“I’d sort of prefer to use my tongue for other stuff.”
“You, girl, are very bad.” Jenn bent to retie her shoes. They were old and filthy, a score from Good Cheer Thrift Store down in Langley. She’d tried to clean them up about six times but had given up the effort. She knew she needed to replace them, but as always, she lacked the funds.
Becca seemed to know what she was thinking. She said, “How’s the job hunt going?”
“It’s not. I’d become a streetwalker if someone was actually out on the streets after five P.M. around here. What about you?”
“Nothing. There might be something with Mr. Darrow, but I don’t know yet.”
“You still alone at Mr. Darrow’s house?” Jenn sat back up, saw Becca nod, and said, “Ooohhh, that must be nice for you and Derric.” Jenn laughed when she saw the color sweep into Becca’s cheeks. “So?” she encouraged her.
“So . . . what?”
“Come on. You’re in a dream situation. You guys doing it?”
Becca’s eyes widened. “Jenn!”
“What? Not my business? It’s always the business of the BFF to know what the other BFF is up to. Come on. Give. Your secrets are totally safe with me.”
“Don’t you have a shower to take?” Becca gestured vaguely in the direction of the high school, which sat beyond two baseball diamonds, the skateboard area, and the children’s playground.
“That must mean yes.”
“No. It doesn’t. I’m not ready.”
“To spill?”
“To have sex with Derric. Not the whole thing, I mean.”
Jenn rose from the bench. She stretched. As she did, she said to Becca, “Aren’t you worried he’ll do it with someone else? I mean, he’s a guy. He’s . . . What is he anyway? Seventeen?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen? Geez, in some cultures he’d already be married. Aren’t you worried?”
“About him doing it with someone else?” Becca hooked up her ear thingy. She fiddled with the connection to the iPod on her waist. “He already did.”
Jenn felt her eyes bug out. “No way.”
“Way.”
“But he’s, like, supremely into you. Now you have to put out. Are you . . . I mean . . . Are you doing anything at all?”
Becca became red to the roots of her hair. She said, “Jenn!”
“Okay. Okay. Just tell me this: naked or not.”
“Sometimes. And that’s all I’m saying. I don’t bug you about your love life.”
Jenn guffawed and slapped Becca on the back. “Like I have one?” was her response.
• • •
THEY PARTED WAYS back at the school. Becca headed for her bike in the stands in front; Jenn made her way to the girls’ locker room. Inside, she heard the showers running and over the sound of the water, singing. The choice of tune was “I Will Survive,” and Cynthia and Lexie were belting it out, with interruptions of “That’s not how it goes!” “Is too!” “Is not!” And then laughter and laughter. Those two were very big on laughter.
Jenn went to her locker. She grabbed her towel and headed toward the showers herself. When she got there, it was to see Cynthia and Lexie soaping each other’s bodies, though. She stopped dead because they’d also fallen silent. Before she could turn away and make tracks out of there, they stopped soaping and they started kissing. Jenn beat a retreat as fast as she could.
• • •
AT THIS HOUR, the only way to get home was the island transit bus. Once Jenn had her backpack of homework, she plodded across the school’s front parking lot and out to the shelter along Maxwelton Road. She was waiting there when a silver Honda with Seahawks stickers all over the driver’s door came out of the parking lot and rolled her way.
Cynthia was driving. Lexie was in the passenger seat. Cynthia lowered her window and called out, “Jenn! You need a ride?”
The last thing Jenn wanted—aside from being naked with those two—was to be in a car with them. She said, “Nah. It’s okay. The bus’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”
“You sure?”
“Yep. Thanks, though.”
“We saw you on the trail,” Cynthia called back. “Looking good. Bye!”
Then she was gone and Jenn could breathe again. The two girls drove off in the opposite direction, toward Langley. It was just as well, Jenn thought, that she hadn’t accepted Cynthia’s offer because it would have taken the girl way the hell out of her way.
• • •
JENN HAD TO ride two different bus routes to get home from the high school. This meant a wait in the wind and in the rain that had begun to spit from the sky when she alighted from the first bus, hung around for a bus from another route, and then alighted once again at a triangle of rough, cabin-like buildings that formed a hobbit-sized commercial area called Bailey’s Corner. She could have ridden the second bus farther at that point, in order to end up closer to her home, but she wanted to talk to the proprietor of the small market that was the main feature of the Corner, and she knew from experience that he would be there till seven o’clock when he shut down for the night.
So she dodged through the rain and, with her backpack of homework slung over one shoulder, she dashed to the market. The door banged closed behind her.
Tiny Holiday was behind the counter, and he was neither. The size of a Jeep, he possessed a funereal air that had long suggested to his customers a serious lack of vacation time on sun-drenched beaches or in snowy ski resorts. He was hunched over a magazine when Jenn entered the premises, and he hid this reading material beneath the counter in a furtive move that suggested the publication’s questionable nature.
“Say what, Jenn?” was his greeting. “Whatcha need?”
“A job,” she told him. “You been thinking any more about my proposal?”
“Big storm coming,” was his reply, with a look directed outside into the darkness. Both of them could hear the wind howling, and a howling wind meant trees crashing onto the island roads and through people’s roofs. “Your parents know you’re out in this?”
“Course they know,” Jenn told him, a marginal falsehood. Since she wasn’t yet home from school, they knew she was somewhere. “So I’m wondering if you’ve thought about the job? See, I could do ’bout anything for you, only it has to be in the morning because I got soccer after school. Or I could come here after soccer and close up the place for you, and that way you could go home and have dinner with your family. You’d get home around six or even five-thirty if I get lucky with the buses. What d’you say?”
“Too dangerous,” Tiny Holiday told her.
“What’s too dangerous? Eating with your family? Why? Do they throw knives or something?”
He har-harred appreciatively but then said, “Too dangerous having a teenager here to close the place is what I mean. There’s been break-ins all over South Whidbey and two armed robberies at the Wells Fargo over in Clinton. We got druggies living in the woods and coming out only when they need to score, and the only way they can score is with someone else’s money. So the answer is still no.”
Jenn was not about to be deterred. “What about early morning?” she said. “Druggies don’t like to get up early.”
Tiny rolled his eyes. “I’m not about to open this place any earlier than seven, girl.”
“But there’d be customers. People on the way to the ferry. They’d buy coffee. They’d buy doughnuts. We could try it and see how it goes. I could open up for you at five. Or even four because of the early ferry.”
He shook his head. “Not enough business, Jenn. I’d be paying you more than I’d be taking in.” He raised his head as a loud crack indicated a heavy branch coming down nearby. He said, “You get home now. You can use the phone to call your dad to come pick you up if you’d like.”
She didn’t want that. She wanted a j
ob. She shook her head and left the place after telling Tiny Holiday that she’d be fine. Her parents would be too busy anyway to have to come up from Possession Point.
Just outside the little market, Jenn dug inside her backpack for her flashlight. There were no street lights on the island roads, and once she left Bailey’s Corner for the long walk to Possession Road, she’d be in complete darkness with only the wind and rain as companions.
She set off into a frenzy of storm gusts. It was long way home, and she wanted to kick her own butt for having gotten off the bus in order to talk to Tiny Holiday again.
She needed a job. Now. Yesterday. Whenever. She had to come up with the fee for the All Island team, and she also had to grab funds somewhere in order to purchase better shoes and decent equipment, none of which was going to be on sale at any of the thrift stores on the island.
It took forty minutes for her to make the walk home, but at last she reached the pockmarked driveway that led to her family’s ramshackle house. It was on a property that had seen its heyday at least sixty years previously, and the features of this place were now piles of junk like old toilets and fishing nets and orange road cones, along with a single wide dump of a trailer that had been briefly occupied the previous year but was now as empty as her family’s bank account.
Lights from a car came jostling toward her from the house. That would be her mom, Jenn figured. She stepped to one side, but her mom didn’t pass. Instead, she halted the car, rolled down her window, and gave Jenn a look that took in her bedraggled appearance.
“Where on earth . . . ?” she began.
“Soccer practice, the island bus, and talking to Mr. Holiday about a job.”
“Again? Jenn, honey, no means no.”
“Sometimes it means ask me later.”
“Not in this case, I’m afraid.” Kate tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and frowned into the storm. She said, “I just got a call, so you’ll need to help your father finish making dinner. It’s easy enough. Hot dogs cut up, put into baked beans. You know your dad, though. Mr. Secret Ingredient. There’s bread and canned corn, too.”
“What about you? Coming back for dinner?”
Her mother shook her head. “Bible study tonight.”
“Aren’t you having anything to eat, then?”
“The Lord has other plans for me. I trust in Him and in His ways. For He is—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jenn said. “See you later.”
She started to trudge off, but her mom went on with, “It wouldn’t hurt you to become familiar with the Bible, Jennie.”
Jenn ticked a salute at her. “It’s on my to-do list.”
Before her mother could make any further comment, Jenn headed in the direction of Possession Sound. Out of the darkness, lights began to emerge. They came from across the water, in the windows of the more expensive houses in the town of Mukilteo. They also came from the nearby shabby old building that was the house where Jenn had grown up.
Its special features were a listing front porch, sheets hung at the windows and inexpertly made into curtains, and siding with great splintered patches where the weather had worn completely through the paint. Near the house, Jenn’s dad had his brew shed. Its lights were on, so she figured he hadn’t gotten around to beginning the dinner yet. Typical of Bruce McDaniels, she thought. Between beer and baked beans, he’d always choose beer. Besides, this was yet another source of income for the family. His brews were popular, so he had to keep up with demand.
But when she opened the door, her father wasn’t inside the shed. She sighed, switched off the light, and fastened the padlock on the door.
She found her dad where he was supposed to be. He stood in the kitchen with a completely unnecessary apron wrapped around him. He was doing something with a loaf of bread while Jenn’s little brothers wrestled on the living room floor. They were in a dispute over the television remote, she saw. Pretty dumb, as they didn’t have cable and had to rely on a completely inadequate antenna to pick up the two channels that they actually were able to watch.
Her father turned from the counter on which he was fashioning his creation. He said, “Jenn o’ my heart! Home at last!” and his slurred voice suggested he’d been sampling brew again. He waved around himself in an expansive gesture that took in the kitchen. “Are you here to assist or just to admire?”
She walked over to see what he was doing, which was using cookie cutters shaped like whales and maple leaves to make fanciful shapes out of the bread. A lot of it was, however, going to waste. He also had the habanero sauce out along with a bag of hardened brown sugar. She sighed and said, “Want me to take over? Might be faster and those guys—” She jerked her head at her brothers. “They’re not going to settle down till they eat.”
“An answer to my prayers,” Bruce said. “I shall advise your brothers that table setting might be in order.”
Good luck with that, was what Jenn thought. She found the canned corn her mom had told her about. She stirred the baked beans with their chopped-up hot dogs. It was a meager enough meal, but sometimes they didn’t even have this much. Then it would be pancakes for dinner. Syrup, no butter.
She hated her life.
8
When Becca looked out the window the following Sunday morning, what she saw was a mass of gray so thick that her field of vision ended at the poles holding up Ralph Darrow’s front porch. There had been fog before during her time on Whidbey Island, but she’d not yet seen fog like this. Becca didn’t even notice Derric till he was on the porch itself. He wore a heavy winter parka and a blue and lime-green ski cap with SEAHAWKS printed on the front of it. He wore gloves and boots as well. From this Becca understood that it was not only foggy outside. It was also bitterly cold.
Usually she attended church with Derric and his family, something she’d been doing since Christmas. After the service, their habit was to head to a coffee roaster deep in the woods where they enjoyed bantering over breakfast. But today Derric had claimed that he and Becca wanted instead to go over town, taking the ferry that would allow them to catch a movie in nearby Lynnwood. This wasn’t the actual case, but there was no way that Derric would consider telling Dave and Rhonda Mathieson the truth.
Becca didn’t like lying to them. But anything less than lying, Derric had argued, was going to make his parents suspicious. For the reality was that he had been invited to La Conner for Sunday lunch, and if he told them that, he would have to tell them who Jeff and Darla Vickland were. That would lead to him having to tell them how he’d become acquainted with a family all the way up in La Conner, which would lead to him having to bring up Rejoice.
He could have done this, naturally. But the problem was he’d already pointed out a different and older girl in a photograph of his days in an African orphanage, and he’d told his parents she was Rejoice, the object of a childhood crush. For Dave had come across a slew of unsent letters Derric had written to someone called Rejoice. His curiosity had been piqued by these letters, and he’d started to ask questions to which Derric had manufactured answers.
To Becca, the moment when Derric’s parents started to ask him about Rejoice represented the moment he could have explained that he had a sister, that as a little boy of five years old, he’d not known to tell Children’s Hope of Kampala that one of the mass of abandoned and orphaned children they’d picked up from an alley in the city was his sister. But whenever Becca brought this up, he countered with the fact that he should have told Children’s Hope that the two-year-old girl was his sister. And since he hadn’t, he didn’t want to wreck the way his parents looked at him: both as their son and as a person.
“I was a selfish rat” was how he put it.
Her reply of “You were five years old when you first met Rhonda. There’s no such thing as a five-year-old rat” never made any difference.
So today she just said that she didn’t like lying to Da
ve and Rhonda. Derric’s reply as they climbed into his Forester was, “I’ve been lying to them for the past nine years and even before that. Another lie isn’t going to kill them or me. Don’t you ever lie when it’s the only thing to do?”
Becca didn’t reply as she fastened her seat belt. The only response she could have made was the one she also couldn’t make: Her entire life on Whidbey Island was a lie.
They rumbled from Newman onto Double Bluff Road where the fog was so dense that they couldn’t see the one hundred yards to the island highway. They crawled along, and Becca worried about what it was going to be like for Derric, driving all the way to La Conner, where the fog was probably going to be worse. He was planning to take the freeway to get there instead of driving up the island and crossing Deception Pass Bridge. He figured there would be less fog this way, and Becca could only hope he was right. He was also dropping Becca in Langley. She had work to do in the library there, using the library’s Internet for a project in her graphic design class. At least, that was what she’d told Derric. It was, she explained, way too complicated to go any further into it than that.
Derric had said, “Why doesn’t Mr. Darrow have Internet at his house? He could even do it through his phone, for God’s sake.”
To this she’d replied, “Because that would mean moving into the twenty-first century, and he’s barely made it into the twentieth. I’m lucky he even has a phone, Der. He doesn’t have a television.”
“How’re you feeling about Seth’s plan?” he asked. “I got to say I don’t like it much.”
“We’ll still be able to see each other,” she pointed out. “Seth and Prynne’ll come over when we have a date. And we can have study dates at Ralph’s place, too. I think it’ll work out okay.”
Despite her words, Becca was uneasy. When Seth had phoned her to explain the scheme and to inform her that Prynne had agreed to come over to Whidbey in order to stay with Grand from seven till three every weekday, Becca had heard the pleasure in his voice. He wanted Prynne close to him, and now he had that. But this understanding had prompted Becca’s recall of that quick vision she’d had from Prynne, the one that clearly showed another man who was part of her life. That smile of his . . . Becca remembered it all too well. It was knowing and pleased and something else, although she couldn’t put a name to what that was.