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The Secrets of Peaches
Chapter One
If there was one thing Murphy McGowen had always known, it was that she would someday make it out of Bridgewater, Georgia. Among her scattered musical taste, her scattered curly hair, and her scattered past (which included clothes scattered at the edge of the lake and parts of Bob's Big Boy scattered over Route 1), planning her exit had been the one constant.That, and her long-held desire to streak MayorWise's front lawn. She just hadn't gotten to it yet.
If Murphy hadn't had a tattoo of Ringo Starr on her back already, she would have had these words from Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" tattooed there: Two lanes can take us anywhere.
Songs of escape were written through Murphy's DNA like eye color (hers were cat green), and she had the words down exactly. The song went like this: going to NYU, majoring in music, and spending the rest of her life feeling like she'd finally landed in the right place. As fickle as Murphy could be about many things, there was never a variation on this refrain.
"Murphy, can we go?" Leeda asked. "The dogs look hungry." She nodded at Birdie's papillons, Honey Babe and Majestic, who sat on the wet bus-stop sidewalk staring at the three of them, their butterfly ears cocked expectantly. The tiny dogs appeared to be smiling—they always did when Birdie was around and when they were together. They were so attached to each other Murphy called them John and Yoko, even though they looked more like a cross between Bambi and the Muppets.
"I just fed them before we left." Birdie looked over her shoulder at Leeda, who was tugging Birdie's auburnhair into a braid. Leeda yanked it. "Oh, I mean, um, no, I didn't. They're starving." She rolled her eyes at the dogs,who smiled back.
"You're the worst liar, Birdie." Leeda dropped Birdie's braid and threw her head back despondently. She stared up through the plastic ceiling of the shelter area where they sat.The rain sent splat patterns across its surface. "I have so much studying to do."
"A week into school and you're already obsessing," Murphy observed.
"I guess." Leeda shrugged. She was on what Murphy considered a perfectionist recovery program. Leeda went for first place by default, always.
"Five more minutes. One will come. Pretty please?" Murphy looked at Leeda, who was still staring at the rain-splattered ceiling. Next she turned to Birdie and poked her on the arm, which was lying across her own warmly. Birdie was a furnace. "Please?"
"She just wants to see one more," Birdie said, fluttering her eyelashes at Leeda. "Then we can go." The thing about Birdie was she was a born ambassador. It was probably from all the time she'd spent hovering in the no-fly zone between her parents.
Murphy studied them both. Leeda looked straight out of Martha's Vineyard—all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved nd rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was.
The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth.
Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together— picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake—had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.
Murphy, mind restless, tapped her feet on the sidewalk and stared at the initials carved into the Plexiglas walls. She poked at the pack of cigarettes in her pocket, although she'd given up smoking because her boyfriend, Rex, kept telling her it was a stupid habit. She wore faded jeans that clung to her curves and a vine green T-shirt that matched her eyes. Murphy didn't have to dress sexy to look sexy. She could wear a nun's habit and still look like she needed to cover up. Murphy and Birdie let their heads rest back against the wall like Leeda's.
"It feels like somebody pushed the pause button," Birdie said. She was right. It seemed like the gray Georgia fall would never end—it would be just one long rainy afternoon after another, on into the apocalypse.
They sat in silence. "What day's graduation?" Murphy asked, her voice skating across the crackling of the raindrops. "May fifteenth? I wonder if it's too early to book my bus ticket."
"Don't say that!" Birdie said.
Murphy felt the restlessness bubble up the way it always did when she thought of all the days that stood in her way. "Do you think once I leave, if I look back, I'll turn into a pillar of salt?"
Leeda rolled her eyes. "The drama."Murphy grinned at her.
She knew the reference was backward. In the story, Saul's wife turned into a pillar of salt because she looked back over her shoulder at the reckless and rotten city behind her. But Murphy was the one who'd always been too loud, too reckless, too rotten for Bridgewater. The number of times she'd been whispered about, caught, and raked across the coals (usually because she asked for it) were too many to count. Because she couldn't keep quiet, because she couldn't contain . . .
The Secrets of Peaches. Copyright © by Jodi Anderson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
