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

see yourself,” Lillian said. “I’m not the weird one here, Kelsey, not by a long shot.”

“I never said you were.”

“How’s that sea ice treating you? I hope you can swim as well as you play ball, Kels.”

“Lillian, come on….”

But she was gone. Just like that. She’d thrown her book bag over her shoulder and walked out of the Frosty Freez, leaving Kelsey feeling slapped by her own metaphor and also bailing on the bill.

Lillian had left for Alaska a few days afterward, and now she was writing postcards about mountains and lakes and clean air. All things that existed in Montana, too, if wildfire smoke wasn’t obscuring the view.

Or if you lived anywhere other than Lared, where the latest plan was to wear green surgical masks to play ball outside.

When Kelsey pulled up to the courts a few minutes late (thanks, JJ), she couldn’t help noticing that her teammates looked like escapees from the nearest hospital. They were lined up shooting free throws. Every time someone bounced the ball, puffs of ash flew into the air like dust bombs. Babs, the Lynx all-star forward, had also donned a pair of ski goggles. Kelsey couldn’t tell if anyone was laughing, because their mouths were obscured by the green masks, but she knew one person who would think this was hilarious.

Glancing at the passenger seat, she almost expected to see Lillian, notebook and pen in hand, eyes rolling to prove her point. “This town is so myopic, if the world was ending, the only worry would be how to get in ten more minutes of court time.”

On the seat there was just the Snickers wrapper and the postcards from a distant land—as if her cousin’s ghost had decided to haunt her through the postal service. Lil wrote about the wildflowers, fireweed and columbine and skunk cabbage. She said foxglove was her favorite but it was poisonous, and believe it or not, you had to watch the younger campers, who were known to eat things they shouldn’t.

I wish you were here, Kels, but I realize it’s hard to imagine you doing anything else, anywhere else. I guess I’ll just have to see the world for the both of us. Love, Lil.

Where does Kelsey see herself in a year, two, five? She sees nothing but smoky, swirling ash.

There’s a tap on the window. Her father’s eyes are quizzical over his green mask, his brow furrowed. Is she going to play?

She has those same eyes; can widen them the way he does to answer, can mirror him in so many ways.

Yes, of course she’s going to play. What else would she do? She tries not to hold his gaze too long, afraid there will be something in it that will make her question herself. She cares what he thinks and has felt uncertain about how he sees her since the season ended. Since that one loss.

Her father is one of the best referees in the state. His brother, Lillian’s dad, is one of the best coaches. Right out of college, they stepped into their roles as easily as they’d stepped into their high-top sneakers all their lives—the laces untied, never taking them off, sometimes even sleeping with them on.

When Kelsey and her brothers were little, their mom had loaded up the station wagon with bags of Cheetos and coolers full of Wonder Bread sandwiches and soda and they’d driven all over Montana to watch her dad ref. So many hazy memories, surrounded by sweaty brothers all stretched out in sleeping bags in the back of the car, waking up in time for the next game. Montana dust coating the back window, grazing their skin, their clothes, as if an invisible hand were tossing fistfuls of sand at them as they drove across the state. The sun blistering orange in the heat of the day.

Everything in her memory was tinged with orange, their Cheeto-y fingers and Orange Crush tongues. They were the disheveled kids with constant bedhead, yelling from the bleachers in Billings, Helena, Bozeman, and places so tiny they were left off the maps. Small-town gymnasiums with hard wooden bleachers and oversized mascots, like chickens with big feet and tissue-paper feathers, that made them laugh, while others sometimes caused their mother to tut and shake her head, or worse, leave the gym.

Once, Kelsey’s mother had made her and her brothers wait in the car because one of the teams called themselves the Redskins and had an Indian mascot with long braids and a feathered headdress who ran up and down the sidelines wielding a tomahawk.

“I will not let you just sit and watch this hideous display of racism,” she told them. “It is demeaning and wrong and don’t you ever forget it.”

“But it’s cold out here,” her brother had whined.

“Good. I hope you’re uncomfortable, because that’s nothing compared to how kids from Rocky Boy or Crow or Flathead must feel when they play here,” their mother said. “Put on your damn coat if you’re cold.”

Kelsey would not forget it, nor would she forget the screaming parents who sometimes jumped right out of the bleachers to get into her father’s face, his whistle blaring, sweat darkening his back and the armpits of his zebra-striped jersey. She loved that he was the one who could make people cheer happily or scream with anger—he and his whistle spurred more emotion than any preacher she had ever seen yelling from a pulpit. It was thrilling to behold.

But that was when she was a little kid and her only role in any of it had been to eat popcorn and stomp her feet on the bleachers when the cheerleaders asked the crowd to join in, trying to distract an opposing free throw or psych up the defense. It was loud and stinky and exciting. But mostly, Kelsey had been cheering for the ref, the guy in the stripes, the one with the whistle and the eyes that matched her own. She could not imagine a more perfect world than the