Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Read online

  Poppy was panting and holding hard to Gina’s wrists. “Well, if you chop a leg off a starfish, it just grows back. And if you chop it in half, it will grow two bodies.”

  Gina stared at her. “So?”

  “Well, Greta said the fishermen who are green—you know, the new ones? They don’t know this. When they pull the gear up on their lines, if the hooks are full of starfish that ate all the bait, the fishermen get so mad they chop up the starfish and throw them back overboard. But instead of solving the problem, they’ve just doubled it.”

  “I still don’t follow.”

  “She just said that you’re so angry, you’re like a starfish. You chop off one bit of your anger and then it grows back, twice as big.”

  Gina was livid that Greta was talking about her as if she could possibly know what Gina felt. She dropped Poppy’s hands so hard her mittens fell to the ice, leaving the little girl’s fingers exposed and throwing her so off balance that she toppled onto her butt, her bare hands flat against the frozen pond. Poppy started to cry, but Gina skated off toward Alpaca and the sled, leaving Poppy to crawl around on her own to find her mittens.

  It was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, and Gina realized it was already getting dark. Off in the distance, a flash of color glistened across the snow. Alpaca had suddenly pricked up his ears and taken notice. Perhaps it was some kind of hare or ptarmigan; if so, he’d be after it like a shot.

  Gina had unhitched him from the sled, which he seemed to have only just realized as he started to run, untethered, toward the shadow that every once in a while glinted against the white backdrop. She tried to untie her skates but her hands were too stiff, giving Alpaca a good head start, and he would not listen when she called. She shoved her feet into her snow boots and chased him, still clutching the snow shovel.

  The snow got deeper in a hurry, making her plunge through the top crust, slowing her down, and still all she could hear was Poppy’s ridiculous little voice telling her that she was a starfish. Her anger exploded. It grew a leg, and then another leg, and then a body.

  She could feel her angry starfish body growing bigger and bigger, and suddenly she was swinging all her starfish arms and legs, now numbering in the twenties, the thirties, the forties. She was a starfish monster swinging at everything in her path. The whole world seemed to be screaming, egging her on, louder and louder as she swung her pointy arms again and again and again.

  And then she was lying on her back—the screaming had morphed into deathly silence—while all around her the snow glistened with color. Shards of red and purple and glassy green were everywhere, as if a rainbow trout had flopped around, scattering its lovely scales. As her eyes adjusted, she realized it was just the aurora reflecting off the white, white snow. She had been the one doing all the screaming.

  Gina was so tired. Her shovel lay next to her, still gripped tightly in her otter-skin mitten. She saw it as if from a distance and tried to let go, but her hand had become a claw; she couldn’t flex her fingers. For the first time she thought about how much pain her mother had been in. What a relief it must have been to be free from an earthly body that would not do what it was intended to do.

  I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, Gina said to no one and everyone, but mostly to her mother, who was maybe one of those stars blinking overhead, and then finally to Poppy, who had made her way over all on her own, miraculously dragging the sled by Alpaca’s empty tug line.

  Frozen snot covered Poppy’s face, and her eyelashes were caked with ice from tears that had frozen before they could fall.

  Finally Alpaca came back and curled up on one side of Gina as Poppy curled up on the other, and they huddled there, slowly warming themselves against each other’s frozen bodies.

  “Poppy, are your hands okay?”

  Above them, the lights changed from the green of a mallard’s head to the soggy gray-green of pea soup.

  “They’re cold,” said Poppy.

  “Put them under my coat,” said Gina. “I can thaw them out.”

  “It’s okay. Elizabeth is holding them.”

  Gina rolled over and looked at Poppy’s hands lying at her sides. They were two balled-up fists clenching the empty air.

  “Well, Elizabeth can still hold them if you warm them on my belly. She doesn’t have to let go.”

  “Okay.” Poppy sniffed. “She’d like that.”

  Gina helped Poppy get her frozen hands out of her mittens again. The little girl’s fingers were turning white, and Gina braced herself for the icy touch against her stomach. She carefully covered them with her shirt and then her coat, trying not to press on them too hard with her own mittened hands. Please be okay, please be okay.

  “I should have never left you on the ice like that,” Gina whispered. “I’m sorry, Poppy.”

  “It’s okay,” said Poppy. “Elizabeth was there.”

  PIGEON CREEK

  Ruby was no shrinking violet. She knew Jake was sneaking off in the night, but she didn’t know what she could do about it. She knew it, not because he would have otherwise been sneaking into her house—God, her father owned hunting rifles!—but because he was suddenly perpetually yawning. His eyelids were constantly drooping over his sea-foam-green eyes, like two sagging window shades blocking a view of the beach.

  She would have been hard-pressed to miss something like that, even from landlocked Colorado.

  Ruby loved Jake’s eyes more than anything else about him because they were uncomplicated. Even when she’d been very young, before she’d understood what a crush was, Jake’s eyes had made her giddy, as if she could swan-dive into them.

  But they also always gave him away.

  “You look beat,” she said, tossing her homemade felted backpack into the backseat of his white VW Bug.

  Every other teenage boy in Pigeon Creek owned a pickup truck and used words like “gas guzzler,” “big bed,” “bucket of bolts,” and other manly terms to describe their alter egos. Jake was not like the other boys in Pigeon Creek. He was confident enough to drive around in a car called a Beetle, for starters.

  Her father watched from the kitchen window. Ruby said nothing to Jake about the fight they’d just had, how her father had said that her music was awful and to turn it down.

  “What are you trying to do, dance with the devil?” he’d asked tersely.

  He could have been talking about her music or her boyfriend, actually.

  She didn’t tell Jake that she’d slammed the door in her father’s face. She didn’t need to widen the chasm between Jake and her father. Truthfully, she would have liked it if they got along. She loved her dad. Usually, their relationship was not a door-slamming kind. But it seemed they were both feeling edgy these days.

  Jake yawned and didn’t respond to her comment about how he looked. Lately, much of what Ruby said barely registered with him, as if he was always somewhere else, even when he was sitting right next to her.

  “Dad says you should get the muffler fixed,” she said as he turned the key in the ignition.

  Right on cue, at the sound of the muffler, Priscilla—or was that Ophelia?—lifted her head from the blackberry brambles that clung to the wooden fence. Ruby’s father’s goats were the only things that could tame the ornery plant.

  Ruby marveled at the idea of a mouth that could chomp blackberry thorns like a Weedwacker.

  And then for no reason other than she was suspicious, Ruby thought about Martha Hollister. Martha had a mouth like a Weedwacker, and a body like a hooker, said a little voice in the back of her head.

  Martha also swore like a sailor, laughed with teachers like they were her peers, and ignored the boys in her class at Pigeon Creek as if they were grapes withering on the vine. Probably because she had thickets of ripe, juicy, thorny boys somewhere else to snack on. Martha was only a sophomore, and yet Ruby knew
that sophomore Martha Hollister had already made her way through the entire class of eligible senior boys at Pigeon Creek High School. Everyone knew.

  Jake was not eligible, but what happens when you’ve finished with all the blackberry bushes, the ones you were allowed to have? Well, if her father’s goats were any example, you moved on to the perennial patch or even the clothesline. Nothing was off-limits. Ophelia had once gorged herself on Ruby’s father’s long red woolen underwear and hadn’t even choked on the buttons.

  God, Martha Hollister, you indiscriminate little goat.

  Ruby glanced over at Jake, but he was concentrating on driving through half-open eyelids. She had an urge to grab the roll of duct tape from his glove box and use it to stick his eyelids to his forehead. He’d had a whole extra hour of sleep yesterday because they’d turned the clocks back for daylight saving time. What the hell?

  He’d also forgotten to kiss her good morning.

  * * *

  —

  Jake could see Ruby squirming in the seat next to him, even though he could barely keep his eyes open. He liked to joke about how he could drive around Pigeon Creek blindfolded, but the truth was, even old people who’d spent their whole lives in this town couldn’t do that. The town was an obstacle course of right angles, and the only thing that saved people from dying on blind corners was the fact that the speed limit was something like negative ten. People here didn’t drive: they crawled.

  He wanted to tell Ruby, but every time he thought he was really going to do it, she’d do something so sweet and familiar he couldn’t bring himself to lower the hammer. That was exactly how he thought of it: as lowering the hammer and shattering everything they’d shared over the past four years. And all the years before that, if anyone was counting. He’d known Ruby all his life.

  His best friend was sitting next to him, bouncing around like she had to go to the bathroom, and he knew exactly what she was thinking. She always wriggled when she was mad and didn’t know how to tell him. That was love, wasn’t it? All of it: the knowing, the not talking, the weird moving around in her seat…How do you just walk away from that?

  But then, how do you not sneak out and tap on the window of a beautiful girl who’s willing to do anything—anything—when you’re a teenage boy who can’t see straight because you’re bored out of your mind living in a town the size of a peanut, driving like a senior citizen? It was 1995, but Pigeon Creek was stuck in a time warp. Of course you’re going to go off the rails sooner or later.

  Martha Hollister was the fast-moving train that had come to town so the boys of Pigeon Creek could realize that speed limits are simply suggestions.

  But the thing he really wanted to tell Ruby about was the moose.

  Until last night, Jake had only ever seen moose in the national park. But at two a.m., lying naked next to Martha in that strange bottle gazebo her mother had grouted together in their backyard (who were these people?), he had heard the sound of alders being pulled from the ground and the chomp, chomp, chomping of a moose having a midnight snack.

  Jake had wondered briefly if glass bottles were enough of a barrier between them and an angry mama moose—he did not want to die naked—when he’d jumped up to see just how close they were and peered out through a square Bombay Sapphire gin bottle that was just at his eye level. The brown eye staring back at him from the other side looked like a cold, wet marble. It blinked, and then from somewhere deeper came a low, rumbling cacophony of regurgitated alders. The moose had actually burped. Then it turned unceremoniously and went back to chomping branches.

  Martha, lying naked on the gray woolen blanket spread out across the dirt floor, had laughed like a hyena.

  Ruby wouldn’t have laughed like that. But Ruby wouldn’t have been naked on the cold ground either.

  By the time he pulled into the school parking lot, he knew he would ditch his first-period class to go sleep and he would not tell Ruby that he was ditching class, or that he’d snuck out to visit Martha Hollister. Or, worst of all, that a burping moose had made him remember his girlfriend while he was messing around with someone else.

  Ruby was normally the only person he could talk to, but certainly not about this and definitely not now.

  Because as Ruby got out of the car and swung her bag (why did she have to felt everything?) over her shoulder, he saw her staring at Martha Hollister, who had just walked up to the curb with boots that were too high, a skirt that was too short, a laugh that was too loud.

  Martha glanced over at Jake and then coolly ran her eyes over him as if she owned him. She might as well have shouted through a megaphone. Ruby saw it and instantly she knew. And Jake knew she knew. Why were girls so goddamn telepathic?

  * * *

  —

  Martha tried to rearrange her face, but it was too late. She hadn’t meant to do it, honestly she hadn’t. Especially since the last thing she saw when she turned to walk nonchalantly past the flagstone with the words “Pigeon Creek High School” etched on it (Lord, why was every sign in this town etched in flagstone?) was Ruby throwing her felted bag back inside the car. Had she actually hit Jake in the side of the head with it before getting in herself? He did not look at Ruby, nor did he look at Martha. He stared straight ahead, like a man going to his own funeral.

  Martha heard the door slam and then she heard the muffler, the same muffler she strained to hear late at night. Even though Jake had parked a block away, that rattly sound like fate laughing at its own joke was her cue to dab a tiny bit of gardenia perfume on both her wrists and behind her ears, the very middle of her neck. In the time it took to do this, two quick taps would sound on her window. It had become practically routine; why shouldn’t she glance at Jake at school as if she could eat him for breakfast? They’d been doing this all summer, and he said he was going to tell Ruby anyway. The clock was ticking.

  The perfume had been a going-away gift from her friend Jane when she left California. Nobody here had it. The girls here wouldn’t have known what to do with gardenia perfume, if Martha was being honest.

  That’s right, honest, not mean.

  Martha wrote Jane letters about Pigeon Creek and Jane wrote back, “Oh my God, you poor thing, you have stepped back into the 1940s.”

  But Martha didn’t feel sorry for herself. She was the most thrilling thing to happen to Pigeon Creek in years, and that was not lost on her. She floated down the hallways of her new school like a fairy from a foreign land as the denim sea parted to let her through (cowboy boots and cowboy hats, denim jeans and jackets—she’d never seen so much denim in her life), knowing she was turning heads with her knee-high leather boots and her shimmery short skirts.

  Martha had told Jane when she left that she was going to take this place by storm. And by God, she had.

  The only problem was Ruby. If Martha had been more charitable, she would have felt sorry for the token hippie of Pigeon Creek, but she could only shake her head and laugh at the idea that felting everything wool a person owned and wearing clothes like billowing circus tents made you a hippie. And then there was the fringe. God: So. Much. Fringe. But worse, Ruby wore her hair in two long braids. How old was she, five?

  * * *

  —

  It didn’t help that Jake had been dating Ruby, the hippie wannabe, for years before Martha had arrived in Pigeon Creek.

  History is a difficult thing to dismantle, unless you’re a dictator.

  Glancing at them in Jake’s VW Bug—a car she had never ridden in herself, now that she thought about it—Martha thought she might actually love Jake. He wasn’t like any of those other boys, and there was something both thrilling and terrifying in that realization. If she loved him, then she had something to lose, and that scared her more than anything.

  Okay, maybe she shouldn’t have given him “the look.” She would apologize tonight when he came by. Maybe he was cutting it off wit
h Ruby right now. Because Jake loved Martha back, didn’t he? Well, she would apologize anyway. She slid into her desk and pulled out her Webster’s dictionary, also a gift from Jane.

  Apology: a written or spoken expression of remorse, sorrow, or regret for having wronged, insulted, failed, or injured another.

  Hmmm, that didn’t sound right.

  Next definition: Apology: An inferior specimen or substitute; makeshift.

  Yes, that was it. Ruby was a sad apology for a girlfriend. Jake was going to dump her any minute.

  Martha told herself again she was just being honest, not mean. She closed the dictionary and flipped her hair forward, adjusting her headband, aware that all her classmates’ eyes were on her as they filed into the room.

  She would have felt guilty if she had anything to feel guilty about.

  * * *

  —

  Jake drove Ruby in silence, unsure where they were heading. There weren’t a lot of options—this was Pigeon Creek, after all. And since Jake was having the worst day of his life, of course Ruby’s father just happened to be walking down the sidewalk toward them. Oh God, it was like a slow-motion train wreck.

  The closer they got, the deeper the frown line in her father’s forehead grew. Ruby gave him the tiniest nod to say she was all right but not great. Her father’s radar for her was so finely tuned, he’d pull Jake out of the moving car and beat the shit out of him if she gave even the smallest indication that it was warranted.

  Jake certainly deserved it. But no, she’d deal with him herself.

  “Keep driving,” she said. “Whatever you have to say, it would be best to say it far from my father.”

  Even if she was heading away from school, her dad trusted her. He’d know she had a good reason. She’d explain later.