“All right. Well, you two have fun!” Kathy waved goodbye, then sashayed into the crowd.
Finn turned to her sister and smiled. Several awkward seconds later, Zadie broke the silence. “Kathy went all out with this party. I’ve been to carnivals with fewer attractions.” She glanced out the window at a bouncy castle overflowing with teenagers which was next to a pen that contained several mini horses. From the outside, it looked more like an eight-year-old’s birthday than a graduation party.
“It’sa lot,isn’t it?” Finn half-grimaced. “I said I didn’t want to make a big deal out of my graduation, but I guess she didn’t hear that part. I mean… I haven’t even met half of these people. A guy I’ve never seen before actually asked me what the graduate’s name was so he could write it on a card.”
“I hope you didn’t give him your real name.”
“Nope. I told him her name was Chrisantha Applebees.”
“Like the restaurant chain?”
“Yup. I was sure he would know I was messing with him, but he actually wrote it down! I feel kind of bad about it now.”
“If he wrote her a big check, you might have to change your name to Chrisantha.”
Finn laughed. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
The conversation settled into awkward silence once more.What happened to us?Zadie thought. They used to tell each other everything, often staying up well past Finn’s bedtime to share their dreams for the future as well as their fears. Their dreams changed almost weekly, but their fears stayed mostly the same. In those days, Zadie never would have imagined that she’d look into her sister’s face and see the wandering gaze of someone searching for something to say. Zadie almost blurted out the news of her pregnancy just to fill the void.
Thankfully Finn spoke first. She stepped closer to Zadie and spoke in a low voice. “Hey… you haven’t seen…” She trailed off.
“Seen what?”
Finn screwed her mouth to the side. Something she did when she felt embarrassed. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”
“You can tell me.”
“No. Forget I asked.”
Just then a female friend of Finn’s came running up. “Finn! You’ve gotta come with me. Jack wrote a song for your graduation, and it’sterrible,but in, like, a funny way.”
In an instant, Finn’s whole demeanor changed. “Seriously?” she squealed, then turned back to Zadie. “I’m gonna go check this out, but let’s catch up later, okay? We can talk vacation plans.”
“Yep. Totally. See you later,” Zadie said and watched her sister disappear into a swarm of laughing teenagers. She could feel a clot of envy forming in her chest. It wasn’t that she wanted Finn’s life, exactly; it was that Finn appeared happy in a way that Zadie herself hadn’t been in a very long time. Finn had a family who threw her parties and friends who wrote songs for her. Even people who didn’t know her gave her cards and fancy perfume.
Zadie had Finn. Or at least she used to.
She needed fresh air. Zadie stepped out onto the deck, which was possibly even more crowded than the room she had just come from. She counted five extra-large coolers, all of which were also doubling as seating. “Excuse me,” she said as she reached down to open one of them. The man sitting on it sighed to make sure she knew she had inconvenienced him before standing up. To get back at him, Zadie took her sweet time before finally digging a flavored seltzer water out of the ice.
She cracked open her can and surveyed the grounds, looking for a place where she could be alone for a few minutes. Behind the petting zoo, she spotted a tractor-trailer filled with hay and made her way toward it. Zadie pulled herself up onto one of the hay bales that was covered with an unzipped sleeping bag. Maybe it was the pregnancy or maybe it was just the stress of being an introvert in a house full of strangers, but she suddenly felt exhausted. She lay flat on her back and closed her eyes, feeling the warm sunlight on the backs of her eyelids.
Zadie must have fallen asleep, because when she opened her eyes, the trailer was moving. She sat up groggily and realized she was not the only passenger. Two parents and their three young children sat across from her, along with a small posse of moody-looking teenagers who must have boarded the hayride for the irony of it but were probably secretly enjoying themselves.
“Ah. You’re awake!” said the person sitting next to her. Zadie turned and saw that it was Daniel, Finn’s older foster brother as well as a guy who kept a ukulele in his car just in case of “emergencies.” Zadie hadn’t asked him what he meant by this, because she was afraid he’d say something corny like, “Funmergencies!” To be fair, Daniel was a kindergarten teacher, so he probably had more use for a ukulele than most. He was clearly on the hayride by himself, which Zadie found kind of odd but not that surprising. Daniel didn’t strike her as the kind of guy who cared much about what other people thought of him.
“Welcome to the party, or should I say part-hay.”
That joke was particularly bad, even for him. “Hey, Daniel,” Zadie said as she looked around for the event pavilion and saw only an exhibit about local flora.
“I would have woken you, but you looked so comfortable.”
“I don’t usually fall asleep in public, but I didn’t sleep great last night.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m used to people sleeping in weird places. I once found one of my students asleep under the sink hugging a bag of guinea pig food like it was a teddy bear.”
“That’s cute.”
“Oh, it was precious,” he said earnestly. “We did have to call his parents, though, ’cause it turned out he’d been eating the guinea pig food for weeks.”