Now, Victoria removed her shirt, and boys I recognized from the football team hooted, wanting more. A few yards away, a freshman girl vomited loudly, but that did nothing to distract them. Victoria kicked her shirt into the fire, shook her boobs in our direction.
Bitsy had grown up here, and he had not experienced Dogwood, or David’s free month of HBO. I felt the need to explain. “They’re not real lesbians. Real lesbians are useful and dependable.”
“Those boys are morons,” he said. “I’m not like them.”
“I know,” I said. “I can’t believe your mother is letting you hang out with me.”
“She doesn’t know,” he said. He took risks, and that was attractive to me. I might give him more than friendship. If he kept spitting chew at Kaitlynn, definitely more.
“It’s a small town,” I said. “I threatened to kill her.”
“True,” he said. “But maybe it was worth it. They gave her a raise.”
“What?” That familiar fury rushed back, and I took deep breaths, and instead of his mother, my mind flashed upon a girl with a blue mouth. The consequences of desperation. I would control my anger. I had been taught to reframe things at Dogwood, see things as they really were. I had been another mean dog in a yard. I exhaled. Bitsy’s mother deserved the hazard pay. And I was on the first real date of my life.
“Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
The boys threw a pile of winter coats onto the fire, and I recognized them, stolen from the teachers’ lounge.
A burst and a whoosh as the sparks exploded toward the freshman girls, and they screamed and clung to each other. Typical. Except they kept screaming.
I looked closer, and they dashed away from bushes, a tree line suddenly lit with a blue glow. As the light brightened to glaring, I heard the motor, as the bushes burst open. My brother emerged, gunned his four-wheeler into the clearing.
He cut the engine and dismounted, stupid cowboy boots slipping in the muck. Nobody moved. We all knew who it was, but the freshman girls ran into the woods anyway.
Victoria threw a beer can at Ronnie, and it glanced off his helmet. He removed his leather gloves, flipped up his visor.
“You children are violating so many laws,” he said, and the fire popped and swelled as if to prove his point, some teacher’s blazer soaked with years of Lady Stetson. “This is an illegal burn, for starters.”
When Ronnie saw me across the clearing, his eyes narrowed.
Kaitlynn stalked toward my brother, half a foot taller, and most likely stronger, years of being the base of every cheerleading pyramid.
“What are you going to do about it, Meatloaf?”
Ronnie tried to remove his helmet, too tight for a dramatic gesture. It took him several attempts to reveal that hateful face, forehead shellacked with a hunk of sweaty hair. He pointed at Victoria’s bra. “Public indecency. Intoxicated minor.”
“I should beat the crap out of you,” said Kaitlynn. She crouched down into a boxing stance, wobbling slightly.
“Hopped up on diet pills,” he said. “Felony possession.”
Kaitlynn was outraged. She worked hard for her abs. She took a step forward and slapped her bare stomach. “Crunches, you pervert.”
“Citizen’s arrest,” he said, and half of my peers groaned; they had heard this threat many times.
Victoria lunged toward me, grabbed my wrist. “Here! Right here, douchebag. She’s breaking probation!”
“She’s only been drinking Dr. Pepper,” offered Bitsy.
Victoria dropped my wrist. “Don’t you have a curfew or something?”
“It’s only eight thirty,” I said.
“You’re so creepy,” said Kaitlynn. “Stop pretending you’re a cop.”
“I never identified myself as a police officer,” Ronnie responded.
Kaitlynn lunged for Ronnie’s jacket, but he took a step backward. “Give me your stupid notebook,” she demanded. We all knew about the notebook, his history of taking names at high school parties, even though most of them were fake. “Tonight, I’m going to burn it.”
I was surprised when Ronnie reached into his pocket. I actually thought he was going to give her his precious notebook, but instead he withdrew a can of bear spray. Kaitlynn shrieked when he sprayed her in the face.
“Self-defense,” he said as she continued to scream.
The party was over.
FROM THE DESK OF TIFFANY TEMPLETON
I’m not a Peeping Tom, but our trailer court was perfect. I swear it gets darker in our trailer park than in the woods, or maybe we just swallow all the light like a black hole.
Mr. Francine was easy to watch. His windows were immaculately clean, and he kept a woodpile next to his house that was a perfect blind. He did not have a wood stove. I think he kept the wood because it looked appropriate. You don’t know this, but he wears camouflage outfits all weekend. I think Mr. Francine really wanted to appear as if he belonged in Gabardine.
Unfortunately, he looked like a space alien. You’ve seen him. I watched him that first night, gray-skinned, large head, slight body, freakishly long fingers. His eyes are the only big thing about him, and they look weird set so deep in that gray skin. I figured if I spied long enough, I’d find out why his skin was that color. David likes to say that Mr. Francine looks like he just emerged from underground after a mining disaster. In the summer, we have stray dogs that roll around in the potholes, leap out of the dust with black, black eyes. That’s what Mr. Francine reminded me of. But I spied on him and saw him in a bathrobe after a shower, and the dust never came off.
A year after I began to volunteer, we started noticing that things were disappearing. On Saturdays we did inventory, and restocked shelves, and there were always cans that showed up on our spreadsheet, but were nowhere to be found. My dad wasn’t that concerned—he reminded me about charity and desperation.
One Friday night, I discovered where the cans had gone, and it was not out of desperation. Mr. Francine stole from the food bank after closing his office. He had a key, so it was easy.
I watched him drop a duffel bag on his kitchen counter, watched as he stacked twenty-one cans in a pyramid. I knew they weren’t from the grocery store—at the food bank, most of our cans were dented or had peeling labels. He smiled and beheld that pyramid, seemed pleased with himself.
From the woodpile, I watched his front door open, flooding his yard with light. I scooted closer to the shadows, and he carefully navigated his front porch, his view blocked by the pile of cans in his arms. I watched as he disappeared into the stand of quaking aspens behind his house.
Besides my mom, Mr. Francine was the only person in the trailer park who owned his property. Of course, my mom found out what he paid, and she said she would never let it go. He also owned the half acre behind it, and that ring of aspen trees flooded every spring.
He returned fifteen minutes later, and as soon as his bedroom light was extinguished, I crept behind his house and stared into those trees. All I could see was a crooked storage shed, perched up on the rise of the mountains behind. Out of the flood zone.
The next Friday night, he had a stack of sixteen cans, and again, he lugged the perfectly shaped pile through his yard and disappeared into the darkness. I followed behind as quietly as possible.
Behind an aspen, in the full leaf of June, I watched a flashlight flicker to life inside the storage shed. Seconds later, the flashlight disappeared. Minutes passed, but I clung to that tree, determined, unmoving. When I saw the flashlight reappear, I snuggled as close to the trunk as I could.
When he passed by me, his arms were empty.
Three days later, I returned to his property. It was Monday, at ten o’clock in the morning, and I knew he was at work.
We had really old books in our public library, but I bet you had the girl detective books in Cleveland. I
wrote down all sorts of titles in my notebook. Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Storage Shed. Nancy Drew and the Lair of the Town Clerk.
It made me nervous to sneak around in the daylight. The sun flooded the inside of the storage shed when I opened the door. Tools, a lawnmower. On the floor, a blue tarp. When I pulled it back, I saw the trapdoor, new pinewood. I swear I could still smell the mill. I pulled the ring, and all I saw was darkness underneath.
Cursing, I ran the quarter mile to our trailer, returned with a flashlight.
A metal ladder had been screwed into the wooden frame. I shone the light and saw a dirt floor. I descended the ladder. Tough Tiff. The toughest girl in the trailer park.
Two hundred square feet, walls made of cinder blocks, turned on end. A chair, a cot, a carefully rolled sleeping bag. A stack of books, the flashlight glinting off the plastic jackets. Nicholas Sparks. Mr. Francine was a romantic, I guess, his little gray heart must have pumped out normal red blood. All along the walls, in perfectly arranged stacks, cans and cans of food. He had been stealing from the food bank for years. The stacks were taller than Mr. Francine, just like his filing cabinets at work. There must have been a thousand cans, each label perfectly centered, gleaming in the light. He must have dusted daily. A bunker. Mr. Francine was a survivalist. I would have pegged him as First to Die in an Apocalypse, but I was wrong. He was ready for a trailer park war.
That wasn’t even the weirdest thing. He had scented candles there, too. Even in his bunker. I don’t know what his obsession is. What kind of scent covers up the smell of the apocalypse?
All those cans enraged me. When I saw the brand-new can openers, I knew what I had to do. Three of them, the exact same model. He probably waited until they were on sale at Shopko.
It was cruel, I know.
I stole them.
The next time you see Mr. Francine, I hope you can see him for who he really is. You know something now, and that gives you power. Now you know why I did it.
He’s not going to make it through the apocalypse, and I think that’s a good thing, because I don’t want him to repopulate the earth.
I know it sounds like a fortune cookie, but I don’t care. Laugh at the man with a thousand cans but no can openers.
Chapter Sixteen
IN JUNE, ALL THE RIVERS were at their highest point. We were always warned about the undertow, but despite the cresting water, kids waded up to their thighs, watching weird things rocket past in all that rust, occasionally dodging an entire uprooted tree.
The high school students claimed the entire bridge, drank stolen booze and tethered inner tubes to the moorings, or yoked them to trees stripped bare before the end of the summer, skinned by clotheslines or twine. I never joined them.
The bravest boys jumped from the bridge. Three local kids had died, swept up by the undertow, but in Gabardine, death was part of our history, and drowning was better than incineration.
* * *
* * *
THAT MORNING, BITSY SHOWED UP at my front door, an inner tube hooked around each arm. At ten o’clock, it was barely fifty degrees, but there he was, shirtless. I’m not going to pretend that the sight made me swoon. Pale, and so skinny that his chest seemed caved in, and I don’t think he’d brushed his teeth.
“Surf’s up, dude.” Crooked grin, charm attack.
“I just woke up,” I said, peering out of the metal screen door. I didn’t want him to see my pajamas, the enormous black T-shirt that had belonged to my dad, neck so stretched out that the collar scooped almost down to my boobs, the ancient black sweatpants dotted with light blue specks. I had forgotten to empty the lint trap on the dryer.
I let him in anyway.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was the toughest girl in Gabardine, but within ten minutes, we were sitting at opposite ends of the couch, eating yogurt with plastic spoons, watching my DVD of Faces of Death.
I sat there thinking that I should have been writing it all down. It was weird to finally be with a boy worth writing about.
“I don’t have any summer clothes,” I said. “I don’t even own shorts.”
“You got a pair of jeans you don’t like?”
I nodded, and headed straight to my mother’s closet, where she had hung her future skinny clothes. I pulled a pair of black jeans, twice my size, and dropped them in Bitsy’s lap.
“We don’t have scissors,” I said. They’d gone the same way as the silverware.
“Jesus,” he said, and slid a pocketknife from his own shorts, and began to hack away.
Suddenly, he sprung backward over the couch. He had a knife in his hand, so at first I was scared, and the less rational part of my brain convinced me that this all had been a setup and he had always planned on murdering me to get revenge for his mother. It was a relief when I turned around and saw that he had flattened himself on the carpet.
At first I was confused, but then I heard it. I had studied Bitsy’s mother for an entire month, and I immediately recognized the jingle of her keys on a belt loop, the creak of a metal mailbox pried open, and the metal protesting again as it was wedged shut.
“Is she gone?” His voice was muffled by the carpet, and I didn’t even want to think about how long it had been since somebody had vacuumed. Likely, it had been my dad, and he died quite a while ago.
“Hang on.” From the couch, I watched Mrs. Bitzche take a wide berth around our mailbox, like it was poisonous, like she knew I was watching. She didn’t even glance at our house. I guess I was expecting her to stare longingly at my father’s empty chair. Instead, she powered past, and those athletic strides were familiar to me. Even at fifty degrees, she wore shorts, the official ones, the summer uniform. After she passed from view, I peered over the couch, at Bitsy’s scrawny back, legs that would never be as finely developed as his mother’s.
“All clear,” I reported.
An hour later, we had eaten three Lean Cuisines. We each had a Chicken Alfredo and shared a Chicken Kiev, leaned across the vast distance between us as we passed it back and forth. He made me replay the electrocution scene three times.
I didn’t have remote controls, for the television or the DVD player. I felt like a moron standing next to the entertainment center and pushing the rewind button with my finger. Ronnie stole the remote controls in 2012, after he caught me dumping piles of his protein powder around the dumpster to fatten up the pack rats.
Bitsy said nothing about the remote controls, and he said nothing about the plastic forks. I think I fell in love with him a little bit.
* * *
* * *
ON JUNE 20, THE SWEETS still wore their dumb T-shirts, but Rufus had fresh powder burns on his hands. Despite the heat, TJ still wore his enormous jacket, and the smell was terrible. But today, TJ did not drink NyQuil. I waited for him to reach into his pocket and remove the bottle, but nothing happened. He went in to see Kelly without his usual medication. Maybe we were all being rehabilitated. Maybe Kelly knew what she was doing.
Something had been bugging me, and I wanted an answer. “How come you don’t ask me about my pages?”
“The stuff you write? Do you want me to ask you about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I figured you’d be shocked or something. I figured you’d want to talk about why I did the things I did.”
“No,” she said. “I understand. I don’t approve of breaking and entering, and I don’t approve of spying on people, but I understand.”
“Thanks for not ratting me out.”
“I met your mother. I got gas yesterday, and she asked for two different kinds of identification. I paid with cash.”
“I don’t think she’s racist,” I said. “She’s just a Libertarian.”
“I think I caught her at a bad time,” she said. “She was sticking a giant stick into a hole. At least that’s what it looked like.” I knew exactly wha
t she was talking about, had seen it all of my life. I can imagine it, Kelly walking through the shimmer of fuel in the air of a hot summer day, the islands of pumps a mirage as the chemicals reacted to the sunshine. My mother and her pole, longer than the entire gas station, brought down from hooks that paralleled the gutter. My mother prying open the cistern, monkeying her hands as she dipped it down, until it arced into the sky. She read the numbers of the underground tanks, wrote them on the back of her hand, the diesel already dissolving the ink. But she remembered them. She always remembered them.
“Your mom is prickly,” admitted Kelly. “I think she just wants to make sure everything is contained in its right place. Even if she has to use barbed wire.”
“Bloody,” I said.
“Yes,” said Kelly. “But you’re the same. You need things to be in order. You look through windows, and you think you see everything that’s wrong. You write it all down. You shine a flashlight on it.”
“I crawl around in the dark,” I said. “I learned from the best. My mom is always waiting, just waiting. She knows that people are terrible. She’s paranoid and suspicious. She always has been.”
“Why do you think your mother is like that?”
“She was born mean,” I said. “Everybody says so.”
“Why do you think your mother is mean to you?”
“I’m a disappointment,” I said. “Especially lately.”
“You are not a disappointment,” she said. “Maybe she thinks that you are exactly like her, and it scares her to death. She wants more for you.”
“No,” I said. “My mom cares more about disadvantaged youth. She buys them cashmere coats.”
“Your mom is just a person, Tiffany. She’s got the same problems as everybody else.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “She controls the universe. Things wouldn’t just happen to my mother. She wouldn’t let them.”
“She couldn’t stop what happened to your dad,” said Kelly. “She couldn’t control the universe that day.”
The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton Page 12