RE: Trailer Trash 3 pt 1 (Patreon)

   “Good morning everyone! I’m Tom Bradshaw with Channel Seven News—live, local and late-breaking news you can trust covering the Fairfield, Springton, and Sandboro areas. We have new information today on yesterday’s Springton South Main shooting, where multiple police officers were locked in a deadly gun battle with a man identified as Jeremy Redford of West Virginia. Two officers were injured, and one remains in critical condition. We take you now to our own Channel Seven’s Kathy Anderson with more on this story.”

   “Isn’t that just crazy?” Mrs. Seelbaugh grabbed the remote off the kitchen counter and turned the volume on their TV up several green bars. “That happened right here in town.”

   “Uh-huh.” Sharing her mother’s long legs, blonde hair and striking good looks, fourteen-year-old Elena Seelbaugh was perched on one of their bar stools for breakfast at the counter in their expensively furnished kitchen.

   Like her mother, she woke up early every morning and tackled each day with a plan. She’d already finished deciding her outfit for school, styled her hair, and applied light makeup to accentuate her best features. When Elena turned her attention to their kitchen television set, aerial footage from the Channel 7 News helicopter was showing the familiar parking lot of a nearby Springton strip mall, filled with police cruisers and an ambulance.

   “I know where that is,” Elena remarked, glancing from the TV back to the puzzle on the back of her cereal box. “That’s over by where we used to go for soccer practice. Right?”

   “Yeah, South Main street,” Mrs. Seelbaugh replied. “That’s close, though, that’s just a few blocks down from where—”

   “—Thank you, Tom.” Channel 7’s view cut to an inoffensive mid-thirties woman in a blazer, standing beside a small two-lane street. Behind the reporter, a hillside of rather decrepit mobile homes rose up to meet a gas station and a liquor store.

    “Wait, where is that?” Elena made a face.

   “Officer Darren Macintire of Springton first pulled the suspect over here, in what residents call the lower park of Sunset Estates, for what should have been a routine stop.” The camera panned across a well-trodden roadside median of weeds and gravel blocked off with yellow tape.

   “Shortly after stepping out of his vehicle, however, Officer Macintire was taken surprise by gunfire—he was shot in the chest at close range and then left for dead, right here beside the road.” The screen then snapped back to frame the reporter woman.

   “Officer Macintire was just entering his ninth year with Springton PD, and remains in critical condition after being life-flighted to the University of Louisville Hospital. We now have the police dispatch recording of the two Springton High students who may have saved this officer’s life.”

   “Springton High kids?” Mrs. Seelbaugh repeated in surprise, turning to her daughter. “Did you hear that?”

   “Yeah,” Elena replied, sitting up and watching their television set with new interest. “I’m listening.”

   A somewhat fuzzy audio file began to play, with dialogue presented sentence by sentence in white lettering beneath two different yearbook photos. The first picture was ‘Alicia Brooks,’ a softly-smiling scrawny black girl Elena didn’t recognize, but the second one…

   “Officer down!” It was the clear voice of a young teenage girl. “We have an officer down at thirteen twenty two South Main street. He’s shot, he’s—he’s bleeding everywhere.”

   “Hello, can you repeat that address?” An adult voice, presumably the dispatcher, responded.

   No effing way. Elena dropped her spoon beside her bowl of cereal with a clatter, scattering droplets of milk. The second picture was the unsmiling wide face of Tubby Tabby, in the terribly unflattering 8th grade yearbook photo from Laurel Middle. The caption beneath the picture even confirmed it—‘Tabitha Moore.’ Leaning forward over the countertop on her stool, Elena listened in disbelief as the recording played out.

   “Thirteen twenty-two south Main street, it’s the lower trailer park. One, three, two, two, South Main. Lower trailer park.”

   “Help is on the way, they should be with you shortly. Is the shooter still at that location?”

   “No, he’s—the shooter drove off. I need um, sorry, I have to stop the bleeding.”

   “Hold on, I need you to stay on the line. Honey? I need you to stay with me on the line. Are you still there?”

   Tabitha Moore, Elena thought, swiping her spoon off of the countertop and turning to grab a napkin from the holder. The whole school’s going to go crazy. This is a huge deal!

   An individual was usually only the talk of Springton high for a week at most before becoming forgotten, old news. Tabitha, however, was a unique topic that seemed to always linger on everyone’s minds. She was an extraordinarily visible beauty, while at the same time, she was inexplicably socially disconnected from the general student populace.

   No one seemed to know anything concrete about her—except that she was incredibly attractive—and that made her the fantasy dream girl for boys, whose imaginations were all too happy to fill in any of the blanks. The girls, for the most part, despised her. Spiteful new stories about her were constantly being started by drama diva agitators, but there was no one close to Tabitha to offer counter statements or put out any of the fires. As a result, the gossip always seemed to run on unchecked and grow out of proportion with each retelling. Eventually, they became tall tales so absurd that nobody really believed any of them.

   “Hello? H-hello?” A different girl’s voice, this time. Elena wondered which one was Alicia and which was Tabby.

   “Hello, we have help on the way but I need you to sit tight for me if you can do that. Has anyone else been hurt?”

   “No.”

   “Can you describe the shooter? Are you still there?”

   “Th-the shooter was a white male, in his, uh in his twenties. He was going, uh, he was—Southbound on South Main, he’s in—he’s in a Lincoln Continental with West Virginia plates. White, a white Lincoln Continental.”

   “That’s southbound, in a white Lincoln Continental?”

   “Yes.”

   “Okay, thank you. Just sit tight please, we have an ambulance on the way there to you now.”

   “These two brave young girls remained at the scene with the downed officer, and were able to stabilize his condition until paramedics were able to arrive at the scene,” Kathy Anderson continued. “Their detailed description of the suspect vehicle may have been instrumental in the resolution of what we’re now calling the South Main Shooting.”

   The view then changed to what Elena assumed was footage from yesterday, of Tabitha—the ‘new’ Tabitha, lithe and effortlessly beautiful—being interviewed along with that scrawny black girl. Evening had apparently fallen and it was getting dark out in the picture, but dozens of bystanders from the trailer park and uniformed policemen were milling about in the background. Tabitha’s red hair was a little more tangled than usual, and while she was wearing one of those expensive designer blouses of hers, it was now dirtied, spotted with little dark flecks.

   Oh my God. Is that blood?

   “Were you two scared, seeing all of this go down right in front of you?” The man offering the microphone asked the girls.

   “Yeah,” the black girl blurted out in response, looking a little shell-shocked from the ordeal. “I was. I was so scared.”

   “I was terrified,” Tabitha gave a weak smile, not quite looking at the camera. She managed to look amazing, poignant somehow, captivating even when she was bedraggled and exhausted. There was a certain serene sadness to her that was picturesque.

   “I’m still terrified. I don’t know that I’ll feel any less scared until I know that the officer’s going to be okay.”

   “Well, our thoughts and prayers are all going out to Officer Macintire and his family, hoping for his quick recovery,” Tom Bradshaw concluded as the screen snapped back to the studio view.

   She saved a cop? Elena’s blue eyes narrowed as the shifting implications whirled through her head. This is gonna change everything. In a town this small, it’s gonna change what people can say about her—and, to who. For instance, Elena was still just a freshman, but she had her sights set on Matthew Williams, who was indisputably the cutest sophomore guy. Everyone knew that Matt’s dad was a cop.

   I think it’s time Tabitha and I have a talk, Elena quickly decided. Currently, the consensus around school was that Tabitha was an exchange student from California, but Elena knew she was actually Tubby Tabby from Laurel Middle, but had gotten liposuction and plastic surgery. After making the news like this, soon everyone would know.

   Tabitha Moore… the trailer trash girl, Elena remembered, quirking her lip. Back in Laurel, that’s how everyone had known the girl, and her Lower Park heritage still featured prominently in the ongoing topics of gossip around Springton High.

   Word was that Tabitha’s parents supposedly owned the entire Sunset Estates trailer park; they were rich upstarts. Alternatively, there was the story that they used to be rich, and were forced to live in poverty due to any number of possible circumstances—drugs, gambling, malpractice lawsuits—and now, Tabitha would do anything for money.

   Or, maybe Tabitha lived with her twenty-two year old boyfriend in Sunset Estate, and there were no parents in the picture at all. Possibly, Tabitha came out as a lesbian to her rich parents and was then disowned; now she had to live on her own in a terrible mobile home with just a tiny stipend to get by on.

   “Oh my word,” Mrs. Seelbaugh cupped her hand over her mouth, turning to her daughter in shock. “Do you know either of those girls?”

   “Yeah,” Elena replied, snapping out of her thoughts. “Sorta. One of them’s in my first period class. Marine Science. Tabitha Moore.”

   “Wait, that Tabitha? The one who was caught doing things with the teacher?” Mrs. Seelbaugh frowned in disapproval.

   “Uh, I guess she wasn’t. It turns out,” Elena shrugged, trying to remember what hearsay she’d already passed on to her Mom over the weeks of the first semester. Now that her stance on Tabitha was about to change, she regretted saying anything back then at all.

   “One of the deans caught wind of the rumor and people got called up to the office, had to talk to the counselors. I think the story was made up? It got narrowed down to this one junior and three sophomore girls who were just trying to start shit.”

   “Start stuff,” Mrs. Seelbaugh absentmindedly corrected.

   “Yeah, start stuff,” Elena rolled her eyes dramatically. I’m almost fifteen, now. Jesus.

   “Well, the one with the red hair, she’s the spitting image of Shannon Delain,” Mrs. Seelbaugh crossed around the counter and into the living room, where she opened up the bottom cabinet below the entertainment center. “Girl I went to school with.”

   “Shannon... Delain?” Elena asked. She didn’t actually care, but her mother’s habit of gabbing away was always easiest to manage when she feigned appropriate interest in all of those old news ancient history stories of hers as if they would ever be relevant.

   “Yeah, Shannon Delain,” Mrs. Seelbaugh slid out a dusty scrapbook and cracked it open. “If she did have a daughter, though, she wouldn’t be your age. I don’t think? When I was first pregnant with you, Shannon was headin’ off to be this big-shot Hollywood actress.”

   “That’s… uh, cool?” Elena responded distractedly.

   “The resemblance is just uncanny, though.” Mrs. Seelbaugh muttered, pawing through the scrapbook pages. “I wonder whatever happened to her—we were good friends.”

   Maybe Tabitha is finally the friend I need, Elena thought, taking a sip of orange juice as she idly watched commercials flash by. The leverage I need.

   Her group of girls from Laurel had been broken up into different courses and classes in Springton, and some of them—Carrie in particular—had sold out, toadying up instead to some of the older sophomore and junior cliques. Elena was prepared, she was outgoing, she had all the looks and attitude of a winner, but starting as a freshman at the bottom rung of Springton’s hierarchy had still been an enormous setback for her. Now, this girl, this new Tabby who’d seemed like too much of a gamble before could be her ticket to regain all of that lost social traction.

(pt 2)

/// Pretty sure Discord's to blame for my computer freezing up / crashing lately, so I'll only be on there sporadically. Apologies in advance if I don't respond right away.