September Lessons (A Year in Paradise Book 9)

by Hildred Billings

  The first thing Leigh-Ann noticed about Carrie wasn’t the eyebrow piercing (technically against the dress code, but rarely enforced) or the set face that conveyed she had seen a few things. She’s got an accent… Sounded vaguely Oregonian, but… thicker. Not quite Texan. Definitely a drawl that Leigh-Ann had not been expecting. Probably because most of the drawls around Paradise Valley were faker than the so-called designer threads on Amanda Ardison’s body. She’s such a liar…

  “Sure.” Leigh-Ann moved her tray closer to the edge of the table, not that Carrie needed the room. “You’re that new girl, right?”

  Carrie’s smile was more tired than friendly. Yet she sat, her tray unceremoniously pushed to the side the moment her butt touched her chair. “Yup. That’s me. Y’all got you eyesight in fine form today, I see.”

  Leigh-Ann cocked her head. “Where are you from?”

  “Oh, sorry, did my accent give me away? Can’t help it. Tried to shut it off when I moved here a month ago, but all of you Oregonians are dropping y’alls like a tornado tore up Texas. That’s before I touch upon the number of Confederate flags I saw on my drive up I5.”

  “It’s a weird place, I guess,” Leigh-Ann said. “I never really thought about the way we talk. Just sounds like TV to me.”

  Carrie picked up her sandwich while happening to glance at Leigh-Ann’s binder. Quite conveniently, the name Leigh-Ann Hardy was written on the spine in silver gel pen. Most of it had faded away after a few years of use, but there was no mistaking that it was hers. “What’s your name again?” Carrie asked. “Lee-Ann?”

  She didn’t flinch. “Lay-Ann.”

  “Huh?”

  After swallowing a bite of sandwich, Leigh-Ann said, “It’s pronounce Lay. Like the chips.” The chips they didn’t get to eat in Clark High, because the school district couldn’t strike a deal with Frito-Lay or whomever.

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah, well… that’s how we say that around here.”

  “You kidding?” Carrie snorted. “How many people calling you Lee?”

  “Too many. There are a lot of out-of-towners around here. Half the teachers have an aneurysm when they find out I’m not the only one. About a county over there’s a town called Ashleigh. Spelled like Ashley, but it don’t sound the same.”

  “Oregonians are weird.”

  “You never told me where you’re from.”

  Carrie popped open her chips and let them spill in the corner square of her tray. By then, more than a few of their classmates looked over in their direction. Either Leigh-Ann was now the most popular girl in school, or she had officially become a pariah – but in a school that size, it didn’t matter. Even the Lepers talked to the “cool” kids on a daily basis.

  “Alabama,” Carrie said, her accent jumping out like a cat from a crate. “Northside. Pretty rural like this place. Where half the town is a trailer park and the other half are people in old houses thinking they’re something special.”

  Leigh-Ann didn’t laugh, although Carrie sure thought herself brilliant. “I live in a trailer.”

  “No shit?” Carrie snorted. “Obviously, y’all got trailer parks. Sorry if I offended you.”

  “I’m not offended.” It took a lot more than that to offend Leigh-Ann. “Just Oregon ain’t that much different from the South, I reckon.”

  Carrie looked at her as if she didn’t know whether Leigh-Ann did that on purpose. “But y’all say ‘leigh’ wrong, apparently.”

  Shrugging, Leigh-Ann pulled a bit of crust off her sandwich. “You move here with your parents? What they do?”

  “Nah. I’m living with my aunt and uncle in Roundabout. I had to… transfer.”

  “Transfer? From Alabama?”

  “It’s a thing.”

  Leigh-Ann didn’t dig into it. Nor did Carrie dwell on it, for she was too busy casting a glance over her shoulder every time the girls at a nearby table moved. Which they did a lot, because that was where class clown Chrystal Greytree sat. She was the master of impressions and facial expressions, and nobody found her funnier than her best friend of two years, little Ms. Christina Rath.

  “You know that girl, huh?” Carrie asked with a lowered voice. “’Cause she’s pretty hot, if you’re feeling my fire.”

  Leigh-Ann could hardly believe it. Of all the girls in Clark High, it was Christina the new girl was crushing on?

  “Yeah, I know her. Everyone does.”

  “Uh, clearly, new people do not know who she is. Hook me up, huh?”

  With a scoff to make her choke on the last of her sandwich, Leigh-Ann said, “That’s Christina Rath. The mayor’s daughter.”

  “Mayor of what?”

  “Paradise Valley.”

  “If her mom ain’t the mayor of Roundabout, then maybe it’s not verboten for me to talk to her or whatever the problem is.”

  “Like I told you,” Leigh-Ann continued, “Christina is straight. Straightest girl in this whole school.” Not really. That award went to Lily Smith, who had a new boyfriend every few months. She was a junior now, but she already hung around the new crop of freshmen, probably looking for the most post-pubescent one of the bunch. Good luck. They’re all five inches shorter than us. “It would be a huge waste of time. You’re better off admiring her from a distance.”

  “You and her go back huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Carrie was not conspicuous at all as she looked between Leigh-Ann and Christina, as if there were something truly scandalous there. “You her ex-girlfriend or something? Then again, how could she be straight if you’re her ex?”

  “I’m her ex, all right.” Before Carrie could get any more radical ideas, Leigh-Ann explained. “I’m her ex best friend. We were like that before sophomore year.”

  “Classic story, huh?”

  “I guess so.” Leigh-Ann had seen it plenty of times on TV, but she didn’t think about how realistic it was. “We were in the same group of friends until a couple years ago.”

  “So, what happened?”

  Leigh-Ann licked potato chip salt off her finger. “Dunno. One of our mutuals moved away. Guess she was the glue holding us all together. One month I was having sleepovers at the mayor’s house, next month I’m spending my weekends at home alone. Whatever. It wasn’t like we had a big fight or anything…”

  That’s what Leigh-Ann had told herself for the past two or three years. No, she and Christina didn’t have a fight. But they did have a falling out that led to a mutual agreement. Of sorts. “You stay away from me, and I’ll stay away from you.” Christina had uttered those words with the kind of fury Leigh-Ann was not inclined to ever hear again.

  Carrie was too hung up on something else Leigh-Ann said to respond to that. “What’s this about the mayor’s house?”

  “Oh, right. Christina’s the mayor’s daughter. I forget not everybody knows that.” Christina and her family moved to Paradise Valley when Leigh-Ann was still in elementary school. By the time Karen Rath was elected, Christina had ingrained herself into the miniature social circles that dotted Paradise Playground. Leigh-Ann thought herself mighty great for being BFFs with the mayor’s daughter. Who else could say they were allowed to call the mayor by her first name, if only because Leigh-Ann struggled with the name “Rath” when she was a kid?

  “Mayor’s daughter?” Carrie let out a whistle. A few people looked in their direction, but paid them no further mind once they realized the new girl was drawing attention to herself. “Go figure. I always have these lofty ambitions. Oh, well. She’s probably seventeen, anyway.”

  “You already eighteen or something? We got Romeo & Juliet laws around here. Don’t be some weird twenty-year-old hitting on freshmen and nobody cares.”

  Carrie tilted her head with a wan smile. “What if I told you I’m actually nineteen?”

  “Whoa.” No, Leigh-Ann had not been expecting that. “Why the hell are you nineteen? You get held back a year somewhere?” Had the unlucky misfortune of being born in late summer,
like Leigh-Ann? It was one thing to be the oldest kid in the class. It was another to be the oldest because you were held back!

  “You could say I got held back. Couldn’t finish my senior year back in Alabama, so I’m doing it here. With any luck, I’ll get that diploma and then get outta here.”

  You had to come all the way to Oregon from Alabama to finish your high school diploma? Weird. But, Leigh-Ann wouldn’t judge. Lots of girls and women moved to Paradise Valley for their own reasons. Sounded like Carrie was openly queer, which might not have been the best move, depending on where in Alabama she was from. You can say the same thing about Oregon. Paradise Valley was often called an oasis in a sea of judgmental pricks. Things had changed a lot in Leigh-Ann’s short lifetime, but if she were gay, she wouldn’t be holding hands with girls on the coast, that was for sure.

  Or in Eastern Oregon… or down south by the Rogue River Valley. Hell, she had heard some stuff about Salem, the state capital. If places in the Willamette Valley could be closed-minded, then maybe that said something.

  “Good luck,” Leigh-Ann said. “This place isn’t exactly hard to graduate from. I’ve been getting Cs and Bs my whole life, and nobody gives me crap.”

  “Good to know.”

  For some reason, Leigh-Ann had a feeling that wasn’t Carrie’s concern.

  Chapter 3

  CARRIE

  “Damn, sure didn’t take you long to figure it out, huh?” The manager of Paradise Pizza, an uninspiring middle-aged man with the more uninspiring name of John, said with a scratch of his hairnet. “You sure you’ve never made pizza before?”

  Carrie finished doling out pepperonis to two large pizzas about to go into the oven. After a half-hour long training session about how to touch pepperoni, Carrie wowed her new boss by, somehow, sprinkling toppings in a record-breaking thirty seconds. Like it was hard or something.

  “I worked in a factory the moment I turned eighteen,” she drolly said. “This is more of the same.” Everyone had their roles, although most were trained to fill-in on other roles if ever necessary. When efficiency was on the line, a girl figured out how to get things done. Especially with bosses like John – or Tony, or Jim, or Bobby-Ray – breathing down her neck. Jim really breathed down my neck. Too much, if you ask me. “You ever work in a factory, John?”

  The man was simple enough that he didn’t take offense to that accusatory statement. “Nah. Don’t think I have, anyway. Think I’d remember that.”

  Carrie snorted. “There’s not much to it. You do what they tell you as efficiently as possible.” She stepped aside as one of her coworkers picked up the pizzas and slid them into the oven. “This job is cakewalk compared to a factory, I tell you what. I can see outside!” She jerked her thumb to the big window overlooking the parking lot. They were far enough away from Main Street and its sidewalks to avoid most of the lookie-loos who peered inside to watch the pies being made, but every once in a while, a child pressed its face against the glass and grinned. Sure beat the unyielding views of fluorescent lights and heavy machinery. Oh, and don’t forget all the workers in their hairnets and blue uniforms. Carrie kinda missed the uniforms. They were snug, but comfortable.

  And itchy. She didn’t miss that part.

  “Good going. You’ll be out of probation soon enough.” John walked away.

  Probation. Ugh. There was a word that made Carrie cringe.

  “You’re doing way better than I did when I started here.” Carrie’s only other coworker on duty, a young-ish woman named Skylar, locked the pizza oven and rinsed off her hands in the corner sink. “Took me two months to put the pepperonis on right, let alone in the time they wanted. Can you believe it? I was responsible for two orders missing the thirty-minute cutoff. Surprised I didn’t get fired, since places like this don’t hurt for potential employees.”

  Was that a dig at Carrie, who only got this job because her uncle put in a good word with the owner? Granted, based on the schedule in the staff room, there weren’t a lot of employees working at Paradise Pizza, and almost all of them – save the manager – were part time. Skylar was at the maximum amount of hours before she was considered full time and eligible for benefits. Saw it all the time at the factory. These buttheads never want to pay more than they gotta, so we take our minimum wage and work three jobs to pay for benefits out of our own pockets. Carrie thought it hilarious she was back in a personal finance class at school. She could practically teach it herself.

  At least minimum wage was way higher in Oregon than it was in Alabama. The only major expense Carrie had was her car, and right now it was only putting her around a small town, its biggest excursion going back and forth between Clark High out in the middle of nowhere. It was ten miles to Roundabout from there. An easy fifteen-minute drive that put some of her commutes back in Alabama to shame.

  So, working part-time, she’d save a little money. What she did with it after she graduated? No idea yet. Maybe she’d drive back home. Maybe she’d go to community college somewhere. University wasn’t on the table. Carrie didn’t know what she wanted to do, since until now, her biggest goal was to simply survive in peace.

  And maybe have a girlfriend.

  “Like I said to him,” Carrie muttered. “You work in a factory, and you figure things out pretty quickly.” She didn’t have to be told to change her net and wash her hands after she accidentally scratched her head in the middle of rolling out dough. With a groan, Carrie dropped what she was doing and headed to the wash station.

  Skylar probably took a while to learn things because she was too busy spacing off every time there wasn’t something to do. She did that now, while Carrie washed her hands and contemplated that rolled out dough for the next pizza to inevitably be called in. It was Friday evening, after all. Didn’t take rocket science to know that the weekend was the boom times for the only pizza place in town. Carrie’s first shift had started at four, a full forty-five minutes after school got out. She was probably looking at phone calls from most of her new classmates putting in orders and then complaining that Paradise Pizza didn’t make this style of pie or offered those giant cookies like the corporate places.

  Meh.

  John manned the phones while Skylar said hello to whomever came inside. A few of the lunch time slices were still available, but most people wanted to buy a whole pizza to go. Suited Carrie fine to stay in the back and man the ovens as the orders came through the pipeline. Like being in the factory. She may have more roles to perform, but once she got into a groove, work was easy enough. John and Skylar remained flummoxed that a teenager put in as much effort as Carrie did, but she was there to work, wasn’t she? Besides, she didn’t get this job based on her own merit. She may as well prove her place on the small “team.”

  Sunset brought the first lull in orders. Skylar came into the back to help with prep. Carrie washed her hands for the seventh time that evening. Anytime now I’ll remember to stop touching my stupid head. She couldn’t help it if the dry, Oregonian air made her scalp itch. Dandruff sucked, all right?

  “Hey, Carrie!” John poked his head out from the office. “Since you’re such a quick study, how about I show you how to use the POS system?”

  In case they worried she really wasn’t a teenager, Carrie snorted at the mention of “POS.” Sure, she knew what it meant. In a variety of ways…

  Skylar took over the kitchen while John trained Carrie on the register. Within two orders, Carrie knew her way around the apps, and within three orders, she was training John on a computer.

  “You kids really are something else,” he said, scratching his head. Carrie had half a mind to tell him to wash his hands. “I thought Skylar would be young enough to figure this thing out for me, but it looks like you’re the computer whizz around here! Go figure!”

  “What can I say? My generation grew up on smartphones. This isn’t much different from an Android OS.” Click that big, colorful button. Follow the instructions. Stare at pictures. Very little reading required. How i
ntuitive. “Let me guess, though. You’re an Apple guy?”

  John looked as if he had no idea what she was talking about. “I got a Nokia. Is that Apple or Android?”

  “You’re on your own, happy planet, John.”

  “You keep talking with an accent like that, honey,” he said with a genial grin, “you’ll be getting all the tips around here! You hear that Skylar?” His voice echoed into the kitchen. “You need to pick up a real accent to get tips!”

  “Sure, John.”

  He was content with Carrie’s progress and returned to the office, where he had a direct line to everyone phoning in orders. When there weren’t customers present in the front, Carrie helped with the dough and toppings while Skylar stayed on top of the ovens and boxing of pizzas. Most customers came in to physically pick-up their dinner, since they either lived a few blocks away or couldn’t be bothered to pay for delivery. Just as well. Someone running out to make a delivery meant they were down a person.

  “Oh, hey.”

  Carrie looked up from her training manual on the front counter and saw Leigh-Ann standing on the other side. The evening was dark enough in that corner of Main Street that Carrie could no longer make out who was parked out front or who walked up to the door. Did Leigh-Ann have a car?

  “Hey, Lee… I mean, Lay-Ann. You picking up?”

  Leigh-Ann smiled. Honestly, she didn’t look too bad for a girl who didn’t do herself up in any way. Neither does the mayor’s daughter, but damn if she ain’t a natural beauty. How cliché was that, huh? Mayor’s daughter being a natural beauty who stole the hearts of every young lesbian in the county. Leigh-Ann’s lanky body was carefully balanced by that heavy sweatshirt and the long hair she kept loose around her chest and shoulders. Her jeans were much too big for her, though. Yeah, I know this look. Second-hand jeans and a hoodie that looks like it came from your dad. Poverty. That’s what it was. Leigh-Ann had mentioned living in the biggest trailer park in Paradise Valley. Who was a cliché, now?