He was dressed like a Pilgrim, but sad as it was, that wasn’t actually weird. A lot of people in Redhood got dressed up for Founder’s Day, especially the old people. Old people love those big black buckle hats and billowy white shirts, I guess.
I glanced at the wide-brim straw hat he wore, then down at his shoes. Unpolished and missing buckles. He was lucky Grandmother wasn’t around. She would have tossed him into the bonfire, instead of a slip of paper that listed her regrets she was hoping to burn away.
The bonfire was the whole point of the Founder’s Day festival—the time we could let the fire eat up every bad feeling, thought, or secret we had and be free from it. That’s what Grandmother says. I think most people just came to make their s’mores.
The guy, whoever he was, waited until the man running the cart turned to help another customer before snatching some chestnuts for himself. He must have felt me staring, because he turned with a crooked grin and a wink.
Okay, then, I thought, and turned back to my drawing—only to immediately jump up to my feet. “Aw, crap!”
A glob of maple syrup had dripped from my Silence Cake onto the notebook page, and slowly made its way down onto my pants, where it pooled in the worst place imaginable. Awesome.
With a small sigh, I popped the rest of the treat into my mouth and tore out the ruined sheet of paper. A whole hour’s work, reduced to use as a napkin to wipe away sticky pumpkin leaf crumbs.
That’s right. Some towns get caramel apples. Others get a special chocolate treat as their claim to fame. We got fried pumpkin leaves.
Some backstory: way back, and I mean way back, before Redhood was even named Redhood, the small group of settlers that arrived with their terrible hats and frowns experienced an endless string of crop failures. During one particularly bad season, the wife of our town’s founder, Honor Redding, was left with nothing but the leaves of their sad, dying pumpkin field. Her name was Silence, which probably tells you everything you need to know about what was expected of her in life. Anyway, legend has it that she saved our fledgling town from starvation by sharing their pumpkin leaves and finding different ways to prepare them to survive the winter.
Since no one wants to eat a plain pumpkin leaf if they aren’t starving, we now fry them and dunk them in honey, maple syrup, or chocolate and slide a stick through a line of them to munch on. And we call them Silence Cakes in her honor because her husband, actually named Honor, gets credit for just about everything else.
The bong, bong, bong of the bell in the clock tower tolled. I looked up, frantic, checking the time—how was it already five o’clock?
Climbing onto the bench, I searched the heads and hats of the milling crowds, the volunteers who were beginning to light the thousands of candles that would eventually be added to floats or carried by the school choir as they sang during the parade. Prue had been pulled away by her group of friends, each dressed in the Academy’s navy blazer and plaid skirt, and my heart started hammering in my chest, just a little, when I realized I’d been so focused on my own stupid sketch I’d lost track of her completely.
But—there they were, by the haystack maze. I leaped down, charging through the line of tourists waiting for their chance to paint pumpkins.
There was a quartet of string musicians playing some dead composer’s song in the white gazebo, under a banner that read CELEBRATING 325 YEARS OF REDHOOD HISTORY. Just as they finished and people began to applaud, the black iron streetlamps flickered on. I tripped over one of the jack-o’-lanterns lining the sidewalk.
Crap. We’d have to run.
I shoved my way through the crowd around the gazebo, fighting through the sea of elbows and baby strollers.
“Watch it—”
“Hey!”
I ignored them. That is, until a hand gripped the back of my neck and yanked me so hard I dropped my backpack. One whiff was all I needed to know who the hand belonged to. Mr. Wickworth smelled like lemons and dry-erase markers. My stomach turned into a knot of wriggling worms.
“Mr. Redding. Would you care to explain this excessively rude behavior?”
Did you know that human beings can, in fact, cluck? I didn’t, not until Mr. Henry Wickworth found me dozing off in class on the first day of seventh-grade English at the Academy. His face turned a shade of purple not normally found in nature, and me and the rest of the class had to sit through a ten-minute rant about respectful behavior and rudeness, and how he’d be expecting an essay outlining the difference by the end of detention that same afternoon.
Yeah, detention on the first day of school. Detention every day for the entire first week of school, actually. So far, I’d written papers on disrespect, inconsiderateness, and honor. I thought he was actually going to take his ruler and break it over my head when he asked for one defining wiseacre, and I only wrote one sentence: I prefer smart aleck, sir.
The truth was, Mr. Wickworth spent more time watching those survival reality-TV shows on his school computer than he did teaching us. The walls of his classroom were decorated with quotes from famous authors I’m pretty sure he made up (“School is important. Pay attention in class.”—Ernest Hemingway). Trust me, if I had the choice between listening to an hour of TV static or sitting through one of his lessons, the static would be about a hundred thousand times more interesting.
“Well?” he said, fingers pinching my shoulders. “What do you have to say for yourself, Prosperity?”
Sometimes I wished I could be reprogrammed to think before I opened my mouth. “Since when do I have to say anything to you outside of class?”
You know when you try to cook an egg in the microwave, how the yolk starts to wiggle, then puff, then explodes all over the walls? I was pretty sure Mom would have had to take my uniform to the dry cleaners to get Mr. Wickworth’s brains out of the fabric if Prue hadn’t suddenly appeared.
“There you are, Prosper!” she said, brightly. Her friends trailed behind her, glaring at me over her shoulder. “Oh, hi, Mr. Wickworth! Are you enjoying the festival? Grandmother asked me to pass along a hello and to thank you for all your hard work.”
Mr. Wickworth’s hand lifted off me. I turned just in time to see the amazing change come over his face. His lips parted, and the face that had been as red as Prue’s fire-bright hair took on a delighted, rosy kind of pink. “Oh. Miss Redding. Forgive me, I didn’t see you there.”