RETT WATCHED CALUM SCAN the classroom before he took an empty seat in the back. Being new couldn’t be easy, especially when it was in a town with only six hundred inhabitants—most of whom lived out of the center of said town. She’d lived there for almost eighteen years, generations before her and generations after. The way it had been with almost every family that remained. It wasn’t often fresh blood entered without leaving soon after.
The last new family was the Harveys two years prior, and they were gone seven months later.
Calum didn’t look away from the lab table when she sat beside him. It wasn’t official, not really, but Rett had been the school’s ‘welcome wagon’ since she was old enough to remember routesthrough school. She never knew why she’d started, or why she kept doing it, but she had to. It felt wrong not to help. Despite making friends with the newcomers only to have them leave again, she never stopped.
Calum, though… He was different somehow. Maybe it was because he acted as if it didn’t bother him, the gossiping and gawking.
Georgie Stone never really talked about her nephew before. All anyone ever knew was that she hadn’t seen him since she was a little kid.Certainly not a little kid now.Rett examined Calum from the corner of her eye. With his black hair and deep brown eyes, sharp cheekbones, and slender body, he could have been a model in Paris or somewhere equally fashionable. He even wore a silver band around his thumb, something no boy in town did. Jewelry was for girls, in their minds.
Yet there he was in Oak Creek, pretending there hadn’t been rumors since before he even set foot in the dirt outside the station.
Rett had been excited to meet him—new people brought new experiences—but she’d seen neither hide nor hair of him since he arrived. He had kept himself isolated in his newness. She would never be able to do it, come to a small town where people gossiped like they drank their beers. Not like he was handling it. She wasn’t built for it.
It was hard enough playing the Virgin Mary in the Christmas pageant, and she had grown up around these people. They watched her go from tiny little Loretta to Rett. She should be used to the attention during the play, but she still threw up before the show every year. Yet Calum was calm, cool, and collected.
As Mister Johnson called for attention, Rett scribbled on a piece of paper:Let me see your schedule. Calum glanced at the note, raising a thin brow, then did as told. Mister Dupree knewwhat he was doing. He’d placed Calum in all of Rett’s classes. She figured it made it easier to show the kid around if they were heading to the same place. So she said a silent ‘thanks’ to the school secretary before passing the schedule back to Calum.
He didn’t say a word to her through any of the classes or on the treks. He refused to talk about himself even when Miss Reynolds tried her hardest. She was the sweetest teacher in the entire school, and Calum acted as if she didn’t exist. Rett still showed him around with his sullen silences. Somehow, he managed to keep his head held high as people stared at him unabashedly.
Rett already knew what they all thought. They’d said the same things since Georgie first announced her nephew was coming to stay for the year.
“Why would he ever leave Las Vegas, though?” Kellie Marie Watson had asked, looking around for validation. She didn’t have to search hard. The rest of the student population agreed with her.
Heck, even Rett agreed. What did Oak Creek have that Las Vegas didn’t? The closest thing to ‘big city’ they had, after all, was the arcade between the corner and the hardware store. The games were from the eighties and out of order more often than they were playable. The ice cream shop was the main point of congregation for the younger generation. Rett always wondered if that was how teens felt fifty years ago. All sock hops and sharing a malt with their sweetheart while life oozed by around them.
As she guided Calum toward Algebra II, Rett almost wished for the days when the biggest gossip was Miss Judy forgetting to water her blossoms and risking her hydrangeas’ lives.
Calum disappeared once they reached the cafeteria two hours later, and Rett stared after him before sighing. She’d foolishly hoped he would at least sit with her at lunch. The boy needed a friend to help him through his first day. But now he’d gone off.She let herself have faith that he would find her when the half-hour was up.
“So? What’s he like?” asked Sofia Alvarez the second Rett sat down with her tray.
Rett paused before shrugging. “Quiet.” It was all she could say.
“That’s…”
“Informative,” Kellie Marie finished Sofia’s sentence.
“What do y’all want me to say? Ain’t like I know him,” Rett protested. She found it rather unfair that they expected her to have any more information than they did. Just showing him around wasn’t exactly a fount of knowledge.
Kellie Marie tossed her long blonde hair over her shoulder, leaning forward. “Somethin’ ain’t right about that boy. I’m tellin’ ya. I heard he ignored Miss Reynolds.Noboy ignores Miss Reynolds.”
Rett ignored the implications in her friend’s words. Someone not showing attention to someone didn’t mean a thing. But of course someone would latch onto Calum’s lack of interest as a way of finding fodder against him. She stayed silent, though. There was no point in arguing with her friends. Not really.
To her surprise, Calum popped up at her side once she dumped her trash and filed out of the cafeteria with the others. Rett pushed away the warmth in her chest, the tightening of her belly. He just wasn’t familiar with the school, that was all. They weren’t friends. She grinned up at him before setting off for English, with him following close behind.
He didn’t seem to mind when she dropped into the seat beside him on the bus. He didn’t look away from the window, and the ride back to Oak Creek was quiet between them. Rett knew it was only a matter of time. She would get Calum talking, eventually. She was nothing if not patient and persistent.
“How was your first day of school, kiddo?” her father asked later that night as he set the small stack of plates beside the stove.
Rett sighed and finished mashing the potatoes. There wasn’t anything to tell, and Matthew knew that. The first day of school always went the same way: Teachers made unnecessary introductions, assigned the first homework of the year, then let the students do whatever as long as they behaved. It was a routine the entire town knew, one they relied on. Without the routine, life wouldn’t be the way it was.
Matthew’s day at work was just as uneventful. He delivered the mail on time then came home to his daughter and his wife. It was what he did every day except for Sunday when he would go fishing or spend the afternoon gardening.
Eliza finally exited the bathroom just as Rett and Matthew finished placing the dishes on the table. Her chocolate brown hair hung wetly around her face. She’d come straight home from work at the meat-packing plant two towns over, disappearing into the bathroom for a shower while her daughter cooked dinner. Rett hated the end of summer. Not because it meant going back to school—she enjoyed that—but because it meant her mother worked longer hours at the plant.
As soon as the trio finished eating, Rett cleared the table and washed dishes while her parents relaxed. She had been doing that, cooking dinner and cleaning up, since she was twelve, when she had begged her parents for more responsibilities. She’d wanted a dog, she remembered, and had to prove she could handle it. The dog never came, but Rett found she liked the tasks.
There was something calming about bringing together ingredients into one cohesive meal and scrubbing dishes. She knew it fell into gender stereotypes, but she didn’t mind it at all.She was who she was, and at least her future husband would be happy and well-fed.
