Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 00.5 - Jolie and Scoobie High School Misadventures

Jolie and Scoobie High School Misadventures

Elaine Orr

Copyright 2013
by Elaine L. Orr

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9851158-6-9

Scoobie’s poetry is an excerpt from
An Unattended Life
by James W. Larkin.

Boardwalk photo by Christina Russo Sporer.

This is a prequel to the Jolie Gentil Cozy Mystery Series.

To learn what happens after high school, try:

Appraisal for Murder

Rekindling Motives

When the Carny Comes to Town

Any Port in a Storm

Trouble on the Doorstep

Behind the Walls (Fall 2013)

www.elaineorr.com

Though written for adults, the Jolie Gentil books have no explicit sex and there is minimal swearing. The Jolie Gentil series can be read by young adults—or shared with your mom.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the many readers who said they wanted to know more about Jolie and Scoobie’s high school years. This was a fun book to write. Several people offered comments on early drafts. Special thanks to Lorena L. Shute and Liz Osisek, who asked great questions and spotted many of the evil typos.

CHAPTER
ONE

“I’M NOT STAYING HERE!  I hate you!”

My parents didn’t even look back. The only reason I wasn’t cussing big time was that there was a group of little kids on the other side of the street, walking toward the beach.

I watched my parents’ car get smaller as I stood on the sidewalk outside Aunt Madge’s Cozy Corner B&B. My eyes burned, but the tears were anger, not sadness.
How dare they leave me with Aunt Madge while they ‘worked things out’ in their marriage?

“What are you looking at?” I yelled at the kids. They started walking so fast that one of them lost his flip-flop.

“Jolie.” Aunt Madge was on the front porch. She didn’t even raise her voice. “I made lemonade.”

I heard the screen door close behind her as she went back into her house.
Where does she get off, acting all calm?

“Turds,” I said, but quietly, as I picked up my small suitcase
. It had toppled over when I tried to kick my parents’ car. Until five minutes before they left I had assumed we were all going home to Lakewood, which was about thirty miles from Aunt Madge’s B&B in the Jersey shore town of Ocean Alley.

Tears slid from my burning eyes and I wiped them with the back of my hand as I climbed up the steps and onto the large porch
. It was my junior year. I was supposed to try out for the varsity cheerleading squad in Lakewood in three days. I could never try out in a new school. I decided to hate cheerleading.

I walked into the B&B
main entrance, since that was the door my parents had left through. Usually we walk out the side door. I should have suspected something when their car was parked at the curb instead of in the small B&B parking lot.

En route to Aunt Madge’s living space, which is behind the small guest breakfast area, I almost kicked over a couple of the light wooden chairs
.
You’re not mad at Aunt Madge.

Her back was to me and she was pounding a loaf of bread on the very worn oak kitchen counter
top. Next to her was a pitcher of lemonade.
She had it made before they left.
If she heard me come through the swinging door, she didn’t acknowledge me.

I watched her for a moment
. Today Aunt Madge’s hair was a very light brown and it was held back from her face with a couple of large barrettes. She changes her hair color every month or so. My father says, but very quietly if my mother’s around, that Aunt Madge puts different rinses in her hair so she doesn’t look her age, which is sixty-nine. I don’t think she cares at all what people think of her age. She just likes the different colors.

“Aunt Madge.”

“Yes, Jolie?” She didn’t turn around.

“I’m sorry you got stuck with me,” I said.

She turned around, an amused expression on her face. “I invited you here.”

“You invited…you mean I’m stuck here because of you?” I asked this very loudly, and was sorry as soon as I did.

“Keep a civil tongue, Jolie.” She turned back to the counter and placed the perfectly formed loaf in a bread pan and covered it with a kitchen towel so it could rise. She whisked her hands together briskly over the sink and wiped them on another towel. She faced me. “Sit.”

I sat at her large table, where she eats and pays bills.

Aunt Madge poured two glasses of lemonade and came to sit next to me
. “This will make you pucker.”

I smiled at her in spite of myself and took a sip
. “You put in more sugar than usual.”

“That’s how you like it,” she said
. When I said nothing, she continued, “Your mother has talked to me several times during the last month about not being happy. From the sound of things, your dad was unhappy, too.”

I nodded
. This was not news. Every night they argued after I went to bed. Not too loudly, but sometimes I listened on the steps that led up to my bedroom. Mostly it was about money. My mother wanted to quit her job at a florist’s. My Dad said stuff like only if she stopped buying clothes at the most expensive boutique in town. Plus, they had two girls to send to college, so they both needed to work. After awhile, I quit listening.

Aunt Madge continued
. “They talked about divorcing,”—I almost slurped my lemonade—“but they decided they have invested more than twenty years into each other, so they should try harder to work things out.” Aunt Madge was looking at me very directly. “They thought they had a better chance at it if they didn’t have to deal with you two girls as much.”

“That means deal with me
. You know Renée’s in grad school.”

“Mostly
. They did ask her not to come home on weekends until at least Christmas.”

“Wow.” Renée and my mom are almost best friends
. “But, why does it matter if we’re there? I don’t care if they fight.”

“Apparently they care whether you hear them
.” She held up one hand as I started to speak. “I don’t think it’s all about money. They both need to learn new ways of dealing with each other.”

“They could go to a marriage counselor or something
. They could fight there.” I felt a lump in my throat and took another swallow of lemonade.

She smiled
. “Would you feel any better if I told you their first choice for you was a boarding school in Rhode Island for a year?”

“A…?  I could run away,” I said
. “That would fix them.”

“I think you’d be more fixed than they would,” she said, dryly
. “I can’t stop you if you want to do that, but I think you’d have a much better school year here than in some juvenile delinquent school.”

“No one would find me,” I said, scowling at her.

She shrugged. “Maybe not, but it gets awfully cold sleeping on a street corner. You need to learn to make lemonade from your lemons, Jolie.” She raised the glass in a kind of toast to me.

Before I could say anything we both heard the yip from her small back yard
. Petey, her black dog, who is a miniature poodle and a bunch of other breeds, was at the sliding glass door, tail wagging in its usual energetic way. I walked over to let him in.

He smelled my sneakers even more than usual
. I bent to stroke him. “I haven’t been near any cats or anything.”

Aunt Madge stood
. “A number of people your age go to First Prez. Come this week, and then you can decide on your own whether to come again.”

It was ten-fifteen
. Her church started at ten forty-five. “Do I have to dress up?”

“You can go in the buff if you want,” she said.

I HAD NO INTENTION of going anywhere naked, so I changed from my shorts and put on the one pair of cotton slacks I had with me and replaced the tube top with a pink tee shirt
. That made me wonder if my parents expected me to live for months in just the clothes I brought with me for the Labor Day Weekend.

Aunt Madge was waiting for me in the kitchen, her purse sitting on the oak table
. “I usually walk, but we’re getting a later start, so we’ll drive.”

I didn’t say anything until we were in the car
. “Do you think my parents will send my clothes?”

“Your dad said they sent them via
UPS on Friday. They should be here on Tuesday.”

I was so angry I would have thrown something if there were anything besides our two purses in the front seat
. “You mean they
planned
all this?”

“Apparently so,” she said
.

In the short drive to First Prez a dozen thoughts passed through my brain. I had heard my parents bickering over the past few months, probably a bit more than usual, but not
horribly much. They never talked about their disagreements with me, and they always put on a united front when it came to things like whether I could go to the beach at Wildwood with a bunch of friends. We had planned to share two rooms, boys in one, girls in the other. My mother knew all the kids going and said probably, but my father was not comfortable with the idea. It’s not that she always defers to him, but they have some sort of deal that if one of them feels really strongly about something they go with that person’s preference.

Really, nothing had been that different
. How could they have plotted all this and not even talked to me about it? And they complain if I don’t tell them exactly where I’m going when I head out with my friends on a Saturday night.

Aunt Madge
’s voice cut into my thoughts. “I’ll introduce you to the minister on the way out. He just came to us from a congregation in New Hampshire.”

“I’ll be thrilled,” I said.

I
SAT IN CHURCH reminding myself that it wasn’t Aunt Madge’s fault that my parents deserted me.
How could they even think about a boarding school in Rhode Island? 
And where was my sister in all of this? Did she even know? And I didn’t even have her college address with me.

It took Aunt Madge’s tug on my sleeve to realize everyone was standing
. A guy about my age in the pew in front of me gave a sort of smirk and then faced the front of the church. He was tall and had a clean-cut look without seeming like someone who tried to look good.
If all the guys look like that, maybe this church won’t be so bad.

First Presbyterian is not a large church, and sometimes in the summer it’s quite crowded
. Once tourist season is over it’s a smaller group, nearly all of whom know one another. Since this was Labor Day Weekend, there were still a lot of people.

I glanced around the church as the
minister offered his thoughts that the close of the summer tourist season provided an opportunity for self-reflection. I decided I was more into looking ahead and not liking what I saw.

We all stood as the closing hymn began
. A woman behind me trilled “’Til we meeeet, ‘til we meeeeet, til we meet again at Jesus’ feet…” 

“We often end on that song
.” Aunt Madge said this quietly as she placed her hymnal in its slot in front of her.

I nodded and tried to smile, but couldn’t really pull it off. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet any of these people again
. Luckily, one thing Aunt Madge is really good at is not introducing me to everyone she knows. Maybe I could even avoid meeting the minister.

A man who looked part prune touched her elbow and I nodded at him as I moved away
. It appeared they were serving doughnuts and coffee in the vestibule and people got them and came back into the main church and sat in pews to talk informally with friends.
Friends! All of my friends are in Lakewood.

I moved close to the food table
. A guy about my age with dirty blonde hair that was a bit long was carefully wrapping a doughnut in a napkin. Another sat in front of him on the small serving table. Everyone else was taking just one. The woman who was filling coffee cups looked disapproving and started to say something.

I moved closer to the guy
. “Hi. Do you go to school here?” I picked up a doughnut and the woman gave me a slightly less disapproving look and went back to her serving duties.

His look was wary, but it cleared when he saw I was about his age
. “Yep. You new?”

We walked a few steps away from the table
.
Yikes! What do I tell people?
“For awhile anyway. My parents are on an extended trip through Europe.”

His eyebrows went up as he took a huge bite of what looked to be a blueberry doughnut
. “They must be riche,” he mumbled, mangling the last word with chewing.

“If they were really rich I guess they would have taken me with them.”

He gave a full grin and his blue eyes smiled, too. “Look at it this way. A whole year without parents. Maybe you won’t even have to study.”

Classes! What classes would I take?
“I suppose. I’m uh, not even sure what classes I’ll be taking.” I wasn’t sure why I told him this, but he looked kind of friendly and I always feel comfortable with people willing to break rules, even if it is only about doughnuts.

“What year?” he asked.

“Junior.”
Gads, would all my classes from high school in Lakewood transfer credits?
Maybe I’d still be a sophomore.

“You could sound
a little more sure about that.” He swallowed coffee as he said this, and grinned again.

“I’m not sure all my credits will transfer.”

“Probably will. Almost all the schools have the same courses now. What do you like to read?”

“Read?” I asked, kind of confused.

“You know, the pieces of paper with words on them, bound all together. Except I read an article that said pretty soon we’ll read books on some kinds of electronic gadgets.”

For a second I thought he was messing with me,
and then he winked. “I kind of like mysteries,” I said.