The following is an excerpt from Good Guys by Mindy Misener. She grew up in Maine and graduated from Williams College and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. After teaching college writing for ten years, she enrolled in Yale Divinity School. Her prose has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Common, Image, and other publications.
Good Guys follows Georgie and Jo, two estranged sisters living in a small New England town in 2008. When Gary Clemmons, a celebrated hometown hero and the brother of Georgie’s secret girlfriend, dies in the Iraq War, Georgie discovers a disturbing secret about his past. As the sisters become entangled in the fallout, their family and community are forced to confront the darker sides of patriotism, masculinity, and religious devotion. It is available now from Melville House.
Outside I sat with my back against a gnarled tree. The punch had left a cough syrup taste in my mouth, and the alcohol was hitting me hard. I should have had more to eat than a flimsy grilled cheese. I could go eat in my room, but I also wanted Georgie to come find me out here. I stared up into the tree. Most of the leaves were gone, and what remained made a tattered black mess against the night sky. A wind started up from somewhere, rushed through the branches. We’d arrived at our house in Maine on an autumn night just like this one. As Dad drove us down the street, still unpaved at the time, he rolled down the windows. “Smell that air!” he called as gravel hit the undercarriage.
The move to Maine was because of Mark. Along the way to coaching Dad to a state title in the shot put, Mark led him to Jesus. When Dad got my mom pregnant the summer before his senior year, Mark was the one who helped him understand that God’s plan was for Dad to marry Mom, not go to Ohio State on an athletic scholarship. Until I was seven we attended Maple Grove, a church in Canton where Mark was an associate pastor. But then Mark left to start a church of his own in Maine, and Mom left for the first time a few months later. She probably would’ve left anyway, but I couldn’t help connecting her leaving with Mark’s leaving. Mark had been the one to put our family together, so it made sense that without him, we fell apart.
As of our move, I still called myself a Christian. But in retrospect it became clear that my faith in God, my faith in faith, and my faith in my father had already started to come apart on that dark, tree-covered road, tiny rocks pinging our car. Our move felt too unscripted to be right. No one, it seemed, was really thinking about where all of this might go.
Our new house was a white, one-story ranch. The yard was a mess of overgrown grass and the garage door was hitched up on one side. We didn’t have any furniture yet. Dad dampened a cloth to wipe thick dust from the middle of the living room floor, where we were going to spread our sleeping bags. The dark oval he made for us looked like the greasy thumbprint of a giant. “Georgie? Georgie?” I whispered, after she and Dad had fallen asleep. It was pitch-dark. Outside wind started and stopped, started and stopped. I knew I shouldn’t wake my sister. But then she turned over and put her hand on my heart, which made it possible for me to breathe again.
Why, I sometimes wondered, did I still hold out hope that Georgie would be there for me in the way I most needed her to be? Then I would remember moments like that dark room. I once saw someone demonstrate how you could help a cat relax by grabbing the loose skin at their neck. It makes them feel like they’re kittens being carried by their mother. Georgie could be like that with me, knowing exactly how to help me surrender my will, if only for a minute. But only, that is, if doing so suited her. And it so often didn’t suit her.
I WOKE TO FIND GEORGIE curled on the floor of my dorm room. She hadn’t bothered to get into her sleeping bag, and was still wearing her clothes from the night before. The jacket blanketed her midsection. I wondered if she’d even brushed her teeth.
I quietly fixed myself breakfast, then studied at my desk until she woke, scrubbing at her eyes and stretching in ways she seemed to find painfully gratifying.
“Can I have some?” she asked, nodding at my bowl of cereal.
I gestured toward the drawers under my bed. “Help yourself.”
“You could feed an army,” Georgie said, rooting until she found two single-serve boxes of Special K with Red Berries. I was eating out of the only proper bowl I had, but Georgie dumped the cereal into an old yogurt container without comment, then drowned her breakfast in a dollar’s worth of milk. She sat cross-legged on my bed, her back to the wall, facing me while she crunched cereal off a spork. I slammed my highlighter onto my desk.
“I can’t think with you chewing and staring at me,” I told her.
“I’m not staring at you.” She sighed, dropped the back of her head against the wall. “Look. I know you’re mad because—”
“I’m not mad.” Obviously I was mad. I stared at the next sentence in the article on my desk. I knew what the words said, but I still couldn’t get the meaning.
“You think I ditched you at the party last night.”
“It wasn’t a party party,” I corrected her. “And you did ditch me.”
“I figured you were going to bed. You should have told me if you wanted company.”
“It’s so convenient,” I said, spitting each word like a bitter pebble, “for you to decide I’m all right. Then you don’t have to know what’s really going on. You don’t have to be responsible. You can live your blissful life where everyone likes you and you don’t have to care what happens to me.”
She gave me a hurt look. “I do care about you, you know,” she said.
“I have class in ten minutes,” I said, though it was more like twenty. “I’m sure you can find something to do while I’m gone. Maybe Morgan’s available.”
Now Georgie frowned.
“She was all over you last night,” I said, to remind her that she was in the real world now, not in a Word of Life bubble.
But Georgie said, too slowly for comfort, “I’m dating someone else.”
“Did you tell Morgan that?” I retorted, wanting to make sure my gibe landed before we moved to the matter of Georgie dating.
“I told her when she invited me back to her room. She was cool about it. Can you back off for one minute? I’m trying to tell you something.”
I was scared, but couldn’t put my finger on why. Too much was happening in the same conversation. Morgan had invited Georgie to her room? Georgie had casually said no? Georgie had a reason for coming to Peabody, and it wasn’t that she owed me a visit. Even Gary’s death hadn’t brought her out to see me, so what was it?
“Is Dad okay?” I asked. Fear tightened my voice. I didn’t know something important. Without giving her a chance to answer, I asked, “Who are you dating?”
“That’s not what I—” she started, and sighed. “I guess we can start there. Tara Clemmens.”
“Tara Clemmens?” My mouth spread in a crazed grin. Was I hearing her right? I started to laugh. “How is that possible?”
Georgie looked hurt. “She’s different now.”
“I’d imagine so!” I laughed harder, but only out of relief. This I could deal with. It wasn’t what I expected, but I could deal with it. I took the measure of my surprise, found myself more taken aback than shocked. Maybe, I thought, Georgie’s sexuality had been quietly between us, all along, keeping us apart. Maybe she had wanted me to know, but I had never bothered to look hard enough. Maybe I’d even let her down by never seeing this part of her.
That sobering thought, along with Georgie’s expression, brought me back. “Okay,” I said. “How long have you been together?” And then, more seriously, “How is she taking Gary’s death?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Wait—did you tell her about me and Gary?” No one, absolutely no one, was supposed to know anything about me and Gary except that we were briefly dating in a church-approved way. She knew this.
My sister said, “It does have to do with Gary.”
Or what, I wondered, did Gary tell Tara, and Tara tell Georgie? Did Georgie want me to know that word was going around? “Georgie—!”
“If you’ll shut up, I’ll tell you.”
The air between us crystallized into something shatterable. I glared at her. What did I care about what anyone at home said about me? I was gone from that place. I would never return. As for whom Georgie was dating, well, I could find a way to not care about that, either. “You know what?” I said. “I have to go. I don’t want to be late.” I started gathering my things.
“Stuff happened before he died.”
I shouldered my bag. “I really, really, really don’t care.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing,” she said.
“Too late,” I snapped. But I didn’t leave. Still wearing my backpack, I sat. I waited for what my sister had come to say.
From Good Guys. Used with permission of the publisher, Melville House Publishing. Copyright © 2026 by Mindy Misener.