Chapter 5
AUbrEY CALHOUN
Milkshake sloooooots
Me: so … I have some interesting news??
Me: spoiler alert: I canceled my flight!!
Me: instead of brunch, how about I bring y’all Zaxby’s?
Candor McDaniel: What!!!
Emma Donarski: OMG THIS IS THE BEST NEWS
Candor McDaniel: I’m so intrigued
Emma Donarski: YES ZAXBYS. We’re at my house!!
Me: Be there in 30!
Emma’s house hadn’t changed a wink—the same old brick town house with spindly black railings. The Rustin U garden flag was still planted off the front walk, weathered and sun faded from time. I parked in the open driveway and made my way to the door in the golden evening light.
Candor was the one to answer. “Louisa Ebeneezaaaaa!” she singsonged, swinging the door wide.
She was barefoot in yoga pants and a tank top, and I knew it was likely that she hadn’t been home since before the party yesterday.
She and Emma tended to flit between each other’s houses so often that they never knew where they left their AirPods or favorite sweatshirt.
“I can’t believe you’re still here!” Emma shouted from the hallway. She slid over in her socks and hip checked Candor out of the way. “Why are you still here? Please tell me you’ve come to your senses and are ready to matriculate to RU with us.”
“With you,” Candor said pointedly. There was a note of pride in her voice, like she wanted us to remember that she was going to Spelman, her mom’s alma mater.
I laughed and shifted my way inside. “No, I’m not going to Rustin … but I’m here for an entire month! I extended my trip!”
Their screeches were so loud that I had to cover my ears. I fought the urge to tell them that if I had things my way, I’d be here for even more than a month.
“The coven will be at peak strength once more!” Candor said. She put a hand on my shoulder as if to hold me in place. “Say more, but not yet. I need that Big Zax Snack.”
We ate in the family room, spread around the coffee table with our fried chicken, Texas toast, seasoned fries, and dipping sauces.
I had missed the tangy Zaxby’s sauce more than I’d realized, and when I plowed through my own too quickly, I switched to dunking my fries into Emma’s.
She was entirely oblivious, too busy making love to her Texas toast.
“Is it true,” Emma asked with her mouth full, “that people up north don’t do sweet tea?”
“It’s true,” I said solemnly. I took a sip of my own tea and let out a satisfied ahhhh. “If you ask for it, they’ll give you this really scared look and come back with regular iced tea and a bunch of sugar packets.”
“That’s so sad,” Candor said seriously.
“You’re so brave,” Emma added.
“Listen.” I sat up and finished chewing. “I’m really sorry about last night. I promise I wasn’t trying to ditch you.”
Emma waved off the apology, but she wouldn’t quite meet my eyes. “You’re fine, Lou.”
“We figured something came up,” Candor said, shrugging a bit too quickly.
I bit my lip. Neither Emma nor Candor was the type to hold a grudge, but I could tell I had hurt their feelings, even if I hadn’t meant to. My gut twisted with remorse, but I reasoned it would pass in a moment, because my friends would understand once I told them about Uncle George’s bequest.
“Something did come up,” I started. “It turns out Uncle George—”
But I never got to finish the sentence, because the front door burst open and a new girl swept into the room.
“AHHH!” Emma and Candor squealed, leaping to their feet as if Taylor Swift had just walked through the door.
They jumped all over the girl, showering her with even more hugs than they had given me.
The spark in their eyes—the one that had faded when I’d brought up last night—was now back in full force.
The new girl smiled brightly and squeezed my old friends with an easy tenderness. “I missed y’all! Who took my parking spot?”
And immediately, I absolutely hated this girl.
First, because she had interrupted my apology-slash-inheritance- announcement at the worst possible moment.
Second, because my best friends were throwing themselves at her like she made the sun come up every morning.
Third, because she had the audacity to call it her parking spot as if she came over here every fucking day, as if Emma and Candor were her friends and no one else’s.
And lastly, and most infuriatingly of all, because she was stupid hot.
She was close to my height, fair skinned, with shiny russet hair gathered into a high ponytail.
She had striking blue eyes and smooth, sun-kissed cheeks that I just knew would be as soft as a fucking kitten.
But mostly, it was the way she carried herself: blazing into the room with a fierce, easy confidence, like she was ready to confront anyone and anything in her path, like she might shove you off a mountain and then assure you, with a smile on her face, that it was your own damn fault.
“I did,” I said, squaring up to face her. “Who are you?”
I asked even though I knew who she was, because of course Candor and Emma had talked about her all year.
But I wasn’t about to make this easy for her, not when she had breezed through the door like she was entitled to the whole world and everything in it, including my two best friends.
I had just been through the strangest, most surprising, most uncomfortable days of my life, and I wasn’t about to roll over for yet another person who made me feel like I didn’t belong here.
The easy grin slid off the girl’s face. She gave me a bemused once-over, like she was confronting a particularly heinous goblin, and glanced between Emma and Candor. “So this is the famous Louisa?”
Candor made a valiant effort to pretend like I wasn’t being an asshole. “The one and only!”
“Louisa Ebeneeza!” Emma added, her smile faltering.
“Lovely to meet you,” the girl said in the same way my grandmother said Bless your heart. “I’m Aubrey.” She paused, and her steely gaze locked on mine. “But I think you already knew that.”
I clenched my jaw and stared her down, refusing to let her see that she had gotten under my skin so quickly. The polite part of me said, Apologize. Tell her this was a misunderstanding. But the exhausted, tenuous part of me said, I can’t deal with one more person who makes me feel invisible.
“Um—here!” Candor said, leading Aubrey to her Zaxby’s bag on the coffee table. “You can have some of my fries! We were just talking about Lou’s plans to stay for the summer. We can finally all hang out!”
The unspoken plea was obvious: Everyone, please be friends.
Reluctantly, I sat back on the floor and dug into the Zax sauce, determined to get my emotions under control.
Emma and Candor launched into small talk, both of them talking fast and high-pitched, clearly trying to smooth over the awkward introduction.
Aubrey settled herself on the couch and crossed her legs imperiously, refusing to partake in Candor’s fries.
“Anyway,” Candor said after a long monologue about the current phase of the moon, “what were you gonna tell us, Lou?”
I hesitated. I had been so excited to tell my friends about the bar, but how could I do that now that this girl had infiltrated? I didn’t want to share this precious new piece of myself with her.
“Um…,” I began. “So the thing is, Uncle George…”
Aubrey interrupted. “George Wade?”
I threw her an impatient glare. Did she honestly think she was part of this conversation? “Yes, obviously.”
She hiked her eyebrows like I was unstable. “Sorry, didn’t realize that was obvious.”
“I would think that Coach Calhoun’s daughter, who apparently considers herself besties with my best friends, would know very well that I’m in town because my uncle George died.”
“So you do know who I am,” Aubrey snipped.
“Did y’all know it’s a quarter moon tonight?” Candor interrupted loudly. “It’s actually my favorite phase because—”
“Uncle George left me a bar,” I blurted out, focusing only on Emma and Candor.
There was a shimmering moment of silence. Emma and Candor cocked their heads in unison, both of them staring like I’d spoken in tongues.
“I’m sorry, what?” Emma said.
“A bar! He left me a bar! Like, a physical space that sells alcohol!”
They shrieked. Candor jumped off the couch and Emma jumped off the floor. Suddenly the three of us were grabbing each other’s hands and dancing in a circle like a group of sugared-up kindergartners playing ring-around-the-rosy.
“Uncle George left you a bar!” Candor yelled.
“You’re rich!” Emma screamed.
“I own a bar!” I hollered at the ceiling, squeezing my best friends’ hands.
Emma turned to Candor with a delighted gleam in her eyes. “Do you realize what has happened?!”
Candor gasped and grabbed Emma’s shoulders. “Oh my god. The manifestation.”
Now I was the one to cock my head. “Excuse me?”
“We’ve been manifesting since graduation!
” Emma exclaimed. “For our first real night out! We’ve tried everything—fake IDs, hitting up Candor’s cousin, we even tried to crash a bachelorette party a few weeks ago—and now you show up and tell us we have a ready-made bar where we can drink and dance and make out with people! ”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” I said, laughing with my whole body. “I don’t have a carte blanche for partying.”
Emma furrowed her brow. “Louisa, you know I don’t speak Spanish.”
“It’s French,” Aubrey said from the couch, and we all turned to her, suddenly remembering she was there.
“She knows that,” I snapped. “It’s her way of being funny.”
“Okay, but what’s the bar?” Candor asked. She backed away from Emma and me to create space for Aubrey to join the conversation. “Where is it?”
“Get this,” I said, holding up my hands like I was about to do a magic trick. “It’s a gay bar!”
Emma and Candor shrieked again. Aubrey shifted on the couch behind them.
“Wait, did he know you were gay?” Candor asked.
“Wait … was he gay?” Emma asked.
I drew up short. “Um—” And truly, how was I supposed to explain this part?
I had reasoned earlier today that it was fine to tell my best friends the truth about Uncle George, but how could I tell them now that Aubrey was here?
Not only was she a stranger to me, but she was also the daughter of Coach Calhoun.
She had a direct line to the same Rustin Football machine that had long profited off Uncle George being straight.
But did that even matter anymore, now that Uncle George was dead and gone?
This is how Dad felt when he wanted to tell you, said a small voice in my head.
“You know, I’m not sure,” I said finally, pretending like the possibility had only just occurred to me. And then I recited my grandpa’s line, absolutely hating myself but rationalizing that there was no other way to get through this. “Apparently he owned a lot of different properties.”
“What’s it called?” Candor asked.
I breathed a sigh of relief that no one had pushed me on the question of Uncle George’s sexuality. “The Frisky Cricket.”
“Oh my god, that’s so cute,” Emma said, clapping her hands.
Aubrey shook her head. “They’re selling that place.”
It was like a balloon popped. Our giddiness evaporated as quickly as it had started. Candor and Emma gave me a baffled look, waiting for me to explain, and I felt embarrassed that I had to share the caveat of the sale on Aubrey’s terms instead of mine.
I glared at her. “How would you know that?”
She stared at me like I was being intentionally difficult. “Everyone knows that. The university has been scouting for over a year, especially down in South Rustin, where that bar is.”
Where that bar is. Her casual disregard set my teeth on edge. “It’s not ‘that bar.’ It’s called the Frisky Cricket, and I own it.”
“Okay…,” she said, as if she didn’t believe me. “Well, you won’t own it for long, based on what I’ve heard.”
“Do you make it a point to keep up with local real estate?”
She blinked as if I was dense. “The university is buying that land for the new football complex.”
There was a sharp pause. My stomach bottomed out as the weight of her words hit me. “What football complex?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.
“Their new state-of-the-art facility. Multiple practice fields, weight rooms, a film room … It’s all part of their ‘vision’ for growing the program.
That’s part of the reason my dad got the job here, because he was aligned with them on taking Rustin Football to the next level.
” She shrugged like the whole thing was completely rational.
“Didn’t Uncle George tell you all that?”
“Don’t call him Uncle George,” I snapped. “You didn’t know him.”
She held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry,” she said in a tone that meant she was the exact opposite of sorry.
“And your dad is involved in this?” I pressed, my voice rising dangerously. “Doesn’t he know about the Cricket?”
She shrugged like that was neither here nor there. “I don’t know.”
“Well, now you can go home and tell him,” I said, trying not to shake with anger. “Tell him it’s an incredible, irreplaceable miracle of a place and we’re not selling it for some stupid football complex.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll tell him,” Aubrey said dryly. “Hey, Daddy, I met this rude, combative girl today and she said to stay away from her plaything. That will go over so well.”
“It’s not my plaything.”
“You don’t even live here.”
“I’ve lived here longer than you.”
She let out a tinkling little laugh. “I’m sorry, are you for real right now? What, you want to hang out for a few weeks, learn overnight how to run a bar, take on the university like some kind of David versus Goliath?”
“Yes,” I said clearly.
“That’s delusional.”
“Aubrey,” Candor hissed.
But I had heard enough. “Okay, you know what? I’m out of here.” I clambered up from the floor and gathered my Zaxby’s trash. “Em, Candie, love y’all. Let me know when you want to hang out alone.”
And before they could do more than call my name, I was out the door and in my uncle’s Cadillac, reversing out of the spot that Aubrey thought belonged to her.