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“Porky’s Revenge.”

  “Tumbling Tom’s.”

  We knew every maple, beech, ash, and birch on that mountain like the back of our hands. We’d gone so far as to name some of the larger and taller trees. We called them our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and they stood guard in a sacred grove and watched over the two of us and didn’t allow anyone else up there. Just Ashley and me. The chosen two.

  We bow to them whenever we pass by and I swear that sometimes, particularly on wild, wonderful, windy days, they bow their branches low to the ground right back at us.

  If you think all trees look the same, think again. Each tree, even trees from the same species, are as different from each other as you are from me. Their shape, their bark, their leaves, their flowers, their seeds . . . all different. Just like people.

  I suppose that if an alien race of tree creatures landed their space ship on planet earth and examined us humans, at first glance they’d think we were all identical. “Seen one, seen them all,” they’d tell each other, and they’d hightail it back home so as not to miss Roots or Sesame Tree or whatever else was on must-see Tree TV. But if they hadn’t been in such a rush, if they took the time to look, to really look, they’d notice how special each one of us humans really were.

  Same thing with the trees on Mount Tom.

  There’s Sugar Daddy, a giant sugar maple that we once thought of tapping for the yummy sap locked inside, but the thought of driving a stake into his mapley heart was way too much to bear. Six of us holding hands would barely circle his studly hulkiness.

  There’s Bradley Beech, named after Bradley Cooper, the movie star, whom Ashley has a thing for. Once, in a brief moment of weakness, Ash and I were on the verge of carving our names and “BFF” deep into his smooth, gray bark. She had her pocketknife out and open and had just found the perfect spot, when—BAM! Down plummeted a gnarly branch from the canopy that landed with a thud right next to us. A message from the forest nymphs. A big STOP! sign sent from the tree goddess above. We caught our breath, looked at each other, and put the knife away forever.

  There’s Sadie’s Twin, an enormous black cherry with bark that looks like crispy, burnt potato chips, kind of resembling Auntie Sadie’s skin after a super-bad outbreak of her eczema.

  But our hands-down favorite is She, a fabulous white ash with leaflets that turn deep purple in the fall. Leaflets as purple as the eggplants that grow like weeds in Auntie Sadie’s garden. Leaflets as purple as the varicose veins that bulge out so frighteningly on Auntie Sadie’s enormous thighs.

  Ashley is super-attached to that particular white ash tree. They do, after all, share a name. Whenever we walk by it, Ashley wraps her arms around it and gives the tree a big ol’ bear hug and a wet, smoochie, tongue-on-bark kiss. It’s really cute, in a somewhat weird and kinky kind of way.

  Sometimes, when we can’t decide what is true and what isn’t, or why the world is the way that it is, or why boys do what boys do, or why zits just happen to pop out at all the wrong moments, or why whenever you wear a really cute short skirt it always seems to get caught in your underwear after you pee and you don’t know it until people point and laugh, we stop and we sit and we ask She.

  And She answers. She whispers to us with the rustling of her leaves. She replies with the groaning of her trunk as she sways majestically in the breeze. She is full of tree wisdom. She is the sage of the forest. And what She says is always the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me goddess of the wild and wonderful West Virginia woodlands.

  To be honest, Mount Tom is more like a mountain wannabe than a real mountain. It doesn’t take that long to climb to the top. But once you get there, there is a little cliff overlook and a ledge that the two of us can just barely squeeze out onto and we can sit back and look out over the entire holler where Ash and I live. It’s an incredible view. It’s like the whole world is ours; the houses, the school, the stores. Even the Evangelical church with its pointy steeple.

  Neither Ashley nor I are churchgoers in the traditional sense. My father is a born-again American Civil War reenactor and spends most of his Sundays fighting holy battles that took place 150 years ago. Ashley’s mother is way too hungover on Sunday mornings to even think about getting her sorry ass up and out of bed and dragging Ash anywhere.

  So off we go to the top of Mount Tom. It’s our church. Our temple to the gods and goddesses.

  We make our way to the top and we sit on the edge of the world and we get a good heavy dose of that old-time religion.

  And, like I said, it’s where we do some of our best thinking.

  It was on top of Mount Tom where we first thought to divide the world of boys into four kingdoms.

  “I think,” Ashley said as we made a catapult from a beech branch and shot nuts out over the edge of the world, “that Auntie Sadie is on to something. She’s got her ‘lookers’ and her ‘snookers,’ right?”

  “Your point?” I asked.

  “We need a system, too. To rate the boys.”

  “Why not just use hers, like we always have?”

  “No way! We must have our own. We must!”

  After a few hours of incredibly brilliant brainstorming, this is what we came up with:

  Kingdom Number One: Losers. Boys such as Sean McKenzie, whose only redeeming quality was keeping us awake in English with his farting or zit popping or falling out of his chair whenever he fell asleep, which happened at least four times every class. One time Mr. Cooper, the science teacher, kicked him out of lab because he sneezed too much.

  Kingdom Number Two: Untouchables. Those hotties way over our heads. Worthy of starring in a think-about, total priorities for drive-bys, but not real life potential. I mean, let’s face it, there are certain guys whom you know it’s never going to happen with so you might as well not even go there, whether you’re obsessed with them or not. The Marc Potvins and the Kevin Malloys of the world.

  Kingdom Number Three: Friends. Hanging-out with material. Fun to make fun of, good to copy homework off of, useful to bum rides from if they can drive, but nothing more. Kids like Sam Walker who liked to fish and Jason Berring who ran track.

  Kingdom Number Four: The most important category. The one that required endless analysis, intense intellectual thought, perpetual contemplation, and ongoing late-night angst: Possibilities. Hotties within the realm of reality. Ashley kept insisting that Marc Potvin really did belong in this category but she was just dreaming.

  The kingdoms are fairly fluid. A boy could start off one week as a friend, plummet in the polls to Kingdom One following some stupid incident or obnoxious comment, and then magically redeem himself by the end of the week with a single glance in our direction or a flick of his hair or a million other tiny, almost imperceptible things and wind up right smack-dab at the top of Kingdom Four.

  We’ve pretty much got every boy in the school ranked, except for the freshmen who, as everyone knows, don’t really even count as people. The notable exception is Dan Felton, who has been held back a grade so many times he must be in his mid-twenties and, while not the brightest lamp in the mine, is way, way hot.

  The third week in September we stayed after school and helped Mr. Cooper clean his lab, and he scored us a sweet job collecting tickets at one of the high school home football games. We didn’t get paid but we did get in free to the game and were allowed to eat as much as we wanted at the food stand. Even though it was crap food, it was free, which made it awesome!

  As an added bonus, we got to watch Marc Potvin do his mascot thing with his miner’s helmet and his oversized overalls and his inflatable shovel which he used to whack other mascots in the head with, much to the delight of the crowd. As unattractive as all that sounds, Ashley would still pant and drool and feel faint and get totally loopy.

  Anyway, being the ticket takers at the game gave us an up-close-and-personal look at all the boys from other towns. As we ripped their tickets and handed the stubs back to them we yelled out their numbers on
the Boy Scale.

  “I got three Ones,” I called out to Ashley as guys with zits bigger than footballs came shuffling up to me.

  “Lucky you!” Ashley laughed. “But take a lookie at two o’clock. Incoming Fours. A whole flock of them!”

  When one of the hotties handed Ashley his ticket, she accidentally-on-purpose dropped it, scoring a sweet drive-by as she stood back up.

  “Ka-ching!” Ashley said, pumping her fist and turning around to drool at their swaying rear ends.

  Most of the time—in fact, 99.9 percent of the time—Ashley and I agreed on which kingdom the boys belonged. But when we disagreed, the sparks would fly. Once she didn’t talk to me for six whole hours, close to seven, because I simply suggested the possibility of demoting Mark Potvin from a hottie to a loser.

  “Are you nuts?” Ash exclaimed, her pupils dilating in disbelief. “I mean, are you completely crazy?”

  Of course, Ashley had been home sick the day last year when Mark Potvin had downed a six-pack of soda and was practicing belching the ABC’s, and halfway through the letter G he had gagged and threw up all over my locker. It even got into those little vent openings they have so if you forget your gym clothes over the weekend the fumes don’t build up to the point that the whole place explodes. I swear I can still smell it when I open the locker door.

  “Marc Potvin?” Ashley cried again. She was visibly shaking. Her eyes were rolling back in her head. She looked like she was ready to speak in tongues, the way they do in those evangelical churches.

  “A loser? That guy is so hot I get heartburn just saying his name!”

  “Ashley. I hate to tell you, but heartburn is a bad thing,” I said.

  “Then heartfreeze. Whatever.”

  “Then why don’t you go barf on his locker? Maybe that’ll turn him on and then the two of you can go behind the bleachers and do it!”

  That got her panties in a twist.

  Like I said, we didn’t speak for hours.

  Moral of the story: there are certain boys on the list you absolutely don’t mess with; Marc Potvin clearly being one of them.

  Auntie Sadie says it’s rude and disrespectful to rate guys.

  “How would you feel if the boys kept lists of you girls?” she asked.

  “Earth to Sadie!” I said. “Of course boys do! The only difference is they only have two categories. Those who don’t and those who do.”

  Sadie sighed. “I guess some things never change,” she said.

  “Anyway,” I continued. “You’re just jealous because our system is so much more sophisticated than yours. All you’ve got are hotties and snotties.”

  “Lookers and snookers,” Auntie Sadie corrected.

  “Whatever. We’ve taken the system to a whole new level.”

  Auntie Sadie took a moment to digest this before seeing the wisdom of our ways.

  “And how do you rate?” she asked.

  “On the boy’s scale? Jeez, Sadie! Please! You know I’m not that kind of girl! Anyway, I thought you were down on lists. I thought you said they were rude and disrespectful!”

  “They are. But I’m curious to know whether or not there’s a boy out there worth his weight in cornfield beans. Any guy in this town who’s not out of his cotton-pickin’ mind is going to rate you a hottie!”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. Pleased as I was with the compliment, anything Auntie Sadie said was highly suspect. I could do no wrong in her eyes. Childless herself, she was my surrogate mother. Had been since my mother, Sadie’s sister, died when I was five.

  According to her I was God’s gift to the universe. I could poo in my pants and she’d label it a Rembrandt.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “how am I supposed to know? On Ashley and my scale I’m sure I’d rate a One. Or at best a Three.”

  To refresh your memory, Ones were losers and Threes were almost as bad: dreaded friends.

  Auntie Sadie scowled and spat out chewing tobacco juice, making a pool of yuck on the ground. “One plus three equals four, darling. Which is what you are. H-O-T Hot! If I was a guy I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you. Which, God knows, they’d better or I’ll kick their butts from here to kingdom come!”

  I don’t know which image was more terrifying: Auntie Sadie as a guy, all lazy-eyed, eczema-scarred 300 pounds of him with his hands all over me? Or Sadie safely guarding my virginity for the rest of eternity, hunting down and literally crushing any Possibility that came within shouting distance.

  “We’re screwed!” I said to Ashley. “With Sadie as protector we’ll never get asked out! Undatables! Forever doomed to wither on the Friend vine!”

  “No way!” Ashley said. “We don’t get asked out because we’re Twos. Untouchables!”

  I shook my head and laughed.

  “We’re so hot, boys don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell of scoring with us,” Ashley continued. We were on our way to school and Ashley had stopped in the middle of the road to adjust the padding in her bra to make her boobs stick out a little bit more.

  “Are they even?” Ashley asked.

  “Are what even?”

  “Number one and number two! Who do you think? I swear to God, number two’s getting tinier by the second. I’m fifteen years old and I’m already shrinking!”

  Ashley was obsessed with boob number one being bigger than boob number two. I’d measured them dozens of times but she was still fixated on the unevenness issue. Once she pilfered a magnifying glass from Mr. Cooper’s class and had me spend all of lunch in the girl’s room stall searching for a millimeter of difference. Of which—surprise, surprise—there was absolutely none.

  If someone had walked in on us, our chances of making it with a guy would have plummeted from zero to around negative five thousand.

  “Oh my God!” Ashley exclaimed, stopping dead again in the middle of the road. “I’ve just had an epiphany!”

  Epiphany was Ashley’s favorite word of the week. She used it about a thousand times a day. She had had more epiphanies this week than Sean McKenzie, supreme ruler of the Kingdom Ones, had zits.

  “We have to come up with a master plan. We have to bring ourselves back down to Earth. We have to show the boys that, even though we’re goddesses, rock stars, out-of-this-world babes, total catches, we’re still just girls. Girls with wants. Girls with needs. Girls with desires!”

  “Girls who are not flattened road kill!” I yelled, dragging Ashley to the side of the road as two of the top high school losers in their beat-up pickup truck almost ran us over.

  “Are you sure they’re even?” Ashley asked, fiddling with her boobs while ignoring the obscenities hurled in our direction. “Number two seems to be riding awfully high today! God they look good, though, don’t they?”

  Even with all of her concerns about her boobs, low self-esteem was not one of Ashley’s issues. Reality, yes.

  Self-esteem, no.

  4

  SCHOOL WAS SCHOOL. Generally a royal pain-in-the-ass, but it was where the boys were and I got to hang out with Ashley and there was constant drama, so it was tolerable.

  Most of the teachers were either sadists or morons, counting the days until their retirement. Most had given up on us, operating under the assumption that we were all a bunch of meth-smoking, moonshine-drinking, trailer-trash hillbillies that would never amount to a pile of coal slickens, so why bother expending any intellectual energy even trying to shove the tiniest morsels of knowledge into our minuscule heads?

  Particularly for us girls. In the eyes of most West Virginia guys, we were already barefoot and pregnant, good for serving up lunch at the diner or, better yet, working the stripper pole at the “gentlemen’s club” in Charleston.

  I learned absolutely nothing in most of their classes. In fact, some teachers were so god-awful that you came out knowing less than when you went in. Their classes were a vast, intellectual black hole that zapped all the creativity and thirst for knowledge right out of you. They were like cerebral v
ampires, sucking out brains rather than blood, and without any of the undead’s redeeming sex appeal.

  Case in point: algebra with Mr. Livingston.

  I had begun the year knowing a thing or two about equations and variables and formulas and crap like that. In fact, I even kind of liked the stuff. There was some sort of sanity in math: rules were rules. There was a definite right and wrong. It was clear-cut, comforting, no mushy gray areas of doubt or confusion. If I paid attention, I got it.

  “You’re, like, a brain!” Ashley said whenever I’d let her copy my homework. “You’re, like, a math goddess. You’ll probably grow up and marry Einstein.”

  “Einstein’s dead!” I told her.

  “What?” she exclaimed. “When did that happen? God, I don’t go online for half a day and things go from pudding to poop!”

  Anyway, Mr. Livingston was the king of the horrid vampires. He had something wrong with his nose and obsessively scratched and yanked on it, oblivious as to how pathetic and totally gross it was. His knowledge of math seemed rudimentary at best, and, though I’m no math whiz, even I could catch the constant incorrect equations he put up on the board.

  By the end of the third week of class I could barely add single digit numbers anymore.

  “You poor child!” Auntie Sadie sympathized. “I had Mr. Livingston when I was a sophomore. He was about a hundred years old then! I thought he’d be dead by now. Does he still pick his nose?”

  “Ugh!” I said, gagging. “It makes me want to puke!”

  Auntie Sadie let out a deep sigh. “When that man dies they’ll probably stuff his body and prop him up in front of the class with his finger still stuck deep inside his snotlocker!”

  “Yeah!” I said, laughing. Auntie Sadie could be quite the hoot. “Who knows, that way I might even learn some math!”

  English class was not much better.

  Ashley and I only survived that shit show by designing a comic book featuring the daily crime-fighting adventures of Diaper Lady, aka Mrs. Osgood, the English teacher. She was one of those old bags with blue hair and a puffy, crumpled look, with a butt three sizes too big that stuck out at an incredibly awkward angle as if she had on an adult diaper. Maybe even two. This was not unlikely, given the nasty way she smelled. Her comic-book superpower was her ability to lift up the hem of her skirt and stop criminal evil doers dead in their tracks with her Super Stink.