“You should come to the Y with me and Gram,” says Freddie.
I shake my head. “For what?”
We sit on the curb of the alleyway behind Scrub-a-Dub Car Wash, sharing a half-cherry, half-lemon shaved ice while Freddie’s on break. He landed a job spinning signs on the corner here. I don’t think he really needs the job, but without Viv around, I think he has some time to fill. And his newfound friend, Adam Garza, whose family owns not one but two local Scrub-a-Dub locations and two more in Jackson, helped him land the gig.
Adam rolls back and forth in front of us on his electric-blue skateboard covered in band stickers, popping up and down from the curb every few moments. He’s quiet, but also the kind of guy who says the funniest things under his breath during class. And he’s cute, too. He’s half Mexican and half Honduran and he has longish brown hair that is always falling into his eyes. I guess I imagined Freddie seamlessly fitting into the fold of jocks or something, but it makes sense he’d gravitate toward the kind of guy who has great hair and is too cool for this town, making him uncool in comparison.
Over the course of a few weeks, Freddie has slipped into my life like he was always meant to be there. We ride our bikes to and from school as far as we can until our roads diverge. Sometimes Adam joins us on his skateboard or Ruth hops on the back of my bike. But I always come over for breakfast a few times a week. We watch movies at each other’s houses on the weekend and spend whatever free afternoons we have on the beach with Ruthie, Saul, and Hattie.
Freddie turns to me. “Gram’s been giving me a hard time about how long it’s been since I was last in the pool. I told her I’d go with her.” He taps the toe of his sneaker against mine. “It’ll be good. Help you clear your head. And pretty soon it’ll be too cold for the beach.”
I am sort of tempted, but the truth is: “I don’t even have time.”
“Last weekend you watched the entire second season of Game of Thrones. You have time.”
“Shut up.” I pass him the shaved ice.
“No spoilers!” shouts Adam.
I roll my eyes and discreetly pull out my phone to check messages.
“That show is way too old for the first two seasons to fall under the spoiler-free umbrella,” Freddie tells Adam.
Adam shrugs. “I’ll be sure to remember you said that, Mr. I’ve-Never-Seen-a-Single-Star-Wars-Movie.”
I turn to Freddie as I slide my phone back into my pocket. “Wait. What?”
“My grandparents never really got into it, I guess? I mean, I know Vader is Luke’s dad. That’s pretty much the gist of it, right?”
I’m not a die-hard Star Wars fan, but Dad loves it. I can’t imagine growing up without it. He even has a tattoo of the rebel symbol on his shoulder, and this is a guy who has zero pain tolerance.
Adam glances down at his phone. “My break is over.” He groans dramatically and drops his board to the ground, rolling around the corner to the front of the car wash.
“I’ve still got a few minutes left,” says Freddie.
My favorite part about visiting Freddie at the car wash is watching all the brightly colored soap drain in the alley. Between the smell and the rainbow suds, this might be the nicest alley in all of Eulogy.
“What’s the deal with swimming?” I finally ask. “Why’d you stop?”
He groans and leans back on the sidewalk with his arms stretched out behind him, holding him up. “Every season, scouts show up to our meets, right? Like, college scouts.”
I nod. “To recruit?”
“Yeah. Around the time you’re a junior, you start to get a good idea of who’s looking at you and who’s not.”
“Okay?”
“And well, no one was really looking at me.”
“So you quit?” I ask. As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them.
He prickles with irritation. “It’s not that simple. Viv and all my friends were getting calls and offers from all sorts of places.” He shakes his head. “Every time I got in that pool, I knew I was doing the best I could. I trained hard. I even broke it off with Viv for a while to concentrate on improving my times. And every day I felt like such a failure.”
“But even if you don’t get scholarship money or specific offers or whatever, you can still walk on at the beginning of the year and try out, right?”
He shakes his head. “You know how sports announcers are always talking about athletes quitting when they’re at the top of their game?”
I nod. “Vaguely.”
“Well, I get why they say that. Sucking at something you love to do really messes with you. The truth is I decided that I’d apply to all the schools where Viv got scholarship offers and that I’d go wherever she went.”
“Are you serious?” I ask. I like Grace. I think I love her. But I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in Freddie’s position with limitless options and then to leave my fate to be decided by someone else.
When he looks at me, I can see all the heaviness that he’s been carrying over the last few years. His grandfather’s death. His on-again, off-again relationship with Vivienne. Uprooting his entire life so Agnes can live out her years here in Eulogy. Coming up short with swimming.
“Anyway,” he says, “Gram thinks I should keep swimming even if it’s just for the exercise, and she won’t get off my back about it. She’s got this theory that if I’m only competing against myself, I have nothing to lose.”
I puff my cheeks and let the air hiss out slowly. “Well, I guess I can give it a go,” I tell him. “But I’m pretty sure I’m going to be super slow and sucky.”
“Well, at the very least, it’ll be a short-lived ego boost for me.”
I smile halfheartedly. “What about Viv?” I ask. “Have you guys talked since that fight?” A few days after school started, the two of them got into a fight because she hadn’t called him back in three days.
He sighs. “We FaceTimed last night.”
“Ooh, FaceTime sex?” I joke.
He doesn’t say anything.
“What is it?”
Freddie shakes his head. “I need to go see her, ya know? She needs to see me.” He finishes the rest of the shaved ice and sets the cup down on the gravel. “You call Grace?”
“Texting is easier. Talking on the phone requires privacy and, well, actually talking on the phone. Who even talks on the phone anymore?” I ask, trying to goad him.
“Excuses,” he says. “And you know my feelings on that.”
Freddie and I have different ideas of how to maintain a long-distance relationship. I’m scared to push too hard, and he’s scared he’s not pushing hard enough. I stand up and take the empty cup. “I’m supposed to go to my mom’s with Hattie.”
He reaches out a hand for me to pull him up. “Tomorrow. YMCA. Right after your route. Cool?”
I swing one leg over my bike and toss the cup in the Dumpster behind him. “What if my hair turns the water blue?” Hattie touched me up right before school started.
“Ramona Blue,” he says. “Everything she touched turned a hue.”
Tyler drops Hattie and me off at the Ocean Springs apartment complex in Biloxi. It’s not a far drive from Eulogy, but our mom lives farther inland than we do. According to her, she’s lived through too many hurricanes to plant herself right on the coast like the rest of us fools. But Harrah’s, the casino where she works, is right there on the water.
“Do we have to do this?” I ask Hattie as Tyler pulls away. “And why doesn’t he have to stay?”
She takes my hand. “You’re here for me, remember?”
I nod. “Fine. But he’s the one who got you into this situation in the first place. Don’t forget that.”
Hattie has yet to tell my mom she’s pregnant. Her reaction shouldn’t matter. We see the woman once or maybe twice a month. But it does to Hattie. She had more time than I did with Mom and Dad together as a unit, and I think she still holds on to the memory of it. The memory of what it felt like to have a mother. Especially now.
According to the court mandate from when we were kids, we’re supposed to stay with Mom every other weekend, but once we got to middle school, the weekends sort of fizzled out, and now we’re down to a dinner or two a month. Our weekends here were always miserable anyway. Being this far from Eulogy, we were nowhere near any of our friends, and Mom has been working the noon-to-midnight Saturday shift since she took the job at Harrah’s.
Hattie knocks on the door of the third-story apartment twice before my mom swings the door open. “Hey, girls. Come on in.”
We’re greeted by the faint scent of cat piss courtesy of Wilson, Mom’s blind orange tabby.
Our mom wears the same clothes she wore twenty years ago, and seeing as she had Hattie at the age of fifteen, that can’t mean anything good. She’s too thin. Her hair is stringy. Short shorts show off her purple varicose veins and soft, lumpy thighs. She should wear a bra, but there’s not much room for one beneath her tiny tank top.
She hugs Hattie first and then me. Neither of our limbs knows where to go, and it’s like this every time. Two strangers embracing.
“Y’all kick off your shoes. I got the news on, but change it if you want. Making some cheesy noodles with hamburger meat.”
My eyes meet Hattie’s the second Mom turns her back. I nudge her on with my chin to get it over with, but she shakes me off.
“Have you talked to Aunt Peggy lately?” asks Hattie.
Mom responds from the kitchen. “Oh yeah. We talked the other day. She went on and on about that blood clot she had in her leg and her new compression socks.”
The two of us sit on the couch, which also pulls out to be Mom’s bed. The apartment is an efficiency, so it’s all one room basically. When we were little girls, we’d all sleep on the foldout with Mom, but as we got older, she’d set up sleeping bags on the floor. That was around the time our weekend visits petered out.
Hattie and Mom trade small bits of information from each of their lives while I flip through channels on the TV.
As we sit down to eat, Mom turns her attention toward me. “Well, Ramona, it’s your senior year. Soon enough you’ll be on your own.”
“Yep.” Even though I basically already am on my own.
She spoons noodles into three separate bowls and pours us each a glass of milk.
“I don’t drink milk with dinner anymore,” I tell her. “Neither does Hattie. We haven’t since we were kids.”
Mom opens her mouth to respond.
“It’s fine,” says Hattie as she drinks down a giant gulp.
I can already tell that all that dairy is going to have her puking her guts out in the morning.
“You datin’ anyone right now?”
I feel my sister’s eyes on me. “Sort of,” I say. “But she’s not from here.”
Mom chuckles. “This too shall pass.” Without even pausing, she asks Hattie, “How’s Tyler?”
I may not be a loud person, but I’m not timid. And yet something about my mom makes me feel so completely unheard, because no matter how many times I tell her that this—my life—is not a phase, she never listens to me.
Hattie wiggles in her chair a little. “He’s good. We’re . . .”
I wait for it. Pregnant. Knocked up. Havin’ a baby.
“Good,” she finishes.
“Well, I’m glad,” Mom says. “You gotta find the good ones and nail ’em down quick, or else you’ll get stuck with the discards.”
I stifle a low groan.
We eat the rest of our dinner in near silence, talking back and forth about little things that mean nothing at all until Hattie breaks the quiet with a loud burp.
“Excuse—” Her face goes white as chalk. “Oh, I’m gonna be sick.” She runs around to the other side of the table and into the bathroom, barely making it, before I hear vomit splatter against the inside of the toilet.
I’m right behind her, hovering like a protector. “Are you okay?” I whisper as I pull her hair wavy hair into a ponytail.
She nods as she throws up some more.
The smell wafts past me, and I have to duck my nose under the collar of my shirt to stop myself from puking right alongside her.
Mom stands in the doorway, like a clueless bystander watching a car accident.
Me taking care of Hattie. Her taking of care of me. I feel my future in Eulogy falling securely into place. “We’re fine,” I tell her.
And we are. We’re going to be fine.