* * *
—
I walked home alone in the dark because, yes, even though I’d turned seventeen in August, which meant I’d turned sixteen over a year before, I still didn’t drive. Sharon always forgot, and it was easier to just get out of the house and hurry home alone than it was to remind her that I didn’t have a license, and then spend fifteen minutes making small talk in her kitchen while I waited for a ride. Sharon was a single mom—like, really single. As in, it was all she talked about. And while she was a good client who paid well, the last thing on earth I wanted was for her to open up her dating apps and ask for my opinion on her profile pics again. And tonight, I just wanted to get out of there.
I thought I was pretty unflappable as a babysitter. I’d dealt with poop, projectile vomits, siblings that went all UFC on each other, and a klepto kindergartner who stole my phone and my house keys. I should have been able to take a little sleepwalking in stride. All in a day’s work, right? Yet I couldn’t get the image of Kaitlyn on the ledge out of my head. It was a nightmare, all right. But mine, not hers. Something happening to the kid you were in charge of was the worst thing a babysitter could imagine. I couldn’t even begin to think about what would have happened if Sharon had come home to find Kaitlyn perched on the roof and me watching reality TV while eating junk food out of a mixing bowl. Or worse…I stopped thinking and forced myself to take a deep breath. I wasn’t letting my mind spiral there. Not tonight, not ever.
Deep down, I know I’m a good babysitter, and it’s a job I want to hold on to. Babysitting is about the only thing standing between me and a job that requires me to wear an embroidered polo, and nothing good ever came out of a job with a uniform. David Gibson worked at Target, and Mark Malloy had told everyone at school that he’d once seen David get a boner while restocking the super plus tampons. The boner in question was probably no more than a pleat-front khaki malfunction, but still, gossip like that was exactly why I liked to stay out of sight, locked away in someone’s family room, far away from the prying eyes of people my own age.
Other teenagers?
Thanks, but no.
Still, I had to admit that the stakes were way higher with babysitting. If I screwed up, someone small and innocent could get hurt. If David Gibson made a mistake, he accidentally shelved the tampons next to the tennis balls.
My major screwup left me feeling like I’d downed three bottles of cold brew—I jumped every time a leaf rustled, and I double-timed it to put some distance between me and the family of ghosts swinging from an oak tree. God, I swear the Halloween decorations around here get more elaborate every year.
I stopped at a crosswalk and waited for the light to change, with a flower bed full of dismembered limbs to my right, and a psychopathic-killer-themed driveway to my left, complete with bloody boot prints leading into the garage. It was a sign of just how twisted small-town life really was. This was one of those nothing-ever-happens places where fender benders made the paper, but still, if Yankee Candle ever introduced a Moonbeams on Rotting Flesh scent, it would sell out in Spring River. There was no place like suburbia for repressing a dark side, and now it came out earlier every year. This year, I’d started seeing skeletons in July.
The light finally changed, and I stepped into the street. Starting to cross, I couldn’t help but think how the night’s events were just a few more things to add to my list of stuff I wished I could talk to my mom about. I mean, I could definitely talk to her about it. She just wouldn’t say anything in response.
So, I’d do what I always did when something bothered me.
Step one: Shake it off.
Step two: Pretend it hadn’t happened.
Step three: Never think about it again.
It had gotten me this far.
When my alarm went off the next morning, I felt like a bag of wet cement.
Which had nothing to do with what had happened the night before.
“Wet cement” was pretty much how I felt every morning, especially Mondays, because high school. Errrrgghh. Gag me with a spoon and tell me it’s dessert. I’ve heard that Rimbaud wrote “A Season in Hell” about high school. Okay, maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was just my interpretation—because it made sense. No one knew about misery and hatred like an assistant principal with an associate’s degree and a God complex. Drown me in sand and blood. No, really, please.
Life as a Spring River Bog Lemming made me want to run off a cliff. Yes, I said that right. We were the Bog Lemmings. Apparently, by the time they’d gotten to Spring River, all the good mascots had been taken, which is all you need to know about this town and its pantheons of education.
The best thing about school was that it meant I got to see Janis every day. Janis was my best friend and the best-dressed person I knew IRL. Actually, one of the best-dressed people I’d seen, period. She’d moved to Spring River in seventh grade, and I still remembered what she wore the first day she came to school: bright yellow leggings, a long gray sweater covered with multicolored pom-poms, pom-pom socks, and papier-mâché earrings, and her hair had been pulled into two afro puffs secured with those ponytail holders that had round plastic beads. Janis somehow made them look retro-cool, and not kindergarten. She told me later that her theme for that day had been “gumball machine.”
I thought she was the bravest person I’d ever met in my life—who else would show up for their first day at a new school in a themed outfit? We’d been best friends from the minute she’d plopped down next to me at lunch and complimented the vintage Fiorucci stickers on my binder. We lived in a town that considered Fruit of the Loom to be the height of fashion, so Janis was my lifeline. I didn’t want to know where I’d be without her in my life—probably wearing things because they were “practical.”
Every night we texted each other what the next day’s look was going to be. Today Janis was “Denise gets a step-daughter,” and I was “Sylvia Plath goes to prom.”
I had on a vintage knee skirt and a sequined sweater set, which contrasted nicely with the Jean Seberg Breathless hair and silver nose stud that I considered my signatures. I’d gone for a lipstick that was matte pink, swapped my normal tortoiseshell glasses for rhinestone cat-eyes, and added the pièce de résistance of my themed outfit: pewter bell jar earrings I found at the antiques mall.
If I’d gotten to school early, I could have seen Janis before class, but I did not generally get to school early. I usually got to campus right before—and occasionally right after—the first bell, so most days I didn’t see her until lunch. And because of our sucky schedules, that was actually at eleven a.m., which—if you ask me—was too early to brave the mysteries of the Spring River High cafeteria. No matter what the cafeteria menu claimed to be serving (Spinach salad! Chicken parmesan! Steak tacos!), the food in the buffet line always resembled something you could buy at Petco. In my time as a student there, I’d never seen a food that wasn’t brown. It was disgusting, but the only other option was to bring your lunch, and that would require planning. And Dad actually going to the grocery store. So brown it was.
Today, the morning was pretty uneventful. I eased through my first three periods as well as one can and headed to the cafeteria, where I found Janis in the lunch line and slipped in behind her. “Denise gets a step-daughter” was right when Lisa Bonet was going boho but wasn’t yet full earth mama. Janis had on baggy shibori-dyed pants, leather slippers, a gauzy silver shirt, and an oversized men’s blazer. Even without dreads down to her waist, she looked Huxtable as hell.
We inched through the line, collecting our browns, and I followed Janis to our table, over in the corner farthest away from the main wall of doors, and sat down next to her. We always sat on the same side with our backs up against the wall, like mobsters, because the cafeteria was one place where you definitely never wanted anyone coming up behind you. They could be carrying gravy. Or worse, marinara.
Tod
ay’s browns were a slice of pepperoni pizza (orange-brown with red-brown spots) and a side of french fries (crispy brown). “So, how was last night?” Janis asked, dabbing her pizza with a paper napkin in a futile attempt to sop up the grease.
Even though we had been texting all night and throughout the morning, I hadn’t mentioned anything about what had happened with Kaitlyn, and now that we were together in person, I still felt weird bringing it up. There was something that kept the words from forming on my tongue. Somehow saying it out loud made it more terrifying. And real.
“Fine,” I said finally, adding what I could only hope was a normal smile. “The usual.” I was wondering how I could change the subject, but I didn’t have to: Janis changed it herself.
“There she is!” she said, slapping my arm as if she’d just seen a celebrity.
“Who are you talking about?”
“The new girl,” she said, then shot me a look. “You didn’t hear about the new girl?”
I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Janis always seemed to forget that she was my one and only friend, and therefore my one and only source of gossip. “Some guy dropped her off this morning,” she continued. “I saw her get out of his car, which was a real POS, but he was hot AF.”
I raised my eyebrows, interested in the development. Most of the males in Spring River were disgusting AF, so anyone who wasn’t—even if it was someone else’s boyfriend—was worth a mention. This was enough info to pique my interest, so I slowly turned like I was trying to stretch, and there was the new girl, standing right past the cashier, poised with a tray of browns and surveying the complex geography of available seats. The lunchroom was like Spring River’s own sorting hat, but instead of houses, it separated you into castes. Usually you could look at someone and immediately know if they were going to be a plebe or an aristo, but with the new girl, it was hard to tell.
She certainly was pretty enough to fall right in with the ruling class. She looked dewy, like she’d just been dipped in olive oil—in a healthy, glowy way. Her black hair hung pin-straight to the middle of her back, so shiny that you could probably have seen yourself in it if you’d tried hard enough, and she looked like she’d been sucking on a lollipop, or at least had really good Korean lip gloss. She’d also clearly won some genetic lottery, because she was skinny—with boobs.
But her clothes looked like they’d been pulled out of a trash can: scuffed Converse that had once been white, maybe, and jeans that were distressed in a didn’t-come-this-way-but-are-this-way-because-they’re-old way. She wore a flannel that was at least three sizes too big over a baby tee that was short enough to reveal a strip of taut stomach.
That strip of stomach was enough to get the guys’ attention, which meant she also got the girls’ attention—the guys wondering how long it’d take to get a bite out of this piece, the girls wondering how long it would take to make her cry and lock herself in the bathroom. But there was something about the new girl that suggested she wasn’t the crying type. And that she bit back.
As she stood there, more and more people noticed her, and a hush rippled through the cafeteria. She had everyone’s attention. We waited with collectively bated breath. The most exciting event of the year! Everyone was dying to know! Who would she pick? Would they accept her or reject her—for all the world to see?
But instead of coming to sit at a table, she turned around, dumped her lunch into the trash, tray and all, and walked out.
“Bold,” Janis said, sopping up the last of her ketchup with a pitiful excuse for a fry. “I like it.”
* * *
—
Cassandra Heaven.
By the time the bell rang for next period, I knew her name, because the table of cretins next to us couldn’t stop joking about who was going to be the first to spend “seven minutes in Heaven.”
Janis and I got up and cleared our trays as Craig Lugweather said something disgusting about how he was going to “open up those pearly gates and come right on inside.”
Craig Lugweather had been my chem partner the previous year, and had spent all class watching bouncing-boob GIFs on his phone under the table. And when I say “all class,” I don’t mean just one day—I mean all semester. A different boob GIF every day, like he had some sort of Google alert set up that zapped them right to his phone. He did nothing while I tried to mix various -ides and -iums without blowing us up. By the end of the semester, I wished I had blown us up. Taking myself out would have been worth it if I’d taken him with me.
As Janis and I headed toward the trash bins, an explosion of laughter erupted at his table, and I couldn’t help but look back. Immediately I wished I hadn’t, because Craig’s hands were formed in an obscene gesture that left nothing to the imagination. He was the Harvey Weinstein of the junior class, and if there was any justice in this world, the Humane Society would have neutered him a long time ago. Just looking at him now made me feel kind of pukey.
I shook my head, and as I turned away, something caught my eye. An almost-full bottle of Hawaiian Punch on his lunch tray wobbled ever so slightly, then tipped over so that it dumped sticky red directly into his lap and interrupted his pantomime.
“Dude, what the?” Craig screamed, immediately punching Dane Kirball in the shoulder.
Dane punched him back. “I didn’t touch it, bro!” he said. “You did that yourself.”
The whole thing made my body feel like it had collided with an electric fence. Because I could swear that somehow I’d done that. Even though I hadn’t. Because I couldn’t. Because that would have been impossible.
Right?
Janis and I walked toward our lockers in silence, and I felt the dread mounting with each step. Lunch with Janis was definitely the highlight of my day. After that it just got suckier and suckier. I dropped off the books I didn’t need and made my way to my next class. Driver’s ed.
The fact that I still didn’t have a driver’s license was one of my most epic fails, and it made me want to bury my head in my locker like an adolescent ostrich. Granted, there weren’t many places I needed to go where Janis wasn’t also going, but someday I was going to have to take the wheel. Passenger for Life: The Esme Pearl Story did not sound like a page-turning bio. It would just be page after page of me sending the same text: “Hey, do you think you could pick me up?” Ugh.
Dad had had big plans to teach me how to drive as soon as I’d turned sixteen last year, but after a few months of “next weekend,” combined with neither of us rushing to get me into the driver’s seat (aka hanging out, just the two of us), we’d finally decided that driver’s ed was the best option. Lower insurance rates too, Dad reasoned, probably more as a way to make him feel better about it.
I’d been too late sophomore year, so all the classes had been full, so I’d tried to sign up for the summer school session, but that had cost extra. That was how I now found myself, lunch congealing in my belly, a junior on my way into a class with a bunch of sophomores and one freshman who looked like he was actually about thirty-five and out on parole.
The driver’s ed room was full of driving simulators that had probably been considered pretty high-tech back when the school had first bought them in, oh, I don’t know, 1963? In all the instructional videos, the women wore gloves and the men wore hats, and everyone stopped at all the stop signs and used their blinker when changing lanes.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved the retro fashion, but I wasn’t sure that the era represented a realistic depiction of driving anymore. Shouldn’t this class have been getting us prepped for how to deal when a guy in a jacked-up Chevy with truck balls dangling off the back made a right turn from the left lane into a Buffalo Wild Wings parking lot and cut you off in the process? I mean, that was what happened to Dad when he was driving me to school this morning. It made him spill coffee on his cargo slacks, and he was not happy about it.
I took my seat in t
he back of the room, and zoned, staring out the window at a crow picking at a Burger King bag in the parking lot. He was really going for it, and I was starting to get into it. Like, I was emotionally invested in whether or not there were any fry crumbs left in that ball of greasy paper, and if so, was—
“Esme Pearl.”
Hearing my name snapped me out of the drama happening outside, and it took a second to realize that I wasn’t just getting called on to answer a question.
Crap. I’d forgotten that today was my day to actually drive. Not in a simulator but in a real, three-dimensional vehicle, outside in the world. I gathered my stuff back up and started to head to the front of the room, and stifled a groan when I saw the three students I’d be sharing said vehicle with.
All three guys, all three football players, all three grinning like they’d somehow rigged this so that they could be together. They probably had, which made me anxious about whatever was coming next. I was sure it wouldn’t be good.
The four of us made our way out to the back of the school, the three of them laughing and talking and me trailing behind, alone and quiet. Our driving instructor led us to the car that was waiting for us in the parking lot.
The car was a Toyota Corolla, shiny beige and one step up from a tuna can on wheels. The instructor was Mr. Dekalb, who was about ninety years old and as deaf as a concrete block. He had gray hairs sprouting out of the pores on his nose, and his eyebrows could have used a good sesh with a weed whacker. He smiled and gave us a speech that was pretty much unintelligible but which I gathered from facial cues and hand gestures was about safety and respect for the road. Then he consulted the clipboard he was holding, and cleared his throat.
The Babysitters Coven Page 2