It was true, wasn’t it? Yet it wasn’t something Leigh-Ann had thought much about in her eighteen short years. She was so focused on getting through life as un-bored as possible, that she failed to make any important decisions. Even her supposed decision to keep volunteering at Waterlily House was born from an inability to enact change.
She didn’t always used to be this way, right? So what happened? Was there a moment when Leigh-Ann Hardy decided to become inactive and indecisive?
Yes. She knew what that moment was. Two years ago. Sophomore year. When everything changed, and she became afraid of more.
Leigh-Ann went home Thursday afternoon, attempting to remember what it was like to take control of her life and make decisions that curtailed her fate the way she wanted it. She sat on her bed, staring into her folded hands that burned to grab her phone and text Carrie, who had been up her butt all week about what word on the street was about the fires and the party.
She’s someone who knows how to make decisions. I can’t imagine… Carrie had made some kind of brash decision with the terrible consequence of getting expelled from her old school. Then she decided that, instead of taking the loss or begrudgingly getting her GED, she’d move to a brand-new school on the other side of the country and be a nineteen-year-old senior. People could barely wrap their heads around it. Was that why they were also kinda afraid for her? Even the adults didn’t know what to make of Carrie Sage and the backstory nobody would tell them. So they made up their own rumors based on incomplete facts and utter fabrications. Yet did Carrie let that bother her? She knew what she wanted.
That’s my problem… I don’t know what I want. Leigh-Ann had no real dreams. No ambitions. She coasted by on life, perhaps hoping that somebody else would decide for her. Or was she waiting for the inevitable? She would either have a job lined up by the end of school, or she would head off to college because it was better than sitting around, raising her parents’ ire and concern. Some kids joked that Paradise Valley was like any other rural small town. It was a dead end. A retirement for adults looking for a specific kind of life. It wasn’t where kids grew up and continued to contribute. Most Clark High graduates at least went off to college or did other things for a while. A girl named Yvette Lewis took a gap year to backpack around Europe and Southwest Asia. She came back tanner, more worldly, and aching to share her experiences with a town full of both seasoned travelers and those suffering from cabin fever. Eventually, she set up base in Portland before spending most of her summers in Paradise Valley to help co-run an outdoor adventure company for tourists.
Leigh-Ann couldn’t do something like that, though. Even if she had the money to travel, she didn’t have the gumption. She had never been farther than Portland to the east and Medford to the south. Going to Canada would be huge. Whenever her parents could spare money to take a small vacation, they always went to the coast or a day trip into Portland. The craziest thing they ever did was go to a family reunion down in Sisters, Oregon. Leigh-Ann had been so mesmerized by the stark difference in geography only a few hours away from her own home, that her cousins commented she was a bigger hick than the rest of them.
It wasn’t Leigh-Ann’s fault… her family was poor, and Paradise Valley was isolated.
I could start making decisions now to change that… Had she already made one, though? First, she decided to let Carrie sit down with her. Then, they became friends. Carrie! Someone who was so new to Paradise Valley that no one knew what to make of her. She was another girl – albeit with a thicker accent – but she was a girl like anyone else. Maybe she intimidated people because she wasn’t afraid to get in her car and drive from Alabama to Oregon, something Leigh-Ann found unfathomable.
Why does she like me? She could’ve made more friends by now. Surely. People talked, but most were open to a new friend if someone stuck out their neck. Was Carrie content with only really having Leigh-Ann for someone to talk to outside of school?
Was her wondering all of this some way to rationalize how she viewed herself?
She only had one bit of homework Thursday afternoon. Ms. Tichenor had assigned, on top of their reading and worksheet homework, coming up with an essay topic about a moment in which they realized their lives were forever changed. Some kids had it easy. They lost a parent, moved away from home, or they were teenagers when their parents had another baby. Easy! What was Leigh-Ann supposed to write about? Although Ms. Tichenor had assured them that no moment was too small, as long as they put some thought into it, Leigh-Ann couldn’t help but feel inadequate.
I didn’t used to feel inadequate…
All these piss-poor attitudes she had toward herself stemmed from somewhere. Her parents would blame puberty. A therapist would try to dig up some traumatizing event from her young childhood. Yet Leigh-Ann knew, didn’t she? Yeah, it was some traumatic moment. But not that long ago. Maybe the problem wasn’t that her life was boring and she didn’t care to make decisions. Maybe she was numb. Numb from a moment that happened not so long ago.
“When I was a sophomore,” she wrote in her English notebook, “I told my best friend that I loved her. She told me she loved me too. We kissed, and then she told me she didn’t love me anymore. Somehow, the whole school found out, and I really haven’t been the same since.”
When she put it that way…
Leigh-Ann had been avoiding that hard truth for the past two years. When a confused teenaged girl wracked with the weight of puberty put herself out there, the result had the power to either make or break her. Would she succumb to the weight crushing her shoulders? Or would she be brought up by a higher power that determined her young fate?
Two years ago, she succumbed.
Nobody could blame her. Few people, let alone a shy girl born from an insular world, could survive the kind of rejection she faced when she told her best friend she had been crushing on her for years. When their friendship crashed and burned a few weeks later, Leigh-Ann could only assume that she was the problem. She had decided to act upon her crush, and now here she was, lonely in her senior year.
“Everyone around me says that I’m free to explore who I am. They say I’m in safe company who won’t judge me for liking guys or girls.” Leigh-Ann tapped her pen against the bent wires of her spiral-bound notebook, struggling to find the words to write and realizing that she wouldn’t dare turn them in to Ms. Tichenor. “But it really sucks when a girl rejects you. She’s supposed to be your friend, and though she says she likes you, you can’t trust her to still be nice to you the next day. Then you watch her go out with a bunch of boys over the next two years and realize that it really, really was you. You’ve screwed it up.”
If Leigh-Ann had never told Christina that she liked her, would they still be friends? Would Leigh-Ann be relatively popular? Would she be hanging out with Amanda and Chrystal at the pizza place, stealing glances at the new girl behind the register and spreading rumors about why she got expelled from “all of Alabama?”
Pointless, wasn’t it? That was an exercise in futility if Leigh-Ann had ever found one.
She pulled the paper out of her notebook, but she didn’t ball it up for the trash. Instead, she carefully folded it up and put it beneath her pillow. She would come back to it later. For now, she needed to write something she could actually hand in to English class the next day.
She couldn’t think of anything. She was so wrapped up in her own head that every time she pressed her pencil to the paper, she remembered the look on Christina’s face when she said they shouldn’t be friends anymore.
Leigh-Ann also thought of that moment when Carrie implied they were off to hot and heavy make-out spots, like that’s what Leigh-Ann wanted.
Maybe… a bit.
I don’t know. I don’t know what I want from anyone. Friendship? More? Maybe she merely wanted a trusted person to experiment with. Someone who wouldn’t judge her for feeling the way she did. Someone who could gently reject her, if it came to that, and still treat her like a friend afterward.
Leigh-Ann could still be friends with people who rejected her. She was sure of it. If Christina came to her door that day and asked to make it up to her with pizza and a movie, Leigh-Ann would accept it.
That wasn’t happening. Like Carrie being into her probably wasn’t happening, either.
Leigh-Ann picked up her pencil and forced herself to write. “When I was five, my parents took me to the Enchanted Forest outside of Salem. I decided to not listen to my mom when she said to wait for her by the bathroom stalls. I spent the next thirty minutes crying because I got lost and nobody could find me. Since then, it’s made me realize that my parents really love me, and I’ve never doubted it since. Although I was scared back then, I think it was a good decision by five-year-old me.”
It was the safest thing she could think of on the spot. An easy B- if she really bullcrapped her way through the assignment. Ms. Tichenor would be disappointed in her, but it was for the best. Nobody needed to know the truth.
Chapter 13
CARRIE
Carrie’s aunt sent her to the store early Thursday evening to fetch some groceries for dinner. She was still aghast to see some of the prices from the only proper supermarket in town. Even in my hometown there’s only one supermarket, but the prices there aren’t quite like this… One of many things she adjusted to living in the Pacific Northwest was the price. The apartments in a small town cost as much as they did in the city. Gas? God! Living so far away from the Gulf had never been as apparent as when Carrie went to fill up her tank with regular. Her eyes practically bulged out of her head when she realized the serious raise in minimum wage pay actually came at a price.
Most people in towns like Paradise Valley had friends and coworkers who hooked them up with fresh eggs and vegetables. Hunting was still a big event starting around that time of year, and already Carrie’s family had come into a windfall of fresh deer meat and some jerky that might last them half the winter. For those who couldn’t hunt, fish, grow vegetables, or keep chickens on their property, though, they hoofed it to Wal-Mart an hour away or sucked up the convenience fee of the price-gouging supermarket.
Seriously… three bucks for caged eggs. These would’ve been a little over a dollar back home. But Carrie’s aunt asked for a dozen eggs, so that’s what Carrie grabbed alongside a box of mac and cheese and a jar of marinara, barring a couple of brands the family claimed were terrible. Her uncle wanted a candy bar, and her aunt told her to grab herself and Carrie a couple of donuts if they looked fresh enough. They weren’t.
Carrie had procured a ten-dollar bill before leaving, and she received a dollar-fifteen in change – hardly worth giving back to her aunt, but she’d do it, anyway. Her meager bag of groceries didn’t feel like anything as she walked back out to her car.
“Oh, hey.”
She nearly leaped out of her skin when Christina’s voice sounded behind her. Carrie whipped around by the hood of her car, the grocery bag slipping from her hands, but not making it to the ground. “H… hey.”
Christina stood by the bottle return machine, dressed in jeans and a heavy, autumn-inspired sweater that hid most of her torso. Hair pulled back into a ponytail accentuated the fullness of her face and the glimmer of blue in her eyes. Even if Carrie didn’t know that Christina was one of the popular girls at the local school, she’d know it from that one glance.
Now, why was she talking to someone like Carrie?
“Sorry for startling you.” The sleeves of Christina’s sweater covered her hands as she lifted them toward her chest and face. “Didn’t mean to. Saw you coming and thought… well, I should apologize to you. For the other thing.”
Carrie unlocked her door and placed the groceries on the floor of the passenger side. “For what?” she asked, popping her head back up.
“For the party the other night. I was drunk when you flirted with me, and I think I was a bit of a bitch in the way I turned you down. I dunno. Don’t really remember how you reacted, only that it happened.”
Carrie’s fingers slowly wrapped around the open door of her car. Her other hand went onto the roof. Was this how she braced herself for accepting rejection? Again? Speaking of being a bit tipsy… Looking at how pretty Christina was hurt, but she also looked… well, seventeen. Carrie may be a senior in high school and only recently minted nineteen, but she looked at girls like Christina and realized they weren’t worth the drama. I remember being seventeen. Weird to think how much I’ve changed in the past year alone. Then again, making a giant mistake like sleeping with a married woman and getting expelled from her old life, let alone from her old school, would sober a girl’s bad decision making.
“No worries. Trust me when I say I’ve gotten way worse rejections in my life.” Carrie attempted to smile, but a breeze picked up the moment the corners of her mouth spread apart. She snapped her lips closed again before the cold breeze stung her teeth. “Do you…” She looked at her empty car. “Do you need a ride somewhere? I’m heading back to my aunt and uncle’s.”
“Oh, no! It’s okay! I’m waiting for someone else to pick me up.” Christina looked up and down the walkway outside of the supermarket. Nobody spared a second glance to the new girl in town or the mayor’s daughter. “Don’t tell anyone you saw me hanging out here, though. My mom gets soooo weird when people ask her questions about me. Who knew that having a mayor for a mom could be a pain in the butt, huh? Not as many perks as you might think.”
“Cool. See you at school, then.” Carrie hopped into her seat and shut the door. Christina waved at her as the motor started and gears shifted from Park to Reverse. Carrie thought she caught another familiar car in her sight, but she was too busy concentrating on safely getting out of the parking lot to think about it.
Her aunt didn’t say anything about the price of groceries as she took them and started dinner. Looked like spaghetti. When Carrie asked about the box of mac and cheese, her aunt said, “Dillon’s out for the evening and said he’d be back after dinner. I always make sure he has something to make.”
Was he too good for leftover spaghetti? Hmph.
With Dillon out of the house, though, Carrie didn’t have to worry about hearing anything through the walls. Nor did she have to fight him over what to watch on TV when her aunt and uncle retired to the deck for their evening beer and candy. Yet before Carrie could settle in on the couch and flip to her favorite YouTuber, her aunt popped out of the kitchen and apologized before saying, “I forgot to have you pick up some cheese from the store. Would you mind…?”
Carrie turned off the TV and hopped back in her car. She was offered her aunt’s car so Carrie wouldn’t have to eat the gas, but she had never been comfortable driving any other car. Probably because my mom drove a stick shift and it scared the crap out of me. Carrie knew how to switch between Park and Reverse. That was enough.
With another five dollars in her pocket, she headed back into the store and picked up the cheapest mild cheddar cheese available. The cashier – a young, talkative woman with the name ANEM etched into her tag – had to comment on Carrie’s reappearance in the line. “Forgot something, huh?” Her laughter was a mixture of giggle-snorting and a baby-like cackle. “You’re like… the second person tonight. Must be something in the air!”
Carrie grabbed the cheese, insisting she didn’t need another bag. By the time she made it back out to her car, night had all but already fallen.
“Got the cheese,” she texted her aunt. “Is it cool if I swing by the café for a drink? Assuming you don’t need this right now.”
Her aunt sent a shrugging emoji. How noncommittal of her.
Carrie used it as an excuse to swing by Heaven’s Café and grab a small latte that would hopefully keep her awake long enough to eat dinner, do homework, and hang out for a bit. The barista looked at her like she was as foreign as a tourist getting lost around town. When Carrie once again informed everyone in the room that she was a new student at school, the natural question was, “Oh? Whose house did you buy?” They were always surp
rised when she told them the names of her aunt and uncle. That’s also when the questions stopped, and people turned back to their rumor mills for half-true answers.
Carrie was in no hurry to get home. She sat in the half-empty parking lot and sipped her latte while surfing through her phone. Her aunt gave her a time for dinner. As long as she was back by then, she wouldn’t be in trouble.
Meanwhile, her good-for-nothing cousin was out doing God knew what. Carrie kept her ears open for word of another fire. She still had her plan to possibly catch Dillon in the act of setting one of the barn fires, but she wouldn’t have the chance to do anything about it until that weekend. Not with school, work, and everyone watching her like a hawk.
The glow of her phone illuminated the dark settling in around her. The light reflected off the taillight of a car parked in an adjacent lot, one only visible from where she parked by an old auto part store. Are you kidding me? Kids park in an auto part lot? Carrie knew that it was a small town with few options for private canoodling, but that was sad.
It also wasn’t what she wanted to see right before dinner. Especially when she realized she knew that car and its driver.
Dillon. The gross butt.
So, Dillon had a girlfriend? That was news. Did his parents know? Will I tell them? She wouldn’t want him talking about her love life, so she’d spare him. This time.
Definitely an impetus to start her car and get the hell out of there, though. Carrie had no desire to watch her cousin make out with some poor girl who didn’t deserve him. Did he brush his teeth? He had a toothbrush in the bathroom, but that thing was untouched.
As Carrie was about to pull out of the parking lot, however, she caught a glimpse of the unlucky lady.
September Lessons (A Year in Paradise Book 9) Page 9