🎵No-no-notorious🎵
No-no-notorious
I can't read about it, burns the skin from your eyes

The sultry tones of Duran Duran's 1986 title track filled Ruthie's room as she grabbed her pillow and planted it firmly over her face.

The music, instead of getting muffled, got louder as some cold-hearted person turned it up.

Ruthie groaned and pulled the pillow more firmly around her ears, trying to drown out Simon LeBon's dulcet tones, and the fantastic harmony provided by Nick Rhodes and John Taylor.

Regardless of how kickass the song was, it was just too fucking loud, in Ruthie's opinion.

Her dads didn't think so, apparently.

"Come on, Ruthie Barakat Grimaldi," Dad called in his best DJ voice. "It's only the first day of your junior year once! Up and at 'em!"

The edge of her pillow was lifted, and a rolled up magazine was shoved under to serve as a makeshift megaphone so these words could be bellowed in the general direction of her head.

Great.

"Okay, okay," she muttered, lifting the pillow off her face and turning bleary eyes to her dads. "I'm up, I'm up." She rubbed her eyes, hoping they couldn't tell she'd spent much of last night crying.

"Good morning!" Pop sang out, lifting her off the bed as he enveloped her in a nearly bone-crushing hug.

In spite of herself, Ruthie smiled as she hugged him back, adding a kiss. Hugging Pop was one of her earliest and best memories, right up there with hugging Dad. Pop always smelled like aftershave, toothpaste, and hair products, because he went out to an office every day.

He felt Ruthie's hug and smiled as he released her, blue eyes shining as he shook his damp blond hair out of his eyes. "That's more like it, that's our Ruthie."

"Could you at least turn the music down?" Ruthie countered. "It's just too early for Simon to be this loud," she added.

"It's never too early for Simon," Dad responded, still using his DJ voice. He did turn the music down, though, as he, too, stepped in for his good morning hug and kiss. Dad smelled good in a completely different way from Pop, since he did most of his work from home, and didn't bother with hair products and cologne. Dad's smells came from coffee and laundry detergent, gardening soil and cooking. His dark hair and brown eyes were nearly the same shade, and he had the longest eyelashes Ruthie had ever seen on any living creature, male or female.

"Besides, like he said, it's only the first day of your junior year of high school once, Rosebud," Pop added, mussing her already completely wild hair. "We only get one more of these first days of school with you, you know?"

Rosebud.

Ruthie's other nickname, from when she was a baby. Her dads had given it to her because the "R" and the "B" played nicely off "Ruth" and "Barakat," and they swore that she'd looked just like a little pink rosebud when they first got her, all wrapped up in her blanket. It was a nickname that had been supplanted by the whole "Notorious R.B.G." moniker when Ruth Bader Ginsburg had acquired it a few years ago, and now it only made an appearance when her fathers were feeling emotional.

Sure enough, Pop had tears in his blue eyes, and Dad was already patting his back, urging him to "Stop, Phil, don't cry."

"Yeah, Phil," Ruthie added with a grin as she got out of bed and headed for the shower. "None of that weepy stuff, okay?"

"Oh, come on," Pop replied, sniffing. "Next year you're going to be a senior, then it's off to college, and then where will we be?

"And you're not allowed to call me 'Phil'!" he added as she shut the bathroom door. "Bad enough you stopped calling me 'Papa' and shortened it to 'Pop'--!"

Ruthie laughed as she undressed and got in the shower, letting the hot water wash over her and hopefully wake her up. She knew that, especially by high school, most kids just grabbed something from the fridge and ate it on the way, if they bothered to eat at all.

She loved the time she spent with her parents, and treasured their mornings together, so she wasn't really upset, but waking up was so hard for her. What she really wanted to do was belt out a lively version of "The Wizard and I," from Wicked to really wake herself up, but she knew her bedroom door was open, and that her dads would hear her.

Then they'd tease her about how she still harbored secret dreams of being a singer and dancer and actress on Broadway, and she'd have to deny it and convince them that it wasn't true.

Even though it kind of secretly was.

She didn't want to lie to them.

She just wasn't a morning person, not like them. It was obvious at time like this that she shared no genetic material with her dads.

Phillip Grimaldi was her Pop, and he left their tiny town of Warren every morning to drive forty-five minutes on the freeway to neighboring Sacramento, where he was an assistant State's Attorney at the capital.

Todd Barakat was Dad, formerly known as Daddy, and he mainly did legal writing and prepared briefs, since this was work he could do from home. It meant he earned much less money than Pop, but they had agreed when they adopted Ruth that there was no point in having a child if they just paid someone to care for her, so this was the path they'd chosen.

Her dads were as different from each other physically as they could possibly be, with Pop being blond and blue-eyed, while Dad was dark-haired and eyed. And even though they were both lawyers, their educations were different, too.

Pop was a Grimaldi, a third-generation Stanford graduate, while Dad was the child of immigrants who had gone to Berkeley, a public school, the first person in his family to go to college at all.

And then, somehow, they'd wound up with Ruth herself, who looked completely different from both of them. Her hair was reddish-brown and crazy curly, and her eyes were blue, but not the clear blue of Pop's; no, hers looked kind of opaque, like opals, and though her skin was very pale, and had a smattering of freckles, it was obvious that she was definitely not completely Caucasian.

Of course, her dads and their families didn't care, but there were people in Warren who did.

A lot.

Ruthie could remember being called that most odious of terms that began with an "n" when she was young, and though she'd never heard it before, she knew it was bad. She'd left her friends and run home to ask her parents what it meant, crying so hard she'd fallen because she couldn't see where she was putting her feet.

Later, she remembered asking them, "Why did you choose to raise me here, knowing as a gay couple with a mixed-race child that your values would be so different from many of the people who live here?"

It had been just a couple of years ago that they'd had this conversation, Ruthie recalled as she tried to tame her hair and got dressed for the first day of her junior year.

"Well, Rosebud, we think that the world needs to change, and we want to do our part," Pop had answered. "We think you're strong enough to handle that kind of stupidity, that we've raised you to know how. We have, haven't we? At least until you graduate from high school and go off to Stanford and become a lawyer and write laws that will set precedents and all that?" He smiled at her.

"The only way some people will grow is if they see, on a daily basis, that not all families are a white man and a white woman and one point two children," Dad had added with a grin. "So let's show them that we're a family, too, a good one, you know?" He looked over at Pop. "Until you head over to UC Berkeley and make law review and show those Stanford snobs a thing or two?"

Ruthie surveyed herself critically in the mirror before going downstairs to eat with Dad and Pop. She could tell that her eyes were a little puffy, but she believed she would pass muster. And they probably wouldn't notice that she wasn't walking with Amelia, either.

☀️🥓🥞🥐🥚🍳🍌🥝🍓☕️☀️

Ruthie walked to the overpass that had been built over the freeway so the kids who lived on the newer side of town could get safely to the older side of town, where the high school was. It was so hot, even though it was only seven-thirty in the morning.

She loved watching high school movies that were set in the northeast, where September and back to school meant leaves turning and bonfires and cool mornings and autumn in the air. Back to school in central California meant steaming in the mornings and frying as you walked home.

It meant being so happy you had a boyfriend who had a truck with AC, too, Ruthie thought with a sigh as she went down the other side of the overpass.

Former boyfriend.

Brett Carmichael was arguably the most popular boy in school, even though he was still a junior, like Ruth herself, and her best friend Amelia.

Former best friend.

Ruthie sighed as she switched her fairly empty and therefore light backpack to her other shoulder.

Brett had "repeated" seventh grade, and was therefore one of the oldest kids in his class. And this was also why he was pretty good friends with most of the students in the year ahead of him.

"You mean he flunked," Pop had said bluntly when Ruth had told them about Brett last year. She had invited him over to watch TV, and he had already been on his way when Ruthie talked to her dads about him.

"They don't call it that," Ruthie tried to explain. "It's very judgmental, if you think about it."

"Maybe 'they' don't, but we do," Dad said, using the detested air quotes. "And perhaps there's a reason it's judgmental, Ruth Barakat Grimaldi? Did you ever think of that? Hm?"

"Oh god, Dad, please, don't full name me right now, okay?" Ruth had begged, looking out the window to see if Brett had pulled up. "And please don't say anything to Brett about the other thing? He's very sensitive about it."

"Please, how rude do you think I am?" Dad asked, affronted. "I'd never insult a guest."

"But Ruth, you know what we say, right?" Pop had added. "You don't ever bring other people's low standards into our home, right?

"As if standards in this idiotic country weren't low enough," he continued, shaking his head and muttering to himself.

"Right, right," Ruthie had soothed, nodding.

Now, remembering that conversation, Ruth shook her head. She should've listened to her parents. They'd never steered her wrong.

Was it Ruthie's fault that, because of her parents' excellent tutelage, she'd excelled far beyond public education's ability to teach her, and she'd skipped sixth grade? Which made her, at barely fifteen, the youngest junior Warren High School had ever had?

And therefore way too young for all of the "activities" Brett Carmichael, at eighteen, wanted to indulge in the summer before his junior year?

Her parents had been very unhappy that Ruthie was dating Brett, she knew.

She also knew that they would've been even more unhappy if they'd known that most of those dates had ended in tug-of-wars over various items of Ruthie's clothing, with Brett cajoling and bullying in turn while Ruthie held on with grim strength as she tried to explain that she just wasn't ready for those kinds of "activities."

"Come on, Ruth," Brett would insist. "You could at least blow me. I mean, Christ, who ever heard of a girl who won't give a BJ in this day and age?"

"In this day and age?" Ruthie had repeated. "What does that mean? Is fellatio a technological advancement or something?"

"I didn't say word fucking one about cats!" Brett yelled, his voice loud in the confined space of the truck's cab. "I'm talking about giving head, you bitch!"

These words left Ruth gasping for breath as she laughed, which made Brett even more angry.

"Come on, babe," he begged. "With a face and body like you got, I bet you're good at BJs." He nodded encouragingly. "Could you at least give me a hand job, then?" He started to unzip his jeans.

"No! Brett, I don't want to, please." Ruth couldn't believe this was what love was supposed to be like.

Ruth felt her face turning red with embarrassment as she remembered their last "date."

Brett had dropped her off at home, saying, "We're through, Ruth. I love you and all, but I can't go through this any more."

Ruth had nodded silently, tears streaking down her cheeks as she opened the door of the truck and walked up to her front door.

Less than twelve hours later she'd gotten a text from her friend Linda, telling her that Brett and her best friend Amelia were now "going out."

She was pulled back to her surroundings by the sound of the first bell.

She checked her schedule, though she knew she had English first.

Ruth had dawdled as she remembered her horrible last date with Brett, and she was one of the last in the room. She saw some of the kids give her sympathetic looks. Even though her break up with Brett and his subsequent getting together with Amelia had just happened two days before, in a town the size of Warren, such news spread like wildfire, and everyone already knew.

She had to take a seat close to the door because she was so late, but there was someone even later than her, it seemed.

He slid into the seat closest to the door just before the bell rang.

Everyone was looking over at him, and Ruthie, too, looked to see who was sitting next to her.

He was a stranger, which was unusual in Warren.

A handsome stranger.

Very unusual.

Dark hair, quite long for a guy from around there, and eyes that were a tricky shade of blue-green. He had very long legs, which were angled out the side of the desk, and an almost fiery field of angry energy.

Very very unusual.