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

to Jake about the fight they’d just had, how her father had said that her music was awful and to turn it down.

“What are you trying to do, dance with the devil?” he’d asked tersely.

He could have been talking about her music or her boyfriend, actually.

She didn’t tell Jake that she’d slammed the door in her father’s face. She didn’t need to widen the chasm between Jake and her father. Truthfully, she would have liked it if they got along. She loved her dad. Usually, their relationship was not a door-slamming kind. But it seemed they were both feeling edgy these days.

Jake yawned and didn’t respond to her comment about how he looked. Lately, much of what Ruby said barely registered with him, as if he was always somewhere else, even when he was sitting right next to her.

“Dad says you should get the muffler fixed,” she said as he turned the key in the ignition.

Right on cue, at the sound of the muffler, Priscilla—or was that Ophelia?—lifted her head from the blackberry brambles that clung to the wooden fence. Ruby’s father’s goats were the only things that could tame the ornery plant.

Ruby marveled at the idea of a mouth that could chomp blackberry thorns like a Weedwacker.

And then for no reason other than she was suspicious, Ruby thought about Martha Hollister. Martha had a mouth like a Weedwacker, and a body like a hooker, said a little voice in the back of her head.

Martha also swore like a sailor, laughed with teachers like they were her peers, and ignored the boys in her class at Pigeon Creek as if they were grapes withering on the vine. Probably because she had thickets of ripe, juicy, thorny boys somewhere else to snack on. Martha was only a sophomore, and yet Ruby knew that sophomore Martha Hollister had already made her way through the entire class of eligible senior boys at Pigeon Creek High School. Everyone knew.

Jake was not eligible, but what happens when you’ve finished with all the blackberry bushes, the ones you were allowed to have? Well, if her father’s goats were any example, you moved on to the perennial patch or even the clothesline. Nothing was off-limits. Ophelia had once gorged herself on Ruby’s father’s long red woolen underwear and hadn’t even choked on the buttons.

God, Martha Hollister, you indiscriminate little goat.

Ruby glanced over at Jake, but he was concentrating on driving through half-open eyelids. She had an urge to grab the roll of duct tape from his glove box and use it to stick his eyelids to his forehead. He’d had a whole extra hour of sleep yesterday because they’d turned the clocks back for daylight saving time. What the hell?

He’d also forgotten to kiss her good morning.

—

Jake could see Ruby squirming in the seat next to him, even though he could barely keep his eyes open. He liked to joke about how he could drive around Pigeon Creek blindfolded, but the truth was, even old people who’d spent their whole lives in this town couldn’t do that. The town was an obstacle course of right angles, and the only thing that saved people from dying on blind corners was the fact that the speed limit was something like negative ten. People here didn’t drive: they crawled.

He wanted to tell Ruby, but every time he thought he was really going to do it, she’d do something so sweet and familiar he couldn’t bring himself to lower the hammer. That was exactly how he thought of it: as lowering the hammer and shattering everything they’d shared over the past four years. And all the years before that, if anyone was counting. He’d known Ruby all his life.

His best friend was sitting next to him, bouncing around like she had to go to the bathroom, and he knew exactly what she was thinking. She always wriggled when she was mad and didn’t know how to tell him. That was love, wasn’t it? All of it: the knowing, the not talking, the weird moving around in her seat…How do you just walk away from that?

But then, how do you not sneak out and tap on the window of a beautiful girl who’s willing to do anything—anything—when you’re a teenage boy who can’t see straight because you’re bored out of your mind living in a town the size of a peanut, driving like a senior citizen? It was 1995, but Pigeon Creek was stuck in a time warp. Of course you’re going to go off the rails sooner or later.

Martha Hollister was the fast-moving train that had come to town so the boys of Pigeon Creek could realize that speed limits are simply suggestions.

But the thing he really wanted to tell Ruby about was the moose.

Until last night, Jake had only ever seen moose in the national park. But at two a.m., lying naked next to Martha in that strange bottle gazebo her mother had grouted together in their backyard (who were these people?), he had heard the sound of alders being pulled from the ground and the chomp, chomp, chomping of a moose having a midnight snack.

Jake had wondered briefly if glass bottles were enough of a barrier between them and an angry mama moose—he did not want to die naked—when he’d jumped up to see just how close they were and peered out through a square Bombay Sapphire gin bottle that was just at his eye level. The brown eye staring back at him from the other side looked like a cold, wet marble. It blinked, and then from somewhere deeper came a low, rumbling cacophony of regurgitated alders. The moose had actually burped. Then it turned unceremoniously and went back to chomping branches.

Martha, lying naked on the gray woolen blanket spread out across the dirt floor, had laughed like a hyena.

Ruby wouldn’t have laughed like that. But Ruby wouldn’t have been naked on the cold ground either.

By the time he pulled into the school parking lot, he knew