Kissing Bo. The thought embarrasses me. I want to melt into a puddle to be washed down the kitchen drain.
Up front, Marcus is already at his register.
“You beat me here,” I say.
“Tiff’s been dropping me off early because of practice.”
Marcus and I have always sort of been extras in each other’s lives. He’s a year ahead of 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.