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  Chapter 3Some Small Adjustments

  Blossom Valley, 1977

  For the first time in her entire life, Jackie Carlisle was actually glad when Christmas break was over and she had to go back to school. Even getting up on cold dark mornings, climbing onto the stinking wheezy bus with damp half frozen hair, was better than the long days at home.

  Ninth grade was at least predictable, at least had a chance of some laughs. Where day to day at home, who knew what weird thing would happen next? And since her parents had announced they were getting divorced, it was like no laughing allowed on the premises.

  Jackie, anyway, had not been much surprised by the announcement. Not like her sister, who burst into pretty pink cheeked tears, or her brother, who being only 3, had no idea what forever even meant. At least, she told her friends later, they didn’t tell me they were going to move somewhere new and have another baby. She had a new, hoarse sounding laugh, a slightly deeper voice that she had been cultivating. Cynical, world weary – and why not, with the way her family was driving her crazy.

  She and her friends were the top dogs at school, and she tried to take advantage of that status when she could. Next year, tenth grade, they’d be back at the bottom at the high school. Honestly, being the leader, being the oldest, tallest, smartest and so on came naturally to Jackie. She was the oldest in her family, and the oldest of her cousins too. She had been tall since she could remember, always one of a few girls relegated to the back row in class pictures (no cute ribbon haired cross legged poses for her).

  As for being smart, she was pretty confident there too. She had always gotten good grades. When she was little, the teachers would write stuff like “it’s a pleasure to have Jackie in my class” or “she’s always prepared and very helpful around the classroom” in those notes they sent home to her parents. And not to be super competitive, but Joy’s notes never seemed as good.

  This year, though, Jackie wondered what the teachers would write, if they still wrote notes instead of just assigning grades. She always did her work, including little flourishes where she could, or extra credit assignments if available. None of the classes were all that hard really. But she had noticed in History, that the teacher kind of favored some of the kids who were, like, secretly smart. Who didn’t raise their hands, but knew the answers if called on, and who liked to argue the so called right answers.

  She could remember this one guy, already obviously a stoner even in ninth grade, talking about Kennedy and Vietnam, and the teacher nodding, smiling, even though what the kid was saying was nowhere to be found in their textbook. Or a paper she had written that came back with only a B, and a comment about not “just regurgitating what was in the book.” She’d had to look up the word, and then been mad – wasn’t all of school just a matter of digesting then barfing back up the same facts?

  She told herself it didn’t matter. That teacher, anyway, was kind of pathetic. You could tell he was young and inexperienced, never mind the beard he had that he liked to stroke. He tried to use teenage slang, only it came off stupid. Things like exclaiming, “dynamite!” when who said that anymore. They probably made fun of him in the teacher’s lounge.

  What bothered Jackie more – what she tried not to think about, or steered her mind away when it wandered there – was that possibly in the bigger world she was not destined to be the smartest or the one in charge. There were two feeder schools to the high school, so twice as many kids. And already things like Bs in History. Proofs in Geometry she could struggle through but that truthfully didn’t make much sense when they were finished. She wondered if she was not quite getting it the way the dweebier kids did.

  Ironic, she thought (vocab word, memorized, of course), if it turned out she wasn’t as smart as everyone had always assumed. Her superior abilities were the one thing that both her parents agreed on.

  Jackie had to catch the bus straight home three days a week now. And while she did not necessarily have a better place to go, it sucked just the same. If it wasn’t too cold, her friends could stay after, hang around and then take a long, slow walk home, or catch the late bus. They could go bike riding or all get together at somebody’s house, watch TV in the basement or something.

  Jackie, on her babysitting days, was only allowed to have one friend over at a time. Any more was considered a distraction, as if two people over would keep her from noticing if JJ had wandered outside to play in traffic. On their stupid little street that had no cars, and as if he would bother going outside without a whole entourage to push his stroller and carry his snacks.

  But those were the rules. And Joy would be sure to tattle if Jackie broke them. Or if they tried to coordinate and both have more than one friend over, both agree not to tell, little JJ would be sure to rattle off everybody’s name to Mom later on. Sneaky little blabbermouth. Young as he was, he had a pretty good sense of when anyone was trying to fool him. Like a sixth sense, he’d perk right up and pay special attention the moment she or Joy started telling him something that might bend a rules the tiniest bit.

  Jackie just did her best to adjust. Same as she had always done. “You’re the oldest, you set the example,” and so on. She had not wanted to move, back when they had left the city, but now Blossom Valley really felt like home. To be honest, that had been her first thought when Mom was explaining the divorce and how Dad would now be living in the place where he sometimes stayed over, closer to his work.

  Joy had sat there, cuter than pie, choking back her tears, while JJ’s head swung between her and Mom like a hyper yo yo. Dad had sat stiffly, with a serious but friendly expression, his basic salesman face on, saying nothing, as if they had agreed that Mom would talk and his job was just to nod. And Jackie had been sitting there wondering if they would have to move, how she could stand being the new kid in the middle of the school year. How long to wait, looking somber, before she could get that part clarified.

  “We’ll stay here,” Mom had said.

  “Here in the house?” Jackie asked, making sure. Both parents nodded, exchanging one of those looks that made it seem like they had been married, would be married, forever. She had glanced at Joy, wishing the pair of them could communicate with just a raised eyebrow, back each other up the way sisters in trouble did in books.

  But Joy was just staring at Mom, bug eyed in relief, as if the idea of a move was only just occurring to her.

  Jackie shook her head now, freshly annoyed at the memory. It was another dull afternoon. Joy was down in the basement, listening to her three favorite 45s on the scratchy old hi-fi over and over again. One of them was a Bee Gees song that had started to get badly on her nerves. But since she had announced that she would only listen to albums anymore, Joy played her little records all the more.

  And JJ, for whom Jackie was forced to be here for all afternoon while Mom worked her new job, was basically content to play on his own. He was playing one of his favorite games, which involved dragging all his toy train tracks and bright orange race car tracks into the living room and running them across the furniture in a growing and ever changing course. He wasn’t big on actually running the trains and cars – and a good thing, since the tracks tended to loop and dip in gravity defying ways – but had a fine time just making weird configurations.

  He looked up as Jackie leaned toward the front window to see out. The weather was Pennsylvania at its dullest, not snowing or even raining, not windy enough to be a storm but not sunny either. Just gray and cold. “Watch,” JJ said in his childish monotone. “Watch this.”

  “Good, JJ,” Jackie said back brightly. “Wow.” She couldn’t even tell what he had done differently. Not that that mattered; he just wanted somebody to pay attention. Yeah, that was her job, she thought. Sit and praise JJ. Because she knew that contented as he was playing with her there, if she went left the room, he would find some reason to whine or he would pretend to hurt himself, or in some way need to assure he had a
ttention before he could go back to playing by himself.

  He had his own bedroom – the three and a half year old! – just because he was the only boy, while she and Joy had to share. Not that he appreciated it at all, oh no, he had to drag all of his toys into wherever she was sitting.

  JJ hummed to himself, but it was like he had eyes in the back of his head as far as whether she was watching. Jackie went over to the phone. “I’m calling Karen,” she told him, knowing he would pester her with questions otherwise. In addition to being one of her best friends, Karen didn’t mind helping baby sit. She thought JJ was adorable.

  “Karn, Karn,” JJ repeated back. He picked up one of his wooden train cars and ran it back and forth, still mumbling. Was he naming his train after her or just telling it? He seemed fond of Karen too, although it was a little hard to tell with him – he would be pretty friendly with anyone who walked in and said boo to him.

  Jackie just needed a brief conversation to convince Karen to come over. She was home and bored too, they both had homework, and Karen didn’t have to stay inside.

  She hung up and went to get a book out, maybe read an assignment during the time it took Karen to bike over. JJ had dropped his train and went back to rearranging the tracks.

  Karen, she thought, was pretty smart, but also tended to be one of those kids who wouldn’t raise a hand even if they knew the answer. She didn’t seem to care about her grades, although they were good. She didn’t want people to think of her as a smart kid, in fact she made kind of a point of trying to fit in with the average kids. She worried that smart girls were never popular or pretty, she had said as much.

  Karen wasn’t all that pretty, Jackie thought, smart or not. Nothing really stood out about her – her hair was mousy brown, her eyes somewhere between brown and hazel, her face kind of narrow, lips thin. But she had a nice smile, a cheerful way of making you feel like she cared about you. Even JJ must have picked up on that. What had Mom said – Karen was trustworthy.

  Well, that was the kind of friend Jackie needed, she thought. Teenage years were supposedly the worst. The world was going to crap, her own little world all the more so. Dad moving out, Mom and Dad with their hissing hostile arguments as he chose what to take with him, fake smiles from both as they discussed the visits to Dad’s apartment and summer vacation possibilities. More than ever, she needed people she could count on.