Three Day Summer(14)

“Um . . . your name?” comes from somewhere right beside my ear.

I jump, nearly poking myself in the cheek with the scissors. I turn around to see Michael staring at me apologetically again.

“Sorry,” he says right away. “Oh, man, I feel like ‘sorry’ has been half of all the words I’ve said to you.”

I laugh. There have been a lot of other words, but he probably doesn’t remember them. Not sure he wants to, either.

“It’s okay.”

“Kara?” he says to me. “Is that right?”

“Cora, actually.”

“Sorry! Aaaah!” he slaps himself in the forehead.

“It’s okay. I’m actually impressed you almost remembered. You get a B+ in freaking out.”

He grins at me. I notice his two upper teeth overlap slightly. “So, Cora . . . would it be too forward of me to ask when your shift is done here?”

“Um . . . seven . . .” I hesitate. I was not expecting that. Nor am I expecting what comes out of my mouth next. “But you have to go find your girlfriend again, right?”

He blushes once more and his smile droops. “Amanda,” he stammers. “Yes. Her.”

“Amanda,” I repeat, picturing the back of her head as I saw it that morning, in Michael’s tight grasp. Then, for no reason at all, I grin like an idiot.

“Okay,” he says. “Well, thank you. Again. And, for good measure, sorry.” He gives me a smile before turning around and walking out of my tent.





chapter 16


Michael


Cora still has a couple of feathers sprouting from her arm when I leave her, but I choose not to bring this up with her. She’s right. I need to find Amanda. And Evan, Catherine, Suzie, and Rob. I guess.

I slowly move toward the music. At certain moments, I can see trails of color undulating in time to Richie Havens’s voice. He’s singing a slowed-down version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” now, and some of the thousands of people around me leave pink and orange hues in their wake, including a shirtless, redheaded guy dressed in tight white pants who is gently swaying with a sheep.

“I still think the Beatles are coming, man,” I hear a guy in a long purple tunic say to his friend, who just shrugs noncommittally. My sources would say: wishful thinking. Rumor has it they’re on the verge of a breakup.

There are all sorts of people around me: short, tall, dark, pale, redheaded, blond, brunette, bald. A lot of people around my age, but also children and some old folks. Even when I visited Times Square with my family three years ago, I never saw this many people all in one place.

There is one problem. None of them are my friends. And as I slowly trudge my way closer to the music, I cannot fathom how I will ever find them. This is an ocean of heads and bodies. How can you find five specific drops of water in an ocean? Just when I start mulling that impossibility, I catch a glimpse of red and white from the corner of my eye, and immediately whip around. Only when I see that it’s some stranger in a striped dress do I remember that Cora is not the one I’m supposed to be looking for. “Get it together, Michaelson,” I mutter.

Eventually, I make it as close as I think I can get to the stage for now. It sits at the bottom of a hill, level with me, but I see that a lot of the audience is camped out on various parts of the slope, staring down into the stage like a crystal ball. Havens is a hazy orange blob who stands at the center in front of a microphone and, I think, is brandishing a guitar.

It’s taken me all this time to realize that I am actually inside the festival, despite the lack of tickets. I silently thank Evan—wherever he is—for however he made that happen.

And then I just close my eyes for a moment and listen. As Havens sings about freedom, I think about my own. Freedom from my parents. From Amanda. From school, and the war, and even the limits I put on myself. Why can’t I be anything, go anywhere? What is there to stop me?

Thinking about going anywhere only brings one image to my mind. I open my eyes and slowly turn my head to find it: the yellow medical tent. It’s far away now, even farther than the stage. But somehow I realize the thing that’s been bobbing up and down just below the surface of my thoughts is the long dark hair of a part-Seneca girl.

I look around and, after a few moments, spot a girl with a slim Timex on her wrist. “Excuse me, could you give me the time?” I ask her.

“Six thirty,” she says gleefully, her eyes shining with the same sort of warmth toward mankind I can see in most of the faces surrounding me.

“Thanks,” I say, reflecting her feelings back at her.

I amble back to my yellow landmark, trying to take as close to half an hour as possible, and not even looking for the flash of blond hair I’m supposed to find. Richie is singing about freedom and this is mine, a yellow that is full of possibility instead of weight.





chapter 17


Cora


I bandage up my last bloody foot (these people really need to stop walking around barefoot) and tell Ruth, who relieved Anna about twenty minutes ago, that I’m off for the day. She gives me a brief nod of acknowledgment before turning back to her latest patient, a guy who must be in his sixties at least. I admire his tenacity even as I think him a great big idiot for being in the middle of this overcrowded field at his age.