Chapter 16
July began to prepare for August. The blazing blue days at the heart of the month took on a weighted-blanket quality toward its end.
The wispy white striated clouds of earlier summer gained heft, turned pale silver, and hung daylong in the sky like objects on a mobile, undispersed by the sun.
In that weather, we all felt summer’s deadline.
We looked down the season’s golden carpet and saw its tasseled edge.
If we were going to turn into other people, we’d better hurry up and do it—which was why Margaret balayaged her hair, dying her dark chestnut waves to fade into honeyed tips.
“Incredible,” I said when she turned up at my front door on the last Saturday of the month looking shiny and new. “Genuinely fantastic. A trendsetter. Gorgeous.”
“And you look like a sexy tube of toothpaste,” she said when she saw my mint-green outfit.
I had on white sneakers with an inch of platform and shorts so short the pockets only fit half my phone and two thirds of my butt cheeks.
I hoped Eleanor would wonder if my shorts were for her benefit.
By which I mean, I hoped Eleanor would take my butt cheeks personally.
We had dressed for the occasion: Every summer, our corner of Ohio offered one of the oldest continuously running agricultural fairs in the country.
Or rather, a corner of Ohio adjacent to our own.
The fair took place a county away, a good forty-five minutes driving east on the highway, longer if you hit traffic.
My mom disapproved of the great quantities of fried food, creaking metal rides, and general spirit of intoxication, or at least she never had any interest in attending herself.
She liked reading books and going to museums. She didn’t like trudging around in the heat and having to explain that all carnival games were designed to take away your money.
We never went to the fair when I was a child.
If we were driving anywhere for entertainment, it would be toward the city and not away from it.
I didn’t protest, because I hardly knew the fun I wasn’t having.
The fair, however, took on a new significance as I got older.
All the teenagers who lived within an hour’s drive attended, all those various schools with their separate social lives pooling uniquely into one place, making the fair an annual opportunity for plot none of us could stand to miss.
A wide wake of photographic output always trailed the event on social media, guaranteeing material for discussion.
Obviously, it was better to have pictures of yourself to include in the cumulative online portrait than only to dissect everybody else’s.
I’d gone for the first time the previous year, though not very successfully.
Eleanor got sick and canceled. Margaret made her plan with Bea before I had a chance to ask—or at least, when I asked, she claimed to have.
Bea was a more thrilling person to go with than I was.
Bea’s mom drove the two of them, a thinly plausible explanation for why Margaret didn’t offer me a ride.
I met them there. We had fun, but I left before nighttime like a child.
A few hours was the longest my mom could tolerate entertaining herself in the area before returning to retrieve me, and she insisted I leave the fair by seven because she didn’t like getting home after eight unless it was for her own reasons instead of mine.
On the heels of my broken summer, I determined to do better. I didn’t ask Margaret. Instead I told her, in front of Nancy, who always wanted help with rides, “Mar, my mom can drive us to the fair in the afternoon, if you want.”
“Oh, yes,” Nancy agreed on Margaret’s behalf immediately.
“Please thank Celeste for me,” she said.
“I can pick you girls up at ten.” Because unlike my mother, Nancy was an adult who stayed awake after the sun set.
Once I’d secured Margaret, Eleanor hardly needed to be asked.
She planned to meet us there, her mother having some errand to complete nearby, and all three of us agreed to sleep over at Margaret’s house afterward, my first night sleeping in anyone’s bed other than my own since the start of summer.
Which meant that for the first time in weeks, I was live. I was on the scene as it happened.
My mom drove with a single hand on the wheel, her hair in a neat braid down her back.
She sensed the intensity of our desire to have fun radiating from the back seat and so felt called upon to warn us of the various evils she imagined we might encounter.
She confirmed we knew not to accept food or especially drinks from people we didn’t know, or even people we knew but didn’t trust, or who seemed too eager to see us consume whatever they’d provided.
“And don’t ride any rides that seem suspicious,” she said.
“Suspicious how?” I asked. I didn’t like when my mom said things for my benefit in front of other people. Instruction was our private business.
“Like they might fall apart.” That was literally all of them.
“What about strangers?” I asked. “Should we get into their vans?”
“Yeah,” Margaret joined in. “What about their basements—should we ask to see their basements?” I’d missed Margaret badly.
“No basements,” my mom said from the front seat, not trusting us enough for humor. “You girls keep each other safe.”
I wedged my hands under my thighs. She thought everyone on earth was my personal responsibility. She didn’t know I’d lost my right to order Margaret around.
We got off the highway and drove the last ten minutes through a suburban neighborhood that I recognized as much more likely to host a massive agricultural fair than the one where we lived.
Doan shared a county with Cleveland, which we’d now left.
The quantity of American flags waving from front porches increased.
The houses grew either closer together or noticeably farther apart, with no sidewalks to connect them.
Passing through Main Street, we saw a church, a popcorn shop, and a memorial set up on the side of the road.
My mom pulled into the lot next to the fairground.
As soon as she put the car into park, Margaret and I rushed out.
In the vehicle, we still belonged to my mother, but as soon as the car vanished from sight, we would be no one’s.
We would just be people in a crowd. Right away, the day’s baking heat began to sheen our skin.
My mom rolled down her window. Margaret took a few courtesy steps onto the sidewalk while I lingered to say goodbye.
“I can always come back and get you,” she said quietly. “Even if Margaret and Eleanor stay.”
The implication that I might need rescuing made my face hot. “I know,” I said. “Thank you.” Then I kissed her on the cheek through the window and turned away.
I grabbed Margaret’s hand. We both had on miniature backpacks.
We took off at a jog toward the entrance, an enormous balloon archway.
A woman wearing a green gingham button-down shirt and a zippered vest with a metal pin with her name on it took our entry fee and stamped our hands.
The cost of admission came with an accordion-folded paper guide to the grounds, which I knew I’d keep.
It is lightly thrilling to be handed a map.
On the attached schedule: a bulb show, a magic show, a wood-carving demonstration, a hot-air balloon ascension, a demolition derby, and fifty other things I didn’t bother reading.
The fair wasn’t an event you could attend alone.
The sheer quantity of people present and physical sprawl of the grounds meant that everyone arrived in an alliance.
It served as a reminder of the power of our own, how much better off we were in each other’s company, the mutual glow of our shared attractiveness, the safety of our closed unit.
Groups of teenage girls scare people for a reason.
“Let’s go to the bumper cars,” Margaret said.
“What about Eleanor?” I asked.
“El can find us,” Margaret announced with what I considered to be unreasonable confidence.
Getting lost at the fair was easy. Uneven aisles containing carnival games broke and twisted into new corridors of sticky food—the smells of cooked meat and burnt sugar often heady, sometimes fading—that wrapped around the fair’s largest anchor points, sprawling tents and pavilions housing livestock and produce for exhibition.
Massive, dubious metal rides served as compass points because they could be seen from a distance, hulking above the temporary city of red, white, and yellow stands.
The fair’s full sprawl encompassed almost a hundred and fifty acres of open land, which meant that every year, groups of friends agreed on designated meeting points only to ignore or forget them.
“We can wait five minutes,” I countered, and purchased a crushed-ice apple cider for four dollars.
I drained the liquid in a few sweet gulps, leaving behind a cup of shaved ice, no juice.
“Do I need to throw this at you?” I asked Margaret because of the impatient look on her face.
She laughed and held her own cup of ice to her neck.
Our phones vibrated simultaneously with a message from Eleanor. It was a picture of ourselves in the crowd. I looked tall and tan against my minty clothes. Margaret had one hand on her hip, her brown-to-blond hair visible even from a distance.
“She’s so good at taking those,” Margaret said, in an almost resigned tone of voice, because Eleanor mostly took pictures when she felt like it, which was not as often as Margaret would have liked. “I swear this will be the best photo of me all day.”
I turned in the direction from which the photo had been taken and saw Eleanor skipping toward us in a matching set, brown oval tortoiseshell sunglasses, and a miniature backpack.