Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (best ereader for graphic novels TXT) 📕

give them free ice creams if they learned one Slovenian word a day. They kept trying to say thank you in Slovene, but it was impossible to make their tongues fit around the sharp edges of the words. Finally one day he said, “Don’t worry about it—I have a speech impediment in my own language. I’m not saying it the way they do back home either.”

He gave them each a chocolate-chip ice cream sandwich for their efforts.

“Do you think he could be our father?” Jane had whispered out of the corner of her mouth. He had dark hair, just like Martha. Jane was fair, with very fine, straight hair that pinged out of her braids, making her look a bit like a bedraggled hedgehog.

Martha surveyed the Slovenian ice cream guy and said, “Nah, neither one of us has a speech impediment.” She had no idea what that was, but it was a big word, so if they’d had one, they would have known.

They were ten at the time. Jane was the one who had the Webster’s dictionary, another gift from the traveling librarian, so she looked it up and confirmed that Martha was right: he probably wasn’t their father.

“So, get this,” Martha said, flopping herself down on Jane’s couch, making dust particles fly into the air.

“Oops. Sorry, Huckleberry.”

Jane’s dog sniffed close to Martha, smelled her breath, then backed away suspiciously.

Jane laughed. “What kind of toothpaste is Zoe making now?”

“Oh. Absinthe,” Martha said distractedly.

Jane had tried Zoe’s toothpaste once, but it tasted like bird poop.

“Zoe’s diary talks about how a guy built her an outhouse before he left,” said Martha.

“An outhouse?”

“Yeah, his last great token of love.”

“Wouldn’t you have been considered a last great token of love, if he was your father? I mean, before an outhouse?”

Martha seemed not to have heard her.

Jane wondered then—and secretly not for the first time—if she and Martha could really have the same father. She knew her mother would not view an outhouse as a token of love.

Martha had started to worry Jane. She seemed restless and edgy, and a few steps ahead, as if she was already moving on from the only life they’d ever known.

And suddenly she was interested in outhouses? There were a few forgotten ones, tilting precariously along the bluffs, but the girls usually steered clear of them, for obvious reasons.

“You’re on your own for this one,” Jane said. “Not my thing. Not anyone’s thing, actually.”

The last person who had used the abandoned outhouses had been the Slovenian ice cream man.

“Don’t you want to know?” Martha asked. “Maybe he carved his name in the wall or something.”

So Jane begrudgingly trudged along behind Martha to the slanted building punctuating the hillside. There had been no directions in Zoe’s diary, and there were four other outhouses in various locations, but Jane didn’t mention this because she hoped they were only going to check out the one that Martha had her sights on and then go eat the picnic lunch they’d brought along. It was so old it didn’t even smell bad anymore. There were mouse turds along the wooden seat, and the blue Styrofoam was chewed all around the hole. An old license plate from Washington state dangled precariously by one nail. The date said 1980: fifteen years ago.

“What if that was his?” Martha whispered as if they were in church, not a literal shithole.

Both girls had been born in 1981, a few months apart. Of course their mothers couldn’t be friends, just do the math! Something live scurried around down in the hole, and Huckleberry barked like a maniac.

“Can we go, please?” Jane said.

“I spend hours with you and your stupid mollusks,” Martha said, which was true.

“Okay, but what else is there to see?”

Martha shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go have a picnic.”

It was a beautiful day, but clouds were hugging the far horizon, and the girls knew they needed to get to the other side of the beach, where, if the wind changed direction and it did rain, they’d just barely be out of reach of it.

Huckleberry got there first, spinning in circles and kicking up sand until the girls shooed him off so they could spread out their blanket and unpack their food: liverwurst sandwiches from Mama, barbecued tempeh from Zoe.

“If you write the word ‘love’ on your water bottle, it makes the water taste better,” Martha told Jane as they sat hidden from view, out of the wind, sipping carefully because sand had crusted the rims of their bottles.

“You mean I won’t notice the sand between my teeth if the bottle says ‘love’?” Jane asked.

Martha laughed. “You’re so funny, Jane. But yes, it can even change the physical composition of the water.”

“What do you mean, I’m so funny?”

“I just mean, you know, provincial.”

She said it as if she’d just looked it up and had been waiting for the right moment to use it. Which she probably had.

Martha also cleared her throat and announced, “I’m going to remake myself into a totally different person.”

“Like who?” Jane asked, her mouth full of liverwurst.

“I don’t know. Maybe a hippie.”

“Technically, I think you already are one,” said Jane, pointing at the tempeh sandwich.

“Okay, maybe not a hippie. I just want a chance to start over somewhere and be a whole new person. I think I’m ready to be in a bigger place. And I’m dying to have sex.”

Jane felt her face grow hot. So that was what Martha meant by “provincial.”

“God, Jane, see what I mean? You can’t even talk about sex, which is the most natural thing in the world.”

If it was the most natural thing in the world, why did both their mothers act as though they’d all just washed up here at high tide?

But Zoe talked to Martha all the time about her body and the weird things it was doing, while Mama, of course, did not talk to Jane. And in this instance, Jane was relieved. But it was the first thing that had come between her and Martha,