Liz Reinhardt - Rebels Like Us

Part of me takes sadistic delight in hurting my mom like she hurt me. Part of me wonders what kind of terrible, petty jerk I’m turning into.

“I didn’t realize you watched the episodes. Well, at least one of us got to enjoy them.” She already looks sufficiently bummed. I could stop there. A good person would.

“I didn’t watch,” I blurt out. It’s almost involuntary, like I’m possessed by the vengeful spirit of a chronic television drama spoiler. “I just read about it.”

“You never look at spoilers.” I try to interpret the wrinkles in my mother’s forehead like fortune-tellers read palms. I realize there’s no secret mystery, just the stress-induced skin creases that come from dealing with a belligerent teenage daughter.

“I do when I don’t really care about a show. It was getting so stupid.”

Eight seasons. One hundred twenty-four episodes. Three flus, a few dozen snow days, rerun marathons during heat waves and summer vacations at my maternal grandparents’ lake house, episodes with pints of ice cream to forget boy problems, low-key birthday celebrations just the way we liked—One Hundred Thousand Beats had seen us through it all, and this is the way I honor my old faithful medical drama?

“Okay, enough.” Mom presses her fingers to her temples like she’s trying to ward off a migraine with her bare hands.

“Enough what?” I will her to fight, to explode, to tell me why she chose that gross man over me.

“Of this attitude all the time. I’m not some monster who ruined your life. You keep pushing me away, but—have you spoken to your father?” Just before she really lays into me for being a jerk, she flips and brings up my dad.

“I texted with him last night.” It’s not a lie. He sent me a bunch of screenshots from this site that puts witty text on famous art. I know it was just a ton of crying cat emojis from me and stupid art jokes from him, but it counts as talking. Sort of. “Why are you bringing Dad into this?”

“You...you really need to set aside some time and talk about what you’re feeling with him—” Mom says in her best teacher voice.

“Why? Because it’s too much trouble for you to have an actual conversation with me?”

“When are you going to stop punishing me, Agnes? I’m human, you know. I mess up too.” She clutches the door frame with a white-knuckle hand, her hazel eyes blinking too fast because she’s getting teary.

I debate asking. Or just telling her how I feel. Instead of vulnerable honesty, I choose caustic sarcasm.

“You sure do!” I exclaim with a big, fake smile. “And now here we are, in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. I’d love to talk about how unfair this is to you, but I don’t want to fail my classes on top of having the entire school hate me, so I better hit the books... You can go whenever.”

I wait, breath held, for her to morph from the sad little rag doll’s shadow she’s been and fly at me like the raging Irish-tempered harpy she always turned into when I put a toe too far over the line before. I half salivate for her to come at me, my ears pricked to hear her screaming that I “better learn some respect” and that she’s “not one of my little friends.” I want it to be like old times, the way we were before, even if that means enduring a screaming fit.

But she doesn’t raise her voice.

The hot mix of adrenaline and hope seeps out of me as she turns on her heel and pads back down the hallway. I’d bet a round-trip ticket to JFK that she’s opening a bottle of merlot and flipping to the melancholy Celtic mix on her iPod. Boo frickity hoo.

Maybe she should have dated one of the thousands of nice, normal single guys who chased her all over the place instead of getting low-down and freaky with a married coworker whose wife aired their dirty laundry far and wide across the five boroughs. Maybe she should have told her only daughter what was going on instead of shutting her out until things were too screwed up to fix.

Just at the moment when my brain cannot handle one more pulse of confusing information, my phone rings and Lincoln’s gorgeous, traitorous face lights up the screen. It’s like he has a timer set to know when my emotions are most jumbled. I clutch the phone to my chest, and my body crumples around it.

I should have deleted this picture of him from my phone when my hate was surging and made me strong. He sent it to me long before I suspected him of screwing me over. His dark hair is plastered to his head and he’s holding a surfboard. There’s sand all over his dark brown shoulders, and he’s smiling so wide, his eyes crinkled, his white teeth bright against his wet skin. His index finger points to the Saint Christopher necklace I gave him before he left.

He claimed that he sent me the picture because he missed me, and he said he was pointing at the necklace because he was telling his cousin about his wahine purotu who gave it to him for safe travels when he went back to New Zealand over the summer so he and his father could participate in a Maori leadership convention. Which was all so sweet when I thought I was his only “pretty girl.” But now I look at that picture and wonder if he was with other girls on that trip—girls who could flirt with him in Maori, with sweet, sexy laughs, girls who could surf in water swarming with sharks without squealing with fear.

Girls who weren’t me.

“Screw you, Lincoln,” I whisper to his picture, which sweeps off my phone and disappears after the final ring, replaced by a generic voice mail notification.

My ears burn, wanting so badly to hear his cocky voice, even though I know it would probably be roughed up with his tears. My traitor heart pounds, wondering will you, will you, will you?

I pick up the phone and swish my thumb back and forth across the glossy black screen.

Will you, will you?

When I toss my phone on the bed, it lands in the navy bowl of Doyle’s cap. I finger the rough canvas and rub a thumb at the frayed edge of the brim. Holding the hat works like magic to set my head straight, and it radiates goodness and confidence through me the same way finding a copper penny on heads used to when I was a kid. The hat helps remind me that I have no need for people who use and abuse me when there are people who like and respect me.

Decision made.

I will not.

But I will call Ollie to calm the last of my battered nerves.

“Did he call you?” she demands before I can say hello.

“Yes.” I pace my room, which is an exemplary pacing space, since there’s hardly any furniture in it.

“Coño.” Despite being crazy upset, Ollie’s occasional DR swear always makes me smile. “He tried calling here too. And screw him!” I hear her pound her fist on her desk. I imagine all the famous composer bobble heads in her collection nodding along with her righteous anger.

“Should I just pick up? It’s not like I can go see him, right? It’s not like I’ll get sucked back in, so why not hear him out? Right?” I feel jazzed up, like that time Olls and I sucked down an entire netted bag of those fluorescent-colored freezer pops that come in the plastic tubes.

“No!” She’s ferociously adamant. “What will he say? What could he say that wouldn’t be a complete waste of your time?”

“Okay. Can you...can you distract me? Tell me about anything. Your day. Not that that would only be a distraction. I mean, obviously I want to hear about your day anyway.”

“Um, I bought these fierce-looking beads, the most beautiful pewter color, and they went berserk and the color all chipped off them before lunch. I had to refund twenty-five percent of my day’s profits and redo so many seventh graders’ bracelets, I wanted to scream.”

“Damn those bead criminals,” I growl sympathetically.