Chapter 1
Nothing in Heaven or Hell
Two days before our house blew up; I woke to the smell of bacon. I had just had the dream again; the one with the sevens, but that hardly mattered now. I shot straight up in bed and took a whiff. Was that sausage too?
This was not good.
For most people, waking up to the smell of breakfast cooking on the stove probably wasn’t cause for concern. It might even be normal, but my mom wasn’t exactly the ‘normal’ sort. In addition to what I could only describe as her lifelong ‘Hatfield and McCoy-esque’ feud with all kitchen appliances, she had a pretty demanding job.
As the head of the nursing department at St. Vincent’s, she was always rocking a pair of really awesome scrubs and kept pretty weird hours. Usually, she was gone from seven ‘til seven, but three days a week, she was on call. So anytime, day or night, the phone could ring and she’d have to rush back into the hospital. And if the emergency was big enough, like if there was a bus crash or something, she’d have to go whether she was on call or not. Sometimes I didn’t see her for days at a time. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the last home cooked meal I got was sometime around the start of the Bush administration.
I threw the covers aside and started downstairs, combing knots of sleep from my short blond hair. I was halfway down the stairs, about to ask my mom what act of God forced the spatula into her hand, when I saw Casper. Sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of bacon and eggs lifted parallel with his face, he was shoveling the contents into his mouth with a fork.
“Hey Cresta,” he said when he saw me, mumbling through what looked like a pound of food.
I was still in my pajamas. Today they were oversized flannel pants that, while looking like something a lumberjack would wear, were insanely comfortable. I paired them with a ratty Avengers tee that I won for being the 1,000th customer at the new Hot Topic in Newton. Usually, I would be less than excited for a guy to see me like this. My hair was a mess; I was still sporting my sleepy face, and I didn’t even have foundation on.
Casper wasn’t a regular guy though. Since I moved to Crestview a couple of years ago, Casper had been my best friend. A makeup free face was nothing for us. Besides, it wasn’t like that between us. We were friends, buddies, nothing else.
“Hey,” I said, and motioned toward my mother with a confused look on my face.
He shrugged. “You got me,” he answered, and plopped two more eggs onto his plate. “I’m not complaining though.”
“Did you sleep here?” I asked, settling beside him and grabbing a piece of bacon from his plate. I bit into it. It was salty and basically raw, exactly what you would imagine from someone who only cooked once a decade. Still, it was better than nothing.
“Yeah.” He grabbed two more pieces of bacon, apparently more in love with it than I was. “In your car. My dad was being a giant glowing dildo.”
“Casper! Language!” Mom shouted from over her skillet, where she was salting some funky looking gray meat.
“What? Did I not conjugate?” He shrugged.
“You could have come inside,” I said, bumping his shoulder with my own. “You know the couch has always got your name on it.”
I meant that both figuratively and literally as; late last year, Casper and I carved our names into the undercarriage of my living room couch. I don’t know why we did it. It’s just; Casper never really had what you’d call a stable home life. He was with odds with his dad every other day and, even when things were good, I always got the feeling that he thought he was invisible, like he didn’t matter.
I guess I wanted to show him that he did, even if it was just at the bottom of a couch.
“I don’t want to be that weird guy who sleeps on your couch,” he said through another forkful of food, pushing wild red hair messily out of his eyes.
“You’d rather be the guy who breaks into my Jetta?” I asked.
“Absolutely not!” He said. “I would never do that. I had keys made to that thing ages ago.”
I found orange juice, apple juice, and cranberry juice cocktail (the name brands!), along with half gallons of both chocolate and regular milk. Someone had been shopping.
“What the hell is going on here?” I turned to Mom, closing the fridge door without choosing anything.
“What do you mean?” She asked, spooning the gray looking meat into an equally sketchy looking white fluff.
“Somebody took the tumble weed out of the fridge,” I answered.
She smiled. “We needed groceries.”
“Since when? You don’t cook.”
“Maybe I’ll start.” She flipped half of the white fluff over the gray meat, creating a sort of a silver storm cloud of disgusting.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Making an omelet,” she beamed, and scooped the mess onto a clean plate beside her.
I walked closer. Either it didn’t smell as bad as I imagined it would or I was so stunned by what was going on in front of me that I wasn’t thinking straight. “An omelet?” I repeated. Touching her arm, I asked, “Are you on drugs?”
She grinned, but there was darkness beneath her smile, and I knew why. “Don’t joke about that Cresta,” she said. “It’s just that, you know—“
Her phone started ringing. I sighed and backed away. Nobody ever called Mom’s phone; nobody except the hospital.
She picked it up, said “You got it,” and slid it back into the satchel across her waist, the only place she put anything when she wore her scrubs (which was all the time).
“How long have you even been home?” I asked. Not that it mattered. I already knew what she was going to say.
“There was a bus accident.” She already had her jacket on and was halfway out the door.
It was always something; a bus accident, a three car pileup, a French influenza outbreak. But Mom didn’t care. She helped people, it was her job. She always said, “If people are in trouble, I need to be at work.”
She was fierce; determined. It was the thing about her I admired the most. It was also the thing that was going to keep me from seeing her until at least tonight.
“Can you make sure the burners are off?” She called to me from the door. “There’s cash on top of the television if you need it for lunch. There’s some there for you too, Casper.”
“Thanks Mrs. Karr,” he waved and took a swig of orange juice.
“Take care of each other, and don’t forget your inhaler. I’ll see you when I see you, sweetheart.”
I smiled and she closed the door.
She called ten minutes later to remind me not to be late for school, but there was no need. Casper and I were already a quarter of a mile down the road. He drove while I stuffed Pizza boxes and Dr. Pepper cans into a trash bag, the calling card of any night Casper spent in my car. DeSoto High was ten minutes from my house, five if Casper was driving, and school didn’t start for another half hour. Still, I was in a hurry. I wanted to get there early, and not just to study for the ‘pop’ quiz everyone knew Mr. Jenkins was going to give because it was the second Thursday of the month.
Before I could bring it up though, Casper took the conversation in a different direction.
“Is Mrs. Goolsby a slut?” He asked.
“Mrs. Goolsby is eighty six years old and on dialysis. I don’t think she has the energy to be a slut.”
“It’s just, look at that.” He pointed to her house. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. It seemed normal to me. Sure the paint was flaking a little; revealing specks of white under its coat of brown, and the yard was a little overgrown. But that was nothing out of the ordinary, especially for a widow whose children were grown and gone.
“What am I looking at? If Mom didn’t handcuff me to the lawnmower every other Saturday, our house would look just like that.”
“Not the house,” he said, looking out over his black rimmed glasses. “The car.”
At the edge of her yard, a black Sedan sat inches f
rom the curb. The windows were pitch black and it idled softly.
“So she bought a car,” I said. Didn’t seem so strange to me.
“But she didn’t. That’s the thing. Whenever my dad kicks me out and I have to ‘borrow’ the inside of your car,” he put air quotes around the ‘borrow’. “I get a clear view of Mrs. Goolsby’s house. Every night, without fail, a car pulls up and some random dude walks in.”
“Maybe she has a friend,” I said. As gross as the thought of Mrs. Goolsby having a ‘special friend’ was, it was also kind of sweet.
“You know, I saw this thing on TV the other day about gigolos. Apparently these dudes make house calls and stuff. I bet Mrs. Goolsby-“
“Ew!” I threw an empty Dr. Pepper can at Casper’s head.
Mrs. Goolsby with a gigolo? There was nothing sweet about that.
He shrinked away laughing. “What? You were thinking it too.”
“Actually, I was thinking you spend way too much time in my car.”
I looked back at Mrs. Goolsby’s house in the rearview as we were about to turn onto Maple. The black Sedan was gone.
“I’m going to tell him,” I said, tying the junk food filled garbage bag and tossing it into the backseat. I was careful not to look at Casper. I knew what he was going to say.
“Not a good idea Cress,” he squealed into the school parking lot. Wow, he made it in four minutes this time. He left skid marks across the blacktop when he jerked into a space and I shot him a harrowing look.
“I’m an excellent driver. I know.” Casper pulled the keys from the ignition, thumped them toward me, and stepped out. I followed, but he hadn’t stopped talking so, by the time I tossed the garbage and caught up with him, all I heard was the word ‘girlfriend’.
That was enough.
“Barely,” I said. “Owen barely has a girlfriend.”
“How can you barely have a girlfriend? You either do or you don’t,” Casper said, pulling a stick of gum from his pocket. It’s like he constantly had to have something in his mouth.
It was still early enough that the parking lot was pretty much empty. In a few minutes, the morning rush would begin, and the place would fill up- Well, as much as anything filled up in Crestview. Once the other students got here though, I’d have to be more careful. I didn’t want my secret feelings for Owen going public, at least not until I got a chance to talk to him about them first.
For now though, I could be as animated as I wanted. I jerked in front of Casper. He didn’t stop, so we ended up walking toward the school face to face, with me walking backwards.
“Unless the girlfriend in question lives on the other side of the country. Hell, maybe she doesn’t exist at all. He could have made her up. I mean, have you ever seen a picture of her?”
I knew I wasn’t making any sense. Owen wouldn’t make up a girlfriend, but I wanted it to be true so badly that I figured I’d throw it out there anyway.
I had been in Crestview about a week and a half when Owen moved here. I later found out from Casper that that was the first time two families had moved into town so closely since ‘probably forever’.
Now I’m not one for kismet or anything, but you have to admit, as signs go, that’s a pretty good one. We became fast friends, not in the way Casper and I became friends. I could tell Casper anything. I could divulge my deepest secrets to him. There was no way I could talk to Owen like that, not when he had eyes that were deep blue pools and a smile that was electric.
He was so much like me. We both came her from big cities; Sacramento for him, and Chicago for me. He seemed just as out of place as I did in Crestview; a farming community with dirt roads, no red lights, and a grand total of one general store.
Maybe that was why everyone shied away from us at first. Only Casper, who himself would tell you how he stuck out in this place ‘like Lindsay Lohan in an Amish church’ took a liking to us. It didn’t matter to us though. Owen and I always found things to do.
Some nights we’d sit beside the long abandoned railroad tracks talking about how much we missed the sound of traffic. The third Tuesday of every month, when the Christ Methodist Church played G rated movies on their outdoor projector; we’d sit in the back and watch Pulp Fiction on his IPhone.
It never failed though. Every time we got comfortable, John Travolta’s face would disappear, replaced by those horrible words: Merrin calling.
Merrin was undoubtedly the perfect girlfriend Owen had left back in California and, probably because I had the worst luck on the entire planet, she didn’t seem to have any intention of letting him go. Anytime it looked like Owen and I were headed out of the friend zone, anytime I dared to rest my head on his shoulder, anytime we managed a deep conversation, Merrin would give him a little ‘remember me’ ring.
Not that I had any reason to believe Merrin would be threatened by me. Though I had never seen a picture of her, from the way Owen talked, she was just shy of perfect. Which was infuriating because me and perfect, well; we weren’t even in the same county.
“You’re gonna back into Hernando,” Casper said, grabbing my arm and pulling me to a stop.
I pulled the inhaler from my pocket and took a whiff. I was out of breath. I must have been more nervous than I thought.
The ‘Hernando’ Casper was talking about wasn’t a teacher or student. It was a statue. Hernando DeSoto was some sort of Spanish explorer. He marched through Georgia a couple hundred years ago and set up shop here for a while. That was pretty much the only interesting that ever happened in Crestview, so they named the school after him and put up the statue.
It was probably nice when they erected it, about a thousand years ago. Now however, it was clear that, like the town itself, Hernando had seen better days.
What was presumably once the picture of a brave pioneer; a striking man with a Spanish flag in his hand, and his foot propped up on a rock sporting a devilish smirk on his face, was now all but gone. The bronze was dull and dingy. The statue’s sharp lines and edges had been flattened with time, and that devilish grin was barely a grin now at all.
“Forgive me Hernando,” I said, stuffing my inhaler back into my pocket. “Look,” my foot started tapping against the pavement. Yep, I was nervous. “Long distance relationships never work, not even in the movies.”
“That might be true, but it’s been working for them for about two years now,” Casper answered. The light tilt had vanished from his voice. “He has a girlfriend Cress, a girlfriend who is not you.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t want you to get hurt, and I don’t want things to get weird between you guys. Besides, if he doesn’t see how insanely awesome you are, he doesn’t deserve you.”
Okay, that was sweet, and there might even be some truth in it. But I wasn’t looking for sweet, and I wasn’t looking for anything to slow me down. It had taken me close to two years to work up the nerve to tell Owen how I felt about him. If I let Casper talk me out of it now, good intentions or not, I might never do it. And I couldn’t deal with that.
I ran a hand through my wavy blond hair, like I always did when I was trying to collect myself. “Look, I know you wanna protect me and everything.”
“It’s cause I’m a Southern gentleman,” he smiled. We both knew there were a couple freshman girls who might disagree with that, but I let it slide.
“Look at my hands, Casper.” They had traveled from my hair to the inside of my pockets.
“Hands in pockets,” he said.
“And what do hands in pockets mean?” I asked.
His mouth twisted crookedly. “It means there’s nothing in heaven or hell that’s gonna get through that thick head of yours.”
Casper knew me well enough to know that once I was set on something I was set. I looped my arm through his.
“I’ve gotta tell him. That way, either way, at least he’ll know. You know?”
“I know,” he answered, and squeezed my hand.
We walked together into the school. Pushing through the
doors, I turned to give Hernando one last glance, and saw what looked like the tinted black Sedan from Mrs. Goolsby’s passing slowly by.