I walked home from school that afternoon, although I wasn’t quite sure why, given the fact the ends of my fingers were freezing off and the bus journey would have cut my journey time down by more than half. Livi had cheerleading practice, Maria had swim team obligations, and I had an imminent lecture from my mother on the perils of wasting the best years of my life, all of which I could mouth along with her, if I really wanted to land myself in it. Livi had generously assured me I could stick around and wait for her, but hanging around waiting for Livi meant the possibility of running into Adam, and while I wanted to find out what she’d been telling him, I just didn’t have the energy that day.
It wasn’t even that I hated Adam. He was just…. Adam. End of story. Some guy I went out with once. I supposed Livi thought she’d really done good for me, trying- and, knowing Liv, eventually succeeding- to fix me up with Adam Kinsella, one of East Buckley’s baseball stars, no less. No doubt I probably owed her some huge favour for that one, I thought dryly as I jammed my hands in my pockets and wished for the miraculous appearance of a bus. Preferably one heading out of this godforsaken place.
Sure, there were probably tons of people who would chew their arm off for a friend like Livi, just like there were probably tons of people who would kill to live in a place like this, the kind of people who would fawn over the pictures of neat lawns and coordinating exterior paintwork, who would pin it down as one of those quaint towns America just didn’t have enough of. They should try living here for a few years, see how they like it then, when it had screwed their head up completely. There was almost some kind of freaky mentality in this place, one which meant you were brought up to believe this was as far as you were ever going to get.
How comforting was that?
“Hey, August!” The sound of a car on the quiet road, followed by the voice of Maria, interrupted my disjointed thoughts. I smiled gratefully as she slowed down her freshly cleaned white Ford and motioned for me to get in.
“Thanks,” I told her as I slammed the door shut.
“No problem.” She glanced sideways at me as she pulled back out into the road. “You all right?” she asked, skipping the preamble and the idle gossip about whatever had happened at school that day.
“I’m fine.” I frowned, pleasantly surprised that the first words out her mouth hadn’t been at all linked to Adam. “Why?”
She shrugged, her hair still wet under the hat on her head, which needless to say was probably much more of a given trend than the faded baseball cap I had taken to wearing whenever I had incurable bed-head hair. Which was, admittedly, most days, although it had more to do with not really caring than anything else; or at least that was Livi’s view. One of many. “Just wondered. Livi said you seemed kinda…. down. And you’ve been kinda quiet lately,” she added, just to reassure me that it wasn’t just Livi who thought I was suffering from some kind of attack of severe gloominess these days.
I looked out the window before answering as Maria manoeuvred the car down the high street. A high street, I couldn’t help but add to myself, that hadn’t changed since we were kids. The same shops, the same people, the same rituals and traditions of everyone who lived there. Like they were all afraid to change. They painted on smiles and told you to go to college and get an education and work hard…. Yet no one ever seemed to leave. Maybe they should have been using that angle when trying to convince the students to apply to university in places like Boston and Pittsburgh and New York and anywhere that wasn’t on the doorstep.
“Doesn’t this place ever get you down?” I asked her, instead of directly answering her question, which hung in the air mingling with the awkward silence until I chose that moment to speak.
Maria gave me a confused look. “Not really,” she admitted, and when I looked at it from Maria’s point of view- a point of view I had, until recently, been ingrained with- I had to concede there were worse places to be at that time- worse high streets to be cruising down, by the bucketful. “Hey, before I forget,” she said, changing the subject swiftly as she turned into our street, “Ashleigh and Wade are having a party this weekend. You’re gonna be there, right?”
I nodded, out of habit more than anything else. “I guess,” I agreed, grabbing my bag and making the effort to smile. It wasn’t Maria’s fault I was in such a lousy mood lately.
Maria grinned. “Adam’s gonna be there,” she told me happily.
“I wondered when that was going to come up.”
Maria smiled, almost sympathetically. “Just promise you’ll come, yeah?” she appealed, cutting out the engine and turning to me, eyes wide. “It won’t be the same without you,” she assured me, and as I headed for the front door of my house, right across the street, I thought how nice it would be to be able to believe what Maria had just said.
* * * * *
“Did you stay behind at school today?” I had barely walked in the door when my mom had appeared, full of anticipation and faint hope that I might have acquired some kind of credible, yay-school approach to life in between stumbling out the house, bleary-eyed, too early that morning, and coming home later than expected.
“I walked home,” I told her.
“I just saw you get out of Maria’s car,” she pointed out, not as interested now it had become apparent I was still the same hopeless excuse for a daughter that I had been for the last seventeen years. She didn’t wait for an answer as she clattered back into the kitchen, just continued to speak. “Is Maria still swimming for the school?” she asked me, as I dumped my bag at the bottom of the stairs and kicked off my battered sneakers, earning myself a disdainful look at they landed in a heap under the coffee table.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Her mother was talking to me about it the other day,” she went on, sliding the still-hot casserole out of the oven and carefully transferring it to the counter with the aid of the oven gloves which matched her apron exactly. “She’s so proud of her.”
I shrugged. “She’s good.”
“I don’t know why you’re so against taking up some kind of sport or committee or…. something. Anything,” she emphasised. “I know you think I’m only meddling….”
You don’t say?
“….but I’m only doing it for your own good. I don’t want you to be sitting there in a few years time, thinking about how you missed out when you were younger.” All this was cheerfully delivered to me whilst my mom continued to divide up that night’s dinner, like she was relating the details of that afternoon’s weather report, or telling me some inane story about what happened at work that day.
“Don’t worry, Mom. I won’t. Believe me.”
She didn’t answer me for a moment. “Oh,” she started, just as I was about to make my excuses and leave until it was absolutely necessary to rejoin the rest of my family, “I almost forgot. This came for you today.” She reached over and seconds later I found a large envelope with my name on it skimming across the counter towards me. I picked it up and glanced at the postmark. “Admissions brochure from Guthrie,” she announced as I opened it dubiously.
I rolled my eyes. Guthrie was the next town but one along, home of the nearest junior college and probably twice the size of East Buckley if you used your imagination. Half the people that shipped out of East Buckley ended up in Guthrie, and three-quarters of those came back here. I had only sent out for the admissions brochure to placate my mother, who had convinced herself that if it was good enough for everyone else, then it was more than good enough for me, and bonus points were bound to follow in the shape of her being able to keep her eye on me.
“Mom. I told you. I don’t wanna go to….” Too late. The phone was ringing and she had leapt for it in preference to conducting a debate we must have had a thousand times before. “For you,” she chirped after a moment, and I could see by the curious glint in her eye that it was neither Livi or Maria, or anyone else girl-shaped, for that matter. “Some guy,” she added as she handed me the receiver, trying to sound nonchalant whilst doing all but crossing her fingers in the hope that it wasn’t just ‘some guy’, that it was actually somebody substantial.
“Hello?”
“August? Hey. It’s me.”
“Adam.” Great. Even as I tried to sound at least halfway enthusiastic, I felt entirely like banging my head against the wall in frustration. Why that was I wasn’t quite sure- maybe I was just weird, like everyone seemed to believe these days. All I knew as I tried valiantly to keep up my end of a pretty stalled conversation was that if this was Livi’s idea of a perfect match, I was altogether screwed.