Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town

by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

  “Mom, do you miss playing ball?”

  She looked like she was thinking hard about whether to answer.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  “What do you miss most?”

  “Are you trying to distract me? You are not getting out of this, Kelsey.”

  “As if, Mom. I’m not that dumb. I honestly want to know.”

  “Hmmmm. Well, I loved that feeling you get, you know the one? When the whole team is like a well-oiled machine and you execute a play like clockwork. I can still feel that sometimes, watching you girls. Watching each person like a cog in a machine, doing what it takes for the whole thing to come together. It’s like magic. I love that.”

  “But if you were all alone, just playing say, by yourself, and nobody watched, would you love it?”

  Her mother glanced at her as if this was a trick question.

  “Want to know a secret? That I’ve never told anyone?”

  Kelsey shrugged. Yes, she desperately wanted to know a secret.

  “I loved it so much. I used to sleep with my arm around the basketball, just so I could breathe in that dirty orange-leather smell.”

  “That’s your secret?” Kelsey was a little disappointed.

  “No, that’s not it.”

  She pulled the car to the side of the road and put it in park. Then she turned to face Kelsey, wincing a little as her hip twisted underneath her.

  “This is my secret: Sometimes I feel so guilty that we loved it so much, we didn’t want it to end. And we keep living out that thing we can’t let go of through our children, trying to make it last. But I wonder sometimes if it’s fair, this thing we do.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve watched you your whole life. Your talent is beyond believable, and I tell myself, She’s got such a gift. But sometimes I look at your face while you’re out there, and I wonder.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just wonder who you’re doing it for. See you looking around a lot. And I think, My baby is too concerned about what other people think. I don’t see you feeling it the way I felt it. Like it’s magic.”

  “It just doesn’t feel like magic when I’m so worried about letting my own father down. It’s like his job is at stake if I make a mistake. What’s the fun in that?”

  “Honey, I do hear you. That makes perfect sense, so—”

  She was going to say something else, but Kelsey cut her off.

  “Can you be good at something and maybe not love it?”

  “Is this about something Lillian said?”

  “No. I mean, I thought so once. But this is about me. I’ve been wondering more about doing what I love and not just going along with what everyone expects. But it’s hard to separate the two.”

  Wind was blowing dust and tumbleweeds across the road. It had become almost normal, to live amid swirly gray ash, smelling smoke. Normal is whatever you grow used to, like wildfires choking the life out of everything. Or a town that lives through its children, over and over again, until nobody remembers a time when that wasn’t the case.

  “Your dad’s been trying to talk to you all day.”

  “I know. I know I’m in trouble for skipping out on practice.”

  “No. No, you’re not.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well, he wanted to tell you himself, but I’ll just nip this one in the bud. He’s not going to ref this season.”

  “Why not?”

  Not ref? That was like saying her father would no longer need his organs.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “So you can have a senior year like a normal person. It’s too much pressure, having your dad be the one that makes the calls. And you just said so yourself, so obviously he’s not stupid.”

  “So he’s giving up what he loves for me?”

  “I think you are what he loves, Kelsey.”

  Kelsey leaned into her then, breathing into her mom’s neck, which actually did smell a bit like old basketball leather.

  Just when she thought she might start crying, her mom said, “Now, enough of this nonsense. Come on, you’re going to be late for your first shift.”

  Kelsey had hoped she might have forgotten all about the U-Pump-It and Jimmy Jeffs, but of course, that would have made her someone else’s mother.

  “Excuse me, what shift?”

  “You heard me. I told JJ you’d be working for him the rest of the summer, which by my count is about fifty-seven more days, so a penny a day and you’ll have paid off that debt.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Honey, after those Wyoming girls got done with me, that’s about all I have left,” she said, laughing and steering the car back onto the road. A tumbleweed stuck to the undercarriage made a scratching sound along the pavement, like background music in a horror movie, which Kelsey felt was appropriate.

  “We will love you until the end of time no matter what you do,” she said, “but my children will not steal. And don’t you forget it.”

  Kelsey thought back to her brother complaining about the game they were made to sit out in the cold car, because of the racist mascot. She did not want to have to see Jimmy Jeffs every day, but you had to hand it to her mother when she said, “There are some things more important than you being comfortable.” She meant it.

  ALASKA WAS WASTED ON US

  “Your camper pooped his pants and threw them in a tree,” Amy says to Fiona.

  “Oh God, was it Nick?”

  “Yeah. His brother, Franky, said he was going to try to hold it all week, but he couldn’t. I think he’s pretty terrified of the outhouses. Especially the one named Forget-Me-Not.”

  Fiona is sure Nick is terrified of all the outhouses—Lupine, Fireweed, Foxglove. Whoever had come up with the brilliant idea to name them after wildflowers didn’t have a clue about six-year-olds.

  “Can you help me get them down?” asks Fiona, staring into the branches.

  “I have nineteen other campers to worry about right now,” says Amy in an agitated tone.

  “Right,” says Fiona. “I’ve got it.”

  Amy is obviously still mad at her about losing their jobs at Dairy Queen. But she’ll come around; she always does. Fiona just needs to be patient. She wishes Amy were more grateful, though, that Fiona found them both positions here at Camp Wildwood for the summer, even if they are totally unqualified.

  Camp counselors needed, Alaskans preferred. Outdoor experience a plus but not necessary.

  “Look, we tick all the boxes!” she’d said, showing Amy the ad.

  “Especially the ‘no outdoor experience necessary’ box,” said Amy sarcastically. “Have you forgotten that the outdoors is full of mosquitoes, Fiona? And also, I hate children.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Fiona. “You were one yourself once.”

  She couldn’t understand why Amy cared so much about Dairy Queen anyway. Greasy fast food with perverts for coworkers? She should really be thanking Fiona.

  Although, now that she’s standing under the branches of a spruce tree dying from beetle kill and staring up at Nick’s jeans, Fiona is almost nostalgic for her plaid uniform with the little bobble on the cap. And she loves Peanut Buster Parfaits more than she loves other people’s kids, though she definitely doesn’t hate kids. And neither does Amy, she thinks as she finally manages to retrieve the soiled green jeans with a long broom handle. She takes them to the staff cabin to wrap in a plastic garbage bag. They’ll need to go in a bear-proof container until the end of camp. If they haven’t disintegrated by then.

  Lillian, a counselor from Montana, is sitting alone at a table writing postcards. She glances up, gives Fiona half a wave, and keeps writing.

  Fiona smiles. Lillian is such a relief. She has no secret agenda like several of the other counselors fr
om the Lower 48, who are either environmental activists or animal-rights activists or some other kind of activist that Fiona and Amy hadn’t even known existed. Like the girl who said pulling carrots out of the ground was cruel.

  Fiona had thought she was joking and had laughed hysterically until Amy jabbed her in the ribs with her finger.

  “You didn’t have to poke me so hard,” said Fiona.

  “Well, you were giving her the stand-up comic of the year award with that laugh. You needed more than a nudge.”

  Anyway, thank goodness for Lillian. She’s easygoing, funny, helpful—as long as nobody asks her to bring her campers to the basketball courts.

  Fiona had asked her what she had against basketball and Lilian had just rolled her eyes and said, “Basically everything.”

  The kids love it, though, because almost all Alaskan kids love basketball.

  “Something for the bear container,” Fiona says, waving the garbage bag at Lillian.

  Lillian covers her nose.

  “Yeah, if I were a bear, I’d be all over that.”

  Then she goes back to her postcards.

  Finn, from Colorado, comes out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee and nods at Fiona. She doesn’t trust him, mainly because he’s really, really cute in a swoony kind of way, and he knows it. He ties his long hair up in a man bun and wears a headlamp, even though it’s light all night and nobody needs a headlamp.

  “Habit,” he said when someone asked him about it.

  Fiona cannot imagine a scenario where anyone would need to wear a headlamp so often that it became a habit.

  What is he, a coal miner? A mole?

  He points to the garbage bag. “Maybe we should hide those pants and map the coordinates, see if the kids can find them with a compass before a bear does.”

  “What do you mean, ‘map the coordinates’?”

  The look on his face reminds Fiona that she doesn’t fit in the Alaskan brochures Finn and the others read before heading north. Every time she or Amy asks a question, they get the same response, as if being from Alaska means they are supposed to know everything about the outdoors, from dog mushing to kayaking at night to rebuilding the engine of a bush plane.

  “Are you kidding?” says Finn. “I thought Alaskan kids learned how to use a compass in utero.”

  “Whoa, there, Mr. Know-It-All,” says Lillian suddenly. “Did you forget to get off your high horse before you tied it up at the barn?”

  “Sorry, I’m just surprised,” he says. “I’m out.” He makes a motion like an umpire at home plate, switches on his unnecessary headlamp, and backs out of the lodge.

  “Thanks for that,” says Fiona.

  “Don’t worry about it. I get enough of that attitude back home. Small towns, you know? Everybody’s an expert.”

  “Yeah, Alaska’s basically just a really big small town. I get it.”

  She really should learn to use a compass, though. Fiona adds it to the list of things she didn’t know she was supposed to know in order to survive.

  “Are you going to do something with that, by the way?” Lillian points at Nick’s pants. Fiona can’t believe she’s still holding the bag.

  “Yep, going. I’m out.” She mimics Finn’s impression of an ump calling a play and is happy to see Lillian crack a smile.

  Are they even worth saving? Is Nick’s mom really going to want them back in another week?

  Nick and Franky’s mom, Nightingale, is a folk singer who is spending her free summer days at festivals without her sons, singing about wagon wheels and things blowing in the wind. Most of the counselors at Wildwood are of the folk-singing variety. Even Finn was mesmerized by Nightingale’s tiny sandaled feet and the way her flowery dress was just see-through enough to accentuate both her hairy legs and the fact that she did not believe in underwear.

  But even more noticeable to Fiona was how quickly Nightingale had dropped off her kids. When Fiona mentioned this while on KP duty, the cook, who was thirty, said, “When you’re a parent you can have an opinion, but at seventeen you don’t know shit.”

  Cook was rummaging through a box of vegetables Nightingale had dropped off when she’d also dropped off her boys.

  “Would you just take a look at this organic broccoli from her garden.”

  Fiona knew a lot about delinquent parents, actually, if anybody cared to ask. Which they didn’t.

  “Nobody has broccoli growing by mid-June,” she said to Amy as they made their way to the water spigot that night, slapping mosquitoes off each other’s cheeks and arms while they walked.

  “Maybe Nightingale has a greenhouse.”

  Amy held out her brush and Fiona squeezed a dab of Crest onto both their bristles.

  “Maybe people just believe what they want to believe,” she said.

  Amy pumped the spigot, splashing water on Fiona’s sneakers.

  “Well, you’d know all about that,” said Amy.

  She spit toothpaste into a patch of devil’s club.

  “What?” said Fiona.

  “Nothing, never mind.”

  Amy was not acting like herself. She had always let everything roll off her back so easily—this just didn’t make sense. Fiona and Amy’s friendship had lasted this long because Amy wasn’t melodramatic or selfish. Even the day they met, their first day of preschool, Amy had been the one to let Fiona know she had her back.

  Amy had been wearing brightly colored tights with polka dots on them, and Fiona’s had been just a muddy brown that she hated. She’d dipped them into the toilet and pretended to cry. When the teachers tried to console her, she’d pointed at Amy’s tights and said, “I wish I had those.”

  Amy took off her polka-dotted tights and handed them over, right then and there.

  “My Momo put extras in my cubby anyway,” she said. Fiona had been baffled, but also pleased. She’d looked into Amy’s wide green eyes, searching for some hidden motive beyond kindness, which in her four short years she had not seen a whole lot of. When you are raised by alcoholics, you learn quickly how to get things in a slanted sort of way but are leery when you succeed.

  The day Amy had simply blinked knowingly at Fiona and given her the tights, as if to say “I don’t know why you have to do it this way, but okay,” became something of a pattern as the years went by.

  Everything about Amy’s life was the opposite of Fiona’s. She had a nice Momo who lived with her family and made Amy interesting lunches. Her parents didn’t drink too much, and they gave Fiona a curfew if she slept over, just like Amy’s. “We care about you,” Amy’s father said. “We don’t want you out wandering the streets at night. We’d never get any sleep.”

  Fiona’s own family rarely lost any sleep worrying about her. The only person who’s even sent her a card here at camp is Amy’s Momo. It’s in her back pocket now as she makes her way down to the waterfront with Nick’s pants. Amy is supposed to be waiting by the bear container with all their campers. The counselors work in pairs, two for twenty kids, switching every week so nobody is always stuck with the six-year-olds. Fiona is relieved that she didn’t get paired up with a counselor from Outside.

  She passes a group of older kids, who appear to be writing letters in the arts and crafts tent. Scattered among them are pictures of bunnies and razors and some other disturbing images that look like indistinguishable bloody blobs. One of the girls is crying; her friend is patting her gently on the shoulders.

  “I know it’s hard to see,” their counselor, Maggie, from Pennsylvania, is saying, “but that’s why we have to write and let these companies know we want them to stop testing their products on animals.”

  “Hi,” says Fiona. “What’re you guys doing?”

  “Letter-writing campaign to razor companies,” Maggie says without looking up.

  “Razor companies?”

  �
��Yes. They use bunnies to test their products, and sometimes the animals die in the process.”

  “Oh. Wow.”

  “My dad hunts rabbits,” says Evan, one of the few kids who are at camp because their parents thought it might actually be fun.

  Fiona remembers Amy trying to tell Maggie at orientation that there might be a different standard here, regarding animals and, um, hunting and…But she’d trailed off when Maggie gave her a bony stare and informed Amy that she was also vegan.

  “I like that black lipstick,” Amy had said. “The color really suits you.”

  “What’s a vegan?” Fiona had whispered later as they walked to their cabins.

  “No idea,” said Amy, “but I don’t think they eat real food.”

  Fiona smiled at Evan now, willing him with her eyes to stop talking.

  “And how do you think rabbits feel about being hunted?” Maggie asked him.

  Evan looked confused.

  “I guess I never thought about it.” He looked at Fiona for help. “They’re kind of overpopulating and they taste good?”

  “How would you like it if someone talked about you that way?” Maggie snapped.

  Evan blinked and looked even more confused by the idea that he might overpopulate and taste good boiled in a pot.

  “That’s what we’re doing here. We’re thinking about poor, defenseless animals and how they feel.”

  Fiona gave Evan what she hoped was an encouraging smile. Time to get going.

  Fireweed lines the trail, but it hasn’t yet begun to bloom. Camp won’t be over until it’s topped off, when the pink flowers turn to white cottony puffs and blow away. Fiona wonders if her energy for this job will top off before the fireweed does, or before the mosquitoes have sucked all the blood from her body.

  She stares out at the ice-cold turquoise lake fed by a glacier that hangs between two mountains overlooking camp. From here, the small bodies of the campers look even smaller, splashing around in the blue-green water as if it’s a heated pool. One thing about Alaska kids, they are pretty tough. Or maybe they have no idea that not everyone swims in frigid water.