THOMAS: I want to hear more. By the way, the quote is right.
DAVID: Of course it is. Anyway, my grandfather invested so much in the festival, because he thought it brought people together. And I guess, even though my parents aren’t a great fit, and my dad is a total d-bag, I feel . . . I don’t know . . . a sense of responsibility.
THOMAS: That’s deep, Winters.
DAVID: I’m thinking about making a donation, but I know it’ll piss my dad off.
THOMAS: What doesn’t piss your dad off?
DAVID: If I do it, I’m not sure . . . I’m not sure if we can come back from it. It’ll be a betrayal.
THOMAS: Why don’t you wait and see if you win LaserCon?
DAVID: True.
THOMAS: That way you don’t necessarily have to burn the bridge with your dad.
DAVID: Good point.
THOMAS: You’re fighting awfully hard to stay there.
DAVID: Unexpectedly, yes.
THOMAS: Happy in Podunk, a memoir by David Winters.
DAVID: Don’t call it Podunk.
THOMAS: I’ve been waiting months for you to tell me that.
DAVID: (Laughs)
THOMAS: What can I do to help Save. The. Festival?
DAVID: How do you feel about kickball?
THOMAS: Like I’m on my way to Otters Holt right now.
DAVID: No, seriously.
THOMAS: I was serious. Name the time and the place.
DAVID: Saturday after LaserCon.
THOMAS. Consider it done. Hey, you told Billie the truth about the Corn Dolly stuff yet?
DAVID: No.
THOMAS: Clock’s ticking.
DAVID: I know. I know.
25
I shower off the hot dog and humiliation and retreat to the garage to flatten some aluminum cans with a mallet.
Janie Lee is turning the screws on the bow of her violin, tightening the hairs to practice. When they are perfectly taut, she applies the rosin. I like to watch her complete this methodical process. It is the most disciplined thing she does, and has always told me so much about her.
She followed me home from the game like a puppy. We didn’t discuss the concern in her eyes, but I saw it there, leaning toward me like a conversation. “I don’t need to talk about it,” I said as I hung her borrowed clothes from the handle above the backseat window. But she probably did need to talk about it. Because any time I am not fine, or she thinks I am not fine, it pecks at her like a chicken.
She plays the sad, lonely notes from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major.
To make matters worse, she wears the same clothes from the night of the fire—the dream clothes. Pajamas and flannel and lips I tried to kiss off her face.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: Murdered by UGGs.
These feelings need sorting. Just friends is better, I think.
I am capable of mind-over-mattering anything. For instance . . . these cans. They were round beverage holders. Nearly forty of them have gone under my X-Acto knife and lie like thin sheets of aluminum paper on the worktable, ready to be Guinevere’s breastplate. After I make this, I will move on to the Beauty and the Beast costumes Davey says will win us a thousand dollars. The supplies are set up on the far wall. Maybe I’ll start tonight after Janie Lee goes home.
One long note rises from the violin. It is not part of a known song. I stop flattening the cans. “What is it?” I ask.
She cuts big clear eyes toward the driveway, toward something unseen. “I was just thinking about you standing up there tonight,” she says.
The aluminum can is as flat as my mallet will make it. “I was a disaster.”
“You weren’t,” she insists. “You were just yourself. The mayor was an asshole.”
We battle eye on eye, me knowing that if I say, Me being myself is the problem, then she has a best friend obligation to dispute me. Something sugary and sweet like, Woods and I thought you were perfect. Which A) discounts the praise entirely, and B) is utter bullshit.
“Regardless of what the mayor said, I looked awful.”
“You didn’t.”
I skip this praise too. “I was worried about Davey. His dad, man, he’s a ruckus.” Ruckus is the nicest word in my vocabulary for John Winters. “I couldn’t make myself go and get ready.”
“Fifty told me. Said Davey’s dad is pressuring him to move back to Nashville.”
“Yeah.”
She looks uncertain. She asks, “How will you feel about that?”
“I’ll miss him.”
Davey is Hexagon, but he does not specifically belong to her the way it feels that he does to me. She is sad on my behalf, but it only stretches so far. “Are you going to kiss him?” she asks.
Her fingertips idly touch the hair on her bow, so I’m aware that she’s very unfocused. She is very methodical about the oils in her skin and their relationship to all things violin.
I am honest with her. “I would like to. You know, just to see if anything is there. I’m not even sure if he’s available.”
“I have people like that.”
That’s when my heart starts its galloping. Pieces of the dream, ones that had drifted hazily away, come punching back to reality.
“You know the day of the Hexagon of Love?” she asks.
I set the mallet away. “Sure,” I say.
“I know you were hurt about Woods putting you on the guys’ side, but did you notice anything else?”
What else was there to notice? Woods picking Mary Dancy? Old news. He does not, nor did he ever like her, and we both know that. This was either a diversionary tactic or cowardly action. I remind her of this, and she plays three lines of a Lindsey Stirling song she’s been obsessing over. Then she says, “Did you see our names? How it almost looked like they matched?”
I take my mallet back. Banging it against the cans, over and over, I consider my options. To answer is to take a flying leap into dangerous territory. Her shirt is blue, and I am noticing that her eyes are bluer right now than they were when she was dressed up earlier. She is noticing I am not answering her.
With the larger end of the violin, she pokes my stomach. “McCaffrey?”
“Yeah, I saw,” I admit.
“And what did it make you think?”
She is opening a door. We both hear the hinges squeak. She told me a week ago that just friends is better. What has changed other than me wearing upchucked hot dog in front of the whole town? Nothing. And pity is a terrible reason to kiss someone you love.
I flatten my voice, remove every trace of passion like I am sweeping the corner of a dusty room. “I was pretty upset about the whole you’re-a-dude thing. I didn’t think about much else.”