Bethany begins to hold out a hand, but Rufus bounds in for a hug, pulling her against his painted chest. “So great to meet you. Agh, sorry about that!” he cries, swatting at the smudges on her shirt.
“Oh my God, is that your stick?” Rebekah squeals, pointing to a pole in the ground with something like a decapitated head on top.
“Yeah, do you like it?” Rufus pounces on the pole, hauls it up, and proffers the head. “I made it out of foam and painted the eyes on. It’s Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed giant. Watching over our campsite.”
“Argus,” Bethany echoes. “That’s the name of my dad’s company. It’s a home inspection business.”
“That’s right!” Rebekah cries, dazzled.
“Argus, watching over everything,” Rufus muses, gazing at the severed head.
He helps them erect their tent and arrange their supplies. He talks fast, moves fast, and seems much younger than Bethany knows him to be. She feels a kind of disappointment at this, as if Rebekah had purposely deceived her, built him up as something greater.
Rebekah grabs her by the elbow. “Come on, I don’t want to miss Barterhouse!”
“What about Rufus?” Bethany asks.
“He likes to stay at the campsite.”
As Rebekah pulls her along, Bethany looks for Amos. “Where’s your brother?”
“Probably already out in front of the stage.”
They hurry out of the dusty campground and across the field of flattened grass leading to the main stage. Bethany is sweating, and the dirt has come through her sandals and made ankle socks. The festivalgoers throng around them. It is staggering to see so many young people in one place. There are girls in bikini tops, smiling at Bethany and Rebekah as if privy to a shared secret. One bikini-topped girl wears an enormous feathered Indian headdress. One walks by with no bikini at all, just yellow and black paint upon her breasts, two big black-eyed Susans. Bethany is demure in contrast, in the studded shorts and shirttail tee she’d agonized over.
“Look at that!” Rebekah points. Young men in Victorian clothing, women in leafy halter tops, all perched high on stilts. They strut in circles, gesticulating like circus performers. It is hard to tell the difference between regular people and entertainers here. It seems to Bethany that everyone is imbued with some stardust indigenous to this festival and inaccessible elsewhere. The beauty around her is not exclusionary but inclusive. Just by being there, she might absorb it through her skin and begin to glimmer.
They reach the main stage where Barterhouse, a bearded jam band, is riding an upward swell of guitar licks to heaven. Rebekah begins to sway. Everyone is dancing, the boys wiggling in place, the girls swinging their hair. And this, Bethany remembers with a thrill, is just the beginning of the festival.
Rebekah taps her on the shoulder and holds out a thin, warped cigarette that has materialized out of nowhere. Bethany shakes her head. “You know I don’t smoke.”
Rebekah rolls her eyes. “Here, just take it.”
“Why?”
“It’s all part of the experience.”
Bethany puts the wet end into her mouth and pulls a few times, coughing, then hands it back to Rebekah, who shoos it away.
“Pass it on.”
Bethany looks around, makes eye contact with a shirtless guy in a bandanna. He smiles and accepts the joint. “Peace, man,” he actually says to her.
She is relieved, as if she’s rid herself of a hot potato. There are no police in the crowd, she is sure, but glances around despite herself.
She lets herself sway now, feeling the splash of the cymbal. The weed has made her throat dry. She has tried it only once before, at a cast party. The colors around her are candy bright. A fuzzy rainbow totem joggles above the crowd like a neon caterpillar, along with an impaled beach ball and some crude puppets. People dance with foil pinwheels, dream catchers, bubble wands. It’s as if they’ve all come together to achieve a giant resurrection of childhood. Bethany laughs. All at once she grasps something so basic: this is what people mean when they sing about getting back to the garden.
Bethany and Rebekah last for the rest of the set, until they are both parched. Back at the campground, they fill their Thermoses with water and drop into chairs under the canopy. Rufus is picking out a tune on a strange little guitar. The other men are still under the canopy, drinking out of Solo cups. Their sunglasses make it hard to tell if they are awake or sleeping. Bethany doesn’t recognize any of them from town. There don’t seem to be any girls besides Rebekah and herself.
Rebekah taps one of the guys on the knee and he turns toward her with a slow smile.
“Hey, Chris, this is my friend Bethany.”
“Hey,” he says.
“Chris is from Old Cranbury, too.”
He shifts his sunglasses to nest in a sheaf of sandy hair. His heavy eyelids reveal half-pools of languid blue. The surrounding skin is pale where the sunglasses were; the rest of his face is the bronze of year-round exposure.
“Nah, my parents just moved there a couple years ago.”