Set It Off

by Myanne Shelley

  Chapter 2Just Another Phase

  Blossom Valley, 1975

  A few months after she turned 12, Karen Emerson began a brief but passionate phase of writing down absolute truths on the covers of her three ring notebooks, then inking over them so thoroughly that the ballpoint pen raised hash marks like Braille on the inside. In this way she could be reminded of what she had written, what she knew, but not risk anyone else like her brothers or parents reading it.

  Everything was a phase, according to her mom, who was recently into pop psychology. It was as if anything anyone in the family thought to do could be easily dismissed as some unoriginal reaction to the outside world. Predictable and soon passed. Her mom (“please, call me Amelia” to her friends, so embarrassing!) could even joke about her own journey, as she called it, into feminism. It was a little behind the time the new women’s movement had hit the big cities, and quite a lot more subdued. But she was on the journey!

  She had taken a part time job a couple years back when Karen was in 5th and her younger brother in 3rd grade. More recently she’d cut her hair into a modern shag. She had a group of friends who had a monthly night out, women only, and brought home books that were, she said, brimming with new ideas.

  Karen, frankly, had gotten busy enough with her own life not to pay all that much attention to her mother’s doings anymore. Seventh grade meant the Junior High across town, rising super early to catch the bus, seeing the transformation of kids she had known since kindergarten. Some were already growing tall, developing, pretty popular girls and athletic boys, while others pushed their way into one or another newly formed lesser tiers.

  Karen, who had always coasted pretty easily in the middle ground, found herself scrambling a bit in the new scheme of things. She got along pretty well with boys and girls both, and with older and younger kids. She had two brothers after all, one older and one younger. But lately she was understanding what her older brother Peter had tried to tell her, one rainy afternoon the summer before. “It’s just different, it’s just different,” he had repeated several times, finally shushing her so they could both watch the repeat of Star Trek on TV.

  Peter had reached high school, so they took different buses and didn’t talk much now day to day. He had grown suddenly taller (his “growing phase” according to Mom) as well as become irritable and sometimes spookily quiet. He could be in a room with the rest of the family but also somehow not there. As if he was actually hovering somewhere above, or in a science lab somewhere, observing the rest of them through a microscope.

  She could see now how hard junior high might have been for him, a quiet and skinny boy who was smart but in a way that probably branded him a teacher’s pet. Karen was usually referred to as nice or sweet or fun, where Peter was the smart one, their younger brother Clay the funny and clever one. She wasn’t dumb. Just not as smart. But smart enough to see that being real smart wasn’t a good thing anymore, nor popping your hand up in class every time you knew the answers.

  Karen instead worked to establish herself as friendly and nice. The sort of girl who would say hello to anyone she saw, who wasn’t mean to the unpopular kids or scared of the rough country kids, the ones who got into fights during lunch period. She had her eye, already, on the high school twirling team, which was two rungs below cheerleaders, one below pom poms, but better than marching band. Or the kids who did nothing at all.

  Lucky for her, she had a little group of friends who had hung around sometimes in elementary school. These were girls who quickly sat together where they could, and found a table toward the front of the cafeteria that first noisy frightening day at lunch period A. One of the girls had left the group, morphed into the tanned, shiny haired, perfectly made up group that sat together with the popular boys at the dead center at lunch. But Karen had met and brought in a new girl, Jackie, who easily took her place.

  Jackie’s family had moved from Boston, which she breezily called “the city.” She was a tall, broad shouldered girl with perfectly feathered ashy blond hair, a wide smile despite her braces, and a fast, bossy way of talking that Karen admired. On their first day in class, Jackie had interrupted the Home Ec. teacher to clarify the appearance of boiling water. Somehow the way she did it, smiling and confident, hadn’t bothered the teacher, who was like a hundred years old and probably just glad anyone was even listening.

  All of their little group lived in the same part of town. The nice part, their mom called it. The boring part, Peter said – although it’s not like there was really an interesting section of Blossom Valley. There were a couple streets up at the top of the hill with bigger houses, lush lawns, wide porches with views of the whole area (the fancy part). Karen didn’t think anyone with kids lived up there though, it seemed like mostly old people. And there were two trailer parks, but it was dull there too. Mostly grown ups there worked in the factory a couple towns over – people who tried not to draw much attention to themselves. Kids who lived there usually tried to hide the fact, although after awhile everyone knew.

  The rest of the town stretched over the rolling hills, modest suburban tract homes all built around the same time, back when people started settling here, extending a pattern of escaping Philadelphia and then the busy suburban towns around it. To the east were a series of larger and more populous towns, to the west it was more rural farms dotted with small villages until you got to solidly into Amish country. In the very center of Blossom Valley there were some older structures, brick or stone, and just one block with some stores and a gas station. For most everything else you needed, someone had to drive 10 miles or so over a highway too dangerous for bikes, which was totally frustrating for everybody under age 16.

  Fortunately Jackie lived in easy biking distance from Karen. And happily her mom didn’t care where she rode her bike as long as she stayed off the highway. Jackie’s parents were actually kind of strict about where she went. Jackie just laughed this off as the burden of being the oldest. She just had to prove herself responsible, she assured them all, and they would loosen up. They were still getting used to living out in the country. That’s what all the Carlisles called their new home, despite its being on an ordinary street with regularly spaced houses.

  Jackie had to share a bedroom with her younger sister, which rankled her. Karen didn’t see that it was really a problem though – Jackie pretty much bossed Joy around, and Joy was willing to do what she was told just for the privilege of staying in the room, listening to the 12 year olds talk. “We’re practically teenagers,” Jackie often stated. “People should just get used to treating us like teenagers now.”

  They had the cutest baby brother. Both sisters complained about having to care for him, babysitting when their mother went places, changing his disgusting diapers, listening to him squalling in the morning. But Karen could tell they got a huge kick out of him, just as she did. Their love for him ran a lot deeper than their exaggerated complaints about his gross eating habits or the way he ran shouting through the house wearing only a droopy diaper.

  The baby was named Jerry, but everybody called him JJ. He was a junior, named after his father Jerry. Her dad really wanted a boy, Jackie told Karen, to explain why her mom had had another baby despite being so old. Until she mentioned it, that hadn’t struck Karen as out of the ordinary. Her own father was pretty old, more than a decade older than her mother, something they made stupid jokes about sometimes. But Jackie’s father didn’t seem that excited about having a son that she could tell.

  She had only met him once, and that was when she had been over on a Saturday. He had been mowing the lawn – he’d muttered pleased to meetcha, before grabbing a beer and returning to the yard. Jackie said he didn’t like rural life as much as he thought he would. She said her parents had been fighting more in the city. Moving to a quiet place and having another baby were supposed to make them happy. It did stop them from fighting; now they didn’t talk much to each other. He had
a long commute and often missed coming home in time for dinner. While her mom, according to Jackie, kept finding excuses to drive from town to town, shopping or getting ideas for the garden. Or possibly just driving aimlessly, smoking, returning empty handed, or thanking the girls for babysitting by handing them each a candy bar they could have easily gotten in town.

  Jackie said she liked hanging out at Karen’s house better than at her own. Karen had her own room, for starters. She preferred the food they had on hand for snacks, and got a kick out of seeing her dad in the kitchen (one of Mom’s things after she got her part time job, that Dad should part time cook). Her mom would talk to them as if they were normal people, not tiny children. Mom liked to get a “young person’s perspective,” and while Karen, Peter and Clay would just roll their eyes at that, Jackie loved to answer all these crazy questions. And if Peter had a friend over, Jackie would find every possible excuse to parade herself by the pair of them, head tilted down, eyes darting up, smiling, laughing, gauging their reactions.

  Karen, at least until this point, had never looked at either brothers’ friends as anything beyond annoying extensions of themselves. As for her parents, they’d always seemed pretty normal with each other, aside from Mom’s embarrassing need to speak everything on her mind. But seeing the way Jackie’s could be in the same house but never really meet each other’s eyes was kind of odd. Still, she felt more like a grown up over there. Jackie’s parents let them alone, and they could fix their own snacks. Joy treated them like rock stars, and they got to take care of little JJ, dressing him up, hauling him around, even pushing him outside in his stroller.

  Autumn afternoons, Karen liked lolling around Jackie’s bedroom pretending to do homework but really whispering about TV shows and movie stars and older kids at school. Or taking JJ “out for air,” pushing the stroller together as it crunched through the fallen leaves, the fresh scent of cut grass and raked leaves mixing with hints of neighbors’ dinners.

  Drifting away in her head to fantasies of being grown up, with her own baby, a house and a handsome husband in it awaiting her return. And in her imagination, she and this faceless but suave guy would have teasing, bantering conversations. They would talk fast, the way Jackie did, cleverly playing off each other’s sentences, laughing together, toasting each other and their friends with sweet delicious drinks. They would never slouch around in bathrobes every weekend morning or fall asleep in front of the TV, as her parents did. Nor glide past each other with looks on their faces that said almost out loud what a disappointment it was to be sharing even a moment together. Like Jackie’s.

  And riding home, her bike flying down the hills, hair streaming behind her, Karen tried but usually failed to maintain her fantasy world. Something about being on the bike just felt so childish, fun but goofy and unsophisticated. By the time she had bounced over the lawn and stowed her bike in the garage, she was back to being 12. Unsure of much of anything past what was for dinner that night.

  Still, she found herself spending less time playing and more time just sitting, pondering, trying to figure things out. One hand looping through her plain brown hair, wishing it was longer and fuller. The other straying softly across the covers of her notebooks, fingertips brushing the darkened places. Remembering what she had written.

  Teachers lie. Being smart is better than being pretty. It’s much worse being alone in a crowd than being home alone. Nobody’s happy all the time. I’m more afraid of not trying than of trying and failing.

  That last one wasn’t entirely true for Karen, at least not yet. But it was something she had heard on TV that stuck with her. Something to aim for, the sort of person she wanted to be.