Page 24 of September Lessons
Why does she like me? She could’ve made more friends by now.Surely. People talked, but most were open to a new friend if someone stuck out their neck. Was Carrie content with only really having Leigh-Ann for someone to talk to outside of school?
Was her wondering all of this some way to rationalize how she viewed herself?
She only had one bit of homework Thursday afternoon. Ms. Tichenor had assigned, on top of their reading and worksheet homework, coming up with an essay topic about a moment in which they realized their lives were forever changed. Some kids had it easy. They lost a parent, moved away from home, or they were teenagers when their parents had another baby. Easy! What was Leigh-Ann supposed to write about? Although Ms. Tichenor had assured them that no moment was too small, as long as they put some thought into it, Leigh-Ann couldn’t help but feel inadequate.
I didn’t used to feel inadequate…
All these piss-poor attitudes she had toward herself stemmed from somewhere. Her parents would blame puberty. A therapist would try to dig up some traumatizing event from her young childhood. Yet Leigh-Ann knew, didn’t she?Yeah, it was some traumatic moment. But not that long ago.Maybe the problem wasn’t that her life was boring and she didn’t care to make decisions. Maybe she was numb. Numb from a moment that happened not so long ago.
“When I was a sophomore,”she wrote in her English notebook,“I told my best friend that I loved her. She told me she loved me too. We kissed, and then she told me she didn’t love me anymore. Somehow, the whole school found out, and I really haven’t been the same since.”
When she put it that way…
Leigh-Ann had been avoiding that hard truth for the past two years. When a confused teenaged girl wracked with the weight of puberty put herself out there, the result had the power to either make or break her. Would she succumb to the weight crushing her shoulders? Or would she be brought up by a higher power that determined her young fate?
Two years ago, she succumbed.
Nobody could blame her. Few people, let alone a shy girl born from an insular world, could survive the kind of rejection she faced when she told her best friend she had been crushing on her for years. When their friendship crashed and burned a few weeks later, Leigh-Ann could only assume that she was the problem. She had decided to act upon her crush, and now here she was, lonely in her senior year.
“Everyone around me says that I’m free to explore who I am. They say I’m in safe company who won’t judge me for liking guys or girls.”Leigh-Ann tapped her pen against the bent wires of her spiral-bound notebook, struggling to find the words to write and realizing that she wouldn’t dare turn them in to Ms. Tichenor.“But it really sucks when a girl rejects you. She’s supposed to be your friend, and though she says she likes you, you can’t trust her to still be nice to you the next day. Then you watch her go out with a bunch of boys over the next two years and realize that it really, really wasyou.You’ve screwed it up.”
If Leigh-Ann had never told Christina that she liked her, would they still be friends? Would Leigh-Ann be relatively popular? Would she be hanging out with Amanda and Chrystal at the pizza place, stealing glances at the new girl behind the register and spreading rumors about why she got expelled from “all of Alabama?”
Pointless, wasn’t it? That was an exercise in futility if Leigh-Ann had ever found one.
She pulled the paper out of her notebook, but she didn’t ball it up for the trash. Instead, she carefully folded it up and put it beneath her pillow. She would come back to it later. For now, she needed to write something she could actually hand in to English class the next day.
She couldn’t think of anything. She was so wrapped up in her own head that every time she pressed her pencil to the paper, she remembered the look on Christina’s face when she said they shouldn’t be friends anymore.
Leigh-Ann also thought of that moment when Carrie implied they were off to hot and heavy make-out spots, like that’s what Leigh-Annwanted.
Maybe… a bit.
I don’t know. I don’t know what I want from anyone.Friendship? More? Maybe she merely wanted a trusted person to experiment with. Someone who wouldn’t judge her for feeling the way she did. Someone who could gently reject her, if it came to that, and still treat her like a friend afterward. Leigh-Ann could still be friends with people who rejected her. She was sure of it. If Christina came to her door that day and asked to make it up to her with pizza and a movie, Leigh-Ann would accept it.
That wasn’t happening. Like Carrie being into her probably wasn’t happening, either.
Leigh-Ann picked up her pencil and forced herself to write.“When I was five, my parents took me to the Enchanted Forest outside of Salem. I decided to not listen to my mom when she said to wait for her by the bathroom stalls. I spent the next thirty minutes crying because I got lost and nobody could find me. Since then, it’s made me realize that my parents really love me, and I’ve never doubted it since. Although I was scared back then, I think it was a good decision by five-year-old me.”
It was the safest thing she could think of on the spot. An easy B- if she really bullcrapped her way through the assignment. Ms. Tichenor would be disappointed in her, but it was for the best. Nobody needed to know the truth.
Chapter 13
CARRIE
Carrie’s aunt sent her to the store early Thursday evening to fetch some groceries for dinner. She was still aghast to see some of the prices from the only proper supermarket in town.Even in my hometown there’s only one supermarket, but the prices there aren’t quite like this…One of many things she adjusted to living in the Pacific Northwest was the price. The apartments in a small town cost as much as they did in the city. Gas? God! Living so far away from the Gulf had never been as apparent as when Carrie went to fill up her tank with regular. Her eyes practically bulged out of her head when she realized the serious raise in minimum wage pay actually came at a price.
Most people in towns like Paradise Valley had friends and coworkers who hooked them up with fresh eggs and vegetables. Hunting was still a big event starting around that time of year, and already Carrie’s family had come into a windfall of fresh deer meat and some jerky that might last them half the winter. For those who couldn’t hunt, fish, grow vegetables, or keep chickens on their property, though, they hoofed it to Wal-Mart an hour away or sucked up the convenience fee of the price-gouging supermarket.
Seriously… three bucks for caged eggs.These would’ve been a little over a dollar back home. But Carrie’s aunt asked for a dozen eggs, so that’s what Carrie grabbed alongside a box of mac and cheese and a jar of marinara, barring a couple of brands the family claimed were terrible. Her uncle wanted a candy bar, and her aunt told her to grab herself and Carrie a couple of donuts if they looked fresh enough. They weren’t.
Carrie had procured a ten-dollar bill before leaving, and she received a dollar-fifteen in change – hardly worth giving back to her aunt, but she’d do it, anyway. Her meager bag of groceries didn’t feel like anything as she walked back out to her car.
“Oh, hey.”
She nearly leaped out of her skin when Christina’s voice sounded behind her. Carrie whipped around by the hood of her car, the grocery bag slipping from her hands, but not making it to the ground. “H… hey.”
Christina stood by the bottle return machine, dressed in jeans and a heavy, autumn-inspired sweater that hid most of her torso. Hair pulled back into a ponytail accentuated the fullness of her face and the glimmer of blue in her eyes. Even if Carrie didn’t know that Christina was one of the popular girls at the local school, she’d know it from that one glance.
