring.” Cason acts like he’s going to walk away before he turns back. “Feel free to come by our house.”
Whit’s jaw is clenched tight. “Shut the fuck up.”
Cason laughs, leaps down the deck steps, and strides off.
I stare after him, the fading light catching his auburn hair. He stops at the deck bar to flirt with the girl there. She scolds him with a laugh and leans forward, buying whatever he is selling. Then, with a quick glance around, hands him a beer. I look away.
Whit is watching me watching Cason with this look on his face like he’s tasting something horrible. When my eyes catch his, he looks down at the workbook. “What?” I say.
Whit glances up at me. “What what?”
“That was really weird.” I shrug. “You should have told him we were dating. That would knock the smirk off his face, you know.”
“Hilarious,” Whit replies, scribbling in the book like it insulted his mom and his dog, too. “I don’t care what he thinks.”
“He doesn’t think someone like me would be caught dead with you,” I offer helpfully.
Whit rolls his eyes. “He thinks I can only get girls from the Central High Fellowship of Christian Athletes because I’m ‘nice.’”
“And clean.”
He doesn’t reply, but now it seems the notebook has insulted his golf game, too. I take a sip from the melted ice at the bottom of my cup.
“What does that mean anyway?” I ask.
“What?” He punctuates the word with a period.
I twirl the straw in my drink. “Like, I couldn’t be in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes?”
He snorts.
“Oh, screw you. The whole point of all that Christianity stuff is forgiveness and absolution.” I lean over the table, my chest almost flush against the wrought iron. “Don’t you want to absolve me?”
His eyes are close enough that I can pick out green flecks in the brown. For a second, he has no answer. No defense. He’s just an innocent boy in my game.
“I’m not dirty,” I insist, almost to myself.
“I never said that,” he finally replies.
Then either ten seconds or ten minutes pass with us just staring at each other. Suddenly I realize someone is seeing the two of us. When I turn my head, Vera is there, her expression pure confusion. I fall back in my chair.
Whit sees her, too. “People know what kind of person I am, and I’m fine with that.”
I’ve decided he pisses me off. “Boring.”
“Can we just study?” he shoots back.
I lean back over beside him. “So what would Cason think?”
Whit stops and looks me over, eyes tracing my body from head to toe. He meets my eyes again. “Nothing. Cason wouldn’t think anything.”
He’s a bad liar.
25
I drive through the town square to get back from the country club. A few cars are parked out front of the Rough House, but otherwise, it’s dead. I pull into a parking spot at the Bellvue, a local tourist trap that is half hotel, half restaurant. Lean my head against the steering wheel and stare at the Episcopal church. It isn’t in the square exactly—just visible around the corner. It’s huge and white with stained-glass windows from the 1700s. There’s a rumor that Sherman was totally determined to burn it during the Civil War, but some townspeople banded together to stop him.
We’ve never been a religious family, the first thing to make us official pariahs when we moved to town. But Ryan never missed a service at the church. I think it was the windows more than the sermon that spoke to him, though. I always thought this church was the only thing he liked about Buckley. He said no one appreciated anything beautiful here.
Sometimes I think I’m woven into the fabric of Buckley now, along with everyone else who can’t leave. Towns like Buckley are a magnet. No one can stay away. They move to the next town over or across the country, and Buckley keeps pulling them back. Surnames last forever, and the graveyard is already full. There’s no escape.
It’s suffocating.
I drive the rest of the way home.
The light is on in Ryan’s bedroom. I haven’t seen it on since the funeral. When I go in the house, his door is slightly ajar, noise coming from inside.
I nudge the door with my shoulder, making my way in. There’s not much to it; Ryan moved most of his things with him to Michigan and always took summer classes so he’d never have to come back to Buckley. The university returned his stuff in garbage bags, but we kept them all lined up in the garage, one by one. All that he left behind in this room were a couple of old movie posters, a bed, and his bookshelf.
His bookshelf. God, he loved his books so much.
That’s where Mom is, a trash bag on one side of her and a box on the other. She has a book open in her hands, her eyes skimming the page. The last time we were both in here together was the night after the call. I wanted to sleep in his bed, and she wouldn’t let me. I remember crying, telling her she sucked at grieving anyway, and her calmly watching me bawl myself to sleep on the couch.
She said she couldn’t give me that one thing I wanted because she knew best and it was a dangerous way to mourn.
“He liked that one,” I tell her, walking closer to peer at the book over her shoulder. Ryan wrote in the margins and highlighted in different colors. Some of it doesn’t even make sense, just scribbles and pictures. I feel the ice in my veins melting. I reach out to touch the words.
“Do you want it?” Mom asks.
I nod, pulling the book out of her hands and into my chest. “What are you doing with them?” She takes the next volume off the shelf.
“Donating them to Goodwill,” she tells me stiffly. The words take me aback, but I try to remind myself. He’s dead. He doesn’t need them anymore.
“You’re keeping some?”
She nods but tosses two more into the box for donation. She hasn’t
been particularly sentimental since I was five—and we never talk about that time, like so much else. I could count on one hand the things she still kept that belonged to my father: a set of University of Maryland pint glasses and an academic journal with an article he had written and a funny card I’d found tucked into the top of her dresser.
Ryan told me once he thought the reminders were too painful. But she always told Ryan more than she ever told me.
I thought this—Ryan’s death—might send her into a spiral. I kept waiting for it to hit, anticipating. I think some sick part of me even wanted it. But that wasn’t who she was anymore. I had started filtering so many of my thoughts about my mom through what other people said. Her clients and Aunt Kate and even some of the more enlightened Buckley residents. Smart. Tough. Mom adapted and survived; that was how she rolled.
Sometimes I hate her for it.
“I could help,” I say, pulling my memento tighter to me. If I hadn’t walked in when I did, I’m sure it would be in the box with the others. Adapt and survive.
“Oh, Liv, I don’t—” Then she breaks off and sighs when she pulls an empty mini-bottle from the shelf. It spilled at some point, the book next to it soaked in brown and wrinkled. He must’ve hidden it when he was visiting from Michigan one time. He never drank that much before he left. At least, not that I knew about. Without a comment, Mom tosses the ruined book and empty bottle into the garbage bag. I hear it clank.
I don’t know what makes me ask: “Did Dad like to drink?”
She pauses, looks up at me because I never ask about Dad. He had been a forbidden topic for so long. With practiced calm, she wipes the back of her arm over her forehead. “Only socially. At parties. A beer when he went out with all the other academics.” A barely-there smile finds its way to her face but falls away just as fast. “Not like your brother.” She turns back to the shelf.
“It was a phase,” I tell her.
“We’ll never know,” she replies, not looking back at me, not believing me.
“It was a phase,” I insist. It was college. Everyone drank. Everyone hid alcohol all over their room and guzzled wine by the bottle.
Ryan would’ve been back to Ryan as soon as school was over. He would’ve.
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