Chapter Twenty-Four
It’s strange to think the festival is just hours away.
The evening before we open, my colleagues and I survey Juniper Park, admiring our work.
The sign hangs over the arch we set up at the entrance beside the customary stack of hay bales.
The booths we assembled line the park in neat rows, forming aisles for crowds to walk down.
Even the trees have seen fit to dress up for the occasion, with orange-bronze leaves that adorn their branches and scatter across the grass like confetti.
Save for the roped-off Nancy convention section at the other end of the park—and the stage, chairs, and enclosed tent for the greenroom she requested, arranged exactly as her rider dictated—the scene before us comes strikingly close to the festival Marina and I attended every year.
All that’s missing are the people—who should, we hope, fill the park tomorrow.
Soon these empty tables will be full of vendors selling their goods.
This park will be swarming with attendees, hopefully not just Greensteaders but Virginians from all over, here to support this town and celebrate what makes Greenstead unique.
When we part ways that evening, my work still isn’t done.
Marina volunteered to assemble the gift bags for our VIP sponsors, but she texted me that afternoon to confess that helping out with set design for a school play kept her so busy that she hadn’t touched them.
I told her I’d come over to help when we were finished at Juniper Park.
There was a pause, and then Marina texted Can we do it at your place? My AC’s acting up.
I wanted to press her on it. It’s so rare that Marina acknowledges the state of her house that this felt like an opportunity to get more out of her while she was willing to talk about it. But, knowing what it took for her to admit this much, I just replied that she was welcome to come over.
She arrives not long after I get home. My dad treats Marina’s arrival with such fanfare that I feel like a teenager again, mouthing apologies about my uncool dad while he peppers her with questions and marvels over how long it’s been since she was last here.
Once I manage to extract Marina from the parental chitchat, we head to my room and soon fall into a rhythm.
We form a two-person assembly line, loading each bag with our designated items, from tote bags stamped with the festival logo to mini bottles of apple mead we sourced from a vendor.
With the bags filled, Marina moves on to filling out the handwritten thank-you cards for each of our VIPs.
As I’m trying to separate two layers of the colorful tissue paper we bought, I look over to watch her write Meg’s name in the elegant handwriting I recognize well.
All throughout school, whenever we were paired together on a project, Marina has always been the one to do the writing, be it notebook paper or poster boards.
Her handwriting has always been neater than mine.
I don’t think I ever would have expected, some fifteen years ago—or whenever we last did an assignment together—that we would be here at thirty-two, in my same childhood bedroom in Greenstead, working on what’s essentially one big shared assignment.
I would have expected the being-with-Marina part, but not so much the Greenstead part.
Or the fact that Marina and I went a decade without talking.
There’s a lot about my life I don’t think my teenage self would have predicted.
Which is strange to think, because on the surface level, I’d always thought I was following my dreams—getting the hell out of Greenstead, moving to DC.
But I have to admit that those dreams involved more than a city.
They involved being close to friends and family, having a dog with a wagging tail to greet me at the end of each day.
Not wrestling with my conscience while I draft press releases for the company that devastated my hometown.
Not putting in long hours at work, coming home to my empty apartment, and constantly checking the balance of my savings account like a bored student watching the clock, waiting for class to be over.
But I’ll still fulfill those dreams eventually, I remind myself. I’m just postponing them. You can put a pin in dreams, I’m pretty sure. They’re not balloons; they won’t burst. But they can change. Or maybe I’ve changed. The vision feels close in some ways, and so far away in others.
“I’m almost nervous about tomorrow,” Marina says, pulling me from my thoughts.
She closes the last envelope in her stack and begins sliding each one into the gift bags I’ve decorated with yellow-and-orange tissue paper.
With the last card nestled into its bag, she leans back against my bed railing.
We’re sitting on the floor of my bedroom, bags, tissue paper, stickers, and festival goods all around us.
“I just hope it’s as good as everyone remembers. ”
“It will be,” I tell her. It has to be, after everything we’ve poured into it.
“I hope it becomes an annual thing again, if it goes well,” Marina says.
“It could be the thing that people keep coming back to Greenstead for every year, like it was before. We could use the proceeds to reinvest in the town, make improvements. I know one festival might not be enough to save the community center forever, but over time, maybe?”
Her eyes are sparkling with hope, and I’m tempted to suggest she temper her expectations.
This festival probably won’t happen in future years.
Not without the money Ryser pulled from us.
And while I’m still clinging to the chance that Amanda won’t close the Ryser Cares office once she hears about the festival’s success, there’s no way she’d contribute to the festival budget next year after she made such a big deal about revoking the funds.
But I remember my decision to wait until after the festival to come clean about all this, and I remind myself that I’ll tell Marina on Monday.
For this weekend, though, I need to let her enjoy it.
I need to let myself enjoy it. I’ve spent so much time these last few weeks worrying and panicking and letting the pit in my stomach weigh down my every feeling.
Why shouldn’t I set that aside for once and enjoy this weekend too?
Life after the apple festival may be murky—job prospects uncertain, no clue whether Marina and the folks at Ryser Cares will understand why I’ve kept this news from them—but before I face all of that, I get to enjoy this festival.
I’ll see the results of our hard work, taste the mustard-flavored fruits of our labor.
All the harsh realities that follow will still be there, and I can face them then—and not one moment sooner.
It’s almost ten o’clock by the time we place the final VIP bag on my desk. Marina stretches her arms over her head like she’s going to get up—but she doesn’t.
She sighs and turns to me, leaning her head against the side of my bed. “Do you still have that air mattress?” she asks. Her tone is almost apologetic.
“Yeah,” I reply, trying to get a read on her face. “I think my dad still has it somewhere. You…want to spend the night?”
Marina purses her lips, eyes roving. Wrestling with whatever it is she wants to say. “I don’t like sleeping in my house,” she says quietly.
There’s reluctance in her voice. She’s dreading that I’ll ask follow-up questions, try to dig deeper to the root of it. But now’s not the time.
I don’t point out how she used to grumble about that air mattress back when she used to sleep over.
She used to say it deflated too easily, that we’d fill it up before we went to bed and then she’d wake up in the middle of the night and feel like she was slowly sinking into a sagging heap.
I simply ask my dad for it, which of course makes him sentimental all over again—and then he pops his head back into the room to ask if we want him to make us chocolate chip pancakes in the morning, as if we’re still little kids (and yes, we do).
After Marina and I set up the mattress, I rummage through my dresser and lend her an old T-shirt from a volunteer event we did together in high school—which of course gets us talking about school.
Marina shares updates on what our old teachers and classmates are up to.
Before long, we’re catching each other up on our own lives.
Even after we set our alarms for early tomorrow morning and turn off the lights, we still lie in the dark talking, just like we used to do at sleepovers past.
“I like mushrooms now,” Marina announces, as if she’s revealing a scandalous piece of gossip, and she sort of is. My mental Marina file has a whole chapter dedicated to her hatred of mushrooms, with subsections for her complaints about them: too squishy, too earthy, they ruin pizza.
I turn on my side, propping up my elbow, and ask for every detail.
She complies, talking about how a bowl of ramen she had in college expanded her horizons, how those enoki mushrooms were a gateway into the world of mushrooms she didn’t hate.
(But she still hates portabellos, she tells me gravely, and I nod with the deepest of understandings and update my file accordingly.)
I tell her that I stopped getting my hair relaxed a couple of years after college, when I decided I wanted to learn how to do my natural hair.
I detail all the hair care tutorials I watched, the hair routines and product reviews, and how all that knowledge has been wasted in these last few years, when I’ve been so preoccupied with work that it was easier to fall into a routine of throwing my hair in a ponytail or slapping on a headband.
She tells me her new favorite pen has changed from the Pilot G2 to the Pentel EnerGel because it writes more smoothly and the ink doesn’t smear on her hands as often.
I tell her my favorite peanut butter brand has switched from Jif to Teddie.
She tells me about getting stung by a bee for the first time five years ago and discovering she’s allergic to beestings.
On and on we go, trading anecdotes and factoids, updating our mental files, bringing our knowledge of one another into the present.
I don’t ask her about her house or Jess.
She doesn’t ask me about Ryser or DC. We just talk about the details that feel the most compelling as we lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling where my glow-in-the-dark stars used to be.
It’s Marina who falls asleep first. Her breaths slow as I’m explaining how I came to start preferring vanilla cake over chocolate. And when I ask if her favorite cake flavor is still strawberry, she doesn’t respond. I roll over and close my eyes, pulling my blankets closer.
As I fall asleep, I think about everything I still want to tell Marina, everything I don’t, and all that awaits us tomorrow.