Page 18 of September Lessons
It was still early enough in the evening for the rush to only be on the horizon, not hitting the tiny pizza place with the full force of baseball-sized hail. Carrie stood behind the counter in a trucker hat and apron advertising the establishment. For some reason, it was extra itchy that day. What was the deal? Should she be starching them in the laundry? Wasn’t it bad enough she had to take the aprons home for washing? Her aunt had rolled her eyes and chose that moment to tell Carrie she was expected to do her own laundry. What? No, Dillon didn’t have to do his own laundry. Why was Carrie griping? She should be glad she could do free laundry instead of being stuck with the laundromat half a mile away!
Carrie scratched her arm again. What else was there to do? There were no orders. Her coworkers cleaned up and prepped in the back. Carrie was told to stay up there in case a customer came in, but aside from washing the counters, rearranging brochures, and cleaning off the two bistro tables by the window, there wasn’t anything left to do. The hot case was empty after the last of the a-la-carte slices were bought an hour ago. Carrie had already scrubbed it out and shut it down for the day.
Having all this quiet time with few chores to do gave her too much time to obsess over the night before. At the time, she had been fine with Christina’s curt yet polite rejection.I don’t know why she’d be impolite. Obviously, the daughters of queer women can be as homophobic as kids raised by straight people, but nobody’s given me the impression that she’s a jerk.Christina drummed her fingers on the counter and thought about realigning one of the posters in the west-facing window. A bright ray of sunshine came through it now, though, and it might not be worth the blinding trouble.
Maybe it wasn’t Christina’s rejection that hurt her the most. Maybe it was the reminder that she was an outsider in this town. She wasBama.People kept telling her that kids around there loved having new people in their school, but Carrie had yet to feel it. When they weren’t ignoring her, they were whispering about why she had to repeat senior year across the country.Oh, yeah, word got out.She didn’t think it was Leigh-Ann that did it. For some blasted reason, the school had a display set up for that year’s seniors, showcasing selfies taken with a school camera and a few printouts about them. This included their birthdates. Not only their birthdays,but their birthdates.Once people realized Carrie was born in the year 2000, the whispers erupted. Some came right up to her and asked,“Are you really nineteen? Why the hell are you still in school?”Carrie’s favorite was the sophomore who implied she had never seen a nineteen-year-old girl in high school. Was she stupid or something? That was usually reserved for gross dudes!
But her favorite… herabsolute favorite…was the rumor going around that she had gotten pregnant back in Alabama. Apparently, Alabama still lived in the Dark Ages and required pregnant high school girls to dropout and repeat senior year.
Carrie supposed what gave her the most anxiety was fretting over what Christina might say to her friends. She was one of the popular girls, after all. The mayor’s daughter!God, what was I thinking, trying to get with the mayor’s baby?Christina had made it pretty clear she wasn’t into girls. How many hit on her? Was it verboten for the new lesbian in town to put the moves on her? Carrie was the last to find out that she was straight – damnit, Leigh-Ann was right, after all – so she probably hadn’t been hit on in a while. Would Christina go back to school Monday and tell everyone about what happened?
Carrie needed to decide how much of a “high school experience” she really wanted to have. She had gone into Clark High with the intent of getting her diploma and nothing else. She already knew what homecomings and proms were like. When was homecoming, anyway? Wait, Clark High didn’t have a football team…
Five minutes before she was allowed to take her break – and then the Saturday evening rush supposedly began – a familiar silhouette appeared in the door.
“Oh, hey,” Carrie greeted, as Leigh-Ann strolled into the parlor. “Your family order something? Because we don’t have anything in the pipeline. Or are you ordering now?”
Leigh-Ann stopped before the register. She didn’t look like she was about to order a large pepperoni with extra cheese. “Thought I’d come and check to see how you’re doing. I heard last night’s party was a real banger.”
Banger?Carrie refrained from snorting. “It was rowdy, but pretty harmless. The best part was finding my cousin there.” True to her word, Carrie had said nothing to her aunt and uncle. She still had yet to see Dillon before she had to go to work, but as long as his parents weren’t asking questions, she wasn’t offering information. He had said something about staying with a friend that weekend, right?I wonder if they’re actually hanging out, or if it’s a cover for something else.Carrie wouldn’t put it past him. She also didn’t care.
“Oh. I heard it was busted by the cops.”
“I guess you can call it that. I wanna say it was the most Southern thing I’ve seen since I got here, but not only would that be a lie, it doesn’t take into consideration that officer was gay as hellandabout to whoop everyone’s butts.”
“Yeah, she’s mostly talk, though. My dad’s good friends with her. I think they went to school together.” Leigh-Ann still fidgeted with her hands and avoided eye contact. The sleeves of her sweatshirt fell over her hands when she realized she was twiddling those fingers like she had too much coffee. “Did you hear about the barn fire afterward?”
Since this was looking to be an extensive conversation with someonenota customer, Carrie popped into the kitchen and said she was taking her ten minute break. She dug her drink out of her locker and offered Leigh-Ann a snack of Ritz crackers as they sat at one of the empty bistro tables overlooking the emptier parking lot.
“Yeah, I heard about some fire.” Carrie took off her hat and slapped it against the table. Leigh-Ann turned down a share of crackers.I put some peanut butter on them. Come on, some real protein goodness here!God knew she need it to get through her shift. “Are they a problem around here or something? People were making a real fuss about it.”
“It’s like the fifth one this summer, I think. They started back in July, I wanna say.” Leigh-Ann didn’t want any crackers, but she accepted a sip of water. “People think it’s an arsonist. When people wanna blame an arsonist, they point their fingers at people like us.”
“People likeus?”
“Teens,” Leigh-Ann brusquely said.
“Trouble making teens, no less.”
“You gotta understand... lots of kids at school hold it tradition to go making out in abandoned barns. If you’re not having a little nookie up on Wolf’s Hill, you’re doing it in some old farmer’s barn he doesn’t use for anything but straw anymore. The first fire was explained away as an accident. Then people started wondering if they were insurance grabs. Now everyone’s focused on someone from school doing it. You see what I’m gettin’ at?”
“Yeah. I’m seeing it.” Carrie abandoned her peanut butter crackers in favor of taking a swig of her water. She didn’t think about the fact she and Leigh-Ann shared germs for the first time. “Who’s the first person everyone blames? The outsider. Never mind if the first fire started in July, it couldn’t have been me, because I was still driving across the country.”
“People don’t care about the facts,” Leigh-Ann said with a sigh. “Especially if they can conveniently get themselves off the hook.”
“I hope you don’t think I have anything to do with it. Why in the world would I want to burn down somebody’s poor barn?”
“Dunno. If it really is someone from school doing it, then it’s probably because they’ve got some problem. Like… they gotta light fires, you know?”
Yeah. Carrie knew. She knew so well that a face instantly popped in her view.Nah… he’s stupid, but he ain’t that stupid, right?Besides, Dillon had been at the party the night before. Carrie had seen him with her own eyes. There’s no way he had time to light abarnon fire and hoof it over to the party to put in an appearance.
“You say kids go to these barns to make out?”
“Make out, have sex, do some drugs and drink… normal stuff. Ain’t much shelter around here to run to in the rainy seasons, so barns do.” Leigh-Ann softly chuckled. “They say if a girl at school gets pregnant, it was probably made in a barn. Gross, right?”
“I can’t say I’m much in the way of making babies, myself.”
The smile fell off Leigh-Ann’s face. “Right. Girls go and fool around there, too. Biggest barn scandal since freshman year was Billy Willis and Adam Johnson getting caught doing allsortsof stuff. Oh, you don’t know them. They graduated a couple years ago, but I hear that they went to Portland State together. Even if girl on girl doesn’t raise an eyebrow at school, two guys doing it does.”
