Page 26 of September Lessons
Why am I so upset… it’s not like I really wanted to go out with her…Was it the fact she was making out with Dillon, the firebug who was barely the same age as her?
Dillon was a junior! Seriously! What was Christina doing, making out with pond scum like him?Leigh-Ann said she and her friends went out with any boy they found mildly interesting.Carrie knew that the school was small, but were Christina’s choices reallythatdire?
So he gets to implicate me in the barn fires… and gets the girl? I don’t think so.
Carrie’s renewed sense of purpose made her grab her phone.
Chapter 14
LEIGH-ANN
How in the… what am I doing here?
Leigh-Ann plopped down into the corner of the barn, where a generous amount of straw gave her butt a place to comfortably sit. Carrie sprawled on a patch beside her friend, eyes glued to the rafters above them.
This wasn’t what Leigh-Ann thought she’d be doing with her early Saturday afternoon, but when she got a text from Carrie the night before, how could she say no?“You keep telling me about this hill and these barns. Why don’t we go check some of them out?”Leigh-Ann thought it was a joke. Or, at least, it was an excuse for Carrie to climb Wolf’s Hill to say she had done it. Yet when Carrie admitted she wanted to hang out in one of the few remaining barns around town, Leigh-Ann thought of somethingverydifferent.
“I didn’t bring any beer,” Leigh-Ann said. “Couldn’t smuggle any out of my parents’ cooler.” Her parents never missed the occasional beer when they restocked for the fortnight. Leigh-Ann was a pro at stealing about one a month, at first to say she could do it, and then because she found out her parents had great taste in beer. “Sorry.”
“No worries. I couldn’t score pot.” Carrie held up her small bag containing a few snack-sized chip snacks and a couple drink containers. “So it’s pop and chips from the pizza place.”
Leigh-Ann accepted a Coke and a bag of potato chips. “You didn’t…”
“Steal them?” Carrie scoffed. “No way. I need to keep my job and not end up in jail, thanks. That’s a great way to get expelled again.” She settled back in with a Diet Coke and some barbecue chips. “Would be breaking last year’s record. Supposed togetmy diploma this time.”
The crinkling of the chip bags drowned out Leigh-Ann’s voice. She had to wait for crunching to overtake crinkling before saying, “You never told me what happened. To get you expelled, I mean.”
Carrie continued to stare up at the rafters, chips slowly passing her lips and snapping between her teeth. How she did that without choking on her chips? Leigh-Ann had no idea. She had all but given up on getting a response when Carrie put down her bag and said, “If I tell you, you have to promise to not tell a soul.”
Leigh-Ann shrugged. “Who would I tell? I ain’t got anything to gain from that.”
“Guess that’s true. Sorry. No offense.”
Leigh-Ann hadn’t thought about how that could’ve been construed as offensive until Carrie said something.Right. Because I have no other friends. Because I’m a weirdo.Leigh-Ann was used to people thinking there was something wrong with her because she didn’t have a group of friends or a large, extended family to keep her amused. She was that girl who, since mucking things up with Christina, had become a sort of teacher’s pet, although her grades weren’t amazing. She kept to herself. Didn’t go to parties (even if invited,) volunteered at a B&B with the English teacher, and rode her bike aimlessly. Although people rarely gave her crap to her face, she knew what they were saying. She also knew how she was supposed to feel about it.
Was Carrie that much different? She may be more outgoing and more confident than Leigh-Ann, but she had to be, given her situation. New Southerner in town who had been kicked out of her old place and had to start senior year over? God, she better be tough. Because people talked.
“I promise,” Leigh-Ann said. “You can tell me anything. We’re friends, right?”
Carrie stopped munching on her chips long enough to give Leigh-Ann a curious gaze. Was she sizing Leigh-Ann up? Thinking of how to inform her that, no, they weren’t friends?
“I got caught with the principal’s daughter.”
Leigh-Ann had to replay that in her head before she gleaned Carrie’s meaning. “Oh.Oh.You and her were, uh…”
“We were having an affair, yeah.”
An affair?That was one way to put it. Ms. Tichenor might approve. It certainly made Carrie sound like a mature adult.Isn’t that one of the reasons I kinda like her?Leigh-Ann was attracted to bold personalities like Carrie’s. She needed someone who took care of themselves and was willing to take care of her, too. Few were willing to do that, though. Definitely none of her straight friends. A lesbian friend? It would have been great, except Leigh-Ann was already confused enough about her own sexuality. She figured out that much when she remembered that travesty of a thesis statement she turned in to Ms. Tichenor the day before.
“When you say affair…” Leigh-Ann began.
Carrie folded her hands behind her head as she continued to stare up into the rafters. “I mean she was married. I mean, she was barely twenty, but you gotta understand the whole reason she got married at like seventeen is because she got knocked up by her boyfriend. Back where I’m from, you get married when that happens.Especiallyif you’re the principal’s daughter.” Carrie blew some crumbs onto the front of her shirt. “Guess who was unhappy in her marriage to some nineteen-year-old guy who dropped out of community college and wouldn’t finish his plumbing certification?”
“How do you meet somebody like that?”
“Like I said, she was basically our age when it happened. I knew from school. She was only a year or two older than me. We had a small thing before she got with the boyfriend. Resumed the thing a while after the baby was born. Got caught.”
“What happened to her?”
