Small Town Love (The Small Town Trilogy Book 2)

by Alison Ryan

  McKenna sighed. She held the large empty glass bottle of Boone’s in her hand. Her finger nails were polished a dark teal color. The paint on her thumb nail was chipped.

  “I guess you should know,” said McKenna. “Most people don’t bother to ask. They just assume that the worst story is always the true one, because doesn’t that just make it more fun?”

  I nodded, “So, this is a famous story I’m about to hear?”

  “Only the kind of famous that would be defined in the Rut,” McKenna said, placing the bottle next to her legs on the porch floor. “Rachel Lawson and I used to be best friends.”

  McKenna pulled her legs up to her chest on the glider, staring out at the woods between her house and mine. She continued, “I’m ashamed to admit this but it was something I used to be ridiculously and stupidly proud of. I thought I was pretty cool being the right hand gal pal of the most popular girl in the 7th grade. That’s about the time people really start segregating themselves according to status. In elementary school my best friend was Rhiannon, of course. Rachel moved to our town in 5th grade from Richmond. She was just this mesmerizing presence. Everyone was in awe of her Pantene commercial hair and her Guess brand everything. She was like a celebrity or something. Even in middle school she got invited to high school parties. It was nuts. Being around her made you feel that same kind of famous by association. But Rachel also comes at a cost and that cost, unfortunately, was my friendship with Rhiannon.” McKenna looked up at Rhiannon, who sat quietly by her side. She reached over and squeezed McKenna’s hand.

  “It’s okay,” Rhiannon joked. “You were blinded by small town fame. I would have slowed your popularity trajectory.”

  McKenna rolled her eyes, “I’m glad you have a good sense of humor about it, because I’m still completely mortified by how I treated you. Anyway, by 8th grade it was Rachel, then me, then Courtney, and Jennifer Ronaldson went to fat camp and got skinny the summer before 8th and suddenly also had huge boobs, so she became one of us too. We were something out of a terrible ‘80s movie. We were like girl versions of James Spader’s character in Pretty in Pink. Maybe worse, actually. We made Heathers look like a cheesy episode of Full House. We were drunk off our own coolness but it was all precariously tied to Rachel Lawson’s approval. Each week one of us was threatened with exile. It was our worst nightmare. I didn’t have it so bad, being the closest to her. Poor Jennifer had it the worst. She was constantly being reminded of her past as a fat girl. Jennifer couldn’t even eat in front of Rachel for fear of being gutted over her choice of eating a slice of pizza over a limp salad from the cafeteria.”

  I shook my head, “Why the hell would any of you put up with this shit?”

  McKenna shrugged, “It was just the price you paid to be in with Rachel. Sure, it sucked. We were essentially bullied, and maybe if we’d banded together and stood up to her, it would have been different. But, sadly, it was one of those things where the motto was ‘As long as it’s not me.’ Besides, every girl in school wanted to be in our crew. We knew we were all completely replaceable while Rachel Lawson never would be. She set the trends, she made the rules. We had to live by them.”

  I sighed, “I can’t even imagine. There’s just no way I would allow someone that kind of control over my happiness.”

  “You say that,” McKenna said. “But you might be surprised. I look back and say the same thing, but I also remember what it was like to walk into a room and have everyone look at you. In a great way. It felt good to be envied. There was a power in it. It made everything seem more exciting to be in on something that everyone wanted. So high school started. All four of us were nominated for Homecoming court. Rachel was with Ryan by then. They started dating the summer they were junior lifeguards together. None of us had boyfriends, but it wasn’t like we couldn’t if we had wanted them. I guess, in that sense, we were just behind. I ended up going to the dance with a senior from the football team who barely spoke to me. But I still got to say I went to Homecoming with an upperclassman. Even though I had a terrible time, it looked like I had the perfect life. And that was all I cared about, was how it all looked.”

  I cringed at the thought of Ryan being with someone else. I couldn’t help but think of this faceless girl, Rachel Lawson, with her arms around his neck slowly dancing to a Jodeci song. No matter how this story ended, I already hated her. Which I knew was petty, but show me a sixteen year old girl who isn’t.

  “So anyway, the beginning of 9th grade is fine. But over Christmas break Rachel and Ryan got in some kind of argument over him not wanting to go to a party that was being held by some prior year seniors who were home from college for the holidays. And I don’t blame him. There’s nothing more pathetic than people who have already graduated high school having a party that current students at their high school would be attending. The whole thing sounds so stupid to me now, but at the time I of course acted like I couldn’t believe he wouldn’t go. So Rachel asked me to go, because Courtney was traveling to DC to sing in something with choir and Jennifer had a cheer thing. Of course I was thrilled to go and lied to my parents about spending the night at Rachel’s when really we were going over to a party in Wildwood Manor to get drunk and hang out with boys that had no business hanging out with us.”

  I thought about what I was doing my freshman year of high school. Even being in Las Vegas, my life had been pretty tame. My friend Marisol and I had probably been watching SNICK on Nickelodeon and painting one another’s nails from make-up and Urban Decay nail polish in her older sister’s Caboodle. Drinking and boys were something far away in our futures.

  McKenna went on, “So we get to this party. It was a mess. It seemed like the entire world was there, in this tiny little split-level house. Everyone was drunk and loud. As soon as we arrived, all eyes were on us, the fresh meat of Rutledgeville High. But even then, I had a bad feeling. It was like my intuition knew what was going to happen before I did. I wanted to go home, but of course Rachel was in her element and immediately started taking shots with some girls from the dance team. She got really sloppy, really fast, and sat in this guy’s lap, a guy who was two years out of the Rut, which meant he was almost 6 years older than her. Everyone was staring at Ryan Kidson’s girlfriend sitting in the lap of this college guy. So I pulled her off of him and we headed towards the kitchen. She was drunk and pissed off at me and had no idea really what was happening around her at that point. She pulled away from me and walked away. Fine. I decided to just wander around until the party inevitably either ran out of alcohol or got broken up. I sat on a couch and just observed the people around me. Ironically, Kyle Joel was there with his older brother doing his first keg stand. So that was funny. He was still so scrawny and short. He looked like a little kid. Anyway, I glimpsed Rachel being taken by the hand upstairs by the college guy. I didn’t know if I should follow her to make sure she was okay, or just leave her alone. But something told me I needed to follow her. I mean she was fourteen. And I’ve seen enough Lifetime movies to know what’s up.”

  I sat, riveted, waiting for the rest. McKenna picked up the empty bottle of Boone’s again and turned it over in her hands.

  “Part of me wishes I had let her go. But I think it would have been so much worse for her, and despite what happened, I’m glad I didn’t let anything happen to her. Because I get upstairs and I find Rachel half passed out on a bed with two guys standing over her. As soon as I opened the door they looked at me, surprised. It was obvious what was going on, and it made me sick. I pulled Rachel, who was barely coherent, up off the bed and screamed at them to go kill themselves. I took her out to the driveway where, fortunately, Kyle and his brother were getting into their Jeep. I asked them if they could drive us back to Rachel’s house, and of course they did. I think they thought we might invite them over, but Rachel ended up puking over the passenger side window and once they saw that, their interest waned.

  “So we got to the Lawson’s mansion which is just on the other side of Wildwood Manor fro
m where the party was. It was about midnight, so her parents were asleep. I thought that was kind of sad that no one was waiting up on her. By this time she was a tiny bit more sober, I think throwing up her dinner and half the tequila shots she’d consumed probably helped her. So we got inside and went straight to her room. And all of a sudden she just started sobbing. Like, really heaving. I was in complete shock. I had never in my years of knowing her seen her show any emotion, especially this kind. As far as I knew, Rachel Lawson was a soulless robot. But here she was, laying on her four post bed in a pile of hair and despair. She started babbling about how much she hated herself. I just sat there listening to her talk about her fear of not measuring up to her parents’ expectations, especially her mother’s, and about how she was sure Ryan would end up being disappointed with her for some reason and then she showed me something I’ll never forget.

  “She lifted up her denim skirt and showed me her upper thigh, which of course was golden tan and completely cellulite free. But towards the top of it there were gashes, little cuts. She told me she did them to herself when she was feeling really terrible, that the physical pain alleviated the constant pain inside. After that confession, she immediately passed out and I was left there completely stunned.”

  I sat there dumbfounded. That story hadn’t gone where I thought it would go.

  McKenna looked up at me, “I know it’s shitty to tell you that. I’ve only told Rhiannon about it. I would never spread something like that around. And honestly, when she told me that, it was the first time I really realized how much I liked Rachel. It was the first time she let down her guard and I felt even more special that she did it with me. I figured it would solidify my position as her VP of Popular Girl Land. But oh how dumb I was.

  “The next morning she would barely even look at me. My dad picked me up around 9 am and she didn’t even tell me goodbye. She was cold and short. I figured maybe she was just incredibly hung over. I doubted there was a time in her short life of drinking where she had drank as much as she did at that party. And Rachel could be moody. I figured she would call me later that night and we’d figure out plans for what we’d do over Christmas Break. School was out, so I figured we’d shop and she would have me over for the huge Lawson Christmas Party they had every year. But she didn’t call me that afternoon or night. When I finally broke down and called her, her mother answered and told me she was out with a friend. I found that hard to believe, since I was the only one of her close friends even in the Rut at that moment.

  “All of Christmas Break I waited for her to call me back. I also called Courtney and Jennifer to find out what was going on, but neither of them would answer either. By the time school was back in session, I was really nervous. I had a very bad feeling, the same feeling I had when we first entered that damn party. Sure enough, I walked up to Rachel’s locker on Monday and she looked at me like I was some sort of insect she just found on her Cocoa Puffs. I asked her where she’d been and why she hadn’t called me back. She told me ‘I’m not friends with drunk sluts.’ I was completely confused. Courtney and Jennifer also gave me the cold shoulder. Courtney was gleeful about it, but I could tell Jennifer felt bad. She whispered to me in the bathroom later that day that Rachel was telling everyone I had gotten drunk at the Wildwood Manor party and she had to keep me from being date raped upstairs and that I had totally embarrassed myself and her. I couldn’t believe it. I tried to tell Jennifer how it had been Rachel and not me that had been the drunk one but Jennifer wasn’t about to risk her own new promotion in the Rachel Lawson pecking order. And the more I protested, the guiltier I looked. Rachel Lawson didn’t just make the rules. She also got to rewrite the narrative.”

  I shook my head, “What a heinous bitch from hell. I can’t believe she did that!”

  McKenna smiled, “It was pretty terrible. I was a mess for a long time after that. Pathetically, I kept waiting for her to ask me back, to admit she messed up. It took me a long while to even realize why she had done it. It took a very good friend giving me another chance for me to finally be okay again.” McKenna looked over at Rhiannon and smiled. “Thank God for Rhiannon Lowell.”

  Rhiannon straightened up and puffed her chest out, “I really am great, aren’t I?”

  We laughed. It was a good, genuine laugh, the kind you can only have with people who really know you. I knew I was behind them both in what they had been through, but even in the short amount of time we’d had together, I felt like they were the most special people I would probably ever have the pleasure of calling true friends.

  3

  “So, yeah,” McKenna said as we changed into pajama pants and tank tops in her bedroom. “Rhiannon found me eating my lunch in the library one day and asked me what was going on. She’d heard the rumors going around, and wise girl that she was, she didn’t believe them. Or, at least, she didn’t think it meant I should be treated like a pariah.”

  Rhiannon smiled, “I won’t lie and say I didn’t get a sliver of satisfaction in knowing she felt what it was like to be me for a couple days. My girl needed to get some humility. But I mostly felt terrible for her. Rachel Lawson really came down hard on the girl who knew too much.”

  The epiphany set in. I looked over at McKenna as I tried to squeeze my large butt into a pair of her cotton pajama monkey pants from Delia’s.

  “So you think that’s why she came after you?” I asked. “Because she revealed too much? That’s so crazy. I mean, with the knowledge you had, you could have really turned the tables.”

  McKenna laughed, “That’s not how it works. First of all, no one would believe me. Rachel would have just said I was lying. In a game of she said/ she said, I would never come out on top. And then she might have had people thinking I was a cutter, or mental case, or worse. No, I knew it wouldn’t matter, and I also knew it was the shitty thing to do. Because even after all of that hell, I still feel really bad for Rachel. Not enough to ever hope for anything but misery for her, but enough to know that even in the place I’m in, I’m still doing a hell of a lot better than she is. And I think she really hates that I know her now. Rachel thrives on being seen as perfect. She gets off on knowing people want to be her and be with her. And I think she figured I wanted to take her place. Something I never wanted. Only Rachel Lawson can pull off being Rachel Lawson.”

  We slowly crept down the Holts staircase. I could see a light was on in the dining room, Mrs. Holt typing away at her electric typewriter.

  “Wow,” I whispered to McKenna, “Your mom is really dedicated, huh? I mean, it’s pretty late.”

  Rhiannon said, “Maybe her and your dad just got busy and now it’s inspired her to write a hot love scene.”

  McKenna looked at Rhiannon and made vomiting noises, “Ugh. You’re lucky I love the shit out of you, Rhiannon, because I really hate you right now. That is beyond gross to even think about. Now I feel like I need to bleach the inside of my brain. Thanks a lot.”

  That night it rained. Not the thunder storm kind of rain, just a soft drizzle. McKenna slept on the glider while Rhiannon and I had the cots. Mine was closest to the porch railing and I could feel the mist from the rain hit my cheek. It was the most peaceful feeling, laying on a porch in the summer under a clean cotton sheet that smelled like laundry detergent. It made me forget for a moment what was going on over at my own home.

  Maybe I should have stayed and talked to my mother. But the way she had wailed and cried- I just wasn’t ready to deal with talking to her about what was clearly the biggest skeleton in her closet besides my mystery paternity. I just longed for normalcy in the midst of all the crazy. Grandma’s sickness, Bennett, my mother’s drinking; it was all a lot to handle. These new friends of mine were such solace.

  And then there was Ryan. I couldn’t believe how much I missed him as soon as he was gone. All I wanted was to have another day like the one at the lake or even the one where I’d been with him while he mowed Mrs. Kent’s yard. It was always so easy with him. Even at the diner, when we ha
d run into Courtney, it had been a funny moment. He didn’t take himself too seriously, but at the same time, Ryan was serious. He wasn’t a jackass like Kyle Joel. He didn’t match the boy he was on paper; high school jock, good looking dream boy who can have anyone and anything. Ryan was so much more than what was on the surface, and I felt like I might be one of the only people in the world who knew that.

  And Grandma. Just thinking of her sitting at the kitchen table, tiny as a mouse, eating her scrambled eggs in small bites, broke my heart. I was only here because she was dying. I wouldn’t know any of these people were that not happening. I’d still be in Las Vegas, dealing with my mother’s mood swings, living in a rented house, wondering when my mother would get restless and want to start over again. As grateful and happy as I was to be in the Rut, it was hard to know it was because my Grandma was losing a battle that none of us could help her win.

  I looked up at the Holts’ porch ceiling that was painted robin egg blue. The sounds of McKenna’s heavy, drunken breathing echoed around me in tune with the cicadas, crickets, and frogs out in the woods. Rhiannon slept still and quiet, one lithe arm over her chest, the other hanging off the bed towards the floor.

  I stared at her and thought about how easily she had forgiven McKenna. It didn’t sound like it had even been hard for her, or even hard for McKenna to accept it. I know their spat wasn’t on the level of Mom driving the car in an accident that resulted in the death of her brother, but it was still something they had to do in order to move forward. My mother’s problems all started with that. My job now was to help her get past it so we could all move on from the thing that had become her undoing.

  Mrs. Holt made pancakes the next morning in the shape of hearts. It was such a mom move and I loved it.