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kendall
“That’s not how we did it last year” was becoming my new least-favorite phrase. I heard it every week, sometimes two or three times, as the fall festival grew closer. Lori, in particular, made it her personal goal to berate me at every opportunity. “You haven’t posted the entertainment schedule yet?”
No, Lori, I don’t even have all the entertainment blocks filled yet.
Each time Sarah checked in on my progress, I assured her everything was coming together. However, a new problem presented itself every day. I kept encountering little snags or issues I hadn’t considered before, and by the time festival week came around, my sloppily written to-do list was two notebook pages long. I was on the verge of throwing in the towel and admitting to Sarah I couldn’t do this after all.
The caramel apple vendor pulling out was just another setback I didn’t have time to dwell on. I’d never be able to find a replacement with such short notice, which meant I had to shift all the food vendors around on my festival map.
My map looked like a kindergartener had drawn it, but Sarah was still impressed. And though she squinted at it and rotated it again and again in order to comprehend it, she didn’t have a single negative thing to say. “Look at how much this has grown since last year.”
“Well, yeah,” I said with a nonchalant shrug in one of her leather office chairs. “You said you wanted all of Woodvale there. I mean, they can’t just ride the Ferris wheel the whole time.” I chuckled to let her know I wasn’t mad—just overwhelmed.
“But thirty-six vendors?” Sarah looked up from my terribly drawn map in astonishment. “The used book drive? The petting zoo? How are you not losing your mind right now?”
I was. “Copious amounts of coffee.”
Sarah lifted her eyebrows as she slid the festival map across her desk toward me. “Aha, you’re a girl after my own heart.” With a glance at her smartwatch, a birthday gift from Owen, she said, “By the way, I recruited Owen to help us with the lanterns.”
Sarah had invited me over to her house Friday evening to assemble sixteen mason jar lanterns to illuminate the eating area by the food trucks. She had the jars already—she planned to use them for her wedding—but we needed to fix them up with electric tealights, faux leaves, and little craft pumpkins. “Oh, good.” I said, uncrossing my legs. “That’ll make it go faster.”
Her eyes lingered on my face for a moment. I’d begun to recognize that look, so I prepared myself for what would now be the fourth apology. “Are you sure that’s okay?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” I challenged.
She blinked. “I just don’t want to be that person that’s like, ‘my boyfriend will be joining us’ when it was supposed to be a girls’ night.”
Maybe I had misread her. “No, I’m glad he’s helping. Maybe we can con him into doing all the work while we… get drunk and play with his robots.”
“Perfect,” Sarah said with a laugh, flipping her dark hair off her shoulders. No awkward apology after the mention of Owen’s name this time. Every conversation we had brought us closer to becoming actual friends—something I wanted more than I was willing to admit to myself.
* *
My desk was as messy as my mind that week. It was so cluttered, in fact, that it took me five minutes to find the laminated leaves I wanted Mason to help me cut out. “I swear they’re here somewhere,” I told him, a little embarrassed that he was seeing me like this. Not that I ever held any illusion of having it all together. “I’m sorry, I’m a mess this week. Oh, look—”
Beneath a stack of phonics worksheets, I found three fall festival t-shirts—Mason’s, Finley’s, and mine.
“These came in yesterday afternoon,” I said, holding up Finley’s little shirt.
“Aww,” Mason responded, taking the shirt from my hands so he could get a better look at the design. “This looks pretty good, if I do say so myself.”
“They’re perfect.”
Mason folded the shirt back up, dropping it on the little table behind him. And he turned back to me with expectant eyes—looking from me to my desk and back to me.
“What?”
“Weren’t you… looking for something?”
“Oh, yeah. ADHD strikes again,” I said, giggling nervously. As I moved some of the mess around on my desk, I noticed Mason smiling in my peripheral vision. Finally, I came across the laminated sheets of leaves featuring all of our recent sight words—I was going to tape them around the walls in the hallway and let the kids go on a “leaf hunt,” writing down all the words they could find. There were forty leaves total, and cutting them out was going to be a pain in the ass—which is why I wasn’t going to make Mason do them all himself.
I handed him half of the stack and a pair of scissors, and he sat in his chair and got to work. He made do with the tiny, uncluttered former of my desk without complaining. “So, just making an observation here—you seem a little stressed.”
I lowered myself into my desk chair and pulled my hair back in a claw clip. “A little?” I slid the trashcan out from beneath my desk and placed it between us so I wouldn’t have little cut-up pieces of laminating sheets all over my floor. “I feel like I’m on the brink of a major failure. This event is getting so much exposure that I truly believe all of Woodvale is actually going to be present—and it’s going to be a huge letdown.”
Mason furrowed his brows as he cut a yellow maple leaf featuring the word see. “Yeah, the sight of that enormous Ferris wheel is really going to… bum people out.”
“Shut up, you know what I mean,” I said, trying not to smile. “I just—I’m honestly ready for this event to be over with so I can stop thinking about it.”
