Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Our new home,” I repeat, and I think the way I say it, it sounds like a wish.

  Except for the first time, it really feels like it might be more than a wish. It might be our real life.

  13

  Glass Rooms

  The butterflies, as promised, are spectacular.

  Veena and her mom show us around like it’s their home, and I guess it almost is. “I’ve been working on this for years,” Ms. Butra says. She doesn’t have her straw hat on today, but she has a butterfly-covered dress, and I notice Veena’s collection of necklaces has a butterfly charm one too. “I wasn’t sure it would happen. It takes a while to get new things here. But the town’s fallen in love. I knew they would. I always loved—” She shakes her head. “Butterflies are special. Eventown deserves them.”

  The butterflies are free to fly around the entire space, which is really a glass castle with glass rooms. I love that we can see the sky through the ceiling, and I love the way the butterflies sometimes land on our shoulders.

  Even when they’re attached to me, I can’t feel them, but I still know they’re there. Like ghosts.

  “Can we bring one home?” I ask when a blue one lands on my arm. I like the blue ones best. They’re brighter than most things in nature, and plentiful in the butterfly house.

  “We have to keep them contained,” Ms. Butra says. It’s the same word Mom used earlier, and I still don’t really know what it means. “They only want them here, at the house, not out in the town.” I want to run around with the butterflies, flapping my arms like they’re wings. I want to be a butterfly for a minute, flying around a glass castle, landing on a stranger’s shoulders. But Naomi only wants to watch them. And would probably never dream of asking to bring one home.

  “Why?” I ask.

  Ms. Butra gives me a gentle look. “I bet you’re a girl who asks why a lot,” she says. She bends her knees to look me in the eye. “I was always that way too.”

  “Is it bad?” I ask. Something about Ms. Butra makes me feel comfortable, like I could ask anything and not upset her. She’s like Veena in that way—warm and easy to be around. A Ms. Butra cake would be light and fluffy on the outside, but inside would be warm, gooey cinnamon-sugar filling.

  “Some people won’t like it,” she says. “But I think we don’t have enough of it here.”

  I don’t know if she means in the butterfly house or in all of Eventown or maybe in the whole world. But I decide to hang on to it and be curious even if people look at me funny, like Betsy and Naomi and Mom do sometimes.

  There’s a special room in the butterfly house that’s only monarch butterflies. They’re orange and black, and when they’re all together they look like flashing lights filling up a room.

  Naomi doesn’t say a word, but she walks around the room very slowly, taking it all in. Veena stays next to me. “They remind me of you,” she says after a while.

  “Butterflies?”

  Veena nods. “Something new and extra-fun in Eventown.” I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend say something so nice. Jenny would compliment my outfits, and Bess always liked my cookie recipes, but I never thought any of them looked at me like I was something special. The special thing about me was always just that I’m a twin. That I’m like someone else. And isn’t that sort of the opposite of being special?

  “Why do you think it was so hard for your mom to make this place happen?” I ask Veena. “It seems like everyone loves it. Why wouldn’t they want this?”

  Veena shrugs. “When you came here, you left a lot of stuff behind, right?”

  I think about the room we didn’t pack up and the pictures on the walls and the sled in the closet. I’ve been trying not to think about them, but there they are now, and I can’t help missing them. I didn’t want to miss them. I’m tired of missing. “Yeah,” I say.

  “Butterflies are something people had left behind when they came here. So bringing them in—they had to make sure it wouldn’t upset anyone.”

  “I don’t understand.” We’re speaking quietly, but still the butterflies are avoiding us, like they know we’re talking about something important and they don’t want to interrupt. Veena sighs, and I think I’m annoying her for the first time since we’ve arrived. I look at Naomi, sitting and smiling at butterflies. I wish I could be more like her sometimes. Or even that she could be more like me.

  “It’s okay to not understand,” Veena says, and from the way she says it I can tell she’s heard something similar many times in her life. “Right?” she asks.

  I nod, but I’m not sure I agree.

  When I was learning to cook I was told to ask as many questions as I needed to so I could understand how to do everything. I was told that was the best way to figure it all out. I thought everything was like that, maybe, but I guess not.

  The butterflies don’t ask any questions about why they’re in a glass castle, staring out at dozens of rosebushes and pine trees and hills in the not-too-faraway distance. They don’t ask why they’re all of a sudden here and not back in their old homes, and I guess I shouldn’t ask that either.

  Because we’re all—me, Naomi, my parents, and the butterflies—pretty happy in this new home. We have everything we need here, so why make a big fuss?

  “Wanna be a butterfly with me?” I ask Veena. She grins. She may not ask as many questions as me, but she’s not as shy as Naomi. She nods. We both get up and flap our arms, and for a minute they really feel like wings, they really feel like they could lift us way up in the air. We make the same lazy paths around the house as the butterflies do. Naomi watches, blushing, mouthing at me to stop. But I’m not going to stop anytime soon.

  Veena laughs and follows me.

  And it feels good, to run and laugh, but something is missing. A piece of me. I’m trying to be as brave and free and careless and questionless as the butterflies, but my brain won’t stop asking questions, and my heart won’t stop its missing.

  I’m half here and half somewhere else. Not really like a butterfly at all.

  14

  The Opposite of Worry

  That night, I make a perfect lasagna and a perfect green strawberry salad using recipes from the box. Mom, Dad, and Naomi tell me a hundred times how much they love it.

  “It’s not really me,” I say, because the part of cooking that is me is the part where I make stuff up or improvise. Anyone could follow a bunch of recipe steps. Mom and Dad and Naomi don’t understand, though. They tell me I’m being humble and ask for seconds.

  After dinner Naomi and I go out to the front lawn. I like to watch stars and Naomi likes to do her routines under the cover of night. Back in Juniper, after dinner, Naomi would make up her own routines—gravity-defying ideas that worked on the lawn but she was sure would never actually work on the beam. If we caught Mom and Dad peeking out the window, we’d stop and pretend to be doing something else—naming constellations, waving at a passing car, playing tag.

  “We should just lie out and watch stars,” Naomi says tonight. “You like that.”

  “I like watching you practice,” I say.

  Naomi shrugs. “I don’t need to practice tonight,” she says, and lies down on the grass. I lie down next to her. Above us are more stars than there ever were in Juniper. They’re brighter too.

  “What is going on up there?” I say, staring at the sky. “You see those things? They almost hurt my eyes.”

  “They’re huge,” Naomi says.

  “It’s like they’re miles closer,” I say. “In Juniper they looked all dim. They’re bright here. Like Christmas tree lights.”

  “It’s like they’re all the North Star,” Naomi says. We learned a few years ago about the North Star, the brightest one, and it’s my favorite.

  “If I were a star, I’d want to be the North Star,” I say.

  Naomi laughs and shakes her head. “Of course you would,” she says.

  I squint, trying to find the extra-bright light, the magical bit of something special in the sk
y. It’s not there. Or, I guess, it is there, but it blends in with all the other stars’ bright lights.

  “I like the way the sky looks here,” Naomi says. “It’s like the night isn’t quite as dark.”

  We’re both quiet for a while after that. Listening to crickets and the beating of our hearts.

  “Why’d you say you don’t need to practice?” I ask after a long while.

  “Oh,” Naomi says. “I’m sort of perfect now.” She laughs, but she doesn’t take it back or tell me she’s kidding.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “Just what I said,” Naomi says. “I don’t have to practice. I’m already doing everything right. The coach said I don’t need to change anything.”

  I laugh. “I don’t get it.”

  She shrugs.

  “There’s no such thing as perfect!”

  “How would you describe your lasagna today?” Naomi says. She rolls onto her side so that she can look directly at me. “What would you call the roast chicken you made? The French toast?”

  “Good,” I say. “Really good.”

  “Come on.”

  “Better than anything else I’ve made,” I say. I think about the way the cheese melted on the lasagna. How there were no burnt parts. I love cooking, but usually when I’m trying new recipes, there are burnt parts.

  “Elodee.”

  I think about the way the chicken’s skin was crispy but the inside was moist. The delicate ratio of cinnamon to sugar on the French toast. The fact that every meal looked like it jumped out of a magazine and onto our plates.

  In Juniper, I wasn’t good at presentation. I put things on the plate all sloppy, and when Naomi would wrinkle her nose at the mess I’d say, Taste it before you make that face.

  But in Eventown, Naomi doesn’t have to wrinkle her nose.

  “It’s the recipe box,” I say. “It helps me make everything . . . well . . . okay, fine. Perfect.”

  “There you go,” Naomi says. She stretches her legs up to the sky and points her toes. “That’s why I don’t need to practice. What’s there to practice?”

  “Let me see,” I say.

  “I just want to lie here for a while,” she says. “I want to look at the moon.”

  The moon is brighter here too. It has a special shine on it that I never noticed in Juniper. And maybe that’s all it is—maybe I just notice more here. But it makes everything outside of Eventown feel even farther away. The moon is supposed to be the same everywhere, everyone on the planet seeing the same glowing shape in the sky.

  A little bit of worry sneaks into me. With a different moon, and a hidden North Star, it feels a little like we’re lost here. And I don’t exactly miss anyone in Juniper, but I don’t like the feeling that things are so different here, that we could be so different here.

  I want to be under the same sky we’ve always been under. I want some things to change, but other things to stay exactly the same.

  “Do you ever worry—” I start, but when I look at Naomi, she cringes at the word worry. She’s never liked to think much about big things or sad things or things that we have to unwind and untangle to totally understand. She’s not that kind of sister, no matter how much I sometimes wish she could be. I decide to stop myself. “Never mind.”

  “I’m so tired of worrying, Elodee,” she says. “Can we un-worry now? Can we opposite-of-worry?”

  “What’s the opposite of worry?” I ask, because I want to try to give Naomi what she wants. Twins are supposed to do that for each other. Especially now.

  Naomi thinks for a great long while. I get lost in star patterns and the smell of Dad’s rosebush next to us. I start to wonder if Naomi’s fallen asleep. She’s been known to do that when we’re watching the sky. It makes her relaxed and sleepy, while it makes me so curious it wakes me right up.

  She’s not asleep, though. Her voice breaks through the light of the moon and the sweet smells.

  “Hope,” she says. “The opposite of worry is hope.”

  I nod.

  And try to hope.

  15

  Sticky Marshmallow Sadness

  Sunday night is the monthly town bonfire.

  Veena and Betsy made sure we were coming when we met them in the park for cheese sandwiches and a game of kickball with some other kids from class this afternoon.

  “The bonfire is my favorite night of every month,” Ms. Butra says when she pours us big glasses of lemonade after the game. “Everyone all together. The world’s even prettier when you see it by firelight, don’t you think?”

  I’d never thought about it, but she might be right.

  I hope she’s right.

  “Dad?” I ask now as we help Dad water the rosebush. “Do you think the world is better when it’s lit by firelight?”

  “Better?” Dad asks, tilting his head. “I don’t know about that. But it’s nice to see things in a new way.”

  I have more questions to ask, but Dad’s too distracted by his roses to explain what he means.

  “Look at this thing go!” he says. The bush from back home is hard to tell apart from the other bushes now. The blooms are as red as the other bushes, as full and as pretty.

  “It fits right in,” Naomi says, and I can see from the glint in her eyes and the tilt of her head that she wants to be like that rosebush. She wants no one to be able to know that she came from somewhere else and used to have a whole other life.

  “I can’t get over the soil here,” Dad says. “Magic. Now that I know how fertile everything is, I’m thinking a little fruit-tree orchard by the library. Apple trees. Pear trees. A bunch of lemon trees. Think the town will go for it, Grace?”

  Mom’s over in Victor and Maggie’s yard, laughing at something Maggie is saying. I keep waiting for Baxter to come out so I can show him the roses or ask if he’s going to the bonfire too. I like the way he seems smart and safe and goofy.

  Exactly the kind of person I like most.

  Mom finally looks our way.

  “Go for what?” she calls back to Dad.

  “My fruit trees!”

  “I’m sure they will,” Mom says, shaking her head a little at how much Dad loves talking about plants.

  Thinking about the fruit trees gives me a great idea for the bonfire. “Bananas!” I say. “We can bring bananas to put inside the s’mores. And cookies instead of graham crackers. And peanut butter instead of chocolate!”

  Once I start, I can think of a dozen different ways to make s’mores. Caramel s’mores and fruit s’mores and ice cream s’mores and pancake s’mores.

  “Maybe we can do all the experimental stuff next time?” Naomi says. “Maybe we can just show up and do whatever they’re doing this time?”

  I roll my eyes at my sister. “People will love it,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes right back.

  I pack one of Mom’s tote bags full of ingredients I find in the kitchen that I’m convinced I can incorporate into s’mores. I’ve baked a batch of gingerbread, too, because there was a recipe in the box and I’d never tried to make it before. And there was something sort of fun about making a December dessert in the middle of March.

  Mom brings a blanket to sit on, and Dad brings a thermos filled with hot chocolate, and we are ready for a perfect night.

  We can hear the bonfire before we see it. The whole town’s there, from what it sounds like. There’s a lot of laughter and someone playing “The Eventown Anthem” on a guitar and the crackling sound of fire, and then it comes into view: orange flames and everyone in comfy sweaters dangling sticks with marshmallows over the fire. It smells like the best kind of summer night—firewood and burning sugar and pine trees.

  I beam at my parents. “I’m glad we’re here,” I say, because I know we complained about moving all the time before we came, and I want them to know they were right. This was right.

  Betsy and Veena run up to us, spotting us before we reach the fire. Veena’s got sticks and marshmallows all prepared for us,
and Betsy right away starts telling us how to guarantee a perfectly toasted marshmallow. I try to catch Naomi’s gaze to roll my eyes, but Naomi is rapt. I remember with a kind of sticky, marshmallow sadness that she doesn’t like hers burnt the way I do. She’s not the person who showed me how to pick up the flame and blow it out right when the sugary skin turned black.

  “You’re here!” Veena says, and pulls me into a hug.

  “Of course we are,” Naomi says. “It’s tradition, right?”

  Betsy beams like Naomi has gotten the answer right on some test, and I know Naomi’s proud to feel like she’s up on all the Eventown traditions, but I don’t mind that it’s unfamiliar to me.

  Veena introduces me to a few of the families closest to us. They all say they’ve met my mom and they’re happy we’re here. There are cozy blankets on every bit of ground near the fire and everyone’s pouring steaming chocolate into mugs and smiling and pointing out constellations to each other, just like Naomi and I always do.

  It feels so homey I almost forget about my s’mores ideas. We eat three rounds of regular ones before I think to bring out my peanut butter. Veena’s the first one to notice, and she leans in to see what I’m doing as I spread the peanut butter onto a graham cracker and nestle my toasted marshmallow into the center. But soon other people close by get interested, too, and watch me take the first bite. It’s extra-sticky from the combination of peanut butter and marshmallow, but I like how the smokiness of the marshmallow pushes against the nutty sweetness. The taste gives me a little jolt of excitement. It tastes like fun.

  “Delicious!” I exclaim, assuming they’re all waiting on a verdict. “Who wants to try?”

  I hold out the jar of peanut butter, waiting for everyone else to lean over and grab some for themselves.

  They don’t.

  Even Veena only folds her lips together and looks into the fire instead of at me.

  “I promise it’s really good!” I say. “I brought cookies too. I thought they might make a good base. I mean, marshmallows on cookies, right? How could that not be amazing?”