The Boy I Love (13 page)

“What's this?” I said, picking it up.

“It's the list,” he said, “of local families who used to belong to the Klan.”

My heart did a somersault, I swear. I slid my hands into my lap to keep from snatching at the paper and tried to look as though I didn't care as my eyes scanned the list. I could hardly read, I was so scared that I'd see the name Piner.

But guess what? Our name wasn't there! I tried not to let out a huge sigh of relief. There were plenty of names I
did
recognize. This could make me a bad person, but for a moment that made me feel better. For example, I saw the name Kendall on the list, and there sat Hilary Kendall right in the front row, chatting with the person next to her like she didn't have a care in the world. And her family had been in the Klan! The Klan had done a lot of damage here after the Civil War, I knew that already. They had burned down the offices for the African-American newspaper and run a lot of newly prosperous African Americans out of town. But was Hilary Kendall brooding over this? No, she was not. She was just laughing and waiting for Ms. Durand to show up like the rest of us.

I passed the list back to Devon. He smiled like he never would've guessed his project could worry me. Of course, since his family came from up north, he probably just didn't get it.

“I wonder how it's going for Allie at the tryouts,” I said, not wanting him to know I felt relieved not to see my name on the list.

“She just texted me,” Devon said. “She's still waiting, but she made the first cut.”

Huh. Allie texted Devon while still giving me the silent treatment? That didn't feel too good. So I focused back to the discovery about my family at least not being so bad as I thought. Maybe we hadn't been helping out the Underground Railroad or anything, but maybe after the war our heads had got turned around. Good people like Dad and Holly didn't just come out of nowhere, right? Maybe I had relatives who fought against the Ku Klux Klan, or helped out with that newspaper. Maybe I would even research
that
for my American history project!

After class, I ran into Tim by his locker. He was talking to that football player, Jay, who kind of waved at me instead of saying hi, and I tried to remember if I'd heard him say a single word yet.

“Hey, Wren,” Tim said. He gave me this friendly little chuck under my chin. It may have been my imagination, but I thought I saw the girl at the next locker looking over like she wished Tim would be flirty like that with her. The three of us started walking down the hall together. Tim told me about a party that Saturday night over at one of the cheerleaders' houses. Given everything that was going on at home—not to mention what had happened to me at my last party—I didn't feel too optimistic about being allowed to go. I wasn't even sure I'd have the heart to ask, but who knew, maybe I'd get brave.

*   *   *

I have to say, the thought of digging up my family's secret honorable past cheered me up considerably. That afternoon when I got home from rehearsal, I saw the farrier's truck parked out by the barn, and I went right on out there to help. She and my mom had one of the newer horses out. He looked pretty skittish—none of us had ridden him yet—and even though they had tied him pretty good, he kept slamming one row of the stalls and then the other. “Hey, Trudy,” I said to the farrier. She looked up, and the horse pulled his hoof right out of her hand.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

“It's okay,” Mom said. “Could you hold his head, see if you can keep him calm?”

I walked around and grabbed onto his halter. Mom had named him Ulysses when he first came, early last summer, but for some reason we'd been calling him Rex. He was an especially beautiful horse—black, with only the tiniest white dot between his eyes. I lifted my gauzy hand and placed it over the dot, whispering at him to hush and stand still. “They only want to fix your feet,” I told him. Rex had sand cracks when he first came to stay, something horses get from training too much on hard surfaces. My breath made his ears twitch a little, but he seemed to quiet down; he let me scratch him under the chin, and Trudy and Mom got a good look at all his hooves.

“They're much better,” Trudy told Mom. She dropped his hoof and stood up straight. “Just keep up with the moisturizer, and he should still be taking it easy.”

Mom nodded, then said to me, “Wren, can you take him back out to the pasture?”

She and Trudy went into the little office. Trudy worked pretty cheap for my mom, giving her a rescue discount, but I had a feeling Mom was going to tell her they wouldn't be paying her at all. So when I peered into the office as I unclipped Rex, it surprised me to see Mom writing a check from her ledger.

By the time I got back to the barn, Trudy had packed up and left. I asked Mom about the money. “Oh, Wren,” she said. “I don't want you worrying about all that.”

“Mom,” I said. I knew my voice sounded stern, but I didn't care. “How could I not worry about it? Just how do you think that would that be possible?”

She sighed and pushed the hair out of her face. Then she put her elbow through mine, and we walked out of the barn. “You're right, Wren. Of course this affects you just as much as us. I just wish it didn't. I wish things were different.”

“But they're not different,” I said, “and it just makes me feel worse when you don't tell me what's going on.”

Mom looked at me the way she does sometimes, when she remembers that I'm sixteen instead of six. I saw her take a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “You know how Dad told
you we stopped paying the mortgage? Well, that's freeing up a little cash for the moment while Dad's still getting paid, plus there were donations for the horses that got adopted. I can pay for some necessities, but we do need to try to hang on to what money we've got before we decide what our next move will be.”

“But you don't know what that is,” I said, exasperated.

“No,” Mom admitted. “It could take a long time for the bank to get around to getting rid of us. Not that I want this to drag on forever. Believe me.”

“I hate that Dad's happy about it.” There, I'd said it. We were about halfway to the house at this point. The fact that I hadn't seen any sign of Daisy made me think Dad had probably gone on one of his bird walks.

“Oh, honey,” Mom said. “He's not happy. He grew up here. He loves it just as much as you do.”

I stopped walking and glared at her, hoping my dark expression would remind her she'd agreed to level with me. She took another deep breath.

“I think for Dad,” she said, “it's like facing the music. Finally the worst is happening, but at least he doesn't have to
worry
about the worst happening. Because it's already come. And you know, the past has always weighed heavily on him. It did on his father, too.”

“Sooo—they wanted to get away from the past,” I said. “But they couldn't bear to get rid of this place.”

“And now this place is getting rid of itself,” Mom said. She said it with a catch in her voice. We stood on a little rise, so we could see beyond the east pasture, the rows of brick houses that made up Cutty River Landing. All those houses were built on what used to be cotton fields.

Mom followed the direction of my gaze. “There are a lot of ghosts,” she said, “and there's a lot of shame. A whole lot of shame. You can't blame Dad if a part of him feels glad to leave that behind him.”

She reached out and took my right hand—the good, ungloved one. Part of me wanted to tug away from her. But I didn't. I just started walking again, and so did she, the two of us hand in hand toward the house that was still ours, at least for a little while longer.

Speaking of holding hands, on
Monday morning as I collected my books from my locker, I saw Devon walking down the hall, holding hands with a small, dark-haired girl I didn't know. I did know she was a freshman, though, because Allie had pointed her out as one of the few who'd made the cheerleading squad.
Hello?
I thought. Hadn't Allie been his girlfriend just this past Friday? She'd texted him about the auditions, after all. What the heck had happened since then? I wondered if Devon had been with this girl at the party on Saturday, which I never did get around to asking if I could attend. I knew Tim went because on Sunday he and I went swimming at his pool. His head was hurting real bad and his eyes were all bloodshot. He hadn't said a single thing about Devon and Allie. Except for complaining about his hangover, the only thing he told me about the party was that Jay drove him home. I wondered
what it was like to sit in a car with someone who never said a word.

When I got to American history, Allie was sitting way in the back. Devon sat right up front, his long legs stretched out under the desk, not caring who he might trip. He smiled at me as I walked by, like he thought I wouldn't even care about what he'd done to Allie. I didn't smile back, but I did say, “Hey, Devon,” like nothing he'd ever done could possibly bother me or anybody else. Then I headed straight toward the seat next to Allie.

Allie didn't look up as I slid into the desk next to her. She was wearing this floppy blue hat with a yellow flower on it, and the brim kind of hid her face. I ripped out a sheet of paper from my notebook.

What happened?
I wrote, thinking it might be easier for her to write and answer than say anything out loud.

Broke up with me,
she wrote back, in the saddest little letters you ever saw. At this point Ms. Durand came in, so I couldn't say anything. I just looked at her in a way that I hoped told her I was sorry she felt so bad.

*   *   *

After class Allie and I headed outside to the little stone wall that overlooked the football field. Hardly anyone was out there this time of day, so we could have some privacy. I'd be late for English, but talking to Allie was more important. She took off her hat and put it on the wall next to her,
and then she pulled a little brush out of her bag and started attacking her hair with these hard, furious little strokes. I could hear the strands popping and crackling.

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” she said, as she brushed. “I didn't even like him.”

“You
hated
him,” I said, giving the word extra dramatic emphasis so that even she had to laugh. “Maybe that's why he did it,” I went on. “Who wants to go out with someone who hates you?”

“No,” she said. “That's not why. He hooked up with that girl Rachel on Saturday. My parents wouldn't let me go to the party, of course. I don't know why they don't rename me Rapunzel and lock me up in a tower.” Allie whacked her brush against the wall, then told me what happened at the film tryouts. She hadn't gotten a part as an extra, but one of the casting directors offered to get her an appointment with a local modeling agent. So when she got home she confessed to her parents, hoping they might change their minds about her modeling. But instead they grounded her for the next two weeks.

“Two
weeks
! They just don't get it,” Allie said. “Nothing ever works out for me anymore, and the one thing I possibly
could
do, they won't
let
me do.”

Poor Allie. I racked my brain for something cheerful I could say, but honestly everything did seem awfully bleak.

Allie said, “I wish I'd never even come to this school. Maybe we should just go back to Cutty River.”

I froze. I didn't want to go back to Cutty River School, not one single bit. So far things
were
working out for me here. And I'd come here in the first place because Allie'd wanted me to. I wasn't going to leave now just because she hadn't made the cheerleading squad or landed the boyfriend of her choice. I felt bad for her, I really did. Last spring, Allie and I'd been a kind of team. A two-for-one deal. Now I felt more like just one person, and I was finding out I liked it that way.

But of course I couldn't come right out and say this. And I thought,
Maybe now's the time to come clean and tell her about the farm
. “The truth is,” I said, “I don't know where I'll go to school next year. Because my parents are losing the farm.”

“What do you mean, losing the farm?”

Hearing Allie say this, her face all confused like it couldn't possibly be true, made me feel very shaky. So I said the rest real fast. “I mean, my parents can't pay their mortgage anymore. They're going to get foreclosed on, and we have to move.”

“That's terrible,” Allie said. But she sounded kind of matter-of-fact, not like she really meant it. She picked up her floppy hat and pulled it down almost to her eyes.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And the one thing we know is, we can't stay there forever.” That last phrase made my whole throat seize up. Allie reached out and put her hand over
mine, the left one, which still had its gauzy glove. I could feel the weight and warmth from her hand but not her skin.

“Wren,” she said. “It was hard for me to leave our house in Leeville. But now that we're in Williamsport, I like it just as much. I may like it even better. The town, I mean, not the school. I know it's scary to move, but you'll see. It'll be all right.”

I blinked hard a couple of times, then studied her face to see if she was serious. In Leeville, Allie had lived in a nice house out on Honeysuckle Drive. It'd had a good-sized backyard with a privacy fence. The house she'd moved to in Williamsport was almost exactly the same, except a whole lot closer to the university. Did she really think swapping one house for another would be the same as losing the land where your whole family had lived for generations? Leaving acres of live oak and Spanish moss and a rolling river, not to mention fifteen horses and four cats? Swap our nice old farmhouse for an apartment?