Excerpted from Good Guys, out October 16 from Melville House.
Three times in my life I’ve called my sister for help.
The first, I was at a motel almost an hour from Curtisville. Any closer, Gary said, and he might be recognized. Minutes earlier he’d left with his fake ID.
When Georgie heard my voice, she laughed. “Get a ride from your boyfriend,” she said. There was a plasticky clatter as she hung up.
I had been here before, waiting for Gary to return with a grocery bag hanging from his fingertips and a smirk that left me sure there was some joke to all of this. He could have almost any girl he wanted, so why me? I asked once if it was because I was from the church where his dad was the pastor. He looked genuinely surprised. “You think I care what my parents want?”
I guessed I did. Gary lived like everything was either already funny or would be soon. But I had believed there was a sincere, vulnerable part of him somewhere beneath his swagger, his machine-gun laugh. I hadn’t found it yet, though. I was starting to realize I never would.
Why, then, was I here? The last two times he’d checked us into this motel, I’d ignored the question until he came back, then drowned it in screwdrivers until I was indifferent to what happened next and incapable of remembering most of it anyway.
I turned on the TV, but the attempt to distract myself made me feel worse. I re-checked the curtains to make sure not even a sliver of the room would be visible from the outside. I felt both alone and watched. I was definitely starting to feel sick. If the world were good and fair, someone would come for me now. But I hadn’t seen my mom since I was eight. Dad was in the hospital for another back surgery, and Georgie, apparently, hated me. Her reasons were obvious. I was absent right when Dad needed us, I was having sex with Gary, and I was too much like Mom, unsatisfied and ambitious and trying to escape.
The lock beeped, and Gary came in. His keys crashed onto a side table, and he began emptying the bag. Vodka, orange juice, cups, chips, condoms. The orange juice was for me, because shots made me puke. The chips, presumably, were for him, later.
“Can you take me home?” I asked. “I don’t feel good.”
“You were fine ten minutes ago.” He shrugged off his jacket, tossed it toward me. If he had been anyone else, I would see the fact that it landed on my head as a mistake. But he was too good a shot for that. He snickered while I snatched it off. “I already paid for the room,” he added. Already he was mixing me a drink, then holding it out with a flourish.
I didn’t take it. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said.
“It’s a little late to start caring about purity.”
“I don’t care about that,” I said, which was true in a way, even if I also felt a bodily regret I couldn’t shake.
“What’s the problem, then?” He wore a pale blue polo shirt. His short, light brown hair was spiked with gel. I used to find him so attractive it was hard to meet his eyes.
“I just think I should go home.” I tried to sound bored, but my voice was tight with panic.
“Then call someone.” He gestured at the phone. “I’m staying here.”
There was no one I could call. I didn’t have friends who were old enough to drive, because I wasn’t old enough to drive. Georgie, my only hope, had refused.
Even if I could find a ride, there would be the question of what I was doing at a motel an hour from Curtisville, with Gary’s Grand Am parked conspicuously outside.
“Come on, Jo. Let’s watch something and relax.” He meant this as an opportunity. We could pretend the whole exchange didn’t happen. We could pretend I wasn’t trying to say no. “Come on,” he repeated. “Sit down.” He patted the bed next to him. I sat. “Drink,” he said. I drank. “There you go,” he said, like he knew I was catching on. And, finally, I was. Look at me, incapable of getting out of a situation I got into on purpose.
I called Georgie for the second time a little over two years later. Hours before, after Dad had gone to bed and my sister had parked herself in front of the TV to “do her homework,” I headed for the back door. Our mastiff mix, Hulk, followed me, hoping for a walk. “Go away,” I whispered. He turned back toward the living room, but only after a long, searching look I tried to tell myself was his normal expression.
It was March. I took Georgie’s coat, a huge canvas thing that had once belonged to Dad. It was so heavy I felt like I had a body slung over my shoulders.
I crossed Route 9, skirted a marsh, pushed into forest. Because I’d never worn Georgie’s coat before, I’d never figured out that, on me, it was so loose that cold air poured into the collar and cuffs and hem. The busted zipper didn’t help.
I had no plan. Maybe I’d stumble on a cabin with smoke floating from a chimney. Maybe I’d get picked up by someone going to Boston or New York. Maybe I’d die of hypothermia. Maybe the search dogs would find me in a stiff curl at the base of a tree, wrapped in this jacket too big and too broken to save me.
I combed through this scenario, from the panicked search to the wrenching discovery, until the idea was no longer interesting. I didn’t actually want to die. But now I was lost.
My sense of time eroded until I could no longer be sure it was passing. I crossed my arms to keep the front of the jacket closed. Each time my foot broke the surface of the stiff old snow, my arms flung out for balance, then folded back to my chest. I must have looked like a bird who kept changing her mind about flight. When a milkiness crept into the edges of my vision, I thought I might be losing it. But it was morning, or almost morning, and I was at an intersection I vaguely recognized. Across from me was a gas station. Its neon sign blinked the letters O-P-E-N. I was so numb I might as well have been learning the word.
Bells on a strip of leather slapped the glass door as I entered. I asked the man behind the counter for a phone. My lips were distant, unresponsive. But he understood.
“Pay phone’s outside,” he said, nodding toward the door I’d just come through. I could barely see his eyes under the curlicued brim of his Red Sox hat. Still, it was obvious what he thought of my ugly jacket and slurred speech.
“I don’t have any money,” I managed. He sighed and heaved an old desk phone onto the counter. I picked up the receiver, grimed by a decade’s worth of strange ears and mouths and hands. I couldn’t call Dad, who’d be upset in a way that was worse than mad. Georgie had recently gotten a cell phone, though, which I considered a waste of money. Who needed to talk to Georgie so urgently they couldn’t just call our landline?
Me, apparently. I’d even bothered to learn the number, which I now dialed.
“It’s me,” I told her.
“Where are you?”
“Cumberland Farms.”
“Which one?”
“The one in Gray.”
“There are two in Gray.” Georgie had always been better at landmarks and directions than I was. I was good at reading a map, but she was good at knowing things without one.
“The one on 202,” the man said. I didn’t know he could hear her. I wanted to move away, but the phone’s snarled cord was a short leash.
“Who’s that?” Georgie asked.
“I borrowed his phone.”
“What is going on?” I heard a rare note of anxiety in her voice. You could tell Georgie’s whole life as a history of not getting worked up. Not about almost failing out of tenth grade, not about Dad’s gigantic medical bills, not about Mom leaving us again. Georgie had barely lifted her face from her Game Boy when Mom bent to kiss her goodbye.
Now she asked, incredulously, “Are you drunk?”
“Come get me. Please.” I was trying not to cry.
“Stay right there,” she said, and hung up.
The man returned the phone to its hidden shelf. “You need anything? Coffee? A muffin?” His voice had softened a little.
“No, thanks.”
“It’s on the house, hun.” The way he said hun turned my insides. When he started around the counter, I headed for the door.
“Hold your horses,” he said, lifting a paper cup from a stack and filling it with hot water from a red-handled spigot. “Water’s free.” He left the steaming cup in front of the coffee makers and retreated to his stool behind the register, like I was wild.
I sat on a stack of bundled firewood, drank so fast I seared my insides. The wall of refrigerators hummed to fill the silence. The man pretended to have forgotten about me, which I knew was the most decent thing he could think of to do. Eventually he said, “Your ride’s here.” Outside, Dad’s Taurus was lurching to a stop. I hurried out without a thank-you.
As I dropped into the passenger seat, Georgie took me in from top to toes.
“So that’s where my jacket went,” she said. “I thought you hated it.”
“I do hate it.”
She gave a little snort, then paused long enough for me to think she was coming to the obvious conclusion, which was that I’d wanted something of hers to take with me. That I’d thought the jacket would protect me, or at least make me feel less alone.
But all she said was, “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“I took a walk.” The morning sky was the color of mop bucket water. I sat back, closed my eyes as we bounced over potholes. It would be nice to keep going like this for a long time, I thought, long enough for Georgie to forget how I’d taken her ugly jacket and walked eight miles in the middle of the night. Or long enough for me to become someone who didn’t do this sort of thing in the first place.
“Jo?”
“I got rejected,” I told her.
“What? Where?”
“Everywhere.” This wasn’t entirely true, but it was true enough. As of the day before, four of the six schools I’d applied to had rejected me: Dartmouth, Wellesley, Georgetown, and Tufts. I had gotten into Southern Maine, but I didn’t want to go to Southern Maine. I still hadn’t heard from Peabody, but it was the most selective of all the schools I’d applied to. I didn’t have a chance.
“Seriously?” For the second time that night, she sounded actually upset. Then she said, “I wondered if it had to do with Gary.”
I stared at her. “You want to talk about Gary now?” The growing light had clarified her features: thick blonde lashes, full cheeks, dimpled knob of a chin. My sister’s basic physical appeal was always most obvious when I was mad at her.
For a while after I’d called from the motel, Georgie and I didn’t talk about Gary. But then I started avoiding him, which meant I quit church for good, which meant Dad got upset, which meant Georgie got upset that I’d upset Dad, who was just home from the hospital again and not doing very well.
Georgie pulled into our driveway and turned off the engine. “I just wanted to see if you wanted to talk about it.” Then, defensively: “I’m trying to do the right thing here.”
“You called me a whore!”
“No,” she said. “I called you a… never mind.”
My eye roll was so big it took my head with it.
“It was a bad time, with how Dad was and everything. I didn’t like what was going on with you and Gary.”
She’d come home one afternoon when Gary and I were there. Dad was at one of his thousand physical therapy appointments, or maybe getting another scan. Georgie was supposed to be at practice. She didn’t care that she sat the bench. Her relationship with basketball looked a lot like her relationship with church: she was somehow very committed while never expecting more than the minimum from herself. Anyway, she’d forgotten her shoes, and drove home for them. I didn’t know until Gary came back from the bathroom and said, “Uh, your sister’s here.” I heard the front door slam. In the silence that followed I wanted to laugh, which made me realize I was actually kind of scared.
Gary started taking me to the motel after that.
“What are you trying to say?” I asked Georgie.
“Just that—that night you called me—I wasn’t thinking, and I—”
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure she believed me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her to.
I had worried at first that Georgie would tell. She was a good Christian girl. She volunteered for the church nursery and brought the old folks’ cars around on icy days. She was friendly with guys, including Gary, but not too friendly. She attended the Bible study that Gary’s younger sister, Tara, had started at our high school.
But a week passed, then another. And I remembered how, of all the instructions in the Bible, “do not judge”’ seemed the most important to her. Not, it seemed, because of what Jesus said about the measure you use being the one used against you, but because Georgie didn’t like to have to make a final decision on anything. “What do I know?” she would ask, about things she should definitely know about.
I said, “All I care about now is getting into college, and getting away from this.” I gestured at the car, the house with its broken porch and sagging gutters, the matted snow of our lawn, dotted with dark knots of dog droppings.
Georgie was included in my gesture. She had to know that.
“I’m going to make it up to you,” Georgie said, in her stout way that promised failure. I snorted to remind both of us that I was the only one good for my promises. I was the one who planned and executed. You didn’t need to know us for ten minutes before you understood: I was going to make something of myself, and Georgie would not.
But still, Georgie had something I didn’t, something I had long struggled to name. Maybe it was confidence. Not in herself, exactly, but in her life.
“Jo?”
I thought of the time I had a splinter buried in my palm. Dad broke off the only available edge when he tried to get it out, and I couldn’t dig into my own skin without feeling woozy. Georgie came along with tweezers and a damp cloth. “Don’t close your eyes,” she told me. “You have to expect the feeling. But squint so you don’t see too much.” Her grip was too strong to yank away from, her hands warm and firm. Somehow it was comforting to know I couldn’t escape her even if I wanted to. I was still bracing for the pain when she exclaimed “Got it!” and dropped my hand.
What did I need from her now? Don’t let go, I thought, but it was a wish too private to say. Besides, all she offered was help. Help was temporary. Holding on was forever.
“Jo?”
“Stop saying my name,” I said.
“I’ll figure something out.”
“If you say so,” I said.
Inside, I took the hottest shower I could stand, dressed in the thickest sweats I owned, and climbed into bed with a hot water bottle. Georgie and I shared a wall thin enough for me to hear her sigh, betraying a weariness I didn’t usually associate with her. The sound made me realize she really did want to help. And maybe she could. I could ask her to change her mind about college. Maybe we could start together at Southern Maine. We could room together. I could help her with her classes, and we could take turns doing laundry. Sure, we would drive each other nuts sometimes, but we would make it work.
I promised myself I would talk to her in the morning.
The third time I called—that’s a longer story.
From GOOD GUYS. Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by Mindy Misener.
Mindy Misener grew up in Maine. After teaching college writing for ten years, she made a career change and is currently enrolled in Yale Divinity School. Her prose has appeared in The Missouri Review, CrossCurrents, The Common, and many other outlets.
