Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “The founder of the town—” Josiah begins.

  “Jasper Plimmswood!” Naomi interrupts like we’re in the middle of a pop quiz.

  “That’s right,” Christine says, smiling.

  “Jasper Plimmswood and the first settlers here needed to start over. Their whole lives had been destroyed by a hurricane. And living amid all that destruction, being in the place where they used to have everything and now had nothing—it was too much. They wanted to be able to be somewhere they didn’t feel that loss all day every day. Somewhere they could feel whole again. And a little new. Like a big breath of air after you’ve been underwater for a long time. Do you know what that feels like?”

  “Naomi and I have holding-our-breath contests sometimes,” I say. “And when we finally give up and take a breath again, it feels great.”

  Christine nods eagerly.

  “That’s a little what Eventown feels like, I think,” Josiah says.

  I think about the way the stars look so bright and how somehow the sunset and sunrise seem to last forever. I think about how music class is actually fun, and I make delicious meals whenever I’m in the kitchen, and when I wake up in the mornings the day usually feels light instead of heavy, even if something hard has happened. I think about our rosebush, and how it’s brighter and happier here than it ever was back home.

  I think I’d like to be a little like that rosebush. Fitting right in with Eventown. Getting more beautiful and stronger and healthier in the sunlight.

  “That sounds nice,” Naomi says.

  I nod. It does. It sounds nice. Maybe I wouldn’t be so angry if I took a fresh breath. Or so lonely. Or so sad when I think about the things we don’t have anymore.

  “Wonderful,” Christine says. “Let’s get started then, shall we? I heard you two loved stories in your old town. Books with stories in them. Is that right?”

  We nod.

  “Then this will be easy,” Josiah says, picking up right where Christine leaves off. “We’re going to take you into what we call a Storytelling Room and have you tell us six stories from your life. Big stories. The story of your most scared moment, your most embarrassed moment, your most heartbreaking moment, your loneliest moment, your angriest moment, and your most joyful moment. I know that sounds like a lot. But we’ll help you. Okay?”

  We nod again, slower this time, foreheads a little more wrinkled.

  “Oh, you girls look so scared,” Christine says in the softest, gentlest voice. A cloud voice. A blanket voice. “I know everything’s so new right now. But I promise there’s nothing to worry about.” She has deep dimples that never really disappear. “We’ve done this a hundred times. And it’s always a good thing. Okay?”

  “I’m not scared,” Naomi says, even though I know she is. She just wants to do the right thing, the thing they’re asking of her.

  “Well then, why don’t you come with me and Josiah first, okay? And Elodee can head in after. Did I get it right? You two really do look alike. It’s just lovely.”

  “You got it right,” I say, thinking it’s weird how we can look so much alike when it seems like we’re getting more different every day.

  Naomi gets up with the straightest back and the deepest breath and looks to me. Her pretend bravery fades, and she’s my regular sister again for a minute: quiet and small and nervous and needing me. I get up and give her the biggest, strongest hug I’ve mustered in months.

  Naomi is gone for a long while. Hours, I think, but it’s hard to say because I am busy eating cake and drinking hot chocolate and using the watercolors Josiah brings out for me to paint my favorite parts of Eventown. I paint the butterfly house and Veena’s mother’s lemonade and the ice cream shop. I paint our backyard and Naomi’s smile.

  I try not to think about the six stories I’m going to have to tell. How do you know which story is the scariest or loneliest? The only story I’m sure about is the most heartbreaking one.

  When Naomi finally comes back to the main room, she looks rosy-cheeked and calm, just like the picture I’ve painted of her. She looks tired, too, but not in a bad way. She looks the way she looks after a long day at the beach or when she’s won a really tough gymnastics competition.

  “Elodee, you’re up!” Christine calls.

  “Is it weird?” I ask Naomi.

  “Yeah,” she says. “It’s weird. But also sort of nice. To think about all the stories we have, and then to just sort of . . . let them go.”

  “Let them go?” I ask. There are some things I can’t imagine letting go of. Deep down stories. Stories that live in my heart and in my limbs and even in my toes and fingertips.

  Naomi looks out the windows, to the Eventown Hills, and maybe somewhere beyond too. “I can’t explain it,” she says. “But it’s good. I promise. And everyone in town’s done it.”

  I promised someone long ago that I would never simply do what everyone else was doing.

  Josiah and Christine are waiting for me by the door to the room Naomi just exited, and Naomi is standing so close to me she almost feels like part of me in a way she hasn’t in years, and I have a thousand stories swimming around my head all the time, and a few that tell themselves to me over and over and over no matter how hard I try to make them stop.

  “I’ll try,” I say, so quiet only Naomi can hear me. So quiet I hope no one else hears me, especially the person I made my long-ago promise to.

  18

  The Perfect After

  The room is the coziest I have ever been inside. Centered around a crackling stone fireplace and filled with vases of roses and bowls of blueberries, it feels both like home and like somewhere entirely made-up.

  The only thing on the walls is an enormous wood carving of a rose. It’s mesmerizing—the petals create a sort of spiral shape, and the wood looks both heavy and delicate. Christine must see me staring at it, because she puts a hand on my shoulder and looks at it with me.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, but it’s so much more than beautiful. It’s magnificent.

  “Sit wherever feels comfortable,” Christine says. There’s a low, blue couch and a wooden rocking chair that looks like it was made by someone’s grandfather. There’s a small swinging hammock and a pile of cushions and an overstuffed armchair that looks like it could swallow me up.

  I want to be swallowed up by rose-colored velvet cushions and thick navy blankets, so I sink into that armchair. It’s heaven. A little sigh escapes as I nestle into it, lifting my knees to my chin and wrapping my arms around my shins so that I’m a tiny, cozy ball of limbs.

  “I chose the chair when I came for the first time too,” Josiah says, like it’s a secret thing we share.

  “What’d Naomi choose?” I ask. I want him to say she chose the chair, too, and sat in it just the way I am now.

  “The couch,” Josiah says. Christine gives him a look like maybe he wasn’t supposed to tell me that. My heart sinks. The couch looks stiff and uncomfortable. The back is low and the seat is narrow. It would be hard to curl up onto it. She would have had to sit straight up on the couch, and it’s hard to explain why I feel sad that Naomi would want to be perfect instead of comfortable, but it makes my eyes fill and my heart pound.

  Josiah catches sight of my face, and he kneels down next to the armchair.

  “Hey,” he says. “It’s okay. Things are going to get so much easier for you. For both of you. That’s what we all want here. To make things easier. Simpler. More even. Okay?”

  The tears are falling without my permission. I nod.

  “Good,” Christine says. “Now, take as long as you need with each of the six stories. We want to know every detail you can remember. Every feeling and every word and every moment. This is all about you and how special the moments of your life are.”

  I nod again. After months and months and months of being in a family that doesn’t want to talk about anything, months of not being allowed to bring up certain memories, certain details, certa
in bits of the past, I am excited to remember out loud instead of only, always in my head.

  “You’re a brave girl,” Josiah says.

  “I’ve been told that before,” I say, thinking of a day at the top of a rock, looking down on a lake, being told to jump into the water, hesitating, then letting myself go. I am thinking of how much I loved the splash of water, the sinking down and bobbing back up, the grin at the end of it all, the way it felt to do the thing I’d been so scared of, the not having to be scared anymore.

  “Well, maybe you’ll tell us about who told you that,” Josiah says. He winks again, and he doesn’t look anything like my dad, but he reminds me of him anyway.

  “You ready for the first story?” Christine asks. She leans forward and touches my knee. I nod. I am doing a lot of nodding in this pretty little room. “Wonderful. Why don’t you start by telling us the story of the time you were most scared?”

  “Take your time,” Josiah says. “It might take you a minute to come up with the right story. There’s no rush.”

  I close my eyes. The armchair gives a little more, and I could almost fall asleep, but I won’t because I’m thinking through every time I ever got scared. I have no idea how I’ll choose. But just when I’m trying to decide between my first time going the hospital because I burned my finger while cooking and the day I tried out for the school play, I realize there’s a deeper down fear that isn’t the same as being scared of doctors or singing in front of all my friends.

  “I got it,” I say. “It was less than a year ago. September. And we had missed the first day of school. So we were going in a week late. And I guess I sort of knew everyone would be looking at me. I mean, people look at me a lot anyway because I’m always doing things no one else is doing. Like, I like wearing skirts and dresses over jeans, and people thought that was really weird, but I just liked the way it looked. And I made friends with kids in younger grades; people thought that was weird too. Sometimes I wore stickers on my cheeks and sometimes I brought really strange things in for lunch. Delicious things that I made with—with my family. Things they thought made no sense. Ham sandwiches with cream cheese and pickles. A container of strawberry jam to dip my apples in. I don’t know, stuff like that. So I was used to people looking at me for those kinds of things. But usually they liked it, I think. They’d try the sandwich and realize it was good. Flora even started wearing skirts over pants too. My weird things weren’t actually that weird.

  “But this day was different. I didn’t want anyone looking at me. I didn’t want them asking how I was doing or if I was okay or where we’d been the week before or what I did over summer vacation. I didn’t want to answer anyone’s questions. And I would have been scared anyway, but then Naomi got sick. I couldn’t tell if she was sick-sick or just scared-sick, but she wouldn’t get out of bed. I was all dressed in my jeans and this green dress over it and a yellow cardigan over that, and I had packed my favorite lunch of a cheese-apple-bacon sandwich, and I had worked on my Everything’s Fine face for hours the night before in the mirror.

  “But Naomi was in bed, and refusing to move.

  “Mom told Naomi she had to go to school. I could tell Dad wasn’t so sure about it, though. He kept pacing back and forth across the hallway. He asked me three times in a row if I’d be okay at school by myself. I wanted to say yes, I could do anything, absolutely anything at all. But I couldn’t get the words out. I was stuck to the ground. And my heart was stuck to the back of my throat. And my hands were stuck together in front of me, twisting around each other.

  “The back of my neck started to sweat. Then the back of my knees. Why does it always start on the back of everything? Fear comes from behind I guess? It’s so sneaky.

  “Finally I went into our room and just begged Naomi to come with me. I was shaking and crying, and it was awful because she was crying, too, and she really wanted to stay in bed, and she really needed me to be brave and go to school by myself and check it out for her before she went, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be as brave as I was supposed to be. As brave as I’d promised I would be.”

  I drop my head. I still wish I could have been brave enough to help Naomi. I wish I could have been brave enough to go to school alone and answer everyone’s questions so that Naomi wouldn’t have to.

  “It’s okay,” Josiah says, his voice startling me out of my memory. “It’s okay; these stories can be hard to tell. Don’t worry. You won’t have to tell it again. Not ever. The story’s safe with us now.”

  They ask a few more questions about the story and I tell them what I can remember—the color of our bedroom, what pajamas Naomi was wearing, what I ate for breakfast, who I was most scared to see at school. I tell them about the way the sun was already bright, not like here in Eventown where it’s soft for hours every morning, and how Dad looked ragged and Mom was trying to be Very Responsible and Parental. I tell them some of the questions Naomi didn’t want to answer and what kinds of faces I didn’t want to see. I tell them as much as I can about that day, without telling them about every other day that led us there. I tell them everything I can think of until my brain feels squeezed dry and the story is totally gone.

  I feel it sort of lift out of my heart.

  I feel almost lighter, as if the story weighed a lot and I’ve been carrying it around with me. I feel good. A new kind of good. Maybe this is what Eventown good feels like.

  “What’s next?” I ask, excited to feel even lighter, even more Eventown-ish.

  Christine smiles. Josiah does, too, a big, goofy grin like he’s proud of me for doing such a good job telling my story.

  “We’d love you to tell us the story of the time you were most embarrassed,” Josiah says.

  I blush just hearing the word. I’m not even thinking of a specific time. There are so many times, they all sort of bubble to the surface and heat up my face.

  I tell the story of when Naomi and I were both still doing gymnastics, before I realized that being twins didn’t mean we had twin talents.

  “When we got to the first competition, the first one ever, I was so confident,” I say, after explaining the exact colors of our leotards and the name of our coach and everyone I could remember who was watching. “I was sure I’d be wonderful. Maybe even the best one. I don’t know why I felt that way. But I started this routine on the bars and I couldn’t even get onto them. I mean, I literally couldn’t pull myself onto the bars to even start the little baby routine. I pulled and pulled and pulled and I couldn’t get the strength. The coach had to lift me up, and by then I was so embarrassed I fell right back off. It was humiliating. And Naomi laughed. She didn’t mean to. She would never laugh on purpose. But it came out, and she covered her mouth and that made it so much worse. Then she got up there and blew everyone away. And it was so much more humiliating because she looks exactly like me. So it was like . . . I was the sad Before and she was the perfect After, and you could watch the one body have two totally different sets of abilities? I don’t know. I sat there watching her and just wanted to hide. Forever, maybe.”

  The humiliation peeks back out as I speak about it, a red flush on my cheeks, my toes pointing toward each other, my head dropping, the wish to maybe somehow disappear for a few minutes until we can all forget it’s ever happened.

  “Embarrassment is hard to get rid of,” Christine says, “hard to forget. It always feels so present, doesn’t it?”

  I nod. It feels very present right now, even though I haven’t done gymnastics in years.

  “Keep telling us about that day, okay? We want to know everything. The whole story.”

  So I reach into my memory and pull up every detail I can. How we wore our hair in French braids and that I noticed that Dad cheered harder for Naomi’s success than my failure. I tell them about Naomi’s pointed toes and big smile and how all the girls wanted to be friends with her and not me after that. I tell them about disappearing into the bathroom for fifteen minutes just to try to get away from a
ll the people and feelings and embarrassment.

  I tell them everything I can remember, and they listen to every last bit of it.

  When I’m done, I’m not blushing anymore. My toes are turned their regular way. I can look Christine and Josiah in the eye. It’s gone. The story. The way it felt under my skin. The things it did to my heart.

  And the memory of it too.

  Gone.

  19

  A Golden Glow

  I feel ready to tell whatever the next story is.

  “Deep breath,” Josiah says. “The next story is a big one.”

  I nod. I’m getting good at this. The stories are coming out easily, and when they’re done, they drift off, like dreams I once had.

  “Tell us the story of your biggest heartbreak,” Christine says in a slow, careful voice.

  I swear the light in the room shifts. The sun, I think, is beginning to set.

  They said they’d ask for it, but I guess I hoped they wouldn’t.

  “Do I have to?” I ask.

  “Take your time,” Josiah says. But he does not say, No problem, you don’t have to tell us that!

  “Is there something we can get you to make you more comfortable?” Christine asks. “More hot chocolate? A change in the temperature? Maybe start a fire in the fireplace?”

  I nod to all of it. The hot chocolate. Making the room warmer, lighting a fire. They give me a quilt; the fire hisses, then crackles, and I get a little lost in the flames and the way they climb and flutter and are somehow both wild and contained.

  They wait. They wait for what feels like hours, and I want them to tell me we can move on to the next story, or that I can tell the story of my second or third biggest heartbreak, but they don’t. They only wait.

  “You can tell it like a story,” Josiah says. “It helps, I think. To tell it like a story that happened to someone else. ‘Once upon a time, a girl named Elodee lived in a place called Juniper . . .’”

  And because the way he says it makes it sound less real, and because the waiting is long and the armchair is comfortable and the flames are telling me it’s okay, and maybe also because no one has wanted to talk to me about this in so long, I start to talk.