They were my friends, but not really. They didn’t know how to handle me and I felt like I’d grown past them. But the three of them were determined that when class started, it would be just like old times. Which meant class always started with gossip.
“Troy left Brie.”
“With the baby?”
“With the baby. But his mother is going to file for full custody.”
“Why not him?”
“He doesn’t want the baby.”
“So why’s his mom want it?”
“She says Brie’s on drugs.”
See what I mean? Gossip time. I waited for a gap in the conversation before jumping in. It wasn’t often I had something to contribute, so I was excited at the chance to be included. “Did you guys see the new kids in town?”
“No,” Madison said, “Not the
new
kids.”
She placed the emphasis on the word ‘new,’ drawing it out. I stopped dead in the tracks of my story.
“Well, go on,” Lacy said, “Who’d you see?”
I quickly told them about the four. Madison nodded along, but she and Kris kept giving each other knowing looks. With the two clearly not paying attention, my story petered out lamely.
“So what do you know that I don’t?”
“Nothing,” Madison said primly.
“Guys,” I said.
Madison and Kris smiled at each other.
“C’mon. I know you know something. Just tell me.”
The professor walked in, pulling out his laptop. In another class, I could have continued pestering them, but in this, the professor made it clear his presence meant it was time for all of us to shut up. I gave Madison one last pleading glance.
“Don’t worry,” she said, folding her hands primly, “You’ll find out soon.”
Chapter 2
Class let out late, as usual, and as I drove home I tried to decipher what Maddie’d meant. I knew from the tone and the looks it had to do with a boy. So, what? Someone had a crush on me and I didn’t know about it? Oh, no. I didn’t want a boy, not right now. Especially not a boy from town, who’d pretend he understood why I wanted to leave, who’d nod along eagerly to my plans, and ultimately get mad when he realized I wasn’t gonna change my mind for him.
A little pool of dread began to form in my stomach. The knot tightened when, pulling on to my block, I noticed a figure sitting on the concrete steps leading up to our small porch. The excitement of the day evaporated from my mind as I drew close enough to make out an all-too-familiar crop of black-brown hair. My heart clenched. I pulled up in front of the house, my breath catching. The boy stood up, making his way toward my car.
Not a boy anymore, though, not like the last time I’d seen him. Since then, his shoulders had filled out. His face sported a five o’clock shadow his younger self would have envied. And his eyes seemed different now, wiser.
Even so, my heart leapt out of my chest seeing him. It didn’t matter how different he’d look, I’d always know Nathan. God, that sounds trite, but it’s true. Or it was, once. If you’re wondering how a nerdy academic earned a spot on the outskirts of the popular crowd, well, cheerleading had been one-half of the equation—Nate had been the other half.
I didn’t roll down the window. He gave me a wounded smile, cocking an eyebrow. “What, Kyrie, you scared of me now?”
Goddamnit, now I had to open the window to prove I wasn’t chicken. I rolled the window down. “What do you want?”
“I just wanted to say hello. I’m in town, you know. For a while, maybe.”
“Maybe? That’s the best you can do? Well,
maybe
, you can just take your rear end and march it right on back to whence it came. And you can take your ‘hellos’ on with it, jerk.”
“I probably deserve that.” He pulled his hand through his hair. The way he was leaning against the truck right now, he almost managed to be looking up into my eyes, like a dejected beagle. “I have been a total jackass.”
His eyes glistened, over-bright. My god, he was going to start crying. My hand, acting completely without authorization from my brain, reached out and grabbed his shoulder.
This was rich. The last time I’d heard from Nate, roughly one year earlier, he’d left me sobbing. And I hadn’t stopped crying for two whole weeks. Okay, in the interest of honesty, if we’re talking about intermittent tears, it had been more like three months.
But now, here I was, reaching out in order to prevent him one measly tear. Nuh uhn. I hardened my resolve. I took my hand back.
Sensing my withdrawal, he reached out to grab my wrist. “You have no idea what this last year has been like.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, voice hardening, “Because while you’ve been out seeing the world, I’ve been trapped here, working my butt off so I can save up enough to transfer out of community college. So why don’t you go sing your sad song somewhere else?”
“Fine, I’ll leave you alone. But look, I’ll be at The Station tomorrow if you change your mind and want to come talk. Just talk. Let me explain myself.”
I glared at him, worried that if I said anything out loud, it would somehow turn in to ‘I love you, don’t ever leave me again!’ That kind of backslide would lead to nowhere good.
He got on his motorcycle—I know, right? Apparently in the year since I’d last seen him, he’d turned in to a moron—and drove off.
I blinked after him. Like anything could get any worse. Everything felt tangled and messy. All I knew was that walking alone, into an empty house, facing several hours before my mom came home from the theater to lecture me on letting some guy get me down was a recipe for disaster.
Instead, I pulled away from the curb and let my subconscious take the wheel. It steered me out of town, through the outskirts, south on SR 21. Then I turned on to an unmarked dirt road, ribbed and puckered from 4wd mud tires. A couple minutes later and I began to breathe again. Somehow I’d wound up at Meriah’s. And as I parked my truck next to her impeccable 4x4 pickup she came out of the house, holding a rifle. Long black hair in a ponytail, pale eyes and light skin dotted with freckles. Her complexion hadn’t been built for sunny climates and she usually looked more burned than anything, but she still seemed part of Texas more than anyone I’d met. She plopped it down on her porch the moment she saw me. A woman living alone in the middle of nowhere has to be careful, but Meriah wasn’t one to let that infringe on her sense of hospitality.
“Come on in, sweetie. Would you like some tea or lemonade?”
Meriah was only about nine years older than me, but she projected older than her twenty-eight years. I first met her when I was thirteen and my mom, a little exhausted by my constant singing, enrolled me in music and singing lessons. I had to cancel my lessons a year ago, since that money now needed to be put aside for college, but I still kept coming out here regularly. Old habits die hard for me—once I’d had a ritual established, I stuck to it.
Following her through the screen door, down the hall and into the kitchen, I took my usual seat on the vinyl chair at her little table. I picked at the aluminum lining of the Formica tabletop with my fingernail. Meriah had inherited the house from her great aunt, and rather than remodeling, had just fixed up the existing. The kitchen was still the original 50s everything, but she’d bought the table and chairs to match.
Reaching out, Meriah slapped my hand away. “Don’t ruin this; it’s an antique.”
“Sorry.” I sighed. I leaned my head on my hands, watching as she went through the motions of making the sweet tea. Authentically Texan in almost every way, Meriah made the only sweet tea I could drink, meaning, the best sweet tea in the world. She’d been born here, but had actually traveled the country before coming back and settling down, opening up shop as a music teacher. One of only two actual music teachers in town—the other was an older lady with doilies on her piano and a stuffy house and a ruler she’d whap you with when you hit the wrong note. Meriah was different. She’d stumble through explaining a few times, and then she’d demonstrate and explain once more and suddenly you felt like you’d known how your whole life and all she’d really had to do was remind you—it was that obvious.
The cool glass of sweet tea, in a Flintstone’s jam jar, plopped down in front of me and Meriah sat herself down in the chair next to me. The open back door of the kitchen and the front door allowed for a nice cross breeze here, and for a moment we just sat, soaking up the end of the day, letting the calm seep in.
A year and a half ago, I’d shown up at her door in the middle of the night, in tears, holding the massive stack of financial aid letters. She didn’t understand math, not really, but she stayed up the next two hours with me and we poured over them, trying to find something I may have missed. At the end, I had to resign myself. The song of my life was stuck on replay: work hard, work harder, it will never be enough. Meriah’d poured me a glass of tea just like this, patted me on the shoulder and said, “Welcome to adulthood. It’s a bitch. But the fun part is, you can still spit in the wind.” And sitting down, she helped me come up with plan B, the plan I was on now. She saved me from the morass of despair that would have led me who knows where.
I lifted the glass to take a sip and she slapped my hand again. “Hold on a minute, I’m not finished yet.” She retrieved a box of Ding Dongs from the cupboard and set those in front of me, as well. “Now I’m done.”
Ding Dongs and iced tea. Not the normal combination, but perfect for what I needed. I pulled the foil away from one of the small cakes and crammed the entire thing in my mouth.
About five minutes later and I was ready to tell Meriah what had happened. Recounting my encounter with Nathan was surprisingly short. I guess the whole thing felt a lot bigger than it actually was.
“You going?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, really, you’re actually going to listen to my advice this time?”
“Don’t I always follow good advice?” I asked, pitching my voice toward sweet. She rolled her eyes.
“You like to think you do. But here’s what I have to say, and take it as you will. Stay away from that boy,” she said, taking a long sip from her glass. “He doesn’t have your best interests in mind.”
“Yeah. That’s probably good advice,” I muttered.
“And here it comes,” she said under her breath.
“It’s just,” I leaned forward, resting my arms on the table, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I showed up and told him off, you know, in front of everyone? Spectacularly.”
“It would be if you could actually pull it off, honey, but we both know how good you are at that sort of thing.”
Which is to say, I’m not.
“It’s best to keep your distance. Kill him with apathy. Better that than risk humiliation.”
She had me there. Leaning back in my chair, I took a deep breath. Without warning, the rest of my day came back to me: flashes of the four college kids I had seen, and the weird feelings they’d brought with them.
“Nathan isn’t the only person come to town,” I said, and quickly told Meriah about the three strangers. Leaving out the part about the puking.
“They sound like kids on a spring break road trip. Why would you worry about them?”
This gave me pause. I’d never told Meriah about my instincts. I tended to keep that part of my life hidden as it seemed a little woo-woo. These kids rang the alarm bells stronger than anyone I ever encountered, sure, but how to explain that?
“They just gave me the willies, I guess,” I said, leaning back in the chair. “Too perfect.”
“Perfect girls give me the willies, too.” Meriah laughed. “They spend way too much time on their hair.”
#
At home, my mom was in kitchen with dinner. She gave me a kiss on the head and launched in to a tirade about the latest employee at the theater, a projectionist who kept coming late to work.
“If I have to go up there to start the movie,” my mom said, pulling the burgers out of her bag of fast food (fast food is a staple at our house. Thursdays are burgers from Big Al’s), “Then that’s fifty percent of his job right there. But can I dock fifty percent of his pay for that? No. Why? Well, that would just make me a terrible boss now, wouldn’t it? Ugh.”
She collapsed in the chair and gave me a funny look, “What happened? You look like something happened.”
Here came the tough part. If my mom got wind that Nate was in town, she’d be hunting him down and running him right back out again. Plus, my mom was stressed. I wanted to tell her, but at I also wanted to eat before the fries got too soggy to digest. And I wanted a chance to figure things out for myself before she decided to figure them out for me. She sat down on the couch and I sat next to her. We both reached for the sodas, and sighed as we took sips, then laughed. We’re kind of similar that way.
My mom looked a lot like me, add eighteen years. It was in the coloring that my dad came out. My mom had darker skin and black hair common for her Hispanic origin—my dad must have been white. My skin was slightly paler than hers, my hair was chestnut brown to her black, I had green eyes, where she had brown, and curls where her hair was straight. That came from my dad, too, she said. I would not know, seeing as he did not ever bother to look us up after I was born. Surprisingly, my mom did not harbor a grudge about this. He never lied to her, she said, so why should she be angry?