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Sam was very cutely excited and nervous, too, and he had to leave early to get everything set up. Not only had he arranged the thirty-something kids who were going to do the dancing, but he was bringing out his sound system and hooking it up so “Tubthumping” could be heard at a suitably horrifying volume.
“I need to pick up some cheese and crackers and apple slices at the store, too,” Sam said, typing it into his phone. “Something both the kids and parents will eat. Maybe some water and Capri Suns.”
“Make sure they’re Pacific Cooler,” I said, folding myself into the chair at my desk and opening up my laptop. Dr.Nilsson had said she’d get me comments on my last chapter by today, and I was hoping to have a chance to take a look before all the festivities started.
“Phoebe,” Sam said. “I’ve been working with kids for years. Trust that I know the superiority of Pacific Cooler by now.”
He came from behind to press a kiss to the top of my head, and then he headed out, leaving me alone with Dr.Nilsson’s email and Lenore, who’d graduated at least to hanging out in the same room as me. I’d turned an empty box on its side, and she liked to crawl in and out of it before eventually settling down to rest.
“Let’s see what we have here,” I said, opening up the email. I couldn’t deny that I’d still talked to myself before Lenore, but her presence definitely made it happen more often. Only now I could justify it as talking to her.
Dr.Nilsson started with a bit about how she’d heard from Dr.Blake and was happy I’d set up the interview, et cetera. Then she launched into her feedback on myIn Cold Bloodchapter, and it was my own blood that immediately turned cold. Phrases likenot your best workandrambling and disjointedandneeds more robust scholarshipflashed before my eyes before I could even bring myself to read the whole block of text from beginning to end.
I double-clicked the file to read her comments, and the sheer amount of red made my eyes tear up, whether from stress or the harsh glare of the color itself on my laptop screen. There were positive comments in there, too, although Dr.Nilsson tended to be fairly brusque with those—aGoodin a little bubble next to asingle point could count for a lot—but mostly I saw all the places where she’d slashed something as tangential, or asked for more evidence from outside the text itself to back up an argument. At the very end, she’d included one final comment.
As sheer textual literary analysis, this isn’t bad. But it fails to make the necessary connections to theory and cultural context that would elevate it to doctorate-level rhetorical study. You’re in the home stretch—don’t let yourself go off course now.
Those words created a pit in my stomach that lasted all through getting ready and into lunch with Shani, although I did my best to present a happy face in front of her. She was so pleased that I’d invited her out, making several comments that she’d always thought we should see more of each other, that I felt guilty that it had never occurred to me to do so before my brother had asked me to as part of his ruse. She really was a good person, and fun to talk to, with lots of stories from her job at the hospital or the many times my brother had been an idiot.
That idiot is going to propose in less than an hour,I kept wanting to say, but I was very proud of myself for keeping the secret. If I blew it at the last minute, I’d never forgive myself.
My pretense for stopping at the park was supposed to be that I remembered it from childhood and just wanted to drop by and take a walk down memory lane. But it used to be nothing but trees and a couple benches,I’d typed back to Conner.Why would I care that they put a playground in here now?To which he’d replied,SHANI WON’T KNOW THAT BUT SHE EATS UP NOSTALGIC SHITJUST DO IT PLEASE.In case I was wondering if he’d gotten any more relaxed with the second go-around.
Still, I felt obvious as hell when I rolled by the park and turned my car in at the last minute. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “I used to love this place when I was a kid, and I just wanted to check it out.”
“Cool,” Shani said. “Conner never mentioned that. He did say that you used to take him to a playground in another neighborhood sometimes, until someone asked you if you lived there.”
I’d completely forgotten that, but now it came flooding back. I did used to take Conner when he was about four or five, and I was eleven or twelve, to this small playground the next neighborhood over. It only had a swing set and the tiniest jungle gym that could still be classified as such. It was in a fairly new neighborhood, and the tree cover wasn’t great, so inevitably by the time we went home Conner would be a little sunburned and probably dehydrated, but he still begged me to take him. Then, one day, some random grown-up had asked me if we lived there. Mynowas honest but also self-protective—like I’d ever tell some stranger where I lived.
“Then you’re not allowed to play in this park,” the grown-up had said, her tone as serious as if she’d caught us shoplifting. If I could go back in time, I’d be, like, the fuck we can’t, and keep taking Conner there every day until someone forcibly removed us. But at the time, it had spooked me enough to keep us away.
Those memories continuously surprised me, reminding me that there had been a time when Conner and Ihadbeen close, or at least I’d taken care of him a lot. But I couldn’t get wrapped up in that right now. I needed to stay focused. There were a bunch ofkids playing on the equipment today—more than the number I suspected were involved in the flash mob plan—and my palms were already so sweaty I had to wipe them on my jeans.
“Does it look like how you remember?” Shani asked as we walked up to the park.
There was Sam’s sound equipment, set up next to a covered awning where a bunch of people were hanging out around a few picnic tables. Those must be the parents. I spotted more than one Capri Sun among them.
“Uh,” I said. “Not really...”
There was a mark we were supposed to hit, that would signal the music to start and the dance to begin. I’d assumed Sam would want to do that himself, since it was his sound system, but he must’ve deputized a parent to handle it. It made sense that he wouldn’t want to risk Shani spotting him, but I wondered where he was.
“Did you ever read that book on grief I gave you?” Shani asked.
Great. Fewer than ten yards from the mark, and Shani was asking the big questions. What was I supposed to do? Delay somehow and talk this through, while thirty-odd kids anxiously waited for their signal to start dancing? Already I noticed several kids openly staring at us. If we didn’t get this show on the road, it was going to start looking like someChildren of the Cornshit real fast.
“I haven’t yet,” I said. “Sorry. I will. What’s your favorite thing to do at the playground? I always liked the swings.”
I sounded like a first-grader trying to make a friend at school. Shani looked a little taken aback, but probably just figured that Ireally, really didn’t want to talk about the grief book. Which was also fair.
“The swings are cool,” Shani said, then perked up as she seemed to think of a better answer. “Ooh, you know what I liked? When they had a balance beam. I havefantasticbalance. Does this—”
But we’d hit the mark, and all of a sudden the opening bars of the song started, the echoey, distant singing, and then right into the chorus. It made even me flinch back a little from the shock of it being piped through the park, and I’d known it was coming. As soon as the chorus started, a couple kids jumped off the jungle gym and started dancing in unison. I could see what Sam had been saying—they were almost more a series of poses than an actual dance, and one kid was half a beat behind, watching his friends do the moves first, but it was ridiculously cute.
“Do you see that?” Shani said, her smile wide with delight. “They must know each other or something. Where is the music coming from?”
She swiveled her head toward the pavilion, but by then it was on to the slower singing, the woman talking about pissing the night away in lyrics I still couldn’t believe an elementary school would sanction. Once she came in, another group of kids started dancing toward us, doing another set of synchronized moves from the first group.
“This is unreal,” Shani shouted over the music. “Have you ever seen this kind of thing?”
