Today he finished up half an hour after I did, but I hung around and waited for him, sitting outside on one of the concrete parking space bumpers and finishing off a half-priced deli sandwich.
Sometimes Dash and I just went driving. He liked to drive out past Acadia, out into the cornfields where everything was flat and the sky seemed impossibly wide. We’d see the crops change over time—green stalks, growing taller and thicker, then drying out, turning to that light tan color. Then cut down to nothing. The ground looked a bit like a desert after that—flat and brown and expansive. Then it would start all over again.
Brit would complain—It’s just corn on corn on corn, it’s boring—but I liked the rows. The order. The ritual.
Dash was my favorite person to be quiet with. In the same way Terrance was an easy talker, Dash was great at comfortable silence. I never felt pressure around him, like I had to say something. Like he expected anything from me.
It was on one of our drives this past spring when Dash had adjusted his grip on the steering wheel and said, “So.”
There was a pause, but I knew he would follow it up with something. Dash took his time—always had. He was thoughtful and deliberate in a way that I wish I could be. I don’t think he had ever said something he hadn’t meant to.
He had spoken, eventually: “I met somebody. Online.”
“Yeah?”
“Uh-huh. He goes to school in Indianapolis.” Another pause. “We’ve been talking.”
“Nice,” I said. “About what?”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Just talking.” Silence. “Like how Terrance and Mia are talking.”
Terrance had been very into Mia Reyes at that time. It would later end after they went to the spring dance together. Apparently she decided that Terrance’s dance moves were just too much for her to handle. Or at least, that’s what he told us.
“Oh,” I said to Dash. “Cool.” A pause. “What’s he like?”
“Smart,” Dash said, with a smile that I hadn’t seen before—something small, private. “Funny.”
“Good.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I mean. If he were stupid and humorless, there would be way less stuff to talk about.” I glanced over at him. “Less stuff to like, right?”
His smile grew. “Right.”
seventeen
I tried, the next week, in between work and the library and babysitting, to rally interest in my Megan Pleasant project. I sent reminders out to WWYSE. I proposed information-gathering sessions that no one seemed to be available for.
Terrance shot me a list of ideas, but I knew he was only humoring me as the MPASFC’s vice president.
Brit and I were biking to Teen Zone 2 one afternoon, and I couldn’t help but bring it up.
“No one is on board with my Megan project. No one cares.”
She looked over at me, pedaling with her hands off the handlebars. I didn’t have the balance for that. “Translation: no one cares as much as you do. It’s not our fault you care about shit like fifty times harder than the average person.”
“I just … really want to do this. For all of us.”
“There are other ways to raise money. Trust the booster club. There’s still like six months to go, and they managed to get money for the Macy’s parade back in the day.”
“That’s different. The band is bigger now, it’s way more money, and also inflation and stuff—”
“Sophie. It’s summer. Okay? Can we just … enjoy summer? Just for a little bit?”
I frowned. Brit might have been a little bit right. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“Don’t push it.”
* * *
I went about ten minutes without talking about it.
Terrance was already at Teen Zone 2 when we arrived, and to my surprise, August was with him. They were playing Ping-Pong on the old table, which had a net at one point, but was now sadly lacking. Flora had drawn cartoon faces on each side of the paddles a while ago—happy on one side, frowning on the other.
“I play winner,” Brit said, dropping her bag on the couch. She was supposedly starting a new job tonight, at Pizza Hut.
“Uh-uh,” Terrance said. “We’re doing a tournament.”
“You can’t do a tournament with two people.”
“Can so.”
August missed the next point, and then a few more, before surrendering his paddle to Brit. She held it up to her face so the happy side was out—a big half-circle smile and squiggly eyes.
“Thanks, friend!” she said in a creepy voice.
“No problem. Thanks for inspiring my nightmares.”
He took a seat on the couch, a stretch of space between us.
“How’s the Megan project going?” he said.
“Nooooo.” Brit groaned. “We just decided to chill on the Megan Pleasant thing for a little bit.”
“Technically you decided to chill on it,” I said.
“You said we could enjoy summer!”
“We can do both.” I looked at August. “We just need to gain some momentum.”
“Do you really think you can get her to come?”
“For sure. It’s not like it’s some random town. It’s her town. She loves Acadia.”
“Loved Acadia,” Brit corrected. “Past tense.”
“You make it sound like she’s dead,” August said.
“Yeah, she definitely is.” Brit backhanded the ball, and Terrance missed. “That’s what all this is about. We’re trying to track down her ghostly specter. Barring that, Megan Pleasant’s hologram is gonna play the fall festival.”
“I’m just saying, you said it in like a cryptic way.”
“Aren’t all specters ghostly?” Terrance asked, retrieving the ball.
“She’s not dead,” I told August.
“She just hates Acadia,” Brit added, and easily returned Terrance’s serve.
“She doesn’t hate it. All that stuff has been super exaggerated.”
“What stuff?” August asked.
“Well.” Brit got another point off Terrance and put her paddle down while he went to collect the ball. She always said that celebrity gossip was stupid, but at the same time, Brit enjoyed other people’s drama inherently. “First of all—her family up and left town out of nowhere.”
“That’s not super weird, is it? People move.”
“Yeah but she built this big-ass mansion right outside of town for them to live in. Or, they started building it, and then suddenly they stopped building it, and then suddenly her family’s old house was for sale, and they were gone.”
“Should I be taking notes?” August said.
“Careful, that’s like foreplay to Sophie,” Brit replied, and I rolled my eyes. “So she abandons the house. Her family leaves town. Then her third album comes out, and the lead single—the biggest song off it—is all about leaving home and never going back.”
August frowned. “So? Songs can be fictional.”
“Soooo, naturally everyone asked her about it in interviews, like, ‘Hey, Megan, didn’t you write that one song about how your hometown is great? Tell us more about how you’ve followed it up with one that says you want to burn it to the ground.’”
“What’d she say?”
“That the message in the song is pretty clear.”
“What’s the message?”
“You heard the ‘burn it to the ground’ part, right?” Brit said.
“Why does she hate it, though?”
“No one knows.”
“Hm.” August glanced up at the ceiling, a little wrinkle between his brows. For a few moments, there was just the thwack of the Ping-Pong paddles and the hollow sound of the ball hitting the table. “Could be worth investigating,” he said finally, glancing over at me. “Don’t you think?”
“Why?”
“Figuring out why she doesn’t want to come back here … if that’s the case”—he added, when he saw my expression—“seems important to getting her back here.” A pause. “It’s like … the last prong. Of the multipronged approach. Right?”
I had the sudden urge to grab both sides of his face and kiss him soundly.
Instead, I just nodded.
“Right.”
* * *
That night I took out my planning notebook and added a category to the Megan Pleasant fall festival page: Social Media Outreach
Local Contacts
State Fair
I wrote the word INVESTIGATION in big letters and underlined it twice.
eighteen
I began my research that night, starting with a profile of Megan from a while back titled A PLEASANT PLACE: THIRD ALBUM SEES COUNTRY DARLING IN A NEW STATE OF MIND.
At twenty-two, country star Megan Pleasant is poised to release her third studio album, Foundation. The follow-up to her sophomore album, Letters Home, Foundation is a departure for the breakout second runner-up of the first season of America’s Next Country Star. I sat down with Pleasant at a café in Nashville to discuss her career, her upcoming album, and a potential homecoming—or lack thereof.