September Lessons (A Year in Paradise Book 9) Read online

  Leigh-Ann had to back away before she threw-up.

  Some would say she was lucky to be exposed to different kinds of relationships. After all, it wasn’t every girl who saw her mother and father at home, then went off to work to see her lesbian boss snuggle with her wife. The exposure wasn’t limited to lesbian relationships, either. The shop teacher, Mr. Wilson, was married to a man, although hardly anyone ever saw the guy. The point was that everyone knew about it. Nobody had a problem with it, outside of a few glib comments from those who were clearly living in the wrong place. Every once in a while a lost tourist exclaimed they didn’t know they were traveling through a town of insert slur here, but the town was quick to deal with it. Growing up in Paradise Valley was like living in an entirely different world.

  One that sometimes confused Leigh-Ann more than it was worth.

  I’m straight. That’s all there is to it. She thought that with that teenaged conviction that said there was no room for change. She had it all figured out. Maybe she didn’t know what she would do with her life, but she figured out that part of herself, at least.

  Yet…

  When she saw her boss kissing her wife like that, Leigh-Ann couldn’t help but think about what happened at the beginning of sophomore year.

  She went back outside and sat on the front steps. Mr. Murphy was still there, but he kept to himself as he muttered notes into his phone and scribbled in his legal pad.

  “You gonna kiss me, huh?” her friend had asked. “I guess that’s okay. We’re sixteen now. We should be able to kiss whomever we want!”

  It had been one of the sweetest kisses of Leigh-Ann’s life.

  Leigh-Ann Hardy swore upon God and her own mother that she was straight. She had always known that, so it must have been true, yes? So what if she kissed another girl once? Experimentation. Everyone knew about it. They always talked about it on TV, so it must have been true. It was okay to experiment and reaffirm what you already knew about yourself. Considering what happened after that one kiss, Leigh-Ann could confirm that she was straight. Most definitely.

  Did she have an answer for why she always thought of that kiss with a girl and never with the boys? No.

  Why? Was she supposed to?

  Chapter 5

  CARRIE

  She returned home from her final shift of the weekend to the sounds of her uncle berating her for where she parked her car. Carrie had to go back out, before she had the chance to change her clothes, and move her car from where her aunt was supposed to park later that evening.

  “You smell like anchovies,” her younger cousin, Dillon, said. “When was the last time you bathed, Bama? Five days ago?”

  The little shit was only two years younger than Carrie, if it could be believed. By some stroke of cosmic luck, he barely made the cut to be a junior that year. The kid already had his own beat-up car, but that meant she was last on the totem pole for four precious parking spots. It was only an issue when she wasn’t the last one to park, though.

  Also, when she wasn’t bone tired from work, and her crappy cousin went all-in on harassing her. As was his right, or something.

  “If there’s anything I’ve learned since living here,” she said to Dillon, “it’s that we ‘Bamans’ bathe twice as much as you Oregonians do.”

  “So?” His huff was the reward she sought. “It’s all sticky and gross down in the South. We get our showers when we go outside!”

  Carrie inhaled as deeply – and as loudly – as she could muster when she walked by her cousin. “Whew. You’re right.” Okay, so he didn’t smell that bad. I mean, he smells like a teen boy. So… gross, but not surprising. “You sure do get a great shower out there. Now pardon me. I need to take my second shower for the day.”

  She dealt with more crap from her cousin than her aunt and uncle, but that may have been because Dillon was used to ruling the roost. His only-child syndrome was stronger than Carrie was used to, having come from a place where most people had at least two or three and sometimes lived with their packs of cousins. Even if you were an only child, chances were you didn’t grow up alone. You had nine cousins crawling up your ass, or the neighbors’ kids bust down your door to get to you during the summer. Honestly, sitting in this house with only her cousin to keep her age-appropriate company was quiet. He spent half his time telling her she smelled or was too stupid to properly finish school, but whatever. Like everyone else at school, he had no idea why his cousin had been expelled from her high school in Alabama. My aunt and uncle know. Dear Jesus, that’s bad enough.

  If Dillon knew… Carrie would never hear the end of it.

  Like she never heard the end of her working at a pizza shop, as if that was somehow beneath them. He has no room to talk. He doesn’t have a job at all. Dillon boasted about the “odd jobs” he did over the summer, but Carrie knew he was off at summer camp for most of it. His family wasn’t rich, but Dillon had been going to the same camp every year that he now qualified to be a counselor with reduced fees. So while he was off swinging over water and telling ghost stories to a bunch of middle-schoolers, his classmates were washing cars, bagging groceries, and helping their logging and farming families meet their deadlines.

  Odd jobs… what did he do? Pick up some trash from the highway and turn in the bottles for a deposit?

  “So, do you guys have a brick oven at the shop?” That was the first earnest question Dillon asked Carrie about her job. Too bad he did it when she was still resting up after her shower. Because creeping into your cousin’s bedroom doorway to startle the bajeezus out of her was a great idea. “I hear those things get pretty hot. Do you use real fire?”

  Carrie scoffed from where she lay across her twin bed. “Brick oven? Yeah, right. It’s a regular electric oven. That’s why the pizza is so flat and greasy, I guess.”

  “Oh.” Dillon didn’t leave. Instead, he hung out in the doorway like he didn’t have better things to do. “I keep telling my mom and dad that we should get a firepit. That season’s passed now that summer is basically over, but I bet if we had one for next year, we would have everyone coming by to party.”

  Because his parents were totally the partying types… “A firepit? Where? You don’t got the room for something like that.”

  “Who said we needed room besides where you dig the pit and put the thing in?”

  “Uh, you need room to make sure you don’t burn everything down when you light it.”

  Dillon furrowed his brows. “So? This place could go up in a blaze for all I care. It’s a crappy house.” He thumped his knuckles against the wall. He left a tiny dent behind. “See? Balls quality. Might as well torch the place and start over with a better house.”

  “Wow.” Carrie didn’t know what else to say at first. “Yeah, go ahead and light the whole house on fire, Dill. See what your parents think about that.”

  “I ain’t gonna light the house on fire!” He exclaimed that the moment his dad walked by in the hallway, head swerving at the sound of his son’s words. “You kiddin’? I like my stuff!”

  “You said…”

  “Whatever. You’re an idiot. Bet you’re doing homework.”

  Gee, how could he tell? Was it the binder on her bed and the opened backpack on the floor? “Yeah, I’m so stupid, I’m actually doing my reading homework and worksheets for English that are due tomorrow. God, so stupid. It’s almost like I’m semi-responsible.”

  “Yet you got expelled for being too dumb to live.” Dillon trotted out after that. Whew. Yeah, boy, you sure got me. Carrie could only roll her eyes and flip open her copy of 1984. The corresponding worksheet for the assigned chapters was so easy she could do it in her sleep. Assuming she read the book, anyway. Ms. Tichenor seemed the type of English teacher to have recently read the books she assigned. If only I weren’t so tired…

  Her eyes crossed as she flipped through pages and scanned the paragraphs for the right answers. One of the “thought provoking” extra credit questions at the bottom asked her if she witne
ssed Big Brother in her own life. Does a cousin count? There were no locks on the doors, unfortunately, but she made sure it was shut after he left.

  I wonder if my own mother counts. The only reason Carrie got into so much trouble was because her mother insisted on opening her big mouth. “I let a lot slide around here, girl,” she had said in the aftermath of Carrie’s scandal, “but if you think I’m gonna be right with God if I don’t tell your teachers, you’ve got another think comin’. The Bible says I’ve gotta do a lot of things, and you may not care about what the Bible tells you, but I’m not meetin’ up with St. Peter for him to tell me I didn’t do a good enough job following the Word.”

  So here Carrie was. Her mother claimed to keep loving her lesbian daughter, though she wasn’t sure what the Bible really said about it, but she wouldn’t keep the fact that Carrie was caught with a married woman away from the whole community.

  Married woman… sounds like she was thirty-five. Carrie’s ex-girlfriend was a twenty-year-old gal named Ainsley. She had married her baby daddy three years before but hated the guy’s guts. Didn’t have the money or the will to divorce him, though. She kept it hidden from me well enough. The husband part. Not the baby part. That was obvious when Ainsley kept bringing the baby along for the dates. The few times she got a babysitter, she lied her ass off about meeting up with Carrie in a roadside motel.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Sure, that relationship was going nowhere, but Carrie never anticipated it would effectively ruin her rural Alabaman life. Getting expelled wasn’t because she was fornicating with a female student… nah, that honor went to fornicating with the principal’s daughter. Now that nugget was something Carrie had known going into the relationship from hell.

  None of the other school districts would touch her, not that she wanted to deal with the bullying she’d receive. Her mother’s church group was so adamant that Carrie should disappear that her mother made the emergency call to Oregon.

  So here Carrie was… smelling smoke in the air.

  “The hell…” She slipped off her bed and went to the window. The blinds shot up. Carrie unscrewed the latch and poked her head out the gap.

  She sure had smelled smoke. What happened when there was smoke? Oh, there were fires, too.

  In this case, it was Dillon hunched over in the backyard, where he had surrounded a patch of dry grass with wet rocks. The box of matches beside him said everything Carrie needed to know, long before she saw the tendrils of smoke spiraling up into the air.

  Carrie closed the window and walked out into the living room, where her uncle watched TV with his hands folded on his stomach.

  “So, I’m not really a snitchy kind of person,” she announced, “but Dillon’s in the back lighting grass on fire.”

  With a heavy sigh, her uncle sat up in his seat and lowered the volume on the TV. “The boy likes his matches. Leave well enough alone.”

  “But…”

  “He’s never hurt nobody. We’ve had talks about how to do it safely. He got the wet rocks?”

  “Yeah.” Carrie put her hands on her hips. “He got the ‘wet rocks.’”

  “Well! Nothing else to comment on here. Make sure you get your homework and chores done before bed.”

  That was his way of saying goodnight, huh? Fine. Carrie would go back to her room and ignore the smell of smoke in the air. Nevertheless, she decided that was a good sign to finally stop smoking… and made sure she knew her exit routes should things get a bit crispy around there.

  Chapter 6

  LEIGH-ANN

  Third period was truly the worst time to have English. After math first period and chemistry second period, Leigh-Ann’s tired brain was so fried that she didn’t have the mental capacity to deal with literary tropes or diagraming sentences. While she didn’t have a least favorite subject, really, she would rather save the brain matter for English class. You know, that class so many other students treat as their study hall. Funny. Fourth period was study hall.

  Between her lack of sleep, two hard subjects first thing in the morning, and hunger seeping into her gut, Leigh-Ann struggled to keep her eyes opened and her attention on the front of the room, where they had set aside their discussion on 1984 to talk standardized testing in the language arts. That soon spiraled with a question from Amanda about why so many words in the English language had the same letters but different sounds.

  “You have to consider the lingual source of the words in question.” Ms. Tichenor’s blue whiteboard marker squeaked as she wrote. “English in particular is made up of many Latin-based words as well as Germanic. Although the two base alphabets share many of the same letters, you’re looking at very different interpretations of their sounds.”

  Eyes glazed over in the classroom. Including Leigh-Ann’s.

  But not Carrie’s, who raised her hand for the first time since joining Ms. Tichenor’s class a week ago.

  “Yes, Carrie?”

  “I know we’re already on a tangent,” Carrie’s drawl made half the students snicker, “but there’s something that’s been driving me crazy about pronunciations and such.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why in the big blue world do y’all here pronounce L E I G H like lay. It’s wrong. I get hives every time I hear it.”

  Everyone looked in Leigh-Ann’s direction, although Carrie was the one who asked that. Ms. Tichenor allowed a small smile before she answered in earnest. “That has to do with regional differences, yes.”

  Carrie twirled her pencil like a baton. Although Leigh-Ann swore she focused on what the new girl said, her eyes were instantly enchanted by that rhythmic movement of that mechanical pencil swinging one way, then the other. If Carrie used the same rhythm for her words, Leigh-Ann would have been hypnotized and completely lost to Ms. Tichenor’s further explanation.

  “I don’t have time to completely deviate from today’s lesson plan,” the English teacher said, as she wrote down more notes from their reading on the board, “but I would ask your history teacher about the people who settled this area. Then ask him who explored it. Take the name Willamette, for example…”

  “Whoa.” Carrie slammed her pencil against her desk. “The Willawhatta?”

  Ms. Tichenor turned around, incredulous. “Willamette Valley… the Willamette River…”

  “You mean the…”

  The other half of the class groaned. “It’s Willamette, damnit, ‘Bama!”

  Carrie puffed out her cheeks and gave Digby Wallace a side-glare that suggested he keep his thoughts to himself. “Y’all need phonetics. That word is clearly pronounced Will-uh-met. It’s basically French and a half.”

  How Ms. Tichenor kept her performative teacher’s smile on without staring Carrie down was something Leigh-Ann would wonder about for a long, long time. “It’s true that there were many French explorers in the area when that word was first written down on maps. The word Willamette actually comes from a Native American village. I believed it was one of the Clackamas tribes.” A giant map of Oregon hung on the far side of the room. Handy for the occasional Oregonian author they were forced to read. More handy for days like today. When Ms. Tichenor pointed to the Clackamas territory, she said, “French explorers spelled Willamette the way they did because it made sense to them. Naturally, the typical pronunciation would be more like Will-uh-met, but it’s not that simple when you consider the Scandinavian settlers that came to the area. Things get… murky. Linguistically speaking, that is.”

  Carrie slowly shook her head in disbelief. Leigh-Ann struggled to keep from giggling.

  “Nowadays, locals have agreed it’s called Wil-lamb-it, so that’s what we call it, damnit.”

  The class burst into laughter. As if that were the first time Ms. Tichenor swore in class.

  Carrie sat back in her seat and said, “That doesn’t explain the Lay and Lee thing.”

  “Word of advice, Ms. Sage,” Ms. Tichenor said with a twitching grin, “never head farther south from here. Your
brain will really break form how they pronounce things.”

  “They also got that weird twang going on down there. Hey, ‘Bama,” Digby continued to tease the new girl, “you might fit right in!”

  “Digby,” Ms. Tichenor snapped. “Can we please get back to discussing 1984? There’s only thirty-five minutes left in this class, and we have much to go over.”

  Because of the interruption, Ms. Tichenor kept them thirty seconds past the bell. They only had two minutes to get to their next class, but Leigh-Ann wasn’t worried. She already had her stuff for the class next door. Carrie, however, hustled out of the room as soon as they were allowed to leave.

  “Learned something of real value today, huh?” Leigh-Ann chided out in the hallway. “I don’t mean the hardware store in town.”

  “The what?” Carrie swung open her locker door and tossed her English notebook and copy of 1984 into its depths. “Y’all got some interesting lingo around here. And… accents…”

  “Thinking about that twang, huh?”

  “Y’all sound like daft Texans.” Carrie shut her locker. “I don’t get it. The farther west I drove, the more the Southern left the people. Then I got to Idaho… then Oregon…”

  “It came back?”

  “You’re not surprised, huh?”

  “I grew up here, so no.” Leigh-Ann shrugged. “I figure it’s a rural America thing. They don’t speak with twangs in Nebraska or Montana?”

  “Sure they do, just not… you know… Texan!”

  Leigh-Ann had never heard a lingual comparison to Texas before. She had seen plenty of shows and movies set there, after all, and outside of the occasional “y’all” it sounded completely different to her. Everyone in America says y’all… don’t they? Granted, it really slid off Carrie’s tongue when she said it. Was quite pleasant to listen to. The more heated she got, the more that Alabaman accent flew out like she was hanging out with her folks at Thanksgiving.