All That Remains (Manere Book 1) Read online

  “I’m going to be working here for a while. I’m planning on taking some classes at MMC.”

  “Oh yeah? What are you going to study?” I asked, but there were only a handful of options at Manere Mountain Community College. Nursing, Auto Mechanic, Criminal Justice, Bookkeeping, and Education. With limited classes and resources to teach those classes, MMC could only offer so much regarding an education. It was the reason, so many professionals in town weren’t spectacular in their chosen field. If the competition wasn’t great, then it wouldn’t make much of a difference if the curriculum wasn’t top-notch.

  There were only a few of us who went above and beyond what was required of high school to prepare ourselves for a University. It meant hours of additional reading and self-designed lessons that could have easily been for nothing. It wouldn’t have been unexpected if I had been rejected by every school outside Manere because they didn’t believe I was fully prepared, but I somehow managed to convince them.

  “I think I will do Education. My mom always wanted to be a teacher. Maybe all the years of her talking about going back to school or wishing she had done it differently made me want to try my hand at it. You know?” I nodded.

  “Obviously, it’s not as impressive as you. Going off to a real college and everything. I just don’t think I could have left my family. It would have been too hard for me. You’re much stronger than I am”.

  I smiled and held my tongue resisting the urge to remind her that her below-average grade point at a subpar school was what was likely keeping her from attending a university. “I think that’s awesome Abby. You would make an excellent teacher.” I gave her a reassuring smile.

  Abby went back to busying herself. I too tried to appear engaged in the job by wiping counters, refilling the condiments, and placing fresh lettuce and luncheon meats in their cubbies. I thought about the driver who delivered the fresh ingredients that didn’t appear all that fresh anymore. I wondered if he or she enjoyed being one of the few people who was given a free pass to go in and out of town without having to stay. Where did he or she live? Did they have a pool? Kids? My mind often wandered when it came to thinking about life outside of the desert. I leaned over the counter to see the people on Main Street walk by. There didn’t seem to be a lot of interest in Hoagie’s Heroes, but since it was one of the few stores on the block still in business, it must have been doing well enough. The nail salon next door was the most recent defunct business. Apparently, there wasn’t a market for manicures and French tips or enough money to justify them.

  Claudia Banner and her older sister Mia were working there after their grandmother opened the business. They had spent time learning the tricks of the trade from her since the short-lived cosmetology school, which also once sat on Main Street, closed years before. There were only so many clients in a town that restricted flow from the outside. After the store closed, the Banners got jobs elsewhere, and it was as if Banner Nails never existed. While lost in another stare I caught Milo McDonough walking out of Big Star Video across the street. I shrunk below the glass partition that housed the sandwich ingredients hoping he wouldn’t see me through the window. He hadn’t seen me which was precisely why he walked right in. I looked around to find a hiding place, but Abby had mysteriously disappeared. She was probably retrieving supplies from the back room because everyone who worked at Hoagie’s seemed to inexplicably be in the back room most of the time. I stood straight up accepting an awkward encounter as my fate.

  “Angie? You work here now?” he asked. His voice sounded genuinely curious without any trace of negativity. It was a change from his usual demeanor toward me.

  “Yes. Just started today. They already have me working like a dog” I chuckled. His ease started to appear more strained like he remembered that our relationship was not in its best form at the moment. His face turned disinterested in making small talk and began looking over my head to the menu.

  “I’ll have the meatball sub, with provolone instead of swiss. Can you throw some mustard on there too? Jalapenos, onions, lettuce…”

  “No pickles. You hate pickles on meatball subs” I said. He looked at me like it was peculiar that I knew this fact about him.

  “I’ll take the pickles, actually. I don’t mind” he said. I knew he would take off the pickles as soon as he got home. As much as Milo was trying to pretend, we didn’t have a history, I still knew him better than most. Even with our friendship breakup, it felt strange not joking around with him or us both getting sandwiches after hitting the video store to pick up the grossest and dumbest horror movies imaginable.

  “Did you want chips or a drink?”

  “I’ll just grab these and this” he went over to the rack for a bag and the fridge for a drink.

  His movements were so rapid that I didn’t even know what his choice was. It didn’t really matter. I suppose that was the point. If he were any other customer, I wouldn’t have cared what they picked up. Milo wanted to make sure I knew that he was no different from a stranger off the street. Milo was my best friend when we were kids, but after junior high something shifted. He told me that I had changed, which was accurate, but so had he. He gave off an air of being so much better than everyone else, and above the drama of high school.

  “If you decide to be the same Angie I used to know, give me a call,” he said.

  It was spring break of our eleventh-grade year when he walked away from me with the most disappointed look on his face. I wasn’t ready to change or didn’t even know I needed to. There were a few times throughout high school when we had truces mostly due to us being neighbors or being stuck in the same group in class. We were partners in Chemistry in eleventh grade which was a strange time. Once we were working on something together, it was like no time had changed. We played nice without it taking any effort. Once the bell rang, our blissful bubble was popped, and we went our separate ways.

  There was a night, Junior year when I broke up with Ezra Bellingham, who I was crazy about for some reason. I wanted to break up with him because I knew he was going to end things and I would much rather have been the dumper than the dumped. I was so distraught that I walked to my house alone in the dark, which I rarely did, and I felt this shiver through my bones. It was a genuine feeling of terror, but there was nothing that caused it. It was that feeling of being alone and afraid in the dark when you’re a kid before you run into the safety of your parent’s bed. I had nowhere to run. There was no reprieve in the form of a parent offering me a spot in their cozy four-post haven.

  Milo had, at one time, provided a semblance of comfort and safety which is why I immediately thought of him while on my walk. Milo and I had been lab partners at the time and seeing his face every day and listening to his calming subdued modulation made me need him more. Of course, Milo was only civil to me during those classes, and anything that seemed friendly was probably done offhandedly. However, that creepy walk home reminded me of how important Milo was to me when we were kids and that losing him so I could be a worse person seemed absurd

  The next morning, I approached Milo about Prom. I wasn’t asking him to go, I just wanted to sell him tickets since that had become my main job for ASB. After an exasperated sigh over having to stop to talk to me, he told me he wasn’t going. When I tried to sell him a yearbook a few weeks later, he once again told me that he was not interested in what I was selling. It became nearly impossible coming up with new and plausible excuses to talk to him. When there is only one person who wants to fix a broken friendship, the amount of effort becomes overwhelming and fruitless.

  The plan to get us back on track had been derailed too many times, and I decided it was best to accept the death. It was like a long bout of dying, and I didn’t want to pull the plug even though he had done it years earlier. When I went over our conversations in my head, I could see why he was hurt. I wasn’t always kind, but I never thought that it would result in what had been the true end. That’s the problem with having a friend with a good heart and a plac
id temperament, you think you can treat them however you want. In fact, their kindness almost ignites a fuse inside others making them want to harm them. He flipped a switch; he was no longer buying what I was selling.

  “Angela!” Abby hollered from the back room. I walked back to find she was pinned between the wall and a large metal shelf that had tipped over wedging her in. Abby’s slight five-foot frame had no chance of getting out of such a mess.

  “Hmm,”

  “Hmm? Can you help me, or do we need to call someone? Everyone is on a lunch break.

  Why is everyone always smoking and leaving me by myself?” Abby moaned.

  “No. We can get you out of this, no problem.” I pulled a few boxes off the shelves and dropped them on the ground making the weight less unwieldy. I finally pulled the shelf up and set it straight.

  “Angela! Thank you so much. I thought I was going to suffocate in there. Good thing you’re so tall. You should have been in volleyball”

  “I was in volleyball in ninth grade.”

  “I didn’t know that”

  “It didn’t really last. I was also in basketball and baseball. Each for a short time. I’m not really into sports long term. I like to get in, get bored, move on”.

  Abby laughed. She seemed to laugh at everything I said just as she did in junior high. I thought I was funny sometimes, but her easy laugh made me suspect that I probably wasn’t.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Abby bent down to pick up paperwork that had fallen off the top shelf.

  “It looks like a contract for business.”

  “Are they going to sell Hoagie’s Heroes? If they did that would they hire new people?” Abby said panicked.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that. You know the chamber of commerce would never let a corporation come into town to buy the sandwich shop. Too many rules.”

  “Who’s Michael Fullworth. It says the owner, but the owner’s name is Bob. Is the owner’s name not Bob? Is that like a nickname? Weird nickname for Michael. Why not Mike?” Abby rambled on when the name that sounded familiar finally hit me.

  “Isn’t Michael Fullworth the guy who used to own this place? A few years back. Look, this is dated six years ago. He must have wanted to expand it, and it never worked out”.

  “Maybe he sold it to Bob.”

  “Maybe”

  I started to push around the boxes to clean up the mess.

  “Maybe he died. That would be sad” Abby’s words jostled my memory.

  “You’re right Abby. That’s why the name sounds familiar. It’s not because he used to own this place, it’s because he’s the guy that hung himself in Finnegan’s Park a few years ago”.

  “Oh my gosh. That is so creepy. I wonder why he killed himself. You think the Chamber of Commerce people were like ‘no way, Jose’ and so he got super depressed?”

  “Maybe”

  “I think that’s what happened. I think he was tired of following their dumb rules. Not really a reason to kill yourself. It didn’t really affect them all that much. Like they even care who lives and who dies” Abby said.

  Abby’s uncharacteristic perceptiveness was somehow inspiring. “Abby. Don’t you think it’s odd that there have been so many mysterious disappearances and deaths in the last few years?”

  “Not really. There’s always been a good amount of deaths in Manere. Life in the desert, I suppose, isn’t easy for some people”.

  “How do you know there have been a lot? You never read about deaths being as frequent thirty or forty years ago, right?” I said.

  “No. That’s only because they don’t want to talk about it. My dad has told me all these crazy stories from when he was in high school in Manere. Don’t your parents ever tell you about what it was like when they were kids.”

  “No” I didn’t want to explain for the one billionth time that my parents never grew up in Manere and for the 2 billionth time, I did not have a dad to ask.

  “Well. My dad says that his friend, Freddy something, was going to go off to Stanford. I think he was some great runner with a scholarship. He was the best athlete at school. He had the best grades and was always reading stuff he found in the library. He even taught himself Spanish since the school didn’t have the class back then. I guess they don’t really have it now either. That’s strange, isn’t it?” I nodded and waited patiently to hear the rest, but Abby seemed to be caught in her own thoughts. It was almost an epidemic. It was probably the unbearable heat or just the sharpness of the sun piercing through our minds, but either way, getting a thought out could sometimes be a task during the summer.

  “So, anyway?” I asked.

  “So, anyway, he killed himself. I can’t remember how he did it. It was gory though. Isn’t that weird? Why would someone like that kill themselves?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I said agreeing with her sentiment.

  “Except. Well, except I guess if you’ve tried your whole life to do something. To do something perfectly and then you finally do it. It’s not like he was done but what if achieving it just made him think he wouldn’t be able to live up to it?” She said.

  “That’s a depressing thought.”

  “I know. Did you hear that?”

  “Hear?”

  “Angelia, I think we have a customer” Abby walked out of the backroom to return to her job while I considered what she had told me.

  Usually, when I heard stories about people dying by accident or suicide, my stomach would cramp up which would result in vomiting or a mild panic attack. For some reason, I wasn’t experiencing either. I picked up the contract and stuffed it into my backpack. I didn’t think anyone would miss it. I would have been surprised if anyone had even known it was there in the first place.

  Chapter 5

  After six hours, which felt like so much longer, of my first day, I left the Hoagie’s smelling of pickles and onions. I looked ahead while crossing the street to get into my car. Since it was Main Street, there was always a good chance I would run into someone I knew. When I heard my name, I flinched and scolded myself for summoning someone with my thoughts. I turned around to see it was Derek.

  “Hi, Derek.”

  “Abrams, how's it going,” Derek asked with unexpected genuineness.

  I rarely spoke to Derek alone. It wasn't for any singular reason, it just seemed that there had always been someone else around. If we truly wanted to admit it to ourselves, we were probably not good friends but more of friends through friends. Something indefinable about Derek kept me wary. I’m not sure if it was his reputation at school, or within our group, but I was never quite as comfortable when he was around.

  “It’s going well. I guess. Just got off work.”

  “Oh yeah? Hoagies? I thought you were working somewhere else. The video store or something.”

  “No. That didn’t work out. “ I had applied to the video store a month before and had been hired. I then found out that Milo had also been hired at the same time. At first, I was thrilled to have a chance to spend time with him, but during an awful anxiety episode, I realized that if I did work there, he wouldn’t be as happy. He always wanted to work at the video store, and I knew his family was counting on him to bring in some extra money, so he could pay for himself to live away from home when he moved to New York. I also had spoken to Abby around the same time about getting me a job with her. It only made sense to let him work there without having to deal with me.

  “Are you going to the dry lakebed at all this summer?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. I may be focused on other things this summer.”

  “Alright Abrams. Just don’t get too stuck-up for us just because you’re going to some fancy smart people school.”

  Derek may have been flippant but growing up around people who openly mocked intelligence, and the desire to be a better person was beginning to weigh heavily on me. I was becoming more irritable and desperate to leave than ever before. In the years before, I probably pushed beyond thei
r close-minded statements because I had no other option. I was stuck. I could be stuck and miserable, or I could just accept them as my friends and realize that it was just the way things were.

  “Derek. What are you going to do? Still criminal justice at MMC?” I asked knowing that it didn’t matter if he took a single class. His father was Sheriff. He would become a police officer with absolutely no effort required.

  “That’s the plan. I think I may take a few months off first. Maybe not start until the spring.”

  It was typical Derek to take a few months off from doing the bare minimum just so he could return to doing the bare minimum. Mediocrity was exhausting for most in Manere.

  “Sounds like you have it all figured out. Aren’t you supposed to be hanging with Lucy tonight?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure. I should probably go home and give her a call. Hope she’s not waiting for me.”

  “You go do that,” I said wanting to end the conversation.

  My patience was running thin, and I didn’t want to prolong the discussion any longer. It was bad enough that Derek gloated about his family’s status in town. His father was the Sheriff, his mother was the principal of our high school, his uncle owned the only bar in town. Even his older brother was the assistant manager at the bank. He had no problems in Manere. He could do whatever he wanted, and no one would bat an eye. Of course, this meant he could go from being a charming and amiable person to acting like an entitled asshole in an instant. Sadly, I spent far too long having some form of a crush on him. I wasn’t the only one since he also dated our friend Shannen and of course moved on to Lucy.