Georgie, All Along (70)
I hold up my hands in surrender, but I’m not sure I all the way wrestle the smile.
“Okay, you have to pick,” she says. “Black, green, yellow, gold, or”—she squints down at another can—“pink?”
I shrug. “It was on clearance. Hand me the yellow.”
She looks up sharply, clutches three of the cans close to her chest. “No,” she says, her voice firm.
I made Georgie a promise when I offered to come along with her tonight. Spray-painting the rock outside our old high school was, apparently, something she and Annabel had planned to do together—first, back when they were dreaming of their time as teenagers, and then later, when Georgie found her list again and decided to do it. Georgie says she can’t quite remember why they didn’t do it back when they actually went to this school, but figures it had something to do with Annabel’s mom, who was pretty strict. Apparently, this time, Annabel was more than game, but the baby she’s got coming wasn’t—mostly she’s got to keep her outings low-key, and for the last week her hip’s been bothering her enough that she’s been on bed rest.
So tonight, I’m a standin, and Georgie said the only way she’d let me come was if I didn’t do anything that could get me into trouble. I know that’s because of everything I told her that day a couple weeks ago. Tonight, she made me park my truck four streets over, and she says I’m to stay under these stands and aim her phone flashlight at the rock while she’s painting. Also, I’m supposed to run if anyone shows up.
“Come on,” I tell her, gesturing again for the can, because the truth is, I never intended to keep that promise. I’m not letting her go out there alone, and I sure as shit wouldn’t run from anyone who found us. My luck and it’ll probably be the same dickhead who used to work security at the football games here on Friday night. I know he knows I’m the one who slashed the back tires of his Firebird when I was sixteen.
“Levi, you promised.”
“I lied,” I say, and it’s strange to admit it so baldly. Once upon a time, I used to lie a lot—about where I was, what I was doing, what I was thinking. When I cleaned up, I told myself lying was something the old Levi did, that there’d be no cause to do it on the straight and narrow. But that was before I knew about Georgie Mulcahy, and I’d do all sorts of lying to keep her out of trouble. It doesn’t make me feel like the old Levi.
It makes me feel brand-new.
“No,” she says again, shaking her head. “You said you like to keep your nose clean.”
I reach down and snatch one of the cans she’s not holding. “I won’t get it on my nose.”
She blows out a heavy, frustrated sigh. “This isn’t worth the risk.”
“Georgie, there’s probably twenty-five years of spray paint on that rock, some of it real fresh. People aren’t getting arrested over this. Don’t worry about the risk.”
But she is worrying about it, I can tell. She’s going to need more convincing to let me go out there with her.
I step toward her and hold out a hand, hauling her upward when she takes it, the cans knocking together between us. She smiles.
“Good thing this isn’t that wasp spray,” she says. “I could spray your face and leave you here, incapacitated. Go about my business alone, like I meant to do.”
She softens the threat with a fast, hard kiss that lands crookedly against my lips, but I’m not going to let her distract me.
“I’m doing this with you. Let’s go.”
She shakes her head. “It’s such a silly thing; it doesn’t even matter. I don’t know why I wanted to do it, except that everyone else did.”
It’s Georgie who’s lying now, and that’s another thing I know from spending the last couple weeks with her. She doesn’t show me the journal, but she talks about it a lot—about everything she’s trying to learn from it, about how what she’s picked from it is stuff she thinks will help her in some way. If she picked spray painting this rock, then there’s a reason, and it’s not because everyone else did it.
I don’t say anything. That works pretty well on Georgie, I’ve learned. If I leave it quiet, then she won’t leave the thoughts inside her head.
She fidgets against me.
“I was thinking,” she says, talking pretty much to my chest at this point. “When people did this back in high school, it was kind of . . . you were saying, I was here, you know?”
“Sure,” I say, though I can’t say I understand the I was here impulse. For me, I was here until I wasn’t. It was bad here and then it was bad somewhere else, and I’d rather no one remember it at all.
“And when I wrote about it the journal, I imagined Bel and I . . . I don’t know. We’d get to high school and we’d make our mark. With our initials on the rock, but in other ways, too.”
She pauses and steps back from me, enough to shake one of her cans of spray paint. Clack clack clack.
“Bel, she definitely made a mark. I bet if I went inside that building right now, I could find her name on a debate trophy, or her picture hanging on the wall somewhere for all her academic achievements.”
I swallow, an uncomfortable pang of recognition inside me. If I walked inside that building right now, I could find something similar about my brother, and probably my sister, too. Evan’s football trophies, the all-American recognition he got in his junior year, his name listed as salutatorian for his class. I don’t know much about Olivia’s high school years, but it’s not hard to imagine she had successes. She was smart, athletic, had taken dance classes since she was little more than a toddler.