Just another reason I couldn’t wait to get out of here.
Gatlin wasn’t like the small towns you saw in the movies,
unless it was a movie from about fi fty years ago. We were
too far from Charleston to have a Starbucks or a McDonald’s.
All we had was a Dar-ee Keen, since the Gentrys were too
cheap to buy all new letters when they bought the Dairy
King. The library still had a card catalog, the high school
still had chalkboards, and our community pool was Lake
Moultrie, warm brown water and all. You could see a movie
at the Cineplex about the same time it came out on DVD,
but you had to hitch a ride over to Summerville, by the community
college. The shops were on Main, the good houses
were on River, and everyone else lived south of Route 9, where
the pavement disintegrated into chunky concrete stubble —
terrible for walking, but perfect for throwing at angry
possums, the meanest animals alive. You never saw that in
the movies.
Gatlin wasn’t a complicated place; Gatlin was Gatlin. The
neighbors kept watch from their porches in the unbearable heat,
sweltering in plain sight. But there was no point. Noth ing ever
changed. Tomorrow would be the fi rst day of school, my sophomore
year at Stonewall Jackson High, and I already knew everything
that was going to happen — where I would sit, who I would
talk to, the jokes, the girls, who would park where.
There were no surprises in Gatlin County. We were pretty
much the epicenter of the middle of nowhere.
At least, that’s what I thought, when I closed my battered
copy of
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