Greenstead Apple Festival October 2012
Greenstead Apple Festival
Tension pricks the air at the apple festival Marina and I attend during our sophomore year of college.
Like last year, I take the bus down from DC for the weekend.
But this time, Marina and I aren’t prattling about our new college lives.
She’s not giving me a detailed breakdown of her dorm mates’ drama at William I’m not recapping my first (and last) frat party experience.
This time, we’re quiet as we stroll the booths.
Even fewer vendors and attendees have shown up this year.
The sky is overcast, a cold, angry wind whistling through the park.
There’s less laughter, music, and excitement around us.
It feels more like a funeral than a festival.
I don’t have to mention this past summer to know that’s what’s hanging between us.
A few months earlier, during one of our regular walk-and-talk calls, where we’d walk around our respective campuses and catch each other up on what we’d been up to, Marina told me about getting an internship doing administrative work at an accounting firm in Greenstead.
After a couple of weeks of feeling down—first being rejected for the counselor job she’d applied for at a music camp in Norfolk, then discovering her closest dorm mates were planning a summer trip to New York without her—the Greenstead internship was just enough of a consolation prize to lift her spirits.
Then she asked about my summer plans, and I replied that I didn’t have any yet.
What I hadn’t told her was that I’d applied for an internship at Ryser.
I’d come across the listing while looking for summer jobs, and while I understood Ryser’s storied history with Greenstead, I was desperate to not have to return home for the summer.
An internship with Ryser would mean staying in DC, enjoying my new city, and making some money at a place that, going by the job description, actually sounded kind of fun.
I liked free snacks. I liked ice cream socials.
I liked the sound of a dynamic, fast-paced environment .
I applied, and I decided I’d figure out how to tell Marina about the possibility of interning for our town’s collective enemy later.
After all her rants whenever a Ryser Cares ad came on, and her ongoing boycott of Ryser products—she was the only third grader I knew who’d ever boycotted anything; in fact, she was the reason I learned the word boycott as an eight-year-old—I knew she wouldn’t understand.
But, while they’d called me in for an interview, I ultimately didn’t get the internship. I tucked away my disappointments, reminding myself that at least this meant I wouldn’t have to tell Marina I was a sellout.
“What if you applied, too?” she asked when I told her I didn’t have any summer plans. “They asked if I knew anyone else who could intern. It would be so much more fun if you were there. We could spend the summer working together!”
After a year in DC, I’d been dreading the prospect of returning to Greenstead for the summer.
But interning with Marina would make the idea more tolerable.
Fun, even. I quickly agreed and submitted an application the next day.
After a phone interview that consisted of three questions about how I liked college, how my dad’s triathlon training was going, and when I could start, I was offered the internship.
My conversations with Marina turned to the summer we’d spend together, how we’d work during the day and have evenings and weekends to ourselves.
We talked about spending a Saturday at Solar Summit, going tubing in James River, maybe road-tripping to Virginia Beach for a weekend.
Our summer was shaping up to be our best one yet.
Then two things happened.
First, our internship began. Marina and I toured the small office, with its dim fluorescent lighting that cast everyone in a sallow hue, the three employees yawning at their desks, the gray walls and cubicles, and the unpleasant smell emanating from the tiny office kitchenette, like fish-flavored popcorn.
It was so different from the Ryser office I’d seen during my interview, where colleagues chatted in halls, people had important-looking meetings behind glass doors, innovation rooms held beanbags and flip charts scribbled with ideas, and the kitchen smelled like fresh coffee and donuts.
Second, three hours into the internship, the marketing manager who’d interviewed me at Ryser called with a last-minute offer. The candidate they’d hired had a family emergency and dropped out of the program, they said. Was I available to start interning for them tomorrow?
It felt like a lifeline. I was being handed an out from toiling away in this dead, quiet, fishy office.
An out from languishing in Greenstead and getting stuck in the same quicksand that had grabbed hold of everyone else in this town.
Now that I knew what life outside Greenstead was like, being back there felt like a prison sentence.
I could find some sort of summer housing in DC to make this Ryser internship work.
My old roommate had mentioned renting an apartment as a subletter for the summer; I could probably crash with her.
Hell, I’d get up at 5:00 a.m. and commute from Greenstead to DC each morning if that was what it took to escape this wasteland.
I choked out a yes without a second thought.
My supervisor was unfazed when I handed in my resignation, as though it was common for interns to run screaming within hours of starting.
Then came the task of telling Marina.
“So…it turns out there was a mix-up,” I said, staring just past her at a lone pushpin stuck in her cubicle wall. “I just found out I won’t be getting college credit for this internship, so I have to switch to another one, in DC. I start tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Marina’s brow dipped. I could see her trying to piece together how this could have happened in the last three minutes. “Wow. You…have another internship already?”
“Yeah. Their first choice left, so now they want me.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. Still her mind was puzzling. “Where is it?”
I hesitated for several long seconds, then got out the words as quickly as I could. “Ryser. My degree program, um, made me apply.”
Something flashed across her face. “Why didn’t you tell me you applied?”
“I forgot.” Seeing the suspicion in her eyes, I changed course. “I mean…I got busy all of a sudden. It’s…it’s not important. But I’ll come back on the weekends. We can still do everything we planned. Are we still on for Solar Summit this weekend?”
Her response came after a long pause: “Yep.” She spoke without emotion, but her smile was the signal I needed that this was fine. We were fine. I bolted in such relief that by the time I asked myself whether there was something strained about her smile, I was already on the bus back to DC.
I thought—hoped—that this wouldn’t change anything between us. But in a single text a few days later, she canceled all those summer plans we made. I got busy all of a sudden , she texted. And I couldn’t bring myself to call her out on using the same exact lie I’d fed her.
Now that we’re together in person for the first time since that awkward moment at the accounting firm, I don’t know what to say. I briefly consider apologizing again before deciding that would be overkill. Instead, I ramble to fill the silence.
“I went to the DC state fair last month,” I say as we pass a booth selling art prints. “They had so many art booths. They also had an art contest. And a pie-eating contest, and a million other contests.”
Marina says nothing.
“They had a huge animal adoption booth,” I continue when we pass the empty space where the petting zoo used to be. “I petted four dogs and it was amazing. Oh, and there was a West African food truck. I got to try jollof rice.”
“Sounds fun.”
I shove my hands in the pockets of my jacket, racking my brain for something else to say.
I just need to keep talking, and this moment will pass, and she’ll be back to her old self.
“Do you think Musty’s started sticking around in the fall, too?
” I ask. Referencing our old name for Greenstead’s faint mustard smell will get me some nostalgia points, at least. “I feel like I can still kind of smell him. But maybe being in DC has spoiled me. A summer without breathing in Musty was pretty refreshing.”
“You can just go, if you hate it here so much,” Marina snaps, coming to a stop. “If you want to ditch me like you did at the internship I recommended you for, go ahead.”
I stop dead in my tracks. “I wasn’t ditching you . I told you, there was a…mix-up.”
“Was there really?” she presses. The way my eyes fall to my boots is response enough for her. “I guess you’ll do anything to get the hell away from here.”
I let out a frustrated sigh. “I’m sorry I left the sad, boring office in a town where everyone’s stuck. I’m sorry I took a paid opportunity in a place where people haven’t given up yet.”
Her laugh is hard and sarcastic. “So you think I’m stuck?
You think every single person here”—she gestures to the people scattered around the park—“has just given up?” She’s speaking loudly enough that a woman at the cotton candy booth behind her takes notice, frowning at me as if I’ve insulted her directly.
My face warms. “I didn’t mean that. I just—”
“Well, I’m not stuck,” Marina continues on, crossing her arms. The wind whips her hair across her face and she doesn’t bother to move it. “I actually give a shit about the place where I’m from, which is more than I can say for you. If I’m stuck, then you’re fucking selfish.”
Wind flies through my jacket, stinging me with cold, but it’s nothing compared to the punch-in-the-gut feeling of my best friend calling me selfish.
It pierces my sense of self like an arrow.
Am I selfish? Have I always been, and I just never noticed it until now?
Is that what’s wrong with me, why I couldn’t wait to leave Greenstead while everyone else is content to stay here and support each other?
But how is it selfish to want a different life for myself?
Doubt gives way to anger, cold transforming me into steel. “Fine,” I spit. “Let’s say I’m selfish. I’d rather be selfish than naive and self-righteous. It’s exhausting trying to live up to your standards.”
Her jaw drops. For a moment her eyes shine with tears, but she blinks them away and shoots back, “I didn’t realize not wanting my best friend to lie to me is an impossible standard.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, come on. You’re not mad because I lied. You’re mad because I took an internship that doesn’t abide by your stupid Ryser boycott.”
“You don’t get to tell me what I’m mad about!” Marina shouts, causing a few passersby to turn their heads. “And if that’s what you think, you don’t know me. And I clearly don’t know you .”
I hate the way she’s looking at me. Like I’m some monster she doesn’t recognize.
It makes me want to hurt her right back.
“I only lied because I’m sick of the way you judge me.
Did you ever think maybe the reason your dorm mates planned that trip without you is because no one wants to be around a judgmental buzzkill?
I’m not putting up with it anymore. I give up. I’m done.”
Marina’s face is a stone wall, her expression unreadable. “Fine. I’m done too.”
With that, she stalks off toward the parking lot.
I remain rooted to the spot, still reeling from her anger. It’s then that I notice the wary looks from the vendors and attendees in earshot. I cast my eyes down and plod to the exit, eyes stinging as I blink back tears against the wind.
On the long bus ride back to DC that evening, it occurs to me that for the first time in our eleven years of attending this festival together, we didn’t end it with a caramel apple.
It’s this realization that makes our fight feel bigger than any of our past arguments.
It’s then that I know there will be no apologies, no amends.
How can there be, when we don’t live in the same town anymore, when we don’t see each other at school every day?
When I’m a selfish monster and she’s a self-righteous saint?
With every mile I draw closer to DC, I feel like I’m pulling further away from our friendship. I could get off at the next stop, I tell myself, turn around, show up at her door, talk it out, make it work. But I stay seated. She could also reach out, if she wanted to. This isn’t just on me.
And when I step off the bus and check my phone to see no missed calls or texts, I know something I shouldn’t yet know.
Even though it’s only been a few hours since our fight, and there’s still a chance we could make up later tonight, or tomorrow, or when I’m back in Greenstead for Thanksgiving or Christmas, I feel a truth somewhere deep in my gut.
Our friendship is over.