by Sarah Bannan
We tried to look at him now, and we remembered what we had heard people say at the pep rally – how it was a “tragedy” and he was “very brave” and that his father was “not coping well.” We wondered what he was thinking as he stood in the field making out with Gemma Davies, the preacher’s daughter, whether he knew what everybody was saying about him. We wondered if he cared that Gemma had made out with Jason Nelson over the summer, or if he knew what Shane Duggan was doing with the new girl, or if he realized that Taylor and Tiffany had told people over the summer that he “should get over himself.” We wondered if he’d say hi to us if we ran into him and where he and Shane would be sitting for the light show and whether we could sit near them. We wondered how long anybody could kiss for – he and Gemma were setting a record.
We landed. The field was busier than before and the New South band played in the gazebo at the center, the Azalea Avenue Church of Christ Gospel Choir waiting in the wings. They started a square dance and the senior citizens’ dance club stepped into place, perfectly timed. We stood back, watching, laughing, waiting. The caller called us and the guys pulled us up – we did the dance we’d known since kindergarten – do-si-do and four ladies chain – and we were laughing and the blue-haired ladies smiled back at us.
We hung out. We drank. We ate. We waited around and walked around and we filled up a day moving around the field until the light started to fade, the techno pounding from the House of Mirrors subsided, the Twirling Coffee Cups and the Circle of Destiny closed, the DJ by the dunking machine dismantled his decks. The New South came back to the gazebo, and the fiddle and the banjo and the harmonica made people lower their voices, made them start to take their places on the lawn, with their blankets and their plastic chairs and their six-packs of Bud and liters of Mountain Dew. The field was on an incline, like a natural amphitheater, and we could hear the music, and our parents hummed along.
We stood on the edge, behind the parents and all the kids – versions of ourselves years from now and from years ago – and we watched the balloons. A football field away from us, they began to collapse as the air was released from them. They were hard and big and strong and then gradually limper and limper. From where we were standing, they made no sound and we thought it was incredible, watching these big things lose their power, lose their weight. It was cool, though we would never say this out loud.
We saw them: Andrew Wright and Brooke Moore and Gemma Davies. Andrew looked even taller from far away, and he had his bony fingers laced through Gemma’s. Gemma, all blonde and petite, looking up at Andrew, and then up at Brooke, in platform sandals that made her legs look like they went on for miles. They started to walk closer to the balloons, to the area where we weren’t supposed to go. We stood away from them, but even from way back, we could see Brooke’s face was red and blotchy. Gemma moved away from Andrew, put her arm around Brooke’s waist. Andrew stood back, took out a cigarette. We didn’t even know he smoked.
Gemma Davies was always consoling Brooke Moore, from what we could tell – and that was funny, ’cause Brooke had always been the one who got everything, Gemma always runner-up except for “Best Personality” and who cared about that anyway. Even when Gemma had come in second place in the Miss Teen Tennessee Valley Authority Beauty Pageant, when she’d been beaten by Tiffany Port, who didn’t even have a talent, even then Gemma was comforting Brooke. They’d been at the after-party at Shane’s and Shane had ignored Brooke the whole night – he’d done a keg stand and then made out with Tiffany “as a joke” – and Brooke just stayed the whole night, watching it unfold, until Andrew Wright found her sprawled out on the tiles in the Duggans’ master bathroom, puke around the toilet seat, a little on her chin, down her shirt. Andrew got Gemma and she pulled back Brooke’s hair and let her throw up some more, and then she took the bottle of vodka from Brooke’s purse, along with her car keys. Andrew helped lift her up and they loaded her into Andrew’s mom’s Ford Escort. Brooke had been yelling the whole way out – it was kind of sad, and we would have been really sad for her if she hadn’t made such a scene at church two weeks earlier, going on about the evils of alcohol, the weakness of those who partook. Until that night, Brooke had never had a drink – not even a sip of crappy champagne at New Year’s or a glass of red wine when her parents weren’t looking – and we never saw her take a drink after that night either. Pure and perfect. That was Brooke, so everybody said.
The day of the balloon festival, Brooke looked tired. Lauren said it was ’cause she was freaking out about Shane, but Jessica said that that was crazy. He was the one who was obsessed with her. We wondered if that’s just what she wanted us to think: maybe he wasn’t really that into her. Or maybe he was pissed that she’d gotten all fat, or that she had worn the same outfit after the pep rally that she’d worn to the festival. We didn’t know. But we knew that they weren’t together. That she was alone.
We stayed and watched her for a little while, until the light show began. The balloons, which had been deflated just an hour or two ago, were inflated again, but they stayed on the ground. In the darkness, it was hard to tell which one was which, which was the blue one and which was the red and which was the rainbow and which was the silver. Once the light show started, everything would be clear.
The music came first – some instrumental song we were meant to know, but didn’t – and then the first flash of fire from one of the balloons. The sound of the gas, the fire and then the color and then out again, and then to the next balloon, and then to the next, and we moved our eyes with each of them and then there were two lit together, then three, then four. Like punches, explosions of yellow and pink and red and orange and gold. We had never known a show better than this – there’d been an article in the paper last year saying balloon light shows were a thing of the past. But we didn’t think so, there was no way this could be forgotten about, no way it could become extinct. We watched the fire pop and fade in each balloon and, as the show went on, the fires stayed on longer, the colors from the balloons got more intense. The music sped up and then each balloon was keeping time and then more and more, like they were on top of each other, like the balloons controlled the music, not the other way around. People, even us, let out “ooohs” and “aaahs,” and sometimes somebody would shriek or scream or laugh. We watched the color – and we watched the smoke linger in the air after each fire was extinguished. We held each other’s hands when we thought the sound was too close, afraid the fire might burn us. And we watched the balloons so closely that we didn’t notice right away that Brooke and Gemma had left – and that Andrew was sitting on his own. We wondered how long he had been there, if he wanted us to join him, and we stared at him for a while, talking about him, his mother, his “depression.”
And then Shane and Carolyn walked right in front of us – blocking our view for a second – and sat down next to Andrew on the grass. Even from behind him, we could see Andrew’s shoulders stiffen, you could swear you saw his whole body freeze. And the finale began – and we looked back toward the balloons, just as Shane put his arm around Carolyn, for everybody to see.
We stared at the balloons – twenty or thirty of them, lighting up and then going dark – and they were no longer pretty, just loud and terrifying, color and music and fire all at once. The music was going so fast now, we didn’t think the balloons could keep up, didn’t think the fire could be lit and put out so quickly. And then we watched the light disappear and the smoke fill the air – if you didn’t know any better, you’d think there’d been a fire. People clapped, the guys manning the balloons came out and took a bow, and we clapped and screamed some more. It was dark without the fire from the balloons and we took out our phones and used them as flashlights, just to try to see where we were going.
The DJ came on again and played “I’m Proud to be an American” and some of the dads sang along, loud and off key. Families around us started pulling together their blankets and lawn chairs and Styrofoam coolers. And we looked in front of us again,
at Shane and Carolyn. Their bodies were close together and he was leaning back, propping himself up with his elbows. We couldn’t tell if they were holding hands any more, not really. Andrew got up and brushed himself off – we thought he’d gotten a grass stain on his ass – and he said something to Shane. We couldn’t hear him, but we watched him walk away, toward the parking lot. We started to gather our things too – we felt lame sitting around, listening to shitty music – but we kept our eyes on Shane, on Carolyn. We had gotten everything – our bags, our bottled water, our secret stash of Marlboro Golds – and made our way to Jessica’s car.
We were fifteen or twenty feet away when Lauren remembered she didn’t have her iPhone. And if she hadn’t gone back, we never would have seen anything, maybe nobody would have ever known. If we hadn’t gone back with Lauren to where we’d sat, to the place we’d laid our blanket for the evening, Lauren never would have been there with her iPhone in her hand, ready to take a picture, to save it. And we never would have seen Carolyn lay her head on Shane’s shoulder. We never would have seen Shane put his hand through her hair and place his lips on her forehead. We wouldn’t have known anything. And a part of us wished we knew nothing at all.
But we did see it: Carolyn and Shane, like a couple, like Brooke and Shane were supposed to be. Close to each other, not hooking up, nothing like that, but close, touching. We stared with our mouths open: this girl had been here for ten minutes, and already she was where everybody wanted to be. Close to Shane, close enough to smell him, feel the heat from his sunburn, the stubble on his neck. We weren’t jealous – or at least we didn’t think so – but we wanted to make sure what we saw was real, wanted to look at it later, to analyze their body language, like they did in every month’s Allure. Lauren picked up her phone. She put the backs of their heads in her image finder. She clicked. She saved.
Lauren kept the picture to herself – she sent it to us, of course, but we didn’t send it around, not immediately anyway. And even then, we didn’t send it to very many people. That didn’t seem to matter, though, when all was said and done.
But all of this came later, once we thought we knew what it all meant. That day in the field, nothing had happened. A new girl had come to our town and we saw her in a field with a football player who may or may not have been dating somebody else. You wouldn’t have thought that it meant anything. But, in the end, we guessed it did.
But not yet. Not yet.
Chapter 4
Living in Adamsville, Alabama, was embarrassing. It was embarrassing that you had to travel to the adjacent county to buy hard liquor; that Adamsville had the highest number of fast-food restaurants per capita in the US; that our mothers wore holiday sweaters and our fathers wore socks and sandals; that if you abbreviated our city and state you got AA. It was embarrassing that our department store was called Parisian’s, and that we called it Perish Anne’s. It was embarrassing that our parents attended our Homecoming Dance to watch Lead-Out, and that we wore corsages made of streamers and plastic, so heavy you had to make sure your dress didn’t rip during the course of the night. It was embarrassing that we had known each other since kindergarten, and that we were all members of the same Baptist church. It was embarrassing that the sermons were about sex and drinking and their dangers, and it was embarrassing to watch your former nap mates make out in the church parking lot immediately following service. All of this was embarrassing and all the more so when someone from the outside looked in. We didn’t like it.
The night before school started, we picked out what we would wear and took pictures and texted them to each other to make sure we weren’t wearing the same thing. We needed to look dressed up, but not so dressed up it looked like we were trying too hard. We needed to look different, but not so different that people didn’t recognize us. It was hard to make much of an impression, really, since we saw each other so often over the summer: at the river, at the country club, at church, at the pep rally, at the balloon festival. And even though we would have seen people the week before – or maybe even the night before – the way you looked on the first day of school made a difference.
We wore jeans, mostly. Parisian’s had done a sale on Sevens in July, and a bunch of us had bought them, but we tried to get different washes, so we didn’t look like clones. We wore sandals that showed off the French manicures we had managed to put on our toes, and we wore white and black – colors that would show off our tans. And what we wore was brand new. This was important.
Over the past week, news about Carolyn had spread. Gemma Davies was the main authority. Her dad made her make friends with anybody new to the congregation, if only in a totally fake and superficial way, and Gemma obeyed. Brooke met Carolyn by extension, and then so did Andrew Wright and Shane Duggan, and that was why they were all together at the balloon fair – Gemma’s dad had made her invite Carolyn along. At the time, Gemma told people that the new girl was really cool, that she was glad to have her with them. Later, she told people she was sorry she’d ever invited her. Things would have been simpler if she hadn’t.
Taylor Lyon’s mother had done the window treatments for Carolyn’s house on D’Evereux Drive, so Taylor had seen her and talked to her. We heard they had gone to the mall and a movie together, along with Tiffany Port (who else?), and that Carolyn had worn J Brand jeans and an Abercrombie top, and that she had seen Lady Gaga in some small and exclusive nightclub in New York. Taylor told people that Carolyn had had a boyfriend back home, but they had split up before she moved, or that they had an open relationship or that they would get back together over the summer or something like that. We heard she didn’t have a dad, or maybe that her mom and dad were divorced, and that she and her mom lived in a one-story house on D’Evereux Drive. Brooke Moore’s mother had sold them the house. They’d paid a fortune for it, apparently, but real estate is crazy in the north. You can get more for your money down here.
We wondered if Carolyn would be in any of our classes and we heard that she might join the swim team – Coach Billy had told Nicole’s mom, who had told all of us. We wondered if she’d be fast or slow and what we would talk about in the locker room and if she would think we were lame. This is what we thought about as we ate our breakfast and packed up our bags and headed out the door on our first day of school.
There were no buses in Adamsville and everywhere was too far to walk, so we car pooled with Lauren Brink and she drove her parents’ old Volvo. She’d put in an iPod deck over the summer to make it feel less lame, but it was better than being dropped off by our parents, and we drove with the windows down until we noticed what it was doing to our hair, and we rolled them up, turning the air-conditioning vents to face us directly.
The parking lot was insane on the first day – everybody trying to get their place for the year – so we got there early, before 7.15, because we didn’t want a space out in the middle of nowhere and, plus, we had volunteered to work in the office in the mornings – our mothers made us. We parked near the library, in the side parking lot, ’cause we’d heard this was where the seniors were gonna park, and some of the popular juniors. There were only a dozen cars there when we arrived – an Oldsmobile, an SUV, a brand-new Ford pick-up right next to two beat-up Dodges, a few Japanese hatchbacks and a burgundy station wagon that we had seen sitting in the parking lot all summer. And then we saw Blake Wyatt’s mini-van – a hand-me-down from his mom – and we thought his car was a good sign. Blake usually knew stuff. We sat in Lauren’s air-conditioning and reapplied our make-up, our deodorant, and looked in the rear-view mirror to see who we could see.
We saw a red Honda pull up and drop somebody off, and we heard later that that was probably Carolyn, but we missed it, ’cause we were busy trying to light a Marlboro Gold and pass it around and inhale a drag and then swallow some mouthwash so that we wouldn’t reek when we talked to people later.
We checked the weather on our phones – 97 degrees, heat index 102 – and even though thick puffy clouds were eclipsing the sun, we kne
w that the air was like soup, heavy. Our parents had called the heat “oppressive” and we thought that sounded about right. We sat in front of the air-conditioning vents, cooling down our faces, blasting our armpits, and we looked at the school. Since they’d already had to deal with the spray paint in the gym, they’d gone ahead and painted the outside of all the buildings too – and everything was so white it was almost blue – and we wondered how long it would stay that way before somebody put something obscene on the side.
Our school was single-story – the PTA had insisted on this when the school was being constructed: there are more fights in two-story schools, more chances for students to hide underneath landings, lurk in corners and sneak cigarettes, that’s what the research says. Banners were flying in between the different buildings: “Welcome classes of 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014,” and a huge sign covered the front of the main building: “Go, Bears! Take State!” in perfect bubble letters, the work of the cheerleaders, for sure.
A bunch of kids stood in front of the library, in orange and black t-shirts – the “welcome committee’” in charge of guiding around lost freshmen, reassuring parents that their fourteen-year-olds would be safe in this new place, that there was nothing to fear. The welcome committee was made up of band kids, mostly, and Taylor Lyon volunteered to do it but had backed out at the last minute, had said it was “too mortifying” and, plus, you were required to speak to “legions of social rejects.” We wondered if she meant us.