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

he would ditch his first-period class to go sleep and he would not tell Ruby that he was ditching class, or that he’d snuck out to visit Martha Hollister. Or, worst of all, that a burping moose had made him remember his girlfriend while he was messing around with someone else.

Ruby was normally the only person he could talk to, but certainly not about this and definitely not now.

Because as Ruby got out of the car and swung her bag (why did she have to felt everything?) over her shoulder, he saw her staring at Martha Hollister, who had just walked up to the curb with boots that were too high, a skirt that was too short, a laugh that was too loud.

Martha glanced over at Jake and then coolly ran her eyes over him as if she owned him. She might as well have shouted through a megaphone. Ruby saw it and instantly she knew. And Jake knew she knew. Why were girls so goddamn telepathic?

—

Martha tried to rearrange her face, but it was too late. She hadn’t meant to do it, honestly she hadn’t. Especially since the last thing she saw when she turned to walk nonchalantly past the flagstone with the words “Pigeon Creek High School” etched on it (Lord, why was every sign in this town etched in flagstone?) was Ruby throwing her felted bag back inside the car. Had she actually hit Jake in the side of the head with it before getting in herself? He did not look at Ruby, nor did he look at Martha. He stared straight ahead, like a man going to his own funeral.

Martha heard the door slam and then she heard the muffler, the same muffler she strained to hear late at night. Even though Jake had parked a block away, that rattly sound like fate laughing at its own joke was her cue to dab a tiny bit of gardenia perfume on both her wrists and behind her ears, the very middle of her neck. In the time it took to do this, two quick taps would sound on her window. It had become practically routine; why shouldn’t she glance at Jake at school as if she could eat him for breakfast? They’d been doing this all summer, and he said he was going to tell Ruby anyway. The clock was ticking.

The perfume had been a going-away gift from her friend Jane when she left California. Nobody here had it. The girls here wouldn’t have known what to do with gardenia perfume, if Martha was being honest.

That’s right, honest, not mean.

Martha wrote Jane letters about Pigeon Creek and Jane wrote back, “Oh my God, you poor thing, you have stepped back into the 1940s.”

But Martha didn’t feel sorry for herself. She was the most thrilling thing to happen to Pigeon Creek in years, and that was not lost on her. She floated down the hallways of her new school like a fairy from a foreign land as the denim sea parted to let her through (cowboy boots and cowboy hats, denim jeans and jackets—she’d never seen so much denim in her life), knowing she was turning heads with her knee-high leather boots and her shimmery short skirts.

Martha had told Jane when she left that she was going to take this place by storm. And by God, she had.

The only problem was Ruby. If Martha had been more charitable, she would have felt sorry for the token hippie of Pigeon Creek, but she could only shake her head and laugh at the idea that felting everything wool a person owned and wearing clothes like billowing circus tents made you a hippie. And then there was the fringe. God: So. Much. Fringe. But worse, Ruby wore her hair in two long braids. How old was she, five?

—

It didn’t help that Jake had been dating Ruby, the hippie wannabe, for years before Martha had arrived in Pigeon Creek.

History is a difficult thing to dismantle, unless you’re a dictator.

Glancing at them in Jake’s VW Bug—a car she had never ridden in herself, now that she thought about it—Martha thought she might actually love Jake. He wasn’t like any of those other boys, and there was something both thrilling and terrifying in that realization. If she loved him, then she had something to lose, and that scared her more than anything.

Okay, maybe she shouldn’t have given him “the look.” She would apologize tonight when he came by. Maybe he was cutting it off with Ruby right now. Because Jake loved Martha back, didn’t he? Well, she would apologize anyway. She slid into her desk and pulled out her Webster’s dictionary, also a gift from Jane.

Apology: a written or spoken expression of remorse, sorrow, or regret for having wronged, insulted, failed, or injured another.

Hmmm, that didn’t sound right.

Next definition: Apology: An inferior specimen or substitute; makeshift.

Yes, that was it. Ruby was a sad apology for a girlfriend. Jake was going to dump her any minute.

Martha told herself again she was just being honest, not mean. She closed the dictionary and flipped her hair forward, adjusting her headband, aware that all her classmates’ eyes were on her as they filed into the room.

She would have felt guilty if she had anything to feel guilty about.

—

Jake drove Ruby in silence, unsure where they were heading. There weren’t a lot of options—this was Pigeon Creek, after all. And since Jake was having the worst day of his life, of course Ruby’s father just happened to be walking down the sidewalk toward them. Oh God, it was like a slow-motion train wreck.

The closer they got, the deeper the frown line in her father’s forehead grew. Ruby gave him the tiniest nod to say she was all right but not great. Her father’s radar for her was so finely tuned, he’d pull Jake out of the moving car and beat the shit out of him if she gave even the smallest indication that it was warranted.

Jake