Page 9 of September Lessons
“You gonna kiss me, huh?”her friend had asked.“I guess that’s okay. We’re sixteen now. We should be able to kiss whomever we want!”
It had been one of the sweetest kisses of Leigh-Ann’s life.
Leigh-Ann Hardy swore upon God and her own mother that she was straight. She had always known that, so it must have been true, yes? So what if she kissed another girl once? Experimentation. Everyone knew about it. They always talked about it on TV, so it must have been true. It was okay to experiment and reaffirm what you already knew about yourself. Considering what happened after that one kiss, Leigh-Ann could confirm that she was straight. Most definitely.
Did she have an answer for why she always thought of that kiss with a girl and never with the boys? No.
Why? Was she supposed to?
Chapter 5
CARRIE
She returned home from her final shift of the weekend to the sounds of her uncle berating her for where she parked her car. Carrie had to go back out, before she had the chance to change her clothes, and move her car from where her aunt was supposed to park later that evening.
“You smell like anchovies,” her younger cousin, Dillon, said. “When was the last time you bathed, Bama? Five days ago?”
The little shit was only two years younger than Carrie, if it could be believed. By some stroke of cosmic luck, he barely made the cut to be a junior that year. The kid already had his own beat-up car, but that meant she was last on the totem pole for four precious parking spots. It was only an issue when she wasn’t the last one to park, though.
Also, when she wasn’t bone tired from work, and her crappy cousin went all-in on harassing her. As was his right, or something.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned since living here,” she said to Dillon, “it’s that we ‘Bamans’ bathe twice as much as you Oregonians do.”
“So?” His huff was the reward she sought. “It’s all sticky and gross down in the South. We get our showers when we go outside!”
Carrie inhaled as deeply – and as loudly – as she could muster when she walked by her cousin. “Whew. You’re right.” Okay, so he didn’t smell that bad.I mean, he smells like a teen boy. So… gross, but not surprising.“You sure do get a great shower out there. Now pardon me. I need to take my second shower for the day.”
She dealt with more crap from her cousin than her aunt and uncle, but that may have been because Dillon was used to ruling the roost. His only-child syndrome was stronger than Carrie was used to, having come from a place where most people had at least two or three and sometimes lived with their packs of cousins. Even ifyouwere an only child, chances were you didn’t grow up alone. You had nine cousins crawling up your ass, or the neighbors’ kids bust down your door to get to you during the summer. Honestly, sitting in this house with only her cousin to keep her age-appropriate company was quiet. He spent half his time telling her she smelled or was too stupid to properly finish school, but whatever. Like everyone else at school, he had no idea why his cousin had been expelled from her high school in Alabama.My aunt and uncle know. Dear Jesus, that’s bad enough.
If Dillon knew… Carrie would never hear the end of it.
Like she never heard the end of her working at a pizza shop, as if that was somehow beneath them.He has no room to talk. He doesn’t have a job at all.Dillon boasted about the “odd jobs” he did over the summer, but Carrie knew he was off at summer camp for most of it. His family wasn’t rich, but Dillon had been going to the same camp every year that he now qualified to be a counselor with reduced fees. So while he was off swinging over water and telling ghost stories to a bunch of middle-schoolers, his classmates were washing cars, bagging groceries, and helping their logging and farming families meet their deadlines.
Odd jobs… what did he do? Pick up some trash from the highway and turn in the bottles for a deposit?
“So, do you guys have a brick oven at the shop?” That was the first earnest question Dillon asked Carrie about her job. Too bad he did it when she was still resting up after her shower. Because creeping into your cousin’s bedroom doorway to startle the bajeezus out of her was a great idea. “I hear those things get pretty hot. Do you use real fire?”
Carrie scoffed from where she lay across her twin bed. “Brick oven? Yeah, right. It’s a regular electric oven. That’s why the pizza is so flat and greasy, I guess.”
“Oh.” Dillon didn’t leave. Instead, he hung out in the doorway like he didn’t have better things to do. “I keep telling my mom and dad that we should get a firepit. That season’s passed now that summer is basically over, but I bet if we had one for next year, we would haveeveryonecoming by to party.”
Because his parents were totally the partying types… “A firepit? Where? You don’t got the room for something like that.”
“Who said we needed room besides where you dig the pit and put the thing in?”
“Uh, you need room to make sure you don’t burn everything down when you light it.”
Dillon furrowed his brows. “So? This place could go up in a blaze for all I care. It’s a crappy house.” He thumped his knuckles against the wall. He left a tiny dent behind. “See? Balls quality. Might as well torch the place and start over with a better house.”
“Wow.” Carrie didn’t know what else to say at first. “Yeah, go ahead and light the whole house on fire, Dill. See what your parents think about that.”
“I ain’t gonna light the house on fire!” He exclaimed that the moment his dad walked by in the hallway, head swerving at the sound of his son’s words. “You kiddin’? I like my stuff!”
“You said…”
“Whatever. You’re an idiot. Bet you’re doing homework.”
Gee, how could he tell? Was it the binder on her bed and the opened backpack on the floor? “Yeah, I’m so stupid, I’m actually doing my reading homework and worksheets for English that are due tomorrow. God, so stupid. It’s almost like I’m semi-responsible.”
