C H A P T E R  5: The Girl With Two Names

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      Fact: Scout-Juliet Compton hated when people asked her why she had two first names.

    She hated it more than she hated children, vienna sausages, and mittens. And Scout-Juliet Compton absolutely despised children, vienna sausages and mittens.

    So, on her first day of fourth grade, after enduring the same probing from her peers for five whole years on the matter of her names, she replied, with the straightest face she could muster, "I had a twin named Juliet... and I ate her in the womb." That was also about the same time that her collection of friends reduced to one, Bodhi "Bo" Benson, who only stuck around because she was shunned as well — her status as a pariah, however, resulted from being the resident lesbian. They were known as Cannibal Lecter and Bo Van Dyke, respectively — although respect and those godawful nicknames should never go in the same sentence.

    Scout's reasoning was untrue, of course. There was no cannibalized twin. It was just that her parents couldn't decide on a single first name. Her father, Scott, campaigned for Scout, arguing that the best names had a personality of all their own, and Scout seemed to have more character than most. It also didn't hurt that they'd have nearly matching names. Her mother, Virginia, asserted that Scout was an "atrocious" name and that Juliet was wholesome. They almost got divorced over it. Eventually, they conceded, gave her both names and threw a hyphen in the mix.

    Scout always thought they should have just gotten the divorce. After all, Virginia left before Scout could even walk. She never came back.

    Scout's brows knitted together as she clipped her name tag to her tank top. Why she even needed a name tag was beyond her. She worked at the desk of her father's auto repair shop, for Christ's sake. They already knew nearly everyone in town and the only thing the customers cared about was getting the free tire rotation that came with the oil change, as promised by the sign outside.

    That was all Scout's life consisted of; sitting within the confines of her father's shop, Santan Valley Auto Repair, answering the phone and making appointments; and, on occasion, Bo breaking Scout out to hang at the shops further in town, wherein they would terrorize every old classmate that coined them as Cannibal Lecter and Bo Van Dyke. They usually got kicked out of the shops or the owners would threaten to call their parents. That was all the excitement Santan Valley had to offer.

    After graduating from high school four months early, Scout thought she would be out partying with friends, having drunken sex and regretting it in the morning. That was what she thought every other eighteen-year-old girl in the world was doing, but Scout soon discovered that she was not the average eighteen-year-old girl. Scout's only friend was Bo, who had an aversion to anything that even remotely resembled a social gathering; and the only guy Scout had ever had sex with was her ex-boyfriend, Antonio Ruiz, who cheated on her with half of Santan Valley's female population. She found it astounding that they hadn't yet named a sexually transmitted disease after him.

    Scout sighed, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She ran a hand through her long, copper hair that faded into blonde at the ends like the bleeding hues of the sunrise, hoping that she could miraculously pull the thought of Antonio right out of her head. She hated wasting valuable time thinking about a guy that was probably banging someone somewhere in Arizona right now. No matter what he was doing, Scout knew that she was the farthest thing from his mind.

    She pushed the thought of Antonio, and all of the sentiments that came with it, out of her mind. She descended the stairs from her and her father's little apartment over the auto shop and joined him downstairs.

    Scott Compton was a short, but fairly muscular man that scowled as often as he breathed. He didn't scowl for any particular reason, though. After his wife left him to care for a five-month-old baby girl all by himself, scowling just became his natural expression. Contradictory to his face, which still appeared to be handsome in that mature way that salt-and-pepper-haired men tended to look, he never really was a negative person. He had a lighthearted nature to him, and a kindness imbibed deep in his bones. Ask him to do you a favor and he'll do you five, Scout always said.

    Looking at her father hunched over the reception desk with the phone squished between his shoulder and his ear, and his reading glasses struggling to get a grip on the end of his sweat-slicked nose, Scout observed that the only physical feature she ever got from him was his height. She would have been perfectly content accepting any other trait from her father, but she just so happened to be burdened with the only one she absolutely abhorred having — her shortness was near the top of her very extensive hate-list, right between mittens and bugs.

    Scout had only ever seen one photo of her mother — before her father "accidentally" dropped it down the garbage disposal, — and had long ago decided that she did not look like her much either. Virginia was six-foot, blonde, and blue-eyed. Scout was five-foot-two, brunette, and hazel-eyed. Virginia was oddly pale for having spent her entire youth in Arizona. Scout always seemed to hold a tan; not as good of a tan as her aunt Georgia Morgan, however, but it would do. And whereas Scout thought she had all of the elements of average; most people would say Virginia had a face that belonged in a magazine.

    Scout watched as a bead of sweat raced across her father's forearm, passed the old, faded tattoo that was supposed to be an eagle, but looked more like a fist-sized, discolored birthmark these days. She hadn't noticed until then that she was also beginning to sweat. The Arizona heat was bad. It was always especially bad after a thunderstorm, which they had already experienced two of within the last hour and a half. Arizona's weather made the top ten of her hate list, right above miniature forks.

    "Dad, it's hot."

    Scott, who was still on the phone, shot her that famous scowl. "It's Arizona," he whispered, placing his hand over the phone. "What am I supposed to do?"

    "Turn on the air conditioning," she said, pointedly.

    Scott sighed. He reached his arm over the desk and flipped the switch on the wall's thermostat. A blast of cool air shot out of the vent over Scout's head, blowing her hair over her shoulders in an ombré cascade.

    "I should make you pay the bill next month," he said.

    Scout couldn't help but laugh at her father's expense. "Considering that you're the one who writes my paychecks, you'll still be paying for it."

    Scott's face fell back into that scowl as he tossed a pen at her. She caught it just before it could smack her in the forehead and smiled brightly at him. That was their daily routine: Scout woke up late, forcing her father to answer the phone; she complained to him about the weather; he threatened to dock her check for having the air conditioning running all of the time; and then Scott gave her a kiss on the forehead as she took over the call. Then he would disappear into the large garage to repair some Santan Valley resident's jalopy.

    Scout sat behind the reception desk, her feet propped on the desk, for what felt like a long time. She had peeled the electric green polish off of three fingernails by the time a call came in. When Scout answered with a monotonous "Santan Valley Auto Repair," the man on the other end of the line curtly replied that he had the wrong number and hung up.

    Scout parroted his words in a high-pitched tone before slamming the phone back on the receiver. In such a small town, where everyone knows everyone and nothing ever changes, how could you have dialed the wrong number? Probably some kid too chickenshit to see his prank call through, she thought.

    After unwinding a loose thread from her denim shorts, Scout decided she couldn't sit at that desk any longer and resolved to joining her father in the garage, appointments be damned.

    When she opened the adjoining door between the shop and the garage, a wave of Arizona heat all but slapped her across the face. Her father had opened the garage doors to let in the light of the scintillating afternoon sun. Scout was on her way to shut them but stopped in her tracks.

    Her father was laying on the mechanic's creeper beneath Mrs. Fern's, the elderly motel owner, green Plymouth Fury, and sitting perched on the hood scantily clad in a strained tank top and Daisy Dukes with that unfailingly haughty smirk plastered across her face was Mandy Morgan, the bane of Scout's existence. Mandy's position on Scout's hate-list was number one — two and three, as well, on particularly bad days.

    "Good afternoon, bitch-face," Mandy snickered.

    Scott rolled out from under the car. "Language," he warned, before disappearing again.

    Mandy rolled her eyes. "Sorry, uncle."

    "No afternoon is a good afternoon if you're here," Scout sighed.

     "Wow," Mandy said with feigned hurt. "Aren't you just a Georgia peach?"

    Scout crossed her arms tightly over her chest. "I really don't have the patience for your shit today, Mattress-Back."

    Mandy's eyes narrowed. Whenever anyone mentioned the nickname that haunted her throughout her entire tenure in high school, she all but burst into flames. She made the mistake of sleeping with a married man once and was known as the town get-around from then on out. She believed in sexual freedom; Scout believed in STDs.

    Scout often wondered how in the world two people so diametrically incompatible could ever share the same genealogy. She deduced their relation to being some sort of divine prank, like the universe placed the two of them in the same family tree just for shits and giggles. She thought there was no way that their mothers happened to be sisters by coincidence. Where Scout was an honor roll student that graduated early, Mandy got held back in her senior year, then dropped out and fail her GED test twice. Where the only person Scout had ever had sex with was her ex-boyfriend of almost two years, Mandy proudly added new notches to her belt when she could. And where Scout's aspirations in life exceeded beyond Santan Valley, Mandy was perfectly content spending the rest of her life helping her mother, Georgia, run their convenience store.

    The only time in their lives when Scout and Mandy ever got along was on an especially hot day in July seven years ago. Scout, then eleven, had been coerced by her father to accompany Mandy, then fourteen, to the local swimming pool. On that day, Mandy decided to show-off in front of a group of guys hanging around the pool, so she dove in the deep end. Beneath the water, Mandy's hair got caught at the bottom of the pool and she thought for sure she would drown to death until Scout, who had always swam like a fish according to her father, dove in, unwound Mandy's hair and towed her up to the surface. Afterward, the two of them agreed to never speak of it. Scout never wanted anyone to know that she actually cared about Mandy enough to prevent her death, and Mandy was just thoroughly embarrassed about the whole event.

    "Stop staring at me," Mandy snapped, flipping her long, black hair over her shoulder.

    Scout only continued to stare out of spite. She hated everything about Mandy's face. From her perfect skin to her symmetrical nose to her plump lips, down to the exact symmetry of her features. She thought Mandy's face was the standard for what models should look like. Maybe she was meant to be Virginia's daughter instead. Maybe Scout was switched at birth in some horrible twist of events where she was really meant to be with her birth family that had timeshares around the country, or at least traveled so she could say her entire existence wasn't spent in this stupid little town.

    "You make me wanna die," Scout drawled.

    Mandy pulled an emery board from her pocket and began to file her nails. "Ditto."

    "Oh, Christ." Scott went on, "Can't we all just get along?"

    "No," Scout and Mandy hissed in unison.

    Scott rolled out from under the Plymouth dotted with oil stains and dirt. "Well, at least you two can agree on something."

    Scout's eyes narrowed. Her sneaker-clad foot was just a few inches away from her father. She had to refrain from kicking the creeper, sending Scott rolling under the Plymouth.

    "Scotty, you here?!"

    Scout, Mandy, and Scott, who had just gotten to his feet and began to dust himself off, looked toward the door where the light, sing-song voice of Georgia Morgan floated in through the garage.

    "Yeah, Mom, and so is his annoying daughter," Mandy chuckled, not taking her eyes away from the emery board filing quickly at her left ring finger.

    Georgia stopped in the middle of the wide garage door, her cowboy boots covered in freshly overturned dirt, like she was in a rush to get to the garage. There was an ever-present smile the size of a lesser planet on her face, even as she annoyedly swatted at stray hairs that sprung loose from her ponytail.

    "What can I do you for, Georgie?" Scott smiled, wiping his oil-stained hands on his T-shirt.

    "Might've got you the help you been needin' 'round here."

    Not even a minute later did Mandy's emery board hit the floor of the garage with a dull thump. When Scout looked at her, Mandy's mouth was open. After a second, she closed it, pushed her chest out and crossed her long, smooth legs. Scout had never seen someone bat their eyelashes as much as Mandy did in that moment — it made Scout nauseous.

    Skylar, with a complacent look on his face and his hands shoved deep in his jeans' pockets, had claimed the spot beside Georgia, who patted his shoulder proudly.

    Scout clenched her jaw so tightly that it began to hurt, like how it felt to chew on a Jawbreaker for an hour. She was sure she looked angry, but that wasn't the case. She just didn't want to look as stupid as Mandy seeing a new face in town, especially one she thought was nice to look at.

    In all of her eighteen years living in Santan Valley, Arizona, Scout had never seen a new face. She found him just as much interesting as she did handsome. He reminded her of a painting, of the sketch lines of fine art: rough and effortlessly captivating. From the scars that seemed to compliment his aesthetic, to his jaw, to his cheekbones, to the angle of his nose, to the copper sunbursts of his eyes.

    Instead of Scout's jaw falling open like Mandy's had, she found herself smiling. Smiling as brightly as Arizona's afternoon sun. Scout-Juliet Compton did not smile often — smiling being number nine on her hate-list, — but when she did, and when it was genuine as it was then, her smile could attain world peace.

    At least, that's what Skylar thought.