Chapter 17 #2
The crowd rustled, officially disturbed now. Their necks craned to look at me; their murmurs zipped through the air. Aubrey distanced herself with a subtle step away.
“We’ll speak later, Louisa,” Grandpa said in a low, terse voice. “As I was saying—”
“WHAT—ABOUT—THE BAR!” I shouted again. I was scaring myself now, feeling completely out of control, and yet I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d tried.
There was a whine of feedback as Blond Lady moved the microphone and shuffled my grandfather aside. “Honey, I understand people have attachments to different things, but this really is the best thing for the university, and your uncle would have—”
“It was HIS bar!” I screamed.
The crowd reached a fever pitch, not bothering to lower their voices anymore. Women scowled at me; men widened their eyes like I was disturbed. The server from the Cricket stood stock-still on the perimeter of the room, watching me anxiously.
“Louisa!” Grandma hissed. “Be quiet!”
“No!” I was on the edge of a precipice, my throat thick with fury and grief, my emotions threatening to boil over. “I’m tired of staying quiet! I’m tired of you erasing us!”
“George wanted his football legacy to—”
“You wanted that!” I screamed. “He was more than just a football player! He was the owner of that bar!”
“Sweetheart, you’re confused,” Blond Lady said patronizingly.
“The bar we’re talking about is … well, it’s…
” She licked her lips, clearly trying to figure out how to put it, and a dark, slithering satisfaction came over me as I watched her struggle.
“It was a gay bar,” the woman whispered finally, trying to tell me without the ears of the crowd.
“You’ve got it confused with some other place—”
The dark rage swallowed me up, and my body shook against the restraints I’d been feeling all summer, and my voice was ringing out before I could stop it—
“George Wade owned that gay bar! He was a gay man, and you can’t just erase that part of him!”
The crowd went unnervingly silent. Their shock was so sharp, so palpable, that I felt it in my lungs.
Suddenly, Dad’s hand was on my shoulder. “Louisa, enough,” he murmured into my ear. “Let’s go outside and—”
I wrenched away from him, slammed my champagne flute on a table without seeing it, and bolted for the patio.
Outside, I gulped down the air, my body heaving as if I’d been drowning. My senses returned to me slowly: the screaming insects, the cramping in my hands, the filmy aftertaste of champagne. My heart thudded violently and an itchy hot rash spread across my neck and shoulders.
“What the hell, Louisa?!”
Aubrey was there, gripping my arm to get my attention, her eyes blazing in the glow of the string lights.
“Uncle George,” I whispered, still reeling.
“Yeah, Uncle George,” she said heatedly, “the man you just outed.”
“I didn’t out him,” I muttered, dazed.
“You just fucking did!” Angry tears pricked her eyes, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away. She glowered at me like she had never seen something so repulsive in her life, but the longer I stared back into her dark, raging eyes, the more I saw her wounds and her fear.
“People need to know,” I managed at last. I shook my head, cleared the rushing from my ears. “They need to know who he really was, how they’re distorting his—”
“That’s not for you to decide!” she yelled. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe—after all the stuff Hannah and Baker talked about the other night—”
“Is this about him, or about you?” I yelled back. I swelled with anger again, felt it sink me like the rush of water through a boat. “He’s dead. He’s dead, but we’re alive, and they can’t keep acting like we’re not right fucking here!”
The sound of jarring metal—the patio door banging open—and then Coach Calhoun was descending on us like a ferocious predator who’d been deprived of his kill. Aubrey made a jerky movement, turning her body completely away from mine.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded, stalking toward us. For one fleeting second, I thought he was screaming at Aubrey, and my sudden anger evaporated as I moved to stand in front of her. Then I realized his rage was directed at me, and the unchecked wildness of it knocked me breathless.
“The hell was that, hmm?” he screamed. “What was that ridiculous, childish, selfish tantrum you just threw in the middle of my party?!”
I steadied myself and looked up at him, kept my eyes trained on those scathing blue eyes, the eyes he’d given Aubrey.
In that moment, I loathed Rhett Calhoun like I had never loathed another human being before; and deep in my psyche, in my heart of hearts, I was shocked and ashamed to realize that I could understand it suddenly, this white-hot hatred of another person, this molecular impulse to silence them, to cage them, to remove them from the table at all costs.
“It’s not your party,” I said with as much disdain as I could muster.
He towered over me, his voice spitting with rage. “Do you realize you just ruined years of careful planning—fundraising—leveraging—you just hijacked the focus from our program and players to make it about you and your precious specialness—”
“Back off, Rhett!” yelled a new voice. The door had banged open again, and my dad was rushing toward us with a fury I had never seen in him before. He looked like he wanted to tackle Coach Calhoun to the patio stone and rip his limbs off one by one. “Don’t you dare talk to my daughter like that—”
“This answers the question, doesn’t it,” Coach Calhoun interrupted, sweeping an arm over us. “You’re the one indulging her, coddling her, letting her run sideways—”
“As opposed to you?” I yelled. “What kind of dad do you think you are, Coach?”
“Louisa, stop,” Aubrey hissed through her teeth.
I whirled on Aubrey. “You knew about this, didn’t you? That the deal had already gone through?”
Aubrey gawked, unable to answer me, her petrified eyes darting to her dad.
“I’m out of here,” I said with as much disgust as I could muster. I stormed off the patio, down the back steps, and away from the sickening cocktail party happening inside.
“Louisa, wait!” Dad shouted after me, but I kept my back to him and swept into the night with a dark, blistering feeling like I was ready to watch the world burn.