by TE Carter
“Yeah. I … I go to Saint Elizabeth’s. I mean, I did. Last year. Like last month. I just finished there is what I’m saying.”
She nodded and sat down. I waited to see if she’d fall asleep.
“My church used to pay for it. For school, I mean. But they can’t anymore,” I said.
“That sucks.”
“It does. But I’m not here about that.”
“What’s up, Ellie?” she asked.
I didn’t know how to ask her. How to tell her what I needed. I don’t know why—even now—I trusted her. I don’t know what made me sure she wouldn’t ridicule me for asking. But something about her seemed wise. Indifferent to the way people looked at her. Maybe it was because she was older. Maybe it was her purple hair. No one in the magazines or at my school had purple hair. She didn’t look like everyone else, either, but she didn’t seem to mind. Maybe that was what I needed. Someone who was okay with being her own version of okay.
“I have to start school—high school—in a few weeks. I don’t know anyone,” I said. “I didn’t really have any friends at Saint Elizabeth’s, but it doesn’t matter now anyway, and I … I don’t want to be a loser.”
Kate looked at me in my muddy shorts and my markdown shirt. On it was a singing ear of corn. I don’t know what that was supposed to mean. But I can promise it was marked down as soon as it arrived at the store. What girl wants to be identified by musical vegetables?
“Yeah, I’ll help. That’s what you’re asking, right?”
I nodded.
“Okay.”
“Why?” I had asked her, but I guess I was surprised it was easy. I guess I expected her to say no and when she didn’t, I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
“What do you mean?” Kate asked.
“Why do you want to help me?”
She looked bored, but she gestured to the other lawn chair. It was hard to tell with Kate; she wore boredom like an heirloom. It sat on her like something passed down through the years, something she’d forgotten she even wore, or wore out of obligation. Not a conscious choice, but a part of who she had to be.
She sighed and stared up at the sky. “I was supposed to go to college this year. I’m not. I’m taking a year off. Let’s call it reinvention. You can be my partner in it. We can both be reinvented. Why not?”
I liked the word. Reinvention sounded interesting. It sounded a lot better than what it was—a favor from a stranger because I didn’t have real friends.
“Clothes,” Kate said, looking at my corn shirt. “You need to start with clothes.” She leaned back into her chair and put her hood up, covering her face. I wasn’t sure why she wore the bathing suit if she was just going to wrap herself up anyway.
“Can you take me?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Thanks. My dad … he’s clueless, you know?”
“Is there a guy?” Kate asked. “There’s always a guy.”
“There’s no guy,” I said. There wasn’t; I hadn’t really considered it. I was so worried about being pretty, about being like everyone else. I wanted to be normal. To be good and to be noticed, but not in the ways they noticed me. I didn’t want to look different, to have curves where other girls didn’t, to be the kid with no mom. They said that was my problem. That I was trying to make up for missing my mom by being gross. Like my breasts somehow grew based on how many parents I did—or didn’t—have.
“Really? No secret love interest? That’s refreshing.”
“I mean, there was one guy I thought was cute. Jeremy,” I admitted. “He sat two desks up in English. But I never talked to him. And I won’t now. He’ll be at a different school.”
“It’s a big world out there. I’m sure you can find him online.”
“Maybe,” I said.
I didn’t go online much. I’d joined Facebook the year before, after everyone else had moved on to other platforms. I only had one friend, though—a distant relative in Omaha. There were two girls in an anime group I joined who talked to me, but neither ever responded when I tried to add them. People basically accept anyone’s friend requests, but never mine. It was more embarrassing to have one friend than not to have Facebook, so I deleted my profile.
“But it’s not about that,” I told Kate. “I just want to belong.”
“Hollow Oaks isn’t a place you want to belong,” Kate said.
“I do.”
She paused and looked at me. I couldn’t see her expression because of her hood, but after a minute, she nodded. “Yeah, all right. I’ll help. I’m going to sleep now, though. I’ll come by tomorrow afternoon. We’ll do some shopping.”
She slipped her headphones on, and I was dismissed. I crawled back up the hill to my house, getting mud stuck in my fingernails. She was sound asleep when I turned back to wave.
chapter five
When he’s finally done with her, the girl with the gum hurries to leave. She grabs the little bit of herself that’s left and rushes out of the room, only to realize she has to wait for him for a ride home.
When they leave me alone, silence settles back in. The silence of the place when it’s just me here hurts almost as bad. Almost.
I hate it. I hate that nothing indicates what kind of place this is. I hate that there’s no sign, no warning. For me. For the ones who came after. For the girl who doesn’t know there’s gum on her shoe.
The door’s closed, but he left the light on. Most of the time it’s dark.
When I see the flicker of color, I turn my head to make sure it isn’t a trick. My eyes making up stories in the light—after so much darkness. But I keep staring, and it’s definitely there. A little bit of color amid the endless brown.
I don’t actually know if it’s hers. It could be anyone’s. It could have been here for days. Maybe I just haven’t seen it before. Either way, though, it’s there. It’s something.
I wish it was something important. I wish it mattered, because it aches too much to be what it is. It’s a small tube, the cap dented with teeth marks. One of the things you hold on to while you’re searching for something else in your bag, putting it between your teeth and biting down to make sure it doesn’t fall. The letters are faded; I don’t know what brand it is or what her preferences are. It could be spearmint or bubble gum or pomegranate. We put so much thought into it, into these details, and then it ends up here.
It’s just lip balm. Just … life.
Ordinary and simple and necessary.
And tainted.
Something so common, a part of her everyday. Probably used almost by reflex at this point.
But now, it’s a trigger. It will remind her every time. When she digs through another purse and finds a tube like it, she’ll remember. She’ll remember when she reaches for this one, and it’s gone. She’ll wonder if she left it here. And then she’ll relive what happened here.
I want to save it for her. To save the one part of her they didn’t take. Didn’t steal in this room. I want to make remembering hurt less for her, but I’m not in the business of saving much these days.
chapter six
“Dad, Kate’s going to take me shopping tomorrow. Can I have money for clothes?”
He was half asleep, John Wayne doing something or other on TV.
“Sure, Ellie. My wallet’s on the counter.”
I went to the kitchen to get the money, rifling through his wallet. It was next to the perpetual pile of bills. Almost every one of them had the red stamp on the front: PAST DUE. The pile was always the same size, and past due was the constant state of things.
“Bring me a soda,” he yelled from the couch.
I saw his vest for work hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs and reminded myself I needed to iron it.
Our dog, Fred, woke up as I headed back to the living room. He beat me to the sofa. I squeezed in between him and my dad, handing my father the can.
“Are you working all weekend?” I asked.
“Of course. One of thes
e days maybe I’ll get to do a single shift. A man can dream, right?”
Imagine it. Imagine having dreams, and then, you can’t. He was like my mom. They came here with a plan. He’d finished film school and she was a writer. They were going to memorialize Hollow Oaks, to tell the world about this place. They had goals, and then they had me.
“We should watch a movie,” I told him. When he’d stay awake, he would tell me a little about what he’d learned during film school. I always liked hearing his stories, but it was so hard for him to stay awake. Maybe he wasn’t tired as much as he was weary. Weary of working double shifts at a job meant for a teenager, because that was what you got when you had a daughter in a place like this.
“Maybe later,” he said. We wouldn’t. He wouldn’t make it through the Western he was watching.
“You can skip the commercials,” I said. I didn’t think he needed to know about bathtub scum.
“The remote’s over there.” He pointed toward the TV.
“Oh.” I could have gotten up, but I was comfortable between him and Fred. I still liked the moments we could find.
Maybe it was some kind of omen. Wayne Breward placed television ads for his real estate firm, because he could. He ran his campaign as tax assessor with commercials, even though everyone else had signs, just because he could. Wayne Breward and the rest of the Breward family needed Hollow Oaks to worship them. They’d saved the town from the edge of ruin, and they reminded us of it constantly.
“The number of these abandoned homes continues to rise,” he said from the TV. “Every month, there are more. If they’re not fixed, think about what that means for you, the homeowner who didn’t run away.”
My dad pushed me off him and moved to get the remote. He changed the channel and handed it to me before sitting down again.
“Well, I guess we’re watching a movie. Anything but listening to that asshole.”
“It’s sad. All the houses,” I said.
“What’s sad is how nobody helps,” my father argued. “It’s easy to pitch in and support Wayne Breward, to make his little company the hero of this town, but I knew those people, Ellie. They were good people, a lot of them.”
“From the factory?”
Hollow Oaks had always been a broken town, but it used to be full. The factories had closed first. People stopped buying the products they made, or the companies found ways to make them somewhere else cheaper. My dad had worked a second job, to make a little extra when I was a baby, and when the factories closed, the second job became his only job.
When the evictions in our neighborhood started, he’d go outside. Talk to people while strangers made them choose what they could take with them. Gave them a time limit for packing up their histories. My father would chat with people and try to help. Try to make it hurt a bit less, but over time, he stopped chatting. He’d watch them from our yard instead. No one spoke. It became too shameful to have to explain it. To have to tell your neighbors that it wasn’t your fault. That your medical bills had gotten too high. That the interest rates changed. Whatever it was that caused it, it was humiliating to stand on the curb in front of what was your home and pretend there was anything left for you.
Sooner or later, my dad didn’t watch, either. We only knew it kept happening because there were less people at the grocery store every time we went. We knew because of Wayne Breward and his ads. All his great successes at saving the poor houses from people like us.
“What are people supposed to do?” my dad asked in response to another of the ads. “You take their jobs, then you tell them it’s going to cost more for them to stick around? We’re all only human.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say. I was fourteen. I spent my afternoons watching YouTube and staring at girls online, trying to figure out what made them special. Trying to find all the ingredients that made up a girl, that made her pretty and worthwhile. I didn’t understand mortgages and economic collapses and what it feels like to have your dreams die. I had yet to figure out my dreams.
My dad tried several times to talk to me about Wayne Breward, about corruption, about what power means for people who don’t have it. He tried again that night, while I played with a wad of cash in my pocket and dreamed about paying full price for eyeliner.
I guess you can add selfish to the things that make a girl. At least this one.
chapter seven
I started school with the right clothes. My curves showed where they were supposed to but nowhere else, and Kate had helped me with my hair. We’d bleached two strips down the front and dyed them blue so the color framed my face. With my new T-shirts that were a testament to my apathy, I fit in by not caring about fitting in.
And it worked. No one said a word. They looked at me like I was just another girl. I didn’t make fast friends on the first day of school, no, but there weren’t comments made in gym class. I didn’t have to change in the bathroom stall in the locker room, just to avoid the way they stared. There were no notes passed to me later, when they’d ask if I needed to whore myself out to pay for my implants. Since obviously my dad couldn’t afford bread.
It was three days into school and my locker was stuck. I figured I had the combination wrong and tried again, but it wouldn’t open. The late August day was too warm, and sweat was spilling down my new shirt. The school didn’t want to spring for air-conditioning, so we finished the day with our clothes stuck to us.
“Having trouble?” He leaned against my locker with all the confidence in the world. I’d seen him a few times. We weren’t in classes together, but he’d smiled at me every day because his math class was across the hall from mine. On the first day, he’d winked at me. On the second day, he’d commented on my shirt. It was self-deprecating—a shirt that mocked my introversion by claiming reading the shirt was enough social interaction for a day. We’d run into each other in the hall between classes and he’d laughed at it. And said I was too cute to be antisocial.
And now he stood at my locker, smiling at me while I tried to get it open.
“My locker’s stuck,” I told him. It was obvious, since I was pulling on it, but I told him anyway.
“You’re new here.” A statement, not a question.
“Sort of. I mean, I’ve lived here forever. But here, yeah. I went to Saint Elizabeth’s.”
He pushed me to the side. “Cool. I’m Caleb.” Punching the bottom right of the metal door, he simultaneously spun the dial into place. It opened on the first try. “Sometimes you gotta rough ’em up a bit. They’re tricky like that.”
“Ellie. I mean, you didn’t ask, but I’m Ellie.”
He leaned back against the locker beside mine while I found my books. Three days and I already had a bag full of homework.
“Nice to officially meet you, Ellie. Elusive girl from the hallway.”
“I’m not elusive. That’s where my class is,” I said.
He laughed as if I was the most hilarious person he’d ever met. “Yeah. So, Miss Not Elusive, what’re you doing now?”
He wasn’t exactly attractive. There was something wrong about the way he moved, the way he smiled. Everything about Caleb was off somehow. He was tall, but he walked like he’d woken that morning into his tallness and now he couldn’t figure out how to get his body to work the same way.
There was also the way he smiled. It was cute, but it had this way about it. Like he’d learned about smiling from a textbook. The idea of smiling came through, but it seemed like he just followed the directions rather than actually smiled.
“I … um, nothing really. I have to read.”
We had a test Monday on summer reading, which I’d put off all summer to work on reinvention.
“What’re you reading?” He took my bag from me and rummaged through it. “Great Expectations? They’re still teaching this crap, huh?”
“Aren’t you, like, a junior?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?”
I hadn’t had to guess. It had b
een three days, but everyone knew Caleb and his older brother, Noah; you didn’t need friends to know who they were. They walked through the school like the only people who’d ever mattered. It was probably true.
“I mean, they didn’t exactly shake up the curriculum in the two years since you were a freshman. I think Dickens has some staying power.”
He turned to me and brushed his fingers along my arm. “You’re cute, Ellie.”
It wasn’t the kind of cute you want to be called as a girl; it was the kind of cute you call your puppy, or your brother when he eats paste.
“Thanks?”
“Really. I wasn’t kidding yesterday. You’re way too cute to be antisocial.”
“Oh.” I had nothing to say to that.
He didn’t move, but he didn’t say anything, and I wasn’t sure what the natural steps were in a conversation like this. I closed my locker and reached for my bag. Caleb tossed the book in and slung the bag over his shoulder.
“Listen, Elusive Ellie. You’re cute. It’s Friday. You don’t want to go home right away. Come out with me.”
“Um, I don’t know,” I said.
“Why not? What’s the worst that can happen? I’m a nice guy.”
I didn’t really have a why not. A part of me wanted to go out with him. Although he wasn’t conventionally cute, he was talking to me. He’d noticed me for three days and he remembered my shirt. He was paying attention and I didn’t have a reason to say no. But I didn’t want to say yes, either. It felt too … sudden. It had only been three days.
Caleb smiled again and grabbed my hand. “Ellie, Ellie, Ellie. There are better things to do on a Friday than sitting around reading garbage.”
I liked the way he said my name. It was effortless. I liked that he remembered it.
“Where are we going?” I asked, deciding he was right. What was the worst that could happen?