Down and Out in Bugtussle Read Online Free Page B

Jones.” I make a show of looking through the sub folder. “Well, Ms. Franks, I’m sorry, but Mrs. Davis didn’t leave you a personal message explaining her whereabouts.” I give her my bestI’m-so-not-impressed-with-your-attitude glare. “So why don’t you take a seat?”
    Her fellow classmates snigger as Brittany Franks rolls her eyes and goes to the back of the room. Another student yells that Brittany isn’t sitting in her assigned seat, so I go through the folder until I find the seating chart. When I pull that out and hold it up for them to see, I don’t have to say a word. They automatically rearrange themselves. Except Brittany Franks, whom I have to threaten with detention before she moves to her assigned seat.
    Second period is Mrs. Davis’s planning time, so, thank the good Lord in heaven, I’m off for forty-five minutes. I piddle around online for a little while, trying to distract myself from how tight these pants are, then text my pal Lilly Lane and ask her when she has lunch. Like me, Lilly graduated from Bugtussle High School back in 19-and-let’s-not-say-when. Then we moved to Starkville and enrolled in Mississippi State University, and that’s where we met Chloe. After Lilly graduated from college, she took off to pursue the magic of her dreams and spent a few very profitable years on the modeling circuit. When she got tired of the hustle and bustle, she moved back to Bugtussle and immediately landed a job teaching French, which isn’t the most difficult thing to do because foreign language teachers tend to be in short supply in northeast Mississippi.
    Lilly Lane hails from a wonderful and beautiful family, all of whom make living life look splendid and easy. Her handsome and distinguished father is a big shot at a furniture company in Tupelo, her lovely and petite mother runs the only investment firm in town, and her sexy older brother is halfway through a highly decoratedarmy career. They’re just a perfect freakin’ success story whose only dysfunction is how normal they are. I’ve often wondered how her parents got everything so right and how they have such a seemingly trouble-free existence. They must make a lot of good decisions. Like hundreds and hundreds of consecutively good decisions.
    Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if my parents were still around. If it would be different or if I would be different. I wonder what it would’ve been like had we stayed in my mother’s hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, rather than moving to my father’s hometown of Bugtussle, Mississippi. Certainly my mom would’ve been much happier during that last year of her life. She didn’t like Bugtussle. She didn’t fit in. And she didn’t want to, either. Perhaps they would still be around, because if we’d just stayed in Nashville, they wouldn’t have been on the road coming back from there like they were the day the accident happened. I stare at the digital clock on Mrs. Davis’s desk, fully aware that mulling over the “what-ifs” and “maybes” is a colossal waste of time, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.
    I remember standing in that funeral home where so many strange people kept hugging me and saying things like, “Everything happens for a reason” and “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.” I didn’t believe that crap then and, to this very day, I think those comments were creepy and sadistic. I mean, I don’t think God orchestrated a series of unfortunate events because the angels up in heaven desired the company of Jake and Isabella Jones. Likewise, I don’t believe the Lord grabbed the steering wheel and jerked a truck into the front of my parents’ car. The poor guy driving the truck was just trying not to run over a little old lady standing on the side of the road whose car had broken down. The whole thingwas just bad luck and wretched timing. I fail to see any strokes of divinity or rationale in what happened, but whatever. People