Happenstance
Also by Jamie McGuire
Happenstance
A Novella Series
Jamie McGuire
Happenstance
Jamie McGuire
Copyright © 2014 Jamie McGuire
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical
events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names,
characters, places, or events are products of the author’s imagination, and any
resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
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work of this author.
For Lori Bretch.
“Go home. Turn off the lights. And kill yourself.”
Erin Alderman glowered at me, pure hatred in her beautiful honey
brown eyes. She was spearheading a group of nine cheerleaders on the other side
of a small, rectangular window. But the glass wasn’t the only thing that
separated us.
Nine pairs of eyes danced between each other and me in my black apron
splattered with chocolate milkshake and fudge sauce. They were enjoying the
show, but not one of them looked directly at me.
Erin Masterson, Erin Alderman’s best friend and co-captain of the
cheer squad, was holding the banana split Blizzard I’d just made for her, with
vengeance in her eyes. She was as beautifully put together as her best friend,
but instead of long, flowing golden hair like her friend, she had long, flowing
chestnut hair. “I said with walnuts on top. You have a simple function: put ice
cream in a bowl, cup, or cone, and mix ingredients. If you can’t perform a
minimum wage job at a Dairy Queen at seventeen years old, how do you expect to operate
in your daily adult life? You should give up now, Erin. Die with dignity.”
Erin Masterson wasn’t speaking to her best friend. She was
speaking to me, Erin Easter, the third Erin in our senior class. They weren’t
always my enemies. In kindergarten and first grade, we tried to spend every
waking moment together; our teachers and parents came up with nicknames to
eliminate confusion. Erin Alderman was known as Alder. Erin Masterson was
Sonny. My name was simple: Easter. The three of us didn’t share only names, we
also shared a birthday: September first. They went home with their parents, who
were country club members and would eventually be heads of the Free Masons and
the PTA, and I went home with my mother, who was barely twenty and had no one to
help, not even my father.
Our friendship changed dramatically in fifth grade when, for
reasons I’m still not sure of, I became the Erin’s favorite target. Now in our
senior year of high school, I mostly tried to avoid them, but they loved to
visit me at the Dairy Queen where I worked on weekends and almost every day
after school.
I pulled up the sliding window and poked my hand through. “I’m
sorry. Hand it to me and I’ll remake it.”
Frankie bumped me to the side with her hip, yanked the cup out of
Sonny’s hand, scooped out the large chunk of brown ice cream with peanut chunks,
and tossed it in the trash. She spooned in a half dozen walnuts, and handed it
back. “I’m not wasting an entire cup of ice cream because your mama didn’t
teach you how to deal with disappointment. Get the hell on,” she said, jerking
her head to the side.
“I’ll let my
mama
know how you feel about her parenting,
Frances
.”
Sonny spat out the words, making sure to call Frankie by her given name, the
name she loathed. “I’m sure your litter makes you an expert.”
Frankie grinned politely. “That term is for dogs, Masterson. No
one but your mother calls their kids that.”
The Erins glared at Frankie, and then all ten girls walked away
as one unit.
“Sorry,” I said, watching the cheerleaders happily jog across the
street, energized from their confrontation.
Frankie frowned and perched her hand on the curve of her hip. “Why
are you apologizing? I’ve told you a hundred times, but I’ll tell you again.
Stop taking crap from those harpies. It only makes them worse. Ignoring does
not work with bullies like that. Believe me, I know.”
“Only three months left, though,” I said, washing the sticky milk
and sugar from my hands.
Frankie sighed and looked at the ceiling with a sigh. “I remember
graduation. One of the best nights of my life. All of that freedom, just waiting
to be experienced. It was all ahead of me—summer, college, turning twenty-one.”
The dreamy look in her eyes faded, and she cleaned the counter. “One night with
Shane was all it took to make it disappear. Seven years later, I’m at the same
job I had in high school.” She shook her head and laughed once, scrubbing a
stubborn piece of dried chocolate off the counter. “I wouldn’t trade my babies
for the world, though.”
One corner of my mouth turned up as I watched Frankie mull over
the decisions that kept her at the Dairy Queen. She counted herself lucky to
have a job. The oil company had moved, and all the decent paying jobs left with
it, so a paycheck from the Dairy Queen was as good as anything in our struggling
town.
The phone rang, and Frankie answered it. “No, Keaton, you can’t
eat the peanut butter out of the jar. Because I said. If you’re starving, then
eat a banana. Then you’re not starving! I said no, and that’s that. Put Nana on
the phone. Hi, Mama. Okay. Same as always. How about you? Good. No, Kendra has
dance at six. Kyle has T-ball at seven.” She smiled. “All right. Love you, too.
Bye.”
She hung up and turned to me, mirroring the strange look on my
face.
“Did you lose one?” I asked.
Frankie chuckled. “No. The baby’s asleep, thank the lord.”
She wiped the counters again, and I cleaned up the mess from
making Sonny’s banana split Blizzard. Our Dairy Queen was housed in one of the
smallest and oldest buildings in Blackwell, a tiny speck on the Oklahoma map.
The owners, Cecil and Patty, were more than happy to let out-of-towners stop to
take pictures of their unique fifties-style building. Patrons could order from
one of the two sliding windows in the front, or the drive-thru on the south
side. There was barely room for Frankie and me to move around, and we often
bumped into each other when we had a rush of customers after baseball games or
during fair week. A lone shaded bench was placed on the side of the building for
customers who wanted to stick around to eat their dip cones or hot dogs, but it
was usually empty.
“Oh, goody. Practice is over,” Frankie said, watching the various
cars and trucks belonging to the baseball team back out of their spots in the
gravel lot across the street. Several of them drove into the DQ and parked, a
dozen sweaty boys hopped out and walked across the asphalt to my window.
Frankie opened hers, and two lines formed.
Weston Gates had to lean down to look at me,
his eyes meeting mine through shaggy, brown strands of hair, still wet with
perspiration. His dark gray T-shirt read
Blackwell Maroons
. The maroon lettering crackled from numerous washes during his
now fourth year of high school football, basketball, and baseball. His father was
a jock at Blackwell high school, too, and his mother and older sister Whitney
were
both head cheerleaders. Whitney was now in her second
year
of college at Duke University, going for her law degree, and she rarely came
home. I didn’t know her well, but she had beautiful, kind eyes, just like
Weston
.
“Just whatever, Erin. It’s all good,” he said with a shy smile.
“Did you just say she was good, Wes?” Brady Beck chided. “How
would you know? I didn’t know you’ve been slumming it.”
The other guys chuckled and made stupid noises.
Weston’s cheeks were already flushed from practice, making them look
like someone had brushed a light red paint brush across them and slapped him …
twice. They turned two shades darker. The rosiness of his cheeks against his
emerald eyes made them appear even brighter. I’d been trying not to stare at
those eyes since grade school, and once Alder had set her sights on him in
eighth grade, I tried even harder.
“Ignore them, Erin. They’re assholes.” He choked a bit when he
spoke, then he turned to cough into the crook of his elbow.
I made him a simple strawberry dip cone—extra tall, because I
knew that was his favorite—took his money, and watched him drop his change in
my plastic tip jar.
“Thank you,” he said, taking a big bite off the top as he walked
back to his truck.
The other guys weren’t as polite, and most of them didn’t even
look me in the eye. I was used to that, though. Growing up with a mom who had
seen the inside of a jail cell more than once, the other parents weren’t shy
about keeping their children from being corrupted by Gina Easter’s daughter. My
mother wasn’t always so messed up though. She was Blackwell’s homecoming queen
in 1995. I knew that only because I’d come across the photos. She was
beautiful, with her blonde bangs teased to one side and her full, healthy
cheeks pushing up her big brown eyes into slits.
Like Frankie, Gina got pregnant young. Unlike Frankie, she let
the resentment of trading her dreams for an unplanned baby become so
unbearable, she turned to alcohol. And weed. And as the years added
disappointments to the growing pile, any drug was good enough if it helped her
forget what she could have been. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it did numb her
anger, but most nights adding a case of Keystone Light to her rage just made it
worse.
Every night when Frankie shut off the lights and said her
favorite phrase, I cringed, knowing it was time to go home to Gina.
“Adios bitchachos!”
“Don’t forget I have a senior class meeting tomorrow after
school, so I’ll be a little late.”
“I remember,” she said, grabbing her purse and keys. She held
open the door for me. “Ride?”
I shook my head. Every night she asked me, and every night I said
no, which is why she barely made a question of it. I lived only five blocks behind
the DQ anyway, and the first day of spring was right around the corner.
The soles of my shoes crunched the loose gravel next to the curb
as I walked along the dark street. Only random areas around town had sidewalks,
and the shortest path to my house wasn’t one of them. A few cars drove by, but
it was an otherwise quiet Thursday night. No church traffic, no game traffic.
Thursdays were my favorite nights to walk home.
I climbed the concrete steps to the porch, and the screen door
whined when it opened. I could hear Gina’s music from the other side of the
door, and hesitated just long enough to psych myself up for whatever awaited me
on the other side. When the door swung open, and I saw that the living room was
empty, I hurried to my room and shut the door.
The music was coming from her bedroom, down the hall from mine. I
could smell the weed as soon as I walked in, so she was probably smoking and
relaxing in her bed, which was always preferable to a drunken rage.
The loose strings of my apron untied easily, and I peeled off the
rest of my clothes, throwing them into a full hamper. Most nights I was too
tired to do laundry, so it piled up until I hauled it to the Laundromat a few
blocks south of the Dairy Queen. Being alone at the Suds & Duds was creepy
at night, so I preferred to wait until early Saturday afternoon. Gina was awake
then, and it was a good excuse to get out of the house before work.
I slipped on an oversized, faded black T-shirt that read
Oakland Raiders.
I’d assumed it was my dad’s, but I
wasn’t sure. It could have been one of the random items Gina picked up from the
secondhand store. But for some reason, I liked to think it was his—whoever he
was—and wearing it made the roach-infested termite palace we lived in feel a
little more like home.
I sat on the green carpet in my bedroom. It was once something
similar to shag, but it had become matted over the years and looked more like
the pelt of a very ugly animal. I had a page of Algebra II to finish; then I crept
down the hall to the bathroom, washing my face and brushing my teeth to the
muffled lyrics of Soul Asylum. Gina was definitely high. “Runaway Train” was
her go-to song when she scored a dime bag of weed.
Back in my room, I sat on the edge of my bed and watched my
reflection in the mirror atop my dresser. They were from the second hand store,
like everything else in our house. The mirror wobbled when anyone walked across
my floor, and most of the dresser drawers didn’t open right, but they completed
their function, and that’s all I needed. I brushed my dark brown hair away from
my face until the brush could pass every strand without catching then smoothed
it back into a ponytail.
The aging springs of my bed complained when I crawled under the
covers. The ceiling fan bobbed as it turned slowly, lulling me to sleep as
whatever song Gina was listening to hummed through the walls. I took a deep
breath. The next day would be long. The senior class meeting was mandatory, and
I dreaded going. I generally avoided school functions, just to save myself the
humiliation suffered at the hands of the other Erins. Middle school taught me
that any attempt to socialize was not worth the inevitable teasing and
sometimes bullying that ensued. At times, teachers intervened, but mostly they
didn’t. The Erins, along with Brady Beck and a few of their friends, relished
only one thing more than taunting me—making me cry. That always seemed to be
the goal, and the more I resisted, the harder they tried. So for the last four
years, I kept to school and work, and myself. I had won a scholarship, and
between that and grants, I was getting the hell out of Blackwell, away from the
Erins, Brady, and Gina.
I reached over and pulled the lamp string. As much as Sonny
genuinely wanted me to, I wouldn’t turn out the light and kill myself. I was
going to rest, save my strength for another grueling day. Tomorrow would bring
me one day closer to the freedom that Frankie dreamed about.