Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

  I tell the story like it’s a fairy tale, like it belongs to another girl named Elodee and not exactly me.

  My throat goes dry from all the talking.

  My eyes are puffy.

  Sometimes I wait decades in between sentences. Sometimes I start sentences that I can’t finish.

  I don’t know how long it takes for me to tell them everything, every last thing I remember.

  There is a great pause when I’m done.

  “Thank you,” Christine says.

  And as the story settles between all of us, it starts to fade. It lifts off from me, and my heart, finally, finally feels a little lighter. A little less broken with every breath.

  “What’s the next one?” I ask. Now that I’ve told the worst story I know, I’m ready for the next three stories. Christine smiles like I am brave and powerful, and maybe I am.

  “Tell us the story of when you were angriest,” Josiah says.

  “I’ve been angry a lot,” I say.

  Christine nods, like she already knows that, like it’s written all over my face. “Think of when you were the most angry,” she says. “Take your time.”

  I decide on the angriest of all the angry times and start to speak, but before I get more than two words out, there’s a knock at the door.

  Josiah and Christine exchange a look that tells me this is unusual, so I sit up straight in the armchair and un-cozy myself.

  “Come in,” Christina calls.

  The door opens, and Naomi’s on the other side of it. “Some people are here,” she says, a little scared. “Veena’s mom and some other people I don’t know. And they say they need to talk to you.”

  There’s another series of looks exchanged between Christine and Josiah.

  “Excuse us, Elodee, Naomi,” Christine says. Josiah stays with me and Naomi until Christine calls him out of the room, too, and we’re all alone in the storytelling room, the fire still burning, three of my stories untold.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to do all this to begin with, but now that I’ve told three out of the six they said they’d ask me about, I want to tell the rest. I want to feel that release of pressure, that slow fade, that letting go.

  I listen at the door, trying to hear what’s going on out there. I hear a few words here and there, but not enough to tell exactly what Ms. Butra and the others are doing here.

  “Too young!” Ms. Butra says, beyond the door.

  “They didn’t choose . . . ,” someone else says, followed by a dozen more words I can’t make out.

  “Safe . . . ,” Josiah says.

  “The magic of Eventown, the promise of . . . ,” Christine says.

  “It’s time . . . ,” Ms. Butra says. “Their stories . . . our stories . . . part of ourselves . . .”

  I press my ear hard against the door, but Naomi pulls me away. “Don’t,” she says. “Just let it be.”

  I step away. I don’t want to argue. Not in here, with the fire and the cocoa and the untold stories sitting in my chest.

  When Josiah and Christine come back, they are rushing, gathering papers, putting out the fire. They don’t look upset, exactly, but they are not the same as they were a few minutes ago, listening to me cry.

  “We’ll have to finish this another time,” Josiah says, not even quite looking at us.

  “We’re very sorry, Elodee,” Christine adds. “We’ll complete your welcoming another day. Wonderful job today. You did great.”

  “I—I’m leaving? Before I finish telling my stories?” I ask.

  “It’s okay,” Christine says, but she gives Josiah a look that says it might not be. “You told us such a big story, and that’s what’s important. Now you two head home and take some cake with you, and we’ll figure this all out later.” She gives a smile that is approximately half of her old smile, and she ushers me out of the room to where Ms. Butra and a few other adults are standing.

  Veena’s mom gives me a sad kind of smile and the smallest of waves. Naomi bites her lip.

  “You girls get home safe,” Josiah says. “Don’t forget the cake.”

  And like that, we’re dismissed, and back on the outside of the Welcoming Center.

  “I didn’t finish,” I say on our walk home.

  “What do you mean?” Naomi asks. The sun is still setting, and it makes her hair—and therefore probably mine—look like it’s on fire. It reminds me of the flames in the storytelling room.

  “I only told three stories. Not six.”

  “Oh.” Naomi looks a little worried. “Which ones?”

  “I didn’t tell an angry story or a lonely one. Or . . . what was the last one?”

  “Joyful,” Naomi says.

  “Oh, that’s a fun one. What’d you say for it?” I ask.

  Naomi shrugs. “I don’t know, Elodee,” she says. “Let’s talk about something else. I’m tired.”

  That’s when I see it. How very, very much Naomi loves it here.

  She loves it more than Juniper, not just differently than Juniper. She loves even the Welcoming Center, not just the roses and ice cream like I do. She loves it more than I love it.

  I try to believe she does not love it more than she loves me.

  I love Naomi’s smile here. The way it comes easily and stays. The way it moves into her eyes. The way it looks like mine and makes me smile too.

  On the walk home, I think about the stories I would have told for an angry moment and a lonely moment and a joyful moment. I sort through the stories like my life is a book being told to me, like Christine and Josiah said. I hear about getting a new swing set in the backyard and not getting invited to Bess’s birthday party and the time I was so angry that I yelled at my own reflection, at the top of my lungs, daring it to yell back.

  Some stories are harder to remember. Like the book has been splashed with water at certain chapters, making the words blurry and hard to read.

  And the stories I told Christine and Josiah—those stories are the hardest ones to remember. Those pages have water all over them.

  And it’s spreading.

  I wonder if Naomi’s stories are the same. I look at her, trying to tell. She sees me watching her and smiles.

  “Do you feel welcomed?” she asks. “I do. I feel like we belong, finally.” There’s a bounce in her ponytail and a swing to her arms. The Eventown sun is setting and it gives her a golden glow.

  It must do the same for me.

  I hope it does.

  20

  A Sweet Little Storm

  I wake up Wednesday after dreaming all night of a cake. And now I know I need to bake that very cake.

  “You have school.” Mom laughs. “You can bake a cake after.” We haven’t told her what happened at the Welcoming Center. I search her face to see if maybe Christine and Josiah called to tell her, but I don’t see anything different about her. Maybe they forgot all about me.

  I sort of hope they did.

  “It’s an important cake,” I say. Naomi laughs. When Naomi’s in a good mood she thinks all the weird things I say and do are funny. When she’s in a bad mood she wants me to hide them away. Today she is all sparkly laughs and rosy cheeks and big smiles.

  “Well, you can make the most important cake in the world after lunch. It can be absolutely presidential if you like. But you can’t skip school to bake, as much as I’d love a slice of an Elodee cake right now.” Mom kisses the top of my head, and Dad’s out in the garden tending to his perfect rosebush, and I decide not to ask when, exactly, I’m going back to the Welcoming Center to finish everything up. It was so tiring, and my voice is a little hoarse from all the talking, and I don’t need to go back right away.

  All I really need is to make this one cake. The cake in my head. The cake that reminds me of my most joyful moment.

  I think about the cake all through school. A few times Veena has to elbow me to pay attention and Betsy has to wave her hand in front of my face to remind me to listen to her talking. I want to do nothing but talk about that cake, bu
t I think they might not understand it. It’s not a chocolate cake or a vanilla cake that I want to make. It’s a jasmine–olive oil cake with white chocolate–pear frosting.

  A magical, strange cake that I have made before. A cake that made me happy. A cake that now makes me a little sad.

  I don’t want to tell anyone what flavor cake I’m thinking of making yet. I’m worried if I say it out loud, someone in Eventown will tell me not to do it. Maybe even my own sister.

  But I know, more than I know anything else, that the cake has to be made, and it has to be made today.

  I think about cake the whole walk home, which I do with Veena because Naomi’s at gymnastics practice. It doesn’t make any sense to me that Naomi’s at practice if she’s already perfect, but I’m happy to have the time alone with Veena. Of all the people in this town, I know Veena’s the one who might not tell me my cake is too weird to make. She’s the one who might not insist on a vanilla cake from the recipe box. I look at the necklaces around her neck and search for one with a cake charm. Instead, I see a locket, and it makes my heart race. So many things could be kept inside a locket. Secrets and stories. And secret stories.

  She sees me seeing it, and she slips it under her shirt.

  Someday, I want to ask Veena what’s inside the locket. I want to ask her about all her necklaces. But not today. Not yet.

  Someday, I want to ask Veena why her mom went to the Welcoming Center when I was telling my stories. I want to know why she came there when Mom said it was a one-time thing. But I’m not sure Veena knows her mother was there at all; I don’t want to be the one to tell her.

  I am trying to do what Naomi asked and fit in.

  “Do you bake?” I ask Veena instead of asking about her mom or her necklaces. She shakes her head.

  “I eat!” she says, and I laugh. Veena isn’t my twin and I have only known her a short while, but I think she might get me more than almost anyone else.

  “Close enough,” I say. “Can you assist?”

  Veena seems to consider the question very carefully. “I can,” she finally concludes. I like that Veena understands the seriousness of cake. I like that Veena doesn’t ask anything more about the cake, and I like that when we’re at the kitchen counter a few minutes later and I finally tell her what it is we’re making—jasmine–olive oil cake with white chocolate–pear frosting—she gives another serious nod. “I’m glad you’re here,” she says, and I don’t know exactly what makes her say it, but I’m glad I’m here too.

  Someone once told me that you bring your feelings into your cooking and baking, and that must mean that today’s cake will taste the way friendship with Veena does—easy and soft like velvet and surprising, like fireworks exploding in the sky when it isn’t even the fourth of July.

  In other words, delicious.

  “Can I see the recipe?” Veena asks. She bounces into the kitchen and opens the recipe box, thumbing through all the butter-stained index cards.

  “Oh. Well. There isn’t one,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s an idea in my head.”

  “Oh,” Veena says, unsure at first, then nodding her head, then smiling. “Well, that will be new for me!”

  I don’t know where to start. Usually I can do lots of baking and cooking on autopilot, the steps memorized deep down in my bones. But I’m feeling all out of it today, and I can’t figure out how to tackle my idea. We have all the ingredients I need—Dad brings home bags and bags of fresh finds from the market and the gardens every day. Still, my mind stalls trying to decide what to pull out of the cabinet first.

  “You said it’s a cake, right?” Veena asks, while I dig through cabinets and the fridge.

  “Yep. Jasmine–olive oil cake with white chocolate–pear frosting.” It sounds better and better the more times I say or think it. Like a poem. Like a story I haven’t told anyone yet.

  Veena’s eyebrows rise right up to the ceiling.

  “I didn’t know we could do that,” she says.

  “Well, I’m not sure we can,” I say. “I’m having trouble coming up with a plan.”

  Veena gives a thoughtful nod and lets me think in silence.

  I go for the bowl of fruit on the counter and pick out three pears. The idea doesn’t feel quite like mine. I feel the fuzzy telling of a story deep in my stomach, another watery page from the book of stories of my life before Eventown.

  Cutting up the pears comes easily. I remember the rhythm of how to cut safely and I even remember a hand over mine, showing me how to be firm without being reckless, how to be safe and fast at the same time. I try to tell the story to myself, like I did at the Welcoming Center. Once upon a time, Elodee learned how to cook, I think. The counter in Juniper was white and the knives were dull and the person teaching her smelled like flour.

  It’s a story I love.

  I show Veena how to sift flour, and she seems to like the rhythm of her hand pressing the sifter’s handle. I melt white chocolate for the white chocolate–pear frosting, and the scent is almost too sweet.

  Veena loves it. “That smells amazing,” she says. “Shouldn’t we just leave it like that? I mean, what could be better than regular white chocolate?”

  “That’s boring!” I say. “We have to make it more interesting.”

  “How can white chocolate be boring?”

  “It’s just—typical. We’re making something strange.”

  “Oh.” Veena keeps sifting the flour. She doesn’t really need to, but she’s taking it so seriously that I don’t want to bother her.

  I open a box of confectioner’s sugar and the powdery sweetness fluffs up, making a cloud over the box, a sweet little storm in the middle of the kitchen.

  Veena laughs. “It’s so messy!” she exclaims. “I didn’t know it would be all funny and messy!”

  Dad comes in for a glass of water after the pears and chocolate have been mixed together on the stove and I’m just starting to experiment with the cake batter. I don’t know how much jasmine is enough or how much olive oil will be too much. He watches me pour a half cup of olive oil into the bowl. It hits the batter with a sloppy sound and I know immediately that it was too much.

  Veena laughs again. “Olive oil in cake!” she says. “So weird.”

  “It’s usually really good. But I think I messed up.”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “I put in too much olive oil, I think. I’m going to have to add something else, to balance it out.”

  Veena still looks confused, as if I didn’t answer her question at all.

  “I was thinking maybe we could go out for dessert,” Dad says, watching me ponder the cabinets. “Big sundaes. Or even a slice of pie at the diner.”

  “I’m making dessert,” I say. “We’re making dessert, I mean. Me and Veena.”

  Veena smiles at being included and starts stirring the white chocolate and pears with super focus.

  Dad loves my cooking and baking. I’ve made him birthday cakes before and that he gobbled them right up. I don’t know why he wouldn’t want cake today.

  “It just seems like a lot of work. You should be outside, having fun.”

  “This is fun,” I say. “And besides, I think we need cake today. I think we need this cake. I dreamed about it. Here. Taste.” I give him a spoonful of the frosting, and it’s not perfect, but it’s good. It’s two different kinds of sweet. It’s extra thick, and it needs more vanilla and less chocolate, but it’s good.

  As soon as he swallows, his eyes light up, then squint, the way they do when he’s trying to think of a word for a crossword puzzle or the name of a rare flower. He takes in the mess and our smiles and the taste and pulls up a stool, deciding to stay in the kitchen with Veena and me the rest of the afternoon. He taste tests the batter and suggests a tiny bit of nutmeg for the frosting. It doesn’t work, but I like experimenting with him. Veena laughs at every idea we come up with, but she tries each of them anyway. A few times she asks why I
want olive oil cake when vanilla is so good, why I want pear in my frosting when plain white chocolate is so delicious, why I want to bake a cake instead of buying one from the Eventown Bakery.

  “That’s not the point,” I say over and over.

  “So the point is just trying something and seeing what happens?” Veena asks. I can almost see her brain working.

  “Right. And I like to do it whether it goes well or not.”

  “Especially when it doesn’t go well,” Dad says with a silly Dad-wink.

  “Especially then,” I say, and we look at each other, that one glance encompassing years of kitchen memories and messy mistakes and broken plates and exploding pies and funny tastes and delicious mess-ups.

  I wish Naomi were here for the moment of remembering. It’s gone so fast I could almost believe it didn’t happen at all. Like hard butter turning into liquid over the stove, the stories in my head, all the years in the kitchen, turn messy and soft. They aren’t quite solid anymore.

  When we’re finally done preparing everything, it looks wrong and smells even wronger. I know the cake’s not going to be good before I even put it in the oven. The flavors aren’t hanging on to each other. They’re not mixing right. I’ve added everything I can think of—buttermilk, maple extract, more eggs, different kinds of flour—but none of it quite works.

  The cake falls in the oven, the middle drooping and sagging like a crater has hit it.

  It tastes like olives. I spread frosting on top, but it’s too hard and it comes out in clumps that tear at the soft surface of the cake.

  The kitchen smells like burnt pears and olives and too much sugar.

  It’s a failure.

  We’ve been in Eventown for exactly one week and I haven’t had a single failure. Each recipe has been better than the one before, better than anything I’d ever made in the past. Veena keeps eating little crumbs of it, like she hopes it will start tasting good if she keeps trying it.

  When Mom and Naomi arrive home, they practically recoil from the smell.