Eventown

by Corey Ann Haydu

“Some days are harder than other days,” she says with a sigh, like she knows the same things I know, like she’s shoved someone, too, like she’s sat in a little room like this one and gotten a headache from the effort of trying to be okay.

I guess it takes loving the rain so, so much to make her stop caring what everyone else thinks. Naomi in the rain, not caring about what other people think is my favorite Naomi, so I wish for rain a lot, especially lately.

It feels like the beautiful sunset we watched last night is inside me, like it lasted so long that I swallowed it whole and I get to carry it around so I can feel golden-pink and toasty.

Back in Juniper, the school counselor said some people feel anger easily and some people feel sadness easily and some people feel fear easily. I told her I want to be a person who feels happiness easily. She smiled a funny smile. And that smile made me feel angry too.

We’ve always had a house filled with books. So many that we can forget the titles of even our most favorite ones. Now I have a sneaking suspicion we might not have packed any of them. Not even the ones we loved so hard the binding is broken and the pages are stained. I suddenly miss every single one of them.

I think it’s okay, sometimes, for a memory to hurt.

It’s hard, though, to be exactly what everyone else wants me to be. Naomi’s good at that. I never have been. And someone once told me that was a good thing. It doesn’t feel like a good thing right now, though.

I promised someone long ago that I would never simply do what everyone else was doing.

Someone once told me that you bring your feelings into your cooking and baking, and that must mean that today’s cake will taste the way friendship with Veena does—easy and soft like velvet and surprising, like fireworks exploding in the sky when it isn’t even the fourth of July. In other words, delicious.

I don’t want to stick to the recipes.

I can’t think of anything better than being able to live at a library.

“I don’t feel like getting all worked up about something.” “Well, I don’t either, but there’s something to get worked up about, so I don’t have a choice!”

Love, love this!

“Why are you so obsessed with asking questions that no one wants to answer?”