Anna Snoekstra - Little Secrets

She swallowed and looked back at the board, oddly grateful she definitely wasn’t the least fortunate person in town. She looked for rooms to rent among the badly photocopied posters advertising secondhand cars and used baby cribs for sale. There were two advertisements for tenants. One was so far out of town she had no idea how she could get to work, and the other was a room share, but she wrote both numbers down in her notebook. Neither was appealing, but both were better than sleeping under the stars with the fossickers.

As she stood thinking of how the rent per month added up against her income, she felt a movement behind her. Nothing touched her, but the hair on her arms prickled and stood. Turning, she saw the back of a man walking up the stairs. Will. Without thinking, she began to follow him. She wanted to know more about him, understand what someone like him, someone with new clothes and no apparent connections with the town, was doing here in Colmstock.

Rose waited until he reached the crest of the stairs and turned down the corridor before she began quietly climbing them herself. When she reached the top, he was gone. He must have entered one of the offices. Rose looked into one. A woman sat glumly behind a computer, barricades snaking around the room in preparation for a long line, but no one was waiting. The woman straightened when she saw Rose but Rose just smiled at her and kept walking. The next room was the public records. You were meant to register yourself at the station and ask the attendant to find records for you. Rose had done research for stories here a couple of times. There was no one behind the desk now. Looking at the logbook, she saw that the last entry was for over six months ago. There’d been layoffs at the council around then.

She was about to turn when she heard a sound of a filing cabinet drawer squeak open. Leaning across the desk, she looked into the archives. There was Will, flicking through a drawer like he was perfectly entitled to be there.

“Hey!” she said. “What are you doing?”

He looked up at her and smiled. “Hi,” he said. “You’re the waitress from Eamon’s, right?”

As if he didn’t remember who she was. She narrowed her eyes at him. “You know you’re not allowed to just look through this stuff yourself.”

He shrugged. “Are you going to help me?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t work here, you know.”

He didn’t answer but began flicking through the records again.

She came around to the other side of the desk. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

He stopped, turning around completely this time, and fixed her with a blunt stare. She found herself taking a step backward.

“If you don’t work here,” he said, not smiling anymore, “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

He stared at her, waiting for her to leave. And she did. As she was turning to walk out of the room, she wondered why she was doing it. She never, ever let people talk to her that way. If they did she was quick to tell them to bugger off. But something about the way he’d looked at her, about the severity in his voice, had made her falter.

She was almost home, replaying the encounter over and over in her head, when she remembered the reason she’d gone out in the first place. She took the notebook out and flicked to the page where she’d written down the phone numbers and prices for the rentals. Wishing she’d paid more attention in math, she divided the monthly amounts by 4.3 and then put together a rough estimate of her weekly wage. Snapping the notebook shut, she felt the all-too-familiar lump rise in her throat again. There was no way it would work. She’d have to get a second job, like most people in town.

Walking in through the front door, she imagined it. The only jobs around were at the poultry factory. She desperately didn’t want to work there. Her mother’s job there was debeaking. Rose remembered the way she’d looked after her first day. She’d come home so pale she looked sick.

Rose had poured her a glass of water and asked her what had happened. She hadn’t really wanted to know, not at all, but she wanted her mother to feel better. Her mother told her about how she’d had to use a dirty pair of scissors to cut the end of chickens’ beaks off so they didn’t peck each other in the battery cages.

“The noise they make,” she’d said. “They’re in agony.”

She had to do one hundred a day; if she didn’t reach the target she’d get her pay docked. Rose had told her not to go back, that she was sure there’d be another job she could get. But her mother had gone back. That was five years ago.

Rose sat down on the end of her bed and looked at her suitcase. If she worked at the factory, she’d give up on ever getting out of town. There wouldn’t be time. Slowly, she shut the lid of her suitcase with her foot and pushed it under her bed, her good clothes still folded inside. She was going to ask her mum for a month, just one month, and in that time she was going to make her dream happen. She was going to get out of here.

7

“So Frank wasn’t worried?” Mia asked, as they laid towels down on the carpet of her bedroom.

“He said he wasn’t, although Baz said he was. It is just a toy though, right? It can’t be anything too bad,” Rose told her.

“How did Laura handle having to let it go?”

Rose smiled. “I don’t know if she’ll ever forgive me.”

“I’m sure they’ll give it back to her when it turns out to be nothing.”

“Hope not—I don’t think I’d sleep with that creepy thing in the house.”

They sat down on the coarse gray towels, the bristles rough on their bare legs.

“If I tell you something, you won’t laugh?” asked Mia, who was stirring the wax that they had heated up in the microwave. The two of them were sitting on the towels in their undies, a half-empty bottle of Bundy between them.

“Maybe, but tell me anyway.”

“My aunt Bell said she’s going to give me her old tarot cards.”

Rose snorted. “You’re going to be a fortune-teller?”

“No!” Mia hit her playfully. “I don’t know—it’s stupid, I guess. I just find it interesting.”

“It’s not stupid! You should do it. You’re good at that stuff. Your beer-foam readings double our tips.”

Mia smiled into the wax tub.

“Maybe we could get in touch with the ghosts of the Eamons?” Rose said, poking Mia in the side.

“They’re tarot cards, not a Ouija board!”

“Same thing though, right?”

Mia opened her mouth to retort, then saw Rose’s smile.

“But seriously,” Rose said, “I think you could do the tarot thing and charge suckers a mint. People in the city love that shit, and I won’t be able to pay the rent on my own.”

“The city?” Mia asked. “I thought, you know, without the cadetship...” She trailed off.

Rose leaned back against her bed. “I’m going to work it out,” she told her. “I’ve already sent in a bunch of job applications. Just for crappy temp jobs and call centers, but something has to come up, right? And once I’m settled, you can follow. We can still do it.”

“Cool. Okay, are you ready?”

“Ready.”

They repositioned themselves so their bare legs were laced together. It was always easier to do it to someone else. One time, when Rose was about fourteen, she had been too afraid to pull the wax strip off and had left it on for a full twenty minutes. When she had finally worked up the courage to do it, it had hurt like hell. The thing had pulled off a layer of skin. For the next week, Rose had a raised pink rectangle on her calf that was so tender she could barely even touch it.

They’d been doing this together for ages, thinking it was easier if someone else was the one to pull the strip off. Sometimes, Rose worried that their friendship was a little stunted. She loved Mia, but it was like they both reverted back to being teenagers again when they were together. Like neither could really grow up with the other around.