Chapter 7: The Festival
The boardwalk was a symphony of false cheer. Every plank underfoot had a different complaint, groaning in protest against the summer crowd. The air was a thick soup of fried dough, salt, and coconut sunscreen, pierced by the tinny carnival music looping from ancient speakers. Strings of fairy lights trembled in the humid breeze, their golden flicker doing little to push back the deep violet dusk gathering over the water.
Lily was a spark in the gloom. She tugged Jess by the wrist, her laughter cutting through the din. “Come on, the ring toss is right there! I’m feeling lucky!”
Jess allowed herself to be pulled, the stuffed seahorse from the last winning already tucked under her arm, its cheap polyester fur damp from her grip. She could feel it without turning: Soren’s presence, a dark orbit a few paces behind. A shadow detached from the family. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left the house, hadn’t acknowledged the previous night at all. The only sound from her had been the occasional, faint click of her Zippo, opened and closed in her pocket—a phantom echo of the sound that had scored Jess’s sleepless hours.
“Three for five dollars!” the bored carnie shouted, his eyes already sliding past them to the next mark.
Lily handed over a crumpled bill, accepted the rough wooden rings. “Watch this, Jess. Champion form.” She stuck her tongue out in concentration, her round face lit by the garish booth lights. She threw. The ring skidded off a bottle neck, clattering to the floor.
“Damn.”
Jess took her turn. She aimed, let her wrist go loose. The ring sailed, hooked the neck of a blue bottle, wobbled, and fell.
“So close!” Lily cheered, as if it were a victory.
Soren leaned against a support beam just outside the light, a silhouette sucking on a cigarette. The ember flared, illuminating the sharp planes of her face for a second before fading. Her eyes were on Jess’s hands.
Another round. Lily missed. Jess missed, but her miss was narrow, a grazing shot that spun the bottle.
On the third Lily throw, a ring landed, looped perfectly around a green bottle’s neck. The carnie barely looked up as he handed over a grotesque, glittery snail plush. Lily whooped, spinning and shoving the snail into Jess’s already-full arms. “Told you! It’s all in the wrist!”
Jess laughed, adjusting the toys. “You’re a natural.”
From the shadows, a voice, low and smoke-roughened. “You let her win.”
It wasn’t a question. Jess’s skin prickled. Lily was already turning, bouncing toward a strength-test hammer game, her joy a protective bubble.
Jess didn’t look at Soren. She kept her eyes on Lily’s retreating back. “She’s happy. That’s what matters.”
Soren pushed off the beam. She didn’t move closer, but her voice sliced through the space between them. “Is it?”
The two words hung there, mixing with the scent of sugar and tobacco. They weren’t about the game.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jess finally glanced over. Soren was looking not at her, but at Lily, who was now mock-threatening the hammer mallet with a giggle.
Soren holds her gaze for a moment that goes slightly longer than comfort allows. Then she looks away, back to the crowd, and the expression settles back into composure like water closing over a stone.
"Nothing," she says. Easy. Final. "Forget I asked."
Lily’s voice called from the hammer game. “Jess! Come see if I can ring the bell!”
“You should go,” Soren said, the hint of a smile touching her mouth—the same one from the hallway. “Your audience awaits.”
Jess stood rooted, the stuffed animals feeling like accusations in her arms.
“Go on,” Soren repeated, softer, almost a whisper meant only for the space between their faces.
Jess turned, walking toward Lily’s beaming face, the cheering crowd, the blinding booth lights. Every step felt monitored.
She could feel Soren’s eyes on the nape of her neck, a physical pressure. It stayed with her through Lily’s triumphant hammer swing, through the dizzying spin of the Tilt-A-Whirl, through the sticky purchase of cotton candy that dissolved into nothing on her tongue. The glittery snail and the seahorse remained clamped under her arm, absurd anchors to a reality that felt increasingly thin.
“I’m starving,” Lily declared later, collapsing onto a sun-bleached bench. “Hotdogs. Now. It’s a rule.”
They found a stall at the mouth of the main pier, the air greasier here, the shouts of seagulls more aggressive. Jess accepted the foil-wrapped bundle, its heat immediate through the paper. Lily led them past the crowds to a quieter stretch where the pier jutted out over the dark, lapping water.
“This is the spot,” Lily said, plopping down and swinging her legs over the edge.
Jess joined her, the wood rough against her thighs. She let her feet dangle, the void beneath them a cool, upward breath. The stuffed animals lay between them like a third, silent guest.
A few yards back, Soren leaned against a sturdy piling, the red tip of a new cigarette flaring to life. She didn’t sit. She was a column of watched shadow, separate. The salt wind tugged at her dark hair, but her attention was absolute.
Jess took a bite of her hotdog, the flavors of mustard and brine barely registering.
“Remember that time we fed our fries to the gulls here and got mobbed?” Lily laughed, ketchup on her chin. “My mom was so pissed.”
“She called us harbingers of chaos,” Jess said, forcing a smile.
She could feel the stare. It wasn’t on her face this time. It was lower, more specific. A focused, burning line of sight that made the skin between her shoulder blades tighten. She glanced down, following its imagined path.
It landed on the stuffed seahorse. Its black, beady eyes stared blankly at the ocean. Lily’s victorious prize, shoved into Jess’s possession.
Soren’s gaze wasn’t curious. It was possessive, analytical, and sour. It dissected the toy, this symbol of Lily’s easy, unthinking claim. Her jaw worked slowly, a faint muscle ticking near her temple as she took a long, deliberate drag. The smoke she exhaled was snatched by the wind, vanishing toward the water.
Lily, oblivious, nudged Jess with her shoulder. “You gonna eat that or adopt it?”
“Sorry,” Jess murmured, taking another mechanical bite.
The pressure of the stare intensified. It was no longer just observation. It felt like a reclaiming, a silent argument Soren was having with the plush toy itself. You are a placeholder, that look seemed to say. You are evidence of a game I wasn’t playing.
A seagull landed with a clumsy thud near their feet, its head cocked. Lily tore off a piece of her bun and tossed it. The gull snatched it mid-air with a sharp cry.
The cigarette burns down. Soren lets it. She's barely smoked half of it — she'd lit it mostly for something to do with her hands, which have been a problem all day, always wanting to be somewhere slightly different from where she's put them.
Down at the end of the pier Lily has finished her hotdog and leaned her head on Jess's shoulder, and Jess has tipped her head sideways to rest on top of Lily's, and they are both looking out at the water with their feet swinging over the edge and the seahorse in Jess's lap, and the whole thing is —
Soren stubs the cigarette out on the railing and looks away.
The whole thing is very Lily-and-Jess, is what it is. The easy physical language of a five-year friendship. The kind of closeness that doesn't need to announce itself because it's never not been there. Soren knows what that looks like from the inside — she has had friendships like it, still has them, knows the particular grammar of them. She is not unfamiliar with the concept.
Then she picks up her jacket from the railing where she'd draped it, pushes off, and walks toward them.
Not close. Just — closer. She stops a few feet back from the edge, enough that she's no longer separate, not quite part of the end-of-pier configuration but adjacent to it. Lily tips her head up and looks at her upside down.
"Done brooding?" Lily asks pleasantly.
"I wasn't brooding," Soren says. "I was looking at the water."
"Same thing."
Jess looks up at her. She still has the seahorse. Francis, Soren thinks, involuntarily. She named it Francis.
"There's a bench," Jess says, nodding at the one behind her. Neutral. Easy. An offering that doesn't require anything back.
Soren looks at the bench. Looks at the water. Sits on the bench.
They stay like that for a while — Lily and Jess at the edge with their feet over the water, Soren on the bench a few feet back, close enough now to be in the conversation without being asked to perform anything. Lily talks. Jess answers. Soren says a thing here and there, less than she might, more than she planned to.