Sunbound

☀ The Girl With Two Names

C H A P T E R  5: The Girl With Two Names

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      Fact: Scout-Juliet "SJ" Compton hated when people asked her why she had two first names.

    She hated it more than she hated children, vienna sausages, and mittens. And Scout-Juliet Compton absolutely despised children, vienna sausages and mittens.

    So, on her first day of fourth grade, after enduring the same probing from her peers for five whole years on the matter of her names, she replied, with the straightest face she could muster, "I had a twin named Juliet... and I ate her in the womb." That was also about the same time that her collection of friends reduced to one, Bodhi "Bo" Benson, who only stuck around because she was shunned as well — her status as a pariah, however, resulted from being the resident lesbian. They were known as Cannibal Lecter and Bo Van Dyke, respectively — although respect and those godawful nicknames should never go in the same sentence.

    Scout's reasoning was untrue, of course. There was no cannibalized twin. It was just that her parents could not decide on a single first name. Her father, Scott, campaigned for Scout, arguing that the best names had a personality of all their own, and Scout seemed to have more character than most. Her mother, Virginia, asserted that Scout was an "atrocious" name and that Juliet was wholesome. They almost got divorced over it. Eventually, they conceded, gave her both names and threw a hyphen in the mix.

    Scout always thought they should have just gotten the divorce. After all, Virginia left before Scout could even walk. She never came back.

    Scout's brows knitted together as she clipped her name tag to her tank top. Why she even needed a name tag was beyond her. She worked at the desk of her father's auto repair shop, for Christ's sake. No one cared about her name. The only thing the customers cared about was getting the free tire rotation that came with the oil change, as promised by the sign outside.

    That was all Scout's life consisted of; sitting within the confines of her father's shop, Santan Valley Auto Repair, answering the phone and making appointments; and, on occasion, Bo kidnapping Scout to hang out at the shops further in town, wherein they would terrorize every old classmate that coined them as Cannibal Lecter and Bo Van Dyke. They usually got kicked out of the shops, or the owners would threaten to call the cops. That was all the excitement Santan Valley had to offer. Often times, Scout wished that they actually would call the cops. Getting arrested would be more interesting than anything else that had occurred in her life thus far.

    After graduating from high school four months early, Scout thought she would be out partying with friends, having drunken sex, and regretting it in the morning. That was what every other eighteen-year-old girl in their town was doing, but Scout soon discovered that she was not the average eighteen-year-old girl from Santan Valley. Scout's only friend was Bo, who had an aversion to anything that even remotely resembled a social gathering; and the only guy Scout had ever had sex with was her ex-boyfriend, Antonio Ruiz, who cheated on her with half of Santan Valley's female population. She found it astounding that they had not yet named a sexually transmitted disease after him.

    Scout sighed, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She ran a hand through her long, copper hair that faded into blonde at the ends like the bleeding hues of the sunrise, hoping that she could miraculously pull the thought of Antonio right out of her head. She hated wasting valuable time thinking about a guy that was probably banging a cheerleader somewhere in Arizona right now. No matter what he was doing, Scout knew that she was the farthest thing from his mind.