Maddie suddenly felt like she might start crying. “So, I guess this means you won’t be a Maypole dancer?”
Nora sighed.
Maddie shook her head. “You know what? Never mind. I don’t know why I even bothered to come in here.” She turned and left.
* * *
Natalia Rowan looked at the four girls standing in front of her. “This is it?”
Maddie had to admit that the turnout for the Maypole dancers this year was pretty low.
Natalia sighed. “Well, it will just have to do. They’ll be less of us, but it’ll be all right.”
Maddie remembered the first time that she, Nora, Sawyer had been in the Maypole dance together. She remembered how Natalia had been unsure about the fact that Sawyer wanted to dance with them, considering he was a guy. Sawyer had made a bargain—he’d make all of the Maypole dancers’ dresses if he got to be a dancer himself. And after that, he’d made the dresses for years. But then last year, he hadn’t been involved. No one had made dresses, in fact. They had just all used things that they had in their closet. Maddie felt wistful.
“Guess I’ll have to modify some of my dance steps,” Natalia was saying, mostly to herself. “I felt like I needed at least six people to hold the ribbons. Of course, I don’t even know how we can have a Maypole, considering that engineering won’t do setup anymore.”
The other dancers all started chattering amongst themselves. Everyone sounded worried. Maddie turned to someone beside her, to express her own worry.
And then, she saw Nora and Sawyer, both coming from opposite directions. She broke out into a big grin.
She took off, running to meet Nora.
Sawyer came over to join both of them.
Maddie threw her arms around Nora. “You’re here.”
Nora laughed. “What the hell? I thought it might be nice.”
Maddie turned to Sawyer. “And you? Did you know Nora was coming?”
Sawyer gave them both a hug. “I just kept thinking about whether or not I could stand Himeros flirting with me, and I decided that I’d put up with it for years. Besides, after I accused him of being possessed with the spirit of Owen Asher or whatever, he might have given up on being attracted to me. Maybe it’ll be okay.”
All grinning, they made their way over to the other dancers.
When Natalia saw them, she smiled too. “Are you two going to dance this year?”
They both nodded.
“That’s fabulous,” Natalia said.
What a difference from the first year, when she hadn’t at all been interested in Sawyer being there.
“What about the dresses?” Natalia asked. “Will you make the dresses again this year. As you can see, it would only be several.”
Sawyer looked around at them. “Six dresses? I can do that.”
“Wonderful,” Natalia said. “Ren will be so pleased.”
“Ren?” Maddie said. Ren was Himeros’s boyfriend. Or at least, he used to be. They might be taking a break. Maddie wasn’t really up on it. She knew they’d had some issues.
Natalia nodded. “Yes, it’s Ren’s first year dancing the Green Man. I know he’ll be happy to know that he’ll have a decent number of Maypole dancers.”
“What about Himeros?” Sawyer said. “He’s always the Green Man.”
Natalia got a sad look on her face. “He didn’t feel up to it. He’s aging again, you know. He said his joints don’t really support him the way they used to. He said dancing the Green Man should be a young man’s job.” She shrugged.
That was sad and all, but Maddie could see that Sawyer was relieved. Not having to deal with Himeros was definitely a good thing.
* * *
It was Lute’s turn to watch Owen.
Owen and Nora were sitting out in the middle of the tweens and rebels enclave in front of the fire pit.
Lute didn’t see any reason to watch while skulking in the shadows. So, he was just sitting at the fire pit with them. They were there with probably four other tweens. Everyone was drinking.
Lute was fairly sure that Sawyer probably would’ve been there with him, but Sawyer was off in the fabric enclave, working on Maypole dancer dresses. Sawyer generally accompanied Lute to all of his sessions of watching Owen. Sawyer seemed to do nothing but watch Owen, in fact. Well, except when he was looking for the “real” Nora.
May Day was just around the corner. Lute wanted to be excited about it. He usually was excited for May Day. He loved all the holidays in Helicon. But lately, he didn’t feel very excited about anything. Sawyer was anxious, and it must have been rubbing off on Lute. He remembered that back in the beginning of their relationship, there’d been a fire between him and Sawyer. The two of them hadn’t been able to resist each other. Sawyer had been, to him, this unique exotic person. He was male, but female, male but… Lute didn’t know, but he couldn’t get enough of the other muse. Back then, they would spend whole evenings in each other’s tents doing nothing but talking and making out. Sawyer’s hands would be buried in Lute’s hair, Lute’s mouth would be tracing the outlines of all of the muscles in Sawyer’s chest.
Not anymore.
Now, they barely touched each other. It wasn’t that they weren’t intimate at all. Every night, before they went off to sleep, they made love in some capacity. But it had become perfunctory. Habit. It wasn’t fiery anymore.
He wasn’t sure if it was just that their relationship wasn’t new anymore. He knew that it was typical for the fire to die down between two people. But he and Sawyer had been hot and heavy and strong for a long, long time.
No. He knew what the problem was. The problem was Nora Sparrow.
He had ceased blaming it on Owen. Maybe Owen was the impetus, but Sawyer wasn’t concerned about Owen and what Owen was going to do to other people. Sawyer was only concerned about what Owen was doing to Nora.
His theory that some shape shifter was the Nora that they were all seen walking around had become an obsession for Sawyer. Sawyer spent all his time, when he wasn’t watching Owen and Nora, looking for the “real” Nora. He was sure that Owen had her stashed somewhere close by. So he was methodically searching all of Helicon. Apparently, when Loki had impersonated Mack for all that time, he’d had Mack tied up in the woods somewhere. So it followed, according to Sawyer, that the “real” Nora was out in the woods. Except for the fact that Sawyer had basically searched every square inch of woods in Helicon and still hadn’t found her.
Lute hated it. He missed his boyfriend. He missed the way he used to feel. He missed everything. He spent his days in silence for the most part. He didn’t say anything to Sawyer, didn’t tell him how he felt.
In the past, when he was sad, he could have taken solace in his music. But now, he seemed to have lost the desire. He would go to the music enclave, pick up an instrument, and try to play. But nothing came to him.
He felt adrift. Felt lost. He felt… sad.
There was nothing for it. He was supposed to be watching Owen, so he was watching Owen.
“I thought I was going to have to call in the fact that you owed me to get you off on your own,” Owen was saying.
“What?” said Nora, who was running her finger around the edge of her glass of beer.
“You remember how you owe me? For helping out your friend Maddie?” Owen said.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I wanted a little time to myself, and you never give it to me, so I was planning on calling in my chips. But then, you’re off doing something in the mornings.”
Nora set down her drink, visibly turning paler. “I thought you were sleeping through that.”
“No.”
Nora took in a long, slow breath. “Well, I can get out of it.”
“Don’t even think about it,” he said. “It’s great. Really. You should go do things on your own sometimes.”
“You don’t even know what I’ve been doing.”
“Does it matter?”
“Well, you might not like it.”
Owen set down his drink now. “What do you mean?”
Nora picked her drink up. She took a big gulp of it. “You didn’t like it the first year that we were here.”
“What are you talking about, Nora?”
“Before I tell you, I want to remind you that I can get out of it.”
“Nora, spit it out.” Owen’s voice had gone low and menacing.
“I’m a Maypole dancer,” she said into her beer.
Owen picked up his drink again. “Okay. Cool. Why would you think that I would care about that?”
“Because you yelled at me that first year back in Helicon. You said I looked like a slut.”
“Did I?” He seemed to be thinking about it. Then, he leered. “Well, even better. Will you be in a slutty outfit this year? Because you’ve kind of, um, matured since then, and I can only think it would be an improvement.”
Nora’s eyebrows shot up. Then, she giggled. “Owen Asher, naughty boy.”
Lute leaned forward. Hmm. She wasn’t offended by that?
“I was beginning to think you’d gone celibate,” Nora said. “That first year, you were desperate to jump my bones. This year, you don’t seem interested at all.”
A vein in Owen’s forehead popped out. It pulsed. He drained the rest of his drink, and when he slammed the glass down, his hands were shaking a little bit.
Nora smiled a small, self-satisfied smile.
Lute inclined his head. He thought he understood something between the two of them. What Nora had just said to Owen was payback. He had taunted her with the slutty comment, and she had gotten him back with the fact that apparently the two of them weren’t having sex. It was an interesting way to conduct a relationship, but it was far from atypical. Lute’s own parents, for instance, did a similar dance when they got angry with each other. They both knew how to wound the other effortlessly.
But it wasn’t that his parents didn’t care about each other, or that they weren’t in love. It was simply that people who were together for a long period of time got annoyed with each other easily.
Lute was even more convinced that Owen and Nora were exactly what they appeared to be. A couple, with a history, who were together. Whatever darkness and danger the others saw, he didn’t see it.
* * *
The morning of May Day, Maddie woke up exhausted. The night before, she’d had to stay up late along with the other Maypole dancers. They’d been putting up the Maypole. There was no one else to put it up. The engineering enclave usually took care of that, but since they had decided that they were no longer responsible for such things, no one was doing it. True to form, the committee that had been formed had done little more than discuss the issue. Nothing had been decided. Helicon was in a state of limbo.
Natalia was beside herself. She’d complained and cried and worried. But in the end, there was nothing for it. They had put up the Maypole themselves. What was May Day without a Maypole?
It didn’t help matters that there were less dancers this year than there usually were. The six of them, plus Natalia and Ren, had struggled long into the night getting everything ready. Then they had all stumbled back to their tents and fallen into bed.
Maddie had slept as long as she possibly could, but the sun was high in the air, and it was May Day. She couldn’t sleep any later. She tumbled out of her hammock and put on the dress that Sawyer had made for the Maypole dancers. The dress sported a skintight bodice made from white lace, with a pale blue shimmering fabric behind it. The skirt was made of that same shimmering blue fabric, but it hung in asymmetrical layers, to allow movement.
Maddie surveyed herself in the mirror. She wasn’t sure how she looked in the dress, but she knew that she felt self-conscious. She was either too fat to be wearing a dress this tight, or too thin. Unfortunately, she couldn’t tell which. She turned from side to side. From certain angles, she thought she looked painfully thin. Her hipbones jutted out, and she could see a few of her rib bones above her cleavage.
But the back of her legs had a little bit of cellulite on them, and her stomach bulged out in a most unseemly manner.
She scrutinized herself for a long time, but finally she forced herself to leave. She didn’t have time, for one thing. And for another thing, it didn’t do any good to stare at herself in the mirror. She only wished that she could really tell what she looked like. She felt like, a long time ago, she used to have a sense of what the truth of her body was. She had been worried about her weight, but she knew that she looked really okay underneath it all. But now… now she really had no idea. When she looked at her body, she saw a distorted image.
Putting it from her mind, she headed across the tweens and rebels enclave to Nora’s tent. Nora was probably still asleep. Maddie’d had to wake Nora up every day to get her to go to Maypole dancer practice. Maddie didn’t imagine that today was going to be any different.
But when she arrived at Nora’s tent, she found Nora outside on her knees, rubbing her fingers in the wet grass and muttering to herself.
There was still dew!
Maddie knelt down next to her friend, wetting her fingers as well. Together, the two of them washed their faces with the morning dew.
The only reason the dew was still around this late in the morning was that the muses changed the weather to springtime weather in honor of the holiday. There was a bite and chill in the morning air, and all of the trees were now dripping with blossoms of different colors. It was springtime.
If Maddie hadn’t been so tired, she could’ve really let the joy bubble up inside her. Her exhaustion put a bit of a damper on everything.
Nora grinned at her. “Happy May Day, Maddie.”
Maddie smiled back. “Happy May Day. Was that the charm I heard you whispering?” Tradition had it that staying a charm while washing one’s face in the dew would allow the whisperer to get the boy of her dreams.
If Nora was saying the charm, it meant that she wasn’t as happy with Owen as she might be letting on.
But Nora shook her head. “Don’t be silly. I don’t even know the charm. I don’t think you’ve ever taught it to me.”
“I think I did,” said Maddie.
“No,” said Nora, straightening up. “Let’s not talk about Owen today, huh?”
Maddie considered, and then she nodded. “All right.”
Nora stretched. “Do we have time for breakfast?”
“I don’t know,” said Maddie. “You’re not even in your Maypole dancer dress yet.”
“That’ll take me two seconds,” said Nora. “Wait here.” She ducked inside her tent.
While she was inside, Sawyer came over, already dressed in his Maypole dancer dress, his blond hair woven into an intricate braid. He was carrying a basket over one arm, and steam was rising from it.
“Breakfast,” he said. “I got little egg and sausage sandwiches with that gravy Mica Stone makes.”
Maddie gaped at him. “How did you have time to go pick up breakfast and do that to your hair?” Her own hair was just pulled into a quick and tidy bun.
Sawyer shrugged. “I haven’t been sleeping much lately, I guess. I try to be productive if I know I’m not going to get any shuteye.”
“I didn’t know you were having insomnia. I’m sorry.” She felt a little concerned for her friend.
“It’s no big deal,” said Sawyer. “Is Nora awake?”
“She’s getting dressed.”
Nora poked her head out. “This dress is super tight, Sawyer.”
“Whatever, it should fit you perfectly. I took measurements.” He set down the basket and started for Nora’s tent.
“Wait!” she said, horrified. “I’m not completely dressed.”
“Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Sawyer said.
“Sawyer.” She glared at him. “No.”
Sawyer shrugged. “Fine.”
A few minutes later, Nora emerged in her dress. She looked fabulous in it. Maddie thought that Nora’s body was nearly perfect—she
swelled in the right places and dipped in the others. She was perfectly proportioned. But Maddie’s own body… She looked back and forth between the two of them, comparing body parts. Nora’s breasts were a little smaller than Maddie’s, but her waist was smaller too, and her hips were smaller as well. Maddie’s were huge, and—
“Why are you staring at me?” said Nora.
“Not,” said Maddie, looking anywhere but at Nora. “Not staring. Not at all.”
Nora made a face.
Sawyer held up the basket of food. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” said Nora, diving in.
They each grabbed a sandwich and started walking. The sandwiches were portable, so they could walk and eat at the same time. Sawyer also had a thermos of coffee and some mugs, but they’d get into that after they reached the dance enclave and could settle down.
Once there, they met the other dancers, in addition to Natalia and Ren. Natalia was resplendent in her May Day dress, which was a pale yellow with gold accents. Ren was in the green velvet outfit of the Green Man. Everyone looked gorgeous, but they were all yawning.
It was a good thing that Sawyer had brought some extra coffee, because not everyone had managed to get some before arriving. They stretched and caffeinated and got ready for the coming day.
Maddie looked out across Helicon to see that it had been decorated for the celebration. The visual art enclave had put up fire baskets all over, one at every enclave. The fire baskets were intricate metal sculptures of leaves and trees and dancing mermaids. They were beautiful and whimsical. There were ribbons and streamers draped over tree branches, and bent archways covered in blossoms bedecking the area near the main fire pit.
May Day. She shut her eyes and breathed in. It was perfect, wasn’t it?
After they had finished their coffee, Ren distributed unlit torches to all of the dancers and Natalia gave them all flower wreaths for their heads. They all matched this year—daisies.
“Let’s get these torches lit,” Ren said. “Every one gather around.”
They put their torches together, and Ren lit them all at once. Then he lit the fire basket in the dance enclave.
Ren raised his voice. “Together, on this May Day, we welcome the spirit of spring into our midst. The fire of passion is lit again, and we bring the fire to Helicon.”
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