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  KABOOM!

  OTHER BOOKS BY BRIAN ADAMS

  Love in the Time of Climate Change

  KABOOM!

  BRIAN ADAMS

  Copyright © 2016 Brian Adams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote lines from the following song lyrics from John Prine, “Paradise,” John Prine, 1971.

  Green Writers Press is a Vermont-based publisher whose mission is to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups. Green Writers Press gratefully acknowledges support from individual donors, friends, and readers to help support the environment and our publishing initiative.

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  EBOOK ISBN: 9780996897310

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  Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

  —JOHN MUIR, Our National Parks, 1901

  KABOOM!

  Prologue

  IT WAS JUST MY LUCK. The moment the cell door closed I got my period. Perfect timing or what?

  “Excuse me!” I yelled out. “I have a medical emergency here!”

  Silence. No response.

  “Hello!” I yelled again. “I’m having issues!” I tried rattling the bars the way they do in the movies when convicts want to cause trouble or create a diversion for a jailbreak or something sinister like that. But the only sound my rattling made was a pathetic squeak. Kind of like the sound that one of Auntie Sadie’s goats makes when you rub its butt.

  Still no response.

  I raised my voice in that shrill, high-pitched, girly-girl way that I find so annoying when other girls do it.

  “Anyone home? I’m kind of bleeding here! Somebody do something!”

  Finally, after what seemed like forever, the jailer dude came shuffling around the corner. His hair was all askew, his uniform wrinkled, his eyes puffy and swollen. He looked exhausted.

  “What’s a girl gotta do to get a tampon around here?” I asked, forcing a smile and attempting to inject a little humor into the situation. Given the circumstances, this was probably not the smartest thing to say.

  The jailer glared at me with his tired eyes, wheezed a breath in and out, turned, and silently shuffled away, once again making himself as scarce as boobs on a rooster. I was left alone to bleed in peace.

  All things considered, it had been quite a day. I had skipped out on school and chained myself to a logging truck at the bottom of Mount Tom. Our mountain. Our sacred mountain. The mountain the coal company wanted to blow the top off of. The police had come, arrested me, and dragged me away.

  And now, here I was hours later, bleeding to death in jail.

  And that wasn’t even the highlight! The absolute best part, the crowning moment of my day, actually my entire life, was when my boyfriend told me, for the very first time, that he loved me.

  “I love you,” he had said. “I love you so much!”

  Me! He said he loved me!

  Awesome or what?

  1

  I LIVE IN GREENFIELD, WEST VIRGINIA. The heart of Appalachia.

  Greenfield is a coal mining town in a coal mining state. You were either a miner, related to a miner, or worked in a place supported by miners. Take the coal out of Greenfield and it’s hard to imagine there’d even be a town.

  And if Coal is King, then the crown prince is the high school mascot—the Greenfield High Coal Miner.

  The Miner is always a prince, never a princess. Girls need not apply. It is, as my Auntie Sadie says, the way of the world.

  “Why can’t I be The Miner when I get to high school?” my little sister Britt asked one day.

  “’Cause you’re a girl,” Sadie said.

  “So what? Being The Miner would be fun!”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, you don’t have a penis,” I told her. “Give it up.”

  Little sisters! Jeez!

  Being the mascot is the sweetest thing you can possibly be at our school. The position to die for. Sure, there are the head cheerleader and the captain of the football team and “Miss Coal Greenfield,” but they’re nada, nothing, tiny goat turds compared to “The Miner”—our high school mascot.

  Auditions for the job are beyond intense. It’s like running for mayor. Or even president. The whole town comes out to watch the show. Bookies lay odds on the favorite, miners bet like mine owners, fortunes are won and lost. Okay—maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit here, but it is quite the scene.

  Auntie Sadie told me a great story about the classic mascot incident in town. “The Year of the Scam” as folks in Greenfield still call it.

  “Bill Mayrose was the manager of the bank back then,” Sadie said, sucking in her breath. “Oh my goodness, was he a looker!”

  There are two types of men in Auntie Sadie’s world: lookers and snookers. The lookers are hot and the snookers are not. Auntie Sadie has been on the lookout for a looker for as long as I can remember, without any success. Sadie is on the plus side of 300 pounds and she has a lazy eye and perpetual eczema that envelopes her face. Much as I love her, it’s going to have to be some sort of special looker to take a second look at her.

  “That Bill Mayrose was something else!” Auntie continued. “He thought he was God’s gift to the world, that man. Lord above, not only was he a looker but he had more money than a sow has nipples.”

  “What’s that, like ten dollars?” Britt asked. She was twelve and a know-it-all. Britt the Twitt.

  “Quiet, child!” Sadie continued. “Don’t interrupt. Now, Mayrose had a little bit of a boy who put the ook in snook. As spoiled as Prince William’s child, that kid was.

  “So, when that dweeb Alex, Bill Mayrose’s runt of the litter, got to be a senior in high school, Mayrose goes off and bribes the high school principal to choose his son as the mascot. Bribes him! And not some dipshit little tweedly kind of bribe but a big respectable bribe like the mine owners give to the politicians at the statehouse.”

  “How much?” Britt asked.

  “Six figures, rumor has it.”

  “Auntie, that’s like a hundred thousand dollars,” Britt protested. In her defense, neither of us ever quite knew how much of Sadie’s stories to believe.

  Sadie rolled her eyes (as much as she could with an uncooperative lazy eye) and gave me a wink. I pun
ched Britt in the arm. After all, a good story, true or not, should never be interrupted.

  “Child, may I continue?” Sadie asked.

  Britt sighed, nodded her head, and rubbed her arm.

  “Anyway, that boy was no more mascot material than that three-legged goat of mine. Lord knows, even the goat smelled better. Cutting to the chase, somebody caught wind of the scam and squealed. They say the snitch was one of Bill Mayrose’s flings, some sleaze that did payroll for American down at the mine.”

  American is the name of the company that owns and operates the coal mine in Greenfield.

  “Evidently he had dumped her a few weeks before and now it was payback time,” she went on. “The mascot scam was the biggest thing to hit this town since the mine cave-in at ol’ Number 3 in ’97. The whole town got their knickers into such a knot you couldn’t drive down Franklin Street without running over someone sobbing and flailing their arms and shouting out obscenities. Good gracious me, you would’ve thought the mine had shut down, the way the poopoo hit the propeller!”

  “What happened then?” Britt asked.

  “The high school principal resigned and snuck off in the middle of the night. Bill Mayrose fled town with barely his shirt on his back.”

  Sadie sat back in her chair and fanned herself with a bag of Cheetos. She ate them obsessively and had convinced herself that they satisfied all of the major food groups. My guess was that at least half of her 300 pounds were Cheeto flavored.

  “Bill Mayrose,” she sighed, picking at her eczema, which was even more red and flushed than usual. “Whew! I wonder whatever happened to that man. For all his faults he was quite the looker.”

  “What happened to his kid?” Britt asked.

  “Ha! Funny you should ask. He still lives here. Not only that, he’s gone on to become one of the bosses down at the mine!”

  “Is there a moral to this story?” I asked.

  “Darlings,” Sadie said, closing her good eye and letting the lazy one do its thing. “I hate to clue you in, but when it comes to coal there’s nothing moral about it!”

  2

  AT THE END OF MAY, auditions are held for next year’s high school mascot and the town goes absolutely bonkers. It’s pretty much the highlight of the year, which tells you something about our town.

  Everyone shows up. Everyone. People who left Greenfield years ago and vowed never to set foot in town again, come hell or high water, are sucked back in for the big event. Rumor has it that one year even Bill Mayrose came sneaking back in, disguised as a woman.

  A television station down in Charleston finally got wind of it. Now every year they send a TV crew to video the finalists and interview the winner. You’d think we’d be the laughingstock of the whole state, the whole country, the way we hyperventilate and salivate and gyrate and practically have a conniption fit about the whole thing. But no. We’ve become a tourist attraction. A destination site. Wild Wonderful West Virginia, the tourist magazine put out by the state, went so far as to feature us in an article last year and now lists the audition as one of their must-see events.

  Last spring, when I was a freshman, Ashley got the idea of silk-screening T-shirts that read “I was there! Greenfield High School Mascot Auditions 2015.” Below that was a picture of a hillbilly coal miner jumping up and down with a jug of whiskey in one hand and a banner that said “Go Greenfield!” in the other. Pretty sick. Conjuring up every stereotype that urban folk have of us Appalachia coal people.

  Ashley is my best friend. She always has been and she always will be. I’ve known her forever.

  Anyway, the T-shirt idea was a huge hit. We set up a stand outside the gym and sold out in three hours. Fifty T-shirts at ten bucks each. You do the math. We made a fortune.

  We’re planning on doubling or even tripling our output next year, maybe branching out into coffee mugs and onesies for the little ones.

  Ashley has already come up with a thousand different designs, some of which are really offensive, some pretty lame, and others amazing. We’re even thinking of having people vote for the best one. Sort of like The Voice on TV. Only not.

  The Greenfield High mascot for this school year is Marc Potvin. All bow down to the chosen one.

  Poor Ashley. She’s obsessed with Marc Potvin. She has as much chance with him as I do with Kevin Malloy, Marc’s best bud. Which is absolutely none. They’re both seniors. They’re both hot. They’re both super-popular.

  And Ashley and I are, well, not.

  They’re senior sensations.

  We’re sophomore slugs.

  “Better a slug than a slut!” Auntie Sadie said when I moaned to her about my cruel, cruel fate.

  “That’s helpful!” I said. “Such fabulous choices.”

  The closest that Ashley has gotten to Marc was when she accidentally-on-purpose dropped her science book and, stooping to pick it up, accidentally-on-purpose touched one of her boobs to Marc’s knee.

  I was standing next to Ashley by her locker.

  “Score!” Ashley silently mouthed to me, pumping her fist.

  Ashley is the master of drive-bys. That’s what we call it when you accidentally-on-purpose touch a guy with your boob.

  Ashley’s goal is to do a drive-by on every hot guy in the entire school by Christmas. She’s already up to nineteen and it’s only the third week of class.

  “You’re a perv,” I told her.

  “Takes one to know one,” she said.

  Ashley goes so far as to plan her drive-bys in advance. She rehearses every move as if she were contemplating robbing Bill Mayrose’s bank.

  My drive-bys are all accidental. Like the time I fell on top of Sean McKenzie when we were playing volleyball in gym.

  “Cyndie, that was no drive-by!” Ashley argued. “That was just a spaz move. You can’t count it!”

  “Count it?” I groaned. “I’ll be in therapy for years trying to forget it!”

  When I was lying there on top of him he reached around and fondled one of my boobs. A quick “grab-and-go” as the boys call it. Embarrassing. Humiliating. If Sean McKenzie had been a looker it would have been one thing, but hot he was not.

  Now, if I had fallen on top of Kevin Malloy? That would be a different story! Definite fodder for one of those late-night thinkabouts.

  Lately Ashley has been starting off each day recounting her last night’s thinkabout. That’s our code word for touching ourselves. Not just touching but, you know, touching touching.

  As in down-there touching. “Mining the muff,” as we say in Greenfield.

  There’s not the minutest smidgen of a detail that I don’t know about Ashley’s life—whether I like it or not, whether I want to know it or not, I know it. I could write a book. Two or three volumes. Not that there is really all that much to write about. After all, we live in Greenfield, for goodness sake.

  Ashley is the master of WTMI, way too much information.

  “Oh my God, Cyndie,” Ashley gushed as we were walking to school yesterday. “I had the best one ever last night! Starring Marc and me down by the river.”

  “What else is new,” I said.

  “Anyway,” Ashley continued. “I was wearing that new pink bikini I showed you and he had on a SpongeBob Swimsuit and one of our T-shirts! It was so hot!”

  “Wait!” I said, stopping in the middle of the road we were crossing and causing a car to swerve to avoid us. “You had a thinkabout featuring SpongeBob and our drunken miner?”

  “Stop!” Ashley giggled. “It was Marc. He is such a looker!”

  While we make up most of our own terms—or Ashley/Cyndie–speak, as we call it—we occasionally steal one of the sweet ones from Auntie Sadie.

  “Anyway, the good stuff came when the suit came off and he started in on me!”

  The rest of the walk consisted of Ashley’s spirited monologue, recounting in explicit detail exactly what “starting in on her” meant.

  As I said, even from a BFF it was WTMI.

  Speaking of th
inkabouts, here’s an incredibly embarrassing story:

  Last weekend I was in the middle of a wonderful one and Britt walks in on it. No knocking. No warning. She just waltzes right on into my room.

  I was off in la-la land and didn’t even have time to take my fingers out of my you-know-what.

  Britt stopped dead in her tracks, sucked in her breath, took one look at me, and dropped a whole bowl of popcorn on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled.

  “What does it look like I’m doing, twit?” I yelled back. “Ever heard of knocking? Ever heard of the right to privacy? Get out of my room! Now!” I threw a pillow at her.

  “Dad!” Britt yelled down the stairs. “Cyndie is masturbating!”

  Oh my God! When I got my hands on that girl there was going to be a master beating!

  Why did my mother have to have a second child?

  3

  ASHLEY AND I reserve our thinkabouts for our bedrooms, but we do some of our best thinking on Mount Tom.

  Mount Tom is our mountain. It’s the mountain that we can bike to when we want to get away from the world and the crazies and my twit of a sister and Ashley’s mother, who drives her insane. It’s the mountain we go to when we just want to be by ourselves.

  We made a path to the top of the mountain that no one else knows about—no one, except for Ashley and me and Tom himself, and he’s not talking ’cause he’s long dead and gone.

  It’s our special, sacred place.

  Mount Tom was named—surprise, surprise—for Tom, some old-time miner who, back in the day, came tromping up here looking for his lost pig, tumbled off the cliff, broke his neck, and died. Why folks didn’t come up with a more imaginative name than Mount Tom is beyond me. I mean, really, think of the possibilities! Ashley and I once spent an entire afternoon dangling our legs over the edge of the cliff on top and renaming the place.

  “Lost Pig Peak.”