Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds Page 8

  “You made it from scratch, right?”

  “Yes, even the filling and the frosting. No box cake this one.”

  “Then, yes, I want it. My grandmother always said that a homemade cake is like a love offering.”

  “Your grandmother said that?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “Well, you can have it then. I think I’d like your grandmother.”

  He smiled, “I’ll clean the plate and bring it over to you.”

  “Just tell Brad and he can drop it off at work.”

  “But I have to repay you for doing all this for my buddy. Maybe lunch sometime?”

  She blinked. Lunch? He seemed like a nice guy. No. He probably was a nice guy. Took direction well and was helpful. This was the guy who was the real possibility, the one who was right in front of her instead of the one who would never be.

  The “no” was right on her lips. Her tongue right at the bottom of her front teeth.

  She looked down at her empty cake carrier. She had gone in full and now left empty. But she didn’t have to.

  And there were more ways to take chances than going to Vegas.

  “Joe,” she said, “lunch sounds really good.”

  The smile that he gave her was worth the answer. She turned and there was Kesha sucking her teeth and arching her eyebrow. Cat gave her a wink as she held the cake carrier in her hand to carry out to her car. It suddenly occurred to her that Kesha had been single for way too long. And she liked red velvet cake.

  Maybe this matchmaking thing was gonna turn out to be all right.

  Introduction to “A Taste of Joie De Vivre”

  Kellen Knolan’s job as a teacher introduced him to Young Adult fiction. “The one thing I noticed,” he writes, “was how constantly dour many of the characters seemed to be. Why weren’t there more stories about the kids I knew? Alternately fun, serious, worried, goofy—and yes, dour. I moved [the kids] to Nexus, Louisiana, where everything is fantastic fiction, save for the internal lives of the kids themselves.”

  “A Taste of Joie de Vivre” marks Kellen’s first appearance in print, but certainly not his last.

  A Taste of Joie De Vivre

  Kellen Knolan

  A sweat ball crawled slowly down Ashley Foret’s back.

  Starting as a tiny droplet at the base of her neck, it had built mass but not momentum and was now firmly planted at the base of her spine. Lacking the inertia to move over the bulge of her butt, its tortured tickle grew as other sweat balls gravitated towards it. Considering reason No. 36 it sucked to be overweight, Ashley still found a small smile forming on her face: three dozen reasons was nothing compared to how many reasons it sucked to be the Nexus High School mascot.

  Clad neck to toe in a furry tiger suit, Ashley was every component of miserable. The summer heat of Louisiana’s Cajun Country in full force, it was 89 degrees with humidity to match. While it was vacation for most everyone else, all the fall sports were back at practice. Even the cheerleading squad was there, despite their coach being on leave.

  Walking to school along the edge of the city of Nexus’s commercial district, Ashley once again laughingly lamented out loud the lack of streetlamps in this part of town: “Where’s a good back-scratcher when you need one?”

  That Ashley could have a sense of humor about anything was testament to both her demeanor and the culture in which she was raised: Pure blood Cajun with roots going back to the Acadians settlement in the swamps two-and-half centuries ago. Joie De Vivre, her grandmother always said, “The Joy of Life,” as a cure for everything.

  When Ashley lamented being overweight, it was her Maw Maw who’d say “Who dat want be skinny mullet anyway?” in her heavily accented Cajun. Annoying at times, incomprehensible at others—fat or skinny, hair or fish, Ashley still had no idea what the expression had to do with wanting to be thinner—Ashley nonetheless listened. It was Maw Maw who’d gotten the family through when Ashley’s mother, Maw Maw’s only child, died in a car accident driving back to Nexus from New Orleans on I-10.

  Not that Ashley always listened right away. At fourteen years old and about to be a freshman in high school, it was her job to be a pain in the butt—and Maw Maw’s job to set her straight, as when Ashley said she was going to decline the offer to be the school mascot after failing at tryouts: “I wanted to be a cheerleader!”

  “Don’t you make a bahbin!” Maw Maw shot back.

  As often the case, Ashley was momentarily lost with her grandmother’s words. It wasn’t the accent; she’d lived in Cajun Country long enough to understand all but the thickest accents. It was what a bahbin was, and stopping for a moment to once again consider the mishmash of French, English, Native American and African tongues, it took her a second to remember just what the expression meant: “I am not pouting! I just wanted to be a cheerleader, not the mascot!”

  “Co faire?” Maw Maw asked. “Everyone see you the same.”

  “Why?! That is why! Who wants to be seen as the fat girl in the fur!” Ashley cried. “Who wants…? Oh, God, I am so sorry Maw Maw…”

  Like many of the older people in Nexus, Louisiana, Maw Maw was hairy, strangely so. Just one of the litany of birth defects that had afflicted the residents of the town for generations, all the older people in town seemed to be afflicted with something: Webbed feet and hands, translucent skin that seemed to almost glow from underneath, hairy faces and hands—even on the women. In many places it would have been a curse—but not in Nexus, or, as it was called many years ago: Recontere.

  Because in Recontere, Louisiana they simply went with it, celebrating their differences instead of being afraid of them. Laissez les bons temps rouler, they called it: “Let the good times roll,” and through decades of poverty, storms and deprivation, the people of Acadiana Cajun Country had, and no more so than the afflicted generations of Recontere.

  For years Recontere had been a refuge for all kinds of people who might be shunned anywhere else. Whether born there, a refugee from the many traveling circuses that traveled the backroads in the mid-20th century, or just someone who grew tired of being a spectacle somewhere else, Recontere was where they gathered to live their lives and if a few nickels could pass their way, tell their stories. As it happened there were many nickels in those days, and after a time these men and women came to be known throughout Acadiana as “The Storied.”

  By the dawn of the 21st century, however, those days were long over. Inside town whatever had produced the birth defects had stopped. Outside, circuses had stopped traveling, and in their rush to get everywhere on the interstate, people had long ago stopped descending into a small town along the swamp just to listen to a story. Town leaders had even abandoned the name Recontere, a semi-combination of the French words for Encounter and Story, and changed the name of the town to Nexus.

  Why they’d done that was a mystery to Ashley who’d heard the basics of the story many, many times; Acadians were fiercely proud of their history. But it was a story without an ending. Each time Ashley thought she might get a chance to ask her unanswered questions, Maw Maw would start into a slow tirade using words that Ashley knew her grandmother would not want her to know. Sometimes Ashley even saw tears, as Maw Maw lamented the distant strip of interstate highway that had stolen both her daughter and her way of life. The only time Ashley ever saw the Joie De Vivre leave her grandmother, Ashley always longed to know more, and was always afraid to bring it up.

  Until the day after cheerleading try-outs when Ashley apologized to Maw Maw for blurting who wanted to be the fat girl in the fur.

  Laughter filled Maw Maw’s voice. “In the fur I am fat! And you! A bon couer and practice! And not shave so much, es bon!”

  And she was right—not about the need to stop shaving; Ashley thought she had enough social problems without being all hairy, too. But about doing something whole-heartedly, which is why Ashley took the mascot job and walked to school every day in sweltering heat to make sure she was at practice on time. Maw Maw having
given up her driver’s license long ago—you could walk most everywhere in Nexus, anyway—it was Ashley’s only way to school with her father working the offshore oil rigs for the next week.

  Almost within sight of Nexus High School, Ashley lamented having to walk for reasons beside the heat. Mainly that moving at such a slow speed allowed her to observe what a crap-fest this part of Nexus actually was. Boarded up buildings, vacant houses, overgrown lawns: Each a reminder of the glory days of Recontere, all they served to do now was punctuate that more than just the interstate had left the town behind, whatever its name might have been.

  Wishing one last time for a lamppost to scratch her back on, Ashley couldn’t help but notice at her feet a rusted-out hole where one used to stand. Mindlessly kicking it, Ashley went to Plan B for scratching her itch: flogging her back with the tiger head in a random attempt to hit the sweat ball. It worked—sort of.

  “Hey, ya fat fur ball!” screamed a voice from a passing car. “That’s costume abuse! You owe me laps!”

  Snapped from her contemplation of sweat balls, swinging animal heads and the dismal state of Nexus, Ashley looked up just in time to see Niki Bordelon’s brunette head duck back inside Portia Comeau’s BMW Mini as the two headed for cheerleading practice. The captain and assistant captain of the squad, respectively, they had the power to make good on their threats. Heck, Niki and Portia were the reason Ashley was already in costume in the first place: Everyone was expected to arrive at practice ready to go.

  Normally, this rule didn’t apply to the mascot; it was one thing to expect girls to arrive in tiny skirts and T-shirts, it was another to expect someone to do so in a full-body fursuit. But then there was nothing normal about the Nexus High School Cheerleading Squad these days; that much had been clear since the coach’s car blew up in the parking lot the last day of school—while she was in it.

  ***

  Miss Lynette Dugas, cheerleading coach, demonically frightening math teacher, and anal-retentive car owner, was known throughout Nexus High School for all of these things. A first-year teacher, she was insanely bitter that she’d had to “come crawling back to Nexus,” as she put it, to find a teaching job. Her career plans putting her in New Orleans but her grades and teaching acumen making her employable nowhere but her backwater hometown, she was unfortunate proof of just how few people wanted to call the place home these days. Taking her frustrations out on her students almost daily, she was reviled by nearly everyone, who took to calling her “The Dragon Lady,” a term she actually seemed to embrace.

  So when the students of Nexus High School felt the thump of a distant explosion inside even in the far corners of the school building, a few dared actually hope it might be her in the flames. Her car nearly vaporizing as she closed the door, the fireball had literally melted some of the letters off the signs in front of NHS hundreds of feet away. (The school was now officially a “RUG REE ZO”) The car, a brand new black Camaro, was left a metal hulk of melted tires, leather, and engine parts. The car’s personalized license plate, Louisiana tag “DRGNLDY” was found on the roof of the gazebo in Brasseaux Park, more than a block away—with the bumper still attached.

  It was a miracle that no one in the school was hurt or even injured, largely because the parking lot was still empty of people during sixth period when Miss Dugas went home early because of illness. More importantly, however, was that she always parked on the far edge of the parking lot with instructions (and well-known threats) that no one was to get anywhere near her car. A parking lot designed for a much larger staff and school population, Miss Dugas’s Camaro was nearly a hundred feet from any other car when it exploded.

  And that wasn’t the strange part.

  The strange part was that she walked away from it. Literally standing up amidst the flaming wreckage of her car approximately five minutes after the explosion, she simply walked out of the flames and over to the paramedics. Ashley, hundreds of her fellow Nexus Tigers, and the fire department now gathered in gaped-mouth silence, it was fellow incoming freshman Drew Broussard who spoke first: “Damn, she’s hot.”

  “That is so wrong,” Ashley said.

  “Why?” Drew asked. “Because I’m gay? I can appreciate the feminine form.”

  “No, you jackass,” Ashley said, “because what’s left of her clothes are still on fire.”

  “If you call a sports bra and panties clothes,” Drew said, now cocking his head slightly sideways. “At least I think it’s a sports bra. With the flames it’s kind of hard to tell—”

  “Drew!” Ashley said, as members of the fire department began to run towards Miss Dugas. “The woman is on fire!”

  “No, just what’s left of her clothes. She’s just fine, and I do mean fiiiiinnnnnne, although how the hell that’s possible, I have no idea,” Drew said. “I knew she wasn’t human.”

  “DREW!”

  “Hey, you’re the one who called her a dragon lady,” Drew said, sounding not the least bit unhappy. “It’s not my fault you were right.”

  “She’s still a human being,” Ashley said. “I’m sure there are better things that could be said.”

  “Yeah: She’s hotter than I thought,” Drew said, now starting to laugh. “That firefighter just knocked off her bra…”

  ***

  Recalling the incident, Ashley was somewhat ashamed to find herself laughing. Partially because she had to admit Drew was right; Ashley herself had gotten a “C” from the mercurial math teacher for nothing more than using a wooden pencil instead of a mechanical one.

  More, though, it was because Miss Dugas had been completely uninjured by the accident. No burns, no scars, nothing. Well, not the physical kind of scars, anyway. Rumor was that even though she was officially returning to teach and coach come fall, she desperately wanted to leave since virtually the entire town had seen her naked. But so what? She’d wanted to leave town since the minute she got here; the town and school would be better off without her, Ashley decided. And besides, if looking for a new town where no one would have seen her naked was the goal, she was screwed. It had gone viral on YouTube about three weeks ago.

  Be that as it may, even absent for the summer Miss Dugas’s presence was still felt throughout the cheerleading squad. Her captains, Niki and Portia, ran it just as cruelly as she would have. Certainly, cheerleading squads had always been a cauldron of rank, title, and mean-girl behavior. But where most cheer coaches tried to minimize these behaviors, Miss Dugas at best looked the other way, and at worst encouraged them. Now, with her gone, Niki and Portia had free reign to treat everyone like crap.

  In the beginning, Ashley hoped the school administration would put a stop to it. But given the chaos following the explosion and the administration’s desire not to bother the only math teacher it could find, it pretty much refused to do anything. Coupled with the fact that Niki and Portia weren’t doing anything illegal, just mean, the principal figured it was “girls being girls,” and let it go at that.

  It was more than that, of course; making people run laps in sweaty suits in Louisiana’s summer heat was likely dangerous. But Ashley refused to give Niki the satisfaction of hearing her complain or seeing her quit—another thing she’d learned from her Maw Maw. That’s why, even though Ashley once again found herself on the cheerleading craplist, she trundled on to practice, knowing exactly what awaited her. Not because it was bad, but because it was normal.

  Finally reaching the edge of the school parking lot, Ashley walked through the middle of the dirt that used to be Miss Dugas’s parking space. The corner of the lot yet to be repaved, Ashley figured it wouldn’t be. In all her years in Nexus she’d noticed that things that fell apart tended to stay that way, whether through a lack of money or enthusiasm she didn’t know, that was just how it was.

  Stopping for just a moment to make sure Niki and Portia were out of their car and onto the football field, Ashley was relieved to see her friends, Kayla and Autumn, were still in the parking lot. As always, Kayla had her jittery hand
s wrapped around an iced mocha. While Autumn’s hands were rock-steady, perfect for applying yet another layer of mascara.

  Having all tried out together, Ashley was relieved her friends had made the squad, even if during practice they weren’t actually allowed to talk to each other. Calling to them, she was surprised to see them completely ignore her as they continued huddled in conversation. Hoping she hadn’t become a social pariah to even two of her best friends, she approached quietly trying to hear what they were talking about.

  “…I’ve heard she can only go out at night…” Kayla said.

  “And that she has to wear one of those Arab sheets during the day…” Autumn said, completely unaware that Ashley was opening her mouth right behind her: “It’s called a burqa, guys,” Ashley said knowingly. “And who in the world in Nexus is wearing a—”

  “SSSHHHHH!!!” Both girls said to Ashley. “There’s a reason we’re trying not to get noticed!”

  “You’re trying not to get noticed,” Ashley said to them both. “It’s the only way not to do laps around here.”

  “This is different,” Kayla said. “Madison is a vampire and no one is supposed to know.”

  “Madison Gaudet is a vampire?” Ashley asked, her eyebrows now fully raised. “That’s horrible!”

  “I know,” Kayla said. “No one’s supposed to talk about it.”

  “Well, I can see why,” Ashley said, the sarcasm beginning to drip. “She’s the best garlic-oyster cook Schucker’s restaurant has. If she’s a vampire she’ll have to stop doing that, although I do suppose this means they always have someone for bussing tables on the night shift, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m serious,” Kayla said. “I heard my grandmother talking about it on the phone this morning.”

  “Your mom watches reality TV and thinks they’re documentaries,” Ashley said. “That doesn’t say a whole lot.”