THE REST OF THE WEEKEND passes in a haze of sleep, binge watching shows on Netflix, and subsisting on bowl after bowl of cereal. My phone hasn’t made a peep. I figured Alex would’ve told Owen why we left early and then Owen would’ve told Hannah and she’d at least text and try to coax me out of my carefully controlled cave, but nope. Not a word. And call me naive, but I really expected Charlie to call and explain the Girl. Again, a colossal nope. On top of that, my parents were busy with the furniture store they own downtown and I’m pretty sure Owen was sleeping off a legendary hangover, so I caught only glimpses of anyone on my way to and from the kitchen until Monday morning.
“How are you, my daughter?” Mom asks as I drag myself to the refrigerator for some yogurt.
“Grunt.”
“What’s new? Your dad and I haven’t seen you all weekend.”
“Grunt and groan.”
She laughs and hands me a spoon. I peel back the foil lid on a Greek blueberry.
“How are things with Charlie?” she asks.
“Grumble grumble.”
“Mara Lynn.”
“They’re fine, Mom. Just . . . still weird.”
She pushes a stray curl behind my ear. “I’m sorry, honey.”
I wait for a little more comfort, but it doesn’t come. My parents are pretty cool parents. They trust Owen and me. They have a sense of humor. They know when to back off and when to push. They don’t freak out when we bring home a grade lower than an A minus. And they were generally chill when I came out to my family during breakfast one morning last Thanksgiving break. But “Oh” and “Okay” and “We want you to be happy” are about the extent of their support. And hey, that’s more than a lot of kids get, especially in the South, where going out in public as a queer person can be like tiptoeing through a minefield.
Still, when I started dating Charlie, Mom got a little squirrelly. She’d stare at Charlie’s and my joined hands a little too long and she asked way too many questions about how things had changed between us. To her credit, I don’t think she cares what gender I date or who I like. With Charlie, she was honest-to-god worried about romance ruining things with my best friend.
A best friend is an irreplaceable person in a girl’s life, Mara, she said more than once.
It was annoying, but eventually, I agreed. At least that’s what I told her. In truth, I was worried about Charlie and me because I was incapable of being a normal girlfriend. A good girlfriend. I was defective, and ultimately, I knew Charlie would figure that out.
Not that I’d ever tell Mom any of that. My mother and I . . . well, we operate on a need-to-know basis. When I was younger, we were the kind of close that meant a phone call home at midnight whenever I tried to sleep over at a friend’s house. She’d come pick me up and I’d spend the rest of the night snuggled in between her and my dad. Owen would join us in the morning, bashing through their bedroom door and hurling himself onto the mattress. I was happy there. I had friends, but I just didn’t like being away from home, being away from the people I trusted the most.
The people I knew would never let anything bad happen to me.
All that changed after eighth grade. I tried to act like I always had, tried to make myself feel close to my mother again, telling her little things about my life in a desperate attempt to connect. But it all felt hollow. I know she felt it too—felt it and was completely confused and hurt by it.
“So have you picked out your outfits?” Mom asks now, a smile on her face while she pours herself another cup of coffee. The subject change is glaringly obvious, but it’s better than an I told you so. Still, I can’t help but smile a little, thinking about Empower’s newest mission, taking on Pebblebrook’s violently inequitable dress code. Empower is the feminist group and newspaper I founded freshman year, and my plan is to push every possible limit of the dress code without actually violating it. I’ll get hauled in to the office, probably more than once, and despite Principal Carr’s inability to find any infringement according to his handy-dandy measuring tape, he will demand that I change. I’m a distraction, he’ll say. Boys will be boys, he’ll say. If I’m a nice girl, I should know better, he’ll say. Because that’s what he says to any girl who shows a deltoid or has naturally long legs under her skirt or has to wear anything above a AA-cup.
And that’s when I’ll breathe fire.
For a second, I get lost in the simple beauty of it. The way I’ll take him down with words, with defiance, with cool logic and reasoned arguments. Just thinking about it calms me down, makes me feel as though I’m in control. Charlie says I’m obsessed with it—control. And she’s a little right, though she doesn’t know why.
The Dress Code Takedown is one of the few things I’ve shared with Mom. I knew she’d love the idea, and honestly, I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t ground me for all eternity if I end up in detention.
As expected, she literally squealed when I told her about it. The woman has two great passions in life: refinishing old furniture to look even older, and feminism. Before she and my dad opened the store five years ago, she wrote op-eds for Ms. magazine and still does a few times a year. She’s always tried to let Owen and me make up our own minds about stuff, and when I started Empower, she cried. Actual tears that required a tissue.
“Nothing’s final, but yeah, I’ve got a few ideas,” I say, licking my yogurt spoon clean and tossing it into the sink.
“Let me know if you need help. I pushed quite a few boundaries back in my day.”
“You didn’t burn your bra on the quad, did you?”
“No, I rather liked my bra. Although I did retaliate against my cheating boyfriend in high school by filling his locker with water balloons.”
“Water balloons?”
“They were very special balloons.” She winks at me and I can’t help but laugh.
Mom laughs with me, the golden-brown curls I inherited springing into her face, but then her expression sobers. She sets down her mug and comes over to me, cupping my face in her hands. “You know I’m very proud of you. It takes a brave person to challenge the institutional misogyny of the patriarchal system.”
Even though I want to roll my eyes at Mom’s verbose dramatics, a flicker of warmth spreads through my chest. But it blinks out with the next breath. Mom doesn’t know how much of a coward I really am. She’d write one hell of a cautionary op-ed if she knew the real reason I started Empower.
“Ugh, why are Mondays a thing?” Owen asks as he walks into the kitchen pulling on a dark-green Pebblebrook sweatshirt.
“Inevitable consequence of the weekend,” I say as Mom pats my cheeks once and releases me.
“Good morning, son of mine,” she says.
“Grunt.”
I bust up laughing while Mom whacks Owen on the back of the head with a rolled-up magazine. “Go to school. Be good.”
“Always am,” he says, chipper as usual, even though he still looks half hung-over and exhausted. Must’ve been some party.
Mom forces us to endure kisses to our foreheads and we grab our bags, heading outside at the same time. Owen frowns at his phone as I unlock the Civic and toss my stuff into the back seat.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Owen’s frown deepens. “Nothing. Just . . . Hannah’s not answering my texts or calls.”
“Did you guys have a fight?”
He glances up at me, his eyebrows knotted in the middle. “No.”
“Maybe her phone’s dead. I haven’t heard from her either.”
“Yeah.” His lips form a thin line as he pockets his phone. “Anyway, can I bum a ride?”
“It’s your car too.”
We don’t talk all the way to school, which is rare but kind of nice. I need the minutes to run through what I’m going to say to Charlie. On top of Empower, we have three classes together. I’ve decided to play it totally cool and ask about Girl because that’s what friends do. We ooh and aah over new crushes and tease each other about that inevitably weird first kiss.
Girl’s full mouth flashes through my mind and I swallow against the tangle in my throat. “This is what friends do,” I whisper to myself as I pull into the school parking lot.
“Huh?” Owen asks.
“Nothing.”
“You sound so convincing.”
“Really, it’s nothing.”
“Is this ‘nothing’ the redhead with Charlie on Friday night?”
I wince. “You saw them together?”
He waves a hand. “I vaguely remember something crimson-hued in Charlie’s vicinity. Then again, maybe it was just a giant Solo cup.”
“Were you really that trashed?”
He rubs his forehead with both hands. “Do you have to scream all your questions?”
I laugh and turn down the music a little. “Good thing you had Hannah to take care of you.”
He sighs, dropping his hands into his lap and turning toward the window. “Yeah.”
Some alarm in me goes off—some twin sense. “What’s wrong? You sure you aren’t fighting?”
But he just shakes his head and turns up the music. I can’t help but roll my eyes. Clearly, yes, they are fighting and probably about Owen acting like a total miscreant frat boy when he drinks. Hannah’s ridden his ass about it more than once.
“Good luck with Charlie,” he says when we walk into school, parting ways in the main hall to head to our separate homerooms.
“Thanks. Good luck with Hannah.”
He frowns but waves me off, disappearing into a crowd of his perpetually laughing orchestra friends.
I watch him, but my eyes don’t focus on him for long. Almost immediately, they start a search for Charlie. I run through my even-toned questions about Girl in my head over and over, determined to be a good best friend.
Except I never get to prove that I’m a good best friend, because Charlie is absent from school. So is Hannah, and neither of them responds to my messages. Consequently, not only do I spend the entire day obsessing over what I would’ve said to Charlie, I don’t even get to hash it out with Hannah at lunch or through texts, leaving me feeling like a dormant volcano about to erupt by the end of the day.
To top it all off with an irritating cherry, Greta accosts me on the way to my car.
“Hey, is Owen okay?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“He got called out of calculus and never came back.”
I frown. “He didn’t?”
“Hope he’s not sick. Tell him hey for me.”
I roll my eyes as we reach my car and she leaves, and then I take out my phone to text him. The cars around me clear out and still no Owen and no returned text.
“What the hell is with everyone today?” I whisper-yell as I drop myself into the front seat. I suddenly feel marooned on a desert island, all my friends nowhere to be found. Before I leave the parking lot, I text Alex and ask if he knows what happened to Owen. Surprise, surprise, he doesn’t respond either. I power down my phone, sick of looking at its stupid textless screen.
When I pull into my driveway back home, my stomach immediately goes twitchy. Both of my parents’ cars are in the garage, which is totally unheard of at three thirty in the afternoon.
I throw the car in park and jog through my dad’s myriad of carefully stored tools and furniture polish and paints, opening the garage door that enters the house through the kitchen. Out of habit, I kick my shoes off, and my gray flats have barely joined Owen’s ratty Chucks before I hear him.
“—swear to god, Mom. This is . . . I don’t get it.” His voice filters in from the living room. Our house doesn’t have one of those fancy open-concept designs. Each room is neatly in its little box, so a giant wall of cabinets blocks my view of my brother, but I don’t need to see him to hear the tremble in his words. The sound of it pulls my feet to a stop.
“He said the state attorney might press charges, Owen,” Mom says evenly, but there’s an edge to her voice, the kind she gets when dealing with an irate customer. “And you’re telling me you have no idea why?”
“No! I swear. I’d had a few drinks, yeah, but . . .” A sob cuts his words off and I hear him gasping for breath. I feel my own lungs shrink and gulp at the air.
Dad murmurs something I can’t make out, his voice soft as always. Still, there’s something off about the sound of that, too.
“Owen,” Mom says, “are you sure you asked—”
“She wanted to,” Owen chokes out. “I swear to god she wanted to.”
“Honey,” Mom says, and I hear the squeak of a body moving over our ancient leather couch. “We’ll figure it out. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. It has to be, right?”
“I’d never do that,” Owen says, his voice raised to a fever pitch. “I didn’t . . .”
“Of course not, sweetheart,” Mom says softly, trying to calm him down, but I doubt it works. I’m the only one who can get Owen to simmer down when he’s stressed or drunk. Well, me and Hannah.
“I’ll call the Priors again,” Dad says, his voice coming closer. “Surely we can work this out quietly.”
“It’s not only up to them, Chris,” Mom says. “It’s the state’s decision.”
“Well, I still think I should call.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Owen says, and he sounds so small, I can’t hold myself still anymore. I drop my bag onto the kitchen tile and nearly run into my dad on my way to the living room.
“Mara,” Dad says, eyes widening behind his black-rimmed glasses. His salt-and-pepper hair is sticking up in all directions, as though he’s been dragging his hands through it over and over. “When did you get—”
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “What’s going on?”
I don’t wait for my father to answer. Instead I circle around him, needing to see that Owen’s okay. He’s huddled in one corner of the couch, my mother’s arms wrapped around his back and his chest, joining at his shoulder. He leans into her, his messy hair messier than ever and his eyes red-rimmed.
“What happened?” I ask.
His gaze snaps to mine, something like fear blooming in his expression.
“Nothing,” Mom says emphatically. “Just a misunderstanding.”
“About what? Why is Dad calling the Priors?” Prior is Hannah’s last name. “Is Hannah sick or something?”
Owen’s mouth drops open and I wait for a joke to roll out of it like always when things get serious. When Grammy, Mom’s mom, had a stroke, he spent the entire four-hour drive to Kentucky quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail. To an outsider, it would seem insensitive, ill-timed, totally uncouth. But I know Owen. He did it to make me laugh. Make Mom laugh. Make us all breathe a little easier until we had to deal with reality.
But a joke doesn’t come. He watches me for a few more seconds before looking down at his lap, picking at a loose thread on his shirt.
“Mom?” I say, taking a step closer to them. “Please. You’re scaring me.”
She sighs, releasing Owen long enough to rub at one eye before looping her arm around him again. “Like I said, honey. It’s a misunderstanding. Apparently . . . Hannah feels like . . . she thinks . . .” Mom blinks rapidly, the color slowly draining from her face.
“Thinks what?” I tell my feet to move, to go sit on the couch, to take Owen’s hand, but something keeps me cemented in place.
Mom presses her eyes closed and inhales a huge breath. “Hannah feels that Owen . . . took advantage of her at the lake the other night.”
“Wait. She thinks that Owen . . .” But my words trail off as the entire scene clicks into place.
He said the state attorney might press charges, Owen.
She wanted to. I swear to god she wanted to.
“Took advantage?” I whisper, and Owen lifts his head to meet my eyes.
“I didn’t, Mar. You know I didn’t.”
“Took . . . advantage?”
But we all know that’s not the right word. The word we should be using lunges into my throat, trying to unfurl on my tongue. “Did you . . .” I shove the word back down. There’s no way in hell I can say it. There’s no way it’s really the right word. “Owen, did you . . . force yourself on her?”
“Mara!” Mom springs to her feet, her eyes blazing, her curls wild.
On the couch, Owen flinches, recoiling farther into the cushions. “No! Hell no. You know I would never do that, Mar.”
“I know you wouldn’t. I know that. So why would she say you did?”
“That’s enough, Mara,” Mom says, but it’s not. And I can’t stop. I have to understand. I need Owen to explain this. Because, yes, I do know Owen would never do that, but I also know Hannah would never lie about something like that. She loves Owen, so why would she lie?
“We had a fight, that’s all,” Owen says, raking both hands through his hair. He leaves them there, resting his forehead in his palms.
“You told me this morning that you weren’t fighting,” I say. Unshed tears sting my eyes; my thoughts tangle and scatter and I can’t hold on to one long enough to make sense of any of this. It has to make sense somehow.
“All right, enough,” Mom says. “Go to your room, Mara.”
I blink at her. “What?”
“You’re not helping. Go to your room and cool down.”
“No. I need . . . we have to . . . Owen, just tell me what happened.”
He keeps his face pressed into his hands.
“Owen!”
“Go,” Mom says. “Right now.” She places her hand on my shoulder and pushes me gently toward the hall. I feel boneless, weightless, so I go.
“It’ll be all right, honey,” she says. “You know your brother. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
She leaves me at the bottom of the stairs, a light squeeze to my hand the only other comfort offered. In the kitchen, I hear Dad mumbling into the phone. In the living room, I hear Owen start to cry again, Mom whispering support.
I stand by myself in the hallway, the unspoken word echoing through my mind as though it’s another language. The stairs unfold in front of me, but I can’t seem to push myself up. Instead, I find my keys and ghost toward the front door.
Open.
Close.
Car door. Key into the ignition. My body moves through the motions but my thoughts . . . where are they? My eyes drift toward the still-blue sky.
Not a star in sight.
Ten minutes later, I pull up outside Charlie’s house.