Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

and it wasn’t like she could just go hang out with other girls who were late bloomers like herself. Jane hadn’t even gotten one zit yet. Martha had zits and armpit hair and boobs that had basically popped out of her chest one night while she slept.

Martha had been begging Zoe for ages to take her to Vancouver to buy a bra, but of course, Zoe, who actually was a hippie, did not believe in bras.

“They cause cancer,” she said.

Jane thought Zoe was kidding. But she wasn’t.

“All that underwire keeping your lymph nodes trapped. It’s not natural. Everyone’s waiting for the science to prove it, but by then, so many women will have died of cancer.”

Jane knew better than to tell Mama things Zoe said. Bras causing cancer would go into the same category as the time she’d mentioned Zoe had communicated telepathically with a bag of chips.

“Someone needs to take that woman’s wineglass away” was all Mama had had to say about that.

Martha was still talking about remaking herself and Jane was busy tuning her out, when Huckleberry started barking his head off at something on the opposite side of where they were hidden, out of the weather. The clouds hadn’t lied: rain was suddenly beating down everywhere, except in their secret spot. Jane looked out and saw two kids struggling to pack up their buckets and shovels, caught totally off guard by the pelting rain.

“We should help them,” said Jane, noticing that the girl was about their age. She figured Martha would want to try out being “a totally new person” on this stranger. Sure enough, while Jane was still thinking this, Martha was already off, with Huckleberry on her heels.

The boy had gotten interested in something along the water’s edge and wandered off, leaving his sister (if it was his sister) to fill their netted beach bag with all the loose toys by herself, her drenched hair falling in her eyes, slowing her down.

Suddenly, a scream wrenched the air. Jane thought maybe Martha had stepped on a piece of glass—that had happened more than once to both of them—but it wasn’t a Martha scream. Jane noticed there were more people on the beach than she’d realized, all caught off guard by the beautiful day that had turned on a dime. A wave of soaking-wet beachgoers began to move toward the boy, who was at the edge of the water staring into a rubber boot and screaming his head off.

But what Jane was most impressed by was the speed with which the boy’s sister ran, as if her feet had wings. Not even Huckleberry could keep up with her, and he was faster than the arctic terns that spun and whipped in the wind, terrorizing him.

When the girl reached her brother, she grabbed the boot out of his hands and covered his whole face with her body. One quick glance inside and she dropped the boot in the sand and dragged her brother backward, trying to get away from it.

As adults arrived, it was scooped up and quickly hidden away, so Jane and Martha never got to see firsthand what had caused all the commotion. But word traveled quickly, and eventually the boot ended up in police custody. The thing that had caused all the screaming was a severed human foot.

After just a week of police tape and investigations and everyone being treated as if someone had done something sinister, Martha and Zoe—both of whom Jane loved as much as she loved her own mother—up and moved to Colorado. Just like that, Martha got her wish to remake herself somewhere else.

They packed up Zoe’s diaries and nailed the blue shutters closed, locking up the old secrets and the bath drains full of hair. Jane gave Martha her Webster’s dictionary; she figured Martha needed it more than she did. They drove off in a half-empty moving van because Zoe didn’t believe in material things. But she also said she didn’t believe in living in a place where random body parts just materialized and made everyone suddenly suspicious. It wasn’t good karma.

Mama said that so many people were lost at sea, it was amazing body parts didn’t wash up more often. She and Jane were staying put.

Now Martha wrote Jane letters about Zoe’s gazebo made of colorful liquor bottles (Mama had snorted at this but said nothing more) and how weird it was to not hear the ocean, but she still talked about it because this new life she had created meant pretending she was from California.

Martha told Jane that California was much more interesting than being from what she called “the tiniest little isthmus on the edge of the Washington/Canada border where nothing ever happens.”

“An isthmus would actually connect two pieces of land,” Jane had written back. “I think you’re using the wrong word.”

Martha hadn’t mentioned it again. “I talk about you all the time,” she said. “I told someone that you’re the one who gave me the gardenia perfume.”

When Martha wrote that the poor girls from Middle Earth, Colorado, didn’t even know what to do with gardenia perfume, Jane tried being facetious.

“Oh my God, you poor thing, you have gone back to the 1940s.”

IT. WAS. A. JOKE.

Jane didn’t want to be part of Martha’s lies, as if she wasn’t interesting enough for real. And she had never smelled or seen gardenia perfume in her life.

She tried to bring Martha back to reality. “The jig is up. Has anyone figured out that you’re not from California but actually from a tiny thumb (not an isthmus) that juts into the Pacific Ocean?”

But Jane missed her friend terribly, and after the whole rubber-boot incident, Martha was right about one thing: nothing ever did happen here anymore. No couples strolling in the sunset. No kids building sandcastles. No more geeky-looking birders with long-lensed cameras and birding scopes and incredibly unattractive cargo shorts. Pretty much nobody came to the beach anymore except the last few locals who were too tired to leave, like