“Dying,” one of the parents said. “I’m dying.”
“‘Form the corn,’ though?” someone whispered. “Are they teaching them science?”
“More to the point: Are our children glorifying GMOs?”
“Shhh.”
Annie snapped a photo and sent it off to Lena and looked around again for Laurel, who really should be here by now.
People applauded as the song ended, then stopped abruptly as they remembered that clapping was forbidden.
An exuberant voice broke through the quiet.
“Live from Fall Fest, the FALL FEST DANCERS. WOO-HOOOOO! WORK IT, Fall Fest dancers! Give us some MORE!”
A murmur surfed through the crowd. Heads craned toward the noise.
“YAAASSS. Shake it, shake it, SHAKE IT, FALL FEST DANCING DANCERS!”
“Yikes,” Finn’s mom said. She arched an eyebrow at Annie, who was too stunned to respond.
She knew that voice.
Laurel was on the bank of the river with one hand cupped around her mouth. In her other hand was her pink water bottle, held overhead like a pom-pom. Behind her, her friends were doubled over in laughter.
The second-grade parents had lifted their cell phones toward the gazebo, where their children were rearranging themselves in a large imperfect circle for the next number.
Annie’s gaze was pinned to whatever the hell was happening on the riverbank.
Sierra was attempting to contain Laurel in a clumsy hug as Laurel wriggled in protest. She broke free, shook her arms overhead in a victorious V, and her T-shirt rode up to expose her belly button.
Sierra tried again, and they toppled in a tangled heap on a family’s picnic blanket. Plates spilled, the parents jumped up, and as Sierra started to help clean up the mess, Laurel crawled on her hands and knees toward their toddler, then rose on her hind legs, hands clawed like a grizzly bear. The child’s mouth opened in a wail as the crowd began to cheer for the second graders, who were taking their final bows.
Annie glanced guiltily at the stage before looking back toward Laurel, who kneeled in the center of the plaid picnic blanket. She swigged from her pink water bottle, wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
There was a cold pit of comprehension in Annie’s stomach. Laurel was drunk.
* * *
The text that Annie had sent to Lena showed Hank in the town’s gazebo in the throes of a dance step, his knees bent inward awkwardly. It wasn’t fair to blame Annie for sending the picture. She thought she was being nice.
Which didn’t mean Lena wanted the thing.
The oven timer buzzed. Lena should check on the cupcakes, but she ignored them. She pressed delete and watched the gazebo and Hank’s knees and the slice of river and the crowds of people gathered for Fall Fest swirl together and swoosh into the trash.
Very satisfying.
This was the problem with new friends: they might breezily send pictures of off-limits places, unaware that there were rules to be followed.
No main street, no town green, no high school, no riverbanks. Places are tricky, Annie. Memories barnacle to them.
This was the problem with old friends, too. That one conversation with Melanie about Fall Fest had been a signal whistle to long-buried memories: emerge and attack!
Like the year when Rachel was in middle school and Tim, for some reason, had decided to crash their mother-daughter tradition and tag along to Fall Fest.
He had acted like a bratty child, sulked when Rachel wanted to hang out with her friends and insisted that they make a leaf pile like they had when she was little. Rachel had played along dutifully, watching patiently as he fell dramatically backward into the pile with a too-loud laugh. He stayed there for a long moment, playing dead.
Middle school was difficult enough and the last thing Rachel needed was to worry about placating her embarrassing dad. Lena recalled being furious, wishing that Tim wasn’t just playing dead.
It wasn’t out of the realm for him to have fallen on a rock and knocked himself out, was it? And if he was left there for long enough … well, given hypothermia, rattlesnakes, bears, might he just disappear?
She remembered feeling a little burst of happiness at the thought. Life would be so much easier without him.
It started there, Lena’s granting herself permission to imagine, when she needed to, Tim slipping off Waterfall Rock, Tim’s car with failed brakes. The game was figuring out how to off him in a way that would keep her hands as clean as possible.
All that preparation apparently served her well: when she succeeded in killing him a few years later, Lena didn’t even break a nail.
* * *
“That girl is crazy,” Abe said.