I had just wanted to know. That had always been my problem. Even now. I wanted to know why my dad never came out of his study. I wanted to know why we couldn’t leave this worthless old house just because a million Wates had lived here before us, especially now that my mom was gone.
But not tonight. Tonight I just wanted to remember chicken salad sandwiches and ten and two and a time when my dad ate his Shredded Wheat in the kitchen, joking around with me. I fell asleep remembering.
Before the bell even rang the next day, Lena Duchannes was all everyone at Jackson could talk about. Somehow between storms and power outages, Loretta Snow and Eugenie Asher, Savannah’s and Emily’s mothers, had managed to get supper on the table and call just about everyone in town to let them know that crazy Macon Ravenwood’s “relation” was driving around Gatlin in his hearse, which they were sure he used to transport dead bodies in when no one was watching. From there it just got wilder.
There are two things you can always count on in Gatlin. One, you can be different, even crazy, as long as you come out of the house every now and then, so folks don’t think you’re an axe murderer. Two, if there’s a story to tell, you can be sure there’ll be someone to tell it. A new girl in town, moving into the Haunted Mansion with the town shut-in, that’s a story, probably the biggest story to hit Gatlin since my mom’s accident. So I don’t know why I was surprised when everyone was talking about her—everyone except the guys. They had business to attend to first.
“So, what’ve we got, Em?” Link slammed his locker door.
“Countin’ cheerleadin’ tryouts, looks like four 8’s, three 7’s, and a handful a 4’s.” Emory didn’t bother to count the freshman girls he rated below a four.
I slammed my locker door. “This is news? Aren’t these the same girls we see at the Dar-ee Keen every Saturday?”
Emory smiled, and clapped his hand on my shoulder. “But they’re in the game now, Wate.” He looked at the girls in the hall. “And I’m ready to play.” Emory was mostly all talk. Last year, when we were freshmen, all we heard about were the hot seniors he thought he was going to hook up with now that he’d made JV. Em was as delusional as Link, but not as harmless. He had a mean streak; all the Watkinses did.
Shawn shook his head. “Like pickin’ peaches off the vi
ne.”
“Peaches grow on trees.” I was already annoyed, maybe because I’d met up with the guys at the Stop & Steal magazine stand before school and been subjected to this same conversation while Earl flipped through issues of the only thing he ever read—magazines featuring girls in bikinis, lying across the hoods of cars.
Shawn looked at me, confused. “What are you talkin’ about?”
I don’t know why I even bothered. It was a stupid conversation, the same way it was stupid that all the guys had to meet up before school on Wednesday mornings. It was something I’d come to think of as roll call. A few things were expected if you were on the team. You sat together in the lunchroom. You went to Savannah Snow’s parties, asked a cheerleader to the winter formal, hung out at Lake Moultrie on the last day of school. You could bail on almost anything else, if you showed up for roll call. Only it was getting harder and harder for me to show up, and I didn’t know why.
I still hadn’t come up with the answer when I saw her.
Even if I hadn’t seen her, I’d have known she was there because the hallway, which was usually crammed with people rushing to their lockers and trying to make it to class before the second bell, cleared out in a matter of seconds. Everyone actually stepped aside when she came down the hall. Like she was a rock star.
Or a leper.
But all I could see was a beautiful girl in a long gray dress, under a white track jacket with the word Munich sewn on it, and beat-up black Converse peeking out underneath. A girl who wore a long silver chain around her neck, with tons of stuff dangling from it—a plastic ring from a bubblegum machine, a safety pin, and a bunch of other junk I was too far away to see. A girl who didn’t look like she belonged in Gatlin. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Macon Ravenwood’s niece. What was wrong with me?
She tucked her dark curls behind her ear, black nail polish catching the fluorescent light. Her hands were covered with black ink, like she had written on them. She walked down the hall as if we were invisible. She had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen, so green they could’ve been considered some new color altogether.
“Yeah, she’s hot,” said Billy.
I knew what they were thinking. For a second, they were thinking about dumping their girlfriends for the chance to hit on her. For a second, she was a possibility.
Earl gave her the once-over, then slammed his locker door. “If you ignore the fact that she’s a freak.”
There was something about the way he said it, or more like, the reason he said it. She was a freak because she wasn’t from Gatlin, because she wasn’t scrambling to make it onto the cheer squad, because she hadn’t given him a second look, or even a first. On any other day, I would’ve ignored him and kept my mouth shut, but today I didn’t feel like shutting up.
“So she’s automatically a freak, why? Because she doesn’t have on the uniform, blond hair and a short skirt?”
Earl’s face was easy to read. This was one of those times when I was supposed to follow his lead, and I wasn’t holding up my end of our unspoken agreement. “Because she’s a Ravenwood.”
The message was clear. Hot, but don’t even think about it. She wasn’t a possibility anymore. Still, that didn’t keep them from looking, and they were all looking. The hallway, and everyone in it, had locked in on her as if she was a deer caught in the crosshairs.
But she just kept walking, her necklace jingling around her neck.
Minutes later, I stood in the doorway of my English class. There she was. Lena Duchannes. The new girl, who would still be called that fifty years from now, if she wasn’t still called Old Man Ravenwood’s niece, handing a pink transfer slip to Mrs. English, who squinted to read it.
“They messed up my schedule and I didn’t have an English class,” she was saying. “I had U.S. History for two periods, and I already took U.S. History at my old school.” She sounded frustrated, and I tried not to smile. She’d never had U.S. History, not the way Mr. Lee taught it.
“Of course. Take any open seat.” Mrs. English handed her a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The book looked like it had never been opened, which it probably hadn’t since they’d made it into a movie.