Paint Me Fearless, page 1
Paint Me Fearless is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Paint Me Fearless
Copyright © 2020
Hallie Lee
ISBN: 978-1-952474-26-2
Cover concept and design by Jonathan Grisham for Grisham Designs.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations for review purposes.
Published by WordCrafts Press
Cody, Wyoming 82414
www.wordcrafts.net
The Shady Gully Series
Book 1
Hallie Lee
Contents
Prologue
PART I
The Squirrel Looked Fine To Me
Jennings, I Presume?
Jump, Shout, Knock Myself Out
Sounds Like A Fairy Tale
A T-Shirt That Said Boogie
Sorting And Packing, For Crying Out Loud
PART II
Extra Sugar, If You Please
Bucket Of Lard
Orange Station Wagon
Pieces Of Pie
Evil Trickery
The Sunshine In Sunny
PART III
An Expensive Barolo After All
Lair Of Luxury
Dim Those Lights
Filthy Microwave That Did Me In
To Save An Apple Fritter
Smorgasbord Of City-Slicker Neopolitan
PART IV
Plum-Sized Proteins And Spirits
Winston In A Frame
The Before
We’re Just Trash
The After
A New Season
Enough
Shame Is A Robber
A Message From the Author
Book 2 of The Shady Gully Series
Acknowledgements & Thanks
WordCrafts Press
For Mama and Daddy
Prologue
He was tall, lean, and at least ten years younger than me. His eyes were deep blue, and at this moment, full of pleasure. Exhilaration. Joy. His expression and demeanor mirrored my own. Except for the anxiety and eagerness that made my legs buckle.
Can one experience anxiety and eagerness simultaneously? Yes, I decided. One can.
He placed his hand gently on my shoulder, and I followed him. Our legs and feet were bare, creating an intimacy I hadn’t expected. It was an unfamiliar emotion that made me suddenly feel unsure. Vulnerable.
“Just breathe,” he said.
I obeyed. Shivered as I let myself go deeper in the water. Soon my calves were submerged, and seconds later the water was up to my waist. He was so tall that the water hadn’t yet reached his upper thighs.
His presence, so large and looming, reassured me. It reminded me I wasn’t alone. However unsteady my body was, and it was, his capable hands guided me deeper and deeper into the water.
He spoke softly to me now.
Distracted by the comforting embrace of the warm water, I had trouble focusing. Felt my knees buckle again.
I looked at his mouth, the sincerity in his eyes… and finally I smiled. Nodded with conviction.
No more anxiety, no more fear. Just excited now.
I said words back to him. Repeated what he said.
The tone that came from my mouth was confident. It sounded strange to me. I’d never been confident a day in my life. But on this day my words were full of something akin to… peace.
Finality.
Why had it taken me so long to get here? So many wasted years. Such a wasted life. Tears slipped from my eyes as I thought of the insecure girl, the anxious wife, the unrewarded mother. The failures, the losses, the disappointments.
But I didn’t regret that. Those were simply things I experienced. What I regretted now, in this moment of clarity and grace, was that I let all that anguish define me. Shame me into hiding. I let the brokenness rob my life.
I was a slave to my fears. My insecurities.
But not anymore. Not after this.
When the young man with the blue eyes gently placed his hand along the middle of my back, I followed him willingly…
PART I
Chapter One
The Squirrel Looked Fine To Me
Robin
All day I kept hearing about this new girl. It put me in a bad mood. I didn’t even know I had sixth period with her until Bubba told me.
“You gotta see her, Robin. She looks just like you. Except she’s good lookin’.”
Bubba’s flabby belly jiggled as he and Daryl, his Cohort in Crap, high-fived like they were already in high school. Like they were foxy and cool. As if. Even if Daryl and Bubba made it out of junior high, they’d never be foxy and cool.
I acted like I didn’t hear them and instead sat at my desk and pretended to write a note to my best friend, Claire. I didn’t really like Claire, but we’d agreed to be best friends last week. Her last note to me was pretty lame, except for the neat way she’d folded it. Claire knew how to do things like that, which was why I figured it would be good to be her best friend.
When I heard the sporty guys tromping into class, I straightened my shirt over the roll around my belly. Converse shoes and flashes of blue and white everywhere, the junior high athletes liked to make an entrance. Lenny, the quarterback, headed straight for the window. Supposedly he had the talent to go varsity, whatever that meant.
He raised his arms, held up his imaginary gun, and shot a fluffy squirrel, who fluttered along the branch of an oak tree just outside the classroom window.
“Puuhhh. Puuhhh.” Gunshot sounds. Lenny nodded, pleased with his aim.
“Nailed him,” confirmed Ricky, his best friend.
The squirrel looked fine to me. In fact, he came closer to the window, twitched his tail, and chomped on an acorn while giving Lenny the eye.
“I’ma get me a few this weekend at my camp.” Mitch tugged at his blue-and-white letter jacket, winking at his friends. “Squirrels, I mean.”
I rolled my eyes. Mitch was some kind of back. Halfback, fullback, hunchback, I don’t know, but of all the sporty guys, I hated him the most. Number one, he wasn’t even cute or foxy. Number two, he always acted like he was in on some secret that you weren’t, as if you weren’t good enough to even imagine all the great things going on in his world. Like stupid hunting trips at some camp in the swamp. And number three, Mitch acted like this camp in the swamp was the playboy mansion, and he himself was the old perv guy kissing all the girls.
“Yeah, right,” Ricky teased. Ricky was the guy who caught the throws Lenny threw, whatever that was called. A split end or a loose end or something. He was okay, especially when he put Macho Mitch in his place.
Love’s Baby Soft perfume wafted down the row of desks as Claire hurried into class and sat behind me. “It’s not your camp, dork,” she told Mitch. “It’s your uncle’s camp. And I doubt you’ll be getting any action unless it’s kissing yourself in the mirror.”
Besides the cool note folding thing, this was another reason I liked Claire being my best friend. She said stuff, and she wasn’t scared of anybody, and I wanted to be more like that. Except without so much Love’s Baby Soft.
“Who dunked you in the perfume, Claire?” Mitch coughed. “Are you trying to hide some BO or something?”
Claire ignored him. Instead she focused on tossing me another note. It was like a beautiful pink present. How did she fold it like that? This one was shaded in pink crayon with bright-purple headlines: NEW GIRL!!!!
“Have you seen her?” Claire was breathless.
“No.” And I didn’t want to. I hated new girls and the way they twisted me up inside. The way I always got kicked down the Popular Pyramid, especially if they were pretty and—
“Coach is on his way.” Dean the Brainiac made his way to his usual front-row desk. He wore glasses and was tall, like a giraffe. He was on the football team, but I didn’t know what kind of end or back he was… or if he even played. Dean was kind of like that. Always around, but hard to remember.
Except today he seemed more talkative than usual. “He’s got the new girl with him. She’s got a weird name.”
“I heard she’s foxy.” Macho Mitch puffed his chest out like a rooster.
“Where’s she from?” Daryl asked. “I heard a big city.”
“Probably,” Bubba said. “Girls are better lookin’ in big cities.”
“Yeah,” Ricky nodded. “Girls in Belle Maison are gorgeous, not like here in Shady Gully.”
“Belle Maison isn’t really a big city,” Dean pointed out. “In fact, it’s relatively small compared—”
“And Shady Gully isn’t a city at all,” Lenny added. “Right, Dean?”
“Nope. We’re just a small-town community in the great state of Louisiana.”
Claire coughed. “The shithole of the world.”
Shocked, I whipped my head across the row to stare at Claire. She actually uttered a curse word, and even more daring, she did it just as Coach Calvin’s shadow loomed at the entrance of the classroom door.
Claire was my idol.
†††
Two seconds. That’s all it took from the moment Coach led the new girl through the door to the pivot of heads in my direction. And I even heard someone gasp out loud. But that could have been me.
This was worse than I’d imagined. She was worse than I’d imagined.
She stood there on full display, dwarfed by Coach Calvin’s extreme bulk and height, but she seemed confident. Coach mumbled something, her name probably, where she was from, but I couldn’t hear. I could only see.
If only I were blind.
If I were blind, I wouldn’t have to look at her and see that she was short like me. Less than five feet tall. I wouldn’t have to see that she had short dark hair just like I did. Or that her eyes were brown just like mine. Even the way she stood there smiling at the class and up again at Coach… it was just like me.
Except that it wasn’t. There wasn’t a roll around her belly. Her crisp white shirt was neatly tucked into her blue jeans. Her hair was shiny and soft, not coarse and bushy like mine. She wore lip gloss and mascara and… my heavens, was that blush?
Not a smudge of Clearasil dotted her face in a pathetic attempt to hide pepperoni-sized patches of acne. And another dagger to my heart—no Coke-bottle glasses sat atop her perfect nose. I hated her on sight. Again, if only I were blind.
Suddenly my heart pounded, and my vision blurred. Oh no! Now God was punishing me, and I really was going blind! I dropped my head and rubbed my eyes in fright. And then to my horror, a big, sloppy tear splashed right in the middle of Claire’s pink note.
“Robin? Robin?” Coach’s voice penetrated my panic. “Are you okay?”
I guess I still had my hearing, so that was a plus. “I… yes. Allergies.”
“I told ya, Robin,” Bubba mocked. “Y’all are twins. Kinda.”
I prayed that everyone would turn away from me and focus once again on the new girl. Sure enough, Dean the Brainiac in the front row wanted to know about where she was from. “What’s Albuquerque like?”
“I don’t even know how to spell that city,” Lenny mumbled.
“Much less say it,” Ricky added.
Coach Calvin offered the new girl a piece of chalk and asked her to write Albuquerque on the chalkboard for the class.
“It’s a giant city with lots of people, and it hardly ever rains there,” she said.
Oh, kill me now. Her voice even sounded like an Eagles ballad.
Dean smiled up at her.
“Oh,” she added, “and there’s a hot-air balloon festival every year.”
“Where in Mexico is this?” Mitch asked. “Sounds like an awesome road trip.”
The new girl chuckled, and Coach explained, “It’s in the state of New Mexico, Mitch. Not the country.”
The class laughed, and Mitch’s face turned apple red. For a moment I thought I could rally and claw my way out of my pit of embarrassment and enjoy Mitch’s pain, but I couldn’t.
“I knew that, Coach,” Mitch said. “I was just messing around.”
More raucous laughter. Coach nodded and gestured like he was instructing a player on the football field. “All right, all right. That’s enough. We need to get on with our lesson.” As the class erupted in groans I glanced at the clock. Forty more minutes left of this nightmare.
“Why don’t you write your name on the board?” Coach suggested to the new girl. “That way everyone can remember to stop by after class and welcome you to Shady Gully Junior High. And to Shady Gully.”
“More like condolences,” Claire muttered. I realized I’d forgotten all about Claire and her pink note. The perfectly folded present. Back when life was good.
“Where’d you get your name?” Lenny asked the new girl. “It’s different.”
“Do you have a nickname or something?” Dean asked.
She smiled across the classroom. Literally across. Like she was accepting an award or something. “My mama loves history, and she said Désireé was the name of Napoleon’s lover.”
The silence was so thick that only the sound of Lenny’s born-again squirrel could be heard, happily chattering his way along a wobbly branch on the oak tree.
The Albuquerque girl with the name of a lover underlined a word on the chalkboard for emphasis. She placed the chalk back into the tray and grinned at her new admirers. “People call me Desi. For short.”
Obviously charmed, Dean pulled out the chair next to him for Desi. From Albuquerque. Named after a lover.
She was everything I wasn’t. She was the better me.
Her desk creaked a little as she turned around and looked at me. When she smiled, I turned away and looked out the window.
But all I saw was the dang squirrel, who hopped along the ledge of the window… as he too scrambled to get a closer look at the dazzling Desi.
Chapter Two
Jennings, I Presume?
Desi
On the bus ride home, a husky high school guy wearing cowboy boots and a western belt slipped into the seat in front of me. He stretched his arm along the top of his seat and casually turned back to me. “Howdy,” he offered with a lazy drawl.
“Uh… howd… hi?”
He grinned and let out a low chuckle.
His name was Adam, and he said he was going to be a country music star one day. He just thought I should know.
“Is that so?”
“Count on it,” he said.
He had reddish hair. A nice smile. I believed him.
He chatted for a bit, pointing out dirt roads here and there. “Yonder direction is where the Wolfheart clan stays. You need to steer clear of Brad and his bunch. Ain’t no place for a girl like you.”
Interesting that Adam already had me pegged for a particular kind of girl. I resisted the flair of irritation. Instead went with a wide-eyed, earnest nod. “Thanks. Good advice.”
“My pleasure.” Adam tipped his imaginary cowboy hat.
Mama said to smile and make friends, so I figured I could add Adam to the list. He ought to count for more than one, seeing as how he was going to be the king of Nashville one day.
He rolled the bus window down, and the breeze felt good. It was a hot breeze, but that might be as good as it was going to get here in Shady Gully, Louisiana.
Adam hummed a song, and it wasn’t half-bad. He acted real casual about it, but I could tell he was giving it his best effort. I sat back in my seat, surveying my surroundings.
Country roads indeed. No red lights, traffic jams, or five-car pileups. Just twisty blacktop paths and an occasional house set back from the road.
Here and there the bus would stop and let somebody off. I was fascinated by the wide range of dogs that rushed down the driveways. Some were big and scary and would bark right up to the point they saw their kid get off the bus. Then their tails would wag and beat a cloud of dust around them. Some dogs were little and yappy, but just like the others, they greeted their own and led them inside to what I imagined were milk and cookies and reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
“Do you have a dog?” I asked Adam.
So consumed with his melody, it took him a moment to focus. “Huh? Well, yeah. Of course. Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, this is me.” Adam rose.
I hadn’t noticed before how tall he was and found it amusing the way he hunched over to avoid bumping his head on the roof of the bus.
“It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Désireé.”
The bus slowed at a modest red brick house with a long driveway. Naturally, a German Shepherd waited at the edge. He looked older, a little scruffy, whiter around the face. He didn’t bark either. Just sat there eyeing the bus like a perfect gentleman.
“That there is Waylon.” Adam pointed.
“Jennings, I presume?” I enjoyed the flash of surprise on Adam’s face.
“Yes, ma’am.” He tipped his imaginary cowboy hat once more and stepped off the bus.
I watched him greet Waylon with an affectionate pat on the head.
