by Naomi Niles
I didn’t even bother to ask where we were going, figuring we would probably end up at some community college in the Bronx. So naturally I was surprised a few minutes later when we pulled up outside of Fillmore Public High School.
“Carson,” I said slowly. “Carson, I think there’s been a mistake. This is a public high school.”
“Yeah,” said Carson, putting the car into park. “And it’s just about lunch time, so she ought to be getting out of class soon.”
An odd sensation of panic came over me as I followed Carson across the commons toward the gym in the center of campus. Carson hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he looked much older than his twenty-three years. “Hey, don’t you think we need a visitor’s pass for this?” I said quietly, trying not to draw more attention to us than we were already getting.
“Alright, you go to the principal’s office and tell ‘em we’re here to find this girl who stole my money,” muttered Carson.
I followed along a few feet behind him as he pulled open the door of the gym and went inside. I could hear the scrape of sneakers on the basketball court, and for a moment I was transported back to my own high school days. With a pang of guilt, I remembered how I had turned down Sergeant Armstrong’s offer. If I accepted the position I would be going around to schools just like this one, talking to young men about how they could better themselves by serving their country. Being back here was almost enough to make me reconsider.
Clear at the other end of the gym, a couple of boys were shooting hoops. Carson, who had no sense of shame at all, ran straight up to them. “Hey, you mind if we join you?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” said a lank, mop-haired guy who couldn’t have been older than sixteen. “Two against two?”
“Me and Zack against you and your buddy,” said Carson. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Heath.” He motioned to his friend, who was at least a foot shorter but spectacularly built. “This is Tony.”
We got to playing, and I think for a few minutes Carson forgot why we had come, he was so caught up in the game. We’d spent so many hours out on the court in the last year or two that we won the first game, and the second, without a lot of effort. At some point, we stopped scoring and started playing just for the joy of it. Tony and Heath, who had looked annoyed at first, now watched us with a begrudging sense of awe.
“Where you guys from?” Tony asked when we’d been playing for about twenty minutes and had worked up a good sweat.
“We just got back from Libya,” I told him, tossing the ball and sinking it effortlessly into the net. “We’re both SEALS who somehow made it through four years of deployment without drowning or dying of exhaustion or getting our legs blown off.”
“Oh, yeah?” Heath swept his long, wavy hair out of his face. “Were you on SEAL Team Six?”
“Are you one of the guys who caught bin Laden?” asked Tony. Turning to Heath, he added, “Did you know The Rock’s brother was one of the guys who helped catch bin Laden? And The Rock found out about it before anybody else.”
“No way!” Heath exclaimed, turning to look at us with his eyes aglow.
“No, we weren’t with those guys,” I replied. “We were fighting terrorists in the deserts and jungles of Africa.”
“I’ll tell you somethin,’” said Tony in his thick Bronx accent. “I’ve actually been thinkin’ about joining the Navy. I really appreciate what you guys do over there. I heard a SEAL speak recently at a Fourth of July celebration, and it made me feel like maybe I haven’t done enough to support my country.”
“Well, if you stay in school and get a good education,” I told him, “you’ll be serving your country just fine.” Reaching into my pocket and pulling out a pen and a loose sheet of paper, I added, “Tell you what? Why don’t I give you my number, and you call me if you ever need to talk about this?”
I wrote down my number and handed it to him. “Thanks, man,” he said, grinning shyly, as he folded it up and tucked it away in his shoe. (“It’ll fall out of my shorts pocket,” he explained, as the rest of us watched him curiously).
At that point, two policemen entered the gym, having apparently been warned that there were a couple of older guys walking around campus without permission and questioned us for a few minutes before asking us to leave. But even the humiliation of being escorted off-campus by the school police wasn’t enough to dampen my spirits.
“Did you see that?!” I shouted as we climbed into Carson’s car. “Those kids were fascinated. I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony ends up joining the Navy.”
“I told you you ought to have taken the recruiting position,” said Carson. “Now you’re recruiting, and you don’t even mean to.”
Carson seemed to have accepted the fact that his wallet was gone forever, though he hadn’t ruled out hanging around Murphy’s that night to see if Kayleigh showed up. “Just don’t do anything crazy while I’m gone,” I told him as we stood out on the green an hour later, clubs in hand.
“Are you really leaving?” Carson asked.
“I am. I’m heading out tomorrow, and I’m taking Kayleigh—I mean, Kelli—with me for a couple weeks. Just so you can’t hit on her in my absence.”
“Dang, I was really looking forward to that,” muttered Carson, and he took another swing with his club.
Chapter Twenty-Eight Kelli
I woke up that morning to a couple of texts from Zack.
I liked texting with him because his messages were consistently kind and encouraging, and I invariably felt better about myself after reading them. I sat at the dining-room table reading over them while Renee cooked breakfast. I think she had this weird idea that we spent all our time sexting each other, but there was nothing in our conversations to scandalize my mother. He was just…sweet. He was my Zack.
“So,” I said to Renee as she scrambled eggs in the skillet, “I’m leaving for Texas tomorrow afternoon.”
“Oh yeah? Do you need me to drive you to the airport?”
“No, I’m not going on an assignment or anything. Zack invited me to go home with him for a few weeks.”
“A few weeks ?” Renee beat her spatula repeatedly against the side of the skillet, then set it down on the counter and looked at me.
“Yeah, he wants me to meet the rest of the family. Apparently, they’re farmers who live out in the country, which isn’t what I’d have expected from someone like Zack. He’s the most sophisticated one of the bunch. He’s got three brothers, and from what he tells me they’re all completely different.”
“Wait, how long are you going to be gone exactly? Did you ask your boss?”
“Two or three weeks, and yeah, he’s fine with it. I don’t think he was even paying attention.”
“Oh.” Renee turned and looked sadly into the distance, blinking once or twice. She said in a faint voice, “Okay. Cool.”
It was the tone of voice Renee used when she was performatively offended, and it raised my suspicions immediately. “Wait, are you mad about something?”
“No, it’s cool,” she said, in a tone that clearly conveyed the opposite. Reaching for the pepper shaker in the cabinet, she sprinkled it over the eggs with alarming energy.
“Are you sure you’re not angry?” I asked again as I watched her take out the salt shaker and shake it with equal force.
“No, you go and have fun on your trip,” said Renee. “Don’t mind me, just sitting here in this apartment by myself, recovering from a nasty and unexpected breakup. Don’t let my sufferings ruin your Texas vacation .” By now she must have emptied the salt shaker, for on saying these final words she turned and threw it at the garbage bin in the corner with all her might.
“Hey, I’m not trying to run out on you.” Perhaps I ought to have been angry that she was acting so childish, but all I could muster was a feeling of sympathy. “I wouldn’t have gone if Zack hadn’t insisted on it. He wants me to meet his family.”
Renee stirred the eggs aggressively. “You’re already fu
rther along in your relationship than me and Max. When he went home to Wisconsin last Christmas, I asked him if I could go with him, but he told me it would be too cold. Like I couldn’t just wear a coat or something!”
I sat there quietly for a minute, thinking. It was hard to ignore the feeling that Renee was jealous of my relationship with Zack. Not that she wished she was dating him instead, but that she wanted the sort of intimacy and easy closeness that existed between the two of us.
“Renee,” I said. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I think you would be happier if you broke things off with Max. Instead of waiting around for him to break up with you and then being miserable, you ought to take control of the relationship.”
“Maybe so,” said Renee quietly. “I didn’t want it to have to come to this, but you’re probably right. It just sucks that I’ll be doing it when you’re down in Texas, and I won’t have you here to console me.”
“We’ll make plans to Skype while I’m down there. I don’t like the thought of you being up here all by yourself.”
“I wish I had a cat,” she said sadly. Renee loved cats but had never owned one because I was allergic. Sometimes I got the feeling she still blamed me for that.
I continued to brood over my sister’s recent romantic struggles on my way to work. Since we were kids, it seemed like there had never been a time when we were both happy and at peace with the world. One or both of us was always on the verge of a breakdown, perhaps because we were so sensitive by nature, and the petty slights and cruelties of others, that the rest of the world seemed to shrug off so easily, left permanent scars. Sometimes it felt like our lives had been nothing but scars and heartache.
I left the apartment with a few minutes to spare, but an accident on the subway—someone had thrown himself in front of the train—made me ten minutes late. By the time I reached the basement at a quarter past eleven, the rest of the team was already going through the morning briefing. Despite this, Dennis was wearing his headphones, blasting “Everybody Hurts” at full volume.
“Aren’t we having a meeting?” I asked as I sat down. “Couldn’t you tell him to turn that down?”
“Already tried,” said Evan. “He couldn’t hear me.”
“I’ll text him,” I said, reaching into my purse and pulling out my phone.
Within moments, Dennis’s phone dinged. He picked it up, took one look at the text, and set it back down.
“As I was saying just before you walked in,” said Evan, “Shelley was present at the awards banquet yesterday and heard some rather interesting information. Shelley, do you want to tell us about it?”
Shelley held onto her notepad with both hands and smiled. “I stationed myself near the refreshments table during last night’s dance and heard several SEALS talking. Apparently, the rumor is that one of them is thinking about writing a book detailing his time in the service, which I think would make for an interesting story in itself—Kelli, I’m honestly surprised you didn’t come to the banquet.”
“I was there.” Both Shelley and Evan stared at me blankly. “Guys, I was literally there the entire time.”
“Anyway,” said Shelley, “there have been insider accounts of the Navy before but from what I understand the top brass frowns upon these memoirs because they threaten to expose the military’s internal workings. It will be interesting to find out whether the author intends to write a sanitized account of his time in the service—I’m assuming it’s a man; if it’s a woman, all bets are off—or whether he plans to throw caution to the wind and write a gripping exposé of Navy life.”
“Kelli,” said Evan, tapping a pen on the desk, and I felt an ominous feeling even as he said my name, “I think I would like you to cover this story.”
“Me?” I asked, feigning surprise. “Why?”
“Because you lived with these guys for over a month,” he replied. “You know them better than anyone else in this office, and if the author would be willing to confide in anyone, I think it would be you.”
A laugh escaped my lips before I could suppress it. “I think you overestimate how close I was to these guys. Most of them didn’t want anything to do with me even when we were living together, and they only spoke to me yesterday out of politeness and because my boyfriend would have murdered them if they hadn’t. They already see me as the Rita Skeeter of New York City, and the fact that I wrote an exposé on life in the Navy didn’t help that.”
“That expose is why I think you would be the perfect person to write this next article,” said Evan, sounding a little frustrated. “You ought to at least call the guy and see if he’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you what: if you can land this scoop before anyone else does, then I will make you a lead editor.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said without much conviction. “What’s his name?”
Evan turned to Shelley, who read the name off the front of her notepad. “His name is Zack,” she said. “Zack Savery.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine Zack
When I went up to Kelli’s apartment the next morning, I expected her to come flying out with her usual hug and tackle. But when she opened the door, she looked like she had just gotten out of bed. She hadn’t bothered to put up her hair yet, and dark circles lined her eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “You wanna come in?”
I pulled out my phone. “We need to get going in about twenty minutes. You almost ready?”
Kelli looked annoyed at the question. “Yeah, I’ll be ready.” Without offering me a drink or anything to eat, she turned and walked back to her room.
I figured she was just stressed from packing and traveling and resolved not to antagonize her. I hadn’t eaten anything but a granola bar on my way out the door because Renee had a habit of feeding me anytime I came over. But this morning, Renee was nowhere in sight. Her absence added to the feeling of tenseness in the room. I thought back to Kelli’s unusually unkempt appearance when I had first come in and wondered if they had been fighting.
I snuck a cookie from the jar on the table and waited for Kelli’s return. A few minutes later, she came walking back out, dressed in a pair of high-waisted jeans and a Totoro t-shirt with matching Totoro socks. She would’ve looked adorable if she didn’t seem so grumpy. She was dragging along a single suitcase on wheels and carrying a brown leather bag.
“You ready?” she said curtly, grabbing her keys off the table. Without a word, I rose and followed her out the door.
We made it through luggage check-in and past security with no trouble, and Kelli’s spirits began to lift a little as we waited at the gate for our flight to begin loading. A group of about a dozen nuns sat by the window chatting joyfully with a couple of teenage girls, one of whom was holding a large pretzel. Kelli pointed me to a boy a few seats down who couldn’t have been more than six and who was peering eagerly through a pair of binoculars, as if afraid he would miss the planes otherwise. A young woman in a flight attendant’s uniform with a silk bow in her hair winked as she ran past me.
“Did you see that?” said Kelli, shaking my arm. “That woman was totally flirting with you!”
I shrugged and returned to the book I was reading, a James Patterson thriller. “I don’t have time for women,” I muttered. Kelli smiled in disbelief and held onto my arm the more tightly.
Once we were onboard and safely seated, she asked me to tell her about my family.
“What would you like to know?”
“Well, what are they like? What are the things I should know before I get there so there won’t be any problems?”
She threw me an anxious look. I wondered if maybe this was what had been bothering her when she woke up: the fear that she would say something wrong, that she wouldn’t fit in, that the rest of the family wouldn’t like her. It was the fear of my platoon all over again, only now she had projected it onto my family.
“Maybe you oughtta just go and have a good time and let the river carry you.” I leaned back in my seat, feeling relaxed.
“So there’s my mom and dad,” I said. “My dad’s in his late sixties, and we’ll be celebrating his birthday while we’re down there. My mom is an old sweetie who loves tea, loves to cook. She doesn’t get offended easily, but there are a couple things—try not to cuss or talk about sex in front of her.”
“I would never,” said Kelli, shaking her head with vigor.
“My dad don’t say much, and it’s hard to get him really angry. Just be yourself, and I suspect he’ll like you.”
“K, k…”
“Now, my brothers—this one’s tricky because I don’t know which of ‘em are going to be there. Curtis basically lives on the farm, and he’ll probably be in and out of the house while you’re there. Braxton’s been in and out of jail over the past couple years, and it’s anyone’s guess where he’ll be when you get there. Him and Darren have some longstanding feud that I don’t pretend to know the details of, but they’ve been at each other’s throats since they was little. It’s a wonder one of ‘em hasn’t killed the other by this point.”
“Yikes,” said Kelli. “Sounds dangerous.”
“It is, a little,” I conceded. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell who Mama is more ashamed of: Braxton or Darren. One of ‘em will probably end up in prison, and the other spends most of his time playing Halo and can’t be bothered to settle down and get married, not that any girl would have him. Compared to them two, Marshall’s done alright for himself.”
“What does he do?” Kelli asked with genuine interest.
“Runs a few casinos over in East Sulphur Springs,” I replied. “We’re pretty sure he’s mixed in with the mafia, but I wouldn’t bring it up in front of him, as it tends to set him off.”
“K, got it,” Kelli said in a low voice.
“Anyway, that’s my family. Out of all the brothers, I’m the only one who got out into the world and made something of myself. Curtis could’ve gotten out if he’d wanted to, but he enjoys the life of a farmer, and I think he’s mostly happy with where he is right now. I can easily see him and Allie settling down and having a few kids.”