Chapter 40 #2
“Y’all do this?” Both of us jumped at the sound of Sofia’s voice.
We spun to find her appearing between the trees behind the post office.
Possibly’s postmaster was in rubber boots and her nightgown, her hair up in a scarf.
I wanted to laugh at her appearance—not because she looked bad, but because it was…
appropriate. Had she been woken by the lights and the sound of AMOR suddenly coming to life in the middle of the night?
Jack tossed his hands up defensively as I responded.
“I saw the lights from my window,” I hollered down the street. “The music started when we got here.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Sofia said. “I was in bed reading and looked out the window and saw the lights.”
Jack and I shrugged in unison. We didn’t have any information that would be helpful to her.
“It’s pretty,” she said as she strolled down the street towards us, her boots squishing against the pavement. “If nothing else.”
“Who do you think—”
I didn’t have time to finish my question.
Starbuck and Levi Lee came tromping across the tram tracks from the grassy patch to the south that led to the pirate ship.
Starbuck was in old-timey pajamas—something Lucy and Ricky would wear on I Love Lucy.
Levi Lee was clad only in basketball shorts that barely reached his knees.
Levi Lee was looking around with starry eyes, as though he had never seen fairy lights before, and Starbuck was massaging his chin as though in deep thought.
“What be this?” Starbuck bellowed, though he seemed more amused than annoyed.
“Dunno,” Sofia answered for us as the men joined us on the street. “Jack and Jordan got here right before I did. Said they ain’t seen no one.”
“I saw the lights from my window,” I said, repeating my story as though it mattered.
“Arrr,” Starbuck growled, “we saw it from the sleeping quarters in our hammocks.”
So, that’s where Levi Lee lived. In the sleeping quarters of the ship with Starbuck.
Were they…related?
“I thought Liberty Lane was on fire,” Levi Lee nodded along. “I was half-asleep.”
He’d barely had time to finish his thought when Wyatt shuffled onto the street from the direction of The Pueblo.
Agnes was rowing herself, huffing and puffing, down from the south end of the road.
Then, like the storm that fell from the black clouds earlier in the afternoon, all of Possibly seemed to be flooding the street.
Jasper, Earl Dean, Officer Hanning, Mystic Molly, the teen boys that traveled in a pack around town, Samuel, Grandy, and even Auggie crept out of the shadows to join us to stare up at the lights and listen to The Rolling Stones.
For the longest of moments, all of us just stared in wonder, murmuring questions and theories to each other as we listened to the song.
No one had any idea what was going on or why Liberty Lane was suddenly lit up like a carnival in the middle of the night.
We all agreed on one thing though—we didn’t mind in the slightest.
“What’s going on down here?”
We all jumped as Amos came barreling out of the front door of AMOR, still in his night clothes, his slippers slapping against the sidewalk. His hair was sticking up in all directions and he looked as though he had literally rolled out of bed. Possibly hit the floor on his way out.
Poor guy, I thought to myself.
Everyone froze, unsure of what to say to the man who had, unfortunately, been Possibly’s main character of the day. Well, everyone except Sofia, of course.
“Why don’t you know?” she said, placing her hands on her hips playfully. “That’s your radio station playin’, ain’t it?”
Amos jerked, his head whipping around sleepily as he tried to shake his mid-slumber stupor from his brain.
Everyone laughed. But we weren’t laughing at Amos.
We were laughing with him. Because all of us were as clueless as him.
For a second, Amos bucked up, his spine straightening as his mouth turned downward unpleasantly.
Once Sofia clomped across the street, her rubber boots slapping against the wet pavement, so that she could slap him on the back jovially, he realized that no one was teasing him.
He reached up to scratch this head, suddenly realizing what his hair looked like, and blushed.
“I guess I should get in there and shut this off,” he said with a jab of his thumb at the speaker outside the door. “Don’t know how that happened. Sorry, folks.”
Everyone spoke up simultaneously to either tell Amos it was “okay” and “let it play!” The roar from the Possibilians shocked Amos at first, but a grin slowly bloomed on his face as Sofia clung to his arm and smiled up at him.
Seeing Amos happy after the day we’d all had was worth having us all dragged out of our homes in the middle of the night.
Who would begrudge a neighbor a little lost sleep if it helped them get over heartbreak?
It became apparent that everyone hadn’t planned to get out of the house in the middle of the night for nothing.
When Levi Lee grabbed Sofia and spun her away from Amos, leaving our radio broadcaster standing by the open front door of his business, everyone laughed.
Sofia and Levi Lee strolled out to the middle of the street, her rubber boots squishing on the pavement, and they began to dance uninhibitedly around to The Rolling Stones.
Everyone seemed to partner up, or dance in groups, dancing merrily around the street under the twinkling lights—as though this was a totally normal thing to do.
Even I—who never danced in public before in my life—joined in, dancing in the middle of the group on the street.
I didn’t have a partner, but I danced along with everyone else.
My eyes discreetly found Auggie a few times—he was dancing a few yards away—but I didn’t approach him.
At some point, though I hadn’t noticed him leave and return, Samuel went to his store and got a cooler full of sodas and began passing them out.
So, everyone grabbed a drink, popped their tops, and went back to dancing.
Much to my surprise, Mystic Molly approached me and invited me to dance with her.
Though nervous to dance with another actual, living, breathing human being, I accepted her offer with warm cheeks, and spun around the street with her.
Laughing, sipping our sodas, and exchanging comments with other Possibilians as we passed them, we danced under the twinkling lights until Earl Dean asked for a chance to dance with her.