Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town

by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

  * * *

  —

  Jake had hoped Ruby would ask him to just take her home. Since she already knew what he was going to say, why make a big dramatic play of it? She could have told her father she didn’t feel well and Jake had helpfully given her a ride home, although even he was aware that of all the things Ruby was now thinking about him in the passenger seat, the word “helpful” was not one of them.

  He drove the speed limit, so slowly his eyes were locked the whole time with her father’s until he finally slid past and it was safe to blink again. There was something a little incongruous and downright creepy about staring into your girlfriend’s eyes and seeing her father, but it was even creepier the other way around.

  Especially if you’d done something wrong.

  Ruby was such a daddy’s girl. That was another thing he appreciated about Martha Hollister: no looming father figure to make his life difficult.

  For the second time that morning, Jake felt like he was heading to his own funeral.

  And then he did the worst thing he could possibly do under the circumstances: he laughed.

  * * *

  —

  Ruby stared at Jake, confused by the sound coming out of him. She had nothing in her vast arsenal of emotions to turn to, so she just looked at him like she’d never met him before.

  Should she yell? Punch him? Grab the wheel and kill them both?

  Her gaze was blistering.

  He could feel the heat coming off her.

  He coughed and cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said unconvincingly. “Sorry I laughed.”

  “You’re sorry you laughed?”

  “And I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  “But you aren’t sorry for what you did, are you?”

  He said nothing.

  “What exactly did you do, Jake? And how often?”

  “Oh, Ruby, come on…”

  She wanted him to say it. She wanted him to describe in sickening detail every single transgression.

  He wasn’t even decent enough to do that.

  * * *

  —

  They were near the quarry now. The trees lining the narrow road were laden with fruit. It was that time of year when all the overripe apples and plums falling from the branches would pile up in the ditch—a fruit salad for wasps. They drove past a dead raccoon in the middle of the road, still cradling a smashed crab apple in its equally smashed paws, flat against the pavement.

  The quarry trucks caused so much roadkill.

  There’s a metaphor, thought Ruby as Jake’s tires spun over the bodies of hundreds of flattened green toads.

  She glanced in the rearview mirror. Shadows danced across the backseat.

  “What are you looking at?” Jake asked, relieved to reduce everything to this moment. To ask a seemingly simple question.

  “The light is playing tricks,” said Ruby, who was also happy that there were still simple questions with simple answers, in spite of everything.

  Except it wasn’t simple. The shadows made her imagine Martha Hollister lying across the backseat, her short skirt hitched up to her waist. Ruby thought her brain might explode. How long had Jake been playing her for a fool?

  She stared again at the side of his face as he drove, marveling at how it was possible to know a person so well and not at all, in the very same breath.

  Somehow he had slipped away, this boy she’d known forever.

  She missed who they had been at the ages of ten, twelve, and especially fourteen, when all the possibilities were suddenly split wide open like a piñata that had been smacked repeatedly in the hallways of Pigeon Creek Middle School by a bazillion hormones whacking away at it on their way to class.

  Back then, the hair on her arms bristled just from being close to Jake, from the electric shock of all the possibilities, especially the ones they hadn’t even known existed.

  In health class, the jaded, middle-aged Mr. Spatchcock (really, that was his name), his round rutabaga face tinged pink, went on and on about their changing hormones, how it happened to everybody, how normal it was—“Nothing to get all worked up about!” he had practically shouted above the din of thirty students whose blood was all rushing loudly in their ears, drowning him out.

  But it had been special to Ruby.

  Those changing hormones were obviously going to mean more for the kids of Pigeon Creek, because nothing much ever happened here.

  They needed it to be special.

  Even the camp songs they’d known their whole lives and sang at the top of their lungs, even these had become flirtatious and loaded with innuendo once they’d hit puberty.

  Don’t throw your trash in my backyard, my backyard, my backyard. Don’t throw your trash in my backyard, my backyard’s full.

  Ruby remembered how Jake would croon her favorite round in a falsetto, as if his underwear were two sizes too small. And then one day in the lunch line, completely out of the blue, it had sounded totally different.

  Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegaaaaaaaaar…

  Fish and chips and vinegar,

  Pepper, pepper, pepper, salt.

  That day, with pointy elbows jostling her in the ribs and the smell of the bleach solution the lunch ladies sprayed on the tables surrounding her, his voice had resonated, deep and manly, and those last four words had taken Ruby’s heart with them.

  The warmth that spread all the way into her toes was so unexpected, she thought everyone must be able to see it. Like when she’d peed her pants in preschool (but hopefully not exactly like that).

  The plastic utensils wrapped in a scratchy brown napkin; the meat, rice and gravy blending into the soggy green beans; the carton of chocolate milk: it had all suddenly smelled stronger and felt heavier in her hands.

  She’d barely been able to walk to her seat without tripping.

  It had seemed so easy when she was fourteen and had handed Jake her heart right there next to the chicken fried steak on her blue plastic lunch tray, no questions asked.

  In four years she hadn’t thought twice about it, until now.

  Now she wondered why singing about condiments had made such an impression on her anyway.

  Pepper, pepper, pepper, salt. Really?

  Sitting next to Jake now in his stupid little car, tiny dead animals making a thump-thump-thumping sound under the tires, Ruby realized that the only thing that stood out about that day now was her blue lunch tray and the way the gravy had jiggled when she walked, like greasy gray Jell-O congealing on her plate.

  Maybe Mr. Spatchcock had been right: it was nothing special. She had just wanted it so badly.

  Recently, every once in a while, Ruby had gotten a whiff of something foreign coming from Jake when he was close to her. Something like oiled leather, something sweet and flowery, the tiniest hint of a smell that she’d actually liked. She had thought he was using some new soap; she had thought he was making some kind of effort; she had thought he loved her. God, she was a first-class idiot.

  She hadn’t been able to place that flowery scent. And even though she still had no idea what it was called, she was certain where it had come from.

  He had been telling her they were over, but never with words. Instead, he’d used a shrug, or a look, or that mysterious smell, and she had ignored all of it. He had been lying to her for months, and now all he could do was laugh.

  She switched on the radio in time to hear the latest update from Coyote Jones, the local weather guy.

  “Fire danger is at its peak, folks. No campfires. No burn barrels. I wouldn’t even venture to barbecue a steak in this weather. And if you’re feeling particularly in love, take a nice long skinny dip in the river. Do not even think about rolling in the hay.”

  Normally, Ruby thought Coyote Jones was hilarious, but not to
day.

  “You bastard,” she said, slapping Jake so hard across the side of his face that he swerved into the opposite lane.

  “Holy shit, Ruby, what the hell?”

  “I will never forgive you.”

  The VW careened around the corner, flew onto its side, and rolled over the bank a few times. It was like she was watching a movie of her life in slow motion. What had she just done? The world was spinning, and she heard herself screaming for her mom, who she hadn’t seen in months. She’d told herself she didn’t miss her mom and her sister, but that was a lie too. Maybe the truth was that Jake didn’t feel like being the only solid thing in her life, as Ruby’s family fell apart around her.

  FLIP: she saw her sister Poppy’s wide terrified eyes. FLIP: she heard her mother yelling at her father. FLIP: Poppy’s best friend went missing. FLIP: her parents split up. FLIP: her mother moved to Alaska with her little sister. Every rotation of the car conjured another terrible thing that had happened.

  Her head banged against the dashboard; stars swirled in her brain. The car landed on the creek bank, rocking like a turtle flailing around on its back.

  Ruby had said she was staying with her father so he wouldn’t be alone. Hadn’t she really chosen staying with Jake—the lying son of a bitch—over leaving with her mom and sister? The last thing she saw before the car finally stopped spinning and the world went deathly silent was Martha Hollister’s knee-high leather boots as she walked into Pigeon Creek High School like she owned it.

  Then the faces of the people Ruby loved hovered around her like ghosts, mixed with the smell of diesel and burnt rubber. She must be dead. What a relief, dying before anyone could find out what had happened.

  She and Jake would be the famous high school sweethearts, memorialized forever in a deadly car crash. Because everyone dies famous in a small town, don’t they?

  From the window she saw fuel leaking out of the VW, dark and oily and flowing down to the riverbank. Ruby wiggled her fingers and toes. She didn’t feel dead.

  Jake was hanging upside down next to her, both of them secured just by their seat belts. She reached over and touched his arm, surprised at how calm she was. He opened his eyes. She let out her breath.

  The blood in her ears had nothing to do with love this time, just gravity. She thought of her mom and Poppy and how much she missed them. Her mother had wanted to start over somewhere else, and for the first time Ruby understood how that felt. Her father wouldn’t mind letting her go, especially if it meant getting away from Jake. She had heard that Alaska had more coastline than any other state. She would finally see a real live crashing ocean.

  Martha Hollister could have Jake’s eyes; she could drown in them, for all Ruby cared.

  They helped each other out slowly, silently, checking for broken bones. She had a lump on her forehead; he had a cut on his cheek.

  Jake sat down next to her on a rock and they stared at the overturned car. He wasn’t laughing now.

  “You could have killed us,” he said.

  “How, Jake? You already did.”

  SEA-SHAKEN HOUSES

  Martha Hollister wasn’t really from California at all.

  But saying so wasn’t a total lie, because the place where she grew up sat on the edge of the Pacific Ocean—just like California—and Martha’s brain was bendy enough to make that work.

  When she was younger, Martha and her best friend, Jane, had loved growing up in this place they called Sea Shaken. It was a spot on the stretch of beach along the coast of Washington and British Columbia that was too beautiful to even be named on a map, so they had named it themselves. Everything there was sea shaken: the houses, their badass mothers, and especially the smell of the salty air.

  For Jane and Martha, it was all they had ever known, mingled with a mystery that kept them busy exchanging clues from things their mothers said about a man neither of the girls had ever met.

  Did they possibly have the same father?

  “He wore a dirty white hat,” Jane reported, after her mama had let that slip one night while she stirred the cheese packet into the macaroni. Martha’s mother used real, grated cheddar when she made macaroni and cheese, and she let the girls call her by her first name, Zoe.

  They both called Jane’s mom Mama.

  It was a rare slip, this bit of info, and Jane had immediately run to Martha’s to tell her.

  “Got it,” Martha had said. “I’ll check Zoe’s diaries for anything about a white hat.”

  “Dirty white hat,” Jane corrected her. Details were important.

  Martha had been reading Zoe’s diaries for years and reporting back to Jane, not once thinking that this might be considered snooping.

  They had tried asking direct questions, but neither Mama nor Zoe was forthcoming. The dirty white hat was like a golden ticket in a chocolate bar.

  “He wasn’t from here, Jane” was all Mama would ever say, as if that were a real answer.

  Not from here? thought Jane. Nobody is from here.

  The fact that their mothers were both tight-lipped only reinforced what the girls wanted to believe. And it helped that their imaginations had been sharpened to fine points in an isolated place with very few other people and hours and hours to kill.

  They were both homeschooled (if you asked Jane’s mama) or unschooled (if you asked Zoe), meaning they were free to roam the ocean’s edge, be curious, study whatever they fancied. For Jane, it was bivalve mollusks, clams, mussels, anything with a shell that spit and squirted. She spent hours digging them up, cutting them open, dissecting their kidneys and hearts, fascinated by their siphons and eager to know how they functioned. By the time she was twelve, she knew almost everything there was to know about them. So did Martha, but that was only because Jane needed someone to impart all this knowledge to, since she wasn’t required to write papers or take tests.

  Their mothers might have been very different people who had a strange dislike for each other, but they seemed to agree that little girls should not be made to conform to anything that did not ebb and flow like the tide: their minds, at the very least, should run rampant along the beach.

  It helped that the mobile-library van drove from Seattle once a month, bringing books to all the stray houses along the coast. The librarian often brought biology textbooks for Jane and once even surprised her with some journals from the University of Washington because she knew how much Jane loved reading about scientific studies.

  For Martha she brought fantasy or, once in a while, romance novels. Jane had tried to read one of the romances but rolled her eyes pretty quickly and went back to a battered copy of the Farmers’ Almanac. Martha had rolled her eyes at that, especially since it dated to the early 1900s. “Who cares about the weather in the past?” she’d asked.

  “The past is important,” Jane had said. “If it weren’t, why would we care so much about who our father is?”

  “Well, I’m sure he had nothing to do with a year of bad crops in 1922.”

  Except for a jaunt into Vancouver to give birth to Jane herself, Jane’s mama had never spoken of a life anywhere else, as if she had been born miraculously at the age of eighteen, holding a satchel and harboring a gift for painting marine birds midflight.

  The scattered sea-shaken houses on the cliffs overlooking the ocean had been built long ago, but they mirrored the people who came and went: reclusive and solitary, wind-beaten and up for grabs. Jane’s mother had inherited hers from a widow whose husband had disappeared while fishing for halibut. When Mama (before she was called Mama, obviously) showed up with her satchel of art supplies, needing a home, the widow took it as a sign that she should hand over the house and move on. People here listened—mostly to the wind, but also to fate. The sea told them what they needed to know, and also when to stay and when to go.

  Zoe as well seemed to have materialized out of the sa
nd dunes on the beach, giving birth to Martha as if she’d sculpted her in the rye grass out of flotsam and jetsam, topped off with a head of flowing seaweed. (Martha and Zoe were so hairy they kept a screwdriver by the bathtub because the drain constantly needed to be cleaned.) Before she’d had Martha, Zoe had lived in almost every house on this beach, with one man or another, until one by one the men left—usually on a boat—and took nothing and everything with them.

  The last one to leave had basically given Zoe his house, with its dark blue shutters that would not clasp, but according to Zoe’s journal, he was not Martha’s father.

  Also according to Zoe’s journal, there wasn’t much to say about Martha’s father.

  Zoe and Mama were simply Zoe and Mama. Two women living according to the laws of nature, the sea, the sun, the moon, and their daughters.

  For a while people came from all over to spend time on this particular stretch of beach, so even if not many people lived here, the girls didn’t feel isolated or alone—at least, not when they were younger. The outside world came to them. Families with kids, couples without. They were from all different coasts and walks of life, of all different shapes and sizes. No one ever stayed long, but that was also the beauty of it: how transient people were.

  One summer a guy from Slovenia came and sold ice cream sandwiches out of an old abandoned bait and tackle shop. Nobody told him he couldn’t, so he stayed longer than most. Jane and Martha went often to visit him, and he would give them free ice creams if they learned one Slovenian word a day. They kept trying to say thank you in Slovene, but it was impossible to make their tongues fit around the sharp edges of the words. Finally one day he said, “Don’t worry about it—I have a speech impediment in my own language. I’m not saying it the way they do back home either.”

  He gave them each a chocolate-chip ice cream sandwich for their efforts.

  “Do you think he could be our father?” Jane had whispered out of the corner of her mouth. He had dark hair, just like Martha. Jane was fair, with very fine, straight hair that pinged out of her braids, making her look a bit like a bedraggled hedgehog.