Jackie the Beanstalk
Chapter 1
Cap and Gown
BEFORE WE GET STARTED, I might as well tell you, I’m a girl. I’m eighteen and tall and thin. I like sports, outdoors stuff like camping, and animals. Pop—my Grandpa—started calling me a beanstalk years ago when I started growing—up, not out. He said I was a real tomboy, too. Mam—Grandma—said I needed to grow tall just to contain all the good in me. I love Grandma Mam. She always has something kind to say about everything. Aunt Misty just said it meant I was strong and empowered—a real woman. I thought in any case, it would have been nice to have tits by the time I graduated from high school. Wasn’t to be.
Did you know thesaurus.com lists 385 synonyms for ‘beanstalk.’ And nearly every one applies to me. Angular, slender, gangly, skinny, lanky, lean… You get the idea. I’m a tall, gangly, sometimes uncoordinated, pile of bones with a thin layer of meat and skin pulled over the top. I’m a scrawny, rawboned broomstick with a soaring attitude to match my statuesque height. You get the picture, right? I’m tall and skinny. But what the thesaurus doesn’t mention is that I’m deceptively strong from playing basketball, disk golf, soccer, volleyball, and track. And I have a wicked arm when I’m throwing a softball. I wear my basketball varsity letter, but I lettered in four different sports.
Being the kind of curious kid I’ve always been, I looked up ‘beanstalk’ in the urban dictionary of slang, too, and I found two completely different (in my opinion) definitions.
1) Being a plain annoying human being.
2) Someone doing something legendary.
I suppose I could be legendarily annoying and fit both definitions. Of course, those are just the top definitions. I like the last one on the page just as much.
3) The epitome of clitoral arousal. A clit erection. As in ‘Lick my beanstalk!’
Well, you get the idea. So, how tall is tall? Not that tall if you’re a guy. I’m 6'3". If you want that in metric, I’m 190.5 centimeters. How skinny? 133 pounds naked. Not many have seen that, yet. Dan Blackwell saw most of it back when… Well, you know. Oh, yeah. That’s 60 kilos. I’d be worth a fortune if I was cocaine. Yeah, baby. Like $1.8 million. In the right market. A lot more than I’m worth as a tall skinny girl. I’d have to play in the WNBA for, like, ten years to earn that much. So, I guess I won’t be getting rich any time soon.
I’ve lived with Mam and Pop since I was eleven. And Aunt Misty. She was just graduating from high school when I moved in. She never moved out. I got my mother’s old room. My parents? Don’t ask. We never talk about them. Looking at Mom’s room when I moved in, though, you’d never think she was the kind of person she turned out to be. I quickly adopted Misty’s words for her parents and they became Mam and Pop to both of us. It was so much easier than keeping track of whether we were referring to my grandparents or her parents. Might not be the same as everyone, but it made Misty and me feel even more like sisters.
Okay, a little bit of the backstory. Did you ever notice how country songs sung by men are all, like, “Hot girls in teeny tiny shorts, I will make you my wife, bear my children, front porch, family values, and casseroles.” Oh yeah, and “Poor me, my truck ran away with my dog.” While country songs sung by women are, like, “Oops! I killed my husband.” Well, now you get an idea about my dad and mom. She’s got another fourteen years before she’s eligible for parole.
Poor Mam and Pop were in their late fifties and thinking about retirement and maybe traveling around the world as soon as they could get Misty out of the house. Then I moved in. Now, they’re pushing seventy and still haven’t retired. Still hoping the youngest will move out so they can start traveling. I probably will, but I hate to leave Misty. She’s more like a big sister than an aunt. Maybe she’ll move with me. Oh, wow! The trouble we could get into together would be epic!
Not that I ever get into trouble, mind you. It’s just an expression. Sort of.
Like I couldn’t find a date for senior prom because Dan Blackwell already got Randi Bishop preggers, so he wasn’t going to take me. So, I bought a couple’s ticket and got Misty to go with me. It was easier for me to get a tux than a formal, so Misty got to wear the gown and go as my date. Mam about had a coronary when she saw my haircut. Slicked back and parted on the side. When she saw me in the living room in my tux and my neatly pasted on pencil-thin mustache, she thought I was my date. Oops!
Misty is almost a foot shorter than me, so we made a striking pair on the dance floor. It was almost halfway through the prom before anybody figured out who it was. You wouldn’t believe the number of guys who hit on my aunt. Or, for that matter, the number of girls who hit on me.
I kept my hair short and really look butch now. Not that I’m that way. I’d like some guy to get sweet on me. I’m just not interested in spending the effort to tame one. Probably end up like my mother. Misty, on the other hand, is very feminine and cute. Unfortunately, she depended on that in life and wasn’t that successful. She’s worked at Starbucks ever since she graduated. So, don’t go believing the tall tales you hear about the flirty barista who is suddenly swept off her feet by the rich handsome billionaire, or something. Misty’s still pulling shots. Maybe she set the bar a little high.
So, where’s this story going, anyway? Hell if I know. So, sometimes I’ll just talk to fill the void. I’d say it actually started at commencement. When I accepted my diploma from Principal Rogers, he looked up at me—short guy—and took my hand so we could shake for the photographers. Only in that minute, I could have walked around the entire stadium and counted every one of the two thousand people present. As they say, time stood still.
“I expect I’ll hear news of your great accomplishments, Jackie. You have a unique future before you. I’ve put your travel documents in your folder. Make us proud,” he said. Only it was like his voice was somewhere far away, even though I could see his lips moving, a little out of sync with what I was hearing. It was like his voice was on the other side of some canyon or something. Yeah, Mrs. Donahue would say the right word was ‘chasm.’ He spoke to me across a great chasm complete with an eerie echo. I paid attention in school. Then the camera flash went off and I walked off the platform—one of 300 students in my graduating class.
I’d like to say that was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me, but weirdness kind of follows me around like a lost puppy. Take that time soon after I got my driver’s license, for instance. I was driving Pop’s old Ford Fairlane 500. I know. Sounds weird already, but Pop bought the car new in ’68 with money he’d saved all through high school. Then he was drafted and spent four years as a jungle rat in Southeast Asia. The car still only had a couple thousand miles on it at the time and so he just kept it in the garage and used some of his military pay to buy a motorcycle. Well, I won’t get into how he met Mam and packed her off on an around-the-USA motorcycle trip and they got back with my mom in the hopper and a smile on their faces.
But that’s how the fifty-some-year-old car happened to be in the garage when I decided to go shopping with Misty. I mean, Misty never learned to drive and never really went anywhere more than a bicycle ride away unless someone else was driving. She said driving was what boys were for, but she was happy enough when I offered to drive. She’s still a kid at heart and filled with delusions. We’d gone to the mall, had burgers at Wendy’s, and were headed back home. I decided to stay off the main roads because I wasn’t sure the Fairlane would go at freeway speeds even though it was in immaculate condition. I couldn’t remember it having been out of the garage in the past five years, though it had current plates. But we were driving along without a care in the world when this voice says, “Turn right at the next corner.”
All echoey like Principal Rogers’ voice I told you about. I won’t re-explain that. I looked over at Misty and she was just sitting there like she didn’t hear a thing, the brat. I’m not crazy, so when I got to the next intersection I turned right. I was listening for further instructions, which weren’t forthcoming, when I saw a dog in the middle of the road. I pulled to a stop and jumped out of the car, even though Misty was hollering “Be careful. Don’t let it bite you.”
Well, this poor mangy mutt wasn’t interested in biting. He wanted to lick me half to death. Faker. He got up and followed me to the car and when I opened the door, he climbed in the back seat and lay down like he owned it.
And that’s how I came to own Roadkill. Clever name, right? It’s also how I came to have three months of duty pulling the Fairlane out of the garage every Saturday morning and washing it, then vacuuming out the inside and using some of that ‘new car smell’ polish to go over all the plastic and vinyl in the car and leather conditioner for the seats. After three months, Pop declared the car free of the mangy dog smell at last.
Weird, huh?
But that dog never leaves my side except when I go to school. Hardly even had to train him, except to get him to stand still while I gave him a bath. Now, he even tolerates a ribbon in his hair if I get in a mood.
Mile 0
Where was I?
Commencement was over and I found Mam, Pop, Misty, and Roadkill waiting for me outside the stadium so we could take family pictures with me in my graduation gown and holding tight to my diploma. I never opened it up. They’d mail the diploma sometime this summer. I knew all they gave us at commencement was an empty folder. And travel documents? I wanted to figure out what these ‘travel documents’ were that Principal Rogers mentioned but decided I should do that in private. Then Pop did something I never in a million years would have imagined. He held up the keys to the Fairlane and dangled them in front of my face. He pointed across the parking lot where that red and black fastback was sitting with a bow tied to the radio antenna.
“It’s yours now. Drive it like you own it,” he said. Oh, I gave him the biggest, crushingest hug you can imagine and a kiss right on his cheek. Then I did the same to Mam, only I had to bend over a lot farther to reach her cheek. I turned to Misty and grabbed her hand and took off running toward the car, my cap and gown flying and Roadkill barking at our heels. The three of us piled into the car and I started up the 390 Thunderbird Special V-8 engine and felt the Fairlane come to life beneath my fingertips.
“Where are we going?” Misty asked. Always the practical one.
“I don’t know. Principal Rogers said my travel documents were in my diploma folder.” I handed it to her and a packet of papers fell out, including an old-fashioned AAA TripTik. How weird can things get? Like, was this all a scheme he cooked up with Pop? Old car and a really old map.
“It starts here,” Misty said, pointing helpfully at the first page.
“Okay. Write down the odometer reading: 0. You think that can be real? Has it tipped over once or twice?” I asked. Probably never know the answer to that one. I revved the engine a little to feel it rumble. “You’re my GPS, girl. Let’s see where this map takes us.” I pushed the four-on-the-floor into first, only chirped a little when I let out the clutch, and pulled out of the stadium parking lot following Misty’s instructions to turn right. We were on the road.
Mile 93
We’d been driving along for almost two hours, getting up over the mountain pass and singing 60s songs at the top of our lungs. Sometimes Roadkill joined in as if he knew the music. It was different when he started to whine, though.
“Hey, does my guy need a bathroom stop? Hmm. Me, too. Watch for a place where we can pull over,” I said.
“Um… The TripTik says ‘Diner on right.’ It should be… There it is!”
I saw it in time to pull into the gravel parking lot and find a parking spot. I jumped out of the car and grabbed Roadkill’s leash, then saw some plastic baggies on the seat. Knew what those were for. I grabbed one and headed for the grass out back.
“Hey, see if you can find some water for him,” I called to my aunt. At this moment, she was really more like my sidekick than an aunt. She was only seven years older than me. And we were having too much fun, just letting the old car run. Misty grabbed Roadkill’s dish out of the back and disappeared into the diner. Roadkill did his business and I dropped it in a dumpster on my way to the front door. Misty appeared and said to come on in. “With Roadkill?”
“They said it was fine. I’ve got the three of us a booth.” Well, I’d never heard of a diner that allowed dogs in, but indeed, Misty waved me to a booth.
“Wow! I’m starved. Why is everybody looking at me?” I asked.
“Probably because you’re still wearing your cap and gown and all those things dangling around your neck,” she laughed. “You could take it off.” I started to panic.
“I can’t,” I squeaked. “I’m only wearing underwear.”
“You wicked girl!” Misty laughed.
“That means I don’t have my wallet either. Do you have any money?”
“I’ve got some money and I’ve got your wallet, too. Remember? You gave it to me before we left the house this afternoon.”
“Well, thank goodness for that. I suppose I could take off some of the decorations,” I said. I got to considering what I must look like. I mean, it was fine when I was surrounded by 300 others who looked the same. But in a diner in the middle of nowhere, it had to look pretty strange. The gown and mortarboard were dark, almost iridescent blue. My tassel and the shiny stole were silver. Those were the school colors. The stole only came down to the middle of my torso with pointy ends making like a beacon to show how far it was to the ground. Then there were the cords. Not to brag, but I was a pretty good student and active in all kinds of things. I had a white cord for having done 100 hours of community service projects. The light blue cord was because I was an AP scholar. The gold cord indicated that I graduated with a 3.5 GPA or better. Then on the left breast—if I had anything there—I had my athletic badge, a silver interlinked WW for West Wilford, with a flaming basketball cutting across it to indicate my principal varsity sport. We got little badges beneath that indicated the number of years we participated in each sport. I had fifteen badges. I guess I looked the part of a high-achieving grad.
The waitress took our orders and brought me the biggest, messiest chili burger I’d ever seen. There was a mountain of fries next to it. Misty had a chef salad. She might have thought it was going to be a sensible lo-cal meal, but the bowl it came in was the size of a regular serving bowl and I could see it was totally drenched in blue cheese dressing—Misty’s favorite. The waitress even brought Roadkill a bowl of water and some kibble.
We were apparently in the vanguard of the dinner rush, because people started coming in and getting seated. Our waitress was hustling her butt off. I made a note to be real nice when I tipped her. I didn’t want her to lose that butt. It was way too nice. I notice that kind of thing. Everybody who came in seemed to stop and look at me, then smile and nod. I guess that pride people have in graduates is present, even when they don’t know them.
I don’t know how we managed to finish our meal—aside from a few French fries and a little chunk of burger I slipped to Roadkill. I was mopping up the remains of the chili on my plate with a fry. Misty had done pretty well with her salad, too. I don’t know how she manages to stay so cute and trim with as much as that girl eats. Course, people say the same about me, except for the cute part. We were just trying to decide if we wanted to split a sundae when we heard a ruckus at the cash register and looked up to see what was going on.
Some guy in a winter parka, gloves, and a ski mask was hassling the cashier. He was dressed way too warm for the weather. It was mid-June and the temp was just beginning to cool from the afternoon high of 75. A man in the booth nearest to the cashier started to get up and the fellow at the counter swung around and landed a blow on the side of his head with what was quickly obvious as a gun.
“The rest of you just sit down and shut up!” he yelled waving the gun around. “I’m just getting a take-out and some cash. So, take out all your cash and put it on your table. This pretty waitress is going to come around and collect it for me.” He smacked my waitress on her butt—that fine butt I was noticing earlier—and prodded her forward with his gun. I saw the cashier reach for something and apparently the robber saw her, too. He swung back to her and fired. The cashier staggered back and hit the floor.
I honest to God do not know what came over me. He shot the cashier and slapped the butt of my waitress. I snatched the mortarboard off my head and used one of my best disk golf throws to launch it at the bastard. He never saw it coming as it lodged in the front of his throat. He dropped the gun, tried to take a step toward the door, and fell to the floor.
Roadkill was off like a flash, standing on him and growling. Then he sniffed at the guy, grabbed my cap, and trotted back to me. The guy didn’t move, but a big puddle of blood collected under his neck.
Oh, shit! What had I done?
A woman declaring herself a doctor, scurried around the counter to check on the cashier. She totally ignored the bleeding robber. I guess dead robber was more like it. I just stood there staring at what I’d done as two guys moved to search the perp. My waitress stepped up to our table and gently took the cap from Roadkill. She used her table rag that she washed all the tables with to wipe the blood off the corner of the mortarboard, carefully making sure it was clean. Then she placed it back on my head and made sure the tassel was hanging correctly. I just stared at her as she leaned forward and put a soft kiss right on my lips.
“Thank you, Warrior Wizard,” she whispered. Then she cleared our plates as if nothing had happened. I looked after her sexy butt for a second and then looked at Misty to see what she thought. Her eyebrows were stuck somewhere up under her hairline and her mouth was at least as wide open as mine.
Just then another guy approached our booth. He laid a wallet, some change and the gun on our table.
“He didn’t have much, I guess, but there’s some cash in the wallet. It’s all yours now.” He turned and went back to the front where he and the other guy who’d searched the robber picked him up and dragged the body outside. A minute later, I heard the clang of the dumpster lid.
My waitress was back with two absolutely huge hot fudge sundaes that she put in front of Misty and me, and a little dish of ice cream for Roadkill. At least she knew not to put chocolate on the dog’s dessert.
“How’s the cashier?” I asked.
“The doctor said she’ll be fine. He wasn’t really aiming when he shot her and the bullet passed through without much damage. Don’t worry about her. Your meal’s been taken care of. If you want anything else, just say so. Coffee with your dessert?” Misty and I both nodded our heads and looked at each other.
“What the fuck just happened?” I whispered.
“If I believed what I saw, I’d say a guy tried to rob the diner, you killed him, and then everything went back to being normal. But that couldn’t be right. Right?”
“Right. Um… This sundae is really good, though.”
We hung around, expecting the state police or county sheriff or at least an ambulance to show up, but nothing seemed to be happening and no one seemed to expect anything to happen. I looked at Misty and she shrugged, so we stood to leave.
“What do we do with this stuff?” I asked.
“I guess you are supposed to take it,” Misty said. I picked up the wallet and looked in it. There were some small bills and a fifty. I put the big bill on the table as a tip for our sexy waitress and then tossed the wallet to Misty.
“Put this and the gun in your bag. I don’t have any pockets or a belt or anything.”
“I don’t see how you could need it as long as you have your cap and gown,” Misty said. “Wicked!”
On the way to the door, people nodded our direction, Roadkill padding along behind us with his leash in his mouth. I carried his dishes. Our waitress met us at the door with a bag.
“The cook packed a breakfast for you. We don’t know where your journey will take you, but we’re glad it included our little diner.” She presented me with the bag and then leaned in to stretch up on her toes and kiss me again. Only this was a really really good kiss. I’d be able to taste that kiss for the next couple of hours good. “Thank you, Warrior Wizard. Blessings on your travels.”
We headed out to the Fairlane. Roadkill got in the back seat. I started the car, and felt the engine rumble to life. I took another look around before I pulled out of the parking lot to make sure no police were coming to arrest me. It looked like everyone in the diner had come outside to wave goodbye, my waitress in the lead. I hit the gas and popped the clutch. We peeled out of the parking lot onto the open road and were gone.
“Hi ho, Silver, away!” I shouted out. Misty started laughing.
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