by Leah Johnson
“Okay. Yeah, okay.” Toni looks between the two of us again, but this time her expression goes a little blank, a little hard. “We’ll split up, and when one of us has eyes on her, we’ll all text the group. Then we can figure out what comes next.”
“Pop Top is going on in thirty,” Peter says, looking at Toni imploringly. He makes prayer hands. “She literally reinvented pop punk—you know I can’t miss my girl Pop Top.”
Toni gently smacks the back of her hand against Peter’s arm and rolls her eyes. “We better move fast then, Menon.”
It’s a quick moment, but the way she looks at him and he looks back, I get why two such different people are friends. They balance each other out and love each other all the same.
Imani huffs next to me and starts in the opposite direction, already in motion. It feels like Imani is always moving away from people while I’m rushing toward them, but we’re both constantly in motion. As I turn to follow her, I wonder how long that type of opposite momentum can sustain itself.
I know Festy Frankie the minute I see her. Mostly because, well, I notice her dreads.
Festy—or Frankie? FF, maybe?—is still sitting on the ground between the funnel cake booth and the Granny Smith stage when I spot her. She giggles at something one of her friends says and then purses her lips and leans her head to the person next to her to pose for a selfie. Which, not to be a Boomer about it or anything, kind of annoys me. You stole my apple and you’re not even paying attention to the band on stage? How dare!
Imani groans next to me like she can read my mind.
“You want to take this one or should I,” she asks.
I think about the number of white girls Imani has read for filth on Confidential for everything from cultural appropriation to white feminism over the course of our friendship and shake my head. It’s probably better if I take this one myself if I want any chance of us getting it back. You catch more white girls with honey than with vinegar, or however that saying goes.
“I’ll handle it,” I answer. “Wait here.”
“Excuse me.” I try to pitch my voice just slightly higher than it naturally is so me and Festy become one in the same. I don’t know her, but I go to school with a hundred of her kin—the code switch is almost second nature to me now. “Are you @FestyFrankie?”
Frankie looks up at me and beams, her eyes hidden behind a pair of round John Lennon sunglass frames. I know from my time lightly stalking her page that she wore that same pair to Electric Forest back in June, and to Stagecoach last spring.
Despite the shades, she still puts a hand over her brow line to shield her from looking directly into the sun as she stares up at me. “Yes! Are you one of my lovely Festimals?”
Festimals. Festival animals. The nickname she has for her followers who attend festivals with the same amount of vigor she does. I have to give her credit—she’s got a strong sense of branding. But that’s not why we’re here!
“No. Well, I mean, not exactly. I did see your post about the golden apple though? The one for the #FoundAtFarmland challenge?”
“Isn’t it great?” She stands up, and like magic, produces the apple. She holds it in her left palm and pets it absently with her right much as if it were a small dog. “It was the craziest coincidence! I was trying to take a picture near the fountain and there it was, just waiting for me!”
I internally roll my eyes. Give it a rest, Festy! I don’t have time to chat her up about this. I have a festival to get back to and a scavenger hunt to finish, all before I can even begin to think about how I can help Toni win the Golden Apple competition tomorrow. Diplomacy is key here.
“Are you searching for the rest of them?” I ask.
“Nope!”
She brightens like she doesn’t have a care in the world. And, yeah, maybe I’m judging, but from the looks of her, she probably doesn’t. She gets to go to festivals all year and make money being an Instagram influencer, selling God knows what. I saw at least one ad for flat tummy tea on her page. Whatever background she comes from, all I know is that I definitely need that apple more than she does.
“Could I borrow it from you then?” I rush out, trying to explain the situation. “I really need it to win the scavenger hunt it’s attached to. I have a really good shot at getting the rest of them, but need the one you have to make it work. I can give it back when the weekend is over, even, if that—”
“Sorry, love. I collect Mementos.” She says mementos with a capital M, like it’s a proper noun that deserves to stand on its own and everything.
“I’m sorry, what? You can’t let me borrow it, even though you don’t actually need it, because it’s going to go in some kind of memory box once you get back home?”
She nods seriously, pleased that I seem to be understanding. “Yes, exactly.”
“But I’ll bring it back. If it’s important to you, I’ll give it back once this is over.”
“I’m sorry, my friend. I just can’t bear to part with it.”
She reaches out and pats my shoulder gently. If I weren’t so annoyed, I imagine it would’ve been fine. I probably could have grinned through it, bit my tongue, and gone back to lick my wounds for the rest of the weekend—this part of the adventure over. But to say that would’ve been also giving up on the Golden Apple competition, and Toni. To say that would be to wave her off, to never see her again after just getting to meet her.
And a part of me I can’t explain is just not ready for that.
So, I do what any rational person would do: I steal it. But not like those Tinkerbells tried to steal my apple from me earlier, obviously. I at least tried to come to a mutually beneficial agreement first. I was practically a diplomat about it!
I reach out and grab the apple from her hands so fast if I hadn’t done it myself, I wouldn’t have even realized I’d done it. One blink and the apple has gone from her hand to my fanny pack, and I’m booking it. I swing my camera to my back so it thumps against my shoulder blades as I run. While two dramatic escapes in one day doesn’t come close to matching my record—summer after sophomore year got a little crazy, don’t ask—it is killing my lungs!
I make a mental note to thank Justin for those three weeks I spent helping him train for varsity cross-country tryouts (after which we’d make out in his older brother’s Ford Fusion before he drove me home for dinner).
“Imani, come on!” I shout as I pass her, and she takes off with me.
I’m dodging the bodies that have gathered in the Core, trying to make my getaway seem as innocuous as possible, despite the fact that @FestyFrankie is calling out behind me, her voice getting more and more faint as I dash toward the other side of the Core. But, given the amount of drugs people are no doubt going to get into this weekend, my behavior certainly isn’t the strangest anyone will encounter.
My lungs are burning by the time I double over near the Red Delicious stage, clear across the Core from where we found Festy. It’s only once I stop that the ridiculousness of what I’ve just done washes over me—the absolutely unhinged quality of stealing a golden apple from someone. My heart beats a little faster at the realization that I really have lost my mind. I’ve completely snapped.
I take a puff of my inhaler and my mind starts whirring suddenly, and it’s so fast it feels like my whole body is buzzing. Wait.
I’m literally buzzing.
I reach into my back pocket and grab my phone, and do my best to gather myself before sliding my thumb across the home screen to answer.
“No luck over here. What’s the 411 on your side, O-Town?” Peter’s voice is its normal mixture of peppy and raspy as it crackles through the line.
I look at Imani, where she’s doubled over next to me, glaring at me and then the ground and then me again like she can’t figure out who to be annoyed with. I reach down to run a hand over my fanny pack where it bulges with the pilfered goods. I did it. I actually did this. Not Imani, not Toni—I got this one and I did it all by myself.
I can’t
remember the last time that happened. I didn’t have to rely on anybody to get this done. This victory is mine and mine alone. It’s such a small thing, but it feels so huge in that moment.
A smile breaks across my face.
“I’ve got the apple.”
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
When Olivia returns, shaking the apple triumphantly in our direction, Peter high fives her and I just stare. She tells us the story, a daring feat that involves her trying to negotiate with and then subsequently outrunning Festy Frankie, and she sounds so proud. And rightfully so. What she’s managed to do already today, in pursuit of this car, has been impressive. She’s impressive, and I’m not really sure what to make of it.
It’s not that I’m never wowed by other people—it happens all the time: Teela Conrad showing off her five-octave vocal range, listening to Chuck Berry’s lick in the intro to “Johnny B. Goode,” watching Rihanna anytime she so much as breathes—it’s just that I can usually school my reactions into something indecipherable. There’s something about Olivia though that makes it hard to be impassive. I don’t know why or how this girl is slipping past the barbed-wire fence and into the land of people I want to open myself up to, but I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
I keep my mouth shut as she and Peter do some kind of victory dance and I try to focus on the task at hand.
Peter turns to the group after the two finish their dance and holds his hands out wide. “Time to see the icon that is Pop Top.”
We all stop at the hydration station to fill up our water bottles for the eighth time in less than eight hours. My limited-edition Farmland S’well hasn’t seen this much action since this festival last year. The sun is inching its way across the sky, on its way to setting, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like trying to breathe through a straw as we make our way through the crowd toward where Pop Top is set to perform.
Despite the humidity, this is my favorite kind of scene at Farmland: the festival coming to life. The first day is full of newer and more indie artists, and the crowd always takes a while to fill out. But by the late afternoon, the whole place begins to hum with excitement. The food and merch vendors in the Core are fielding increasingly longer lines, Farmers are still bounding with the type of energy you have before you’ve spent three days in near-sweltering heat and the reality of being back home settles into your bones. The knowledge that for the next few days you have a place you belong.
It’s probably rose-colored glasses, or the fact that I was raised to trust in the magic of live music spaces, but even the fact that I’m Black and surrounded by mostly white people becomes less of an issue than usual. We weave through throngs of people, being greeted with the traditional “Hey, Farmer!” wave, and it’s like wading out into the ocean for the first time: a bigness made even more expansive once you’re enveloped in it, made a part of it.
It breaks my heart that I can’t share this with my dad one more time. It makes me love him even more for introducing me to this place.
Despite how good I feel here though, I can’t help but think about my mom’s warning before I left this morning: “Be safe. You never know what people are capable of.” It’s only been five years since that shooting at the nightclub in Orlando, four since all those people were killed at that festival in Vegas. Two years since that racist murdered all those people in that Walmart in Texas. The list goes on.
She was right to be cautious about coming to a place like this, I know. These days, the danger of just being alive and in public is practically as American as fireworks on the Fourth or apple pie or voter suppression. But this. This is what it’s all about.
You take your chances going to the movies or out to eat or to a concert because this is what it feels like to be alive. Feeling the stifling late-summer air blanketing your limbs, people you care about around you, music you love playing nearby and reminding you why you love it.
We wind our way into the crowd in front of the Honeycrisp stage, bodies pressing in on all sides. Like always, my skin feels alight with anticipation as we wait for the set to begin—my first show of the festival. The girl next to us is wearing a shirt with Pop Top’s logo, and the guy behind us is holding a sign that says POP TOP, WILL YOU MARRY ME? She’s not a superstar yet, but she’s on her way to it. Pop-punk outfits fronted by neon-green-Afro-having Black women are few and far between. She’s impossible to ignore.
When Pop Top takes the stage, her band behind her, the crowd immediately erupts into chaos. And without so much as an introduction, her guitarist launches into the jarring and iconic single-note intro to her first radio hit, “Flowergirl.”
“This is amazing!” Olivia shouts in my direction as the people in front of us start pushing back to form that telltale circle for a mosh pit. Peter is absolutely losing his mind as Pop Top gets to the first verse, and his enthusiasm is matched by the crowd around us. “Everything is so …”
She waves her hand around and she doesn’t have to explain. I know exactly what she means.
The audience explodes when Pop Top launches into the chorus—a return to early-aughts emo that has everyone around us shoving one another, bursting uncontained like a bottle that’s been shaken up and finally uncorked. It never stops being incredible, seeing hundreds of people move together in this way.
I look to my left, and Olivia is into it, bobbing her head along and mouthing the words like this scene is nothing new to her, but it’s Imani that surprises me. For the first time since I met her, she throws herself into the music, and into the crowd, matching Peter’s energy blow for blow.
Me and Olivia make it for the first fifteen minutes of the set before the two of us need a break. I’m sweating in the worst way and she’s breathing a little too hard, so I grab the tapestry from Peter’s backpack and take it to the grass behind where the last of the Pop Top fans are. I spread it out and Olivia immediately kicks off her shoes. She wiggles her toes and leans back to stare up at the sky.
“I love this place,” she says, smiling toward the sun.
“Yeah,” I say. I catch myself staring before she opens her eyes, and I look away quickly. “The feeling, um, never changes.”
“That’s one of my favorite parts about concerts, you know?” She turns to lay on her side and props her head up on one arm. “It’s like being part of some, I don’t know, organism? A living thing. All of us part of a body that needs full participation from each cell to function. You know what I mean?”
I was only adequate at science in school, but I understand what she’s saying.
“Yeah, exactly. The bands are the lungs, but we’re the breath.”
She opens her mouth to respond but pulls her phone out instead. She starts typing furiously.
“We are the breath that gives purpose to your lungs. This movement, your body’s greatest gift,” she says once she’s finished. Her smile is shy, a little abashed for the first time since we met. “It’s just—I do this thing online. Small lines with snapshots I’ve taken. Kind of like my concert diary, only I share it with the world? I don’t know, it sounds kind of stupid when I explain it but …”
Maybe it’s how resigned she is to that word, or how quickly she dialed her enthusiasm back, like someone has told her to be less of herself before, but I’m suddenly filled with an urge to contradict her.
“Can I see it?” I ask. It doesn’t sound stupid at all, and as she hands it over, I know with full certainty just how not stupid it is. “You’re a writer. That’s impressive.”
“No, oh my God, no! I’m not. Not really. I just want to catalog everything? I don’t want to lose these feelings and these moments, and I don’t know, it just feels like scrapbooking has gone the way of the dinosaurs and LiveJournal is a thing I only know about from Tumblr so—”
“That looks like a lyric.” I stop her. I don’t want her to second-guess herself. I hand her phone back and scratch the back of my neck. “It’s hard to do that. You’re good.”
The words feel unfamiliar as the
y tumble out of my mouth, but I can’t seem to stop them. I try to keep myself from slipping any further into dangerous territory—that space where winning the Golden Apple and finding my Truth is no longer the most pressing thing in my life—and I’m worried I’m failing.
“Well, thank you? I guess. I just—It’s not going to be a career or anything, it’s just something to pass the time, so I try not to put too many eggs in that basket, you know? It’s fun and everything, but—”
“Olivia.”
“Hm?”
“Have you ever taken a compliment without explaining your way out of it?”
She huffs out a laugh and focuses her eyes on a random spot on the tapestry.
“You, um, can. With me,” I say. I wait until she looks at me again before adding, “Take them, I mean. I wouldn’t lie to you.”
And I know I say it kind of seriously, but I want her to know that about me. I believe all we have is our word, that when we say things we should mean them, and mean them wholeheartedly. I know from experience how much empty statements and promises with no follow-through can pull a person apart, piece by piece. I wouldn’t do that to her.
“I—” she starts, and then shuts her mouth. “I don’t usually get a lot of compliments for being like this.” She laughs a little. “I’m much better at playing the version of myself other people expect.”
My stomach flips. Part of me wants to reach for her. The part that’s always sort of been there, buzzing, begging to hold or be held. But I don’t do that. I can’t be that kind of person.
So I grab her camera where it sits on the tapestry next to us and snap a picture of her profile as she looks at the crowd in front of us. The sun gives her face a glow, like it rises to meet her in the morning and not the other way around. The snap is enough to get her to look at me again, but this time her expression is different than any I’ve seen on her before. It’s contemplative, a little reserved. She takes the photo where it dangles from the camera and shakes it out a bit.
