Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  A best friend’s.

  I have a lot of questions, but I nod like I understand because I don’t want to interrupt the warm, glowy feeling I’m getting being around all these people. It feels like the beautiful sunset we watched last night is inside me, like it lasted so long that I swallowed it whole and I get to carry it around so I can feel golden-pink and toasty.

  The school is so small that I’m pretty sure I’ve met every single kid by lunchtime. In the fifth grade, there’s only twelve of us, so it’s easy to learn their names and I can almost feel like I’m not a new kid at all.

  In math class we play Monopoly and in science we do a bunch of experiments that feel more like magic than schoolwork. In History of Eventown we all draw pictures of the town, so it’s sort of more like art class. I’ve never had so much fun in school. The kids are friendly and nice and no one has a clique. The teachers all have big, cheery smiles and not a single chair has an annoying squeak. No one’s written mean things about anyone else on the desks or in the bathroom stalls. I can hear birds outside the window, singing little songs to each other. There are delicious sandwiches at lunch, absolutely smothered in melted cheese that never goes cold and rubbery. I could eat a dozen of them.

  Kids speak in hushed, happy tones in the cafeteria, but no one seems to mind that I don’t sound that way. Back in Juniper, Jon called my voice loud and annoying, and he said Naomi sounded like a tiny little mouse. But no one here seems to mind the way we sound.

  We’re fine, just as we are. Good, even.

  “I like this school,” Naomi says, and I nod in agreement.

  We feel so far away from Juniper, I could almost forget all about shoving Jenny and the way everyone looked at me. I decide not to be that kind of person here. I decide to be calm and nice and fun, like Veena. Like Naomi’s probably always wanted me to be.

  “We moved here right before I was born,” Veena says. “So I don’t know about other places people live, but it’s pretty much perfect here.”

  “It is,” Betsy says. “My moms and I moved here five years ago, and it’s so much better than—than the place we were.”

  “Where were you before?” I ask. I’m having trouble imagining Betsy outside of Eventown.

  “Ugh, the worst place ever,” Betsy says. “You wouldn’t know it. It was so ugly I don’t even like to think about it.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop thinking about Juniper,” Naomi says, like not talking about our old home is the best idea anyone’s ever had. I can already tell Naomi wants to be just like Betsy. There’s always someone Naomi wants to be just like. Back home it was Bess.

  But she’s right. It might be okay to stop thinking so much about Juniper. Maybe we can forget about the worst parts. Like the smell of the mall—fake cinnamon sugar and faker fruity body spray. Our old school with its ugly brown floors and mushy chicken tenders and ringing bell that was so loud it would make me leap in my chair whenever it rang. The dog next door who used to bark early every morning or the enormous cars honking their horns and playing bad music too loud out their windows.

  We can forget it all, if we want.

  “Yeah,” I say. “We don’t need to talk about where we used to live. We don’t live there anymore.”

  “Good,” Betsy says, smiling.

  “Good,” Naomi says.

  And it is.

  10

  The Same Kind of Brave

  For the next three days, on the walk to school, Veena tells us what to expect from the day. On Tuesday there’s gym. We play capture the flag, and I feel like I run faster in Eventown, like I’m lighter on my feet.

  On Wednesday we have a math test, and I’m pretty sure I ace it. Somehow the way our teacher here in Eventown explains fractions is simpler than the way our Juniper teacher did. In Juniper our teacher used to just talk more loudly and more slowly when I asked him to explain something. Here Ms. Applebet has a billion ways to explain everything, and she doesn’t stop until we get it. She makes up silly songs about numbers and uses five different colors of marker to write things on the whiteboard.

  On Thursday Veena announces we have music class.

  “Oh,” I say. Naomi and I don’t like music class, but I don’t want to tell Veena that. Everything’s been so good and easy, I don’t want to ruin it with our Juniper worries.

  “Music?” Naomi asks, with a pained look on her face. I can tell she doesn’t want to get into it either, but she also really, really doesn’t want to go to music class. With Naomi so nervous, I know I have to take care of her. I rub her back.

  “We’ll be okay,” I say. “If the teacher’s mean, I’ll be mean right back.” Naomi gives a half smile. She doesn’t try to make me feel any better, though. I wish she would.

  “Yeah!” Veena says, skipping as always. “Music! With Mr. Fountain. It’s my favorite.” Over the last few days, Veena has said approximately twenty-five different things are her favorite. Then she always changes her mind right away, to have another favorite. Naomi and I give each other a sneaky-smirky glance and wait for her to do it now. She does, of course. “Well. Some days gym is my favorite. And some days English is. And some days math is. But music is my favorite a lot of days.”

  “We don’t like music class,” I say. I check in with Naomi again and wait for her to say more, to back me up. But she just twirls a strand of hair that’s come loose from her ponytail and stares at the ground. I try to stand up straighter, to be even braver.

  In Juniper, music was the thing I hated the most. Our teacher was Mrs. Jones, and she never smiled. She told us music took discipline and if we wanted to be musicians we better stop fooling around and start acting our age. She never let us play anything fun. She rarely even let us play or sing songs at all, mostly just scales.

  “You’ll like it here,” Veena says.

  When we get to music class, Mr. Fountain asks what my favorite instrument is. No one’s ever cared before what instrument I might like, but I know the answer anyway.

  “The triangle,” I say.

  “Perfect,” Mr. Fountain says. “I’ve got a triangle with your name on it.” He hands me the silver triangle and the tiny wand that goes with it. My heart soars. In Juniper, I never got to be on triangle. Mrs. Jones always gave triangle to the popular girls, the pretty girls, the girls with delicate fingers and sweet smiles. I was usually on xylophone. On my worst days she gave me a wooden block and a drumstick and tried to convince me that was a valid musical instrument.

  If I were to make a Mrs. Jones cake, it would be a coffee cake with angry, spicy frosting and a lot of crunchy nuts on top.

  But I’d rather think of cakes to make for everyone in Eventown. A Veena cake would be lemon and lime with an airy whipped cream and serious, rich dark chocolate in the center. A Betsy cake would be overwhelmed with cherry syrup and white chocolate and the thickest buttercream frosting anyone’s ever tasted. A little too sweet.

  “How about you, Naomi?” Mr. Fountain asks after I’ve shown off my natural triangle skills with a few brilliant ting-ting-tings!

  “Oh. Well. I guess anything is fine,” she says. Naomi only likes people to notice her when she’s being Gymnast Naomi. I think she’d be happiest just humming along in music class.

  Mr. Fountain squints. He considers Naomi. “Let me see your hands,” he says. She shows him. They are calloused from the bars and so strong. “Good. Now clap them together. Hard.” Naomi does. She starts quietly but gets louder. She’s next to me, so the sound is loud in my ears, but I nod encouragement at her.

  “Now here’s the big question,” Mr. Fountain says. His voice is very serious. “Are you brave?”

  Naomi squirms, so I answer for her. “The bravest,” I say, because Naomi tried a cartwheel on the beam before she’d even mastered it on the floor and she pulled up onto the bars without a spotter when everyone else on her team needed their coach beside them, holding their shoulders as they swung up high. Naomi doesn’t think she’s as brave as me, but that’s only because she’s a diff
erent kind of brave. All the different kinds of brave were explained to me once, and sometimes I wish Naomi and I were the same kind of brave, but we’re not.

  Sometimes it’s extra-lonely to look so much alike but be so different inside.

  It’s a thought I keep to myself, even though there was a time when I would have felt comfortable sharing it with someone. I keep a lot more to myself these days.

  I grip my instrument and tell my brain and my heart to quiet down and enjoy the triangle.

  “If you’re brave, I know exactly what instrument to give you,” Mr. Fountain says. “No one leaves my class without falling in love with music. It’s okay to come in and not like it. But we’ll find what you’re meant to do in here.”

  He has a bushy beard, which he scratches. He moves to the back of the classroom, where there are boxes and boxes of abandoned instruments. Maybe he’ll find Naomi a flute or a violin. Maybe there’s another triangle—gold instead of silver, big instead of small. Maybe there’s a harmonica. I think Naomi could play the harmonica.

  But instead of a harmonica or a flute, Mr. Fountain comes back with the very last thing I’d expect.

  Cymbals.

  Not small, cute, Naomi-sized cymbals.

  Big, brass cymbals, so big she’ll get out of breath from one single crash.

  I am sure Naomi will hate them. Naomi is quieter than me. I have to beg her to let me bring friends to her gymnastics meets. On our birthdays she lets me blow out the candles; she likes that all the attention doesn’t have to be on her. Even when we were little, she always wanted to be the hider in hide-and-go-seek. She’d find the best place to hide, and when I’d find her, she’d look disappointed that she didn’t have more time to be invisible.

  “I think you’re going to like these,” Mr. Fountain says. He huffs and puffs a little, carrying the enormous things to the front of the room.

  I laugh. “I don’t think so!” I say.

  I expect Naomi to agree. But when I look at her she’s all wide-eyed and smiling.

  “Actually,” she says, “those look great.”

  “Really?” I ask. “Those things are, like, the opposite of the triangle.”

  “So?”

  “So, I thought we both liked the triangle.” I hang on to the things Naomi and I feel the same way about, because the ways that we’re different make me sad. We like the crunch of leaves when they turn orange and fall to the ground and reading books after lights out and the place in the Juniper Mall with a jukebox. We’ve always had the same friends and the same way of holding a pencil and a paintbrush and the same fear of the bottom of the ocean. And, I thought, we both always wanted to play the triangle.

  “That’s your thing,” Naomi says, like it’s nothing to strip away one of the things we share. “I didn’t think I wanted to play anything. But these—these look cool.”

  “Try them!” Mr. Fountain says. His eyebrows are as bushy as his beard, and they spike and wiggle.

  Naomi takes one cymbal in each hand. She swings her arms out to the side, and with a great exhale of breath, brings them together.

  Crash!

  It’s the loudest noise in the world, and it makes me want to cover my ears, but Naomi is beaming.

  “Yes,” she says. “Perfect.”

  Mr. Fountain nods and his bushy eyebrows bounce around.

  I don’t think Naomi would have played cymbals in Juniper. And it makes me wonder what else might be different here in Eventown.

  Betsy’s on xylophone and Veena gets to play a few chords on the class piano and all the kids in class look happy with the instrument they’ve been assigned. There’s a rustling of papers, and Mr. Fountain puts the sheet music in front of me and Naomi. “The Eventown Anthem,” it reads.

  “Oh,” I say. “We don’t know how to read music. We never learned at our old school.”

  “You’ll catch up,” Mr. Fountain says, as sure as ice cream is delicious and Saturdays are the best day of any week.

  The other kids start playing, and the song is familiar somehow, even though I can’t remember ever hearing it before. My hand and my heart seem to know when to ding my triangle. It’s a little hard to hear the fairy sound over everyone else’s instruments, but when the noise hits my ears, it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.

  I never want to stop.

  I look over at Naomi, and I can tell she feels the same way. She gets this look on her face the moment before she crashes the cymbals together. Like she has a sneaky secret. Like she’s breaking the rules. Like she has something no one else can understand.

  Even me.

  I try to focus on the music, and it’s pretty easy to do. We sound good. We sound great, actually. “The Eventown Anthem” is cheery and melodic. I can’t help but bounce my shoulders along with the beat. Naomi smiles at the recorder trills coming from the wind section and the high notes Betsy hits over and over on her xylophone.

  I never knew someone could be so happy playing a xylophone.

  “This is perfect,” I mouth to Naomi across the room. She has shiny eyes and bouncing shoulders just like mine. She nods back at me.

  In Juniper, nothing was ever perfect. Especially not lately. I didn’t think anything would ever be perfect again.

  But here in Eventown, perfect seems possible.

  11

  A Blue That Wants to Be Purple

  The next morning, Mom’s got on hiking boots and jeans and a flannel shirt that I’m pretty sure belongs to Dad.

  “Surprise!” Mom says. The word stops me. There’s only ever been one person in the family who liked surprising me and Naomi, and it wasn’t ever Mom. I don’t like surprises anymore. They give me a bad taste in my mouth. They feel scary now. “Your class is going on a blueberry-picking field trip and I’m coming along!”

  Veena told us about blueberry-picking day, and no one loves blueberries as much as Mom. So it makes sense that she would want to come.

  Still, she should know I don’t like surprises. A little flutter of anger hums in my chest. I want to shake it off. Back in Juniper, the school counselor said some people feel anger easily and some people feel sadness easily and some people feel fear easily. I told her I want to be a person who feels happiness easily. She smiled a funny smile. And that smile made me feel angry too.

  I don’t want to be angry in Eventown, so I take a deep breath and try to find another feeling somewhere in me.

  For once, another feeling is there.

  Wonder.

  There’s a lot of wonder here—delicious ice cream and waterfalls on the walk to school and so many flowers they make my head spin.

  I fill myself with wonder now. It feels a little like sparkle and a little like excitement, and a little like the last dive down on a roller coaster and a little like the first five seconds after a dream.

  It’s better than anger, that’s for sure.

  “Sounds fun,” I say. I’m still a little angry, underneath the hope, but I tell it to be quiet.

  Mom beams. “You can make a blueberry pie later, Elodee! I saw a recipe in the box. And one for blueberry pancakes too.” Mom rubs my back, like she might rub the anger right off me. And maybe she can.

  All twelve Eventown fifth graders are waiting outside the schoolhouse for us when we arrive. They have baskets hooked over their arms, and I look around for a field trip bus before remembering there are no cars or buses here.

  Betsy’s brought baskets for Naomi and Mom and me, and Veena’s brought us big straw hats that match hers and the one her mom was wearing the other day.

  “Blueberry-picking hats,” she says before placing them on our heads. Mine’s a little too floppy and Naomi’s is a little too wide, but I can tell from Naomi’s grin that she’s thrilled to be matching with our new friends. So I decide to like the hats too.

  The little sparks of Elodee-anger I felt earlier today are gone. Mom, Naomi, and I stopped at the waterfall on our way here and tried to reach out and touch the cool spray; we fell in love with a cer
tain shade of pink taking over the sky; and Mom promised we could go to the monthly bonfire over the weekend. We remembered the smell of the fire and the endless supply of roasted marshmallows.

  “We loved that bonfire,” Mom said. “And now we can go every month.” She’s excited all the time now, from not being able to keep up with every wonderful bit of our new life.

  It’s impossible to be angry, after all that.

  The walk to the lowest point on the Eventown Hills is quick, and the second we’re at the grassy base, we come across an enormous blueberry patch.

  “Pick gently,” Betsy says.

  “But if you don’t, you get to lick all the juices off your fingers,” Veena says. Betsy rolls her eyes, and I bet Betsy has never picked a blueberry too hard in her life. I’d rather be more like Veena.

  But I know Naomi wants to do everything perfectly, even blueberry picking. And she probably wants me to try to do it perfectly too. I’m not going to, though.

  “You guys pick the first ones,” Veena says. I look for Mom, but she’s chatting with a few of the teachers. She’s leaning against a pine tree, not worrying about sap getting in her hair or what to say next. She looks entirely unworried, and I wonder if I’ve ever seen Mom without a single worry.

  Naomi grins at me. “How many do we need for you to make a pie, muffins, and pancakes?”

  “Um, a lot,” I say. “Maybe four hundred?”

  “Then we’ve got some work to do.”

  “You bake?” Veena asks. “What’s your favorite thing to bake?”