Rise to the Sun

by Leah Johnson

  It’s maybe thirty seconds before I say, “Hey, um, sorry for the life-or-death moment there before, but would you mind giving me a hand?”

  It’s like my voice jolts her out of her own head, and she instantly sits up. She pushes my body a little to the left, hand gentle but insistent, while pulling the netting with the other. Before I know it, I’m back on my feet and eternally indebted to a stranger with a somehow perfectly stoic face. Despite everything, she manages to stand up, brush herself off, and look no worse for wear.

  I want to reach up and squish her cheeks together, just to ease her expression. She was easier to read before, when she was afraid for me, but now she looks sort of like a statue. Beautiful, but emotionless. Years of training, of standing in front of beautiful, unavailable people and seeing both a challenge and a home, have taught me that if I bat my eyes a certain way, or laugh at a joke that wasn’t all that funny, I could eventually get a reaction from her. One that would make me the center of her universe for as long as I had her attention.

  And it would feel good at the start—being noticed, shedding my skin to become someone worth keeping her eyes locked on for the length of our interaction. But it wouldn’t end feeling good. And Imani is right. I have to stop thinking that way. I have to stop inviting the devil to my doorstep and wondering why I keep getting burned.

  “You okay?” she asks, and I realize I’ve been staring for a beat too long. She waves her hand at the rubble of the campsite behind me and straightens her Ray-Bans. “I could, um, help.”

  “Oh my God, yes! Please.” It’s already an inhumane temperature since me and Imani arrived so close to noon. We had a gas station burrito incident that incapacitated Imani about three hours after we’d left Indy this morning. I’m still trying to put the whole thing out of my mind. We both had our pride bruised in the bathroom of that Speedway, to be honest.

  I step out of my tent cocoon so that she can help herself to the materials, and immediately remember why the message boards also said to be careful about going barefoot around a campsite. A sharp pain shoots through my foot, and I realize I’ve stepped on one of those stupid pointy metal hook things that are supposed to keep the tent in the ground.

  I wince, and Great Skin immediately reaches for my arm.

  “Come on.” She looks down at my foot. “I have first aid.”

  I don’t even argue as she almost completely supports my weight and walks me to Imani’s SUV. She helps me hop up onto the hatch, and promises to be right back. I straighten myself out while she rushes down the car lane to get her first aid kit from her truck. I wish I had a mirror, but since I don’t, I make do with a simple inventory of my current state. I smooth down my mini dress, adjust my bun, and clean my sunglasses off before she comes back with a small plastic red box with the white medical plus symbol on top.

  I drop my hands into my lap like I wasn’t just trying to get photo-ready moments before, a little embarrassed even though I probably shouldn’t be. She looks like the kind of person who just rolls out of bed flawless, makeup-free yet perfect complexion, and I envy that ease.

  “Very official,” I say, since she’s gone silent again. “I can’t believe I forgot to bring a first aid kit. It’s like the first thing every message board said to bring.”

  She hums but doesn’t respond, squirts some hand sanitizer into her palms, rubs it in, and then reaches for my foot. She sets to work with Neosporin and an assured touch, and her silence makes me jittery. I really don’t do well with awkward silences.

  “Normally it takes until a second date before people unveil the foot fetish.”

  If I could facepalm hard enough to project myself back in time to before I said that, I totally would.

  “I’m more of a hand girl myself,” she says, deadpan. “But thanks.”

  At that, I laugh so loud it’s probably a little rude, if her confused expression is anything to go from. I realize that she’s saved my life, offered to set up my campsite, and repaired my foot after a feat of my particular brand of clumsiness, and I don’t even know her name. She smooths the bandage over my heel and eases my foot back down before I extend my hand.

  “I’m Olivia.” She takes it after a little too long and shakes once. “I promise I’m normally more together than this. And that my jokes usually land with a splash and not a thud.”

  “You don’t say.” Her voice is barely audible, but I can see the way one side of her mouth quirks up clear as day. “Toni.” She puts her first aid kit into her fanny pack and shrugs. “When you’ve been here as many times as I have, you don’t forget your Band-Aids.”

  Instead of continuing the conversation, Toni gets right to business. She collects all the stray tent debris that I’ve left scattered around the campsite and doesn’t even pull out any directions before taking the pieces and making right everything I pretty much destroyed. Her phone vibrates next to me where she set it on the hatch along with the first aid kit.

  “Toni?” I pick it up and hold it out to her. “Someone’s calling you.”

  When she reaches for it, she immediately turns it on speaker and sets it in one of the camping chairs so that her hands remain free to work.

  “Bad news, T-Bird!” A guy’s voice crackles over the speaker, and Toni immediately stops what she’s doing. She goes still all over. The guy continues like he doesn’t even expect a response. “All the solo slots for the Golden Apple are filled.”

  She picks up her phone slowly, clicks it off speaker, and brings it to her ear so all I can hear is her end of the conversation.

  “That’s not possible,” she whisper-shouts. She shakes her head as he responds. She adds quieter, almost inaudible, “Peter, they can’t be. I’m not—I can’t be a duo.”

  The Golden Apple. It’s all over every message board about this festival. If I thought for even a second that my experience in the back row of intermediate chorus would be enough to get me anywhere, I would’ve entered myself just for the principle of the thing. But the way Toni’s face looks right now, completely lost, I know this wasn’t just a thing she wanted to do for her scrapbook.

  And just like that, a different type of plan begins to come together. No wardrobe changes, no shifting my personality to be something I think she might like me to be—a plan that can help pull things together instead of my usual brand of destruction. She needs someone to compete with. I need a distraction.

  She hangs up and drops down into the chair beside her. I hop off the hatch and tap her on her shoulder. She just barely turns around, and when she does, it’s almost like she’d forgotten I was there.

  I’ve become kind of a master at assuming the roles people want me to play. I know everything you could possible need to know about free-range chicken farming from dating Hilton from Future Famers of America. I got incredibly good at drawing compelling signs when I was with Brandon, the president of Park Meade High School’s PETA chapter. I even considered signing up for Peace Corps when Jenna from AP Lit said she’d only ever be with a girl who was dedicated to public service.

  I’m a chameleon, constantly shifting to match whatever’s around me.

  But the thing about changing your skin to become something or someone else is it requires constant maintenance to keep up. And when I can’t—when the cracks in the surface start to show—that’s when I become a person who does more harm than good.

  My hands sweat at the thought of what it looks like when I get involved in someone’s life, when I hurt them without meaning to. I wipe them on the hem of my dress and shake my head to clear it. No, this weekend I’m letting go of all of that. I’ve only packed my favorite dresses, my cutest sandals. I’m being my best self this weekend. I’m not making the same mistakes I always make. And this is the way to do it.

  “Toni,” I say, trying to project as much confidence and assuredness as I can into my voice. I realize with a wave of awareness that I really need this. More than just a fun weekend with my bestie, I need to do something good for someone, and for myself. I n
eed her to say yes.

  “I think I can help.”

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  “No.”

  I turn back to the tent to finish helping this girl and get back to whatever remains of my weekend. Now that I can’t compete in the Golden Apple, this whole thing is barely more than another incoming college student getting a last hurrah before moving to campus. It feels cliché and empty and all the things I never wanted.

  “Well, why not?” Olivia maneuvers around so she’s directly in my line of sight and puts her hands on her hips. She cocks her head to the side like she has the audacity to be indignant. “You need me, and I just volunteered out of the goodness of my heart. I’m also a totally adequate singer. You should be saying thank you.”

  I lower my sunglasses so I can look at her without any tint coloring it. She’s short, but her bun full of braids adds nearly a foot to her stature. Her face is perfectly made up, even despite the asthma/tent attack earlier, her round cheeks practically glowing. She’s light skinned enough that I can already see the redness from an inevitable sunburn inching across her exposed shoulders. And even though her expression is currently twisted into a scowl, she’s … cute. That’s strike one.

  “Because I don’t do group work,” I finally answer. “And I don’t take favors.”

  I push my glasses back up and weave one of the aluminum poles through the tent’s nylon. This whole interaction is slowing me down. That’s strike two.

  Maybe it was always meant to be this way. What kind of clarity was I supposed to get from a performance where I bombed? I haven’t even managed to pick through an entire song for eight months. I’ve barely been able to stomach the thought of playing again since Dad’s funeral. Why did I think coming here and entering this X Factor knockoff contest was going to help me decide what to do with my life? It was all a longshot anyway.

  “But!” She huffs. “Remember back there when you saved my life? Those were good times, weren’t they? We made some real memories, I’d say.”

  “Why are you pressing this so hard?” I stare at her.

  I realize this is the longest conversation I’ve had with anyone that isn’t my mom or Peter in longer than I can remember. I’ve only known this girl for thirty minutes and she’s managed to blow past years and years of practice of saying the bare minimum and only when spoken to. That’s strike three.

  “Actually, don’t answer. I don’t need to know.” I wipe my hands on my shorts and jerk my head toward her tent. This interaction being over is past due. “Have a good weekend.”

  I start in the direction of the Core and text Peter that I’m heading to him. My mind is whirring with everything not competing in the Golden Apple will mean. Adulthood is just a series of compromises. With no direction for the future, I spend four years at a college I don’t want to attend. I graduate with a degree I don’t care about and start a career that I stumble into and then I stick with it for forty years. My mom is proud because I’ve done the right thing, the stable thing, but before I know it, I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be seventeen and have options. Even if I have no idea what those options are, or how to pursue them.

  I’m staring down the barrel of the rest of my life, and I don’t like what it promises.

  I instinctively walk a little faster, trying to go somewhere, anywhere I can escape my own fate.

  “Wait!” I look over my shoulder and Olivia is running toward me. Or, well, running as well as she can given the way her chunky sandals are currently clomping against the wide gravel road that leads to the Core. When she reaches me, she immediately takes a hit of her inhaler and sighs. “What if it were a trade?”

  I blink. “What?”

  “You scratch my back, I scratch yours. Quid pro quo. My cart, your wagon. I’ve dated like four speech and debate kids, by the way, so I have a million of these euphemisms.”

  She’s smiling, and it’s bright and winning and if I were another type of person with a different type of damage, I’d probably be charmed. But I’m not. So as it stands, I’m just getting more and more frustrated.

  “You don’t make sense.”

  I keep walking, but she marches right alongside me. I’ve never seen someone so unwilling to be shaken, especially by me, except for maybe Peter. Normally it doesn’t take much more than a look to keep people from sitting at my table in the cafeteria or trying to partner with me in AP Chem or sell me something on the street. There’s a reason my classmates used to call me Mrs. Claus, and it’s not because of my proclivity for cookie baking and rosy cheeks.

  It’s because I’m the ice queen. And I’m usually very good at it.

  “I do make sense, Grumpy Gussie, you’re just not paying attention,” she says. “I’m saying we make this a trade. Then it’s less like I’m doing you a favor and more like this is an even exchange. A meeting of the minds!”

  I stop. I don’t respond, and she takes that as her cue to continue with her proposal.

  “Have you heard of #FoundAtFarmland?”

  Of course. Of freaking course this girl wants help finding those stupid apples for that stupid scavenger hunt. I should have guessed. All Farmland newbies fall into the trap of trying to accomplish those promotional gimmicks. One year it’s a social media campaign run by Live Nation to see who can add the most posts to their hashtag in exchange for a year’s worth of free concert tickets. The next it’s something even more obnoxious. And it’s never about the music.

  Past the fact that it’s ridiculous, and honestly mortifying (my dad would roll over in his grave if he knew I was participating in some capitalist marketing scheme that used live music as a means to ply people into buying more and consuming more), it’s also impossible. And I tell her so.

  “This festival is on seven hundred acres of land. There’s no way you’ll find them all.”

  “It’s not impossible for someone like you. Someone who knows this place as well as you must after so many years of being here.” She shrugs. “If you need me just as badly as I need you, then you know I can’t let you down. Right?”

  She pushes her heart-shaped sunglasses into her hair and holds out a hand like it’s already a done deal. Like her argument has been made and it was so undeniably effective I have no choice but to buy in.

  And maybe she’s right. What choice do I have? Without any other plans, I’m headed to Bloomington next week, no questions asked. I’ll be the daughter my mom raised me to be, one who makes solid decisions and sticks to them. So unless I get on stage, and like my dad always said, it reveals another option, then college is it. That’s how this works.

  “I would really like to win that car.” Olivia holds her hand up even higher and smiles even wider. “And I would like to help you win that competition. So, what do you say?”

  I don’t have any more strikes to spare, so I decide to wipe the slate clean. A fresh start.

  I try to settle the screaming in the back of my brain telling me that this is a bad idea, that Toni Foster doesn’t do this, that I can’t do this, that I should not do this. That the more you rely on other people, the easier it is to get screwed over. I take her hand and do my best to ignore how her palm fits perfectly in mine.

  “Fine.” I shake once. “I’m in.”

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  When I leave Toni near the campsites to find Imani and catch her up on the change of plans for the weekend, I expect to see my best friend doing a lot of things. Maybe standing directly in front of a huge fan in the Core, trying to cool down from what she called “unconscionable heat” earlier. Or even grabbing a snack at that taco cart that everyone on the message boards said was a Farmland can’t-miss food. I would have gone so far as to even say maybe she’s found a band playing and is already enjoying a set.

  I never would have expected her to be talking to a guy. And from what I can see, he’s a cute guy!

  “Olivia! Over here.” She waves me closer once she stops me weaving through the crowd of people. It took me a surprisingly long time to get through
security because they were so thorough, long enough that my best friend has been replaced with an unusually chipper clone.

  When I get closer to the taco cart they’re standing near—so she did end up eating at the taco cart!—the guy, who has to be around our age, smiles like I’m his long-lost buddy back from battle. I do a quick inventory: His curly black hair is tucked under an old baseball cap and his long, skinny brown arms remind me a little bit of those wobbly things from car dealership parking lots. He’s basketball player tall, but with none of the solid athleticism that any of the basketball players I’ve dated have had. And he’s wearing a crop top. With jorts.

  It takes all of five seconds before I decide to claim him as my lanky cinnamon roll son.

  He holds a hand up for a high five, which I immediately reciprocate. I’m nothing if not a sucker for an enthusiastic high five.

  “Peter Menon, nice to meet you,” he says. I look over at Imani and she kind of shrugs, like she’s as confused as I am about why she’s conversing with a stranger. It’s not that Imani isn’t social—she is. Just, usually only with people we already know. She’s never been a huge fan of strangers. That’s my territory. “Me and Imani were just bonding over the unusual spiciness of these things.”

  “You should have seen us. It was like that Paul Rudd Hot Ones meme.”

  They laugh at this tiny inside joke thing, but I don’t blame them because who doesn’t love Paul Rudd? I reach for the Fujifilm mini hanging around my neck to snap a picture of the two of them mid-snort. I shake it out and smile. Huh. Look at us.

  “You guys have great energy,” he says, still smiling. He snaps once. “Yo! You two should meet my friend. I’m getting ready to meet up with her over near the Farmland sign. She’s signing up for the Golden Apple.” He pulls his phone from his pocket and scrolls through it to get to his texts. “You two have to hear her voice! She’s amazing.”