Page 23 of September Lessons
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From all the talk around school, Carrie half-expected to come home to the police parked in the driveway. Instead, she found her uncle doing some yardwork and gesturing for her to get on ahead inside. “If you don’t mind,” he said after her, “your aunt left a frozen lasagna in the fridge. If I’m not back inside in forty-five minutes, do us a favor and throw it in the oven, huh?”
Carrie assured him it was no problem. She would simply do her homework at the kitchen table, which was usually empty at that time of day if her uncle didn’t have any use for it.
Dillon walked through the door a few minutes after she sat down. He took one look at the math textbook on the table and scoffed. “You some nerd?” he asked. “I dunno how you get invited to anyone’s party when you’re in here first thing after school, nerding out.”
“Hey, if it offends you so much, I could go down to the library with all the other nerds.”
“Whatever. Do what you want. I’ma be in my room.”
Carrie didn’t think anything of it. Not when the house was quiet enough for her to forego headphones to concentrate on her math homework. She kept one eye on the clock while jotting down numbers and punching formulas into her calculator. A written note in her book reminded her to think about an essay topic for English class, but there was time to think about that later.
The house was so quiet that Carrie almost didn’t recognize her cousin’s voice in the other room.
Were the walls that thin? She had almost forgotten that his bedroom shared a wall with the kitchen. Carrie considered herself fortunate that the guest room she now occupied was far in the back of the house, where she didn’t have to listen to the dishwasher or the clanking of breakfast on Saturday mornings when she tried to sleep in.
Did he know that she could hear him if she concentrated hard enough?
Her first fear was that he was doing something she didn’t want to hear.Ahem. He is a teen boy.Didn’t she know? She was a teen girl! Once she established that he was on the phone, however, she had a reason to keep the earbuds in her bag and her concentration focused on the thin wall.
“Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be the dopest shit you’ve seen. We know what we’re doing, mmkay?” Dillon sounded smarmy enough that he was probably talking to a girl.He doesn’t have a girlfriend. He’s the type to tell me all about her, because he likes to flaunt.Bonus points if the person he flaunted to was a lesbian. “Besides, we’re almost out of tinderboxes anyway. With winter coming, we’re going into hibernation. Police? They don’t have a clue. They think it’s my cousin. Yeah! You know her! I sure as hell say you do after…”
Carrie couldn’t hear more after that, no matter how hard she strained.He must have turned around or flopped down on his bed.At least he hadn’t taken that scintillating conversation to text. Carrie might not know who Dillon was talking to on the phone, but she knew what they were talking about.
It wasn’t hard to figure out that Dillon had something to do with the barn fires. The boy spent half his evenings out in the backyard lighting his own campfires and staring into the abyss of leaping flames. He drew them on half of his belongings. When his parents asked him to start planning his birthday party in late October, he quipped that he wanted baked Alaska. Luckily, neither of his parents took that seriously.
If only Carrie had more substantial proof about her brother’s love for the flame. And, from the sounds of it, he wasn’t the only one. The boy probably had a few friends who were into it with him. A gang of fire starters. Carrie had heard that there was a Stephen King book club in town.Does he have a book about a gang of firebugs?She knew about her namesake, of course, but this felt like a lovely mishmash ofCarrieandIt.
Forty-five minutes had passed since Carrie’s uncle asked her to start the lasagna. She hopped out of her chair and preheated the oven. While searching for the boxed lasagna in the freezer, she concocted what was probably a really stupid idea. Yet if it caught her cousin in the act, it might be worth it.
Now, where was her phone? She had a few texts of her own to make. She wanted Leigh-Ann to tell her all about the gossip around school. The good, the bad… and the downright implicating.
Chapter 12
LEIGH-ANN
My decisions I make right now could determine the rest of my life…
Leigh-Ann remained hung up on that warning for most of the week. Every time she entered third period English class and confronted the woman who said it, she realized that her decisions thus far had been… less than stellar.I’ve hardly made any decisions at all.Yet as their class discussed Tuesday morning, in reference to their reading homework for1984,indecision was a type of decision with its own consequences. “When you’re indecisive,” someone in class had said, “you’re deciding not to act. Which is mostly a no answer, I think?”
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 wayshewanted 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 toCanadawould 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.
