Seventeen year old Misty Cellars lives in a double-wide trailer where she bargains with a local drug gang to keep her mother out of prison. After losing her father to heroin, she is invited to a weekend church gathering, or so it appears. Instead, M...
Jenna started. "Shit!" she mumbled, rubbing her eyes, staring blindly out into the now-dark landscape. She'd fallen asleep. Missed her spot. And she was still new to these parts. Where was she?
Jenna quickly glanced over to the corner where the girl from her homeroom had waved to her. She was gone. "Next stop! End-a-ta-line!" The driver hollered. "Airybody off! Have a good night airybody!!!" The driver hollered even louder, clearly intending to wake up dozing passengers like Jenna so the driver could call it a night.
Jenna rushed to gather her belongings: A milky-blue cardigan with delicate, scalloped edges that her Dad had gotten her at the mall, a back-to-school slash sorry-we-moved-again present, and her worn, one-zippered old Jansport backpack. Rising to her feet, Jenna hurried down the aisle towards the bus driver, pausing. Even in a slightly discombobulated state, she managed to emanate an effortless cool.
Running her hands absentmindedly through her thick, honey blonde hair which cascaded down her tanned shoulders, she smiled brightly. "Hi!" she said, "Where exactly...is the end of the line?" she said, not exactly having to feign a wide-eyed innocence as she clearly had noidea where she was.
The driver looked up, annoyed at first, but smiled warmly when she saw Jenna. Jenna was used to this reaction: She rarely managed to irritate anyone in the long-term, male, female, old, young...it didn't matter. The Fournier charm, as her Dad called it. She always told him he had it too. Sometimes, she swore his eye twinkle was almost otherworldly. It did certainly come in handy. "Old Mapleton, honey," the driver explained, "You lost, honey?" the middle-aged driver asked, shifting to face Jenna, her, starched, bus uniform pants making it somewhat difficult for her to make a natural shift in posture.
Jenna wrinkled her brow, "Ohmigosh," she began, "I just moved here," she explained, slightly rolling her eyes as if the driver was a fellow sorority girl who had totally been there.
The driver smiled patiently, her name tag reading, "Sara T." "Sweetie," Sara T. began, "This here is Old Mapleton, it's south-a the Thorne Apple Farm, you know those parts?"
Jenna shook her head, with a polite yet not-quite-apologetic tone. She was masterful at shamelessly asking for help without the slightest bit of entitlement or self-pity. "Alright honey," the driver said, shifting the bus into a full stop and applying the emergency brake. The bus heaved forward before resting back on what felt like the hindquarters of a large horse.
"Now I'll tell you what. I don't usually do this, but seein' as you're new, and you can't be more than twenty if my eyes are tellin' me right, I'll give you a ride. But my supervisor'd have my tail if I added more miles at the end of the line - and yup, they check, as if there aren't better things to do, I know, - so Imma give you a ride, I'm parked up in the old lot up near the station."
Jenna's brow took a second to unfurrow, while she took a minute to assess her murder-radar. "Low-risk," her radar reported, confidently. "Okay! That is like, so generous of you! Amazing! Thank you so much!" Jenna chirped, brightly.
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