“You don’t owe him a vote or anything else.” Her voice breaks and she lets it, allows herself to sound—to be—vulnerable before him, allows herself to ask him for this one thing.
“You’re right, Nora.” But he’s shaking his head no. “We don’t owe Belsum anything. But I owe the people in this town.” He looks like his heart is breaking. “At least it will be fair this time. At least you’ll get your say.”
She nods and meets his eyes as hers fill. “It’ll be a landslide,” she says. “Right? Of course it will. It has to be.”
“I agree.” Does he? Or is he just saying that to comfort her? “I bet it’s ten to one, a hundred to one, kicking them to the curb. We’ll get the best of both worlds: everyone has their say and we get rid of Belsum.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and wills his words to God’s ears.
He puts his hands on the bar, palms up, and whispers, “I’m sorry.”
Everyone is sorry tonight.
Slowly, she goes over and presses her hands on top of his, not holding but palm to palm, and whispers back, “I know,” dazed by this latest twist of shared misfortune, which is, however, an improvement over the usual kind which she has to burden alone.
One
He doesn’t answer his phone or return my texts, but maybe he’s not getting them because his reception’s so bad. I can’t call his landline because anyone might pick up. So the only place to have this conversation is at school. And we cannot have this conversation at school.
Or maybe it’s that I don’t really want to have this conversation.
There might be a perfectly reasonable, totally logical explanation, a really good and fair and legit reason why River betrayed me, betrayed all of us, double agented, pretended to be on our side, and then consorted with the enemy. Maybe he got tricked into telling, or his grandfather came into town and kicked him till he confessed, or they threatened to make him drink tap water or bribed him with something great even I couldn’t expect him to refuse, like that box you put people in to saw them in half. Maybe he was hypnotized.
But I don’t ask him, not because these scenarios aren’t possible, but because they aren’t possible enough. Much more likely explanations include: I kissed you, but I was faking. I said I cared about you, but I didn’t really. I only pretended to be interested in you so you’d spill your family’s secrets so mine could get richer. I can’t believe you fell for it. I’d never be interested in someone as pathetic as you.
So I make sure not to be alone anywhere he is. When the bell rings, I’m already packed, the first one up and out of the room, like he used to be when he was getting beat up. When he tries to catch my eye, I flick mine away from him at the last second. When I see him coming in the hallway, I pretend I forgot something and turn back the other way. When a note makes its way to me hand over hand in history, I refuse to take it.
“I shall extirpate this missive for you.” Petra deposits it in the trash can with a flourish, so we know he sees. He looks miserable. But not as miserable as I must.
And plus there’s the vote, which is all my fault. Or, to be more accurate, as Monday would insist, it’s River’s fault he told his father, and it’s his father’s fault Omar had to call a vote, but it’s my fault for telling River in the first place, and if I hadn’t, there wouldn’t have to be a vote.
Which could go either way. On the one hand, no one in this town but Omar and Nathan ever had an opportunity to say yes or no to Belsum. Omar was lied to, and apparently Nathan can’t say no to his father. Lots of us would very happily say no to Duke Templeton, but Duke Templeton never asked us. So maybe now that the question’s finally being posed, enough of us will answer it the right way. Not all of us—not Mama’s guys at the bar, not all the ex-employees who dropped off the lawsuit when they got the opportunity to be ex-ex-employees instead—but enough. Sure, some of us will choose jobs and another roll of the dice. But most of us—enough of us—will choose anger and comeuppance and what’s fair and what’s right and having learned our lesson the really, really hard way.
I say us, but actually it’s them. We can’t vote. We’re not old enough. So even though we’re the ones whose future’s being voted on, we don’t get a say, and that’s too bad because we’d vote the right way for sure. I remember the Kyles explaining they had to kick River’s ass because someone had to take up the cause when their fathers dropped it to take jobs. I remember Mirabel saying it’s our turn now.