Rebels Like Us. Liz Reinhardt

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.

      But from a thousand miles away, I can’t see the shimmer of the beads or the intricate knot design, and I’m pissed at how unfair it is. I thought I’d take the gold in rocking my senior year, but it winds up I won’t even get a participation ribbon.

      “And the second chair cellist from Javier wrote a duet for his senior project. He needs a bassoonist, and, um, he asked me.”

      Even though we’re not FaceTiming, my mind’s eye imagines Ollie’s smooth skin blushing pink, and I know she’s twirling a piece of her long black hair like some hip Vietnamese American version of a Valley girl.

      “Is this the skateboard guy?” I squeal. Ollie’s had a revolving door of crushes the last few months, many of them from afar, so we don’t always have names to work with, and I’m not always the best at keeping them straight. Name or no name, dissecting these crushes always takes top priority.

      “No.” I picture how she ducks her chin whenever she does that shy little laugh. “Skateboard guy is first chair, Thorton’s. This is the guy with the pretzels at the fountain that time, remember? Before the symphony?”

      “Romantic.” The word floats out on a sigh. “You’ll send me the demo? And some pictures of him? I think I’m thinking of skateboard boy but putting a pretzel in his hand.”

      “I will,” she promises.

      But I won’t be around to sit on her bed while she practices her bassoon for a jillion hours and obsesses for twice that long over Pretzel Boy’s every word and look.

      Missing that will mean missing the meat of the entire experience.

      Our friendship can get by on the scraps, but I would rather it was fat and healthy.

      “So have you seen my idiot brother’s Instagram?” The best way to feel better about anything, ever, is to rag on my brother with my best friend.

      “You mean the dark, broody black-and-white pictures of half-eaten croissants and close-up eyeballs? I have no clue if it’s an art project or real life, since he captions everything in French, and mon français n’est pas bon.”

      “He’s so pretentious. I think he’s embarrassed to let anyone know he ever lived in the United States, let alone that he’s a US citizen,” I say in a horror movie narrator voice.

      “I’m not saying we have to, but a throwback pic of him might be a fun thing...” I hear what sound like thumps and grunts and am willing to bet Ollie is under her bed. “Ah! A little dusty, but I found that picture from the Fourth of July. The one where your mom bought Jasper and your dad matching American-flag shorts and they both had that weird haircut like the guy from House Party.”

      I howl. “The Kid ’n Play classic!” Underneath my unholy laughter at that memory is a little sting. Maybe it’s partially that I brought the whole senior nostalgia thing on early by switching schools midyear, but bittersweet is my constant emotional jam. I miss the way things were—I miss my family being whole and unpretentious and happy. I miss my best friend. I miss having a boyfriend I trust.

      I push through it because what else is there to do? Ollie is the best shoulder to cry on ever. She’s better at long-distance best friendship than most people are at the one-on-one, everyday kind. I’m thankful our best friendship is still awesome and loving, but I’m pissed circumstances have forced it into a blurry copy of what used to be so sharp and bright, and that aches.

      When we get off the phone, I feel hollowed out. If I was back in the city, tonight would be my life art class at Mom’s college... The one we were attending together, the one where our folders with half-shaded legs and feet and other things are probably still leaning against the cluttered shelf. In the fall, I joked that the hot male model was kind of checking my mom out. But at Thanksgiving, I stopped making her blush by pointing out that kind of stuff (even though ninety percent of straight dudes check my mom out...that’s just my life) because every sign pointed to her and my father reconciling. Maybe that’s why the whole affair blindsided me so hard. Maybe I still feel cheated out of that naive Parent Trap dream.

      Jasper so would have been London Lindsay Lohan in that alternate reality.

      There are no art classes here. I could join a club, but every club has its hierarchy all set up by now, and it’s not like I’ve made many friends. My Brooklyn neighborhood was full of coffee shops and bookstores I’d wander through with Ollie in our downtime. We prided ourselves on finding the best hole-in-the-wall food places. I went to musical reviews and art shows with Ollie and her parents, helped Mom organize student events at the college, rocked the vote, volunteered at soup kitchens, headed committees... My life back home was full to bursting, to the point where I’d dream about slowing down, taking time to do more nothing.

      Now that I have all the downtime I could want, I also have a nasty case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for slap back.

      In this new, boring version of my life, I do homework. I try to nap with no success. I scroll through playlists I instantly hate. I poke around in my unpacked boxes, but I find too many items that make me feel starved for a life that’s washing away too fast. I decide to distract myself with a life-form more pathetic than I am in my current state, so I water Doyle’s tree and imagine Ollie lounging on the beach chair next to me with a stack of paperbacks and a pitcher of her famous lemonade nearby. I imagine my abuela swatting flies, pruning the already-tended bushes, squatting down to save soggy, drowning dragonflies from the pool while we yell at her to relax a little even though we know she is physically unable to do that. I imagine my brother, dressed to the nines in a seersucker suit and poring over Mom’s old copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay, impervious to heat and tedious literature. I imagine Mom and Dad, maybe fighting, maybe kissing... They did those two things so often, I’m having a hard time assigning them any other activity at this pitiful imaginary pool party.

      And, though I fight it, my sappy brain imagines Lincoln, bouncing off the diving board, tucking his knees