Chapter 12 Kylo
Kylo
Friday morning, Audrey’s reunion weekend
We have today off from school, and I am so, so happy not to be stuck at home this weekend with Audrey and her lame friends.
Okay, well, maybe they aren’t lame, but a high school reunion is so basic.
I will never go to mine. Right now, I’m driving back to Everest’s house, and the relief is, like, palpable.
I slept over at their house last night, but I forgot my retainer, so I had to drive back to the farm this morning and get it.
There were the friends, no Audrey, sitting at the kitchen island.
“Um, hi,” I said, then endured the usual boring questions.
How’s school? Is Mr. Blah-Blah still there?
Do you play any sports? Excruciating. Like, why can’t grown-ups just say, Hi, we’ll never see each other again, so I won’t torture you by pretending to be interested, okay?
I grabbed my retainer from my bathroom upstairs, tried not to freak out at seeing one of the friends’ stuff on my counter, then raced back to my car before Audrey got up.
I’m so glad I have my own car, and I’m being super careful not to speed, because I already got a ticket, which caused Audrey and Dad to totally lose it. I was doing fifty in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone. My bad.
I love being at Everest’s house. Their parents call me Kylo, even though, when they met me, I was still going by Mathilda.
Audrey doesn’t call me Kylo. Like, she can’t.
It’s so cringe when she self-corrects. “Mathilda . . . I mean, Kylo,” and “Mattie . . . I mean . . . Um, what’s your new name again?
” and “Ma-Kylo.” Um, hello? I’ve been calling myself Kylo for, like, eight months, and she still pretends to forget.
Mr. and Mrs. Snow have told me to call them Jack and Paige, but, like, I physically cannot get my mouth to say those words because I started life in the South, where kids never call adults by their first names without a title.
Mr. Jack and Ms. Paige sound way wrong up here.
Whatever. They have no problem with Ev’s pronouns and didn’t blink when Ev said they were nonbinary.
There are six kids in my class who identify that way, so it’s not exactly groundbreaking.
Everest’s little brothers, Winter and North (sick names, right?), like, worship Everest. We all do.
I’m still kind of shocked that Everest picked me when they could’ve had anyone.
I don’t know if we’re actually a thing, though. I mean, we’ve kissed. Twice, the second time being last night. It was nice. It was kind of weird, but I’m still new to this, so maybe it’s just that. I was also worried that my lips might be chapped.
Shit! That stop sign comes out of nowhere.
I stomp on the brake pedal. The tires give a little screech, and my seat belt yanks across my chest. My arms and legs go tingly with fear.
I just got my license three months ago. Audrey said I should wait till I was seventeen, but Dad, like, overruled her.
They fought about it, obviously. Well, they didn’t actually fight.
They “disagreed.” So they went back and forth, with Dad saying it made sense, that I could be more independent, and Audrey saying I was too young.
She threw down her usual guilt card: “Mathilda, honey—sorry, Kylo—don’t forget, my mother died in a car accident. ”
As if I could. The house is a shrine to “Grandma Kate,” which Dad makes me call her out of respect, sweetie pie, throw Audrey a bone, okay?
At least Audrey’s father doesn’t insist on being called Grandpa .
. . He’s just Burt, and we only see him a couple times a year.
The farm makes him sad, Audrey says. Him and me both.
I so didn’t want to move here. I was eight at the time, but obviously, no one cared what I thought.
Mee-maw and Papa, my real mother’s parents, were furious.
They even took Dad to court to try to stop the move.
At least I get to stay with them in the same house my parents and I used to live in.
“Your real home,” Mee-maw always says. “Don’t forget your roots, Mathilda.
” I don’t ask them to call me Kylo. They’re way too old for that.
Mee-maw loves to complain about Audrey and Dad, and it’s, like, validating, even if I wish she’d lay off after the first few days.
But for the past two years, I haven’t wanted to go to Georgia, to be honest. The friends I used to have there are, like, distant.
They say I sound like a Yankee, and they talk about things like teachers and friends I don’t know, and even though we still do stuff, I’m definitely fringe there. Awkward.
Here, I have Everest. I have other friends, too, but Ev is totally my best friend. And now maybe my they-friend.
The thing is, I don’t really know if I have the right feels for them.
I just, like, want to be them. They’re so happy all the time.
So comfortable in their own skin. Their life is everything mine isn’t.
Happy. Normal. Their parents say, Hi, nice to see you, here’s a snack, but they don’t try too hard because they have their own lives (hello, Audrey, take a note, okay?).
Everest’s house is small and ordinary, in town, on a street, not like our huge farmhouse with five bedrooms and a guesthouse and a million acres with cows on them.
Audrey used to have to drive me everywhere before I got my license, because town is ten miles away.
Everest lives two blocks from Main Street.
On the farm, it’s just Dad, Audrey, me and Gracie, who’s basically Audrey’s dog even though she was supposed to be mine.
We have three horses, and guess who has to feed them?
Me. Twice a day, or they’ll run along the fence or stick their heads out their stall windows and whinny.
Horses scare me. Like, they could literally crush me.
Audrey really wanted me to learn how to ride when we first moved here, and she wouldn’t let it go, even though I was, like, terrified.
She said I’d be glad I could ride and I’d get over my fear.
I didn’t. The first time I climbed on, I fell off and broke my wrist. To be fair, I was trying to show how not-for-me it was, wriggling around in the slippery saddle.
I didn’t think I would break my wrist. After that, Audrey didn’t bug me about it anymore. Just looked sad, her go-to expression.
The thing about Audrey is that she’s literally exhausting. Like a kicked dog who keeps coming back for more. She just won’t stop trying to be like her mother, who was a saint and perfect, apparently, and they were best-best friends, and she wants us to be exactly like that.
But I had a mother. I remember her. No one thinks I do, but I remember her tucking me in, lying on my bed.
I even remember her lifting me out of my crib.
I remember how soft the skin of her neck was against my cheek when she held me, how safe I felt.
I remember us making forts and how she’d say prayers with me at bedtime.
She sang funny little songs about ladybugs and butterflies and smiled all the time.
I remember her teaching me to write the alphabet—“Straight line up, slant down, slant up, straight line down. Look at that, sugar! M for Mathilda!” Even now, if I catch a whiff of her smell, my whole body, like, breaks out in goose bumps because it feels like she’s right there.
When she got sick, her smell changed to something bitter.
Her hair fell out. I remember Dad taking me to the hospital, and I was scared of how she looked, but I let her hold me, even though she felt bony and hard.
I wanted her to come home so bad, but not the scary skeleton version.
I wanted my soft, good-smelling mama, but the skeleton came, and she screamed sometimes, and I hid in my closet and sucked my thumb even though I wasn’t supposed to anymore.
Mee-maw brought me in that last day to say goodbye, and I fought her the whole way down the hallway.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to the skeleton mama.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to the soft, happy mama, either.
When my dad reminds me Mama did everything she could for even one more day with me, I always feel guilty, like it’s my fault she became a skeleton person.
I still have nightmares about going down that hallway.
But that soft version of my mother . . .
I haven’t forgotten her. Those memories are mine, not just what Mee-maw force-feeds me.
Then there’s Audrey, with her puppy dog eyes and in-your-face yearning to be Mommy to me.
If she could have just sat back and chilled, maybe we could’ve been friends or whatever.
When she does things like pick a bouquet of flowers for me on Mama’s birthday, or gives me a card on Mother’s Day to say she knows how proud my mother would’ve been, I want to scream, You didn’t know her!
She was mine! Go be sad about your own mother and leave mine alone!
For the past year, though, Audrey has gotten even worse. She stares into space a lot and doesn’t seem to hear me sometimes. Last month, I went out to feed the damn horses, and there she was, sitting in the tack room, crying.
“Are you okay?” I asked, and she jumped, even though she couldn’t have missed me coming in.
“Hi! How are you?” she asked. “Can I help you?”
“Um, Audrey, you’re the one who’s, like, sitting on the floor crying. Did you hurt yourself?”
“Um, no! No, I’m fine.”
“Oh-kay,” I said. I could practically hear my eyes rolling.
I fed the horses and filled their buckets with water, and by the time I left the barn, she was standing up.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she asked, like she wasn’t just totally weird.
Then I came home from school two weeks ago, and she was sleeping in my bed.
I mean, ew, right? I woke her up, and she looked at me funny, then left the room without a word.
I even asked Dad about how she’s been, and he said Audrey’s feeling a little blue lately and not to worry.
That’s the way he deals with everything—ignore and smile.
I mean, I love him, and he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, and when he and I do something without Audrey, we always have fun.
But there’s not a lot of there there, if you know what I mean.
He doesn’t actually work anymore, not since we moved here.
Instead, he has, like, the most embarrassing hobbies that no middle-aged guy should be doing.
I mean, wool-spinning, Dad? Then the goats, then the beehives that lasted only until he got stung, like, thirty times.
And now he’s a potter, and not a very good one.
Doesn’t he know how ridiculous it makes him look?
I still tell my friends he’s a carpenter.
A squirrel runs out in front of me, and I shriek and slam on the brakes.
Did I hit it? I don’t think so. A horn beeps behind me, and my forehead gets all sweaty.
I hit the gas again, lurch forward, then creep along at, like, fifteen miles an hour, looking for squirrels and rabbits and deer.
Finally, I get into town, and the idiot behind me hits his horn again, to remind me that I’m still not a confident driver. Bite yourself, mister.
I don’t want to bring all the bad vibes I’m feeling into Everest’s house, so I take a big cleansing breath as I pull into the driveway.
“Kylo!” calls Mrs. Snow when I walk in. “Everest is in their room. Go on up, honey. We’re thinking we’ll go to Stone Hearth tonight. Sound good?”
“Sounds great, Mrs. Snow. Thank you.”
“Call me Paige.” She smiles at me, and there’s no . . . What do you call it? No subtext. A wicked-nice change from home, that’s for sure.