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

certainly deserved it. But no, she’d deal with him herself.

“Keep driving,” she said. “Whatever you have to say, it would be best to say it far from my father.”

Even if she was heading away from school, her dad trusted her. He’d know she had a good reason. She’d explain later.

—

Jake had hoped Ruby would ask him to just take her home. Since she already knew what he was going to say, why make a big dramatic play of it? She could have told her father she didn’t feel well and Jake had helpfully given her a ride home, although even he was aware that of all the things Ruby was now thinking about him in the passenger seat, the word “helpful” was not one of them.

He drove the speed limit, so slowly his eyes were locked the whole time with her father’s until he finally slid past and it was safe to blink again. There was something a little incongruous and downright creepy about staring into your girlfriend’s eyes and seeing her father, but it was even creepier the other way around.

Especially if you’d done something wrong.

Ruby was such a daddy’s girl. That was another thing he appreciated about Martha Hollister: no looming father figure to make his life difficult.

For the second time that morning, Jake felt like he was heading to his own funeral.

And then he did the worst thing he could possibly do under the circumstances: he laughed.

—

Ruby stared at Jake, confused by the sound coming out of him. She had nothing in her vast arsenal of emotions to turn to, so she just looked at him like she’d never met him before.

Should she yell? Punch him? Grab the wheel and kill them both?

Her gaze was blistering.

He could feel the heat coming off her.

He coughed and cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry,” he said unconvincingly. “Sorry I laughed.”

“You’re sorry you laughed?”

“And I’m sorry I hurt you.”

“But you aren’t sorry for what you did, are you?”

He said nothing.

“What exactly did you do, Jake? And how often?”

“Oh, Ruby, come on…”

She wanted him to say it. She wanted him to describe in sickening detail every single transgression.

He wasn’t even decent enough to do that.

—

They were near the quarry now. The trees lining the narrow road were laden with fruit. It was that time of year when all the overripe apples and plums falling from the branches would pile up in the ditch—a fruit salad for wasps. They drove past a dead raccoon in the middle of the road, still cradling a smashed crab apple in its equally smashed paws, flat against the pavement.

The quarry trucks caused so much roadkill.

There’s a metaphor, thought Ruby as Jake’s tires spun over the bodies of hundreds of flattened green toads.

She glanced in the rearview mirror. Shadows danced across the backseat.

“What are you looking at?” Jake asked, relieved to reduce everything to this moment. To ask a seemingly simple question.

“The light is playing tricks,” said Ruby, who was also happy that there were still simple questions with simple answers, in spite of everything.

Except it wasn’t simple. The shadows made her imagine Martha Hollister lying across the backseat, her short skirt hitched up to her waist. Ruby thought her brain might explode. How long had Jake been playing her for a fool?

She stared again at the side of his face as he drove, marveling at how it was possible to know a person so well and not at all, in the very same breath.

Somehow he had slipped away, this boy she’d known forever.

She missed who they had been at the ages of ten, twelve, and especially fourteen, when all the possibilities were suddenly split wide open like a piñata that had been smacked repeatedly in the hallways of Pigeon Creek Middle School by a bazillion hormones whacking away at it on their way to class.

Back then, the hair on her arms bristled just from being close to Jake, from the electric shock of all the possibilities, especially the ones they hadn’t even known existed.

In health class, the jaded, middle-aged Mr. Spatchcock (really, that was his name), his round rutabaga face tinged pink, went on and on about their changing hormones, how it happened to everybody, how normal it was—“Nothing to get all worked up about!” he had practically shouted above the din of thirty students whose blood was all rushing loudly in their ears, drowning him out.

But it had been special to Ruby.

Those changing hormones were obviously going to mean more for the kids of Pigeon Creek, because nothing much ever happened here.

They needed it to be special.

Even the camp songs they’d known their whole lives and sang at the top of their lungs, even these had become flirtatious and loaded with innuendo once they’d hit puberty.

Don’t throw your trash in my backyard, my backyard, my backyard. Don’t throw your trash in my backyard, my backyard’s full.

Ruby remembered how Jake would croon her favorite round in a falsetto, as if his underwear were two sizes too small. And then one day in the lunch line, completely out of the blue, it had sounded totally different.

Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegaaaaaaaaar…

Fish and chips and vinegar,

Pepper, pepper, pepper, salt.

That day, with pointy elbows jostling her in the ribs and the smell of the bleach solution the lunch ladies sprayed on the tables surrounding her, his voice had resonated, deep and manly, and those last four words had taken Ruby’s heart with them.

The warmth that spread all the way into her toes was so unexpected, she thought everyone must be able to see it. Like when she’d peed her pants in preschool (but hopefully not exactly like that).

The plastic utensils wrapped in a scratchy brown napkin; the meat, rice and gravy blending into the soggy green beans; the carton of chocolate milk: it had all suddenly smelled stronger and felt heavier in her hands.

She’d barely been able to walk to her seat without tripping.

It had seemed so easy when she was fourteen and had handed Jake her heart right