Liz Reinhardt - Rebels Like Us

“Agnes, I know you’re angry. I know you blame me. I know you want answers that will help this make sense, but you’re old enough to know that there aren’t always easy answers in life. There are things you can’t understand—”

“I bet I could.” My knees knock under the counter because the little I do know has made me so angry. What if I find out more? What if things between us get even worse? “We used to talk. You used to let me know what was going on with you.”

“It hasn’t always been easy to know when to tell you things.” Mom takes a deep calming breath, one her yoga gurus would be proud of. “Have you spoken to your father?”

“I missed his call from before. I’ll call him later.” I’ll try anyway. I love my father, but our phone calls are always awkward and stilted. We communicate mostly through text, and that’s basically comprised of sending each other funny memes or links to interesting NPR articles. Not exactly deep, but it works for us. “Why are you asking?” She’s avoiding eye contact like it’s her job.

“You...you just need to talk to him. That’s all.” Her words are like a judge’s gavel hitting the bench.

“Why don’t you just tell me?”

“There are some things that aren’t open for discussion.” The words are quiet but firm. “I try to respect your privacy, baby. But you have to understand that I need that back from you, even when it’s hard.”

“When respecting my privacy means you lose everything you care about, get back to me, okay?” I shift back and bump my shoulder on the wall behind me and bite back a scream.

“Let me see,” Mom offers, sounding worried again.

I’m torn between wanting to soak up that worry and wanting to throw it back in her face.

“I’m good.” I bite the words out and turn my shoulder, so she’s left with a goopy blob of aloe dripping down her fingers.

“Sweetie, you’re in pain. Let me at least spread this last bit—”

“I said I’m good,” I growl, sliding off the stool, a carton of cooling Chinese food crushed in my fingers. I grab a bottle of water from the fridge and call out, “I’m going to eat in my room!” Any residual guilt I had about ditching Mom this Friday has evaporated completely.

“Agnes? Agnes! Please come here!” Her words shake, but she stands perfectly still behind the counter.

I stalk down the hall and slam the door to my room. I instantly hate being holed up in this still-unfamiliar space, alone.

When my mother’s sordid tale first started making the rounds in her gossipy department after we got home from our annual Thanksgiving in Paris, it was just a rumble under the surface. TAs would stop whispering when I walked into the office, and I’d hear only my mother’s name and the snapped-off end of a sentence that was definitely filled with dirt. When I went to the bookstore to grab an order for my mother, the snide clerk gave me major side-eye and suggested Madame Bovary as an add-on to the pile. I didn’t get his passive-aggressive dig until a week later, when I realized it wasn’t only the stress of grading fall semester research papers that had her so tense.

There were mysterious hung-up phone calls at all hours of the night. Staff meetings she came home from in tears. I found her laptop open with an updated résumé on the screen, and her friend from college had sent an email titled Unexpected Spring Semester Opening... You Are a Shoo-In! So the clues were blaring in my face like a full-blast neon sign for weeks, but I was dealing with my own drama.

Apparently Lincoln interpreted I’m going to see my family in Paris for a week as Do whatever you want with as many girls as you can while I’m away, and one of those girls contacted me as soon as she realized the guy she was falling for was already someone’s boyfriend. A few hours before the call, Ollie had brought over dozens of nail polishes and painted intricate designs on my fingernails and toenails, then Lincoln’s, then her own, then we rubbed every bit of it off and started all over again, the smell of nail polish remover burning our throats. My last coat wasn’t even dry when the girl’s voice cracked across the line. There’s something you need to know about your boyfriend.

Lincoln.

Was it irony that, while I was loathing my mother for leaving some poor yoga-loving blogger home wrecked, my own boyfriend was screwing half the girls’ tennis team?

He cried—actually he sobbed—when I confronted him and then, exactly three weeks later, whoosh, my mom threw our life into chaos with her announcement that she’d been Skype interviewed for a fantastic spring semester position in Georgia and she got the job. We were moving. Everything went really fast after that. Our apartment was almost empty in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and we had a tree so pathetic, it made Charlie Brown’s look like the one at the Rockefeller Center. While the rest of the world was celebrating peace on earth and goodwill toward humankind, it was dawning on me that I’d really have to say goodbye to the only home I’d ever known and my best friend, beloved school, and Mama Patria. It wasn’t so much that my mother forced me to go—it’s that I had no other choice. Saying goodbye to the people I loved wasn’t easy, but I took some comfort, knowing I’d dodged a big, emotionally draining bullet by not going back. I didn’t have to figure out what to do or say the next time I ran into Lincoln because instead I’d put nearly a thousand miles between us.

So I made my decision and left Brooklyn, but I never really got to resolve...anything. About Lincoln, about life, about Mom’s actions and her lies, about school and what I wanted from any of it. That’s partially why I’m still directing so much fury at Mom. She messed up. So did Lincoln. But I have only her here, so she gets the brunt of all my swirling hate.

FaceTime beeps through on my phone. My pride has taken enough of a beating that it sits back and lets me sob openly to Ollie this time.

“Babydoll,” she cries when she sees my face, already streaked with a few tears. “Grab Mr. Kittenface.” She crosses her arms and waits for me to grab my old, sweet-faced teddy. “Hug him so tight.” I do, laughing wetly at myself and us. “That’s my girl. That’s how hard I’d be hugging you if I were there. Tell me. Everything.”

I nestle Mr. Kittenface in my lap, tugging on his ears while I blubber about Ma’am Lovett, the Southern kids whose shoulders are as icy cold as their climate is tropical, my mom fury, my Lincoln fury... I let it all stew and bubble until we’re both crying.

“Whew. Holy shit.” Ollie unleashes a shuddering sigh. “What a day. You’re wrecking me, you know that, right? And you have every right to cry over every one of those things, but please never, ever speak that asshole Lincoln’s name again.”

I whimper. “Remember when—”

“No.” She pulls the phone close to her face, so she’s one gorgeous, blurry eyeball and a perfect swoop of winged liner. “No, no, no. We’re not going down the LiNeOl road again.”

LiNeOl. Ollie’s nickname for the three of us since we were assigned to the same science group in eighth grade. After years of being our friend around school, I was scared dating him would be a disaster for everyone, but Lincoln was that amazing boyfriend who jumped from friends to more and never let it get weird. He never treated Ollie like a third wheel. He knew her favorite candy was Nerds when we went to the movies and got her purple tulips on Valentine’s Day when she didn’t have a boyfriend.

Ollie used to say she wanted to find the Lincoln to her Nes.

He had sex with five other girls. That I know of.

Five that he confessed to. And there had to be some times when he came back from one of their beds and climbed into mine, whispering about how much he wanted me, how beautiful I was, how we were so perfect together. He threaded his fingers through mine and pressed himself deep inside me, listening to me moan after he’d probably done the same things, heard the same things from another girl’s mouth in another girl’s bed.