Breaking Rules

by Tracie Puckett

  Eight

  I hung up the phone after a short conversation with Georgia. I needed to let her know that I’d decided to tackle the original article and interview with Gabe, and after a dozen promises not to keep her waiting forever, I hoped that I’d hear from him soon.

  I sat cross-legged on the front porch swing, dressed in my RI volunteer shirt. I was outlining a series of interview questions, if and when we nailed down a date and time for the interview. I’d left that ball in his court, so while it seemed that it was entirely up to him whether or not we’d see each other again before Friday, I knew that I’d have to push to set something up if he didn’t initiate the next move.

  Because we were all headed to the same place, Carla, Fletcher, and I decided to carpool to the diner. The other eight volunteers from our school were coming out to support the cause as well, and it wasn’t until our group arrived that we realized how quickly word had spread. People were coming from all over town for a quick car wash, and most of them were donating quite generously to the cause.

  Carla, with her understandable fear of being soaked by an army of teenage boys, all heavily armed with water hoses and wash buckets, spent most of the event walking around and collecting donations from the drivers as they pulled up. Fletcher and I, though, were both elbow-deep in water, suds, and damp towels for the better part of two hours. Everyone really chipped in and did their part, and our first shot at raising money had gone over better than any of us expected. I even heard Carla mention in passing that she estimated we’d pulled in just short of five-hundred dollars in a few, short hours.

  “Mr. Raddick!” Carla squealed from the other end of the parking lot, and my head jerked up at the sound of his last name. “Oh my goodness! It’s so good to see you.”

  I turned my attention away from the blue Prius I was washing and looked up to see Carla bopping up and down as she talked to Gabe over by the building. She twirled her long hair around her finger, looking as though she was purposely doing whatever she could to catch his eye. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the two of them remained engaged in conversation for five minutes. She kept touching him and giggling as they chatted, and I felt a stabbing pain twist deep in my gut every time her scrawny fingers landed on his arm. I hated how comfortable she was around him, and her confidence sickened me beyond belief.

  Why couldn’t I be that breezy every time Gabe dropped by? Why was I always the one getting tongue-tied, nervous, and flustered? Why couldn’t talking to Gabe come as easily to me as it did to her? She didn’t have to mask anything with an argument or with forced laughter. She didn’t get emotional; she didn’t tear up. It was so natural. Whatever she had, whatever it was that I didn’t have, it made being around Gabe look so incredibly easy.

  Trying to ignore my insecurities and keep my mind focused, I eventually finished spraying down the car, trying to put the image of Gabe and Carla behind me. Just as I backed away to pass the hose off to one of the other volunteers, Gabe stepped up next to me and managed a half-wave.

  “We’re seeing you a lot around here lately,” I said, bending down to get my sponge out of the bucket.

  “You mentioned the car wash earlier.” He squatted next to me. “I thought I’d check it out.”

  “I thought you would,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “After all, it is the first big event for the district, and you’re heading up our team.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course, I thought you’d show up with a mud-covered car and expect us to make it look shiny and new, but I guess even I’m capable of being wrong from time to time.”

  “Wow,” he said, stifling a half-laugh. We stood in unison and he let his hands fall to his sides. “I thought we called a truce.”

  “We did.”

  “Then what’s with the hostility, my friend?”

  “No hostility.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and a boyish smirk got the best of him. “From the sound of that last comment, I’d say you still think I’m just a big, fat jerk.”

  I gnawed on my upper lip. “To be perfectly honest, I haven’t quite figured out how I feel about you yet.”

  “Ah, but I didn’t ask you how you feel. I asked you what you think. Feelings and thoughts are two different things, Mandy,” he said, looking up at me as he hinged forward to pick up my soap bucket. “Dump this?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, wringing out the sponge. I dropped back down to the ground and sorted all of the supplies I’d used over the last two hours. I kept my hands busy, and I tried to ignore the whole notion of feelings and thoughts being two separate entities. I much preferred to believe that I could use my mind to manipulate my emotions however and whenever I saw fit.

  After Gabe had dumped the water and passed the bucket off to Fletcher, who was now collecting all the supplies he’d borrowed from home, he kneeled down next to me at the edge of the pavement and flashed a look at me from the corner of his eye.

  “Yes?” I kept my hands busy organizing the soaps, waxes, and unused rags inside the plastic divider.

  “Where’d we land on that dinner?” he asked, picking up the organizer just as I finished filing away the last bottle of soap. We stood again, and the car supplies hung at his side as we walked back toward the group.

  “I thought I left that ball in your court,” I said. “You pick the time and date, remember?”

  “You free tonight?” he asked, tucking the supplies into the back of Fletcher’s beat-up truck.

  “Tonight?” I asked. “Yeah, I guess, but,” I looked down at my wet and soiled RI shirt, “I’m a mess. And I’d have to catch a ride home so that I could—”

  “I’ll take you. We can swing by your place so you can get cleaned up,” he said. “I’m not in any hurry.”

  I tried to imagine letting Gabe come to my house, but then all I could picture was Dad and Bailey nearly killing each other as they ran to the door, ready and willing to tackle the poor guy and interrogate him to no end. If I brought the founder and president of RI into our home, Dad may never let him leave. And if Bailey was there…oh no. That definitely wouldn’t be good. That would only feed right into her suspicions, and that was definitely the last thing I needed.

  “You know what?” I said. “That’s probably not the best idea.”

  “The dinner or letting me take you home?”

  “The latter,” I said, knowing the dinner had to happen, sooner rather than later. “It’s not you, I swear. It’s my dad. And my sister.”

  “Your dad and your sister?”

  “My dad has this weird obsession with influential people,” I said. “So naturally, he has this crazy notion that you should be his best friend. I guess he’s been eager to meet you for a long time.”

  “Ha,” he said, almost laughing. “Eager seems like such a gentle word.”

  “Oh?”

  “He leaves a message for me at least once a day,” he said. “Twice if it’s the weekend. Apparently I’m pretty special to your father.”

  “So I heard,” I said, and we both shared a smile. “Sorry about that, by the way. He never knows how to take a hint.”

  “Ah, it’s nothing. I’ll have to schedule a lunch with him soon,” he said, probably because he knew it would be better to get it over with than to keep prolonging the inevitable. “And what about your sister?” he asked. “Is she hell-bent on meeting me, too?”

  “Not quite, but Bailey requires an elaborate explanation,” I said. “And I’m not sure I’m prepared to prepare you for what you’re in for with that one.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding once. “Well, I think I’ve ignored your father about as much as one person can. If it’ll buy you a little time this evening to get ready for dinner, then I can’t say I would mind entertaining his questions for a while. And I’m sure your sister isn’t as bad as you let on.”

  “Then you have more faith in her than you should.”

  I felt
that Gabe sensed that I wasn’t ready to let him come into my home—whether it was because of my dad, my sister, or my own insecurities because he let his smile fade into something a little more serious.

  “How about this?” he said, pulling his keys from his side pocket. “I’ll drop you off at your place so you can clean up—”

  “And grab my notes—”

  “So you can clean up and grab your notes, and then you can just shoot me a text when you’re ready. I’ll come back and pick you up.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I can meet you at Shae’s. It’ll save you the drive.”

  “Nonsense,” he said as we walked to the edge of the parking lot. Stopping at the back of a black Corolla, he lifted his keys just high enough to unlock the doors. “Let’s do this.”

  My return home had been a quick and painless one. Neither Bailey nor my father had been home, so I was able to drop inside, change my clothes, and grab my stuff—all in a matter of minutes. In no time at all, we were already seated and ordering our food at the nicest restaurant in town.

  “Okay, this is weird.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re just sitting there watching me eat.”

  “I’m not, though,” Gabe said, nodding at my uneaten sandwich. “You haven’t taken a bite in over twenty minutes.”

  I felt my lips pull over to the side, amused by his point. I hadn’t touched my food for a while, for a good reason. It became increasingly difficult to eat anything in front of Gabe, and not because I was self-conscious, but because Gabe was full of questions that required an endless string of answers. I may not have always had the best attitude in the world, but I had manners. And I wasn’t about to sit there and talk with my mouth full. Besides, not even considering the concept of manners, I couldn’t imagine I’d look too flattering trying to communicate anything with lettuce flapping between my lips. Of course, I knew it didn’t matter how I looked in front of Gabe, but I still found myself caring. That was enough to keep me from taking a single bite.

  We managed to make it through our first forty minutes together unscathed. He hadn’t said anything remotely rude, and I managed to keep my opinions and bad attitude at bay. It seemed that our truce held up on both ends. And while I understood that this dinner was supposed to act as an opportunity to interview him for the school paper, he didn’t seem to understand that. Every time I asked him a question or tried to get back on track, he’d crack a goofy joke or start talking about anything but the project.

  And as we sat there and talked, I kept watching Gabe, observing every little thing I could about him. He moved his hands a lot to convey a point, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was for emphasis or if it was simply a nervous habit. But Gabe didn’t have any reason to be nervous, so I pegged his hand gestures as another one of his so-called ‘character traits.’ As he sat there talking, I couldn’t help but let my mind wander back to Saturday afternoon, back to the diner when I’d had lunch with Bailey and Jones. I vividly remembered the things my sister’s boyfriend had said, the way he’d described the man sitting right in front of me. For someone Jones had so easily pegged as a social misfit, Gabe didn’t really fit the bill; he just didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d ever had any kind of problem fitting in. He was handsome, respectable, and successful, but above all of that, he was comfortable in his own skin. And if he wasn’t, he had an incredible way of disguising it.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really have much to go on at this point,” I said, looking down at my digital voice recorder. Gabe had been willing to let me record our interview, but since we hadn’t really gotten around to that part yet, all I’d really recorded was the first half-hour of our dinner conversation.

  “Oh, right,” he said, sitting a little straighter. “I guess we should get to that, huh?”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” I said, looking down to the small notebook I’d kept next to my plate. I picked up my pen and let it hover over the page.

  “I’ll have to admit that I’m guilty,” I said, breaking the short silence. “I’m coming into this interview a little unprepared, so please bear with me. I didn’t have much time for research before we met.”

  “And why not?” He let his head drop a little to the left. He studied me from the corner of his eye, and I felt an instant pang of guilt. I knew I probably shouldn’t have spent two days volunteering for a group I knew very little about, and I thought I sensed that exact same lecture making its way off the tip of his tongue. If he hadn’t smirked just then, I might’ve taken him seriously, but it was clear that he was only teasing.

  “You know how it is—so much to do, so little time,” I said, gripping my pen. “So, Mr. Raddick—”

  “Stop right there,” he held his hand up. “It’s Gabe. Always Gabe. Or Gabriel. Or hey you. Or what’s-your-name, but never Mr. Raddick. I’m only twenty-one, Mandy; don’t make me sound like such a stiff.”

  “You’re only… twenty-one?”

  “Why does that surprise you?”

  Oh, gee, I don’t know. The fact that you don’t quite look twenty-one, the fact that you have a two-year-old charity program, you’re in the military, you’ve been to war. I could probably come up with a hundred more! But then I remembered Jones saying that Gabe had been a senior during his sophomore year, and that would make Gabe two years older than him. Since Jones had graduated high school last year, it made perfect sense that Gabe was twenty-one.

  But how could he have done so much at such a young age?

  “I spent sixteen weeks in OSUT,” he said, answering my question before I had the time to ask it. I had no idea what he meant by that, but I assumed he was referring to his military training. “My unit shipped out to Iraq only two months after I completed my training. Six months out of high school I was already in combat.”

  “Wow,” I said. Then it hit me that Gabe was actually giving me some really good material, so I started scrawling.

  “I was deployed for two months before I returned back to the States,” he said. “My unit remained stationed, but I suffered an injury. I wasn’t in any position to stay.”

  “What kind of injury?” I asked, knowing it must have something to do with his limp.

  “Is it imperative to the story?”

  “Well, no, I suppose it’s not,” I said, and he nodded.

  “When I got home,” he said, brushing over the details of what happened at war, “I went in for surgery, rehabilitation, and then recovery. That made up for a good six months of my life. It was sometime during that recuperation period that I decided it was time to start focusing on RI. I was getting anxious and impatient. I wanted to get out, get moving again. I told you before that I always planned for the program eventually, but I never imagined I’d get it running so early. The time came, and it had to be done. So I teamed up with Lashell—”

  “And how did you two meet?”

  “I’ve known her my whole life,” he said, half-laughing. “She was…” He paused and his smile faded. I watched him closely as he searched for the right words, and finally he just shook his head. “She was a mother-figure of sorts.”

  “Oh, wow.” I wondered exactly what he meant by that. “I kinda figured you’d known each other for a while, but for a lifetime? That’s amazing. It’s apparent that she’s very protective of you.”

  “She’s great, huh? She’s always pushing me in the right direction,” he said, and then his smirk widened into a grin. “Anyway, we had the program going for a while, and we were making our mark in a lot of crucial ways. We were getting a lot of media attention, and the exposure was great for RI and the charities we work for. We wanted to keep doing as much as we could, so Lashell pitched the next big idea.”

  “And what was that?”

  “She wanted to bring the program into the schools. The competition we’re doing here, it’s the foundation’s first go at raising money for local charities through this kind of program. If it’s successful, we plan to keep do
ing it. If it works out, we’ll pack up and move elsewhere, keep spreading the goodness, you know?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “You’re not planning to stay in the area?”

  “We’ve been around here forever,” he said. “And RI has been here for almost two years. We’ve done just about everything we can in this region. We opened the soup kitchen in Desden, and that was huge. It was a much-needed change for their community, and it’s still going strong. We’ve built new parks and renovated the old ones. We’ve cleaned up the streets; we’ve started food and clothing drives. We’re in the schools now. That’s great because we hope that what we’re doing will make an impression on the students, and that you guys will try to continue the good work long after you’ve left the program.”

  “So then what’s the plan?” I asked, no longer focused on writing. All of a sudden, all I could hear him saying was ‘we can’t wait to get out of here.’

  “Ideally, what we’d like to do is uproot, move, and set up shop in a new community every quarter,” he said. “We’ll try to stay in the schools if we can, but we’ll have to have volunteers everywhere we go. That’s one of the big challenges we face.”

  “Oh.”

  “Most of the volunteers we have now are minors or putting themselves through college,” he continued. “So it’s just not practical to expect much more than a few months’ commitment. The staffers though, like Lashell and me, will move when the group moves. Of course, we’re primarily local right now, as I said; we’ve only done work in this region, but we’re scheduled for a stop upstate in the spring. And hopefully, in the fall, we can kick off another district competition with schools up there. We’ll see how it goes.”

  It was wondrous to hear Gabe talk about the project the way he did. It meant a lot to him, that much was clear. I really admired that he could speak so passionately about something that he’d given so much of his heart and soul to; knowing how special it was to him, it made it much more special to be a part of the whole program. No matter what our roles were, no matter how big or small, it just gave me this overwhelming feeling to know that I—and everyone I’d teamed up with at school— had been given the opportunity to be a part of it.

  I knew it was a great idea for Gabe to uproot and move. He’d made his mark on our town and all of the towns around us. He’d done his part here, and it was only best that he keep doing whatever he could to help other communities. He wanted to spread the love, and that was amazing. But that meant he had to leave, and for some reason, I had a hard time stomaching that.

  Not wanting to give that questionable feeling of mine another minute of thought, I shook my head and prepared for another question.

  “So, you grew up out in Desden, right? Graduated from Desden High School?” I faked just enough confidence to make it seem like I really knew for sure.

  “I did,” he said, his lower lip quivered slightly with his response. I couldn’t tell if it was the sudden change of subject or the topic of choice, but something had taken him by surprise. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and then tilted his head. “How did you—?”

  “I may not know a lot, but I know some things.”

  “I thought you said you hadn’t had time to prepare for this interview.” He tried to disguise his discomfort with a forced smile, but I could tell that my simple mention of his high school days put him on edge. “All right, so tell me. How many bad yearbook pictures did you dig up?”

  “None,” I assured him, and he actually seemed relieved by that bit of information. “You can relax, Gabe. I’m not sitting on a pile of blackmail over here. I really didn’t have time to properly prepare for the interview. I just got to talking about the program the other day with my sister and her boyfriend, and it turns out that he knew you from school; he said you graduated a couple of years ahead of him.”

  “Oh yeah?” he asked. “And who is your sister’s boyfriend?”

  “Jones Smith,” I said, hoping the name wouldn’t bring back a flood of terrible memories. If Gabe really had been an über-recluse back in the day, Jones—and all of the other people like Jones who thought Gabe was just a loser and a freak—may not have left him with the most pleasant memories. The last thing I wanted was to dredge up anything bad or pour salt in any open wounds.

  Gabe seemed to search his memory for a minute, but nothing in his expression changed. “I vaguely remember the name, but the face isn’t coming to me.”

  I nodded once. I was ready to let it go, but I’d piqued his curiosity. He turned in his chair and watched me a little closer.

  “Is that all he said?” he asked. “Just that he knew me?”

  “Yeah, for the most part.”

  His lip twitched, and I sensed that he didn’t believe my lie. Still, he let it go.

  “So your sister—”

  “What about her?”

  I was eager to move past the awkward subject and into safer and more comfortable territory, but I wasn’t so sure how safe the subject of Bailey was for me. Gabe already knew how much her friendship and support meant to me, and I didn’t want to shed any more light on my insecurities with my relationship with her.

  “She didn’t want to do the program?”

  “Oh, Bailey’s not really the type,” I said. “Which is why I wanted her to do it in the first place.”

  “And she’s… how old?”

  “Oh, she’s my twin— identical twin, actually. People can rarely tell us apart.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “And that might be a stretch,” I said, stopping him before he got ahead of himself. “I love my sister, I do, please don’t misunderstand. But Bailey and I are the perfect example of why the term identical only refers to our physical similarities.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I assured him. “We both grew up with the same parents, same values, same everything, but we couldn’t be less alike. She was never treated any better or any worse than I was, so it’s fair to say that our upbringing was identical, sure. Yet we grew into two, completely different people.”

  “How so?”

  “Okay, don’t think me immodest, but I like to think I’m a little more grounded and morally sound than she is.” I heard just how self-righteous the words sounded. “Again, let me just say that I love her, I do. But she’s a bit self-absorbed, and she loves men. Well, she basically loves anyone who’ll pay attention to her. She thrives off attention. Nothing means more to her than her friends and her schedule, and that couldn’t be further from who I am. And I don’t know, I find it all a little strange. I just think it’s weird how two people who’ve lived the exact same life could turn out so differently.”

  “You know differences aren’t always a bad thing, Mandy.”

  “But like I told you at lunch, we used to be close,” I said. “Naturally, we were inseparable. But things changed, and I don’t know… Bailey changed. We just grew apart. Sometimes I think it would’ve been easier if she was older or younger or… maybe even my brother; I don’t know. But she’s my twin sister. We’re supposed to have this undeniable connection, this unbreakable bond, and we just don’t have it.”

  Silence got the better of us for a few, long seconds.

  I’d already said too much. In the past eight hours, I’d let Gabe too close; I’d let him see more than I ever wanted anyone to see. Now he wasn’t saying anything. If I sat there and kept talking, I knew I’d only keep digging that hole deeper, and I’d be lucky if I was ever able to climb out.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, stealing a glance at my watch. “I don’t want to talk about this.” I reached over and flipped the power on the voice recorder. “I should probably get home before it gets any later. It’s …” I let a breath pass slowly through my lips. “It’s a school night, and I have a lot to get done still.”

  Though I managed to give him that lame excuse with a straight face, I wasn’t entirely convinced that he’d believed me. Still, he played along.

  “Okay, sure
,” he said, nodding at my plate. “Do you want to take that to go?”

  “I’m not sure it’s worth saving at this point,” I said, looking down at the sandwich.

  Though I’d tried to be persistent and pay my own half of the bill, Gabe insisted on picking up the tab for both of us; I hated that I caved in and let him have his way, especially considering that he was paying for food that I hadn’t even eaten.

  When we reached the parking lot, Gabe opened the passenger door of his black Corolla and nodded for me to take a seat. Doing my best to get in the car without making any unwanted contact, I settled into the seat and fastened my belt. Just like when he’d taken me home and picked me up earlier, the car was cozy, warm, and it carried the faintest scent of coffee. It smelled like him. I took a deep breath and grinned.

  We rode in silence for a few minutes, neither of us throwing a glance in the other’s direction. When we pulled up to the driveway, Gabe hustled around to the side to let me out. It was very gentlemanly of him, and I was surprised at how much that gesture impressed me. I always thought of myself as the kind of girl who would hate something cheesy and corny like that, but something about the smile on Gabe’s face as he did those small things seemed so sincere. I think it was the sincerity that I liked more than anything. The gesture itself was only secondary.

  “So when will I be seeing you again, Mandy?” Gabe asked, walking me up to the house. His limp seemed to have gotten better since Saturday morning, but he still struggled a bit on the steps.

  “I don’t know,” I said, turning back to him at the door. “You seem to have a habit of popping up unexpectedly. I guess I should be asking you when I’m going to be seeing you again? Plan on jumping out in front of my car anytime soon?”

  “I didn’t jump out in front of your car.”

  “And I wasn’t texting,” I admitted for the first time. “I just wasn’t paying attention.”

  “I was inspecting the front gates,” he said, finally giving me the answer I never thought I’d get. At least I could rest easily knowing that we were both a little reckless and irresponsible. “Okay then. I suppose I’ll see you on Thursday at the soup kitchen kick-off.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Standing there, neither of us really sure how to part, I simply stuck my hand out to shake his. Gabe’s eyes trailed down to look at my outstretched hand. For a moment, I thought he was going to leave me hanging, but he eventually lifted his hand and took mine. He simply held it that way for a few seconds, never shaking it, the way he had once done before on Saturday. His fingers only tightened against mine with a gentle squeeze, something that was so simple but felt so warm and tender.

  “Thursday,” I said quietly, and then he nodded.

  “Thursday.”