The weather for Fall Fest was aggressively perfect: sunny with a razor of chill in the air. Annie and the other second-grade parents were clustered in front of the gazebo for the best views of their children, who were being ushered up the steps by their teacher, Mrs. Jalonski.
Hank waved at Annie and she waved back.
“Annie, Hank’s bow tie is adorable.”
“Where did you all find such bright green pants? Seriously, all I could find for Finn was that drab olive, poor guy.”
“Finn looks great,” Annie said with a half glance toward the stage. She scanned the crowd for Laurel and her friends. “All of them do.”
Mrs. Jalonski approached the microphone, tapped it once officiously, and delivered the annual warning about how all applause must wait until after the entire performance.
“I love you, Fall Fest,” a lone voice shrieked from over by the river. “Woo-hoo!”
Light laughter rippled through the crowd. Someone whooped. The two square speakers in the gazebo’s corners crackled and, as if they were zombies controlled by a hive mind, the second-grade parents lifted their phones and pointed their cameras at the stage.
The background music blared through the town square.
Form the corn, form, form the corn.
The moves were pretty simple—jazz hands extended overhead, kick ball change, turn to the side, repeat. Hank was better than a lot of his classmates, Annie noticed with a surprised pride. One of Mike’s sisters had majored in dance in college, and Annie made a mental note to send her the video, ask if Hank was as good as she suspected.
“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.
“What?” Jen asked. She was trying to collect errant burrito wrappers into an empty doughnut box and the wind kept blowing them away.
Jen had purposefully set their blanket down as far away from the stage as possible, but even so, Fall Fest was a sensory explosion. A tiny child had wandered over to the Kingdom School picnic blanket to repeatedly slam the tambourine Colin had brought, and there was a line of kids patiently waiting for a turn with his guitar. And from the gazebo there were the chants of the second graders and the feedback of a PA system that was circa 1952.
People were shouting and cheering and despite it all, Abe had neither melted down nor insisted they leave.
“She fell down again,” Abe said with a snicker. Colin and Jen both turned in the direction of his pointed finger.
About twenty feet away, a teenaged girl lay on her back, singing loudly, her arms raised upward in an attempt to conduct the clouds.
One of her friends filmed her with a camera phone, while another tried repeatedly to get her up on her feet.
“Is that Laurel Perley?” Jen said.
“What is she on?” Abe said.
Laurel was now upright and sashaying in their direction. She stopped along the way, extended her hand to an older couple sitting in camping chairs. “Madame and Monsieur, voulez-vous enjoy Les Fall Fest Dancers?” she shouted.
“Oh dear,” Jen said. She stepped in Laurel’s path, and was hit by the sour smell of alcohol. Colin appeared on the other side of Laurel, and together they coaxed her over to their blanket.
“Laurel, I’m Jen, a friend of your mom, from the neighborhood.”
“Lucky for you,” Laurel said. “She’s a blast.”
“Here,” Colin said. He handed Laurel a water bottle. “Take a sip.”
Laurel held up hers. “I’vealreadygot.”
“This one is water, though. Good to hydrate.”
“Excellentidea,” Laurel said. “Big French test on Monday. De l’eau!”
“Right,” he said.
She sipped and closed her eyes and then leaned over and got sick on their blanket. Jen awkwardly patted her back.
“Gross,” Abe said. “Colin, it’s on your pants.”
Jen hadn’t noticed Annie run up, but suddenly she was on their blanket, too. She yanked away Laurel’s pink water bottle and unscrewed the top, sniffed and gagged.
“Where did you get this?” Her voice was a hiss.
“L.L. Bean,” Laurel said. “It’s right on the bottle.” Her laughter turned into ungainly hiccups.
“She’s going to puke again,” Abe said in a warning tone, “and it’s still on Colin’s pants.”
“I’m so sorry,” Annie whispered to Jen.
There were pink spots of humiliation on Annie’s cheeks and her eyes were mortified. Jen felt a complex mixture of empathy and relief that this time, at least, it wasn’t her kid everyone would be talking about.
“Don’t even worry about it,” Colin said. “It happens.”
Jen nodded lamely, wished she’d thought to provide reassurance before judgment.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking,” Annie said to Laurel. She sounded bewildered as she wrapped her arm around Laurel’s waist and led her away.
“How old is she?” Colin said.
“Eighth grade I think,” Jen said.
“Yikes.” Colin shivered. “That’s messed up.” He’d removed his plaid shirt to dab at the sick stain on his jeans. In his thin white T-shirt, he looked skinny as a teenager. “I had an interview in twenty minutes at Breadman’s Market. Probably better to just bail?”
“Would it help if I go and explain that you were doused in the name of Good Samaritanism?” Jen said. “They know me. I shop there all the time.”
“Why are you interviewing?” Abe’s mouth was an accusing straight line. “Are you quitting school?”
“Never,” Colin said. “Assistant teachers don’t get paid a lot is all. It would just be an after-school job.”
It was becoming clearer by the day that Colin was good for Abe, and it hit Jen that they could be good for Colin, too.
“Wait,” Jen said. “What if we hired you from time to time?”
“You own a market?” Colin said. He and Abe shared a goofy smile.
“No, but I could use help with pickups and drop-offs and Abe would probably benefit from some help with his independent project—”
“We could pay Colin to compose music for my game,” Abe said. “He’s actually a decent musician.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” Colin said. “And I’d much prefer that to bagging groceries. But I’ll do it for free.”
“Why don’t I at least ask Nan if it’s okay to hire you?”
If Nan didn’t require medical forms, Jen was pretty sure she would have no objection to helping one of her teaching assistants earn a few extra dollars after school.
There was probably a perfect psalm for the occasion, something about sharing your wheat bounty with your neighbors.
“Really?” Colin said. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”
Jen would later try to reassure herself that her motives were anything but selfish. That warm effusive glow in her chest was the manifestation of generosity. She wasn’t using anyone.
But for the rest of her life, she would never be entirely sure.