Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (free children's ebooks pdf TXT) 📖

writing poetry and plucking freezing-cold children out of a glacier-fed lake.

She hadn’t even asked Kelsey to go with her when she applied to be a counselor at Camp Wildwood, but of course they both knew it was impossible. No way could Kelsey miss two months of basketball. Still, Lillian could have asked. It was their inside joke, that even weirdos like to be invited. Although normally the joke referred to Lillian, who had not inherited the basketball gene like almost everyone else in Lared.

Lillian was not part of the inner circle that revolved around practices and away games and huge parades every year, that celebrated the Lared Lynx and their many, many state titles. Parades on Main Street were so prevalent, they were boring (according to Lillian), punctuated by balloons and marching bands and the players riding in Cal Worthington’s pink Cadillac, waving their state trophy—year after year—while a sea of maroon-and-gold supporters lined the streets.

That’s what it meant to be born into a town drunk on basketball. Everyone, in some way, was blessed, touched, or, at the very least, obsessed with basketball.

Everyone except Lillian.

There must have been others like Lillian over the years, but if there had been, Kelsey didn’t know them. The ones who couldn’t catch on, no matter how many “little dribbler” camps their parents signed them up for. If someone didn’t have talent, they found other ways to ride the maroon-and-gold wave, usually as scorekeepers, managers, cheerleaders, or band members, or even just by being really, really loud in the stands.

It might not seem possible that everyone in one town was a basketball fanatic, but it was the God’s-honest truth in Lared.

So much so that Lillian had to transfer to the high school in the next town over just to get away. But she’d been born into a basketball family, and unless she emancipated herself and moved to another country—or Alaska—there was nowhere to hide.

Kelsey loved her cousin to pieces, but she also feared for her. And secretly—until recently, anyway—had thanked her lucky stars that she was one of the blessed, because she didn’t want to live her life like Lillian, a seal floating out to sea on a rapidly melting iceberg.

Although when she had said that to Lillian, her cousin had spurted soda out of her nose and howled with laughter.

“Careful, Kels. Your very own metaphor is going to sneak up and bite you in the butt.”

Kelsey had been confused by the laughter and thought perhaps Lil just hadn’t understood what she’d meant. Since they lived in landlocked Montana, anything involving the ocean was a bit of a stretch. But metaphors were more Lillian’s terrain, to be fair.

They were at the Frosty Freez, the halfway point between their two schools, looking forward to the free food that was owed to someone of Kelsey’s stature. So many unspoken rules, it would be a difficult place to understand if you hadn’t been born here. Or in Lillian’s case, even if you had been, but at least she understood what she didn’t know, if that made any sense.

“Hot-fudge sundae for my cousin?” Lillian said, smiling sweetly at the skinny waiter who gave Kelsey’s maroon-and-gold warm-up jacket a cold look. He was from the rival school, the same one Lillian had transferred into. They had never won a state title, although they’d come closer than any other team in the past four years. But the Plateau High Buffaloes still weren’t the Lared Lynx, because nobody was. Even a mere waiter at Frosty Freez who had no stake whatsoever in the game would know what was what. He squirmed visibly but tried to sound like he couldn’t be bothered.

“Like I care about the Lynx point guard?” he muttered, setting two sodas on the table.

Lillian’s elbow knocked over the soda nearest to her. Nobody could say it wasn’t an accident.

“Oh, I’m so, so sorry,” she said as Kelsey tried not to laugh. Soda dripped onto the floor and seeped into the brown shag.

“I’ll bring you another one,” he said, in a tone that implied he absolutely would not be bringing another one, as he wiped his arm on his apron and kicked ice cubes into a corner to melt under a potted plastic plant.

“Don’t forget the sundae,” Lil called after him, “or we could just get a manager…”

Behind his back he flipped her the bird.

“There’s a gentleman for you,” Kelsey said, pouring half of her soda into Lil’s glass, since he obviously wouldn’t be coming back.

“My one little bit of athleticism at work there,” said Lil, wiping her sticky jeans with a napkin and giving Kelsey an impish grin.

“Whatever would I do without you?” said Kelsey.

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough.”

And that was when Lil had told her: Alaska. Summer camp. Three months away, where she wouldn’t have to hear one goddamn word about basketball. At least, she hoped not.

“But you still fit in here, Lil,” Kelsey had said. “Look at you with the soda.”

It was almost the truth, but it sounded weak once she’d said it. Worse, it sounded patronizing.

“Kelsey, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to you when you’re no longer a Lynx?”

“College.” Kelsey shrugged, her mouth full of curly fries.

“Yeah, but only to play ball. You don’t even know what you’ll major in.”

“Doesn’t matter. I already got a scholarship to Montana State.”

“And then after college? You’re going to move back here and have ten kids with your Lynx boyfriend? Who, I might add, is only your boyfriend because you’re both point guards, which is the least romantic thing ever.”

“Hey, hitting kind of close to home, aren’t you?”

“Yes, my point exactly,” said Lillian. “We need to kill this ridiculous dysfunctional genetic disease.”

Their fathers were brothers who had married their high school sweethearts, who were also alums of the Lady Lynx. (The girls’ team was just called Lynx now, same as the guys’. Feminism and all that.)

Kelsey laughed. “It’s an obsession, but I think calling it a disease is a bit of a stretch.”

“If you could only