When We Were 8

by catt dahman

  Nelwynn was set to graduate number one in the class as valedictorian, and everyone respected or envied her good grades. She tutored often, but even though she was naturally smart, she preferred the solitude of burying her nose in books and taking copious notes for tests, things she could hide away in. She liked to be with Jill, Angel, Cassie, and Meg, girls unlike her and, therefore, exciting and fun.

  Meg was a majorette and usually did solo routines because she was the only one who dared to use fire batons and show off her adventurous personality. She loved the attention she received when she twirled, flashed her long legs, and danced in her sequined uniforms. She wanted to be close to Tiffany, Sammie, and Jill but found herself closest to Whitney who was athletic. She never could decide if glamour and popularity were more valuable that athleticism.

  Angel had gained and lost weight and was still pasty and plain, but her sense of humor and wit made her enjoyable for the other girls to be around. She was on the prom committee, as well. She tried hard and found that while some still teased her about being chubby, she didn’t care very much anymore and smiled almost all the time. She called Nelwynn and Jill her best friends.

  Cassie dated the most often, and sometimes she dated the bad boys, so she had a bit of a bad reputation. She never seemed to care for gossip about her and was becoming as adventuresome as Meg, but in negative ways. She was the rebel and the only one who smoked; she loved her bad-girl image. Jill was her closest friend with Samantha as a second best.

  Jill was always at the top of the class but never number one. She didn’t date because the boys at school were more like brothers and buddies than anything. She, Nelwynn, and Angel never had dates, so when they could, the three went to movies and hung out together when their friends had dates, but she spent as much time with Tiffany and Samantha, Cassie and Nelwynn.

  If asked, Jill would have said that despite their differences, she felt closest to Tiffany and Cassie, opposites outwardly, but both as terrified of being vulnerable and alone as was Jill. Jill thought they were the two mentally strongest young women that she knew.

  But while they had closer friends within their clique, they were all best friends.

  The girls still went to the cabin as often as possible, but because their senior year was so busy and many were dating, months went by between visits to their favorite place, and only once during the year had they all been able to go.

  “What was the big topic?” Meg asked Jill.

  “I heard kids talking.”

  “And?” Meg felt impatient.

  “Jenny Jacobs. They still haven’t found her. I can’t imagine her running away.”

  “Why do you care? I hated that bitch.” Meg shook her head. Weeks before, Jenny had charmed Meg’s steady boyfriend, Eric, and after a drunken party held at one of the football player’s house, she had sex with him. Eric, a handsome football player with a less than stellar thinking capacity, was found out when Jenny bragged all over school a few weeks later.

  Jenny and Eric had gotten together a few times, but he called off the arrangement when he discovered it was too much stress to sleep with two girls. Besides a certain painful situation arose, one he knew was an unwanted gift from Jenny, who slept with every boy in town.

  When Meg heard, she confronted him, and his face went bright red, and he stuttered as he begged forgiveness, all but on his knees. Meg threw his class ring in a toilet that hadn’t been flushed after use; the water was dark yellow and dotted with tissue. Meg walked away, crying, and left Eric to get his ring out of the toilet of the girls’ bathroom.

  To Jenny’s dismay, Eric didn’t come running to her but yelled at her in front of a lot of the other kids at lunchtime and called her a slut. A day later, Jenny slapped Meg because Eric was angry and had embarrassed her and Meg was the only person Jenny could think of to hit. Such was the way immature female brains worked.

  Meg fought back, and there was a lot of hair pulling and scratching before teachers broke them apart and took them to the office. After the principal questioned everyone, including witnesses, Jenny was suspended two days, and Meg was let off with a stern warning.

  “But she’s just gone!” Jill said. “It’s crazy. Everyone is talking about it.” She took note that Meg used the past tense “I hated her” instead of “I hate her.”

  “She was the worst majorette,” Whitney said. “She was a klutz.”

  Jill heard the past tense again.

  Meg leveled her eyes on Jill and told her, “Jill, she slept with my boyfriend. She gave him that…that…embarrassing disease, and I had to take all that medicine. You know that. That was humiliating, having to tell my mother and then going to the doctor. I was so embarrassed.” She patted her reddish hair into place; her mother let her use hair color now, and Meg’s hair was more strawberry blonde than plain red.

  Jill was contrite. “I know. I hated that for you.” She had listened as Meg cried about losing Eric and then about Jenny and then about the VD and finally about having to tell her mother and see the doctor. Jill had thought Meg might never stop crying. Had the rest of the school known, it would have been horrible, but evidently, Eric kept the secret, too.

  Just a few days later, Meg had seemed to snap out of her depression and had started acting normal again.

  “Stupid bitch. She had no right to ruin my relationship with Eric and give me VD. And then she slapped me! I mean that she was a terrible person. If anyone deserved payback, it was Jenny Jacobs.”

  Jill was stunned. She wasn’t sure what that meant. The past weekend, Jill had been studying for a math test and writing an English paper, but Meg, Whitney, and Tiffany went to the cabin. Jill looked at Meg and then at Tiffany. “Payback?”

  Tiffany waved her hand. “Stop over thinking things, Jill. Jenny ran away or something. Who cares anyway? She’s gone. Half the kids here are useless.”

  Jill sighed. She wasn’t going to ask anything else. People did leave town, and maybe that was all this was; she didn’t want to know if there were more to the story. It was something she didn’t think she could handle. If anything had happened, the trio would tell the rest later when they were somewhere private.

  Jenny wasn’t found, and everyone decided she had run away because she was a little wild, and besides, the senior class had too much going on to worry about it for long. Only a few people mentioned Jenny after a few days anyway. Jill did try to ask again once, but Tiffany told her, “Payback. It’s been put away. Let it go. Remember? Once it’s put away, it’s gone. Over.”

  Jill tried to forget about Jenny and concentrate on everything else in her life as she sat in the library and read a passage again. She couldn’t concentrate on the book. She thought they had been involved in accidents and done things to bad people to protect and defend themselves, but if the others hurt Jenny, then that was something else. That was true revenge.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. At the cabin, Tiffany’s father read and taught from the Bible, and while he talked about all the good stuff like forgiveness and love, he also read about the way God was in the beginning. God even said He was a jealous, vengeful God and that He didn’t forgive and forget. He sent floods to kill all but a few people. He made sure whole cities were hit by balls of fire. She didn’t know if people should try to be like God.

  Meg’s father, the sheriff, always talked about bad guys and who was being executed in Texas. They liked when he told them about trials and the times he had testified and how a jury found the bad people guilty and how the judges pronounced the sentences.

  In a way, those were the same. God and Judges. Kind of.

  Jill’s father frequently ranted about people who mistreated animals and claimed dogs and cats were of more value that half the humans he knew. Years back when he heard Billy died in the fire, he told them how Cole Rhymer, an old farmer they knew, had cried like a baby when Bill Havilland couldn’t save his favorite cow after she was peppered by buckshot when the trashy boys were out finding trouble.

&n
bsp; The second he heard the bad boys were dead, he caught a mean look from his wife, but he muttered to Cassie and Jill that at least he would no longer have to see Cassie crying over a poisoned pet. Many times, he had watched dogs, puppies, cat, and kittens die of antifreeze poisoning, from the antifreeze that Billy had given to them. Cassie had sobbed hard over each, dehydrating herself.

  She was the reason he started keeping bottles of soda, water, and juice at the clinic along with his boxes of tissues.

  And Uncle Mike always spoke about justice and pruning the roses. He hinted at several more secrets but never again shared them, leaving the girls to wonder if he had been a vigilante of sorts.

  Four male figures that they spent a lot of time with at the cabin were always speaking of justice, revenge, right, and wrong. The problem was it was impossible to tell where one idea ended and the other one began, about the ethics, and about who exactly should be the heroes.

  Jill knew Whitney, Meg, and Tiffany had done something to Jenny. Instead of thinking about the poor girl and her sad family, Jill thought about the cabin and knew if the girls had left any signs, the eight of them might be asked about any evidence left there. Even if they were doing the best things under the circumstances, there was always a fear of being caught.

  Jill had a reoccurring dream that always terrified her. Hands curled into harpies’ claws, scratching and looking for weak parts of a cement slab. Hands trying to raise themselves out of a slab a house sat on. Jill was scared and added fresh concrete, afraid that someone would see. Afraid someone would know. How could she explain? The hands reaching, and if the head arose one night and the mouth appeared, what would the undead creature accuse her of.

  If they got caught, wouldn’t the sheriff possibly question them until they admitted what had happened to Billy and Tom? Then about John and Rex? Jill felt terrible, knowing that she was more concerned about getting caught than she was about the girl’s family mourning her disappearance. That was shallow, she decided.

  Stay buried, she begged them.

  “Is it that confusing?”

  Jill looked up. Charlie was a boy in a few of her classes, and he had never said more than two words to her. He had transferred a few weeks before when his family moved to town. She would have been irritated at the interruption, but he amused her with being so brave, and she was glad he interrupted her bad line of thought. She was near a bad place in her mind.

  “No, I can’t concentrate today, I guess.”

  “Clear your mind of all the junk by pretending to box it away, relax your entire body, and then take one word at a time.”

  Jill set the book down. “Do you ever do that? Just blank on what you’re reading?”

  “All the time.”

  “My mind is in other places,” Jill said.

  “You were pale and frowning. Bad places, I guess?”

  Jill nodded. “I was thinking about some nightmare that I have for some reason and then religions, law, and other stuff. It’s just me. Stress.”

  “That happens. Nightmares are the junk we have to let go. You know what to let go if you have them, right?”

  Jill considered that. “Exactly. It needs to be buried, so to speak,” she said as she smiled.

  “Can I sit down?” asked Charlie.

  “I guess. Sure.” If the book couldn’t take her mind off her concerns, then maybe Charlie could.

  Charlie took off his jacket and sat down. He wore jeans and a long sleeved sport shirt that was as green as his eyes. His dark hair was a little messy, and he had a funny accent.

  “Where’re you from again?”

  “Maine. I know I talk funny. To me, you sound funnier; everyone here does. Half the time I think you’re speaking another language,” he said as he laughed. “And you complain about the cold here? This is nothing compared to home.”

  “Other than that, do you like it here?” Jill asked.

  “It’s fine,” Charlie said. “It’s not wicked cool, as we say, but it’s okay. I’ve made a few friends.”

  “Friends help.”

  “I noticed yours at lunch. I admit it; I was looking,” he laughed. “You have a variety, don’t you?”

  “It’s obvious I do. Who’d think such unlikely girls would be best friends, right? Popular girls, brainiacs, an athlete, and the rest….”

  “I admit it’s interesting. The school isn’t huge so that could be a reason, but it still seems unusual. I guess it’s because you grew up together and have always been close? Or your parents are friends?” he asked as he frowned. “That doesn’t seem right though. I can’t see that as true.”

  “You’re weird. Do you always watch and analyze people and social groups?” Jill tempered her criticism with a smile. She liked talking to Charlie.

  He had to stop himself from laughing hard and disrupting the library’s calm. “I want to be a psychologist. I study people.”

  “What do you see in my group?” asked Jill since she was curious and knew that whatever he saw, it was nothing close to the truth.

  “I see Tiffany who is pretty, and she is snobby to most of the class. But she really seems loyal to her friends, and that tells me that, despite her cheerleading and snobbery, she has a fear of being alone.”

  “Impressive,” Jill said.

  “Samantha is the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think she knows it. She’s genuinely kind hearted, but there is something I can’t put my finger on. There’s a strength within her, and she’s probably one that people can count on in a scrape.”

  Jill nodded. “Nelwynn? Angel?”

  “Angel is self-conscious about her weight and compensates by being funny and outgoing, and she really wishes she could get male attention and approval. Nelwynn is a smart girl and also self-conscious about acting too nerdy. I can’t be sure, but there is something slightly uncommon about them, and I am guessing it could be some latent sexual interest or deep feelings between them.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope that doesn’t offend you.”

  Jill frowned “Not at all. I’ve actually wondered….” She didn’t finish because it felt disloyal to the girls, but she had seen hints that Angel and Nelwynn cared about one another as more than friends, but neither one hinted it was true, and Jill didn’t ask. She found Charlie’s observations fascinating. She motioned him to continue.

  “Whitney is a one-in-a-million. I know she has broken several state records, and we’ve talked some. She’s great. What you see is what you get, but she’s got a tough streak in her, too. She’d trip someone to win, I think.” He watched Jill’s face close over a little. “Or not.”

  “She’s tough. What about Meg and Cassie?”

  “I don’t want to piss you off.”

  “You won’t. I’m finding this fascinating. Go for it. I don’t offend easily unless you say something false or make fun of them.”

  “I’d never do that. Meg is pretty and bold, but she’s a bit wild. Boys talk. Cassie, too. But I think it’s because they are really strong and may be avoiding the problems they keep secret. I don’t know their problems because I’m not a mind-reader.”

  Jill smiled.

  “Best for last?”

  Jill felt uncomfortable. “Oh. Okay. And me?”

  “Unsure of yourself. Always feeling second. Never the first to do things but willing to go second. You’re smart and pretty, and you are very gracious, but you keep to yourself outside of your friends. I think you have secrets and are the most interesting of all.”

  Jill blushed. The part about secrets made her squirm uncomfortably, but the compliments were nice to hear. She wondered if Charlie were being serious, and she thought he meant what he said; he didn’t act as if he were feeding her a line. She dared to ask, “So you decided to talk to me and find out who I really am?”

  Charlie laughed again. It was a real laugh, and his eyes twinkled with mirth. “Sure. Why not try? The most you can do is turn me down for a movie date, right? My ego will be crushed, but
I’ll heal.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. I’d like to go out with you, but you’ll never discover all my secrets,” Jill promised. “If you even try, I won’t stay around you long. I don’t talk about deep, buried secrets.”

  “It might help you. Not to me. But to someone.”

  “I have seven friends I could go to,” she said but that wasn’t really true. They didn’t talk either. “I’d rather keep my secrets.”

  “Okay. I won’t pry. I swear.”

  “And you do talk very funny.”

  Charlie nodded and said, “I can settle for some good conversation and excellent company for a movie. Deal? I’ll try to talk less funny.”

  Jill accepted.

  What began as a movie date became far more. Charlie was funny, smart, and cute, and Jill enjoyed being around him. She barely survived dressing for her date, having Charlie come inside and meet her parents, and getting past the small talk. It was good that her father had already met Charlie when he brought his dog in for shots and a check up at Dr. Havilland’s clinic. At least her parents had all of Charlie’s information on file, something they teased Charlie about, making Jill blush.

  Jill had a great time and agreed to hang out with Charlie the next day. They talked on the phone and met at Jill’s locker between classes.

  They had fun and talked a lot about everything; he was smart and a good listener and also told interesting and humorous stories of growing up in Maine. He claimed that Maine had just as many strange characters as he saw in Arkansas, something that Jill had never thought of.

  “We have the same small town problems as any other place. Poverty. Snobs. Boredom.” Charlie grinned and said, “But you wouldn’t know about that since you girls own a cabin at the river.”

  Jill snorted. “People still talk about that enough that you heard? Uncle Mike was being gracious to us, and we were lonely kids. He didn’t have children. It was all about how strange life is and how it balances.”