Nowhere but Home A Novel - By Liza Palmer Page 0,24

love and I’m going to fight for it—just as I fight for everything.

“They don’t have to know,” I said, taking his hands in mine.

“What?” Everett said, squeezing my hands tight.

“No one has to know, but us,” I said, my mind clear.

“No one has to know, but us,” Everett repeated.

“We’ll know,” I said, my breath catching as he stepped closer.

“We’ll know,” Everett repeated, just before he kissed me for the first time.

Everett and I were standing behind the band shell in the town square, hidden in the shadows. At eleven, we learned we could be who we really were only in the murky edges of North Star, but out in the light we had to be strangers.

“I’d heard you were back in town,” Felix Coburn said.

“Yes, sir,” I say, stepping forward in line.

“Not for long, I expect.”

“No, sir.”

I meet his gaze straight on. I’m not afraid of you, I repeat in my head over and over and over as those light blue eyes take my measure. My heart races. My breathing quickens. I’m not afraid of you, I will.

“Next?” the woman behind the window calls.

“Mr. Coburn,” I say, signing off and walking forward toward the window.

“Ms. Wake,” Felix says, putting his hat on. I don’t watch as he walks out of the post office. I don’t have to. I can feel when he’s gone.

I hand my résumé and the cover letter to the woman behind the counter in a daze. My hands are trembling as she turns around and puts the sheets of paper into the fax and begins typing out the phone number. I hold my hands, trying to steady them. I close my eyes and try to calm my breathing. I can’t do this again. I can’t let this man—this town—have this effect on me every damn time. I’m thirty-one years old. I’m not eleven anymore. When do I stand up for myself or is that just not an option if I’m here in North Star? Do I have to leave North Star to feel as though I’m . . . human. Is that right? Do I belong anywhere? Is there anyplace I can go where I’m not just “a grubby Wake”?

As an eleven-year-old, I bought into the mythology. I looked at my mom and agreed with what people were saying about her. The piece I never understood was what her behavior had to do with Merry Carole and me. I never did any of the things she did. I was a good kid who loved the same boy my entire life. I worked at the family business until I got into the University of Texas.

Do the people of North Star honestly think Merry Carole and I are just like her? I’m sure Merry Carole getting pregnant at seventeen was an affront to one of the finest families of North Star. Of course, no one ever asked why Wes McKay, this bastion of North Star families, had a nasty habit of impregnating the young women of North Star. The sad thing is, from the looks of it, and in North Star that’s not worth much, Whitney looks as though she really loves Wes. So Merry Carole and I are the women North Star thinks we are. The women you’re with in the shadows, but not the women you take to the Saturday dance. We’re the women you’re infatuated with, but not the women you love. The women who raise your unwanted children alone. The women who ruin you. The more Merry Carole and I fight the chains of our mother’s legacy, the more they bind us.

But North Star has always been about appearances. Without the Wakes, who knows who they’d feed on? They might have to take a look at their own pillars of society. I swallow hard as I wait. It seems North Star and I are a lot alike after all. Contemplation is something we’re both running from.

After years of being spit on, I thought I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks. The thing I keep running from, the piece that makes me choke up even now—is that Everett cared. My Everett cared more about what the people of North Star thought, about what his parents thought, than he cared for me. He loved me . . . but not enough. We stole kisses under the bleachers during the big Friday football games. We lost our virginity to each other at a motel just outside of town when we were juniors in high school and swapped promise