Small Town Sinners

by Melissa Walker

  After a silent ride home, in which I try to figure out all the ways in which I could have been kissed but wasn’t, Ty drops me off on the curb with a wave. I hug myself and rub my bare arms, daydreaming about what might have happened, how perfect my first kiss could have been. How perfect it might be with Ty.

  I stroll up the driveway and into the house about ten minutes before nine, which is my summer curfew (and a full two hours before Starla Joy’s). Dean doesn’t even have one. Usually Mom and Dad are in bed reading by now, but when I walk into the living room I hear Dad say, “Lacey, come sit down. We need to talk,” while Mom shifts uncomfortably in her seat.

  I sit in the big chair next to the sofa and fold my hands in my lap, the way Mom likes me to. “Is everything okay?” I ask.

  Dad looks pensive; the lines in his forehead seem darker and deeper tonight.

  I suddenly wonder if I’m in trouble. That’s never happened before. I can’t really be in trouble because I’m home on time and I told Mrs. Tuttle that I was with friends, and that’s not a lie—I was—and I realize that my palms are starting to sweat. I’m almost glad that Ty didn’t kiss me today, because maybe I’d look different after being kissed. But as it is, I haven’t done anything wrong. Not that being kissed would be wrong, really, but maybe my parents would think—

  “You were out with Tyson—I mean Ty—Davis?” says Mom, interrupting my thoughts. And even though it’s a statement, I hear a question mark at the end, like she’s not sure. I also detect a nervous hum in her voice.

  That’s when I realize they’re both truly upset.

  “Yes,” I say, smiling reassuringly. “Ty is a really nice guy. Starla Joy and Dean and I all went to the movies with him last week, and today we went to Ulster Park and talked.”

  I figure bringing up my lifelong friends will be a plus and will assure them that I’m not going out with Ty in a romantic sense, and the way I said that could mean that all four of us went to the park today. But I didn’t really lie. Not officially.

  “Well,” says Dad, scratching the side of his head vigorously, “that’s certainly nice of you all, seeing as how he’s new in town—”

  Then Mom chimes in again. “It’s just that, well, he’s a little …” She hesitates.

  “A little what?” I ask, genuinely curious.

  This hasn’t happened before. My parents have never been uncomfortable about my friendships. They’re really open and loving, even with people like Geoff Parsons. And Ty is a part of the church community, after all.

  “He’s been away for a while,” says Mom, looking at Dad and not me.

  “Away?” I ask.

  “What your mother means is that Ty has …,” starts Dad. “Well, we’ve heard from his aunt that he’s had some … experiences while he’s been gone.”

  Huh?

  “What do you mean, experiences?” I ask.

  “Well, honey, it’s—” Dad starts.

  “It’s nothing,” interrupts Mom. Her left hand goes to one of her new earrings, twisting it around in her nervous way. “Never mind.”

  They are acting so weird. I’d press them, but I don’t really want them to press me back and find out I was alone with Ty today, even if we were talking about God and Christianity. Because we also talked about porn. I feel my face heat up just thinking about it.

  “Okay,” I say, wanting desperately to go upstairs to the pile of books by my bed. I’m in the middle of a really great one about a girl who can see other people’s dreams. “So is it okay if I go to my room?”

  “Yes,” says Mom, and she heads into the kitchen for a final wipe down of the counters, even though she’s probably already done that three times since dinner.

  “So what did you guys grab to eat?” asks Dad, ruffling my hair as I stand up to head down the hallway. “Is Dean still on Weight Watchers?”

  I laugh, and I almost tell my dad about the picnic spot, and Ty and the Power Bars, but I hesitate. I don’t think he’d approve.

  “No,” I say. “We grabbed normal food at Wendy’s.”

  My stomach clenches up when I lie, but I’m starting to think Dad won’t understand why I was out with Ty—even though he told me to help Ty come back to God, which is what I was doing.

  Dad smiles and leans in, out of Mom’s earshot. “Sneak me home a Frosty next time,” he says.

  “I will, Dad,” I say. “I promise.”

  Chapter Nine

  The next day, Starla Joy, Dean, and I sit a while in our spot in the woods and then we get snacks at Sulley’s Drugstore counter, where they have french fries and fountain soda—the place hasn’t changed since my parents used to come here. Later, we meet up with Tessa. She doesn’t usually hang out with us, but today she says her friends are acting stupid and she wants to be with her little sister. Starla Joy plays it cool, but I can tell she’s happy.

  We used to spend a lot of time with Tessa—she’s only seventeen, a year older than we are, after all. She always knew what music we should hear, how to get the perfect mermaid braids into my thin hair, and which makeup colors looked best with each of our skin tones. According to Tessa, I’m a winter, and Starla Joy is a fall. She told Dean he’s a spring, and he even took her advice about trying a blue nail color once, but then he went back to his regular black.

  In the past couple of years, though, Tessa’s grown more distant. She’s been dating Jeremy Jackson for the last year and a half, and the two of them together are like a country love song—small-town high school romance personified. He plays basketball and he even dunked in a game once; she’s not a cheerleader because she’s almost too cool for that, but she’s friends with all the girls who are. Tessa and Jeremy even make eyes at each other in church, though I try not to be too obvious when I watch them. Today’s reunion is nice.

  Tessa’s wearing a silk floral scarf tied around her neck, like you might see in a magazine. Starla Joy experiments with bright lipstick and I dream of turning heads one day, but Tessa? She’s already there. She’s in a whole different social sphere, mainly because she’s insanely beautiful. She could be a J.Crew model.

  The four of us just walk around town, doing nothing much. We consider going to the movies, but we’ve seen everything that’s playing. So we get ice cream and line up on a bench on the main street in town. Tessa swings her legs underneath her and asks me how it feels to have my license.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I say. “So far my parents only let me take the car to go back and forth to work.”

  “They’ll loosen up on the rules soon,” says Tessa. “You’re responsible.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “They got so weird the other day when I was hanging out with Ty.”

  I drop it into the conversation casually, but I hope Tessa will notice.

  She does.

  “Ooh! So what’s he like?” she asks. Her long, wavy brown hair touches the tops of my legs as she leans over Starla Joy to be close to me.

  “He’s cool,” says Dean, breaking in. “He’s awesome at World of Warcraft.”

  “You’ve been hanging out with him too?” asks Starla Joy.

  “A couple of times,” says Dean.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” says Tessa. “I want to know what Lacey likes about him …”

  “He’s really sweet,” I say. “Just like he used to be.”

  “But now he’s hot too,” says Starla Joy, and the three of us crack up.

  “Is this afternoon turning into a chick flick?” asks Dean, and his speech is slurred because he’s licking his Rocky Road ice cream rapidly so it won’t drip down the cone. “Should I turn on my PSP to drown out the gigglefest?”

  “Spare me, Dean,” says Tessa. “You know that if there was a new girl in town you’d be all over it.”

  Dean smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “What I wouldn’t give for a new girl who’d appreciate the many layers of my personality.”

  “Or who’d just put up with your video game playing,” says Starla Joy.

  “That’d be good too,”
says Dean, reaching for his back pocket. Usually he keeps his PSP there but today he promised to leave it at home because Starla Joy and I are increasingly annoyed with the way he looks down at it all the time while we’re trying to talk to him.

  “Darn it!” he says.

  I shake my head at him.

  “This interior-only life isn’t healthy,” Starla Joy tells him.

  Dean rolls his eyes, but he is more himself today.

  “I’m sitting on a bench eating ice cream and talking about Ty, aren’t I?” asks Dean, fluttering his lashes to make fun of us.

  Tessa throws her head back and laughs, and for just a minute it’s like we’re on a stage and the spotlight is focused intensely on her—the way her hair shines, the way her eyes sparkle, the tilt of her chin and smooth curve of her neck. Her laugh twinkles in the air, and I see a few people walking by turn to look.

  “Dean, you know we love you,” says Tessa. He stares back at her like she’s the sun, and I wonder if that crush he used to have on her ever went away. She reaches over and ruffles his hair.

  “So tell us more about hanging out with Ty,” says Tessa, refocusing on me.

  I look down at my flip-flops, pleased to be the center of her attention. But I don’t want to tell everyone about the things we discussed—a lot of it seems personal.

  So I tell them how Ty told me he thought I was passionate about life.

  “Wait—he actually called you passionate?” asks Starla Joy. “As in, he used that word?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I remember because it made me blush.”

  “Oh my gosh, he wants to make out with you!” says Starla Joy.

  My mouth drops open and Tessa says, “Sarah Joyce Minter!”

  “Well, he must,” she says.

  “Um, excuse me,” says Dean. “I hate to break this to you ladies, but guys want to make out with girls. It’s normal.”

  “But they don’t talk about it outright like that,” says Starla Joy. “Oh, Lacey, that’s exciting.”

  “Starla Joy!” I say.

  “Will everyone stop saying my name in that shocked voice?” she asks.

  “I don’t think he meant it that way,” I say. But I can’t really explain the context since he was talking about how I wanted Tessa’s role in Hell House.

  Tessa smiles. “I’m sure he’s a nice guy,” she says. “But even so, be careful, Lacey.” I wish people would stop saying that to me. Tessa isn’t careful. Careful is boring.

  When I get home just before dinner, Mom’s taking tuna casserole out of the oven and Dad’s on the computer in the corner of the living room working on Sunday’s sermon. I flop down in a chair near him with my book, and I’m almost to the end of chapter eleven when I hear the rumble of an unmuffled engine in the driveway.

  Dad’s eyes swing to the front window as the beams of Ty’s headlights sweep through our living room. I hear his car door slam after the engine cuts off, and I look over at Dad. He nods. “Go see who it is,” he says.

  But I know who it is.

  “Hey,” says Ty, when I open the front door just as he’s about to ring the bell. “You left your sweater in my car.”

  I must have forgotten it when he drove me home the other night. I hadn’t even missed it. But I’m glad he’s here. Only I’m annoyed at his timing, because I can feel both Mom and Dad staring at the door. I swing it open wider so Ty can see them eyeing us.

  “Thanks,” I say, taking the blue cardigan from him.

  “Sure,” says Ty softly. Then he looks past me and waves at Mom and Dad. “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Byer!” he says loudly.

  “Hello, Tyson … Ty,” says Dad, with warmth in his voice as he corrects himself. He walks over to us, not inviting Ty in but meeting him at the door. “How are you adjusting to life back here?”

  “It’s nice, sir,” Ty says. “Especially since I get to see old friends like Lacey Anne.”

  My mother coughs in the background.

  “Yes. Well, that’s fine,” says my dad.

  Fine? They’re talking like they’re from some old sitcom. My parents are never this stiff. I look back at my mom and she’s doing that earring-twisting thing again.

  “Well, I’d better go,” Ty says, more to my parents than to me. “My aunt’s making dinner.”

  I know he must want to escape this awkwardness, and I feel bad.

  “Good night,” Mom says, a little too quickly.

  “Say hello to Vivian for us,” Dad says as he heads back into the living room.

  “I will,” Ty says. “Thanks.”

  I know if it were someone else—if it were Dean or Starla Joy or any other Youth Leaders member showing up on our doorstep—they would have asked them to stay for dinner. What do they have against him?

  I give Ty a shrug, and I smile in hopes of conveying that I’m sorry he walked into this predinner, parent-filled zone when maybe he planned to return my sweater and have an excuse to kiss me.

  Ty grins, though, so I know he understands, and then he walks back to his car and drives away.

  “That certainly is a loud vehicle,” says Mom. “What kind is it anyway?”

  “It’s a BMW,” I say. “They’re really safe.” I don’t know if that’s true but I have to try to win points for Ty where I can.

  “So you left your sweater in his car?” Dad asks, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I say. My face turns red, although there’s no reason for it to. It’s hot out, so I obviously didn’t take off my sweater in his car, I just brought it along with me. But I wish I could control my blushing. “Dean says I should staple my sweater to my waist because I’m always leaving it places.”

  Great. Now I’ve gone and rambled in defense of shedding clothes in Ty’s car, which isn’t even what happened. Are my parents really insinuating that anything remotely untoward took place? ’Cause it didn’t. And they should know I’m not like that.

  “Okay,” says Mom, sighing and returning to the kitchen with an efficient gait. “Dinner’s ready.”

  When we sit down and my parents take my hands for prayer, I feel that tightness again, the kind that makes it hard to breathe, and I start to think that the way my parents are acting—the way they seem wary of Ty—is causing it. They’re not giving him a chance, maybe just because he moved away, which seems really narrow minded.

  “Lord, thank you for bringing this food to our table so we may enjoy time as a family and the sustenance of you, our God. Thank you for the beautiful woman who cooked the meal,” my father says, and I can almost feel him smiling at Mom. “Thank you for the sun today, and for the safe return of Lacey’s sweater. Help her to be more careful in the future. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”

  And instead of saying “Amen,” I want to scoff at my father’s annoying sweater mention. But I don’t need that between me and God, so I just say “Amen” and get on with dinner.

  Chapter Ten

  For the rest of the week, I work three double shifts at the barbecue. School starts on Monday, so Mom has been making me do all these last-minute summer chores, like getting my room cleaned up and organized and helping her with her to-do list for the last church supper of the summer.

  I do everything she asks in a zombie state because there are two things that take up 90 percent of my brain right now: number one, Ty, and number two, Hell House. The cast list gets posted Sunday.

  When the day finally arrives, I wait outside the church for my dad to open the doors early, so I can see the list before the other Youth Leaders. I begged Dad all week to tell me how auditions went, but he’s frustratingly disciplined about things like that, and he wouldn’t say a word.

  Still, I’m not surprised when I see the name “Tessa Minter” next to “Abortion Girl.” She knew she had it. The bright side is that my name is in parentheses after hers, which means I’m the understudy, and I’ll have a good shot at it next year.

  I make myself smile big as I see some other people crowding around the list. After all, they don�
�t know I really wanted the part, and there’s no need for them to.

  I got the role of “Party Girl Passenger” in the drunk driving scene. I end up dead, which will include fun blood packets that splatter and dramatic lines like, “Whoa—stop!” and “Look out!” so it’ll still be cool.

  Besides, I’ll have my movie moments another way. Ty’s in church today.

  “So … Party Girl Passenger,” says Starla Joy as she sits down next to me and my mom in the front row. She knows not to mention Ty in front of my parents—I told her how they’re weird about him.

  “Congratulations, Demon Tour Guide,” I say. It’s impressive that Starla Joy got that role—she’s the only girl who landed one of the six demon parts.

  “Starla Joy, are you joining us in the front pew today?” asks my mother.

  “If I may,” Starla Joy says in her polite-with-adults voice. “I have no idea where Dean is, and Tessa’s at home sick so Momma stayed with her. I just called and told Tessa the good news about Abortion Girl.”

  “She’ll do a wonderful job,” says Mom, patting my hand sympathetically. Which annoys me.

  “She will be great,” I say. Then I look up at my mother. “I’m not bitter, Mom. I promise.”

  Mom smiles. “It’s not the right part for you this year, Lacey,” she says. “You’re not ready.”

  I pull my hand out from under hers. She’s still treating me like I’m a kid, like I can’t handle anything, even a church performance.

  Mom doesn’t flinch when I move away, she just continues chatting and smiling.

  “Starla Joy, that lipstick looks so pretty on you,” she says, talking over me.

  “Why, thank you, Mrs. Byer,” says Starla Joy. “And your broach is just beautiful.”

  I sit quietly between them as they go back and forth. My mom and Starla Joy have always bonded over superficial things. And even though I can’t pull off Starla Joy’s bright red lips, I am wearing lip gloss today so I should get some credit. I’m glad when Pastor Frist starts his sermon.