Page 10 of September Lessons
“Yet you got expelled for being too dumb to live.” Dillon trotted out after that.Whew. Yeah, boy, you sure got me.Carrie could only roll her eyes and flip open her copy of1984.The corresponding worksheet for the assigned chapters was so easy she could do it in her sleep. Assuming she read the book, anyway. Ms. Tichenor seemed the type of English teacher to have recently read the books she assigned.If only I weren’t so tired…
Her eyes crossed as she flipped through pages and scanned the paragraphs for the right answers. One of the “thought provoking” extra credit questions at the bottom asked her if she witnessed Big Brother in her own life.Does a cousin count?There were no locks on the doors, unfortunately, but she made sure it was shut after he left.
I wonder if my own mother counts.The only reason Carrie got into so much trouble was because her mother insisted on opening her big mouth.“I let a lot slide around here, girl,”she had said in the aftermath of Carrie’s scandal,“but if you think I’m gonna be right with God if I don’t tell your teachers, you’ve got another think comin’. The Bible says I’ve gotta do a lot of things, and you may not care about what the Bible tells you, but I’m not meetin’ up with St. Peter for him to tell me I didn’t do a good enough job following the Word.”
So here Carrie was. Her mother claimed to keep loving her lesbian daughter, though she wasn’t sure what the Bible really said about it, but she wouldn’t keep the fact that Carrie was caught with a married woman away from thewhole community.
Married woman… sounds like she was thirty-five.Carrie’s ex-girlfriend was a twenty-year-old gal named Ainsley. She had married her baby daddy three years before but hated the guy’s guts. Didn’t have the money or the will to divorce him, though.She kept it hidden from me well enough.The husband part. Not the baby part. That was obvious when Ainsley kept bringing the baby along for the dates. The few times she got a babysitter, she lied her ass off about meeting up with Carrie in a roadside motel.
It was only a matter of time.
Sure, that relationship was going nowhere, but Carrie never anticipated it would effectively ruin her rural Alabaman life. Getting expelled wasn’t because she was fornicating with a female student… nah, that honor went tofornicating with the principal’s daughter.Nowthatnugget was something Carrie had known going into the relationship from hell.
None of the other school districts would touch her, not that she wanted to deal with the bullying she’d receive. Her mother’s church group was so adamant that Carrie should disappear that her mother made the emergency call to Oregon.
So here Carrie was… smelling smoke in the air.
“The hell…” She slipped off her bed and went to the window. The blinds shot up. Carrie unscrewed the latch and poked her head out the gap.
She sure had smelled smoke. What happened when there was smoke? Oh, there were fires, too.
In this case, it was Dillon hunched over in the backyard, where he had surrounded a patch of dry grass with wet rocks. The box of matches beside him said everything Carrie needed to know, long before she saw the tendrils of smoke spiraling up into the air.
Carrie closed the window and walked out into the living room, where her uncle watched TV with his hands folded on his stomach.
“So, I’m not really a snitchy kind of person,” she announced, “but Dillon’s in the back lighting grass on fire.”
With a heavy sigh, her uncle sat up in his seat and lowered the volume on the TV. “The boy likes his matches. Leave well enough alone.”
“But…”
“He’s never hurt nobody. We’ve had talks about how to do it safely. He got the wet rocks?”
“Yeah.” Carrie put her hands on her hips. “He got the ‘wet rocks.’”
“Well! Nothing else to comment on here. Make sure you get your homework and chores done before bed.”
That was his way of saying goodnight, huh? Fine. Carrie would go back to her room and ignore the smell of smoke in the air. Nevertheless, she decided that was a good sign to finally stop smoking… and made sure she knew her exit routes should things get a bit crispy around there.
Chapter 6
LEIGH-ANN
Third period was truly the worst time to have English. After math first period and chemistry second period, Leigh-Ann’s tired brain was so fried that she didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with literary tropes or diagraming sentences. While she didn’t have a least favorite subject, really, she would rather save the brain matter for English class.You know, that class so many other students treat as their study hall.Funny. Fourth period was study hall.
Between her lack of sleep, two hard subjects first thing in the morning, and hunger seeping into her gut, Leigh-Ann struggled to keep her eyes opened and her attention on the front of the room, where they had set aside their discussion on1984to talk standardized testing in the language arts. That soon spiraled with a question from Amanda about why so many words in the English language had the same letters but different sounds.
“You have to consider the lingual source of the words in question.” Ms. Tichenor’s blue whiteboard marker squeaked as she wrote. “English in particular is made up of many Latin-based words as well as Germanic. Although the two base alphabets share many of the same letters, you’re looking at very different interpretations of their sounds.”
Eyes glazed over in the classroom. Including Leigh-Ann’s.
But not Carrie’s, who raised her hand for the first time since joining Ms. Tichenor’s class a week ago.
“Yes, Carrie?”
“I know we’re already on a tangent,” Carrie’s drawl made half the students snicker, “but there’s something that’s been driving me crazy about pronunciations and such.”
“Yes?”
