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

“Lula called. Conrad was in a hospital on the coast; his dad went out there to get him. She was hoping you’d be here when he got back.”

“Wait. What? Is he okay?” He held his breath.

“Well, that’s why Lula called. He’s okay, except…he can’t remember anything. Not even his name. Lula thinks maybe seeing you will help.”

“Why did he have to leave without telling me what was going on?” Now he was crying so hard he could barely hear what she was saying. Conrad was alive.

“There are some things in life that people have a hard time even telling themselves.”

He thought about the hitchhiker, her backpack, whatever it was she was hiding. If this pack wasn’t stolen, then her name might be Delia—which was what was written inside in black marker—but he doubted she’d wanted anyone to know that.

He wondered if Conrad would remember their kiss now. Or even Ben himself. Or why he’d left in the first place. So many secrets.

“I’ll be there in a few hours.”

And if Conrad didn’t remember him, well, they had time. They’d just have to start over, and that wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened. Ben wouldn’t let him get away again.

Conrad is alive.

Conrad is alive.

He slid down the wall of the phone booth and looked at the forgotten bits of people’s lives lying on the ground near his feet. Cigarette butts, a syringe, the stub of a bus ticket to Boise. A piece of blue chewing gum with teeth marks still in it. The rusty hinges of the phone booth kept the door from closing all the way, and just outside, in the pavement, one single purplish-blue flower was growing straight out of the cement. A pansy or a petunia or something else, he wasn’t sure. Conrad was the one who knew the names of flowers, not Ben.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said out loud to the little parking-lot flower. “You’re too beautiful for any of this.”

THE RIGHT KIND OF PEOPLE

By the time Delia was sixteen she had a gum-wrapper chain that was forty feet long.

One of her many babysitters had shown her how to make it when she was five. Probably Michelle, since she was the one Delia remembered best; she smelled minty and was always at the ready with a piece of chewing gum.

“Only use the outside wrapper with the colorful designs. The foil won’t work and isn’t as pretty,” Michelle had told her, sliding the stick of gum from its wrapper, removing the foil, and popping it into her mouth. Then she opened the wrapper wide, folded it in half lengthwise, licked it to crease it, and split the two halves apart. The first one she folded in half again, then again, until it was skinny as could be, and then she folded it in half the other direction. She took one end and folded it yet again, to meet in the middle, then did the same to the other side. Michelle’s flying fingers boggled Delia’s mind, but she persisted and made her smaller, clumsier fingers mimic Michelle’s over and over again, ruining heaps of wrappers before she got it right. Once it stuck, it stuck.

The tiny finished product had a little V shape that you could pretend was a mouth. And then you folded the other half of the wrapper and it fit into the first V’s mouth, and then the next one fit into that one’s mouth, et cetera, et cetera, and it just kept going. “You could go forever if you wanted to,” said Michelle. “I wish I’d started when I was your age, but now I’m too busy, you know, being a teenager and everything.”

Delia did not know what that meant, “being a teenager and everything.” But she wanted a very long gum chain, so she decided to get cracking before anything having to do with being a teenager crept up on her. (Michelle had said it as if it was something you got even if you didn’t want it, like the chicken pox.)

Whenever Delia went to the store she would scan the candy aisle for a brand of gum with a color she didn’t have yet and beg her parents to buy it. She had a lot of green Wrigley’s Spearmint wrappers, and the yellow ones too, called Juicy Fruit. She loved the checkered gum that tasted like oranges and the black jack wrapper, but she hated the spicy licorice taste of that gum, so she gave it to her brother. She kept all her wrappers in an old tobacco box. The gum she stashed in a paper sack, stripped of everything but their foil undies—this made her giggle like mad, the image of gum wearing undies—until she had no idea which flavor was which. She got really tired of chewing gum, and the sticks piled up in the paper bag.

Her parents never said no to gum, because they had a lot of money and she could have asked for anything, like another pair of cowboy boots or another fringy leather jacket (she had six). That was the thing about being the child of a rich Wyoming rancher: you could have whatever you wanted. So packs and packs of chewing gum was nothing at all.

The only rule was that she could not fold gum wrappers in church. Her parents were very Catholic. They gave a lot of money to the church, and her family had their own pew that they sat in every Sunday, in the very front row on the left side of the altar, where everyone could see them. Because of this, Delia and her brother had to look shinier than their friends, and they had to sit up straighter and fidget less than anyone else.

One whole stained-glass window was also paid for by her father’s ranch: the seventh station of the cross, Jesus falls a second time. Her mother gave her a rosary