“Oh, I know. Pretty sure Shannon McGee told everybody.” Laine clears her throat. “She, uh, saw us in the showers.”
Wow. Ava had amuchbetter high school experience than I did.
Laine shakes her head. “So, that’s why Rachel hates me so much? To this day? Jesus.”
“Well, it’s more than that,” I add, unsure why I feel the need to lay out Rachel’s case. “She was so desperate to be like you, and I think she believed that, if she followed your footsteps exactly, she would be. But that day, when you kicked her off the field—”
“—when shethoughtI kicked her off the field.”
“Right, sorry. When she thought that, she felt betrayed. Like you were hoarding all your success and popularity for yourself. It didn’t help that people teased her about her own sister cutting her from the team, either.”
“Huh,” Laine says, as if it’s news to her that Rachel has always had severe Ferris Bueller Syndrome. By the time our friendship ended, Rachel had fully become the spiteful Jennifer Grey to Laine’s charismatic Matthew Broderick, though the ages were reversed. Maybe it’s harder that way. The same mix of DNA just slightly altered to produce a fundamentally different outcome, a different person, having a different, better life only three steps in front of you, but the path from your here to their there is unreachable. Despite everything, I feel a pang of sympathy for Rachel for feeling like her own path wasn’t good enough.
“So … why does she hateyou, then?” Laine asks. “You didn’t ruin any budding soccer careers, right?”
I blow a long breath out, weighing how much to tell her. The full truth is too embarrassing, so I settle on an approximation. “She realized I had a small, totally normal teenage crush on you, and she freaked out. Hated me ever since.”
“Geez, that’s my fault, too?” Laine frowns. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I say softly. Losing Rachel’s friendship was one of the most painful experiences of my life, but like her issues with Laine, it’s more complicated than that. When Rachel discovered my teenage crush box of Charlaine relics hidden under my bed, covered in a meaningful hodgepodge of magazine cut-outs, full of pictures of Charlaine, poems describing my longing to know her and be knownbyher, and god help me, one of her old sports bras—that was the moment our friendship drew its last breath, but it had been sick and gasping for some time.
I can’t say exactly when, but at some point, Rachel became resentful. For most of our childhoods, she was as ambitious as I was, reachingfor success with the confidence that one day, she’d achieve everything she set her heart on. Maybe it was when her perfect grades slipped in her AP courses, no matter how hard she studied, or when her face continued to break out, despite her devotion to the fancy Clinique products she begged her mom to buy. When, no matter how much Tommy Hilfiger she wore, or how smoothly she straightened her hair, the popular girls still rolled their eyes every time she tried to sit at their table. But at some point, Rachel became more fixated with the world’s treatment of her than her treatment of the world, and the debt she felt owed pissed heroff.
So when her sixteenth birthday arrived, and she ran outside that morning to check the driveway for the new car she’d been promised only to receive her parents’ apology thatsorry, we put all our extra money into helping Cosimo reopen Bluebell Vineyards to the public, but maybe by next year, you’ll have enough saved to get a used car …then I, too, became yet another person to wrong her, to take what was rightfully hers. All the rides to school, the meals I ate at their house, the nights I slept in her room, even the care her parents showed me when Dad couldn’t parent me, it all began to feel like tallies on the ledger of what I owed her. A few weeks later, she found my crush box dedicated to Charlaine, and that was officially an injustice too many. The next day, I overheard her blaming my “crazy” father and our “shitty vineyard” for her not getting a car, and I lost it. No blows were exchanged, but they had to pull shy little Zoe Brennan screaming out of her ex-best-friend’s face, and that was that. Our friendship was over, and our rivalry began.
Laine and I are quiet as we crest the hill and take the path through the trees. It’s weedy and narrow these days, with only my dad’s footsteps to walk it into existence, but when I was young, it was wide enough for Rachel and me to race four-wheelers side by side. It feels both strange to walk it now and like traveling a well-worn artery into my past.
That duality follows me all the way to the Woods’s house set at the back of the property, out of the public eye and nestled among the trees. A place I’ve been a thousand times, maybe more. Laine straightens as we climb the front steps, the wood bowed from rain and busy feet. Her hand goes for the doorknob, then stops, slowly rising up to knock instead.
My heart squeezes. Does this place not feel like home to her anymore?
A chorus of voices and the smack of children’s footsteps grows louder until the door’s thrown open by Darla, who’s standing there panting, comically confused. Little kids are so wonderfully expressive before the world teaches them to hide their feelings. She eyes Laine up and down.
“Dad, the lady who kept beating Aunt Rachel at Field Day is here!”
“It’s me, silly. Aunt Laine.” Laine can’t stop herself from nervously riffling through her hair this time.
“AuntCharlaine lives in Cali-fornya,” Darla informs her, and is about to shut the door in her face when she sees me standing behind her. “Oh hi, Zoe!”
Darla runs barefoot onto the porch to hug me, her little arms like a low-slung belt around my hips.
“Hey, Dar-Dar.” I feel a rush of embarrassment at Darla’s enthusiastic greeting. “Chance always brings the kids to our family events,” I say by way of explanation, but Laine just nods, her smile tight. I look down at the dirt-smudged cheeks and bright eyes staring up at me. “Thisisyour aunt Laine, though, Darla. I can vouch for her.”
Darla turns to look at thisAunt Laineagain. “If you say so.”
With that, Darla grabs Laine’s hand and pulls her inside. “I found Zoe and somebody named Aunt Laine on the porch,” she announces, as though she’s dug us up like a pair of shiny beetles for all to see.
Chance’s son Benny, Darla’s twin, waves at us from the table, where he’s meticulously laying out silverware beside each place setting. It makes me smile. That was always mine and Rachel’s job.
“There you are,” Mrs. Woods says as she hurries into the dining room with a covered dish. “I was beginning to think y’all weren’t going to come.” She fixes us with a stern look, but that’s as far as theyou’re-in-deep-trouble-missyvibes go.
“Mom, it’s not even seven yet.” Laine checks her watch. “We’re early.”
“Charlaine! You didn’t bring your pet goat, did you?” Mr. Woods says gamely, setting a large platter of fried chicken in the middle of the table. He holds out his arms, smiling fondly at his eldest daughter. “Come give your pa a squeeze.”
Laine does, and for the first time since she showed up on my doorstep tonight, her tension seems to melt.
“Zoe Brennan!” Ezra’s eyes light up for me next. “Good to see you, darlin’! Awful sorry to hear about your grandmother. How’s Cosimo holding up?”
