September Lessons (A Year in Paradise Book 9)

by Hildred Billings

  “Could say the same to you.” Leigh-Ann cleared her throat. “Ms. Tichenor.”

  “Hm. I had a bit of cabin fever after grading papers all this morning.” She winked at Leigh-Ann. “Why do I get the feeling you’ve already read 1984 before?”

  “Because I have. Is there something wrong with it?”

  “Oh, no, happened to notice that you have a grand grasp of the material’s themes, but seem to have missed some of the details. Which is explained if you haven’t read it in a while.”

  “…But I’ve had a lot of time to digest it.”

  “Indeed.” Ms. Tichenor looked up from her stitchwork again. “I’m not complaining, by the way. I think it’s admirable you’re such a well-read girl.”

  “It helps when you don’t have a lot going on. Might as well read, right?”

  “Yes, but I get a feeling you’d read a lot less if you had a few friends.”

  Leigh-Ann scoffed. “Everyone’s on my case about that today.”

  “People worry about you. It can’t be helped.”

  “Kinda annoying. I can take care of myself.”

  “Just because you can take care of yourself,” Ms. Tichenor said, “doesn’t mean you have to. Part of being human is searching for social interaction. While there are a lot of kids your age who have one or two friends, not having any is kinda odd.”

  “Can’t be helped sometimes. Besides,” Leigh-Ann opened the screen door to the house, “maybe I’m here because I need social interaction.”

  Ms. Tichenor didn’t say anything, but her smirk followed Leigh-Ann into Waterlily House.

  There wasn’t a lot for her to do on a day when she wasn’t scheduled to come in. Sunny suggested she dust some of the furniture, but that wasn’t as bad as either of them anticipated. Give me something, anything to do. Leigh-Ann knew she was desperate when she grabbed a scrubber and locked herself up in the bathroom. The bathroom had been cleaned the week before, though, and there simply hadn’t been enough guests to gunk it up again. Not enough for Leigh-Ann to spend more than twenty minutes in there running wet wipes along the base of the toilet and cleaning out the hair traps.

  That’s what she knew she was too desperate for her own, poor good.

  “You’ve been working so hard,” Ms. Tichenor said at the end of the hour, when Leigh-Ann emerged from the bathroom. She met a pitcher of freshly made lemonade and a cup the size of her fist. “Come take a break with me on the porch. Come on. I can tell it’s going to be one of the last days like this of the year. You won’t get this kind of warmth and breeze before May of next year.” Leigh-Ann almost took a glass when her teacher winked at her. “By then you’ll be graduating from high school and going off to live a brand-new life.”

  Leigh-Ann still took the glass, but she wasn’t in a hurry to join her teacher on the porch. Sunny wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Two guests Leigh-Ann didn’t recognize returned in a rental car. Ms. Tichenor nodded to them as they helped themselves into the house.

  “I think they’ll be quite grateful about that super-clean bathroom.” Ms. Tichenor poured Leigh-Ann a glass of lemonade. “Would you sit, already?”

  Leigh-Ann flopped down into the seat next to Ms. Tichenor, who rocked on the bench as she gazed out at the front yard. Her sewing material had returned to her basket. The only thing missing was her keychain, although Leigh-Ann had a feeling her teacher had left it in her car.

  “Something’s on your mind, isn’t it?”

  Leigh-Ann knew her teacher was about to pry, but she hoped it wouldn’t come so hard and heavy. “I want to keep busy,” she said, hands chilling around the cup of iced lemonade. “Don’t have much else to do on the weekends.”

  Was that a knowing look coming from her observant teacher? Great. “I thought you and Carrie were friends now?”

  “I guess so. You really so sure?”

  “If it’s a topic of conversation in the teachers’ room, then it must be true.”

  “Why are teachers talking about that?”

  “Trust me, hon, teachers get into the gossip about who’s dating who and who had a fight with their best friend as much as other students do. It’s a tiny school in a tiny town. You think we have anything better to do?”

  “You could like… make lesson plans and grade homework and stuff.”

  “We sure could!”

  Leigh-Ann bowed her head. “Things don’t really change when you’re an adult, huh?”

  “Technically, you’re an adult now.” Ms. Tichenor chuckled, “but I get your point. No, things don’t really change. You still don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re faking it ‘til you make it. That’s what being on your own and without anyone to fall back on is like.” She shrugged. “I will say, though, you care a lot less about what people think about you. You also don’t give a damn if people can see through your façade and realize you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”

  “Did you know you wanted to be a teacher when you graduated high school?”

  Ms. Tichenor brushed her fingers behind her ear. “Nope. I didn’t figure that out until I went off to college to get my English degree. I realized toward the end of my undergrad that I liked tutoring. Someone suggested I go into teaching, but whenever I thought about teachers, I thought of kindergarten and third grade.” She made an exaggerated face. Of course, the woman who had made it to her late 30s without any kids probably didn’t want any, let alone teach any. “It was one of my professors who told me I could go straight into high school and or community college, depending on what I did after undergrad. I’ve always gotten along much better with older kids. I like people I can have intellectual conversations with, although sometimes teenagers look at you like you’re severely testing their patience…”

  “Do you think it’s worse for us in the morning, or the afternoon?”

  “Definitely the afternoon. Everyone’s half asleep, even if they loaded up on caffeine and sugar during lunch.” Ms. Tichenor changed the subject before Leigh-Ann had the chance. “Have you started thinking about what colleges you might want to apply to? Or are you thinking community college to start with?”

  Leigh-Ann couldn’t maintain eye contact with her teacher. “I haven’t thought about it. I don’t really think college is in the cards for me.”

  Any other teacher would have berated her for thinking so “lowly” of herself. The guilt trips and shaming that came along with any discussion about college – whether it was guilting a girl into going or shaming her for picking expensive schools nobody could afford – had Leigh-Ann on the defensive before she said anything else. Yet Ms. Tichenor wasn’t the kind to bother a student if they decided it might not be for them. She’d go to bat for any boy or girl hoping to get into a tough school, but when Leigh-Ann said her peace, Ms. Tichenor merely nodded and stared into the distance, as if it held any answer for her to echo.

  “That’s fine. If you change your mind, though, the deadlines for early admissions are in January. Ah, well, I make you all write personal essays starting in November, anyway. Learned that lesson the hard away after I started working here.”

  “You’re not gonna lecture me about going to college?”

  “What’s the point of doing that? When I was a kid, I knew it was stupid to force a kid into going. Besides, you can start community college at any time. They want us to give you this horror story about how if you don’t immediately go and instead enter the workforce straight away, you’ll never go. But that’s silly. You can always go. It’s always there waiting for you. Now, if you have kids, maybe that will make things more difficult…”

  “I don’t know what I want to do.”

  “That’s all right. You’ve got plenty of time to figure it out.” Ms. Tichenor finished her lemonade and stood up. “The only warning I give kids your age is that this is the time of your life when your decisions start to make a real difference. Obviously, I don’t mean to scare you, but deciding to do things one way or hang out with a certain person could, in fact, affe
ct the rest of your life. Not that it’s a good or a bad thing. It’s simply the way it is. Domino effects, and all that.” She stepped past Leigh-Ann, silently implying that the girl should take her time drinking her lemonade. “Excuse me, Leigh-Ann. I have to go talk to Sunny about something. It’s always nice seeing you out of school, though.”

  Leigh-Ann remained sitting on the porch for so long that she forgot about the lemonade. She also simultaneously forgot to get back to her chores, not that she had any left.

  The decisions I make now will affect the rest of my life… Ms. Tichenor wasn’t the type of teacher to inflict the fear of God into her students. She preferred that subtler, more passive-aggressive approach, didn’t she? God help her kids if she ever became a mom. Leigh-Ann stood up around dusk, when her parents would expect her to be home. The decisions I make now will determine whether I stay here to make a life, or if I move on somewhere else.

  The thought had honestly never come to her before. Leaving Paradise Valley made as little sense as staying there, a place that was okay enough to live in, but didn’t afford many economic opportunities for a girl with only a high school diploma. Unless she had the entrepreneurial spirit, maybe. Or knew someone willing to take a chance on her.

  That’s what every kid who decided to stay behind hoped for, though. Everyone wanted to change their lives without hardly lifting a finger.

  People like Carrie also exist… Girls who bent over backward simply to finish what they had started. Carrie had moved across the country to get her diploma. She wasn’t thinking about college or moving back to Alabama yet. Her #1 goal was to get her diploma. Everyone else might as well have been a whole league ahead of her.

  Even after realizing that amazing thing about her new friend, Leigh-Ann still couldn’t help but wonder what Carrie had done to get kicked out of her old school – and her old life.

  Chapter 11

  CARRIE

  Monday morning at school was exactly what Carrie expected. Everyone talked, and nobody knew the facts.

  “I hear that she was the one who called the cops on the whole operation,” Amanda scoffed, only lowering her voice when Carrie passed by to access her locker. “Made sure that the deputy got there as soon as she would see her standing there looking all innocent.”

  That was too much of a garbled mess of pronouns for Carrie to properly understand. Probably talking about me, though. She’d be more surprised if they talked about someone else.

  “The fire was so bad,” Digby said across the hall, “that they had to bring in the fire brigade from Hillsboro. Can you believe it? They bothered people up in Hillsboro about a fire.”

  His friend, a guy name Jake, replied, “Those Southern gals be crazy, I hear. My dad says that he used to date a girl from Atlanta and she was totally nuts.”

  “Atlanta?”

  “Georgia, Alabama… same difference.”

  Carrie almost dropped her math book. Are you kidding me… No, she didn’t expect these rural Oregonians to know the core differences between Georgia and Alabama… let alone urban Georgia and rural Alabama. Then again, if these boys thought Southern girls were “crazy,” let them! Maybe that meant more distance between them and Carrie!

  “All I’m saying is that these fires didn’t happen like this last year. Those were real acts of God.” Carrie turned her head when she realized the computer teacher was muttering in the science teacher’s direction. “Some kid from here is going around starting those fires for their own twisted pleasure, if you ask me.” He caught Carrie looking in his direction.

  “…Real rager of a party, man.” Carrie didn’t know the name of the junior saying that as she passed him, but she knew what he was talking about. “That new girl was there. The senior? Yeah, she’s kinda hot, but I ain’t touching that. I hear she’s gay, anyway. She looks like she’ll chop off your willy.” Everyone around him burst into laughter. When he realized they were laughing at him because of the word “willy,” he said, “Bet that’s what they call it in Alabama. Bunch of prudes down there, I hear.”

  “Christina says she hit on her.” What was this lovely lady’s name? Chrystal? With a Ch… I’ve seen some pretty messed up spellings of a simple word before, but that one’s new to me. “When she was drunk at the party, no less. Came right up to her and said they should go bone in the master bedroom. Can you believe it? Chris isn’t like that. Everyone knows that!”

  “Leigh-Ann Hardy sure knows that…”

  Chrystal and her friend fell into a fit of giggles. Soon, they saw Carrie walking by, but unlike everyone else, the girls held her gaze and silently dared her to say something.

  I won’t give them the satisfaction. Carrie walked into her homeroom and sat down at her desk. Nobody said a thing to her all first period. Including Mrs. Cooper, who kept her eyes turned away when she returned Carrie’s math quiz from Friday morning. A solid B. Instead of commenting on the improvement from the week before, however, Mrs. Cooper moved on to the next student and asked Elaine Jackson to please see her after class.

  ***

  From all the talk around school, Carrie half-expected to come home to the police parked in the driveway. Instead, she found her uncle doing some yardwork and gesturing for her to get on ahead inside. “If you don’t mind,” he said after her, “your aunt left a frozen lasagna in the fridge. If I’m not back inside in forty-five minutes, do us a favor and throw it in the oven, huh?”

  Carrie assured him it was no problem. She would simply do her homework at the kitchen table, which was usually empty at that time of day if her uncle didn’t have any use for it.

  Dillon walked through the door a few minutes after she sat down. He took one look at the math textbook on the table and scoffed. “You some nerd?” he asked. “I dunno how you get invited to anyone’s party when you’re in here first thing after school, nerding out.”

  “Hey, if it offends you so much, I could go down to the library with all the other nerds.”

  “Whatever. Do what you want. I’ma be in my room.”

  Carrie didn’t think anything of it. Not when the house was quiet enough for her to forego headphones to concentrate on her math homework. She kept one eye on the clock while jotting down numbers and punching formulas into her calculator. A written note in her book reminded her to think about an essay topic for English class, but there was time to think about that later.

  The house was so quiet that Carrie almost didn’t recognize her cousin’s voice in the other room.

  Were the walls that thin? She had almost forgotten that his bedroom shared a wall with the kitchen. Carrie considered herself fortunate that the guest room she now occupied was far in the back of the house, where she didn’t have to listen to the dishwasher or the clanking of breakfast on Saturday mornings when she tried to sleep in.

  Did he know that she could hear him if she concentrated hard enough?

  Her first fear was that he was doing something she didn’t want to hear. Ahem. He is a teen boy. Didn’t she know? She was a teen girl! Once she established that he was on the phone, however, she had a reason to keep the earbuds in her bag and her concentration focused on the thin wall.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be the dopest shit you’ve seen. We know what we’re doing, mmkay?” Dillon sounded smarmy enough that he was probably talking to a girl. He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He’s the type to tell me all about her, because he likes to flaunt. Bonus points if the person he flaunted to was a lesbian. “Besides, we’re almost out of tinderboxes anyway. With winter coming, we’re going into hibernation. Police? They don’t have a clue. They think it’s my cousin. Yeah! You know her! I sure as hell say you do after…”

  Carrie couldn’t hear more after that, no matter how hard she strained. He must have turned around or flopped down on his bed. At least he hadn’t taken that scintillating conversation to text. Carrie might not know who Dillon was talking to on the phone, but she knew what they were talking about.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out that Dillon h
ad something to do with the barn fires. The boy spent half his evenings out in the backyard lighting his own campfires and staring into the abyss of leaping flames. He drew them on half of his belongings. When his parents asked him to start planning his birthday party in late October, he quipped that he wanted baked Alaska. Luckily, neither of his parents took that seriously.

  If only Carrie had more substantial proof about her brother’s love for the flame. And, from the sounds of it, he wasn’t the only one. The boy probably had a few friends who were into it with him. A gang of fire starters. Carrie had heard that there was a Stephen King book club in town. Does he have a book about a gang of firebugs? She knew about her namesake, of course, but this felt like a lovely mishmash of Carrie and It.

  Forty-five minutes had passed since Carrie’s uncle asked her to start the lasagna. She hopped out of her chair and preheated the oven. While searching for the boxed lasagna in the freezer, she concocted what was probably a really stupid idea. Yet if it caught her cousin in the act, it might be worth it.

  Now, where was her phone? She had a few texts of her own to make. She wanted Leigh-Ann to tell her all about the gossip around school. The good, the bad… and the downright implicating.

  Chapter 12

  LEIGH-ANN

  My decisions I make right now could determine the rest of my life…

  Leigh-Ann remained hung up on that warning for most of the week. Every time she entered third period English class and confronted the woman who said it, she realized that her decisions thus far had been… less than stellar. I’ve hardly made any decisions at all. Yet as their class discussed Tuesday morning, in reference to their reading homework for 1984, indecision was a type of decision with its own consequences. “When you’re indecisive,” someone in class had said, “you’re deciding not to act. Which is mostly a no answer, I think?”