Chapter 1

 

“Boy, you sure know how to pick the worst days to ditch,” said Corey. “You totally missed it!”

It was raining and miserably October-cold. Janey had parked herself underneath the bridge and stayed there all day, smoking and shivering. She didn’t like to give Corey the satisfaction of being right, however, so Janey took a long pull of her cigarette and blew it in Corey’s face. “Missed what?”

“The foreign exchange students!”

Oh God, thought Janey, here we go. Anything from another continent was automatically cool and sexy, even if they had a harelip and a lisp. The Russians last year hadn’t been so bad looking, but they liked to talk to each other in their native tongue, pointing and laughing at their hosts as if speaking a different language made them invisible. Well, that hadn’t lasted long. Eventually there had been a party, and Janey wasn't taking that crap in her own house. Rolph went home with some nice burn scars on his arm and a sob story about the skinny b***h who went G.I. Jane on his a*s.

Corey was yammering away, and Janey decided it might be polite to pay attention. She liked Corey. Corey was like an adorable puppy Janey couldn’t be bothered to take care of; neglected, but still completely loyal.

“They’re from all over,” said Corey, “And they are all cool and sexy, naturally, but the best thing is the twins!”

Twins. Oh God, thought Janey, here we go. The school-girl fantasy of having twice the opportunity to basically get with the same guy, masking the deeper, darker desire to get both of them at once in a private closet somewhere for a few hours.

“They’re Irish,” Corey continued, “and when I say Irish, I mean accents, red hair---“

“Pasty skin, bad teeth?”

“I didn’t really get to check,” said Corey. “Taylor and her group pounced on them right away.”

Taylor and her lackeys. Naturally they would aim for the twins, thought Janey. Good God, she couldn’t wait until everybody graduated from high school and got into college! The nasty, Freudian things that would broil over and explode in the new freedom of no curfews and a standard drinking age made her shiver in anticipation. Taylor would get knocked down quite a few pegs when she realized she wasn’t the only fanatical s**t in the world.

“They want you to throw a party,” Corey added. “To welcome the newcomers. And get their action.”

Janey rolled her eyes. She wasn’t popular, but she had the best party house in the city, not to mention parents who had a high tolerance for dumb high schoolers dicking around and getting the cops’ attention.

She rolled over on her back and looked at her watch. Janey was almost positive she was the only teenager in Coos Bay who still wore a watch. Cell phones were irritating; they made it too easy for people to communicate with you. “Shouldn’t you be feeding the homeless, Cornelia?”

Corey rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I’ve got enough hours of community service to get a freaking Mother Teresa scholarship or something. If Stanford isn’t happy with my hours now, then there’s just no pleasing them.” She noticed Janey was laughing and added defensively, “What?”

“You sound so pissed off and ‘rebellious teenager’. Good girl. Your parents don’t deserve you.”

Corey shrugged uncomfortably. “My stuff is all taken care of. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, where are you applying?”

Janey shrugged, rubbing her shoulders in the muddy grass. “I’ll stick to the city. Don’t think I qualify for much else.”

“You qualify for plenty of things. You’re just too lazy to look into it,” said Corey.

“It’s only undergrad. I don’t want to blow my wad on a general education I could get anywhere. If I feel like getting a graduate degree, I’ll get more into it.” Janey looked up at Corey. “No offense, but I haven’t got the pressure to worry about.”

That was the blessing of having hippie parents. They didn’t care what you did. You could completely fail at life and they’d just nod and pass you a joint or something. Not that Janey’s parents were total addicts. They had cut back eventually, when they realized that this child-raising stuff might take a little more attention than your average mural on a brick wall.

Besides, Janey didn’t want to go anywhere. She loved Coos Bay. She loved the gray ocean and the idiotic seagulls, and the regularity of the tide. She loved the slowness of the city and how absolutely nothing happened there. She loved Cranberries, the candy store that let you take endless free samples, and how everything somehow managed to taste like salt. She loved having access to fresh salmon and crabs. She loved her bridge, and the store near it that let her buy cigarettes even though she was underage.

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