At the start of one in particular—her performance in the first live show of that season—she raised her mic to her lips before the band began, looking up through her lashes at the crowd.
“I want to dedicate this song to everyone in my hometown of Acadia, Illinois. I love you all so much.”
She did a rendition of “I Hope You Dance” that brought the house down.
One of the judges—giant cowboy hat, black button-down shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest—leaned back in his chair when she was done. “Megan, how d’you think the people in Acadia will feel about your performance?”
Megan shifted from foot to foot. “I don’t know. I just hope they’ll be proud of me.”
He nodded. “I think they’re gonna be real proud.”
A smile split her face, wide and radiant.
twenty-eight
I went over to the Conlins’ a few days later. I hadn’t seen August since the Saint Louis trip.
He came to the door when I knocked.
“Let’s go to Bygones,” I said. “Let’s go treasure hunting.”
He looked at me for a moment. His face betrayed nothing—like Brit when she asked one of her capital-Q Questions, where you would get the eyebrow wrinkle or nothing. But there was some kind of contemplation in his eyes, like he was considering something more significant than a proposition from the world’s most average clarinet player.
He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
So we went to Bygones. That was the secret to finding the deals, after all—You gotta keep coming back around. The inventory’s always changing!
We brushed through the rows of dishes and old silverware; through Mrs. Cabot’s booth that may or may not have contained Brit’s mom’s garbage, and paused in front of a booth in the corner that contained several rows of china dolls, all staring blankly.
I nudged August. “Which one do you think is evil?”
“Do you mean which one do I think is the most evil? Because they’re all baseline at least a little bit evil.”
“Most likely to be found in the empty room of an abandoned house.”
He pointed to one with a purple taffeta dress. “That one. For sure.”
“Most likely to move in your peripheral vision.”
“The one in the red.” She had porcelain-white skin and deep-red lips pursed in a Mona Lisa kind of smile. “Obviously. Look at her. That’s some sinister shit right there. You move, she moves.”
I huffed a laugh.
“Did you have any creepy murder dolls when you were little?” August said a few booths down as we poked through a box of old black-and-white photos.
“Nah. Flora got one from her dad when we were pretty young, but she wasn’t allowed to play with it. Probably for the best—Brit definitely would’ve destroyed it.”
We flipped through the pictures in silence for a moment. Photos of two young women with cat-eye glasses. A man and a woman standing in front of a truck. A baby in a little playsuit and shiny black shoes.
When August spoke, his voice was striving for neutral. Casual.
“Did you ever know your dad? Like your birth dad?”
“No.” I didn’t think often on the man who was my father, because he wasn’t, really. My dad—the one who had carved pumpkins with me, taught me to skate, braided my hair badly but painstakingly when I was a little kid—he was the only dad I’d ever known. Dad prime. All-time Dad.
“He left before I was born,” I said.
August turned away from the pictures, moving toward a shelf of knickknacks. “Doesn’t that make you mad, though? Like … not even at him, because screw him, but like … at the universe, you know? Because why should you have to be left alone like that?”
This was as close as we’d touch to the Saint Louis trip—standing at the gas station, August’s shoulders shaking.
“I’m not alone, though,” I said carefully. “I never was. I’ve always had my mom, and my dad, and Ciara. And anyway, it happened. It’s already done. There’s nothing I can do to change it. So why would I spend time feeling shitty about something I can’t change?”
It was quiet for a moment. “I knew you’d say something like that,” he said. “Since you’re a good person and all.”
“I’m not any better than anyone else.”
“But you care about people. Like … more than most people do.”
“How do you know?”
“You make Cadence mac and cheese on the stove.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“The microwave kind is so much faster. The kind from the box means you have to boil the water and cook the pasta and make the sauce and mix it together. It takes longer and it tastes a thousand times better and that’s the kind you make for her, because you care. You do what’s better, even if it’s harder.”
“Easy Mac isn’t hard,” I murmured. “It literally has ‘easy’ in the name.”
“You know what I mean,” he replied.
twenty-nine
Sophie:
What should we do first when you get here?
Ciara:
Can I call you right now?
Do you have time to talk?
thirty
Friday night found us back at Tegan’s house—inside this time—sitting around talking about band stuff, which I easily navigated into talking about Megan.
“I think we should probably get tickets soon for her concert at the state fair,” I said. I had been compulsively checking every few days, just to make sure they were still available. “So we should figure out who’s going.”
“Well, Dash’ll drive, so there’s one,” Brit said, settling down next to him on the couch with a newly filled cup.
Dash looked up from his phone. “You know, everyone always assumes I’m gonna drive. What if I have plans?”
“Do you?”
“I could.”
“I’ll drive,” I said.
“I’ll do it, I’m just saying,” Dash replied, tapping out something on his phone.
Brit leaned into him. “Tell your man we say hi. Tell him you say—” She started making kissing sounds by Dash’s ear.
“Can you not?” he said.
“Did you get all that?” She made several more kissing sounds.
“Anyway,” I said, before she could do any more Foley work. “It’s on the seventeenth. So just let me know. If you want to go.” I glanced at August.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“In Springfield.”
“How far?”
“Like two and a half hours?”
“So the radius of how close she’ll come to Acadia is max two and a half hours.”
Terrance nodded. He had settled on the floor as well. “She couldn’t declare the state of Illinois entirely dead to her, or else she could never play Chicago.”
“You know, I’ve been doing some reading—” I began.
“Of course you have,” Brit interjected.
“Old articles and stuff, and watching videos, going way back. It just seemed like she loved it here so much, before everything. Like before she actually got famous. I just don’t get why she wouldn’t want to come back.”
“Yeah because if it were up to you, we’d all just stay in Acadia,” Brit said.
“Because Acadia is the best place in the world.”
“Is it? Is it really? Do you really love having to drive forty minutes just to get to Walmart? Do you super love the isolation? Screw that, do you love how small-minded and racist people can be sometimes?”
“There isn’t racism in Acadia.”
“Sophie.” Brit gave a harsh bark of a laugh. “Fuck. Just because you’ve never experienced something doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”
I blinked.
“All that being said, I gotta wonder, how can you know it’s the best place in the world when you’ve never even been anywhere?”
“I’ve been places,” I said.
She kept right on going. “Look, I know how it’s gonna go. You’re gonna go to school as close as you can, and when you’re finished, you’ll move back and get a job and live here for the rest of your life and die and be buried at Oak Hill cemetery and fertilize the very earth of the town you love so much. But not everyone wants that, Soph, not everyone is happy being mediocre. Just look at Ciara. She wanted to get out.”
I didn’t speak.
“Brit,” Flora said softly, at the same time August said: “You’re wrong.”
Brit didn’t look his way, but instead blinked at me slowly, and then shook her head. “I didn’t mean—”
“You’re wrong,” August repeated, and turned to me. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting that. It’s not mediocre.”
I nodded. “I, uh.” I gestured backward, like that could convey I’m going to the restroom. Then I left.
* * *
Sometimes you just can’t help but think of the bad things. Sometimes something sparks it, like kindling, and suddenly they catch, one igniting another, random and unavoidable.
I thought about being four and losing the seashell I had brought to school for show-and-tell, the one my mom had lent me. I thought about being eight and Brit daring me to sneak a peek at the dead deer in Mr. Cabot’s garage, hanging from a beam wrapped in a sheet, blood flowing down the driveway. I thought about Ciara’s voice at the other end of the line: I just … I know it sucks, but I just don’t think I’m gonna make it back this summer. I think it’s better if I stay put.
But you said—
Sophie—
You said that we’d spend the summer together!