by Leah Johnson
I laugh a little at Peter’s enthusiasm, his energy so palpable I feel like I’m absorbing it based on proximity alone. “Oh that’s perfect, actually, because that’s where we’re headed.”
I link my arm with Imani’s and Peter air-drums as we walk.
Imani hates when I change plans last minute, so I try to ease her into it. I didn’t think about her reaction when I decided to do this, and now I realize what an error in judgment that might be. She wanted a strictly best friend weekend, and this throws a slight wrench in the program. But! On the bright side, this could win me a car, which means Imani won’t have to drive me everywhere all the time, and since I’m pretty much perpetually broke, she won’t have to pay for that extra gas anymore. All I have to do is frame it like that and she’ll practically be begging me to loop Toni into our weekend plans. It’s pretty much a sure thing.
Pretty much being the operative words.
“So here’s the deal, while you were gone I had this thing happen—”
“I’ve been working out a bit of an itinerary so we don’t get off track,” she interrupts, analytical and full speed ahead, as always. “I’m thinking we can ride the Ferris wheel now, maybe catch one of those local acts on the Red Delicious stage, and then check out some of the vendors.”
I open my mouth to stop her, to slow her down just long enough for me to tell her about the scavenger hunt, but my phone buzzes over and over again. I think it might be urgent, but when I pull it out, there are messages from my mom populating the screen. The reminder of my lie, the only one I could have told to get out of her sight for a whole weekend, tastes bitter in my mouth as I read them. I don’t want to use her God to get what I want, what I need, but there was no other way.
It’s not like she trusts me anymore, after everything. It’s not like she’ll ever trust me again.
Don’t forget to give Imani gas money for driving you to the retreat.
And make sure to pray before you eat. You always forget.
This will be good for you.
It’s the last text that does it, that makes me stumble a little as we walk. She might as well be thumping a bible right in front of my face. This will be good for you rattles around inside my brain until it’s the only thing I can hear. There’s so much bound up in those six little words. The ways I need to change, the way she thinks I need to do it. I’m too fast, too loose, too wicked for my own good. She’s reminded me as much nearly every day since everything happened with Troy.
It’s bad enough that my mom thinks I’m incapable of making good decisions—that all my best intentions end up getting people hurt. The worst part is that she’s totally right.
I feel a fresh wave of purpose hit me. We’re going to solve this scavenger hunt. I’m going to live up to my promise to Imani, get this car, have a great weekend, and leave this place—and Toni—somehow better than I found them. I can turn over a new leaf. I can.
“Imani, listen, before we do any of that, we’ve had a teensy itty-bitty tiny change of plans,” I rush out. I want to explain before we get to Toni, and I’m running out of time. Imani’s face contorts with confusion—which very rarely happens because Imani always, always has the answer.
Peter points to the sign with one hand and taps Imani’s shoulder with the other. “There’s my friend!” Imani looks to where he’s pointing, and I can’t help but follow Peter’s finger as well. There are easily twenty people gathered around the sign right now, so it’s hard to figure out who he means until he adds, “She’s the one in the hat!”
Peter takes off in her direction—sprinting like a puppy off his leash—and it doesn’t take long for me to realize who he was pointing to. When I spot her, my heart launches into my throat, and like, not in the fun roller coaster way. Of course this is how it works out. I try to ramble through the rest of my explanation quickly, but I know I’m not going quickly enough.
“You know how I was mentioning that I want to get a car? Well funny story, this girl I met—”
“How do you know Peter?” Toni says once we get within a few feet. Her voice is so succinct and her stare so hard, it’s impossible to pretend like she’s not talking to me.
Peter looks between Imani and Toni, excited but a little thrown. “Wait, you’ve met Imani?”
Imani unlinks her arm from mine and jerks her chin at Toni.
“No. How do you know Olivia?” she asks.
And, so quickly it’s like they rehearsed it, they all look at me.
I hold my hands out to the side, palms up, the picture of a guilty woman.
“Um,” I start, looking at all of them not so patiently waiting for an answer. “Hey, Farmers?”
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
I feel like I’m in the middle of an Old West showdown, and I’m not entirely sure, but I think I may have accidentally drawn my weapon first. When Olivia walked up with Peter and her friend, I just didn’t know what to make of it. I never agreed to loop Peter into the plan, and I especially didn’t factor in that this would become some sort of big collaborative effort. The thought of tangling this temporary thing with Olivia up into my permanent thing with Peter got my wires crossed.
“So I’m what? Just supposed to trot along after some girl I don’t know all weekend?” Olivia’s friend—Imani, I remember—crosses her arms over her chest and shoots daggers in my direction.
She didn’t seem to like the explanation about the scavenger hunt, and my involvement in it, any more than I did. But somehow—and maybe credit is due here to Mrs. Robertson’s note in my seventh grade report card to Try not to withdraw when presented with new circumstances or people—my reaction isn’t to just walk away.
I start, “This obviously isn’t what any of us thought—”
“Liv, if you want the car so bad, we can do this ourselves,” Imani snaps. “I really don’t think we have to do this follow-the-yellow-brick-road cosplay today.”
Olivia’s lips twitch like she’s fighting back a smile, even as she nervously fiddles with the camera hanging around her neck. “Well, if I’m Dorothy, does that make you the Tin M—”
“Oh my God, Olivia, can you take anything seriously?” Imani throws her hands up and looks up at the sky.
This has gone far enough. If we’re going to do this, get me on stage for the Golden Apple and win Olivia her scavenger hunt, then we need to get going. So I do something I never do in tense situations. I smile.
Peter shudders in shock, but Imani remains unmoved.
I kind of appreciate that about her. I never know what to do with wolves in sheep’s clothing. If you’re going to bite me, I want to see you coming.
I take a step forward and Imani leans toward Olivia, just slightly, like she’s ready to shield her body with her own in case I try to do something to hurt her. It must be nice, having that type of connection with someone, where they’d be willing to trade their safety for yours if it meant you’d be protected.
Peter is great, and has been an annoying yet absolutely invaluable part of my life since I was eleven, but he lives on the opposite side of the country. While other girls I went to school with were going to the movies with their groups of best friends, having sleepovers that they live-posted about on Confidential, or posing refined and glamorous in manicured front yards before dances, I was at home, plucking out new riffs on my guitar. I was stumbling after my dad backstage at shows. I was choosing the safe route—the familiar route—shielding myself with music and solitude, rather than putting myself out there and trying to make friends my age.
Before I knew it, I was the ice queen—the girl too good to hang out. The girl too aloof to join in. Sure, it was a loneliness I chose, but that didn’t make me any less alone.
So I feel a slight pang, always, at that type of loyalty. Sure, I watched those same girls get into fights and start drama and unfollow one another on Confidential, but a part of me still yearned for that. What it must feel like to care about someone enough to fight with them, to make up afterward? I didn’t—don�
�t—know.
“I think we should listen to her, you know? We’ve got a whole system planned out.” Olivia squeezes Imani’s arm gently. “Trust me.”
She clearly doesn’t trust me, but she’s willing to trust Olivia, which is enough for right now.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” I start.
I glance over at Olivia and she’s looking back at me with an open expression, her lips curled up in a slight smile like she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She reminds me a lot of my dad in that moment, the face he used to make when he was playing his old Gibson SG in the basement. A hope so still you don’t want to move for fear of disturbing it.
“First things first: Everyone set their notifications to receive an update every time @FoundAtFarmland posts something. Cell reception out here gets spotty, and the last thing we need is for them to update and us not to be the first to see it,” I say.
Peter is nodding along, his face attentive and waiting for instruction. It’s a familiar look, one I’ve seen via FaceTime a million times since we became friends. Whatever he can do to help—to be needed—he’s on board for.
I pull out my phone and motion to the first picture they posted an hour ago. According to their rules post, they’ll be posting clues at random all weekend for five apples in total. They might already be collected by the time you arrive though, and if you’re missing one you might as well be missing them all, so you have to move quick.
My heart is already beating like I’m a contestant on that chaotic reality show The Amazing Race or something. I don’t even care about this stupid car, but winning suddenly feels hugely, ridiculously important. And we’re already behind.
The first picture is the golden apple against a solid red background. It was clearly taken in the early morning, given the soft pinkish lighting, but it’s shining with more than a flash. The whole photo has a cotton candy hue to it.
“And I think we need to split up. There are only two places I can think of where this would be.”
I’ve been to Farmland so many times, there isn’t a lot of ground I haven’t covered over the past decade or so of my life. I send Peter and Imani off to check behind the Goldspur barn near the area with the food stalls, and I suggest Olivia and I head in the direction of the billboard—a low wall with a platform that illuminates the posters on it just like a billboard on the side of any highway. We get closer to it, and I can already tell that, as usual, it’s currently plastered with posters about voter registration and reducing waste and schedules of the weekend’s lineup.
It sits low enough to the ground that people also take the liberty of signing the back of it. They paint over it each year so the next group of Farmers can make it their own, but it’s a Farmland tradition.
Olivia and I are moving quick, just in case someone else has the same idea as us. It made sense for us to split into teams with one person who’d been to Farmland before and one newcomer, and Peter was a little too eager to go to the other spot with Imani.
“Chicago is great for concerts, but the parking is always terrible, you know? Imani hates going up there because—Oh wait!” Olivia stops and holds the camera hanging around her neck up to her eye. It’s one of those cute little pink ones you can buy at Urban Outfitters, the ones that print out miniature vintage-looking photos right then and there. She points it straight ahead and clicks once. “Did you see that?”
She takes the printout and hands it over to me. It’s still clearing, so I don’t know exactly what she expects me to look at. She nods her head in the direction of the stage in front of us.
“That little kid on his dad’s shoulders. See them?”
She’s not looking at me, so I follow her eyes to the crowd gathering in front of the Granny Smith stage. A kid no older than four or five has his hands in the air and a pair of noise-canceling headphones on as he watches an indie band that I don’t know play.
It’s such an ordinary moment, but there’s something beautiful in it. Especially when the dad looks up at his son and smiles. It’s simple, but special. Memorable.
The picture doesn’t quite capture what we’re looking at in person, but I get why she wanted to freeze it in time. I wouldn’t have thought about it, probably would have barely filed it away in the recesses of my mind, but Olivia thought to stop. To hold on to it.
I hand the photo back to her without saying any of that though.
“It’s nice,” I say instead.
“Nice.” She smirks. She starts walking again. “You are a woman of few words, Toni. Can’t relate!”
Then she giggles at her own observation, the sound of it almost cartoonishly high, and I smile, even though I don’t want to. It’s hard not to when she laughs like that. When we get closer to the billboard, it’s clear that my guess was right. The apple sits nestled between slats in the wood platform, obscured just so by the oversized light fixture that illuminates the billboard at night. An easy get since it’s the first clue, no doubt.
Olivia brightens even more once we spot it.
“Oh my gosh, Toni, you were right!” She shoves at my shoulder playfully. “I have a nose for sniffing out good people. Well, okay, so I also have a nose that sniffs out people that seem good and then turn out to be pretty terrible, but in this case—”
“Um, Olivia.” I hold my hand out to pause her rant and jerk my head to the side. A pair of girls in fairy wings and flower crowns seem to have the same idea as us. They move casually, laughing, coming from the opposite direction until one of them stops and straightens suddenly. Her eyes lock on mine and she points, just barely, at the two of us. “Do you have your inhaler?”
Olivia follows my line of vision straight to the fairy pair and freezes just for a second. She reaches down to pat her fanny pack, locates the L-shaped outline of her inhaler, and nods slowly.
“On three?” I ask. She nods again. The fairy girls are moving slowly in the direction of the apple, trying to psych us out, I’m sure, with their meandering steps. I start the count: “One, two—”
But Olivia is off like a bolt before I get the chance to hit three, sprinting through the crowd of people between us and the billboard, shouting apologies all the way. I take that as my cue to do the same, and the minute I do, the fairies begin their own barefoot run. Their wings are offering just enough wind resistance to slow them down, so although they were closer, Olivia manages to get to the apple first.
She grabs it and holds it above her head, victorious.
“Toni! We got it!” she shouts in my direction. I stop and take a deep breath, trying not to smile. I want to feel relieved, but then I realize the fairies haven’t stopped. In fact, as Olivia puts a hand on her knee to try and catch her breath, one of the fairies—the one with pink wings—reaches over and snatches it directly out of her other hand. Olivia looks up and wheezes between breaths, “Wha—wait! That’s totally not in the Farmland spirit!”
But the fairy isn’t listening, or stopping—she’s ducking under the bottom of the billboard and taking off, her friend in tow. They’re closer to me now than they are Olivia, who is fumbling for her inhaler. And that, if nothing else, is what kicks me into overdrive. It’s bad enough that they violated the spirit of this festival by doing something dirty like stealing from a fellow Farmer, but to do it while she’s fighting off an asthma attack?
That’s a special kind of messed up.
As I head toward the fairy with the apple in hand, I bump into a burly shirtless guy carrying a totem with a light-up teddy bear on top and lose my footing. I fall directly in front of Pink Wings, and in some graceless act of mercy, she trips over my prone form. Her partner, Lime Green Wings, scrambles to pick up the apple that got dropped in the shuffle, crawling between the legs of all the people on the dirt path trying to get to the first sets of the day.
I lose track of it, and Olivia, until I hear her voice between barely successful attempts to get air into her lungs, “Try and”—wheeze—“take it”—wheeze—“from me now,”—wheeze—“Tink.�
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I scramble to my feet as Olivia shoves the apple into her fanny pack. The fairy on top of me flops to the side in defeat, and the fairy at Olivia’s feet bangs a fist against the ground. The scene is absurd, strange, and oddly cinematic. I wipe my hand across my sweaty forehead and meet Olivia’s eyes from across the pathway. When she beams with self-satisfaction, my chest swells with an emotion that feels a little too close to pride.
And this time I can’t keep myself from smiling right back.
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
I’m sweaty and gross and breathing hard and I’m not even embarrassed. And then there’s Toni, smiling at me like I’m not a total mess. Deciding not to fall in love with her has given me a sense of freedom. It takes the pressure off, the edge that laces every conversation when you want someone to want you the same way you want them—that changes behavior and adds tension and just overlays every interaction with some level of performance.
My heart beats a little faster, and it isn’t because of that daring apple rescue I just managed. When Toni smiles, and really means it, she looks a little like a Disney princess who stumbled onto the set of a Kittredge music video, and it’s too freaking much, okay? It’s just not right. It should be illegal. It’s just plain criminal, the way her eyes crinkle at the corners and she looks down at the ground like she’s a little self-conscious about allowing herself a moment of happiness. I should call in a citizen’s arrest. Someone has to get me away from her before I—
“Olivia!” Imani and Peter are suddenly in front of me and I’m not sure how they got there. Toni stands behind them, smile dimmed from the ridiculously breathtaking thing it had been just a few moments before. I want her to smile at me like that again.
Until I look at Imani’s face and realize that her eyes have narrowed into slits. I’ve been clocked.
“So, you’ve got your apple. We can go now?”
She reaches out and wiggles her fingers like she wants me to take her hand and come with her. And I would, I totally would, but Toni’s smile or not we still have four apples to find today, so we couldn’t abandon the two of them even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. Not yet.
