Chapter 26
Edie awoke with Cassidy’s arm draped across her waist. She sat up and the arm fell with a heavy thud to the mattress, but Cassidy did not stir.
Last night after dinner, they agreed that they needed to stay together so that James couldn’t have any opportunities to permanently separate them.
Edie pitched the idea of sleeping in shifts, but Cassidy talked her out of it.
Light glowed around the blinds, but Edie didn’t know what time it was.
Her cellphone was still dead on the other side of the villa.
Cassidy’s phone lay face down on the mattress beside her with its charge cable trailing off the bed.
She wanted to keep tabs on James and the changes happening in the world at large and had turned hers back on.
Edie knew that the phones themselves no longer posed a threat, but she still didn’t feel comfortable turning hers on. Maybe she never would again.
Edie shook Cassidy awake. “Time to get ready.”
Cassidy’s face tightened and she grumbled. “For what?”
Edie’s heartbeat quickened. Had Cassidy forgotten the plan? “For the meet and greet.”
“Ugh. I’m so tired,” Cassidy said, throwing an arm over her eyes. “I slept like shit and kept having dreams we were back in the tunnel.”
A slow exhale escaped Edie’s lips. Cassidy hadn’t forgotten, although she wished that both of them could be spared the memories of that tunnel. She’d had the same nightmares but decided not to say so. Today they needed to be careful with their words.
“Well, thankfully today is about being in the sunshine and doing what we do best. First the meet and greet, then judging the friend contest, hosting a movie viewing …”
“Schmoozing,” Cassidy sighed.
“The most important schmoozing you’ll ever do, though,” Edie said, ripping the sheets back. “Come on, get up.”
The pier at the south end of the island near the stage had only a few groups around it in the cool morning breeze.
One group sat with their feet dangling into the water while they drank iced coffee and smoothies.
A tan guy in a muscle shirt ran around on the surf-hardened sand doing what appeared to be different exercises while another man filmed him.
Edie chose a bar near this pier for the meet and greet.
The slow morning crowd was a far cry from the bustling activity she’d seen here when the hard partiers finally woke up.
She approached the bartender popping a bottle of champagne behind the bar and let them know she and Cassidy were ready.
The bubbling liquid spilled over the tan man’s face as his expression went blank, just like the man in the restaurant the night before when Edie asked about a music video. With a start, he returned to himself.
“Yes! Sorry, Ms. Lee, we’re running a little behind this morning, but I’ll let them know you’re here and we’ll get your table set up right away.”
He placed the bottle on the bar top and wiped off his hand with a cloth as he walked around to the back of the building.
“That pause they do is so fucking creepy,” Cassidy said with a shiver.
She and Edie stood outside the bar in the shade and waited for Edie’s rumor to manifest. Within minutes, four men whom Edie found indistinguishable from each other appeared in crew cuts and Island Xperience shirts.
They set up a folding table and two chairs beneath the awning of the bar and then set half a dozen cardboard boxes off to one side.
A woman with a black pixie cut rounded the corner and approached Edie with her hand outstretched and an intensity that Edie recognized from past event coordinators she’d worked with.
“Hi, I’m Heather, it’s so good to meet you,” she said, and shook Edie’s hand in a quick but painful jerk.
Heather gave Cassidy’s hand the same treatment and then handed them each a bottle of water.
“The audio equipment is on its way. Security will be just to your right so they won’t get in your way, but rest assured that they are keeping an eye on you. ”
She spoke a mile a minute, like this meet and greet was one of six she needed to handle at the same time.
The crew cut clones mounted a speaker onto a tripod and one of them handed Edie and Cassidy microphones.
Heather ushered her and Cassidy to their seats and explained how much merchandise they had and what to do if they needed help.
Edie reeled at how quickly her rumor came to fruition.
Events like this took days to organize, if not weeks, and yet in a matter of minutes she’d conjured everything she required.
This is how people think these kinds of things work, Edie mused. With enough power you just have to snap your fingers and get exactly what you what.
Lo-fi hip hop played from the speaker as Heather showed the women the materials for the morning.
Each of them had a box of headshots—Edie looked great in hers but had never seen this picture of herself before and still cringed at her short hair—and they also had a box of Island Xperience branded postcards.
The rest of the boxes contained the gift bags.
Cassidy opened one and found sunglasses, sunblock, a shooter of coconut rum, and a can of pineapple seltzer.
“And they each have the friendship necklaces, right?” Edie asked as the idea occurred to her.
Heather stopped her unending stream of words mid-sentence. The sudden cessation of speech jarred Edie more than the dilation of Heather’s pupils as her eyes lost focus. Then she blinked and continued like nothing happened.
“Yes, and they look great!”
Cassidy reached her hand into the bag again and pulled out a necklace with a thin bar of silver on a simple chain.
“It’s a friendship necklace?” she asked.
Edie grabbed another bag and pulled out a necklace from the bottom. “There’s a light on the bottom of each one. When they’re close to each other, the light glows.”
Cassidy took both pendants and cupped them in her hands to block out the sunlight.
“It’s really faint.”
“They glow brighter the more necklaces they’re next to,” Heather explained.
Cassidy raised an eyebrow at Edie and handed hers back. “That’s pretty good merchandising, creating proof that you’re part of the in-group of people who got invited to the island."
“I know, right?” Heather agreed.
“The point is to emphasize friendship. We can prove our friends are here,” Edie told Cassidy in a low voice as they both unclasped their necklaces and put them on.
“Those look great on you two! Hold them up together so we can see the glow.”
Edie and Cassidy leaned into one another and held their pendants close. Heather snapped a couple pictures on her phone, then squinted and cupped her hand around the screen.
“We’ll have to make the lights brighter before we post this, but you two look great. Are you ready?”
Edie and Cassidy straightened up and nodded. Edie pressed the button on the bottom of her microphone.
“Thank you all for coming out,” she said, her voice blasting out of the speaker toward the pier.
Someone controlling the audio elsewhere turned down the music.
“Cassidy and I are so pleased to be here this morning on this last day of the festival. When we were approached to consult, we gave our opinions on the brands and bands we wanted with our own friends in mind. Why would anyone respond to those crazy invites if their friends didn’t, right? ”
She paused. A small group formed in front of the table consisting mostly of women in swimsuits and shorts, and they gave a courteous laugh in unison at this last bit.
Edie had no idea how they’d learned of the meet and greet, but here they all were, ready to talk to Cassidy and Edie and to solidify their plans.
“So, for helping to inspire us, our friends Rose, Apricot, and Daisy all deserve a little call out and thanks.” She turned to Cassidy. “They’re the kind of friends we came with and the kind of friends we hope to leave with.”
“Thank you, Edie!” Heather said into a microphone Edie didn’t realize she had.
“This meet and greet will go until noon. After that we’re holding a best friend competition over at the stage that everyone should go check out.
The music video is being recorded at two, and I’m sure none of us want to miss that, and then there’s a movie screening immediately following that so we can all cool off out of the sun.
Thank you all again for being here. Now come get some swag and meet the ladies of the hour! ”
Edie fell into her element during the actual signing.
Now that she didn’t have to make up everything she said, things felt easy and normal.
She signed headshots and posed with Cassidy and answered questions about all her favorite beauty products and plans for once they left the island.
But Cassidy struggled. She tripped over her words when people asked how she’d curated the list of artists for the festival with energy so low that after a couple questions their fans were ready to move onto speaking with Edie anyhow.
“Have you never done this before?” Edie asked through her teeth as they posed for a picture together following a particularly awkward encounter with a pair of Black Burns fans.
“I don’t know what to say to anyone. What if they realize I’m lying?”
“They’re not going to. They’ll believe anything you say as long as you are believable, but if you’re not, we’re going to leave tonight and never see…” The names she meant to say escaped her.
Two more women approached the table.
Edie quickly finished the thought. “We’ll never see our friends again.”
Cassidy put on her mild smile and took the Island X postcard the couple handed her.
She signed it and passed it to Edie. The card bore a picture of the island from above with a vintage text that read “wish you were here” with smaller text in between that made the entire thing read “wish you were cool enough to be here.”
“How are you enjoying yourselves?” Cassidy asked.