Can’t wait to see the ’bloids accidentally pay millions for pictures of you getting coffee and going to the gym! Have you considered this as a new revenue stream?
Jo sent back a single laughing emoji.
That was when Autumn realized that they had become strangers. She wasn’t even worth words to Jo anymore.
Autumn didn’t want to think about Jo. It was too early to get sad wondering why her oldest friend had dropped her after graduation. She stood up, adding with forced cheerfulness, “At least she didn’t TP the shop. Can you imagine what Lita would do?”
“If anyone touched the shop, Lita would set them on fire. Or tell me to. Thankfully she doesn’t care as much about the house.” Bee let out a long sigh. “Soon I must blend her breakfast.”
Autumn opened the bathroom door. Steam dissipated around her while she went from one end of the cottage to the other in less than a dozen wet footprints. She lived in an old fishing cottage owned by her father’s wife, Ginger Jay. Ginger had bought it to convert into a vacation rental but hadn’t gotten around to it. It was on the forest side of town, as far away from the ocean as you could be. The snap-together laminate floor Autumn had installed was a huge improvement over the stinky old carpet that had come with the place—although, sometimes, she could still catch a whiff of cigarettes and surfperch stuck inside the wood paneling. Every wall was wood paneled. Autumn considered herself lucky it wasn’t on the ceiling.
“How many days until your honeymoon?” she asked, knowing this would cheer Bee up. Bee and Birdy hadn’t had a chance to take a honeymoon last year because they’d been busy taking care of Lita. While the wedding had been beautiful and perfect, Autumn knew Bee had been disappointed to have to go back to work the next day.
“One hundred and eleven days to go!” Bee said. “Oh, speaking of vacations, Nana Birdy is getting a preliminary head count for this year’s Birdy Bash.”
On top of a bookcase that sagged under the weight of a rainbow of scrapbooks and cracked script binders, there was a sepia photo of Autumn, Bee, and Birdy dressed up at the Old West picture booth at Knott’s Berry Farm. In the picture, all three of them wore boysenberry-beer-stained smiles, feather boas, and rented corsets. “What could possibly top our adventure to the berriest place on earth?”
“This year, the rumor is we’re going to the Dave and Buster’s resort in Indiana. All the Dance Dance Revolution you’ve ever wanted, in one place.”
“A bar-cade resort? Count me in!” Autumn rummaged through one of the open dresser drawers and found a crumpled pair of pajama jeans. Today, she needed full range of motion. She was teaching the Broadway Club the 9 to 5 choreography Pat Markey had called needlessly complicated for the Senior Showcase. The choir teacher unsurprisingly preferred her musicals more stationary. Which wouldn’t have been a problem for Autumn if only Mrs. Markey would agree that the choir teacher’s opinion on good theater shouldn’t count more than the theater teacher’s. Unfortunately the Point High drama program had always been a two-party system, and Autumn had been appointed to the losing side.
She shimmied herself into her pajama jeans. “What time is it right now? I have to finish getting ready by six. If I’m even a second late, Florencio will leave me behind. I learned that when I tried to do my makeup at home last time.”
“He’s a terrible chauffeur but a good brother,” Bee said.
“Yeah, yeah. He’s a peach. Everyone loves him. Ask me how many boxes he’s packed.”
“He has three jobs, sweets,” Bianca reminded her.
“Three part-time jobs. Three parts don’t necessarily make a whole!” Autumn countered. “And he hasn’t helped with anything on Main Street. Not a box! Not a bag! There’s already a sign in the yard!”
“We have to have a sign in the yard and staged pictures of the interior online before tourists start showing up for summer if we intend to sell this year,” Ginger Jay had told Autumn—to tell her mom. “No one buys beach houses when it’s ugly outside.”
Personally, Autumn thought that Sandy Point was prettiest when dusted with winter snow—when the ocean rushed up to meet white powder. The beaches in LA had been crowded like amusement parks. The traffic packed down the sand so much it was hard as asphalt.
“It’s five fifty-three. Do you want me to meet you at the house sometime this week?” Bee asked. “I could help any night I’m not on Lita’s dinner duty.”
“That’s okay. You have your own family to help,” Autumn said. Bee had never seen the Main Street house in its glory days, when the bright green walls were filled with life and love and laughter, just as her mom’s Hobby Lobby plaques demanded. Before it became a storage space on a floodplain. “Send me a picture of your TP tree! Love you, bye!”
Autumn had enough time to throw on shoes and put a breakfast banana in her bag before she heard the telltale rumble of her brother’s Jeep out front.
The final drive from Los Angeles to Sandy Point had mortally wounded Autumn’s car, so as long as it wasn’t snowing, she normally rode to work on a beach cruiser scavenged from her parents’ garage. She loved Sandy Point at sunrise—the nippy wind that smelled like salt and pine, the buildings and signs unchanged since the day she was born. But today she had to bring a box too big to fit in her bicycle basket—the T-shirts for the Broadway Club to go along with their increasingly elaborate spring carnival performance.
With the box safely situated in the backseat, Autumn climbed up into the passenger seat beside Florencio. Seat belt clicked, the Jeep jumped away from the curb, speeding off like they were racing someone up the empty street. Their mother liked to say that Florencio drove like there was cake and ice cream at the finish line.
Cindy Kelly had an adorably G-rated imagination.
The sun wouldn’t rise until after the zero-period bell, but the dashboard lights illuminated the dark circles under Florencio’s eyes and the hollow shadows of his deep brown jaw. He pointed at the cup holders between Autumn and him where two environmentally unfriendly cups of coffee sat steaming.
“Both of these are mine,” he croaked. “Don’t get any ideas.”
“I’ll try to resist,” Autumn said. After a stint working as a barista in LA, she’d lost the acquired taste for Rotten Robbie’s gas-station joe. “Did you sleep at all? You sound like my janky garbage disposal.”
Flo burped hazelnut battery acid. “I slept literally…some. We had a match last night, but I went into Days to close.”
Short, buff, and covered in Filipino and Celtic tattoos, Florencio was the chillest dude who happened to be indistinguishable from a CrossFit douchebag. Looking at him, people never guessed that he regularly cried watching the teams he coached win tournaments. Although it was the most likely explanation as to why his eyes looked so puffy this morning.
Florencio coached wrestling all day, but his gig at the middle school was unpaid since the dry-cleaner’s fire that had taken out the team’s sponsor. So, at night, he ran the blender at Days Bar & Grill and told girls on Tinder that he was a bartender.
“I have Mom’s camping cot at the theater,” Autumn offered. “I brought it over for double show days. Or when I have a meeting an hour after school and don’t want to ride my bike all the way home. It’s in the prop closet, if you want to catch a nap later.”
“No time.” Flo yawned wide. “Only coffee.”
The Jeep chugged up the hill, toward the streetlamps of the nicer neighborhoods.
“Mom and I were talking about going crabbing soon,” Autumn said. Casual, offhand, not even looking at him. “You know, like we used to when we were kids?”
Florencio grunted in the affirmative.
“I was thinking we could do the crab boil on the beach. We’d get steamed artichokes for you because you hate corn, duh, and we could bring Rooster with us!” Autumn put extra sparkle in her voice, a spoonful of sugar. “All we have to do is pick up the crab rings and camping pot from Main Street and—”
“No,” Flo said.
“Dad a
nd Ginger said they would be totally down to get everyone together and officially bury the hatchet.”
“No!”
“It’s your family, too, Florencio!” she snapped, her hands balled into fists in her lap.
He took his eyes off the road long enough to glare at her. The Kelly siblings may not have been related by blood, but Florencio had been adopted two full years before Mrs. Kelly got pregnant with Autumn. There had never been any doubt between them that he was the firstborn, even if he’d been born to parents in the Philippines and raised by white, mostly Irish Oregonians.
“I know it’s my family,” Flo said, turning back to the road with a sniff. “That doesn’t mean where the Chief buries his hatchets is any of my business.”
It always came back to that.
Chuck and Cindy Kelly had announced their divorce three years ago, just after Autumn moved to LA. The paperwork had been filed in secret. Lots of things had apparently been done in secret. Less than six months later, the Chief and Ginger Jay dropped professional pictures of their boat elopement to Facebook. Autumn met her father’s mistress as his wife.
It wasn’t that Autumn was a huge fan of adultery—or Ginger Jay—but she had spent the last couple of years coming to terms with her family changing. She was ready for them to move on. Make new memories. Start new traditions. This year, Cindy Kelly had even started acknowledging Ginger Jay in public. It had recently been reported that the two of them spoke in line at the grocery store with zero bloodshed.
Florencio, on the other hand, was a thirty-year-old man giving his father the silent treatment. For three years—through marriages, breakups, holidays, and beach-opening celebrations—Autumn’s father and brother had avoided each other. The two of them could even ignore each other in the same room. Standing in line at the post office. Sitting in the audience for Autumn’s sparsely attended directorial debut. Autumn had once watched them eat breakfast seated at opposite ends of the counter at the Surfside Café, their sour looks as identical as the Celtic knots and crosses tattooed on their forearms. It was totally out of control.
Autumn knew that Chuck Kelly hadn’t handled the end of his marriage well, but she couldn’t quite say that he deserved losing a son over it.
She cleared her throat, trying again for civilized conversation. “Bee called this morning.”
“Early of her,” Flo noted.
“She said Jo Freeman toilet-papered her maple tree.”
Flo’s eyebrows went up. Autumn could tell he was tired because they only made it halfway up his forehead before he seemed to lose the energy to continue, but even he couldn’t resist the lure of townie gossip. “Really?”
“Super weird, right?” Autumn said with a pang of guilt. If it turned out that it was really Eden, she’d feel so stupid for mentioning Jo at all. The sisters did look alike, enough that in the middle of the night Bee easily could have mistaken one for the other. It was more likely Eden doing some senior prank than Jo back from her fancy life in Silicon Valley.
“Do you think it’s about you?” Flo asked. His jaw cracked with a yawn. “BFFs fighting over who gets you forever?”
“No way,” Autumn said as they pulled into the empty Point High parking lot. “I’m sure that Jo forgot about all of us years ago.”
When the lunch bell rang, Autumn was surprised to find her classroom totally empty—well, her side of the classroom. The drama room was split in half with an accordion wall, like a line of tape down the middle of a sitcom bedroom. Autumn had been expecting the Broadway Club to come flooding in the second the lunch period started so that they could tear into the cardboard box of T-shirts. For weeks, the small group of sophomores had been hounding her to track the shipment, even having her mirror her FedEx account to the SMART Board.
Autumn debated whether or not to dawdle. She didn’t want to disappoint her students if she showed up late, but she also had a grocery-store salad waiting in the staff room. She checked her phone, hoping to catch her sole work friend not in an administrative meeting.
The accordion wall screeched aside, making Autumn jump as Pat Markey burst in with a cry of “Oh, Autumn! There you are!”
Papery white from head to Skechers and wrapped in many kinds of fleece—including the ever-present green zippered vest with Mrs. Markey embroidered in gold thread on the left side—Point High’s choir teacher had never surrendered to living in a beach town.
“Hi, Pat. I’m right where you left me,” Autumn said, frowning at the chaos of music stands and risers on the choir side of the room. She didn’t understand how someone as fussy as Pat could also be such a slob. “Are you ready to talk about next year’s show? The kids are dying to vote, and I had a couple of ideas with more name recognition—”
“Yes, I saw the note,” Pat said with a dismissive flap toward the many reminder Post-its on Autumn’s desk.
Nobody is nosier than a teacher, Autumn’s mom had warned her when the school year started—she taught middle school science across the street. Don’t leave anything out you don’t want the world to find out about!
Pat puffed up like a pigeon. “We can’t put up anything as spicy as Spring Awakening or Rent—”
“Schools all over the country do those shows,” Autumn protested.
“That may be, my dear, but no one in Sandy Point is going to attend a performance where teens sing songs with swearing and sexual content.”
No one in Sandy Point had attended the closing performance of the fall musical either. Autumn had never seen a show flop as hard as Bugsy Malone. She had taken for granted that the cast members’ friends and family would attend both performances. Having the curtain come up on an empty audience had crushed her students. Not that Pat had seen the problem. She had rushed the kids out to put on the show. For nobody.
Pat Markey wasn’t a performer.
One day she will retire and I’ll actually get to do all of my job, Autumn reminded herself.
Autumn had thought of Point High throughout grad school. As she learned what made a good teacher, she realized that what she wanted to give her students was what she had been given by her old drama teacher, George Hearn—“not that George Hearn!” he’d say at the start of every school year; Autumn was the only person who ever laughed.
Autumn’s time as one of Mr. Hearn’s drama disciples had been the happiest and most hopeful part of her life. Standing in a noisy ensemble of friends was the safest place in the world. Every rehearsal had been so much fun. Every show had felt like high art. The Point High auditorium had been a haven in which to sing and talk and laugh at full volume, every day.
Grad school was only ever supposed to be a cover for her acting career, an excuse to move to the big city with a scholarship to foot the bill. When Autumn got to Hollywood, she’d assumed that it would be a matter of weeks until she got discovered and promptly sold back all of her textbooks. And while she had found an agent and raced all over LA for auditions, she never booked a single gig. She did become a very in-demand substitute teacher for kindergarten through twelfth grade. At the end of her two-year program, she had a second degree in theater in a town full of film studios.
Her mom drove south to her graduation—traveling alone for the first time—and brought all the latest gossip from Sandy Point. Florencio was coaching wrestling at multiple schools. Bianca was taking over as the manager of her family business. Mr. Hearn was retiring and looking for someone to replace him as the drama chair.
When she needed somewhere to belong, Point High theater called her home.
During Autumn’s job interview, as she expounded on her dream of creating a theater program that would draw in kids from all over Tillamook County, no one had mentioned that Pat Markey wouldn’t be stepping down.
Ten years ago, Mrs. Markey—Pat, Autumn reminded herself; they were coworkers now—had been Point High’s choir teacher. She helped Mr. Hearn—who had never learned to read music—by playing the piano for musical rehearsals. But as Mr. Hearn got older, he kept up with the graded
work—theater history, Shakespeare, one-act plays—and Pat took over directing the annual school shows: the fall-semester musical and the end-of-the-year Senior Showcase. And she had zero intention of relinquishing them to Autumn. The best she could offer was a chance to co-direct. As long as Autumn understood that her place was behind, not beside, Pat.
“What I came to discuss with you, on my lunch break,” Pat said, as though it were not everybody’s lunch break, “is that while I think it is wonderful that you are having headshots done for the students, that is the sort of thing one would want to notify parents of in advance. To give them a chance to opt out, you see? You can’t just have people take you at your word that your friends are trustworthy, my dear. Permission slips exist for a reason.”
“Permission slips?” Autumn asked, feeling like an echo. “For headshots?”
“It does show excellent initiative,” Pat continued, punching the air. “I wouldn’t have trusted the students to take their own pictures for the program. And it is nice to see that we have so many talented alums. It seems like yesterday you girls were in my algebra class. But next time perhaps we could send an email introducing Jo to parents before she sets up shop at the auditorium.”
“Jo?!”
Racing across campus without outright running made Autumn look like a speed walker with a wedgie, but being a teacher meant upholding the rules even when she would rather lose her shit.
Jo couldn’t possibly be at Sandy Point High. Not on campus. In the middle of the day. On a Tuesday. No one dropped out of the sky on a Tuesday morning.
Bee’s voice echoed through her head. Jo Freeman TP’d my tree.
She started jogging.
All the drama students were hanging from the railing on the switchback ramp that led up to the auditorium’s back door.
“The photo shoot’s not for the Broadway Club!” one of the seniors was shouting at the underclassmen. “It’s just for seniors!”
“That’s bullshit!” one of the (four) Broadway Club members yelled back. “Miss Kelly, tell them that’s bullshit!”
The Throwback List Page 3