The Boy I Love Page 2

  I noted how he gave Allie top billing, which was pretty much par for the course. Devon asked me a couple of questions about the TV crew, then told us he was having a party on Saturday night. “It’s on the beach by my house,” he said. The invitation was for both of us, but he was still staring at Allie. This didn’t bother me as I loved Ry, my guitar teacher. Meanwhile, Allie ignored Devon’s staring. She kept zeroing right in on Tim, who kind of smiled back at her in a polite way.

  “So you’ll come?” Devon said.

  “Sure,” Allie finally piped up. “You bet. We’ll come, for sure.”

  Devon and Tim got up and sauntered toward the gym, while Allie and I cleared our food away. “Well, well,” she said, as we tossed out the garbage from our lunch—which in both cases included most of the lunch itself. “It looks like there are all kinds of benefits to having an alligator in your backyard.” She had the happiest little smile on her face, and even though it was nearly a hundred degrees out, I could tell in her head she was already wearing Tim’s football jacket.

  As we walked back toward school, Allie had a little bounce in her step. We were definitely having a better second day than first. Even though I wasn’t at all sure that my parents would let me go to Devon’s, I wasn’t going to spoil Allie’s excitement by telling her.

  Two

  Allie and I have been best friends since kindergarten. She used to live out in the boondocks like us, but last year her parents finally got sick of the commute to the university, so they moved to Williamsport. Allie never had to tell them about wanting to be a cheerleader in order to switch schools, not like me with the acting. When we were kids, Allie won tons of gymnastics awards, but she got so tall she couldn’t do it competitively anymore. Cheerleading seemed like a good new sport for her, but being intellectuals and feminists, her parents did not exactly approve. Not that they would put their foot down about it. They just weren’t particularly encouraging.

  As for my family, we are stuck in Leeville for good. Back when they were first married, my mom turned Dad’s old family plantation into the North Carolina Thoroughbred Retirement Center. The original pillared grand house had burned down during the Civil War, so we live in the regular old farmhouse that was built to replace it. All the other buildings except the stables were torn down years ago. My mom rescues horses that would otherwise be headed to the glue factory, rehabilitates them, and finds them new homes. That last part is theoretical, because Mom is so picky about where they go. Usually the horses stay with us for a long time, if not forever, and we generally have about fifteen of them. This whole setup might sound like a whole lot of fun to you, and I guess it was before the economy collapsed. But taking care of horses is pretty expensive, what with feed and vet bills, so even before that, my parents always sweated bullets over their bills. Mom could never bear to turn one single horse away, even though the farm was refinanced to the hilt.

  However, living on a horse farm does have plenty of items in the plus column, especially my favorite horse, Pandora. Whenever anyone asks what I would take with me to a desert island (and people ask this more often than you might think), I always say Pandora. She is beautiful and gentle and fast, and has been here with us since longer back than I can remember. There is no amount of horse manure I wouldn’t shovel, or tack I wouldn’t polish, as long as I could ride Pandora every day of my life.

  * * *

  After my second day at Williamsport High, my mom was waiting for me in her station wagon when I got off the bus. Aunt Holly hopped out of the passenger seat to give me a hug.

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” I told her.

  “Well, who else was going to protect you from that gator?” Holly said, and I laughed. She laughed too, but there was a wistful note to it. Holly was my dad’s younger sister, and for the last few months she always looked sad, like she might cry any minute, ever since she called off her wedding.

  Holly got back into the car, and I climbed into the rear seat with Daisy, who had to sniff and lick at me to make sure no damage had been done while I’d been gone. Our family nickname for Daisy is Hellhound. She weighs almost a hundred pounds, is pitch black, and has the deepest, most ferocious bark in the world. Mom saved Daisy from doggy death row. She landed there because she bit a FedEx delivery man. You’d think a mother might have been cautious about adopting a dog that had a history of biting, but no. The truth is my mother is the kind of person who should have had ten kids, but instead she had me and three miscarriages. She says that after the last miscarriage, she realized Dad and I were all she really needed in this world, and I almost never point out that she also seems to need a lot of expensive animals whose owners want to toss them away.

  Mom started the car and turned back up our driveway. Last night Dad kept saying that alligators were usually not aggressive toward humans. Mom and I had not taken a whole lot of comfort in the word “usually.” After all, alligators usually didn’t travel northwest of Williamsport. Clearly this reptile was what my dad would call an outlier, and I would not be walking up or down our driveway anytime soon. But at that moment the main thing on my mind was how to get my parents to let me go to that party on Saturday night.

  “Mom,” I said, leaning forward from the backseat. “Do you remember a boy named Tim Greenlaw from the Cutty River School?”

  “It doesn’t ring a bell,” she said, and of course it wouldn’t. We had never done anything social with him, and I generally did not discuss my crushes with my parents.

  “He was a grade ahead of us,” I told her. “Allie and I had lunch with him today, he’s at Williamsport now too.”

  “That’s nice,” Mom said.

  “Anyway,” I hurried on, like if I spoke fast enough she would say yes without thinking, “he has a friend who lives at Wilbur Beach who’s having a party Saturday night, and Allie and me are invited. Isn’t that great?”

  Holly nodded, like she agreed it was great. She looks like my dad and me in that she has brown hair and brown eyes. But lately my dad had started wearing glasses, and Holly can still see just fine. Plus, her face is completely covered with square, pale freckles, which personally I find very wonderful. I’m a big freckle fan, and I have always found it disappointing not to have any myself. Holly is a hospital chaplain at a medical center in Raleigh, so her whole job is comforting sick people.

  “Now wait a minute,” Mom said. “Who exactly is throwing this party? Do we know his parents? Will parents even be there?”

  “And so it begins,” Holly said, laughing a little. “We always knew this day was coming, Elizabeth.”

  Mom sighed and stopped the car. We got out and started walking to the house. “I don’t know, Wren,” Mom said. “In Wilbur Beach? Your dad’s not going to like it.”

  My heart began to sink. Wilbur Beach is the richest town around here, and these days my parents have a grudge against anyone who doesn’t spend every waking moment worrying about money. Whenever my mom sees a Mercedes or BMW on the road, her face gets very dark.

  But Holly, oh thank you, Holly. She said, “Come on, Elizabeth, let her go. What’s the harm? Let her go.”

  Mom didn’t argue. I knew she wouldn’t. Everybody had been treating Holly with kid gloves since the end of her engagement. See, James Galveston was a doctor in the burn unit at her hospital in Raleigh, but he grew up here in Leeville. He was supersmart and super nice. As far as I’m concerned, he and Holly have been together forever; they’ve known each other since high school. Back then the Cutty River School didn’t even exist, so come to think of it, they’d probably started dating at Williamsport High when Holly was a freshman and James was a junior. Their whole lives, everybody always knew that they would end up together. They were just one of those perfect couples: both of them sweet, nice people who wanted to devote their lives to helping others. But last year James’s father died, which inspired his sister to start researching their family, and she had found out that their ancestors had been slaves. Being that they were African American, this was not a big shock. But then . . . it turned out that their great-great-great-grandmother had . . . I can hardly stand to say it. But she belonged to our family. Belonged to our family. It sounds so weird and awful. It is so weird and awful. Just thinking it gives me this sharp and terrible pain in my stomach, and I have to push it out of my head very quickly.

  Holly and James tried to move past this discovery—I mean, it was hardly Holly’s fault—but they just couldn’t. For one thing, the wedding had been planned at our farm (we had never been happy calling it a plantation, and obviously, now this was even more the case). James just got more and more weirded out, and then the question came up as to the possibility of what if they were somehow related, and everybody just became more guilty and more confused, and finally they called the whole thing quits. It was the saddest thing in the world and also—in my opinion—the most unfair. It wasn’t Holly’s fault her ancestors owned slaves. She was the nicest, kindest person I’d ever known in my whole life. All she ever did was help out people of every stripe and color and situation. If she’d been around during slave days, you can bet she would have been working full-time for the Underground Railroad, escorting everyone north. She was the last person who should have to pay for someone else’s crimes.

  Thinking about this, I felt a wave of sadness. I was getting my party, but Holly didn’t get hers. I headed upstairs to change into my barn clothes, then grabbed a couple of carrots from the refrigerator. And even though I knew my mother had an afternoon of forking straw planned for me, and even though I felt plenty bad for Holly and James, I couldn’t help but walk with a little bounce in my step. Because I knew that all my mother and father wanted to do these days was cheer Holly up. If it cheered her up to know I was headed to a party at the beach, then you can bet on Sat
urday night that’s exactly where I’d be going.

  * * *

  On Friday afternoon I couldn’t wait to see Ry, my guitar teacher. He had been at Tanglewood in Massachusetts all summer, teaching at a music camp. I came downstairs carrying my guitar case, wearing a cutoff denim skirt and a tank top, my hair loose. When I got to the foot of the stairs, Dad told me to march right back up and put on something decent.

  “And don’t even think about wearing something like that to your party tomorrow,” he ordered. I swallowed my anger but closed the door to my room gently. I wanted to slam it, hard, but knew that anything seeming rebellious could end up in exactly what he wanted, which was an excuse to go back on his promise to let me go to the party on Saturday. I came back down in baggy khaki shorts, a white sleeveless oxford, and my hair in a ponytail.

  “Happy now?” I said, trying not to sound sarcastic.

  “Ecstatic,” Dad said. He opened the front door for me. “You look prettier like that anyway,” he said, and I rolled my eyes. This was the man who had chosen my mother, after all, who owned no shoes except flip-flops, sneakers, and riding boots. Dad’s favorite outfits for males and females alike consisted of flannel shirts and beat-up Levi’s.

  Maybe to make up for annoying me, Dad let me drive to the music store. He hated driving on real streets with me more than anything in the world, so there was a lot of yelling my name and covering his eyes, plus he had this imaginary brake of his own that he kept stomping on.

  At the music store I hauled my guitar out of the backseat, and Dad looked mighty relieved as he jumped over into the driver’s seat. I waited for him to pull away before I took my hair down and tied my shirt so that just a tiny bit of midriff showed.

  “Hey there, Wren,” Ry said. I smiled at him. It’s true I’d had a little crush on Tim Greenlaw when I was just a child. But Ry made me feel like a girl from a romance novel. Allie didn’t think he was handsome at all, but that didn’t bother me. He could play all kinds of instruments, including the piano, a twelve-string guitar, and a Dobro. Plus he could sing, plus he recited poetry in this voice that was calm and excited at the exact same time. He would do it to make a point, like a poem could actually clarify something, a thought or an idea. I know this must sound completely corny, but when Ry does it, it’s not corny at all. It’s just totally cool.

  Ry closed the door to the lesson room behind us, which may sound promising, but unfortunately, one wall was a huge soundproof window so everyone in the store could look in and see us having our lesson. Ry and I took out our guitars and started tuning. At least he did. I always just pretended to be tuning my guitar until he finally took it away from me and did it himself. “Have you been working on ‘John Barleycorn’?” Ry asked, tightening up my C string.

  “Yes,” I lied. I almost never practiced between lessons. Ry pretended not to know this, but then he would make some comment that should sound like a compliment—about my natural ability—that clearly implied I didn’t put in any effort whatsoever.

  He handed me back my guitar. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my first week of tenth grade?” I said.

  “Are you in tenth grade already?” Ry said. “I forgot you’d got so old.”

  “Shut up,” I said. I hated to be reminded of how young I looked, especially by Ry. We played the song through once, with him shouting out the chord progressions, and me making all kinds of mistakes. I hoped he would come sit by me and show me the chords by putting his hands over my fingers, the way he used to, but he just kept to his own bench on the opposite side of the small space. After a little while we quit and worked on easier songs, but at the end of the lesson we went back to “John Barleycorn.” After the first verse I gave up trying to play and just sang with Ry, keeping up the melody while he came in with all kinds of cool harmonies.

  “Dang,” Ry said, when we finished singing. “You sure do have a pretty voice, Wren.”

  And that compliment was enough to keep me smiling all the rest of the day.

  * * *

  Here was the deal we made so Allie and I could go to the party. It took about five phone conversations between our parents to work it out. My parents and Aunt Holly and I would drive into Williamsport and pick up Allie. Then the three of them would drop us off, and while we were at the party, they’d eat dinner at this beach restaurant my mother loved but never got to go to.

  “A long dinner,” I said. “A really, really long dinner.”

  “A pretty long dinner,” my mom said.

  “Long enough,” my dad added.

  After dinner they’d go listen to music at the tiki bar and then come get us. They would call when they got to the beach entry. I made them swear up and down that they would not set foot anywhere near the actual party.

  “And I’m borrowing a Breathalyzer from Ken Pories,” Dad said on Saturday morning. Ken Pories was one of the police officers who worked with the forest service. “You and Allie are both going to blow into it the minute you get in my car.”

  “You are not serious,” I groaned. We were standing in front of our house. I had just gotten back from a horseback ride in the horrible heat with Mom. Sweat and dirt rolled down my face, and the back of my neck itched.

  “You’ll find out after the party, won’t you?” he asked.

  Grrrr.

  * * *

  Allie and I had been checking in all day long about what we were going to wear and how we were going to act. Allie was ecstatic—she’d found out that Tim Greenlaw used to go out with a girl named Caroline Jones, but they had broken up, so he was officially available. But I was just psyched about being invited to a cool party so soon. It made me feel like my life was finally happening now instead of just in daydreams, and that everything for the next three years might just work out okay. So I spent an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror, straightening my hair. Unfortunately, I have never been any good at doing hair, so I ended up giving up and pulling it into a high ponytail. I didn’t put on any makeup, partly because Dad wouldn’t allow it and partly because after my ride with Mom, my cheeks were nicely pink. I put on my Anthropologie dress and knew I would feel good about myself till I saw Allie walk out the door looking like a supermodel. Here’s what I’ve found works best in such moments of jealousy: Just stop and admit that’s what you feel. Don’t fight it or try to give it a different name. It may be ugly, but if you don’t resist it or make excuses for it, it passes pretty quick.

  My main worry when I came down the stairs was that Dad would send me back up to change. Through the screen door I could see my parents and Holly standing together at the bottom of the porch steps. They all sounded just sad, Holly’s voice full of tears. Her back was to me, but I could see her wave her hand in a sweeping gesture toward our land.

  “Maybe it’s just as well,” Holly was saying. “It was all built on blood anyway, blood and shame. Maybe we should just let it go.”

  “But the horses.” I could hear my mom’s voice catch, not wanting to argue with Holly, but not able to stop protecting what mattered most to her—her horses, her strays. Speaking of which, a one-eyed tabby who’d have nothing to do with anyone but Mom wound its creaky body around her ankles as she spoke. “Where would all the horses go?” my mom said, and my dad put his arm around her shoulders.

  What were they talking about? Giving up our farm? I froze at the thought, and at not wanting them to know I was listening.

  I heard Holly say, “I love what you do here, Elizabeth, I truly do. But wouldn’t it be better, more fitting, if we just gave the place back to the people who worked it? We could track down all the ancestors of all the slaves and just deed it over.”

  “You can’t give away what you don’t own anymore,” Dad said. His voice sounded dark, and I thought that was a very odd thing to say. Whose else would this place be if not ours? I hated the way Dad’s shoulders slumped, and the way Mom’s neck tensed, and I couldn’t stand hearing another word. I pushed the door open with as much noise as I could make, knowing my presence would stop the conversation cold.

  The three of them turned. Holly whistled. “Look at you, pretty girl.”