Liz Reinhardt - Rebels Like Us

“So they’ve always been the queen-bee types?” I can so imagine the Generic Mean Girls as preschoolers with pigtails and bows, lording over the snack table while they nibbled their graham crackers and sipped their juice boxes.

“Ain’t my queens,” Khabria bites out. She sighs and takes it down a notch. “Look, some people are really into cliques here. They have their friends, their jokes, their way of doing things... If you don’t like them, my best advice for you is just stay away.”

I realize I touched a nerve, and I get it. There are girls I would have counted as my best friends in middle school but haven’t spoken a word to in years—girls I’d still defend if anyone else tried to talk crap about them. People—even people you care about—can change so fast, and loyalties get complicated.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.” By now we’ve rounded back to the main hall and Mr. Webster’s class, all the initial closeness we shared over steamy gossip withered.

“Agnes, Khabria!” Mr. Webster pokes his head out the door, calls down the hall to us, and taps his watch in warning. “You’re five minutes late. Let’s hustle.”

“Thank you for showing me around.” I clutch my map in shaking fingers, off-kilter after possibly offending the first person who was actually nice to me.

“You’re welcome. Let me know if you need help with anything else today.” Khabria’s voice runs as cold as the water around an iceberg. She hesitates, then says, “Look, most people here are good folk. We get along, we help each other out. Don’t judge anyone too harshly based on a few minutes of knowing them.”

I watch her skirt flutter as she flounces away before I can answer, and I slip into class. My classmates text on their phones, paint their nails, and chat as Mr. Webster robotically lectures, his body language limp with defeat. I wonder if he regrets anything. I wonder if staying here at Ebenezer was him standing his ground or giving up.

If I stay here, would it be standing my ground or giving up? Bells ring, classes move, and I follow my map like a pro now that Khabria’s shown me the basic layout. For the rest of the day, I’m mostly ignored. Which is fine. I’m only enduring. Just a few months.

Just the rest of my senior ye—

It’s like I accidentally pulled the plug on a hot bubble bath. I search under the suds to plug it back up because if I don’t, every single emotion I’ve kept bottled up will drain, hot and wet and embarrassing.

No girl who grew up on the mean streets of Brooklyn (all right...fairly gentrified Crown Heights, but still) is going to cry on her first day of school in Nowhere, Georgia. I’d have to beat in my own ass. It wouldn’t be pretty.

The final bell tolls and crowds press out of doorways and into the hall on every side of me, a tsunami of bodies. I don’t care about being jostled, but it’s weird to not have a solitary soul waiting for me by a locker or gesturing for me to sneak down a back hall and beat the rush.

I sprint alone to my little Corolla—a poor consolation prize from my mother to make up for the dissolution of my pretty rad life because of her screwup—and peel out. I choke on the diesel fumes from the line of lifted pickup trucks that leads home.

Home.

That’s the word on repeat in my head when I veer the car to the side of the road and pull the damn plug, unstop everything I’ve been holding in. I’ve felt seconds away from drowning all day, and now I weep and scream like a banshee on meth in the semiprivacy of my car, letting it all drain out.

“Vete pal carajo, Georgia! Concho hijo de la gran Yegua!”

I curse this godforsaken state at the top of my lungs and beat the steering wheel. I drum my heels on the floorboards. I scream curses over and over until my voice is hoarse. And then I wipe the mascara out of my eyes, blow my nose, take one deep breath, pull back onto the road. “Coño.” Damn. There’s nothing left to say, so I glare at the obstinate sun, and go...home.

God, it would feel good to spill my guts to Mom the way we used to, Lorelai and Rory–style, but the time for sitcom mother-daughter banter is long gone. When I look back at all the times I assumed she was doing something awesome, like tutoring one of her struggling students, and realize she was, in fact, doing something skeevy, like flirting with a married dude, a bone-crushing feeling of betrayal presses onto me. It’s as if I was waiting at Luke’s with my giant mug of coffee, but my mother never showed.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at her and forgive her for selfishly and systematically ruining my life. Ruining our life. All because of a skinny, kinky weirdo with a weasel face and my mom’s very, very poor tech skills.

Word to the wise, kids: don’t be a fat-fingered idiot when you’re sexting with your married coworker. Because you just might accidentally send a pic of your naked ass to the HR secretary instead of your paramour. And said secretary just might be your weasel-faced sex partner’s wife’s yoga buddy. And then you and your innocent daughter will be unceremoniously exiled to the sweltering marshes of Nowhere, Georgia.

TWO

In the quiet sanctuary of my temporary home, all I want to do is forget the total disaster that was the first day of what’s probably the biggest mistake of my life so far. Mom’s teaching a class and won’t be home for another two hours, so I have unsupervised time to kill.

There are very few perks that come with living in Georgia, but a big, refreshing one is the pool in the backyard. I can practically hear the pool pump hissing, “Come swim in me, Nes.”

I tear to my room and rip open a box labeled Summer Clothes, then a box labeled Vacation, then, in a desperate last-ditch effort, I peel back the tape on one labeled Random Fun Stuff. I find a pair of denim overalls I don’t remember buying, some really old family pictures from the summer we went on vacation to some hokey middle-America theme park, and three yo-yos from my brother’s obsessive yo-yo-collecting days back when he was a nerdy middle schooler (instead of a nerdy college sophomore). I get nervous because I’m not sure where else to look for my lone piece of missing swimwear. I own exactly one bikini.

There’s not an especially long swim season in New York, so one will do. But it’s January here. January. The time of post-Christmas blizzards and sticking to resolutions you made for New Year’s, if you’re all about that. And it’s now hotter than it was when we arrived this hellish December.

I may need more bikinis. In the dead of winter. Unbelievable.

Our Realtor said this was an “unusually hot one” as she fanned her sweaty face and bemoaned every house we looked in that hadn’t switched on the central air. I expect bikini shopping and sweltering heat in Santo Domingo over summer break; this is just madness.

I continue to frantically pick through the cardboard box ziggurat in my room and finally snag the stretchy material of my lone bathing suit in a box labeled Underwear. Fair enough. And I can’t even blame the movers’ crazy box identification because I packed that one myself. Just as I’m about to change, my phone rings and I realize I may have to pick up and talk intelligibly to another human being when all I want to do is dead man’s float around the pool and feel sad for myself. The groan I bite back is a knife of guilt that twists in my gut.

Ollie wants to FaceTime.

My bleary, makeup-smeared image reflects back at me on the screen, and I want to sob. Again. But then I’ll look even worse. It’s all pretty chicken-and-egg.

“Olls, I look like a gargoyle!” I screech the second she connects.

Her gorgeous face, moon round and ethereally peaches and cream, takes up the entire screen, and my throat feels all clawed down both sides because I’m not sitting in her parents’ modern, artsy apartment, gorging on the Vietnamese sizzling pancakes Ollie is a genius at whipping up and sneaking sips of rice wine from her parents’ enormous collection before we get down to our homework and daily two-person merengue party.