One of the girls, a blondie named Georgia, flaunted her new Polaroid camera, which her dad gave her on their latest Palm Springs vacation. She took pictures of us boys—Jaime, Vicious, Trent, and myself—flaunting her assets in a little red bikini and clasping the freshly printed pictures between her teeth, handing them to us, mouth-to-mouth. Her tits spilled out of her small bikini top like overflowing toothpaste from a tube. I wanted to rub my dick between them, and knew with certainty that I would, by the end of that day.
“My, my, this one’s going to be gooood.” Georgia used an indefinite amount of O’s for the last word for emphasis. “Looking uber-sexy, Cole,” she purred when she caught me on camera pounding the remainder of the beer with a blunt clasped between my fingers and slamming the can on my hard thigh.
Click.
The evidence of my wrongdoing slid out of her camera with a provocative hiss, and she plucked it with her glossy lips, bending down and handing it to me. I bit it and shoved it into my swim trunks. Her eyes followed my hand as I nudged the elastic downwards, revealing a straight line of light hair below my naval that invited her to the rest of the party. She swallowed. Visibly. Our eyes met, silently agreeing on a time and a place. Then someone cannonballed into the pool and splashed her, and she shook her head, chuckling breathlessly before skipping to her next art project, my best friend, Trent Rexroth.
Destroying the picture before I got home was always the plan. I blame the fucking Molly for forgetting. In the end, my mother found it. In the end, my father gave me one of his low-tone lectures that always seemed to eat my insides like arsenic. And in the very, very end? They made me spend my summer vacation with my fucking uncle, the one I really couldn’t stand.
I knew better than to fight them about it. The last thing I needed was to stir shit and jeopardize my Harvard stint a year before I graduated. I’ve worked hard for this future, for this life. It was splayed before me, in all of its rich, entitled, fucked-up, private jets, timeshare, annual Hamptons vacation glory. That’s the thing about life. When something good falls into your hands, you don’t only hang on to the fucker, you clutch it so hard it almost breaks.
Just another lesson that I learned way too late into life.
Anyway, that’s how I ended up flying to Alabama, burning two months on a fucking farm prior to my senior year.
Trent, Jaime, and Vicious spent their summer drinking, smoking, and fucking girls on their home field. Me, I came back with a shiner, generously gifted to me by Mr. Donald Whittaker, AKA Owl, after the night that had changed who I was forever.
“Life is like justice,” Eli Cole, my lawyer-slash-dad, had said to me before I boarded the plane to Birmingham. “It’s not always fair.”
Wasn’t that the fucking truth.
That summer, I was forced to read the Bible cover to cover. Owl told my parents he was a born-again Christian and big on bible studies. He backed it up by making me read it with him during our lunch breaks. Ham on rye and the Old Testament were his version of not being a dickface, because he was pretty much horrible to me the rest of the time.
Whittaker was a farmhand. When he was sober enough to be anything, that was. He made me his barn boy. I agreed, mainly because I got to finger his neighbor’s daughter at the end of every day.
The neighbor’s daughter thought I was some kind of a celebrity just because I didn’t have a Southern accent and owned a car. I wasn’t one to crush her fantasy, especially as she was eager to be my sex ed student.
I humored Owl when he taught me the Bible, because the alternative was brawling with him in the hay until one of us passed out. I think my folks wanted me to remember that life wasn’t all about expensive cars and ski vacations. Owl and his wife were like Low Income Life 101. So, every morning I woke up asking myself what’s two months in comparison to my whole fucking life.
There were a lot of crazy-ass stories in the Bible; incest, foreskin-collection, Jacob wrestling an angel—I swear this book jumped the shark by the second chapter or so—but one story really stuck with me, even before I’d met Rosie LeBlanc.
Genesis 27. Jacob came to live with Laban, his uncle, and fell in love with Rachel, the younger of Laban’s two daughters. Rachel was hot as fuck, fierce, graceful, and pretty much sex on a stick (as indicated in the Bible, though not in so many words.)
Laban and Jacob struck a deal. Jacob was to work for Laban for seven years—then he could marry his daughter.
Jacob did as he was told—busting his ass under the sun, day in and day out. After those seven years, Laban finally came to Jacob and told him he could marry his daughter.
But here was the catch: it’s not Rachel’s hand he had given him. It was her older sister’s, Leah.
Leah was a good woman. Jacob knew that.
She was nice. Sensible. Charitable. Cute ass and soft eyes (again, paraphrasing here. Other than the eyes part. That shit was actually in the Bible.)
She was no Rachel, though.
She was no Rachel, and he wanted Rachel. It was. Always. Fucking. Rachel.
Jacob argued, fought, and tried to talk some sense into his uncle, but in the end, he’d lost. Life was like justice, even back then. It was anything but fair.
“Seven more years of work,” Laban promised. “And I’d let you marry Rachel, too.”
So, Jacob waited.
And lurked.
And yearned.
Which, anyone with half a brain should know, only gratifies your desperation for your subject of obsession.
Years ticked by. Slowly. Painfully. Numbly.
In the meantime, he was with Leah.
He didn’t suffer. Not per se. Leah was good to him. A safe bet. She could bear his children—something Rachel, he would later find out—had difficulty doing.
He knew what he wanted, and it may have looked like her, and may have smelled like her, and fuck—maybe even felt like her—but it was not her.
It took him fourteen years, but in the end, Jacob won Rachel fair and square.
Rachel might not have been blessed by God. Leah was. But here was the thing.
Rachel didn’t need to be blessed.
She was loved.
And unlike justice and life, love is fair.
What’s more? Eventually, love was enough.
Eventually, it was fucking everything.
Seven weeks into my senior year, another looming calamity had decided to blow up in my face in spectacular fashion. Her name was Rosie LeBlanc, and she had eyes like two frosted-over lakes in an Alaskan winter. That kind of blue.
The what-the-fuck moment grabbed me by the balls and twisted hard the second she opened the door to the servants’ house on Vicious’s lot. Because she wasn’t Millie. She looked like Millie—kind of—only smaller, shorter, with fuller lips, higher cheekbones, and the little pointy ears of a mischievous pixie. But she didn’t wear anything overtly weird like Emilia. A pair of sea-starred flip-flops on her feet, black skinny jeans cut wide at the knees, and a tattered black hoodie with a name of a band I didn’t know plastered in white. Designed to blend in, but, as I’d later find out, destined to shine like a motherfucking lighthouse.