EIGHT
The next day I woke up and instead of a voice I had a squeak, which I took as a reasonable response to the day before, which clearly was so bad it actually made me sick.
Or maybe it was walking in the rain after singing ABBA in the bathroom.
Let me just say, the problem with being a dramatic person prone to bouts of. . .dramatics, is that it is sometimes hard to indicate to your audience when the whistle coming out of your throat is symbolic and when it’s you actually sick.
Also, both Lucy and Millie never get sick. Ever. I have no idea why but it’s sort of helpful because they accept many things as symptoms of a cold, like itchy fingers, that I think most habitual cold getters would not buy.
This time, though, I was actually sick.
Millie sat on my bed touching my forehead for ten minutes and finally, giving me a bit of a hairy eyeball, told me she needed to go to get some film developed on the other side of town that day so I would be home alone.
I gave her a thumbs-up.
“If you’re feeling up to it,” Millie said, making her way out of my room through a series of, I’m going to say, well-organized piles of stuff, “maybe you could clean your room and finish unpacking.”
I pulled my covers over my head.
“If you feel up to it.”
I did not feel up to it.
I spent the day watching videos of people disco dancing in the seventies, including several ABBA videos. Let’s say it: TV was just way more interesting in the seventies. Like, we need more shows that are just for dancing where people aren’t competing for a million dollars.
After lunch, I watched some videos of people dancing at a club called Studio 54, which was kind of a famous disco club in the seventies, where famous singers and actors and dancers and even some really good-looking regular people used to go to dance and do drugs. Every video of Studio 54 looks crowded. It’s all flashing lights and people with long fluffy hair bouncing and twirling. I always imagine it hot and sticky, smelling like lipstick and perfume and melting ice in people’s drinks. It was the kind of place where people could be themselves, but it was also a place, Millie reminded me once, where there would be a huge line of people at the door waiting to get in.
“And part of what made that place so famous was how few people could get in,” Millie said.
Even cool disco places from the seventies were mean and excluding (also, drugs).
I was thinking about this and about how I’d have to find the pots and pans my mom still hadn’t unpacked if I wanted to make soup, the food of the sick, when I got a text from Berry.
BERRY
Hey you weren’t in school (which u prob know)
BERRY
BERRY
Anne
BERRY
of Greenville?
ANNE
ANNE
BERRY
Are you contagious?
I tested my voice. I already had more of a whisper.
ANNE
Probably not.
BERRY
So you’re not doing anything and you’re not contagious?
ANNE
Yes and yes.
BERRY
Come downstairs, then.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Berry knew where I lived when even I didn’t know my address by heart yet, but she did, and it did. I looked out the window and there she was, standing outside my door, the sun setting behind her plume of green hair. Monty barked her two barks indicating that a person she did not know was near the house. Then she lay back down in the front hall and whined.
“What the heck?” I pushed open the door.
“Are you wearing footie pajamas?” Berry pulled a pair of paint-splattered sunglasses down off her face.
“Yes,” I said, kicking up my left foot. “It used to have a unicorn head hood, but Monty chewed it off.” I stood back so Berry could see Monty sitting and looking unamused. “My dog.”
“Well, that’s something I didn’t know!” Berry looked around my shoulder. “Moms home?”
I shook my head.
“So, you can leave?” Berry asked. “I mean, the house?”
“I guess.” I texted my moms and shoved my phone in my pocket, which on the onesie was actually a pouch. “Do I need to change?”
“People around here are pretty cool with people wearing their pajamas outside.”
“I’ve heard that.” I locked the door. “Where are we going and how are we getting there?”
Berry stepped back, holding her hands out like a game show assistant to showcase a giant, boatlike, ancient red station wagon. “Anne, meet Mato. Mato, meet Anne.”
“Mato?”
“It was my parents’ car when I was little,” Berry said, skipping down the front walk to the car and opening the passenger door, which seemed to pop like a dislocated shoulder. She stepped aside with a little flip of her hand. “I thought it looked like a tomato.”
“I mean, it does!”
Inside, Mato was door-to-door red velvet, scratchy and plastic. Her seat belts were like thick floppy ribbons and stained dark in various places. Her dashboard was sun bleached to a salmon pink in parts. As I slid onto the seat, the heat rose up into my butt like fire.
“Yeah, she’s been baking all day,” Berry said. “So she’s a little toasty.”
Mato smelled like cinnamon, probably because someone had tied a bunch of cinnamon sticks to her rear window.
“She’s beautiful.” I ran my finger along the dashboard. “Hi, Mato!”
Berry slid into her seat and turned the key. Mato purred. “Mato rules. She’s my escape pod.”
The air had been hot earlier in the day, when I’d poked my head out to let Monty go for a pee. But now the sky was purple and orange, and the air was soft and cool, like a glass of cold tap water. I rolled down the window and let my fingers dance on the breeze as Berry coasted farther and farther away from town, like we were a ship heading out into the ocean.
“My dad installed the shocks,” Berry said, “so they’re a little. . .loosey.”
I leaned my head back onto the baked potato that was the headrest and felt my body relax for the first time in days. “This is amazing.”
A few miles away from the house, Berry turned off the main road, toward what I thought was the parking lot of a burger joint. Which, honestly, I would have been fine with. Like if someone I knew was sad, I could see taking them to a burger joint. But then she took another left into what looked like an alleyway, past a used car place, to a small yard fenced in by green chain link. And she pulled the car to a stop.
“TA-DA!” She popped out of the car with significant bounce.
“A fence?”
Berry reached into a veil of dried vines and bushes until she found what seemed to be a pretty small opening. After a few minutes of shoving and pulling, she parted the wall of weeds to reveal a small hole in the fence. “Follow me.”
I stepped out of the car and followed Berry through a curtain of green.
“My parents used to bring me here when I was a kid,” Berry explained, stepping onto the frayed Astroturf. “Then I guess it closed. But I still love it.”
It was a dilapidated but still incredibly cool mini putt course. Really a fine example of the twisted logic of most fun parks built before the aughts: a mix of possibly “realistic” and “fantastical,” concrete creatures all painted in chipped neons and bright hues. A two-headed dragon loomed over the first hole. A timid giraffe stood stunned over the third hole. A furious lion looked like it was choking on the fifth hole, its left paw cracked to show the metal rods holding the whole circus together.
“It’s weird that it’s kind of cute,” I said.
I stepped toward a bear and suddenly something clicked. The bear’s fur was a kaleidoscope of colors, neon blues and oranges I recognized—from Berry’s hands.
“You’re painting them!”
“Oh.” Pink streaks bloomed on Berry’s cheeks. “I mean, when I’m stressed, I give them a little touch-up.”
I spun around, taking it all in—the giraffe’s psychedelic-patterned polka dots, the panda’s green spectacles. “It’s amazing.” I sighed.
“Thanks.” Berry held out a rusted putter in one hand and a chewed-up-looking ball in the other. “Madam.”
“Thanks,” I said, my voice hoarse.
Berry twirled her putter as she walked up to the first hole and dropped her ball by her feet. “Baton lessons,” she said, tossing the putter up and catching it with one hand.
“No kidding. Because you wanted to, like, join the marching band?”
“I’m in the marching band.” Berry grinned.
“Wait. I knew you were in the stage band, but you also marc h? While playing the tuba? How did I not know this?!”
“I mean, yeah, you don’t know all my talents yet. I play the flute and the sax, and I can spin a baton like no one’s business.”
“That’s legitimately amazing.” I made a mental note to ask Berry more questions about herself.
Berry tossed the putter up into the air and, after a wobble, snatched it just before it nailed the sleeping concrete leopard.
I clapped. “Maybe you should audition for the play.”
“Nah.” Berry nudged her ball with her toe.
I took a deep breath. The smell of burgers floated through the air, mixed with what was clearly fresh paint. Berry chipped the ball and it bounced along the edge of the green, zigzagging along the rough terrain. “I was just thinking about why Greenville likes people in pajamas,” she said.
“Why?” I dropped my ball.
“It’s like when you’re a little kid,” Berry said. “And you go to parties and stuff, like going to the park to watch the fireworks with your pj’s and your sleeping bags. It’s like. . .this idea that it’s your home. Maybe Greenville likes that, that feeling of home.”
“So, it’s nostalgia?” I wondered.
“I guess.” Berry reached her putter behind her to scratch her back. “Maybe it’s just an excuse not to get dressed up.”
“This place is nice,” I said, patting the giraffe and hoping the paint wasn’t wet.
“This is my favorite place in Greenville,” Berry said, “because when I was a kid it was the only place in Greenville that didn’t seem boring. And even though no one else wants to psychedelic mini putt, I still do.”
“I’m glad you’re keeping it spruced up.”
Berry looked around. “It relaxes me. There’s a slide and stuff over there, too. Which I’ll eventually do in green.”
“Well, I’m always down to do a psychedelic paint job,” I said, kicking my ball into the hole. “You have my number.”
It was like a little Garden of Eden in Greenville. Or. . .no. I guess that doesn’t work because you get cast out of the Garden of Eden, right? It was a secret place, a world that Berry made inside of Greenville that was just her world.
Maybe she just wanted me to know it was possible.
“You have every right to hate this town.” Berry leaned against the Technicolor panda statue wearing a wizard hat. “But I’m really glad you’re here, Anne Shirley.”
I wished I could say the same. But at least I was happy right at that moment, in that individual spot in Greenville, which was something. The sun finally set. The lights from some building in the distance flashed on and cast shadows all around the mini putt.
On the tenth hole, Berry finally confessed. “Okay, so, full disclosure. And, like, don’t be mad. But I feel like we’re going to be friends, so I, like, have to be honest.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“Don’t be mad.”
“No promises.”
“Like, I know a lot about it but”—Berry pulled her shoulders up—“I actually hate disco.”
“YOU WHAT?”
“I mean I’m not all disco sucks, obviously.” Berry shrugged. “But, like, I think there’s better music. And if you ever meet my dad he will tell you I make fun of his disco records. So I felt like I should just be honest with you. So you don’t think I’m a big disco liar.”
“Disco is the best!”
Berry sighed. “It’s repetitive and the lyrics are terrible.”
I mock-fainted to the green turf. “This is a blow, Berry, I’m gonna be honest, it’s a real blow. Like on today of all days. To hit me with this. Kind of uncool.”
Berry snorted.
I sat up. “What do you like?”
“Punk.” Berry counted off on her fingers. “Um. Country. I like some old nineties rock?”
I shook my head in exaggerated despair. “Say it isn’t so.”
Berry stepped up onto the back of a concrete pony with no ears that looked like a dragon. “Can we still be friends?”
I folded my arms over my chest. “Thinking.” I couldn’t hold it. I let out an embarrassing snort of laughter. Berry gave my butt a light nudge with the boot of her toe.
“Oh, COME ON!”
“Yes! Fine! Geez!” I threw my arms out. “Berry! Of course we can be friends. You’re like. . .the best!”
Berry’s cheeks turned cherry red. “Okay, well, good.”
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. “So, given that this is your night out with the concrete animals, I’ll spot you one disco track for a decent track and we’ll go back and forth, okay?”
“Okay, in all seriousness, what are like your faves?” I asked as I pulled myself up off the ground using the head of a purple turtle.
“Iggy Pop?” Berry flipped through her phone. “Lizzo. Um. The Clash? B-52s?”
“B-52s is kind of disco.”
“Ish?”
“Okay.” I stood up, walked over to her phone. “How about you drove so you get first pick.”
Berry picked the Iggy Pop classic “Lust for Life,” which is actually a very good song.
That night I learned a few of Berry’s favorite things. In addition to mini putt, Berry’s favorite superhero is Ironman and her favorite surrealist painter is Magritte, although as of recently she’d switched to a love of folk art. Berry liked the idea that it was possible for a person to overcome something really horrible and save the day. And the idea that a person could see the world and then produce an artistic rendering of that world that was totally unexpected. We talked about the things that we liked and didn’t like, and we danced around the bear statue and the giraffe and the unicorn with the tail that had fallen off.
And the more we talked, the more I kind of liked being in Greenville.
Right before she dropped me off, Berry snapped her fingers. “Right! I forgot to tell you, Greenville High 101, tomorrow’s last Friday of the month.”
“Which I knew,” I said. “That’s not just Greenville BTW, the whole month and days thing. They have it all over the world.”
Berry shook her head. “Mmm. Last Friday in Greenville isn’t your average Friday.”
“What does that mean?”
“School Spirit Day,” Berry said, grimly. “Whatever you do, wear green.”