Liz Reinhardt - Rebels Like Us

“Shuddup! You look like a goddess.” She gnaws on her lip. “Hey, I checked your Insta this morning...”

“Right.” I shrug. “Call me melodramatic, but it was surprisingly hard to scroll through all those pictures of everything and everyone I was leaving behind.” I take a second to steady my voice, the same way I steady my raw heart every time I flip through my winter photo folder—which is full of pictures of people and places that are a thousand miles away. “I promise I’ll get a new one going soon.”

I guess Ollie hasn’t checked Snapchat yet, or she’d be calling me out about that too. I deleted my account late last night after getting shocked by another surprise Lincoln cameo in a mutual friend’s post-winter-break video. If pictures are hard for me to look at, there’s no way I can handle seeing and hearing video footage of everything I’m missing back home... Plus Lincoln would be like a ghost haunting every Newington clip.

“You really should. Your Insta pics were goals. Plus I want to know what things look like down there. Are there all those mossy trees like in Scooby-Doo? And plantations everywhere? Are they haunted? Did your mom buy you the Mystery Machine to drive around in? Are you wearing ascots and miniskirts? Did you get a Great Dane?” Before she can yell zoinks, Ollie’s eyes dart over my shoulder and go wide with worry. “Wait. You still haven’t unpacked?”

“It’s ‘asylum chic.’ Like it?” She shakes her head and sighs, so I confess. “Truth? It’s a reminder that I won’t actually have to live here forever.”

I wave a hand at the mattress on the floor, covers and pillows piled on it. That, my docking station, and a few choice boxes with the flaps permanently open make up my entire bedroom decor. The movers put all my boxes in my room for me, but I declined when they offered to put my bed frame together. That felt too permanent. Mom made several passive-aggressive comments about how she wouldn’t have bothered to pay an arm and a leg to move all my furniture if I wasn’t even going to set it up, but I stared at the ceiling until she left me to my misery. She was excited to finally have a space bigger than a couple hundred square feet to decorate, and she didn’t get why I wasn’t revved up to be in a new room that’s almost triple the square footage of my old room.

Because I miss my tiny, cramped, perfect old room.

“I miss your old room,” Ollie admits, echoing my internal thoughts with her freakish bestie ESP. Her shoulders slump, and my heart follows their lead.

“It’s okay.” No one brings out my reluctant optimist like Ollie. I hate seeing her down, so I put on a good game face no matter how crappy I feel. “Mom and Dad had been planning to sell our place when I moved to college anyway, and it went for way over asking price, like, the first week it was on the market. They were pretty psyched about it, and I...I’m trying to accept my fate at this point. You know I’m a ‘rip off the Band-Aid’ type when it comes to dealing with emotional stuff.”

“Um, yeah you are!” she laughs. Then gets dead serious. Lecture-time serious. “Speaking of college...”

“I got all my applications in by the deadlines, I swear to God.” I don’t tell my best friend that I hit Send on my SUNY application literally two minutes before midnight on the last possible day. And I don’t elaborate on the fact that I never took my brother up on his offer to proofread my personal essay. I didn’t have the patience to be ridiculed on my native-tongue grammatical failures by my own trilingual flesh and blood.

“You’ll tell me when you hear back?”

“Of course.” I cross my heart with the hand that’s still clutching my bikini, and Ollie freaks out.

“Are you going swimming?” The screen goes down for a second and her shocked voice floats through the speaker. “WeatherBug says it’s eighty-five in Savannah. How is that possible?”

Her face pops back on the screen, and I roll my eyes. “Because Savannah is actually an outer ring of hell. Don’t be jealous. I spent all day with sweaty pit stains. It’s gross.”

“It’s actually not frigid here. Like we could have watched those hot Puerto Rican guys play basketball from your fire escape if we’d had a blanket. Or three.”

“Are you trying to drive me to suicide?” My voice wobbles like the ankles of a first-time ice-skater.

“Sweetie.” Ollie says it on the longest sigh. I know exactly what direction her lecture is going to take, because she’s given it to me a few dozen times before. “Why didn’t you stay here in the city? With me? My parents love you. Or with your abuela. Even if she would have welded one of those chastity belts on you...it maybe would have been better than getting trapped in Georgia. Right?”

“It’s not chastity-belt bad here.”

“No...?”

I think about how I can go to an Episcopal, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Nazarene, or Seventh Day Adventist church if I walk five blocks from my house, but an Americano is an unknown species around here. I haven’t found a single decent coffee shop.

“You have a point...”

“You could come back.” She makes her voice small, like she’s trying to disguise the hope so that I won’t even notice it. Fat chance.

Not only do I notice it, big and comfy and bright as it is—it makes me ache.

“I know.” I do. I made a huge, complicated pro-and-con list on butcher paper in my room and stayed up for a full twenty-four hours contemplating it the night before I made my final decision. “But she’s still...”

“Your mom.” Ollie nods.

“Yup.” The word swings like a wrecking ball.

She chews on her lip and gives me space to be angry. I’ve needed the geographical equivalent of Russia and most of China in terms of anger space. But all that roaming anger is getting narcissistic.

“And he’s still...” She lets the words hang.

“Olls,” I beg, but she’s relentless in her quest to make me face my emotions.

“He was your first love, Nes. And he broke your heart. He’s a dog, but you can’t beat yourself up because you miss him. You need to let yourself feel everything. Don’t clam up.”

The tears coat my eyes like a hot, glistening windshield. When they plop out and make their pathetic slide down my cheeks, I know Ollie won’t say, “Don’t cry.” I tend to squeeze my emotions into a bitty ball I can ignore. Ollie is a “cry it out” advocate.

“I do miss him.” It’s hard to be honest when honesty makes me feel so weak and stupid.

“That’s okay.” The sound of her voice is a balm to my frayed emotions.

“I mean, he was my best friend other than you. I can’t think about him without remembering how good the good times were—it’s bizarre how it changed so slowly. How did he go from being the guy who could always make me laugh to the guy who pulverized my heart?”

“I know,” she says.

“I was scared, really scared to leave home and Newington and you,” I say as I lick a few salty tears off my cracked lips. “But I was more scared of staying and facing him every day, because what he did to me is unacceptable—but sometimes I forget because I’m busy remembering how sweet he can be. How can he be such a snake in the grass and legitimately one of the most interesting, caring people I’ve ever met? He messed up so badly, but I know he still cares about me. That’s dangerous.” I take a deep breath and look at Ollie’s face, just a screen away. “I was scared of falling for him again after everything he put me through. Because a little part of me is always going to love the goofy, smart, sweet guy I fell in love with two years ago.”

“Oh, Nes.” I know Ollie would hug me if we were together, and I want to cash in on that hug more than I’ve ever wanted anything.