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4
Laney
With a yawn,I stretched my tired legs and leaned back on the bench outside Tom’s Diner, savoring the last few minutes of my twenty minute lunch break. We were usually quite busy in the summertime, selling milkshakes and banana splits, so for the last five hours, I’d been on my feet taking orders, cleaning tables, sweeping, and helping with the dishes in the kitchen when I had a spare moment between customers.
The diner was a faded old 50s-style establishment with black and white checkered flooring, a red wraparound counter, a glass case filled with cherry, blueberry, and blackberry pies, red faux leather booths, jukebox in one corner, and walls lined with faded memorabilia. The waitstaff wore vintage blue and white uniforms with little aprons, and the cook wore a white peaked cap and a little black bowtie over his buttoned linen shirt.
It was meant to be cool and retro, but to be honest, I’d always gotten a Twin Peaks vibe from the place instead. I spent half my weekends here coming up with imaginary scenarios in which Silvercreek wasn’t the dreariest, most run-down place in the state and the diner was actually a place that FBI agents came to sit in while they investigated creepy disappearances and shocking deaths with horrifying twists. It was silly, but it helped pass the time.
Tom—the ruddy-faced owner and cook—gave me a sympathetic smile as I finally headed back inside from my break and grabbed my apron. He never said this to my face, but I knew he felt sorry for me because I worked here every weekend instead of hanging out with my friends like most other teens in this town.
It didn’t bother me too much. I wasn’t exactly unpopular. I just didn’t have any close friends.
I used to have a tight group of buddies, all through elementary and middle school, but things changed when I was fourteen, and they all slowly faded from my life. By the next year, I didn’t have a single person I could call in hard times.
I didn’t blame any of them. There was too much drama surrounding me at the time. It still stung, though.
I could be somewhat comforted by the fact that I simply wouldn’t fit in anymore anyway, even if I tried my very best. Most people in this town were born here and died here. They finished school, got a local job, got married, had kids, and kept the same group of friends their entire lives, all without setting foot outside town aside from the occasional summer vacation.
There was nothing wrong with that—it was a valid life choice for those who wanted it. I just didn’t want it for myself.
I’d seen too much of the dark side of places like this, and I’d seen how it could drag a person down if they took a few steps in the wrong direction. Some people developed almost feral instincts when that happened, sharpened by the simple need to survive, and that struggle could amplify those instincts with disturbing results; a story I’d seen unfolding time and time again as I grew up here.
Crime was at an all-time high in the town and its outskirts, even if the local council tried to bury that in the yearly stats by classifying things in sneaky ways. That wasn’t going to change anytime soon, because nothing was being done to fix it or at least reduce it, so it simply wasn’t a safe place. Not compared to the pretty, polished surrounding towns in this part of the state.
The average income in Silvercreek was shockingly low, too, and I didn’t want to spend my whole life living paycheck to paycheck with no hope of saving anything. I’d seen what that sort of stress could do to people. Like my mother, for instance. She made a few poor choices when she was younger, and that shaped her entire existence.
She was a bright young college student when she met my father, and he promised her the world. All she had to do was quit college, move to his hometown, and support him while he started his own business. She was happy to do so, because she didn’t worry about all the things that could go wrong. All the things that would go wrong.
They did, of course, and by then she had me, so she was stuck working whatever jobs she could to get by and support me in the process. Always worrying about what the future held. Always feeling trapped in the teeth and claws of poverty.
Sometimes my internet friends—people I’d struck up conversations with on chat forums and other websites—would ask me why she didn’t just go back to college. Finish her degree. Then she could move us to a better town with better opportunities and get a higher-paying job.
I knew they meant well, but sometimes I just wanted to reach right into cyberspace and slap the shit out of them when they asked that so casually, as if it genuinely didn’t occur to them that it wasn’t an option for most people. They’d clearly never had a job which barely paid enough to cover rent, food costs, and utilities. It didn’t occur to them that there was nothing left over for a college savings fund, let alone anything else.
That was the thing about people who’d never been poor: they just didn’t get it. They could try their hardest to understand when you explained it to them, but unless they fell on hard times and experienced it themselves, they couldn’t know what an anxiety-inducing balancing act it was to get by every month. They didn’t know how easy it was to fall behind and slip under.
They’d never swiped their card at the grocery store checkout, heart thudding so painfully in their chest that they thought it might explode, all because they weren’t sure if there was still enough money in their account to cover the meager weekly food costs.
They’d never spent sleepless nights calculating exactly how much they needed to make in tips to pay the overdue bills before they were sent to debt collectors.
They’d never spent their time worrying about so many little things like that, all adding up to one big, seemingly never-ending headache.
I was determined to get out of the trap and make things better for myself. My mom, too—after taking care of me for so long, she deserved a break.
I knew I wasn’t the smartest kid in the world, but I still put in the hours and effort to keep my GPA as high as I could. I went to school early when it was on, just so I could study as much as possible in the library before class, and I spent my vacations doing much of the same. Books weren’t just a brief escape from reality for me. They were my way out.
“Laney!”
I whipped my head around as I tied my apron in a bow behind my waist. One of the other waitresses, an older blonde woman named Joanna, was grinning and waving at me from behind the counter.
I headed over to her. “What’s up?”
She leaned in, a conspiratorial smile lighting her face. “I had the cutest guy come in while you were on your break. Too young for me, but he’d be perfect for you.”
I returned her smile. “Oh yeah?”
“Trust me, your heart will stop when you see him,” she said, gesturing for me to peek around the side of the countertop with her. “I’m honestly scared to take his check over to him. I’m worried I’ll accidentally let a burp or fart slip out. Stuff like that always happens around the cute ones, doesn’t it?”
