me, and we’ve gone to school together since we were kids. I know him in the same way you know your best friend’s cousin: by name and face. When I started at Harpy’s, it was nice to work with someone I at least recognized, and now I guess we’re friends. He and Tiffanie, the captain of the softball team, started dating at the beginning of the year and in a matter of weeks their lives had fused together like a set of suction cups.
“How’d you do on your finals?” Marcus asks.
I shrug and glance back to catch Bo watching us from behind the heat lamps. He doesn’t look away. My stomach turns. “I was there,” I say. “That should count for something. What about you?”
“Good. Studied with Tiff. She’s visiting colleges this summer.”
I understand that life after high school is probably something I should be thinking about, but I can’t picture me in college and I don’t know how to plan for something I can’t imagine. “What about you? Are you going to look at schools, too?”
He twists his visor to the side and nods thoughtfully. “I guess.” The bell above the front door rings back and forth as a few guys from school file in. As we’re waiting for them to look over the menu, Marcus gazes past them and out the front window, and says, “My girl’s gettin’ out of this town and all I know is I’m going with her.”
Clover City is the type of place you leave. It’s love that either sucks you in or pushes you away. There are only a few who really make it out and stay out, while the rest of us drink, procreate, and go to church, and that seems to be enough to keep us afloat.
Since we close late on Fridays and Saturdays, my mom is asleep by the time I get home. Once I’ve turned off all the lights and have locked the back door, I tiptoe down the upstairs hallway and double-check that she is asleep. Light snores curl out from beneath her door as I let myself into Lucy’s room, careful to avoid any creaking floorboards, and begin to search through my mother’s piles.
There is plenty of junk and stacks of newspaper clippings about people and places I will never understand. I hate that there are things—trivial things, like why she needed a newspaper clipping about a cookbook author who’d be visiting the library—that I never knew to ask Lucy about.
Her funeral was the worst. And not just for the obvious reasons. Half of Clover City showed up because what the hell else is there to do? I guess they all expected to see her folded into a casket like some kind of cautionary tale. But the sad truth was that we couldn’t afford the more expensive wide casket. So, despite my mother having a total meltdown over her inability to give her older sister a “proper funeral,” Lucy was cremated.
But I don’t like to remember her funeral. I like to remember things like the time she took me to my first dance class when I was in third grade. My leotard barely stretched over my protruding belly and my thighs touched no matter how hard I begged them not to. I was too fat. I was too tall. I didn’t look like all the other girls waiting to go into class.
Since I refused to get out of the car, Lucy came to sit in the backseat with me. “Will.” Her voice was smooth like warm honey. She tucked a loose hair behind my ear and handed me a tissue from the front pocket of her housedress. “I’ve wasted a lot of time in my life. I’ve thought too much about what people will say or what they’re gonna think. And sometimes it’s over silly things like going to the grocery store or going to the post office. But there have been times when I really stopped myself from doing something special. All because I was scared someone might look at me and decide I wasn’t good enough. But you don’t have to bother with that nonsense. I wasted all that time so you don’t have to. If you go in there and you decide that this isn’t for you, then you never have to go back. But you owe yourself the chance, you hear me?”
I only stuck with it for the fall, but that didn’t seem to be the point.
In Lucy’s sock drawer, I find a