Tell Me Something Real Read online

  I turn and walk away from her, no goodbye or backward glance. I get to Jacqueline and dodge her lips, instead taking the drink out of her hands and gulping deeply. It’s watered down, and not nearly potent enough for me, but I take it all anyway before motioning to her. “Got any more of this rum?”

  She smiles and reaches behind her, bringing out the entire bottle. Coconut rum—not my first choice, but it’s better than nothing. And it does the job.

  An hour later, I’m seated back in my chair, Jacqueline’s lips at my neck, and her busy hands fighting under the hem of my T-shirt. I’m just drunk enough to feel a nice numbing buzz—one that filters out everything except for the easy stuff, like the way Jacqueline is doing all the work, her hips moving and hands searching, while I let my hands rest at her thighs, occasionally dragging her forward or pushing her backward so I can feel what I need.

  She lets out a groan that neither of us believes, but since it makes her even more committed to achieving her goal, I don’t worry about it. This—randomly hooking up—this is something I understand, something else that isn’t different from town to town, regardless of money. It’s primal, a little sloppy, and about getting what we both want.

  “What’d you say to Lincoln?”

  It takes me a minute for the words to process, and by then, Jacqueline has stopped moving and turned around to glare at Colt. Since I was on the verge of seeing how willing she was, despite the not-very-private setting, I glare as well.

  “What?” I ask

  “What’d you say to Lincoln? I can’t find her.”

  “Your puppy run off, Colton?” I shake my head and stand, ignoring Jacqueline’s squeals when I take her with me. Setting her aside, I face Colt. He’s no longer towering over me, but fuck he’s big. I’m not used to being shorter, and I hate that at this angle, I still have to look up at him.

  “Ever think that your girl might have run off because she saw you tonsil deep in another girl not even twenty feet from where she was sitting?”

  He frowns—not the frown of a man whose been caught lying, or whose plan has backfired, but like a man confused. Jesus, is everyone here slow? “She saw me with Jasmyn? Why would that make her run off?”

  “Jasmyn? Ugh, what a slut.”

  Colt fires a look at Jacqueline. “Says the girl who was just dry humping a guy she met four hours ago.”

  “God, you’re an asshole.” I feel rather than see her toss her hair. “Ford, I’ll be over getting a drink when you’re done here.”

  “I’m done,” I say, but Colt grabs my arm before I can turn away from him. Jacqueline stops when I do, and I look from his hand to him. “Back off, Farm Boy. I don’t know where your girlfriend is.”

  “Best friend,” he bites out. “Lincoln is my best friend, not my girlfriend. Now, what the fuck did you say to her?”

  “Christ, Colt, we all know she’s probably in a backseat somewhere. Isn’t that where she usually ends up?”

  “Shut your mouth, Jackie. You don’t know dick.”

  “Not as much as your girl Lincoln, at least.”

  Colt glares, but steps back. “Fuck the both of you. If she’s hurt, I swear, I will come back and beat your ass.”

  He turns and stomps away, and I let him, a little unsteady as the rum swims through my system. When I feel Jacqueline’s hand slip into mine, I look down at her. “Don’t worry about it. Your cousin’s been protecting Lincoln Brewer from herself for as long as we’ve been alive. He’s always yelling at someone for something they’ve done, when we all know it’s Lincoln.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jacqueline shrugs. “She has diabetes—it’s like this big deal. When we were in middle school, she was always passing out or acting drunk, and people were always blaming it on her disease. Colt would swoop in to save her, and all the teachers would look so sad, like she wasn’t somehow responsible.” Now, she rolls her eyes. “We all know she just wants the attention, like her mom. I mean, just don’t eat sugar. How hard is that?”

  I don’t say anything else, but I don’t stop Jacqueline from chattering, listening intently while she tells me all about Lincoln’s history. And, then, I watch across the fire as Colt—having found Lincoln somewhere—carries her to his truck, lying her down. He stays next to her, and though I can’t tell, I’d say he’s making sure she gets what she need.

  That’s something she doesn’t appear to worry about.

  Jacqueline’s wrong. I don’t know how I know, but I know Lincoln isn’t worried about attention. She’s worried about living like this for the rest of her life, and that… that I understand.

  “No, I haven’t had a juice box…because I told you, I ate on the way here from the lake—you freaking watched me, right after you watched me take my levels and do the ratios.”

  “You’ve been working for a while now, Linc. Your levels can drop suddenly.”

  I roll my eyes, wishing I wasn’t irritated with him for caring. But, good god, I am. “We just started working, Colt,” I say into my phone. “And it’s not like I’m the one lifting bales—I’m spreading salt. I’m fine, and you’re driving me crazy. Stop hovering.”

  “Then stop acting like diabetes isn’t a big deal,” he snaps right back. “If you don’t want me to worry, then take care of yourself so I can stop.” I suck in a breath, because ouch, but he isn’t done. “There’s juice in the cooler. Drink it—or don’t, you know, because you always make such awesome decisions.”

  “Colt,” I say.

  “I have to go. They’re getting ready to load the bales into the cargo containers.”

  And then he’s gone, and I’m left staring at my phone, wondering why we keep fighting. We never used to fight—not like this. The hard part is, neither of us is wrong. He’s right when he says my levels can drop without warning or reason, and I’m right when I say he’s hovering.

  “Trouble in best friend paradise?”

  Ford’s comment has me shoving my phone back into my back pocket, while I pick up my salt canister again. “Best friend? I thought he was my abusive boyfriend?”

  He doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed or regretful. “Jacqueline filled me in on your relationship last night.”

  I snort. “I bet she did. And what did Jackie have to say about me? No, wait—let me guess. I’m an attention whore, which is sort of like the regular whore that my mom is, who jumps into the backseat with every boy who asks? And I make bad decisions because I like being saved. How close am I?” His face tells me bullseye. He doesn’t say anything.

  “Well, she’s not one hundred percent wrong. I do get a lot of attention, and I do make bad decisions that Colt feels the need to save me from.”

  “Have you ever thought of just accepting help? Making it easier on yourself?”

  I stop in the middle of salting a bale of hay and look up at him across the barn where he’s been pulling smaller hay bales off the trailer and stacking them. Right now, he’s also stopped, leaning against the side of the barn while he wipes sweat from his brow with the bottom of his shirt. Honestly, he looks kind of like a model in the middle of a photo shoot: Rich Boys Getting Dirty.

  Yeah, I’d buy that magazine.

  “What’s that?” I ask, as shocked by the fact that he’s talking directly to me as I am by the sight of his bare stomach. Warm brown skin, sharp cut muscles…wow. I wipe my forehead, because it just got twenty degrees hotter in here.

  “Help. It’s obvious you need it—like last night. Why don’t you just let him help you instead of rejecting him and making things difficult for yourself?”

  His words are delivered like everything else he says and does: not quite condescending, and lacking in any forceful emotion so I wonder if he really cares, or if he’s just dropping off an observation that annoys him. And it should make me mad—mad that after twelve days of sweeping barns, running small service calls, and seeing me in this limited environment, he thinks he understands me enough to make these observations. />
  But mad isn’t really my default. I sometimes wonder if I don’t get mad because it would be like opening Pandora’s box—I might not ever get back to the way I am: controlled, a little risky, and ready at any moment to accept that bad things happen just because they can. I’ll either live through it, or I won’t.

  Ford is quiet, able to bear silence better than anyone I’ve ever known. My mother always has the television on, or is blabbering about something, whining about certain injustices, crooning to her newest douchebag boyfriend. And Colt, he’s pretty good at silence, but sometimes while he might not be making noise, I can feel it coming off him. My friend is complicated, and often I wish he would just talk and release the pain that he keeps trapped inside. But that’s for another day.

  I pick up my salt and start again, mostly because it’s easier to do something while I think about what to say. Rather than evade him, or try to work up irritation, maybe even anger, and tell him he doesn’t know a thing about me, I opt for the truth.

  “Summer is different than during the school year. And I do accept help. It’s just more difficult.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Again, his words are not menacing. Just there. I smile. “To you, it doesn’t make sense. The state takes care of me,” I explain before he can say something else. “During the year, I do accept help. A lot of help. Every day at school, I eat breakfast and lunch for free—and sometimes, when water’s been cut off, or I need to escape the house early, or there is no house and we’ve been living in a storage facility or a car or on someone’s dirty couch, I go to school early and use the showers in the locker room. The janitors let me in because the principal told them they could.”

  Ford stays quiet, and I wonder if he’s spaced out or on his phone, but then I hear him manhandling another bale, grabbing it by the strings because he’s too impatient to use the hooks, and carting it over to the rows we’re making. There are others—this barn is far too big for us to do alone, but because of its size, we’re all a little separated as we work with our team.

  “That doesn’t seem like help, so much as opportunity and mandates.”

  I nod, not making eye contact. “You’re not wrong—but not everyone needs those opportunities. Every month, I get pulled out of class to talk to a family counselor, a kind of social worker who floats around the district, and she makes sure I have a backpack and pens and pencils and notebooks and paper. She also checks in with me periodically to make sure I get new clothes, that I have a place to get clean, that I see a dentist once a year, and that I get my medical needs met to the best of her ability. She gives me strips and stores insulin pens in the front office for me.”

  When he drops the next bale, we both stop and look at each other. He has an unreadable look on his face, like he’s waiting for me to react. I don’t smile, but I don’t glower or break down in tears, either. There are times shame is thick and strong—times like when Colt gives up hard-earned money to buy me things I just can’t afford, or when Beau finds more work for me to do because he knows I need the money and won’t accept an outright handout. I hate these times, but I understand I can’t change them. Which is why telling Ford all of this isn’t really difficult, and it’s not emotional.

  I am poor. Not the kind of poor that means my family tightens their belts and lives in a two bedroom home with five people, all of whom contribute so we can get by and hope for someday where things will be better.

  I am the kind of poor that begs for money and still never has enough. I am the kind of poor that has the state twisting its hands on how to help me when I have a mother who is not in jail at the moment, and who hasn’t done anything outright illegal, forcing them to take me away from her. I am the kind of poor who has to choose between the lesser of two evils: try to survive alone, or take a chance on living with my mom and her sketchy bed partners because sketchy as they might be, when they’re sleeping with her, they often bring cash that we need to pay bills so we can stay in our rent by the day motel, or apartment.

  I could stop speaking now. He gets the point—whether he acknowledges it or not, he gets what I’m saying: sometimes, we accept so much help from strangers, it’s hard to accept help from those who know us.

  But, I started this, and it feels oddly liberating to say it all. “During cross country and track season, shoes and socks and running gear and a uniform magically appear in the front office with my name on them. When I crash after a race, Coach is ready with frosting, something he knows that will bring me up from my low. And, when my mom has blown through all of the money I scraped together for rent just so she can stay high, or worse—she’s given it to one of her boyfriends as an investment in their future—I accept help from Colt or Beau and Maggie.”

  When I’m done, my voice hasn’t changed, but I can feel my heart slamming in my ribs, my stomach flipping with nerves and—maybe—emotions, because as much as I try to accept all of this every day, I hate it.

  I hate being poor. There is no honor in the kind of poor I am—only embarrassment and the never-ending need for help.

  “Yeah… I still don’t understand why it’s hard to accept a carton of orange juice and a plea to be careful when you’ve already admitted you accept so much more.”

  I laugh—not only because of the dry delivery that is quickly becoming Ford’s identifier, but because, when he says it like that, straight out, it does sound silly.

  “It’s complicated,” I say, and turn back to the bales.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. And me being so dense, I probably wouldn’t be able to understand it.”

  Now, his voice is just plain snarky, and it makes me smile. “Not dense,” I say. “Just from a world where food and shelter aren’t luxuries.”

  An unreadable expression crosses his face, and then he looks away, jaw tight. “That’s right. I’m not dense, just a rich boy.”

  He walks away, hefting another bale and bringing it back without looking at me, but his movements are jerky. “No, you’re lucky,” I counter. He pauses for a second, eyes flashing to mine. “Everyone has something that’s hard to deal with, Ford. I think we actually learned this in Life 101 last year.” I try a smile, but he doesn’t return it. “Not having to worry about where you’re going to live, or how you’re going to eat? That doesn’t make you a rich boy—it makes you lucky.”

  He doesn’t really acknowledge that I’ve spoken, but something tells me he heard me… and he doesn’t feel lucky.

  To lighten the mood, I lift my eyebrow and smile at him. “Now, your five names? Those definitely make you a rich boy.”

  Ford lets a laugh loose —a sound that reminds me of an unused instrument, something that was once beautiful, but hasn’t been tuned in too long. “Four,” he corrects.

  We both get back to sweeping, and though it’s silent like normal, there isn’t a heaviness to the sound now.

  Thirty minutes go by before I see him stop and walk to the cooler. When he grabs two juice boxes and holds one out to me, I take it, poking the straw through before sipping. We don’t talk until we’re done for the day and we’re carting our brooms out to the back of the Gator.

  “Living is more important than pride,” he says.

  I halt, looking over my shoulder at him, noting he’s gorgeous even with several hours of dust and dirt and sweat on him. His brown hair shines bronze in some places, flipping out at the ends from the heat and the sweat. Oddly, I still imagine running my fingers through it.

  He repeats himself, more adamant this time, and I tear my focus from his hair and focus back on his face. “Pride gets you nothing.”

  I nod. “True—but for some of us, the ones who have always been, and will always be kids of the system, pride isn’t something we get to have often. And not for the same reasons as a lot of people. So, we take it in those moments when we work harder than or with less than the person next to us, because it doesn’t just mean a paycheck; it means we hold value, and importance, even for just that mome
nt. And it’s not often that we get to feel either of those things.”

  Four weeks after being shipped to Albany, I’ve finally found something redeeming about this sleepy, ass-backwards town: football.

  Originally, I began coming to summer workouts because I was desperate to escape the manual labor of sweeping, greasing down tractor parts, fixing fences, and more sweeping. But it didn’t take long for me to recognize one major bonus that came from playing football with farm boys who are looking down the barrel at their glory days: full contact practice.

  Sure, there are rules, and until last week when daily doubles started, we were “opting to play on our own without coaches,” but now that fall-ball has technically started, pads have come out, and the hitting has begun.

  My prep school in Seattle was small—rich, but small. It was the elite of the elite, and while we had a football team, it wasn’t anything to brag about. We went out, ran some plays, and won some games. At homecoming, we gave the leadership kids a place to drive their floats and crown their king and queen. Really, football wasn’t about football; it was an excuse to put girls in cheerleading skirts and throw a party every Friday night.

  For me, it was an opportunity to hit someone as hard as I wanted without repercussions beyond a penalty flag.

  Here, though, in this farm town of fifty-thousand hicks, football appears to be the only reason some of the guys around me even go to school. When I showed up for the first day of lifting, and Coach handed me my workout, I was sure he was exaggerating. And then I watched the entire group of 100 plus boys around me begin, and finish, the damn thing. Even that was nothing compared to the reality of full contact practice that began this week.

  Colt and I have tangled during the bag drill a couple of times already, and both of us have been victor at one point. The first day, I took him by surprise. He might have more muscle than me, but I’m fast. I got over my bags and had him on his back before he ever had a chance to wrap me up. Even the fifty up-downs Coach slammed me with for taunting didn’t make a dent in my high. The next time, Colt played it smarter, acting like the outside linebacker he is, wrapping me up tight and fast before taking me down. Then it was his turn to do up-downs.