by Sarah Bannan
We stayed away from the fire, long after our sparklers had gone out, just standing, talking, flirting. When Dylan went into the house to get more food, Blake Wyatt said we should go follow him and call 1-900 numbers – Mr Hall did it all the time, he said, so nobody would know. We thought this was funny, and he tried to get a bunch of us to go in with him, but we didn’t – so he didn’t – and we stood around for as long as we could stand it.
We looked back again at Carolyn and Shane – and now Shane was gone – she was sitting on the log on her own, everybody had moved away, the smoke was too much. But Carolyn stayed there, had her phone in her lap, was looking at the screen and then looking into the fire and then back to the screen and then back to the fire, again and again – we didn’t understand how it didn’t kill her eyes. Blake called out her name, but she didn’t seem to hear. And then we thought she was coming over to us. But she just walked toward the fire – like, really, really close – so close we thought she might walk right in.
“What the fuck is she doing?”
“Leave her alone.”
“Should somebody go over there?”
“Let her do what she wants.”
“She’s just waiting for Shane.”
“Duggan’s left. “
“He’s in his car.”
“Should we go over there?”
“Leave them alone.”
“She’s just looking at it. “
“She’s just waiting for Duggan.”
“But what the fuck is she doing?”
She stood completely still – and then she swayed a little, back and forth – and she put her hands out in front of her. It looked like she was touching the fire, but she couldn’t have been. She would’ve had third-degree burns.
Andrew was with us and he started to walk away, walk toward her, we didn’t know why. Blake called her name again and then – only then – Carolyn looked up. She locked eyes with Andrew, or at least that’s what we thought, and she stepped back, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She turned her back and walked toward where the cars were parked. By the time Andrew got to the fire, she was already gone – the lights on Shane’s car were on, she had gotten into the passenger seat, and they were driving away.
Adamsville Daily News
17 November 2010
HOMECOMING 2010 – A.H.S. Students Bring Bourbon Street to Fifth Avenue
On Monday evening, Adams High School students put the final touches on their Homecoming floats in advance of Friday’s parade. Working with the theme of Mardi Gras, Friday’s parade promises to provide Adamsville residents with a taste of Bourbon Street through our historic downtown. Local businesses have underlined the importance of the annual parade in attracting trade.
Adamsville Hardware Store owner Brent Moore says: “Although the parade only runs for a few hours, all of the businesses in the downtown area benefit from increased foot traffic. Additionally, the students continue to buy materials for their floats from our independent stores. While it must be tempting for them to shop at the new, large-scale stores such as Walmart and Lowe’s, we are grateful to the students for investing locally and ensuring that certain traditions are maintained.”
The parade will also feature the 2010 Homecoming Court, which is comprised of four young ladies from each class of the high school. The 2010 Court is:
Freshmen
Jessica White
Ashley Moore
Brittany Clark
Amanda Lewis
Sophomores
Kayla King
Brittany Baker
Amber Cook
Danielle Gray
Juniors
Gemma Davies
Carolyn Lessing
Brooke Moore
Taylor Lyon
Seniors
Heather Watson
Jasmine Smith
Sarah Barnes
Emily Simmons
Heather Watson, a senior and daughter of Henry and Judy Watson of Branch Brook Road, told us she was thrilled about her inclusion on the Court. “This is my fourth year to do it and being a senior and all it’s great to have one last great Homecoming memory.” Heather has been accepted through early admission to the University of Alabama and plans to study Sociology and also pursue a teaching degree.
Sophomore Kayla King (daughter of John and Marjorie King of Oak Ridge View) was last year’s winner of the Miss Teen Tennessee Valley Authority Beauty Pageant and says she hopes she won’t be as nervous being part of the Court as she was when participating in the pageant. “Even though I practiced so much with my pageant coach, I was still really nervous before the show. I walked around my house in heels for months to get ready!” Kayla is also a member of the Junior Varsity Cheerleading squad. Her older sister Kristina is a freshman at Auburn University and a former captain of the Adams High Varsity Cheerleading Squad.
Junior Carolyn Lessing (daughter of Abby Lessing of D’Evereux Drive) moved to Adamsville recently from New Jersey and made the Honor Roll during her first semester. Her hobbies include swimming and art, and Carolyn told the Daily News that she is “excited” to be part of the Court and that she had a key role in making the junior class’s float for the parade.
We can’t wait to see it!
The parade begins on Friday at 2.15 p.m. from Adamsville Hardware Store on Fifth Avenue. Families are advised to arrive early to find suitable parking.
Chapter 16
The Homecoming Dance was an Occasion. It came after the parade in town, after dinner out, after the game at our field. The game was planned to be against a team we could beat for sure, and the band did a special set, one they practiced all summer long.
The whole student body drove downtown to watch the parade. So did the middle-school kids, so did our teachers, so did our parents. We wore school colors: every shade of orange you could find, and black jeans and black ribbons in our hair. We wore face paint – bear paws or AHS on our cheeks and glitter on our eyes. The jocks wore their football jerseys, the cheerleaders wore their uniforms, the band wore their marching gear. The Homecoming Court wore their dresses. Sequins and sparkles and heels they couldn’t walk in.
They let us out of school early and we arrived downtown at two o’clock. Everywhere was already mobbed, balloons and kids and moms and dads and flags and posters. Even from inside the car, you could hear the chanting, the band warming up, the cheerleaders doing their cheers. People held their phones in the air and took pictures and flashes went off at every corner. The traffic lights were all stopped at orange. Adamsville stopped everything for Homecoming.
We found a spot to watch from outside Stewart’s Coffee Shop on Fifth Avenue, away from the kids and the parents and close to the seniors and some of the kids from Cullman Community. We liked where we stood but it stank of bacon and grease and fries. We took pictures of each other, tied our jackets around our waists, pulled our hair back and got ready. Andrew Wright and Shane Duggan stood in front of us, with the rest of the Varsity Team. They barely moved. At 2.15, or around then, we could hear the band approaching, the drum beat, the clack of their sticks, the stamping of feet. We stood and we watched. The band was always first.
We watched them turn the corner: 220 members, and the flag corps. They walked in small and uniform steps and they were in even rows. When they filed onto Fifth Avenue, they started their routine, or their set, or whatever it was they called it: some were marching in place, while the rows behind weaved in and out and in and out. From where we watched, we could make out a few faces, but it was hard. Hard to distinguish our friends from the others, who was white, who was black, who was skinny, who was fat, who was male, who was female. The set lasted nearly ten minutes, with excerpts from songs they played in full at half-time at the games: “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Summertime,” Adams High’s “Fight Song,” “Amazing Grace.” It took a few moments to recognize the songs – we were close to the drums and that made the melody hard to make out. But when we did, we sang along, just a
little. We saw families across the street sway and little girls twirl around, dancing. The music was perfect, perfectly timed, perfectly pitched, and we said that they were like robots, only that wasn’t true at all: they were coming together and moving in time, and we loved the brass and the drums and the flutes and the sound of the sticks against each other. One person’s feet on the ground made no sound but 220 made a beat, and we wanted to make a beat, too, with our feet on the pavement, but we didn’t – we held our breath and listened. We felt goosebumps on our arms, and we brushed them off, pulled on our jackets from around our waists.
The band marched on, the music still audible, the set repeated as they moved to Shop Street, turning onto Fourth Avenue. Minutes later, we saw the floats: Bourbon Street, a Chinese Dragon, Comedy and Tragedy Masks, a River Scene. Kinda cool, kinda impressive, each homemade and strange, but each amazing. ’Cause we’d done them ourselves.
And then the Court. We watched the seniors, they always came first: beautiful, perfect, older. And then the junior court turned the corner. Four girls in Mr Overton’s vintage Mustang. They waved. Brooke and Gemma sitting close to each other, Carolyn and Taylor behind them, just as close. Carolyn was perched near the edge, looked like she could fall off. People screamed and clapped. The parents took pictures.
Brooke wore a bright red dress, Gemma’s was aqua blue, with white flowers on the back, Taylor’s was purple and gold – all three in sequins, all over. Carolyn’s dress was black and long and looked like silk – no sequins, no sparkle – and it hung a little too big on her body. She had worn the dress to something else back in New Jersey, we heard – to some formal event her school held on a yacht. We thought this was incredible and exotic, but we didn’t think it was right. You bought something new to wear if you were on the Homecoming Court. You went to Special Moments on the Stripline and tried on every dress that you could, you got dyed-to-match shoes, you had your hair done. We thought she looked different and beautiful, but some people said she looked weird, like she wasn’t even trying.
Before we met her, before we saw her, before Taylor Lyon’s mother had done their window treatments and the photos of Carolyn Lessing had started flying around, we had imagined something else: New Jersey was Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of New Jersey, that kind of crap. We had imagined a girl who spent her free time on a tanning bed, applying acrylic nails with diamante, getting drunk and throwing up outside a hot tub. We hadn’t known that New Jersey was bigger than that – not really – and Carolyn was from this other place. It was half Manhattan, half boarding school, all money and gloss and grooming. Things were understated there; she applied her make-up in natural light and wore the barest minimum. She shopped at Vineyard Vines and had four North Face jackets and a Burberry scarf. We hadn’t even known this stuff was in, that these were the things we should be wearing, but when Carolyn showed us pictures of her friends back in New Jersey, or when we pored over her pictures on Facebook, we saw how cool they all looked, how clueless and out of touch we were in Adamsville. In the beginning, we did a lot to try to look like her, and she did little to look like us. Later, things changed around some, but never that much. She knew things we didn’t, things we didn’t even know we should know.
She had been to places in Europe, we heard, to Paris, to London, to Venice, to Berlin. She learned early on that Shane Duggan didn’t even have a passport and Carolyn had gone all wide-eyed about that, and then had laughed, thinking he was kidding. But he wasn’t, and there were lots of us like Shane.
We looked at Carolyn now, sitting in the back of the Mustang, and somebody called her name and we thought we heard somebody boo. She looked out of place there, too plain or too dark or too city or something. That was the way they did things where she came from: barely there make-up, clothes that are simple but expensive, an expression that says you are pretty but don’t care. We understood that now, and she was the prettiest, by far, but people said it wasn’t fair for her to be there. She was new and she was hanging out with somebody else’s boyfriend. The car seemed to hardly move, and Brooke and Gemma and Taylor waved and waved, they smiled and laughed. Carolyn sat still. She held tight to the side of the car – if the car moved too fast, or took a turn, she’d fall right off. But we doubted she would.
Jason Nelson grabbed Andrew Wright’s phone during the parade: in his pictures, there were thirty-two of Carolyn and Shane – mostly of Carolyn. People laughed, talked about how pathetic he was, and people threatened to tell Shane or, worse, Gemma. But people still felt sorry for Andrew, and the phone was returned. Nobody said anything. At least not for a while.
For the dance, we dressed up. We wore semi-formal dresses and the guys wore khakis and ties. After the parade we ran to the hairdressers for a blow-out or an up-do and to the nail salon for a manicure and pedicure. We wore stockings and heels. We shaved our legs. Just in case.
We were buzzed by the time we got to school. In the gym, our parents were all there, sitting in the bleachers, waiting for us to come out.
We had our pictures taken in the art room and we waited just outside, against our lockers. The water fountains where the baseball players congregated, the broken payphone where the stoners hid during study hall, the trophy case where the faculty stood at the start of every day: everything was different when we arrived there in the evening, dressed up. The loose-leaf paper gathered round the garbage cans, the hall passes dropped on the floor, the papier-mâché human skeletons constructed during biology – all cleared away. The lighting was different, of course, but the air was different too – it was dry and clean. No chlorine, no water vapor from the pool, no trace of PE sweat.
We inched closer to the art room and we lingered at the door, looking in to see who we could see. The backdrop airbrushed and pastel, comedy and tragedy masks that looked almost identical, the words “Mardi Gras” forming an arch over our heads, a Bourbon Street sign and a park bench to our left. It didn’t look like New Orleans but we didn’t really care, we just hoped it wouldn’t clash with our dresses.
While we waited for our turns, we remembered what we’d read in Glamour – place a hand on your hip, jut your shoulder forward, stick your chin out and press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. These things helped us look thinner and they usually worked, so long as nobody could tell what we were doing.
After we’d had our pictures taken, we waited for each other at the side, rolling our eyes, fanning our faces. And then we linked arms and headed to the bathroom, to do shots before Lead-Out.
In the bathroom we drank Absolut mixed with Gatorade, and then shared our Lancôme Juicies and deodorant and Mentos. We laughed and talked about how we hoped our pictures weren’t all lame, and we promised to exchange wallet-size ones when they were printed up. We heard coughing in one of the stalls, then gagging, then a heavy splash and then a flush. We looked at each other in the mirror, Jessica mouthed “OMG,” and the stall opened. Carolyn’s eyes were red and bloodshot, her mascara had run down her left cheek, her foundation all blotchy and uneven. Her hair was still smooth and shiny, and her black dress wasn’t crumpled, and from the neck down, she still looked like she did in the parade. We made room so she could wash her hands and Nicole was the first to speak.
“Um, are you, like, okay?”
Carolyn looked back at us in the mirror and she smiled, real big, inhaling deep through her nose. “What?” She held herself against the sink. She looked like she could fall over. “I’m fine. Just nervous.” She sneezed. “Nervous, I guess.”
“I love your dress.” Jessica said this, but she’d been ragging on it all afternoon.
“I like yours. I like all of yours.” Carolyn looked at each of us, through the mirror, and she said it like she really meant it and it made us smile, just a little.
She rubbed her hands for what seemed like hours. “You’ll ruin your nail polish,” Lauren told her.
Carolyn laughed. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.” She got some toilet paper from the stall, wiped her hands dry, wave
d to us in the mirror, and left.
“Is she, like, bulimic?” Lauren sucked in her cheeks as she looked in the mirror.
“She said she was nervous,” Nicole said. “God. Give her a break.”
“Whatever. I’m just saying, she’s really skinny.”
“She’s NERVOUS.”
“And I’m saying she’s SKINNY. GOD.”
“She IS really skinny,” Jessica said. “Lucky bitch.”
We walked out, moments later, and Andrew Wright was standing outside, looking down the hall, holding Carolyn’s black Kate Spade bag, Carolyn nowhere to be seen. Shane emerged from the men’s, punched him on the shoulder and grabbed the bag from Andrew’s hands. Shane laughed and Andrew blushed. We texted the others, to tell them what we had seen.
In the hall outside the gym with our dates, we were organized into alphabetical order – the guy’s name, not the girl’s – and got out of it as soon as the teachers were out of sight. We wanted to talk to each other and fix ourselves up and calm ourselves down. We moved slowly and then quickly and rolled our eyes at the teachers as they moved us back into line. We held onto each other’s arms to keep from stumbling after the vodka and the rum and the champagne that we had found in the limo. We ate more Mentos so nobody would know that we’d been drinking and that the guys had been smoking. We complained about our heels and our stomachs and our eye make-up – we watched Taylor and Tiffany laugh and hold their compacts for each other and spray perfume into the space in front of them, almost blinding the kids ahead of them in line. Some of us wished we hadn’t worn strapless – our boobs couldn’t hold them up – and some of us wished we’d gone long instead of cocktail, so that we could wear flats and nobody would know.