This Is Not the Jess Show Read online

  Also by Anna Carey

  Eve

  Once

  Rise

  Blackbird

  Deadfall

  This is a work of fiction. All names, places, and characters are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Anna Carey

  All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Carey, Anna, author.

  This is not the Jess show / Anna Carey.

  Summary: “When strange things start happening in Jess Flynn’s hometown of Swickley, the high-school junior suspects reality isn’t as it seems and seeks to uncover the truth about her family, her friends, and her town”—Provided by publisher.

  CYAC: Reality—Fiction. | Secrets—Fiction. | Family life—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Dating (Social customs)—Fiction.

  LCC PZ7.C21 Thi 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 2020007413

  ISBN 9781683691976

  Ebook ISBN 9781683691976

  Cover illustration by Tim O’Brien

  Cover design by Andie Reid

  Production management by John J. McGurk

  Quirk Books

  215 Church Street

  Philadelphia, PA 19106

  quirkbooks.com

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  For Clay

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Anna Carey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Three things happened the week I found out. Titanic won a bunch of Oscars, and my sister and I stayed up late to watch because we’d never miss a chance to see Leo in a tux. Meanwhile every news anchor was talking about the president, and everywhere I went people repeated that phrase, how he “didn’t have sexual relations with that woman.” I probably should have cared (president, impeachment, important stuff) but another, more pressing matter, had consumed me: I’d fallen in love with my best friend.

  Tyler. Also known as Ty, Scruggs, or Tyler Michael Scruggs. Formerly known as Bugs, Bugsy Scruggsy, or Fire Crotch (more on that later). We’d managed to be friends for six whole years with no feelings whatsoever. We’d never got weird with each other, even when we were in the throes of puberty and I was having vivid dreams about hooking up with Zack Morris. Growing up, Tyler had these huge buckteeth and moppy, rust-colored hair. When kids weren’t making fun of his smile, they were heckling him for being a ginger, as if that alone were a sin against humanity. It had taken five years of braces to get his two front teeth back inside his head, but now those braces were gone and his smile was kind of…well, perfect. Now he was five eight, and his hair was longer and a little darker, and it fell into his eyes when he played the drums. Now he worked out.

  I rolled over in bed, my eyes squeezed shut. This thing with Tyler had gotten into my bloodstream and infected my brain. I was never alone because I was always imagining him right beside me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way the sleeves of his tee shirt strained against his biceps. How he closed his eyes and tilted his head back when he played the drums, and you could see the veins in his forearms. He was still the tiniest bit bucktoothed, but now he rested the tip of his tongue against the bottom of them when he was deep in thought. Now it was totally hot.

  There was a knock on my door. My dad pressed his face into the room, his cheek on the doorframe à la The Shining.

  “Jess, what are you doing?” he asked. “It’s almost seven. Kristen’s going to be here soon.”

  “I’m alive. I’m moving.”

  But I didn’t actually move until he closed the door behind him.

  I turned over, watching the tops of the trees sway with the wind. A squirrel ran across the telephone wire. It was the end of March and the cold air had just broken, giving way to spring, so I’d slept with my window open for the first time in months. I got up and searched for my jeans and my pink, fuzzy turtleneck, trying not to obsess about the fact that I had band today with Tyler.

  Someone was shouting something. It was so far off I couldn’t make out the words right away, but it was the relentlessness of it, the repetition that drew me in. It was as steady and sure as a beating heart. Power was the first word I heard with any certainty. The next was harder to make out but it sounded like Forages. Forages, power, forages, power, on and on like that. The words repeated on an endless loop, but when I stepped into the hallway they sounded farther away.

  “The TV’s not on downstairs, is it?”

  My dad was sitting on the bottom step now, his broad shoulders hunched forward as he laced up his work boots. The back of his jacket read FLYNN PEST CONTROL in block letters.

  “No. Why?” He picked at a knot with his fingers.

  “Never mind.”

  I walked across the hall. Sara was sitting up in bed, a blood pressure cuff on her arm. Lydia, her nurse, had arrived early that day, and the room filled with the thwick thwick thwick of the pump. She put on her glasses to read the gauge.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “What?” Sara’s black hair was messy at the crown, where it rubbed against the pillow. Lydia didn’t look up until she’d marked Sara’s blood pressure on her notepad and pulled the stethoscope out of each ear. We were all quiet for a moment, straining to hear past the machine by Sara’s bed, which hissed and sighed like a living, breathing thing.

  “That bird? The chirping?” Lydia asked.

  “No, it was different…” I went to the window and opened it, but the words were much harder to hear now, over everything else.

  “My faculties must be going. The beginning of the end,” Lydia said, the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Forty is approaching…”

  “Forty isn’t old.” I knew she was kidding, though.

  She sorted Sara’s pills into piles on the nightstand. Lydia always had an easy way about her, breezing through even the most chaotic days in our house. She was my mom’s best friend, and she’d been a part of our family for as long as I could remember. When I was kid I’d lie awake, listening to faint laughter downst
airs as they talked at the kitchen table. She was our live-in nanny when we were really little. When we got older Sara and I would spend hours with her after school, digging up bugs in her backyard while my parents were still at work. Lydia was two years into her nursing degree when Sara got sick, and she’d wanted to go into private nursing, so it made sense that she’d be the one to care for Sara as the disease progressed. She’d be there when we couldn’t.

  “What did it sound like?” Sara asked.

  Before I could answer a leaf blower started up outside, drowning out my thoughts. Then my dad appeared in the doorway.

  “You’re not even dressed yet? Jess, come on.”

  “I know, I know,” I said on my way back across the hall. I pulled on the fuzzy turtleneck and paused, trying to hear the strange chanting again, but the leaf blower was still blasting, and the house was noisier now that everyone was starting their day. My mom must’ve turned on the radio in the kitchen. “Waterfalls” by TLC floated up the stairs, the lyrics muffled by my bedroom door.

  I went through the motions of getting ready, on autopilot as I stepped into my jeans and brushed my hair. I was still standing at the window when Kristen pulled up and honked the horn.

  2

  “You’re like the guy from that song, ‘Lady in Red.’ ” Amber glanced back at me as she unbuckled her seatbelt. “It’s like, really? You’ve known her this whole time and you’re only into her now, after seeing her in a red dress? Isn’t that a little…fickle?”

  “Or maybe it’s totally normal,” I said, pushing out into the upperclassmen parking lot. Amber and Kristen were really good friends in a lot of ways, but they had this weird habit of dissecting everything I felt. I couldn’t sneeze without it turning into a discussion.

  “I just didn’t realize I liked him until I did,” I said.

  Kristen tied her flannel around her waist. Her long, curly brown hair was still recovering from last spring, when she got too enthusiastic with the Sun In.

  “Until you saw him with his shirt off,” she smirked.

  The thing is…she wasn’t wrong. It had all started the last week of August, when it was so humid you couldn’t walk from the car to the house without your shirt sticking to your back. I worked that summer at the Swickley YMCA, playing the keyboard for the Seniors Sing! choir, but on Thursdays and Fridays I was off. Those empty hours were filled with Saved by the Bell reruns and swimming in Amber’s pool, which was in-ground and heated to a perfect eighty-five degrees. We stayed in the water until our fingers were wrinkly and our eyes were bloodshot from the chlorine.

  Ty had called me that morning, bored out of his mind. Driftwood Day Camp had ended and so had his reign as assistant to the Music Director. He’d known Amber and Kristen almost as long as I had, but it wasn’t an obvious thing, me inviting him over to Amber’s house. I had to beep her, then wait for her to call me back so I could ask, and she said he could come if he picked up a bottle of Dr. Pepper on the way.

  He’d already started dressing differently by then, trading in his old polos for vintage tee shirts he’d found at Goodwill, ones that said ITHACA IS GORGES or ORLANDO in loopy, ’80s font. When he came through the back gate he seemed taller, and he was tan from a summer spent outside, his shaggy hair overdue for a cut. He was the same Ty I’d known for six years, whom I’d defended in gym class when people called him Fire Crotch or Bugsy Scruggsy. The same Ty who’d stayed up late with me, lying in the treehouse in my backyard after Sara was diagnosed with Guignard’s Disease. The same Ty who only said sorry, I’m so sorry, knowing that the silence was what I needed. But he was different, too. He came through the gate and hugged me, and something felt different.

  “I can’t believe you’re into Bugs, I mean, it’s Bugs.” Amber pulled her braids down in front of one shoulder. She’d worn her hair that way ever since Clueless came out—Dionne Davenport was her style icon.

  “He’s gotten so full of himself too,” Kristen said. “It’s painful to be around.”

  “I don’t think he’s full of himself,” I said. “Besides, this is high school. People reinvent themselves all the time.”

  I didn’t go on, but I didn’t have to. Just two years before, Kristen had gone through her own Love Potion No. 9 transformation, saying goodbye to her glasses and the vast majority of her body hair, and returning freshman year with boobs. She’d started September by making out with Kyle Sawicki, captain of the JV lacrosse team, as if that alone could announce: SEE, I’M DIFFERENT!! I never gave her shit for changing. But Amber and Kristen had distanced themselves from Ty almost as soon as he started working out. They kept saying he was conceited, and it felt like he was trying too hard, and didn’t I find it all a little annoying?

  “Where is everyone?” I asked, as we passed the tenth empty parking spot on our way inside the school. The lot was half empty.

  “Haven’t you heard? There’s some kind of flu going around…” Amber spun her pearl earring between her fingers.

  “Paul Tamberino has been barfing for three days straight,” Kristen said. “Fever, chills, the whole thing. We should be wearing hazmat suits.”

  She pushed through the back door, which had SPRING FORMAL fliers taped on it. She held it open just long enough for Amber and me to pass through, then rubbed her hand against the front of her jeans. It was seven twenty-six, just four minutes before first period, but the hall was practically empty. No Max Pembroke and Hannah Herlihy making out at the lockers by the auditorium. No sophomore girls standing in front of the vending machines, pretending to be engrossed in a snack selection as they waited for the senior guys to pass through. No Mrs. Ramirez telling people they needed to hurry up, get to class.

  “Half the school is out,” I said. “It’s a stomach flu?”

  “Just the regular one, but really, really awful,” Kristen said. “Things coming out of either end, nonstop. They said that—”

  “Ew, Kristen, repulsive.” Amber winced. “We get it, it’s bad.”

  “Jess asked!” Kristen turned left down the hall, then spun around and walked backward, pulling her tee shirt up over her face so it covered her nose and mouth, as if that alone could protect her from germs. “Stay safe out there.”

  “Just remember: Lady in Red,” Amber said, before starting toward her Physics classroom. “She was the same person she was before the dress.”

  “It’s not a Lady in Red situation. I swear.”

  But was it? There was something about Amber’s declarations that always made me unsure. Amber was the only one of us who’d dated anyone seriously. She and Chris Arnold had gone out for six months last year, and she’d decided to break up with him because he said “I love you” and she knew immediately she’d never say it back.

  I took the stairs down to the music wing. I passed a bunch of juniors I recognized, but it was as if all the underclassmen had vanished. I hadn’t seen the school this empty since the tornado in 1996, right at the end of my freshman year. It touched down one night in May, and my family huddled in the basement, listening to it barrel through like a freight train, exploding trees and cars and mailboxes in its wake. The entire block behind the library was destroyed, including Kristen’s house. I’d volunteered every Saturday for weeks, digging personal items out of the debris. I’d found Kristen’s third-grade picture under a bathtub.

  When I got to band, half the seats were empty, and Tyler wasn’t in the percussion section. Emily Hanrahan and Kima Johnson, two girls I’d known since elementary school, were the only flutes. The sophomores who sat behind them were out and most of the woodwind section was missing too. A woman with red glasses sat at Mr. Betts’s desk.

  I went to the music closet, but Tyler wasn’t there either. My mom had been on the phone all weekend, so I was only able to sign onto AOL for five minutes on Saturday, and he hadn’t been on. I hated thinking he might be sick too, that I might not see him for a whole week, maybe more. He d
idn’t stop by our house as often as he had when we were younger, and I looked forward to every class we had together—on Thursdays especially, when he sat next to me in study hall and we spent the period passing notes back and forth.

  My keyboard was on the top shelf and I had to yank it out inch by inch, sliding it across the wood so that it didn’t fall on my head. The band room had a grand piano that I sometimes played, but Mr. Betts preferred the keyboard this year, considering the medley we were performing. It was a mash-up of all these sitcom theme songs—Perfect Strangers, Friends, Full House, The Simpsons, and Family Matters. He liked how the piano solo at the beginning of Family Matters sounded on the keyboard. It was poppy, electronic, and closer to the original. I didn’t have a problem with the actual composition, but part of me knew he was going to make us do something cheesy, like wear sunglasses or shimmy our shoulders at the break. He was always adding what he called “dramatic flair,” even though it felt more third grade than eleventh.

  I’d gotten the keyboard halfway out when someone rushed in to help.

  “Hey, sorry.” I turned and Tyler was right beside me, lowering the thing to the ground. “I was waiting for you by your locker, but then I remembered you don’t go to your locker Monday mornings until second period, so then I came here—whatever, it’s stupid. Hi.”

  I smiled. “Hi.”

  His snare drum was against the wall, behind us, but he didn’t go for it. Instead he just stood there and brushed his bangs out of his eyes. He wore a vintage Eagles tee shirt with a zip-up hoodie over it, and he was standing so close I could smell his shampoo, this new peppermint one he’d started using. One of his drumsticks was in his back pocket and he turned the other between his fingers.

  He was completely unrecognizable from the gawky boy I’d met in fourth grade. We’d only interacted because I’d tried to throw a kickball to Kristen and it had flown past her and smacked Tyler in the head. I’d felt so bad, I’d asked him to play with us, and then he started coming over after school.

  “You weren’t online this weekend,” he said.