Luz, Rebound Read online

  Luz

  REBOUND

  Jeania Kimbrough

  Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Charles Ortiz for checking Spanish translations, and all the beta-readers of this novel who gave me valuable advice and commentary. Cover design by Silvana Bossa.

  Copyright © Jeania Kimbrough, 2015

  All rights reserved.

  Cataloging information:

  ISBN 10 0-9960562-1-1

  ISBN 13 978-0-9960562-1-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917284

  With gratitude to my father, Roland, who taught me a lot about unconditional love.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 1

  Chapel

  At eight-thirty the chapel bell sounded. We made our way from homeroom on the third floor down two flights of stairs that led to entrances of the auditorium. My best friend Kelli linked her arm around mine, ushering me back into the world I’d chosen to leave for a year. “It’s almost like you were never gone,” she said.

  I straightened my elbow so I could feel hers press into my ribs, my heartbeat accelerating with the push of adrenaline this moment held. Today I returned to Trinity from a twelve-month student exchange program to finish my last semester of high school.

  Nicole, my other best friend from before I left to Tasmania, took hold of the brass handle on the multipaned door and opened it in front of me to step through, giggling with excitement for the day in front of us. I grinned back in reply—her laugh had always been contagious—and immediately inhaled the fusty smell of a hundred-year history that impregnated the furnishings of the aged sanctuary. This smell, along with the familiar sound of creaking wooden theater seats mounted to the thickly planked floor, brought back the old routine for settling into the day ahead.

  Perhaps because it wasn’t easy to get in and out of the seats, there was strict enforcement regarding their use. Each grade had its own section, and within each grade we sat in alphabetical order.

  “They left you an empty one this semester,” Nic said, reading the question on my mind.

  “Cool.” My eyes shifted away from the immediate space of my closest friends and traveled up the highest slope of the chapel auditorium where teachers grouped together and monitored all of us below. Across the expanse of their attention and toward the front of the room sat the youngest grades newest to the school, and facing them were the stage and podium where I saw our headmaster standing. Kelli unlocked her arm, her hand squeezing my own before she shifted directions inside and moved toward the back and the teachers.

  “We’re over here now.”

  I followed, taking in the smiles, waves, and hellos from many of my former classmates and grinned back, greeting them. I made my way slowly to my row, almost as if I was a celebrity and I had done something grand to make them proud. Cooper Hainsworth stood up when I approached to let me in. Before he sat down, he hugged me.

  “Welcome back, Kara,” he said, a dimple accentuating his toothy grin. “Class of ’86, hey!” He put up his hand where I deftly delivered the expected high five, even though his gesture surprised me. I’d never felt I had much connection to this football jock before I left, and his exuberance now was curious.

  “Thanks, Cooper.”

  Nic winked at me as she and Kelli moved on toward their places a few rows behind me. Their last names, Oyuela and Perin, were closer in the alphabet to each other than mine. I moved in toward the seat waiting for me in my own row, past two classmates and a couple of blank seats, including Ryan’s, and past another classmate to sit between Lauren, Nic’s quiet, second cousin who lived off campus, and Matt, a smart, talkative guy who worked on yearbook. I exchanged greetings with both of them, aware that the decibel levels were drawing down and that service would begin in a few minutes. I was disappointed to see Ryan’s chair empty. I’d been looking forward to seeing him again, even though I’d already heard much about what he’d been up to since I’d been gone.

  “He made first-string football this year,” Kelli had replied to my unasked question. “And Ryan seems really serious about Christie.”

  “It’s ridiculous the way he carries her around sometimes,” Nic added. “It’s funny, actually. You won’t believe it when you see it. He’s changed so much.”

  “Huh.” I’d been sparing in my replies, trying to show it didn’t really matter. But I was interested. After breaking up with Ryan more than a year ago, I began the one-year high school exchange in Australia last January, where he had only written me once, despite the fact that the last words we spoke were a kind of sad promise of being a Heathcliff and Catherine to each other forever. Maybe it was juvenile, and of course I had fallen in love with Ben since then, but Ryan had been a constant in my life before: a part of the comfort of this place and a source of memories that made me feel homesick when I was gone. I had been looking forward to seeing him as much as my girlfriends in some ways. Not because I wanted to get together again as a couple, but because he knew me like another best friend when I was last here.

  “So, did you see some kangaroos while you were there?” Matt was asking me when my ears honed in on the reverberation of Ryan’s laugh to my other side.

  “Lots,” I said, turning toward the sound, focusing in on the crookedness of his stance, realizing he was trying to keep one arm around Christie while the other reached back to cushion the closing door behind them softly into place. I stared as he straightened and waited for his eyes to lift. He was concentrating on something I couldn’t see, bending down toward Christie to hear something she must have been saying in a low voice. Finally, he lifted his eyes to lock onto my own.

  I felt the smile spread across my face. There was my old friend, his large, deep-set eyes full of mood and intelligence. A thrill ran through me to see him again. But instead of smiling back at me, his chin edged up only slightly in an almost imperceptible nod, and then his gaze shifted downward again. He didn’t look back up.

  My own smile faltered, drooping with my mood, and I became conscious of people’s eyes on me again, except this time there wasn’t the same aura of friendliness I had experienced when I walked into this place. A knot rose up into my throat. I realized that just as my seat had been saved for me in advance, members of my class had anticipated this moment as well. Their silence was watchful. My ears burned, just like that old adage.

  Wow. I swallowed hard. Internally I cringed, wondering what just happened. But the last year of learning to more carefully censure what I said and did shifted into gear, and I let my outside self calmly turn my attention back to Matt.

  “I saw Tasmanian devils, echidnas, emus, possums, even a platypus. You wouldn’t believe how incredible their animals are.” My voice was low but animated. “I stayed on a couple of Australian farms and saw some of them in nature.”
I continued with my story, noticing the sound of bodies rising in my row. Ryan must have been making his way to his seat, but I resisted turning my head. I thought about ignoring him, especially since he’d dissed me just a moment ago, but then I decided I was more grown up than whatever silly slights people were expecting us to present now. This was, after all, one of the things I found so limiting about this high school. In a graduating class of around fifty, too many people thought they knew something about each other’s business, and everyone had an opinion. So maybe they thought I deserved it if Ryan barely acknowledged me, but I would show him, them, and even myself, I was bigger than this.

  I waited for the next lull in the conversation with Matt and then casually turned away from him, looking toward Ryan. He was shifting in his seat and I thought I smelled him—that designer fragrance he started wearing sometimes before I left. His long, tawny fingers splayed across a Jack London novel that was stacked on top of a black composition notebook. The fact that he seemed to still be writing gave me secret satisfaction—obviously, he hadn’t changed entirely—and then I looked up at his profile again and spoke.

  “Hi, Ryan,” I said softly, but loud enough for him to hear me. His head quickly turned toward me, as if he’d been expecting it and was prepared for this interaction.

  “Hello, Kara. Welcome back.” Then he snapped his head away from me, toward a friend on his other side, and asked him something about the weekend.

  I turned forward in my seat again, struggling to keep my face blank. I heard someone snicker behind me.

  “You’re so lucky,” Matt whispered, and the chaplain, wearing a black robe with golden embroidery rose, bringing the Bible in one hand together with the other in front of him. “My friends, let us pray,” Chaplain Robinson said.

  My head, as did most of those around me, bent down in silence. The first chapel prayer began in meditative quiet, which would be followed in a minute or two by a scripture and lesson.

  With my eyes shut, the light of the room hung in my lids, red-and-white blurs that weren’t so much reflective, as distracting. I tried to breathe them in like a yogi, considering what I might pray for. The faces in this room from when I first entered flashed in front of me, followed by those of friends and fellow exchange students to whom I said good-bye at the airport in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. Thoughts of my own siblings’ and parents’ faces at the table the first night I had returned to the house where I was raised came next, then Ben’s solemn expression the last time I saw him, and finally the sight of Ryan three seats to my right. These were all people who were important to me, people I was thankful for, people I even felt responsibility toward, even though Ryan was being so immature and cold to me now. Another breath. I knew I hurt him when I left , but I never suspected he would act this way toward me after so much time had passed.

  I faded into the memory: I had snuck him into my dorm room when I was packing up to leave Trinity before Christmas break. “I think we should be free to see other people during this year ahead,” I had told him. We had been dating exclusively for the past five months.

  Long lashes hooded his large, hazel eyes when he looked down at the floor in response. The shoulders of his lanky frame in the blue-checked button-down shirt sunk a little. He looked so handsome then, and so vulnerable. This was one of the last mental pictures of him I carried with me for a year—that and the sight of his long, graceful hands hanging loosely from his sides. They were perfectly shaped and full of expression to me. I knew them as writer’s hands and would always judge others’ by his own. He loved to compose poetry and stories, just like me, but maybe he was slightly better at them. I knew then what I would say might not make sense to him, but that it was the cleanest way to leave.

  Even so, I concentrated on my suitcase when I told him, averting my own gaze. “You are like my Heathcliff, and I am your Catherine. You know I love you, but I’m not ready for happily ever after. I need to feel free.”

  We had read Wuthering Heights that previous semester. The pet names that had started as a joke now pierced us both.

  “But I don’t understand. I love you. You say you love me. Why do you have to go away from us? What did I do wrong?” His voice had broken at the end.

  I’d have to talk to him. Apologize. I was immature before I left—selfish, really. If this past year had taught me anything, it was to try to see a situation from someone else’s perspective. I didn’t see his then. Or if I did, I didn’t take it into consideration. I wasn’t respectful of it. That had to be the reason he was being so distant now: It was retaliation. I will forgive him for it, I thought, turning my attention back to the moment of prayer. And he’d always forgiven me.

  Help us all…I heard the voice inside my head, concentrating again on the present moment of supplication…be okay. It seemed pushy to ask God for too much more than that. Matt was right. I’d been lucky.

  Chapter 2

  Blonde

  “So how’d ya like Christie’s hair?” Nic asked at lunchtime.

  We had gathered our trays and were sitting at the table I remembered as ours for the past couple of years. It was located in the middle of the cafeteria, with a choice view of everything around us. Ryan and Christie had just walked into the lunchroom together, holding hands. It was a remarkable sight. When I was with him, I never was too public about it. I never hung on him, never spent all my free time with him. She was different. As at the beginning of chapel this morning, they seemed to find each other during the ten-minute breaks between classes, like when I saw her with him after Spanish. I stayed back after the first bell rang to chat for a few moments with my teacher, Señor Tovar, and had to walk past them near the doorway in the hall with their arms around each other’s waist as I left.

  “How long has it been blond?” I asked casually. Christie’s once auburn, wavy locks were now relatively straight and fair, like my own.

  “It changed over the summer,” Nic said. “They came back to school this fall together, and it was like that then.”

  “Really?” I studied her roots. A little too brassy, in my opinion—I guessed because blond was so far from her original color, or because she didn’t have it done professionally. She went heavy on the eyeliner, shadow, and lipstick. When I saw her up close after Spanish class I even noticed the makeup base on her face was lighter than the rest of her skin tone. She looked a little garish actually, but I checked myself from saying it out loud. Most of the girls at my school wore too much makeup, including my friends, and I did too, before I left. I wasn’t wearing any now. I guess I wanted to make a statement that I had changed, too, and that I didn’t need anyone’s approval for it, either.

  “I think she said they hooked up this summer when she saw him around Nob Hill and gave him a ride home,” Kelli added.

  I examined the date on my chocolate milk carton and closed it up, wrinkling my nose. It wasn’t expired, but the cafeteria was burping its end-of-lunch odor of wet rags, disinfectant, and cooked turnips that commenced when the janitor started wiping down the tables. “You talk to her?” I didn’t remember them being friends before I left.

  “We’re on the drill team together,” she said, almost apologetically. Kelli was captain this year. She had always been one of the most popular girls in our class, always voted into an office in student government, Her long, chestnut hair complemented dramatic honey-colored eyes, and I’d seen lots of guys stop walking down the street and turn around just to get a better look at her. Amazingly, her attitude wasn’t affected by the constant attention. She was as polite to the hottest boy in school as she was to the homeliest of classmates suffering from zits and halitosis.

  Compared with Kelli and even Nic, I was shy, maybe even reserved with people who were new to me. I’d been told before I was hard to get to know, but I saw myself as just someone who knew early on whether I was drawn to a person, or not.Certainly Nic and Kelli and I had been fast f
riends. We were like sisters and had always been, ever since those first days in the dorm as fourteen-year-olds, where sixteen of us bonded as the only freshman girls living on campus. The ties were still strong, even though I had been away—though perhaps not stronger than ever.

  “Is she any good?” I couldn’t resist a little snark over Christie’s worthiness at whatever she did. She seemed like such a step down for Ryan.

  “Yes.” She nodded squarely at me. “She is.” Her attitude, which apparently had caught a whiff of my own, wasn’t apologetic anymore. “She would be next in line for captain if something happened to me.”

  I could feel my mouth twitch, containing a grimace. Touché. One thing we didn’t approve of as a group of friends was general bitchiness. We didn’t let each other disparage others for just any reason, probably because the upside of having a small class size was that it made us feel and act somewhat like family most of the time. There was never serious fighting in Trinity. It always felt safe that way because people tried to get along and “do unto others…” as the principle went.

  Nic raised her eyebrows and lifted a forkful of potatoes and gravy off her plate. That Kelli was so defensive of Christie this early in the conversation seemed to surprise us both. Wasn’t it natural to be a little cynical of someone who was obviously trying to copy your look while she dated your ex-boyfriend? Still, it wasn’t worth disagreeing over. After all, I didn’t want Ryan back. I was just curious about his choices. I picked up an apple from my tray and put it in my bag for later. “I didn’t realize…” I murmured, pushing the tray away and crossing my arms on the table in front of me, letting the subject drop.

  My eyes wandered to the big clock near the entrance to see how much more lunchtime we had left. I wished I could escape to my dorm room and retreat for a while. It was draining being back. I missed it when I was gone, but my thoughts had already slipped back to the last days in Sydney, hanging out on Bondi and Manly beaches with friends, working on my tan, playing in the surf, reading and writing in the sand. Albuquerque, New Mexico was a long way from that place.