Liz Reinhardt - Rebels Like Us

Ah right. Before the awkwardness of baseball, there will be the awkwardness of school. Lovely.

I make a point to not watch Doyle’s tall, rangy self saunter away from me.

I come so close to succeeding...

At the last second, I drink him in, then flip over and drag my phone close. My idiotic traitor brain actually thinks about calling Lincoln.

The boy who’s been my best guy friend since we were twelve.

The boy who gave me my first kiss under an old oak tree.

The boy who broke my heart when we were seventeen.

Or the boy who only loaned me his heart so he could take it back eventually, while I gave him mine on a silver platter, free and clear so he could shred it into tiny pieces. Dumb. So dumb.

I toss my phone to the side and throw an arm over my eyes, wondering whose bed Lincoln will be in while I’m standing on second base this Friday. Guilt shoots through me when I remember Mom planned on the two of us going to Savannah on Friday after I got home from school so we could stroll through the art museums downtown and maybe check out the local performing arts college’s production of Grease. I’m torn between wanting to hang out with my mother doing things we love together like we used to and holding tight to a lot of pissed-off anger over the way she screwed things up for us. The betrayal that still cuts deep won’t magically disappear just because we’re both excited to see some Helen Levitt photographs and bop along to “Greased Lightnin’.” Everything is too complicated.

Except baseball.

Playing baseball is definitely easier than dealing with the whole sordid mess of a relationship I currently have with my mother. I roll back onto my stomach, and baseball and cheating and Hawaii and Sandra Dee all invade my dreams as I fall asleep in the oven-hot afternoon of my strange new life.

THREE

“Agnes!” Mom’s on the patio in her favorite pencil skirt and silk blouse, her uniform for lecture days. “You’re a lobster!”

“Wha—” I wipe the drool off the side of my face and try to push myself up, but my skin feels tight and puckered. “Coño! I actually used sunscreen, I swear.”

“Honey, you’re half-Irish. Sunscreen is nothing but a cruel joke.” She runs her fingers over my tender skin. “Come in. I have aloe. And I picked up Chinese on the way home.”

How many times have I had to explain to my more clueless pale friends that dark-skinned people can and do burn? What’s that saying about heeding your own advice...?

“I don’t get it. Why do my genes put me through this trial by fire every summer? Jasper can be out in the sun for hours and this never happens to him,” I growl, limping in and sitting on a stool at the counter. Maybe my skin is reacting so badly because it wasn’t expecting this kind of sun exposure in January. I say a silent prayer it won’t be blotchy and peely tomorrow.

My mother pushes a carton of cooling Buddha’s delight my way. We’ve already eaten at the one and only Chinese food place in a thirty-mile radius so often, they can recite our phone number from memory based on the sound of our voices when we call to order.

“You aren’t in New York anymore, Aggie. As far as your brother’s ability to endure the sun goes, I actually wish Jasper was more careful with sunscreen. Just because he can be out for hours without it doesn’t mean he should. Skin cancer is nothing to play around with.” My mother dabs aloe on my skin, and I suck air through my teeth to manage the pain that stings through the cool. “Plus you freckle.”

I know the go-to image of an Irish lass centers on a redhead with alabaster skin and cinnamon freckles in a wool sweater standing by the Cliffs of Moher, but...

“Right. I’m Irish,” I say through a mouthful of overcooked vegetables I just slurped off my chopsticks.

“But my family is bone-white pale, not freckly. I think your freckles are from your Dominican half.” I look down at my mother’s pale fingers tangled with my dark ones. I love that we have the same oval-shaped nails and double-jointed thumbs. I love what I inherited from her, and I love what’s different about us. And that makes me miss how close we used to be. How close my whole family used to be.

When I was a kid I used to spill out my colored pencils and hold them close to my family members so that I could get the color of their skin just right in my drawings. After a long, dark New York winter, mine would mellow to a dark golden tawny, a few shades darker than my mother’s at the end of summer. By contrast, after a summer spent at our communal family beach house in Santo Domingo, my skin would be a light sepia with a spattering of umber freckles. I’d admire myself in the full-length mirror in the bedroom I shared with half a dozen of my girl cousins, each one of us a different shade of gorgeous and proud to announce it. One of the first slang phrases I picked up in the DR as a kid was hevi nais, which my cousins said about anything and everything—cute new outfits, beautiful hairstyles, too-tall sandals, our sun-warmed skin. It basically means “very nice,” and it’s the kind of casually confident phrase that still makes me feel beautiful and strong in my own skin. I loved the fact that while everyone else in school had their twenty-four pack of Crayola colored pencils, I had my set of seventy-two Prismacolor Premiers with a range of russets and taupes and ochers for my family pictures.

“Can’t a girl define her own cultural heritage?” I snap, annoyed that nothing feels easy with my mother anymore. Not even a conversation about something as simple as freckles.

“Oh, there’s no denying you got plenty of my genes. Even if the freckles are open for debate, you have an Irish temper just like your mother.” I want so badly to smile back at her, but my heart is a cold, congealed pile of old tofu. “You and Jasper might look more like Dad at first glance, but there’s a lot of me mixed in there too.”

“Huh, I’m kind of surprised you even remember how Jasper looks,” I bite out. “We barely see him or Dad anymore.”

“Ag, we were just in Paris this autumn—”

“About that.” I interrupt before she can go into professor mode. My mother is a champ at talking for forty minutes straight at a clip and barely pausing for breath. “I thought you and Dad were making up or something. But you and that guy you worked with had...whatever gross mess going on, and you kept it up after we got home. I still don’t get it.”

Am I accusing my mother of cheating on my father? That makes no sense. They’ve been divorced for years...but the boundaries of their relationship weren’t always crystal clear. I know more about their up-and-down, back-and-forth, off-and-on relationship than I should because our apartment was tiny with very thin walls. Sure, I could have been thoughtful and put on headphones or something when Mom called her best friend, but sometimes I got tired of being surprised by my mercurial parents and their chaotic relationship.

“Okay, this is not a conversation I can have with you right now. Or probably ever, if you want the truth. I know you’re not a baby anymore, but that doesn’t mean you’re privy to every detail about my marriage to your father, okay? Frankly, it’s complicated and it’s private, how your father and I—”

“What? Screwed up your marriage and all our lives in the process?”

My words skid to a stop like a dog that finally caught the car she’d been chasing for miles and has no freaking clue what to do with it.

The tendons in Mom’s neck bulge when she swallows. She squirts more aloe on her fingers and rearranges her features until they’re her best estimation of calm. I prime myself for her raging Irish temper, but she talks in this infuriatingly measured way.