I learned the next morning that oatmeal didn’t have a smell. 412Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡd4k3dgrh3M
Usually I would wake up on a Saturday to the sounds and smells of my dad frying bacon, which he liked as a companion to his Saturday-morning scrambled eggs. My mom would always complain the he made the eggs too runny, but she would eat them anyway. I would always amble down into the kitchen, rubbing sleep from my eyes as my dad was pulling the toast out of the toaster. Mom would always ask how I slept; I would always tell her “okay.” Dad would always ask me if I wanted jam on my toast; I would always tell him no, and that I didn’t like jam.
Alas, none of that happened. That was Columbus, Ohio, and this was Gorham, Alabama.
It was already hot inside when I picked my way down the steps and entered the kitchen to find a large pot of mushy grey oatmeal and a stack of untoasted multi-grain bagels. Marcy smiled at me as I entered and told me to help myself. John bid me good morning from his open newspaper and I caught both of them watching me out of the corner of my eye while I scooped a spoonful of mush into a bowl with some milk and took half a bagel. It was like they expected me to collapse into sobs over the kitchen table or something. I sat down and bit into the bagel, wishing I had some of Dad’s jam.
I didn’t even like jam.
“So, Adam, what are you going to do today?” Marcy asked. “There’s always something going on down at the park on Main Street, you could try going down there for the day.”
I thought briefly of telling them about the girl from last night, but immediately decided against it. I’m sure they would have been less than happy to find out that I had been in town for all of three hours before I was running around with teenage girls. I said that, yeah, maybe I would go down to the park and see if there was anything to do. John told me that he thought there might be a basketball in the garage and that I could take to to the park with me.
“I’d show you where it is, but whoops, I’m late for work!” He said, dashing around like a cartoon character, collecting a briefcase, several books, and some papers before giving Marcy a kiss and dashing out the door. Marcy encouraged me to eat as much as possible because I looked “skinnier than a fence rail,” but there’s only so much odorless breakfast food one can handle.
The house had ceiling fans, but no air conditioner, so I was already feeling pretty grungy and sweaty by the time I got back upstairs to my room. I took another shower, where even the cold water was still a little warm, and threw on some jeans and a fresh grey t-shirt. I almost looked down at my watch, and it hurt only a tiny bit less when I stopped myself. I looked at my cellphone instead, which told me that it was nine-thirty, but also that I didn’t have any cell service. I held it up and walked around the room, wondering if it was just a dead spot, to no avail. The phone reminded me that I hadn’t called my parents last night, not that I was particularly thrilled with them for apparently having planned this as a mental-breakdown vacation, but the lack of bacon and inquiries about jam at breakfast made me homesick anyway.
My thoughts wandered to the girl with the hazel eyes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an extrovert. I’m not daring. My sense of adventure usually includes a Dr. Pepper (which I drank too much of), a cigarette (which I smoked too much of), and some video games (which I played too much of). I mean, it’s a wonder I’m not obese, which my mom actually took me to the doctor about. He didn’t ask about the cigarettes (I knew he could tell) but he said I had an overactive metabolism. Despite my anti social inclinations, I still felt pulled to meet the strange girl with the golden laugh at the library at ten o’clock.
So I did.
Or tried, rather. I let Marcy know I would be going into town; she offered to drive me, but I figured it was about a fifteen minute walk and so I politely declined. Plus, she would probably wonder why I wanted to go to the library instead of the park, and I wanted to keep that to myself. It was not, in fact, a fifteen minute walk, it was actually closer to half an hour. The sun had already reached a steep angle and if it weren’t for the willow trees shading the road, I would have probably been fried like my dad’s bacon by the time the stately white library building came in view. Regardless of the shade, the air was so thick that I felt like I was drowning with each breath. I made a mental note to maybe cover my whole body in deodorant the next time I was planning on leaving the house as I tried to unstick myself from my shirt every five seconds. Finally, I climbed the concrete steps and pushed through the doors, relieved to find that air conditioning actually did exist in the state of Alabama.
The Gorham Public Library wasn’t at all what I had expected for a small town establishment, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what I was expecting anyway. The first thing that caught my eye was the color of the carpet: green. No, green wasn’t… green enough for just exactly how green it was. Not that earth-tone, natural, grandma’s-house green. Not even museum-tapestry green. Not quite jade, but not quite lime either. Emerald, maybe, and boy was it an eyesore. I tread carefully, almost as if the impossibly green carpet wasn’t meant to be stepped on, and noticed that the library was a lot bigger than it looked on the outside. There was even a second floor, though it was more of a loft, and the place was already abuzz with that quiet hum of intellectual activity you could only really find in a library.
“Adam?” I turned my head to find John peeking his head out from behind a windowed door that read JOHN BEECHER, HEAD LIBRARIAN in bold black type upon the glass. “I thought you were heading down to the park this morning.”
“I, uh, wanted to stop by and see this place too,” I said, sort-of-not-very-convincingly. “Seeing as I like to read and all.”
“Ah, yes, of course,” John said with a smile. He came out from behind his door and stood next to me, hand on his hips, surveying the floor like it were his kingdom. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? This place was just about condemned when Marcy and I moved to town twenty years ago, I couldn’t possibly be any happier with it!” I thought about saying something about the carpet, but I wasn’t going to say a thing like that out loud. So I just nodded along to him telling me about the library, which was built in eighteen-something and almost burned down twice in nineteen-something, which was fine and all, but my mind was elsewhere as I scanned the tables and front rows of shelves for that sunbleached blonde hair. Finally, John let me go, saying he had some work to do, but he pointed me toward the “Classics” aisle, which he said I would probably enjoy, so I made my way toward it. I scanned the area several times, but the hazel eyes and the grey Coldplay t-shirt were nowhere to be found Well, duh I thought to myself as I idly picked a book off of one of the shelves and began flipping through it. Why would she be wearing the same shirt she was wearing yesterday? The book I picked up was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which was one of the only books I had ever actually disliked when we read it in class last year. Creepy Puritan voodoo aside. I found it dry and unrelatable, and my B minus on my final essay reflected that pretty well. I slipped the book back into place and thumbed along the covers until I saw Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. I was just about to pull it out and open it up when I felt someone approach me from behind.
“Are you Adam Ellis, perchance?” I turned around and had to drop my gaze nearly a foot to meet the eyes of an olive-skinned Asian boy with short hair and an air of general intensity surrounding him. The first thing I thought was that I couldn’t remember hearing of anyone using the word “perchance” in the last century.
“I am,” was all I said in response.
“Excellent,” He said, looking to his left and to his right before waving me over to an empty corner. “Sorry, you can never be sure of who will eavesdrop and proceed to unfurl farcical rumors around here.” I cocked my head at him, having never heard a teenager spew words like a dictionary before. “Anyway,” he continued, “Caroline will be unable to meet us at this establishment.”
“Wait, who?” My brain didn’t put two and two together until after the kid gave me a look like he was sure I’d been dropped on my head as a kid.
“Caroline. Caroline Wilder. Scary Carrie,” he said, the last of which was clearly a nickname, but he said it as if I were supposed to know such things. “She instructed me to come to the library at ten this morning and inform you that she will be unable to attend your arranged meeting as was planned.”
“Uh, okay?” I said, completely unsure of how to respond. He looked like he had more to say.
“She, however, did not instruct me to have you follow me.” He scratched the back of his neck and looked up at me. “But, I’m going to request that you do, anyway.”
I gave him what was probably the most skeptical look one human being can give to another. “Where?” I asked. And then, more importantly, “why?”
“Not far.” For the first time since our encounter began, the kid shifted around and appeared to be a teenager. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo shorts and looked around again. “I believe we’ve got a situation on our hands.”
“We?” I was lost, now. It felt very odd to be included in something I obviously had no clue about.
“Yes, ‘we’, seeing as you and I are here together, and both of us are here because of the same person,” he said matter-of-factly. “And said person is threatening to land herself in a state penitentiary because said person just discovered that her boyfriend has been sleeping with, and I quote, ‘some doe-eyed skank from the senior class.’”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I was sure I looked like some gangly fish gasping for air with that bewildered expression on my face, but the kid didn’t make any indication of noticing. Finally, I kicked my brain into a functioning gear and looked down at him with a shrug. “Okay, I guess. Where is she?”
“She’s over at Marissa Nelson’s residence. We’d better get there quick before she does something vacuous.”
“I don’t know where that is,” I said, trying to recall what vacuous meant.
“No duh.” Again, amid the veritable thesaurus coming from his mouth, I found those words strange. “It’s just a few blocks away, we can take my car.” I nodded and proceeded to follow him out the front door and out to the street, where I discovered that “car” was a generous term for the mud-splattered old Geo Metro parked haphazardly in front of the sidewalk. I slid into the passenger’s seat to find it pleasantly clean on the inside, to the point of spotlessness. That, and my seatbelt appeared to be missing. It started with considerable resistance and we lurched backward into the street with a groan before he floored it and we were zipping onto main street in two seconds flat.
“So, uh, do you do this often?” I asked through gritted teeth, gripping the sides of my seat as hard as possible. He took it to mean rescuing Caroline from herself, to which he said “sometimes,” but I actually sort of meant driving, ‘cause he blew threw two stop signs and nearly took out someone’s hedge as he came to a screeching halt in front of a handsome two-story a lot like John and Marcy’s. I could see a certain hazel-eyed, blonde-haired girl screaming at someone sitting inside a blue pickup truck. The kid, whose name I still didn’t know, made an apologetic face at me and we got out of the car just in time to hear the twenty most creative uses of the f-bomb that I had ever heard.
“Babe, calm down, I said I’m sorry a million times!” A guy, probably a year or two older than us, was saying from inside the truck.
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down!” She yelled, eyes full of fire and voice full of thunder. “You should have thought of that before sticking it in Betty-fucking-Brainless up there!”
“Caroline!” The boy I was with called out somewhat tentatively. She held up a finger without even glancing in our direction as we cautiously approached.
“I don’t want to see your face around here ever again, Nick!” She was saying in a low voice. “Not tomorrow. Not a week from now. Not ever!”
“Aww, c’mon, Care! She didn’t mean--”
“Nick, honey, you’d better just shut up before you actually piss me off.!” She said, tone dripping with the most sickly-sweet venom. The truck started with a rumble and backed up in a hurry, nearly taking the two of us out as he wheeled it around and took off down the road we came up, yelling something out the window as he screeched around the corner. Caroline Wilder turned toward us, a vision of untold fury. As soon as her eyes flicked over me her expression softened visibly, like clouds breaking up after a late afternoon rainfall, and suddenly she just looked exhausted. “Hello, Adam Ellis,” she said to me with a thin smile. “I’m sorry you had to see that,”
“Me too,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic, but it didn’t quite come out like that. My Stupid Mouth: 1. Me: 0. I suddenly realized I hadn’t had a craving for a cigarette all day, but that I was now longing greatly for one. Unfortunately, I hadn’t thought of it before leaving the house and I could picture them sitting in the bottom of my suitcase.
“Why’d you bring him here?” She asked my companion accusingly, leaning against the hood of the Metro with her arms crossed. He shrugged.
“You wanted me to locate him. I did.”
“Well that was very kind of you, Webster, but now isn’t the best time.”
I suddenly felt like that friend who was over when the host kid’s parents started to argue and you’re just stuck there in uncomfortable oblivion, unsure of if you’re the real cause of the problem or not.
“You are constantly saying ‘there’s no time like the present,” Webster (as I had gathered his name was) said, rolling his eyes. Caroline looked like she was going to argue, but thought better of it.
“Well, I suppose that, despite this unpleasant beginning to an unpleasant summer, we had probably better get started as soon as possible,” she said finally, sliding her butt off the hood of the car and leaning up against the open door frame. “You coming, Adam Ellis?”412Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxjyDpst0ui
“Where are we going?” I asked. I had both doubts about getting in a car with kid I barely knew and serious reservations with Webster’s driving.
“What’s the fun if I tell you that?” She said, eyes crinkling at the corners as the edges of her lips turned upward mischievously. I considered it for just half a second before realizing the alternative was trying to find my way back to the house from wherever the hell we were. So I shrugged one shoulder, tapped my pockets (no cigarettes) and got into the seat behind Webster’s. I didn't have any other choice, right?
I tried, but failed, to convince myself that this was the only reason I crammed myself into the nearly nonexistent back seat behind Caroline Wilder. 412Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡvtqNqtrxvx
and then Add to home screen.