It’ll pick up. That’s all that Cindy would say as she sent Jennifer home again, another busted shift because there weren’t enough bookings. It’ll pick up. They’d been busy, too busy really, in ’20 and ’21 when it seemed like the whole town bought a dog and competed with each other to see whose could be the best turned out. Trenton hadn’t suffered much with Covid but they’d shut down the places people could meet just the same, Frank’s Bar, the Community Room, the library, everything except church and even that was emptier than usual. Everyone seemed to decide that dogs were the answer. Jennifer thought they were just scared of having to spend any time alone confronting their reality in this town, facing in to all their little insecurities that they usually drowned out by speaking to each other. She didn’t speak much to anyone.

They shouldn’t really have been open in ’20 but they figured out a system, dogs dropped off in a small holding pen that Cindy had put up on the side of house and then they’d wait for the owner to push their horn when they were back in their car so they knew they could go out and get their pet. Cindy was on her own by that point, Randall had upped sticks on her and moved to Enders with Sandy Michaels just as she graduated. Nobody could ever prove anything but the word in town was that he must have been seeing her before she turned sixteen. People said they saw them down at Swanson Lake that summer, her in cut off denim shorts and a tiny bikini top, him in jeans, white shirt unbuttoned all the way down, holding hands, kissing, but nobody saw anything more. Randy and Sandy. That used to make Jennifer smile. Jesus, this town, man. 

Jennifer had known Sandy at school, she’d been the year above but had still been one of the girls that had made her life a misery after the hair incident. She’d been into Nirvana but thought all the conspiracy stuff about Courtney Love was crap and wanted to do something to look like her, she thought Courtney was pretty cool but mostly she thought that she didn’t take any shit from anyone and she could use a bit of that. She should have gone to Beauty Marks and talked to Stacey about it but when she was hovering around outside, deciding whether to go in, she’d seen a friend of he mom’s in there and it would all get too complicated trying to explain. So she’d done it all herself, full on peroxide treatment to banish the boring brunette and emerge as a bottle-blonde bombshell. Don’t try for more than two shades. She knew that now. As it turned out the number of shades was the least of her problems as she had some kind of reaction to the peroxide; her hair turned orange and then, a couple of days later, which she’d spent trying to style the whole thing out like she’d always wanted orange hair, it all started to fall out. The best she could salvage was a fairly dramatic buzz cut which left her the laughing stock of the school for weeks. Everyone pivoted over night from picking apart Diane Flint’s apparent Disney princess obsession to picking apart her new look. All graceless stuff about lesbians or cancer mostly. This town, man.

She didn’t regret dropping out. Mostly didn’t regret it. Courtney got expelled when she was growing up and things worked out okay for her. Why stay somewhere you don’t want to be and where nobody else wants you there? Just for a piece of paper saying you can do math and knew who George Washington was. Maybe she could have stayed, sometimes she thinks that Diane was open to being friends and maybe that would have been enough. But she was always hanging out with that Johnny guy, the older one who stayed down a year, and he seemed kinda intimidating, like he didn’t want anyone intruding, so she’d kept her distance. Besides, everyone said they were screwing and she didn’t want to get in the middle of that. Dropping out had been easy, as simple as not showing up anymore. The aftermath had been harder as her mom kicked her out and she’d spent a couple of weeks sleeping in the Community Room, hiding in the toilets until they locked up and then creeping back out to lie down on the floor until morning. Cindy had taken pity on her, maybe she just wanted company after Randy left her, but she let her stay at hers for a while, gave her some shift work grooming the dogs, and, slowly, Jennifer had put enough money down to rent a room in a pre-fab up near the 34. It was cheap because there was highway noise through the night, it wasn’t so bad except when the eighteen wheelers whipped past  and the room would shake, the loose piece of glass in one of the widows would rattle against the frame, and the screen door would swing open if she hadn’t remembered to jam it shut.  They had a steady stream of Big Rigs passing through the town. Sometimes she thought about thumbing a ride and taking off but she had nowhere to go.

It was getting harder when it should have been getting easier. In her head she’d thought that if she could keep the shifts at Cindy’s until she turned twenty one then things would open up a bit, she could take a bar job, worm her way in at Frank’s. He wasn’t getting any younger and she knew he had no family. It wasn’t much of a plan but it gave her something to hold on to, an imagined future where she owned the local bar and all those losers from school would have to pay her to drink in the only place in town to hang out. She figured she’d change the name, maybe to “Jennifer’s” or maybe to “Love’s” in a little nod to Courtney, and she’d put a proper jukebox in, get rid of all that bro-country that Frank had on all the time, put in the pool table everyone wanted but Frank said he couldn’t afford, stop watering down the beer, have open mic nights for singers and comedians. It was when she got to the open mic nights part of her fantasy that reality usually crashed in. This town, man. Nobody in Trenton’s coming out for slam poetry at Love’s on a Tuesday night. She was two years off twenty one and the dog boom was over, Cindy was barely making enough to make her mortgage, let alone enough to give up any shifts and pay someone else. It’ll pick up. Will it, Cindy, will it?

In her darker moments she wondered if her only option was to screw her way out of Trenton. There were a lot of truckers passing through, probably lonely, criss-crossing the country, no ties, no need for alibis. What would even be the going rate for something like that? There wasn’t anyone she could ask. What was it worth, half an hour of fucking? What was she worth? She’d never really been with a man before so it felt like a desperate leap. There was that time with Bobby Davids when they were both fifteen, he’d tried to take things further than she wanted to and she’d spent most of the evening moving his hands away or refusing to join in as he’d pulled himself off. An entirely different version of events went round the school the next day and she’d stayed away from boys after that, wrote them all off as assholes. Not much dissuaded her of that view before she dropped out.

One evening she’d fixed her hair up, pulled it away from her neck, and dressed in a tight, low cut top, spaghetti straps and cropped at the stomach. She’d squeezed herself into year old jeans, slightly too small for her now but they accentuated her hips, and stopped to check herself in the small mirror above the sink in her room. She practiced what she thought was a confident, sexy smile, pushed her lips into a pout, tried to look casual. Her eyes betrayed her, blinking slightly too often, unable to maintain eye contact with herself, she would look away, around the room. It was okay if she caught a glimpse of this girl in the mirror, this stranger, familiar but different, but it wasn’t okay if she stared her down, realised that she was looking back at herself. She thickened up her mascara and applied some more eye shadow, like she was building defences around the source of her betrayal, and took the edge off her lipstick, blotting her lips against a tissue, leaving the imprint of her mouth in scarlet. The suggestion of a kiss.

She’d walked into town and made her way towards the truck and car wash. Some of the freight from the 34 stopped off in town, they could get their wagon freshened up at Dirt Dawg, chat to Marv, or, more likely, go join him at Frank’s for a beer. She didn’t really know what she was going to do, thought she would just walk around for while and see what happened. Maybe they would know what to do and things would happen naturally and she could pretend that this was all just a regular night for her. Fifty bucks. That was what she’d settled on in her head. That was her worth. Fifty bucks for everything, maybe thirty bucks for hand or mouth, and she absolutely wasn’t doing anything other than those things. Fifty was a week’s rent. Twice a week, maybe she could get by doing this twice a week, maybe things would pick up a bit at Cindy’s, and that would get her through.

There was a light on in Dirt Dawg but it was closed, the main shutters to the garage were down. As she came closer the shutters screeched into life and began to rise, on the other side was Marv’s pick-up, headlights blinding her as the barrier rose higher and higher. She shielded her eyes and moved to one side.

“That you, Jennifer” came a voice from the pick-up. She blinked, squinting, eyes adjusting to the flood of light from front of the truck. Was that Diane Flint?

“Hey, yes. It’s me. Diane?” 

Someone else had walked over to stand next to her and she noticed that the driver door on the truck was open, presumably whilst someone had been opening the garage shutters. She recognised him as Johnny.

“You won’t tell anyone,” he said. Jennifer wasn’t sure if it was a question or a demand.

“Tell anyone what?”

“Johnny, she’s cool,” shouted Diane. “Let’s get going. We should put some miles on before it gets too late.”

Jennifer pieced it together. “You’re leaving town, right? You’re taking off?”

“It’s not your business whether we are,” said Johnny. “You sure she’s cool?” This was directed back at the pick-up.

Before Diane could respond Jennifer interrupted. “You don’t need to worry about me. I won’t tell no-one. I haven’t really got anyone to tell anyway. But even if I did, I wouldn’t. Go on, get going.”

Johnny nodded to her, the briefest acknowledgement, and jumped back into the pick-up. He and Diane spoke quietly, Jennifer couldn’t hear them over the sound of the engine. He was shaking his head, Diane was gesturing and doing most of the talking, both of them seemed to be getting frustrated. Jennifer broke the stalemate. “If you’re arguing about whether to ask me along then quit it and get going. Three’s a crowd and I’ve got plans in this town.” Jesus, this town, man. Diane raised her hand, a small, sad wave that she barely had time to give as Johnny gunned the accelerator and left Jennifer standing there.

She didn’t really know why she waited. There was something about the truck wash being left open, unattended, that bothered her so she sat on the kerbside, stared up at the street light, and just waited. That was where Marv found her, about an hour later, when he came back from Frank’s. It had been a quiet night, Frank was in a bad mood, so he’d only stayed for a couple before deciding he should check on how much Johnny had taken in the afternoon. He was a decent kid but Marv knew his heart wasn’t really in it. Marv’s heart wasn’t really in it these days either.

He took in the scene quietly, mentally putting it together. The shutters were open and his pick-up wasn’t there. There was a girl – and she was definitely a girl much as she’d tried to dress up like a woman – on the sidewalk. He thought he’d seen her around town. She might be the one that helped Cindy out from time to time, Cindy always said she was a good worker. He went inside and checked that nothing else was missing. It looked like Johnny had left the safe, the day’s takings still inside, he’d just taken the truck. No note. Had he just borrowed it for the night? Taken someone up to the lake, maybe? That didn’t seem right, he’d have asked if it was just that. Marv figured he’d split town. He was about to pick up the phone, call the sheriff, when he heard a voice behind him.

“Everything okay, now? I… I waited ‘cos I noticed the place had been left open and it didn’t seem right.”

Marv turned round. “You see what happened?” He didn’t expect her to tell him the truth. She didn’t.

“No, I didn’t. I was just coming in to town to… well, to have a drink, but I saw it all open like this.”

“You seem a little young to be coming to town to have a drink,” said Marv. He slowed on the word drink, raised an eyebrow. “If you want my advice then I’d stay away from drink.” Again, he was deliberate on the word. More gently he said, “You don’t want to be messing around with that.”

Jennifer suddenly felt exposed. The night air had cooled and she was aware of the chill on her uncovered arms, her shoulders, her stomach, her neck. The change in his tone, its softening, had pulled away any last remnants of forced confidence, of fake front, that she had left. Fifty bucks? Was that really what she thought she was worth? She felt tears pricking at the edges of her eyes, sensed that the mountain of mascara she’d applied before was about to dislodge in a black avalanche down her cheeks. She wanted to run away, back to her room, sit and sob listening to the sounds of the rigs rattling past, all those truckers she thought she was prepared to give herself up to disappearing into the night. She turned away.

“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”

Jennifer didn’t turn around again. She didn’t really want him to see her like this anymore. It wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t completely sure she knew who she was but she knew it wasn’t this.

“Thank you,” she said, back to him. “I think I’d like that. I’ll be back in the morning. Some honest work.”

She left and Marv watched her walk back up the street before he closed the place back up for the night. He thought about calling the sheriff but decided it could wait until tomorrow; get to wherever you think you’re going, Johnny. He flicked off the lights.

I decided I had unfinished business in Trenton after my earlier story: here. I may round out a loose “Trenton Trilogy” and tell Marv’s story at some point. Anyway, Jennifer deserved more than the couple of lines she got first time out, hopefully things work out for her from here. I think I may have switched tenses towards the end but that’s the sort of thing an editor is for, right?

This is another in the series of stories for my Great Ormond Street Hospital (UK children’s hospital for my non-UK readership, yes, both of you). Donations welcome here.