Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Help me with this side, Elodee,” Dad says. “But be gentle. The root’s the most important part.”

  I nod and go to Dad’s side, but I’m uneasy about unearthing the beautiful plant.

  Dad prepares a transfer bed for the bush, a place where the plant will go as it travels from the place we’ve always lived to the new place, where we’ve only ever visited once before.

  When Dad needs a break, I take one, too, and finally Naomi joins me outside.

  “Are you all packed?” Naomi asks, sounding like Mom.

  “Yeah. It’s weird not having anything in the dresser anymore.”

  “I don’t know what to bring. Do you think they dress the same in Eventown? Do you remember?”

  “I think so?” We stayed in Eventown for a weekend two years ago, the whole family, and it was the best weekend of my life. And everyone else’s. There’s an amazing ice cream shop in the center of town, with new flavors every day. There are rosebushes everywhere, and hills on all sides, perfect for hikes that lead to waterfalls or fields for picnicking or gardens of more roses in even more colors. Here in Juniper, I don’t like hiking at all. My shoulders get cold while my feet get hot. Bugs bite my thighs and dirt gets in my eyes and the end of the hike only ever leads us back to the beginning.

  In Eventown, I loved hiking. It was somehow always the perfect temperature, and the view at the end was always worth it.

  “Pack stuff for hiking,” I tell Naomi. “Do you remember yelling all our secrets at the top of that one hill? We have to do that again.” It was one of the best days in Eventown. The air felt so good and the top of the hill felt so far away from everything that we screamed out secrets at the tops of our lungs. Then a family of hikers came up right behind us and we all giggled, knowing that they’d heard about who Naomi had a crush on and what I really thought of our music teacher and a bunch of other secrets that no one was supposed to actually hear.

  Naomi was so embarrassed she threw the picnic blanket over her head, but I didn’t mind one bit. I had learned by then that it wasn’t so bad when people thought you were strange.

  “Being weird is the same as being brave,” I’d been told. It felt especially true that day, so I told Naomi. She didn’t really agree. She still doesn’t. So I try to be brave and weird enough for both of us.

  It’s not as fun as being brave and weird with someone else.

  “I don’t have hiking stuff,” Naomi says. “I don’t want to go.” I guess she’s not remembering the same things I am. We have the same almost-red-but-really-actually-brown hair and pale freckly skin, the same extra-brown eyes and sharp elbows and crooked front teeth, but sometimes we forget to be the same in all the most important ways.

  “Maybe it will be fun,” I say. “Maybe Mom and Dad will like it. Remember when we visited, how they danced at dinner, how they let us stay up late to play board games, how no one got burned at the beach?”

  “I remember,” Naomi says.

  “Remember how when we visited you finally perfected a back handspring and I made a cake that didn’t fall and everything smelled like roses?”

  Naomi nods. I’m not sure about the move either, but Mom and Dad want us to be positive about it, and I want Mom and Dad to be happy, so I work on my smile and a chipper voice and hope Naomi comes around too. I focus on all those happy Eventown memories and hope that maybe, maybe, living there will be as good as visiting was.

  “What are you going to miss most?” I ask. I’m thinking maybe if I know what it is, I can make sure we have it in Eventown. Saturdays at the mall, the same strip of duct tape across our bedroom for her to practice her beam routine on; I’ll even let her keep the top bunk and I’ll stay on the bottom one.

  Naomi starts to cry, and I know what that means. I scoot closer to her and it feels like I could cry, too, but I work hard not to. Naomi and I promised that we’d be sad one at a time, so that there’s never too much sadness in one place. I make all the room in the world for Naomi’s tears now. I don’t even let myself sniffle from all the things I might miss too.

  Naomi walks over to the rosebush. She peers into the hole we’ve dug.

  “Careful!” I say. Naomi’s clumsy everywhere except the gym, and I’m terrified of her hurting Dad’s plant. I get the feeling that if something happened to the rosebush, Dad might not even be able to muster New Happy for a long, long time.

  “I’m careful.”

  “The roots are the most important part,” I say in my teacher voice. I am six minutes older than Naomi, and that means sometimes I get to boss her around. This time, though, Naomi doesn’t even roll her eyes. She sits on the ground, staring at the plant, half in the ground, half out. It’s getting overcast and it might rain, which will make getting the rosebush out even harder, but I know Dad will find a way. Naomi looks this way and that, trying to see all angles of the plant—the flowers, the roots, the thorns, the exact angle it’s set in the ground.

  “If roots are so important,” Naomi says at last, “why are we moving ours around?”

  3

  Moving Day

  Mom and Dad are packing up every room in the house but one, the green stripy one at the end of the hall.

  I don’t notice the one not-packed room until Sunday morning, when we’re almost ready to go.

  “We don’t need to bring any of that with us,” Mom says, and I guess that’s the end of the discussion because no one argues with her about it. We close the door.

  The house is dusty once we move things around, and Naomi can’t stop sneezing. I’m trying to sweep the living room floor, but her sneezes keep startling me into dropping my broom. Naomi’s sneezes are high pitched and impossible to ignore. Some days it’s funny, but today, Moving Day, I can’t stand it.

  “Why aren’t we bringing the TV?” Naomi asks, before another enormous sneeze zooms out of her.

  “Stop with all the sneezing!” I say.

  “I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can! Hold it in!”

  “You’re not supposed to hold in sneezes. It’s dangerous.”

  “That’s a myth.”

  “Achoo!”

  “Oh my GOD.”

  “Shut up, Elodee. People sneeze.”

  “You shut up!”

  “GIRLS.” Dad’s the one to finally interrupt us, not Mom, who is checking things off on an enormous pad of yellow legal paper. She has her fancy purple pen and her reading glasses perched on her nose and a very serious look on her face. She counts things out on her fingers and scans the room over and over.

  “Sorry,” Naomi and I mumble together. She’s my best friend in the world, but we fight at least once a day. Sometimes it’s about little stuff like sneezes or snores or the last cookie in the jar, and sometimes it’s about bigger things, like who is closer friends with Bess Patrickson or who Mom and Dad are easier on.

  “We don’t need to bring the TV,” Mom says, finally answering Naomi’s question.

  “We don’t? There’s one there?” I say.

  “Nope.” Mom smiles. I haven’t seen Mom’s smile much lately, so I want to grab it from her face and put it in my pocket, for safekeeping.

  “I don’t get it,” Naomi says.

  Dad gives Mom a Look, one that says she should stop talking or change the subject or offer us sundaes as distraction, but Mom doesn’t notice the Look.

  “No one watches TV in Eventown. Don’t you girls remember that?”

  Naomi and I wait for Mom to laugh or Dad to roll his eyes. They don’t. Dad looks at his hands and Mom smiles like no TV is the normalest thing in the world.

  I hadn’t remembered that we didn’t watch TV in Eventown, but I guess we didn’t. I know that Naomi and I read a bunch of books we’d brought from home—a whole series about a girl pirate and another one about firefighting cats. We loved them both. Maybe Mom’s right. I don’t recall a movie night while we were there or hours of cartoons or even Mom and Dad watching the news and telling us to play outside.

  I wonder if
there’s a movie theater in Eventown. The one in Juniper has sticky leather seats and smells like day-old popcorn and only ever plays movies with lots of cars and shooting and earthquakes and cartoon princesses. I won’t miss any of that, but once a year, on Christmas Eve, Mom and Dad take us to a midnight movie and we eat gingerbread in the back row and talk loud about nothing because no one else is sharing the theater with us.

  I guess I’d miss that one night a year. But you don’t stay in a town with a depressing movie theater just for that one night a year.

  I open my mouth to ask about Christmas Eve and Eventown movie theaters, but Naomi’s still stuck on the television.

  “No TV ever?” Naomi’s voice is small and wavering, but Mom doesn’t notice.

  “Not ever!” Mom says.

  “What about internet?” Naomi says.

  “None of that either!” Mom says. “Just a computer in the library for research and emergencies!”

  It’s a lot to take in.

  “It’ll be okay, girls,” Dad says. That’s what he says all the time now, about things that are most definitely not okay. Dad seems to think that if he says things will be okay, we’ll suddenly feel better. We try to make that be true, but it really, really isn’t.

  I haven’t thought to look around to see what else we aren’t bringing, but I do it now with Naomi, running from room to room to see what’s left behind. Mom’s not bringing her old-timey record player or all the records she’s collected over the years, making us stop at yard sales in the middle of nowhere to check out what they’re selling for a dollar a record. She’s leaving behind shelves of books and a bunch of framed photographs of the family and a big quilt that Aunt March made us when we were babies. She’s leaving behind all of our winter coats and hats and scarves, our silver sled, and a painting of the sun that has been in our living room forever.

  “Why aren’t we bringing all our stuff?” I ask when we’re back in the living room with the piles of boxes and sheepish Dad and cheerful Mom.

  “Oh, Bess’s mom is going to run a nice yard sale to get rid of some of it, and the new people who bought the house want to keep a lot of our other stuff. We don’t need to drag it along. The house in Eventown is all furnished and ready for us!”

  “I don’t want to go,” Naomi whisper-whines.

  I yell for the both of us. “We’re not going! We’re not leaving our home!”

  “We’re starting over,” Mom says. She won’t be shaken up. She’s refusing. “It’s for the best.”

  “There will still be gymnastics for you, Naomi, and a beautiful kitchen for you, Elodee, and lots of gardening for me,” Dad says.

  “What’s Mom bringing for her?” I ask. I noticed her computer has been left behind, the book she was working on presumably abandoned too.

  “Eventown is for me,” Mom says. “I won’t need anything else.”

  4

  My Favorite Naomi

  Bess Patrickson lives a few houses away from us, and she comes by to say goodbye, along with Flora Alvarez and a pouty, nervous Jenny Horowitz. They must have all slept over at Bess’s house last night. They have that sleepover look—nails painted the same color and sleepy eyes and a thousand new inside jokes trembling between them.

  They stand in a line and offer us one hug each and a card with all their signatures on it. Jenny drew hers with a heart. Flora wrote hers bigger than the rest, as if we might otherwise miss it. And Bess wrote us both a little note about how much she’ll miss us. The five of us stand in the driveway and talk about things that won’t matter the instant we leave town. The math test last week. Jenny’s cute shoes. What we had for dinner the night before. It’s almost like we’re already gone, living different lives before our car even pulls away.

  It begins to drizzle. The only person with an umbrella is Bess, so we all huddle under it.

  Except Naomi. It drives Mom crazy, but Naomi likes standing in the rain. She’ll come in from a rainy day soaking wet, her clothes ruined, her hair messy and dripping, her mouth in a breakfast-for-dinner smile.

  “Get under here,” Jenny orders, but Naomi’s not having it.

  “And miss all this?” she says, spreading her arms wide and letting the drizzle become a downpour right on top of her head. It’s the only thing Naomi does that no one else does, a part of her that is weird and magical. Mostly Naomi wants to do what everyone else does. She likes fitting in.

  I guess it takes loving the rain so, so much to make her stop caring what everyone else thinks. Naomi in the rain, not caring about what other people think is my favorite Naomi, so I wish for rain a lot, especially lately.

  “Weirdo,” Jenny says with an eye roll. She has called me that same word a lot of times before. Sometimes I think that if I didn’t have Naomi, none of them would be friends with me at all. They prefer the way Naomi wears her hair in a shiny ponytail and that she’s quiet and polite with parents and teachers. They like that she laughs at their jokes and wears normal, boring outfits and buys the same brand of raspberry soap and jeans and monogrammed backpack as everyone else.

  Naomi is not the weirdo. She never has been. So it sounds especially sharp when Jenny calls her one. Naomi doesn’t notice. She’s smelling the rain. To me it smells like nothing, like air. But Naomi says it smells a little grassy and a little springy and a little like wonder. When I asked what kind of cake she wanted me to try to make for our twelfth birthday this spring, she said she’d like a rain-flavored one.

  I haven’t been able to figure that mystery out yet. Maybe in Eventown.

  Under the umbrella, we do not talk about what happened yesterday at school. Still, Jenny won’t meet my gaze. Her glasses seem intact, luckily, and I bet she’s been counting down the seconds until we’re all the way out of Juniper.

  “Mom says Eventown is the perfect place for you to go,” Flora says. “She read an article about it. Everyone who lives there loves it.”

  “My dad said that too,” Bess says. “He said it’s not the kind of place we would ever go because it’s sort of a weird place? But he said you guys need a change.”

  Jenny looks at the ground and nods. Naomi crosses her arms over her chest and focuses on the rain hitting her skin. I have never been so aware of adults talking about me and my family and our decisions. It freaks me out.

  “Well, he’s wrong,” I snap. “Eventown’s normal, and we don’t need a change anyway.”

  “I’m trying to be nice,” Bess says.

  “We’re all being nice,” Jenny says. “We’ve all been nice.” She gestures to their card, like it’s something really special and impressive. It’s not.

  “We try so hard and you guys don’t try at all,” Flora says. I feel yesterday’s anger bubbling again. It’s clear from the way they’re speaking that they’ve had a zillion conversations about Naomi and me and how not-fun and not-happy and not-the-same we’ve been these last few months. I scoot closer to Naomi. Away from the umbrella. I’d rather have her to hold on to. I need to be protected from our friends more than I need to be shielded from the rain.

  The rain comes down harder, and I’m drenched in a moment, but it’s worth it to be close to my twin.

  “Sounds like you all will be just fine without us,” I say, and Naomi nods.

  “We came to say goodbye! We brought the card!” Bess says. “Even after everything that happened this week!”

  “Probably because your parents told you to,” Naomi says, and as soon as she says it I know it’s true. A year ago, Bess would have been here because she wanted to be, because she couldn’t imagine life without us, because she needed to weep into our arms and wave as we pulled out of the driveway. A year ago, we’d have had plans to be pen pals, to visit over summer break, to call and text each other all the time.

  Today, Bess, Jenny, and Flora exchange a look that confirms exactly what Naomi just said. Their parents made them come. As soon as they leave they’ll probably walk to the mall and try on lip gloss at the makeup counter before eating pretzels by t
he fountain.

  “You’re not going to miss us,” I say. All three girls look at each other and then at their feet, and I know it’s true. They’ll be relieved that they can stop worrying about us, stop checking in on us when their parents tell them to, stop trying to make us laugh when we don’t feel like it.

  “You guys have each other, at least,” Bess says. “When I moved here I was all by myself.” She shrugs, like that’s the final word on our big move. The other girls nod, too, and squirm. They want to leave. They wish we were already gone.

  “Sure,” Naomi and I say in unison. It’s a true and not-true statement. It’s good, to have each other. But it doesn’t mean we don’t need anyone else.

  I don’t care much about the rain and I’m too loud for Naomi. Naomi doesn’t like cooking or baking or even really eating my finished projects. She likes pizza and chicken parmesan and French fries and not much else. She wrinkles her nose at spices and new flavors and the way the kitchen smells after I’ve been messing around in it all day. She rolls her eyes when I sing in public or wear a tutu to school or ask too many questions when I meet strangers.

  Naomi wants to be quiet when she’s sad and I want to be loud, and we’re not very good at cheering each other up. I didn’t notice, before. But now that we’re all we have, it’s pretty obvious what we’re missing.

  “Cool. Well. Good luck!” Jenny says. It’s funny, I would have said Bess was the leader of our group, but it looks like Jenny is now. Maybe I shoved her into a new position of power. She shakes her hair over her shoulders and applies a layer of scented lip balm to her mouth. I can smell the berry-vanilla even from a few feet away.

  She blows us a kiss. I think Bess and Flora would have hugged us, but Jenny’s decided a kiss blown off her fingertips is the way to say goodbye, so they follow suit.