Jayne

Jayne is fourteen. She's been living in the same small town for the past three years. She's tired of it. She wants to get away. She's been looking for a way out. Jayne's family moves pretty often; so, three years in the same place seems like a long time. Jayne's not really into any of her friends at school. They are stupid. She's pretty sure that they think she's weird for moving so much. Why don't they ever ask her to come to their sleepovers? They must have them all the time, but she only gets invited when her family goes out of town; so, of course she can't go. How do her friends know that she'll be out of town? How do they know the exact weekends to ask to be sure she'll have to turn down the invite because she'll be in the car for four hours each way, traveling to visit her grandmother? It's crazy. Jayne decides she'll create a rumor about a fake trip out of town so that her friends plan a sleepover, and, at the last second, when they invite her, thinking that she'll turn them down because they've only planned the sleepover because they believe she's going out of town, she pulls a switch-a-roo and agrees to the invite because she's not really going out of town because it was all just a rumor she made up so she could go to her friends' sleepovers.

Jayne is on her way to the grocery store. She's picking up milk and eggs for her mother. They eat a lot of milk and eggs. She's not really sure if she likes eggs. Sometimes she really likes milk, except for when she has a glass and it tastes chalky and leaves an after-taste. Then she's really sure that she doesn't like milk. Jayne's mother really likes milk. Her mother likes eggs, too, but mainly buys them because there are cheap and have protein in them. Jayne and her mother and her younger brother don't get protein from much else—at least that's what her mother says. They never eat meat, her younger brother is allergic to peanut butter, and none of them are too smart, so they can never figure out how to form complex proteins. Jayne remembers trying to figure it out. Last year in science class, they had a section on nutrition and diets where they got to burn food to see what was inside of it. Her teacher had said something about making protein with rice, and Jayne spent a lot of time trying to figure out how rice turned into meat but it got confusing; so, she gave up after a week. But, yeah, Jayne drinks the milk and eats the eggs. They're good for her. She also tries to eat spinach and broccoli because in science class the packets the teacher handed out said that those were super-foods, vegetables with tons of vitamins and nutrients.

Next year, Jayne is leaving her town. She's looking forward to going someplace new. Her mother wants to stay in the same place for the next four years so Jayne can go through high school with the same kids she has known in sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Jayne is not looking forward to being in the same place for four more years. It sounds like a prison sentence to her. The town is horribly boring. Everyone wears the same five outfits. Jayne teases them in her mind about all sharing a huge communal closet where they all go and change every morning. The slowest people always have to wear the same thing and the people who get to the closet early can mix and match their outfits. That's sort of how the mall works. Jayne would love it if their was a bigger mall. Actually, the mall is great because she can be there away from her brother and mother. Everywhere else she goes in town, she is either accompanied by her mother or she is accompanying her brother. She's pretty sure she'll get a job at the mall if she's around this town for another year. She's still hopeful that something will come up.

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