Wednesday

I woke up gasping for air. Finding myself at my desk, I noticed it was too bright outside. Still half asleep, I reached for my phone and saw that it was almost 10:00. Panic. I was two hours late for the meet and greet.

Even then, I couldn’t afford not to take time for appearances. With visions of the twisted park and the pink void lingering in my mind, I showered and shaved while my head reeled from the empty bottle of wine. While I tied my tie in the mirror, I almost thought I saw Sunny Sandy’s smile where mine should have been. I reminded myself to smile correctly for the voters. They wanted me happy, but not too happy.

I drove a little too fast to make up for my tardiness. I didn’t speed, but I was not as careful as I would have normally been driving through Primrose Park. The neighborhood demanded decorum. On the north side of Dove Hill, its residents were either wealthy retirees or people who would inevitably become wealthy retirees. The train depot where Bree was hosting the meet and greet was a relic of the town’s early days as a railroad hub. Some time during the great exodus of union jobs, ambitious housewives decided to build a gated community around the abandoned station—with everything from its own private park to its own private country club.

I knew there would be trouble when I couldn’t find a parking space near the depot. Primrose Park was full of people who would never allow more parking to be built but would always complain about having to walk. Bree didn’t expect much of a turnout when she planned this event. She knew that most of the neighborhood’s residents would vote for Pruce, the Chamber of Commerce’s preferred candidate. This was a stop that had to be made for appearances. Now though, people were lined up out the door.

I tried to enter the building without demanding attention. I circled the long way around to enter through the back door. I was almost there when a grandmother in a sharp white pantsuit gave me an expectant wave. That was when hungry whispers joined the sound of graceful gossip.

I took a deep breath and opened the wooden door. As I entered, the way my breath felt in my body made me think that Tommy would have liked the train depot before it was transfigured by Primrose Park.

Of course, Bree had the depot perfectly set for the scene. I was an actor walking onto the stage two hours after my cue. I worried that Bree would notice something wrong. Maybe it would be my wrinkled shirt or the scent of old wine that had clung through the shower. While I tried to fight the memories of my dreams—now joined by pictures of a large purple pig and a red rabbit—part of me wished that my sister would notice.

“You’re late,” Bree stated bluntly from behind the welcome table. It was surrounded by pictures of the man who wasn’t me. His eyes were full of promise. Bree’s were empty. There was no flash of affection this time.

“I know. I’m sorry. I woke—”

“No time for that.” I wished she would be angry with me. It would be better than the annoyance that boiled like a covered pot. Annoyance was all that Bree would show. Walking to the door, she flashed on her smile like she was biting something hard. I followed her lead just like I have done since we were kids.

I turned to shake hands with Bree’s friend who had gotten us into the depot for the event. She worked as the groundskeeper for the neighborhood and knew the residents would relish an opportunity to meet someone who might matter soon. “Thanks for your help today,” I said with words Bree would have found too simple.

“You’re welcome,” Bree’s friend said. She made an empathetic grimace behind Bree’s back. I didn’t let myself laugh.

The air that entered the historically-preserved building when Bree opened the door tasted of pressed flesh. One by one, the Primrose Park residents brought their pushing pleasantries. Bree walked back to the welcome table and noticed that I was matching their effortful energy. She gave me a stern look that felt like a kick. I did my best to smile better.

During the first onslaught of guests, Bree strategically mingled around the room. She worked her way to the residents her research said would be most likely to influence the others. Mrs. Gingham who worked as the provost at the school. Mrs. Dyess, Mayor Thomas’s deputy chief of staff. Bree’s friend followed her: a tail to a meteor.

I manned my post with force. I greeted each and every resident of Primrose Park with a surgical precision. To one, “Hi there, I’m Mikey. Nice to meet you!” To another, with a phrase turned just so, “Good morning! I’m Mikey. Thanks for coming out today!” Never anything too intimate or too aloof. Though they came in tired and glistening from the summer heat, the residents seemed to approve of my presentation. They at least matched my graceful airs with their own.

I wished I could get to know these people—ask them about their concerns or their hopes for our town. But this was not the time for that. It was certainly not the place. This was the time to be serviceable—just like the trains that used to run through this station. Mechanical and efficient.

Months ago, I would have felt anxious. Now I just felt absent. Every time I shook a hand or gave a respectably distant hug or posed for a picture, I felt myself drift further and further away. By the time the first hour on the conveyor belt ended, I had nearly lost myself in the man on the posters—the man who wasn’t me. That was when I noticed Bree smiling towards me over the shoulder of a grumpy old man with a sharp wooden cane. It was the smile of a satisfied campaign manager, of an A student proud of their final project. The man who wasn’t me was doing well.

When the old married couple at the beginning of the end of the line entered the station, I was nearly gone. “Well, hi there! I’m glad you made it through that line. Thanks for stopping by today!” I had just given the wife a kind squeeze of the hand when I was snatched back to the depot. Reaching for the hand of a handsome young man who smelled like a lobbyist, I saw her in the door frame: Sunny Sandy. She was wearing her signature pink dress.

I correctly exchanged business cards with the lobbyist and gave a cursory look at the VistaPrint creation. When I looked back, Sunny Sandy was gone. She had been replaced with a harried-looking young mother in a couture tracksuit. Only the color was the same. The woman continued down the line.

Another forgotten exchange and she was back: Sunny Sandy with her aura blasting bliss. I knew it was her from her smile. She hadn’t aged in 30 years.

Another disposable photo and she was gone again. The woman in the line looked much too ordinary to be Sunny Sandy. She had struggles and challenges. And feelings. Still, there was something about her. Like Sandy, she was trying to play her part the best she could.

I gave a firm handshake to the grumpy old man Bree had been talking to. I think I made a good impression. The man at least said “Thanks, son.”

Then I was standing before the woman. She wasn’t Sunny Sandy, but she had her smile. Up close, it looked different than it had on TV. It was a smile that strained from the pressure on her teeth. A smile of a woman insisting on her own strength. A smile that blinded with its whiteness. I went to shake the woman’s hand, but I could only see her teeth in that dazzling determined smile. Then I could only see white.

* * *

For a moment after I went away, I felt relief. While I floated in the liminal white space, I did not have to perform for anyone. Not for the people of Primrose Park, not for Bree, not even for myself. I could just be.

Then I started to remember what I had left behind. Bree was certainly staring stakes into me as I stood there blankly. The young mother was surely doubting voting for a candidate who seemed to be somewhere else. I could feel everyone in the depot watching me. It felt like all of Dove Hill. I hoped the man who wasn’t me could take the pressure better than I had.

Before I could start panicking, the floating ended. My feet landed on firm ground. I closed my eyes and braced myself to continue the performance.

When I opened my eyes, I was not at the depot. I wasn’t sure where I was exactly. I could tell I was outside from the air that smelled like an oak-scented candle and the sun that beat down with a heavy glare.

I was in a grass square enclosed by a brick wall. White benches surrounded me. They looked like they had just been painted. For me. The walled square was surrounded by a larger square made from four rows of buildings. Their facades were stylized down to the individual knots in the wood. A stainless steel staff wrapped by two golden snakes rose from one. Another displayed a tin sign reading “Post Office” in crimson red letters. It was difficult to see through the windows that reflected the harsh shards of light, but most of the buildings looked empty, deeply empty, on the inside.

The harsh sunlight drew my eyes to the sky. I expected to have to strain to see the sun, but it was easy. The piercing light wasn’t coming from the sun at all. The sun was a large paper mache ball the color of a cautionary traffic cone. It was surrounded by sharp yellow triangles of construction paper. I remembered that sun from Saturday mornings. I was in Sunnyside Square.

A piano I couldn’t see started playing the song again. If you’re not feeling happy today… I didn’t know if I was feeling happy or not. I couldn’t understand the feelings that flooded my brain like the light crashing from everywhere but the sun. There were too many of them.

I was relieved to have landed somewhere after the white abyss. When I found myself in the park from my dream, my legs felt strong beneath me, and my mind stopped racing. That stillness was something I had not felt in years.

I was glad to be in a place I remembered happily. In the Square, I knew how the day would end: with a nap and a snack. When I watched it as a child, everything in Sunnyside Square made sense. It made the world make sense. It made me make sense.

But none of this made sense. I was in a place that didn’t exist. It had never existed in reality; it hadn’t existed in a studio since the 1990s. I felt my stomach wretch as my mind tried to locate my body. While the scene around me was familiar, it was also wrong. It was like a song from music class had been transposed into an atonal scream. On my television, Sunnyside Square was full of life. Sunny Sandy and her friends loved playing together in the Square. This place, whatever it was, felt dead. If my Sunnyside Square had been an old friend, this place was that same old friend smiling up from their casket.

As my heart slowed in my chest—I couldn’t tell whether it was from calm or dread, both maybe—I felt something standing behind me. I turned and saw a large wooden door towering above me. A door hadn’t looked so tall since I was a kid. I recognized this one. It was the door to Sunny Sandy’s house that sat right in the middle of the park that sat right in the middle of the square.

Through all the feelings I couldn’t ignore—the comfort and the confusion, the peace and the panic—I felt my hand reach up to the gold knocker: a sunflower with a stem for the handle. Part of me wanted to be welcomed into my friend’s house. Part of me wanted to run and never look back. The music died, and my hand knocked without my permission.

One. Two. Three.

On what would have been the fourth knock in common time, the door opened to a large hallway in the same dark wood as the door. Like the door, the hallway loomed over me. Its roof was so far above me that it faded into black. All I could see was a dark space swirling with dust.

In front of me, a grand staircase followed the roof into the void. Beyond each bannister, the hallway was lined with two rooms forming yet another square. I felt like the walls were closing in to suffocate me in a hug.

I could hear voices from the other rooms. The voices of animals. Two quiet clucks from the kitchen. A scurrying from the library. I stepped into the threshold to follow a hoot coming from the music room.

The staircase cleared its throat, and the voices ended in a frightened silence. I turned to look. Out of the black, a bubblegum ghost descended the carpeted steps.

Sunny Sandy. For a moment.

When the ghost was near the end of its walk, I felt my feeling. Fear. It was something that might have been Sunny Sandy…before.

Now the figure looked like Sunny Sandy made into a living mannequin. Its thigh-high hot pink dress was frozen into a hard A-frame. It wore electric blue high heels that fixed its legs in a pounce and a large yellow belt that made its waist want to snap. Its hair was formed into a cyclone of a jaundiced beehive that did not move with the air. The only part of the friend I had known that remained was the shape of its smile. Even that was hard; its teeth razor-sharp.

The figure was now facing me. Though its frame was petite, it shadowed me by at least a foot. I felt my limbs stick like plastic.

“Hi friend!” the figure chirped. “Welcome to Sunnyside Square!”

My eyes were painted open. “I’m Sunny Sandy!” said the figure that was not Sunny Sandy. “What’s your name?”

I did not want to tell the figure my name. I did not want to invite it inside me. Still, even in this place, wherever it was, I had to be polite. I started to ask, “Excuse me. Can you please tell me where I am?”

I couldn’t. When I tried to open my lips, they formed a rictus smile. The feeling reminded me of the meet and greet. I tried again. And again. The whole time, the figure simply stared at me in pedantic expectation. My lips trembled in their unwanted expression.

Animals in the wrong colors peeked out from the rooms around me. A red rabbit. An orange owl. A blue turtle: Tommy. These were the friends I remembered. They were still there. With this creature. They watched nervously while hiding from the figure’s gaze.

What had become of Sunny Sandy giggled. She was laughing at me. “Silly, Mikey.” She knew my name. “If you can’t say anything nice, you won’t say anything at all.”

From the doorway to the kitchen, Maggie the Magenta Moo Cow waved a hoof nervously. She pointed to herself and mouthed, “Hello, Sandy! My name is…” Her eyes worried for me. I should have remembered. It was how every episode started.

“Hello, Sandy! My name is Mikey. It is nice to meet you.” I did my best to mean it. Somehow I knew that Sandy would accept nothing less.

Sandy smiled on cue. Through her glassy eyes, I could tell I had tested her patience. “Nice to meet you, Mikey! We’re going to have a super sunny day today! Because, in Sunnyside Square, the sun can never stop smiling!”

* * *

Before I could try to speak again, I was back in the campaign. I was with Bree in our makeshift office in the civic center. The dust from the boxes of unused festival trinkets formed in the same lines as it had in the black above Sandy’s house.

Bree was pacing in the few square feet of space around the ill-fitting desk. She was in the middle of a critique.

“...believe that Stephanie let us into that depot without warning us. Even if the polling had been right, that shack would have been too small.”

I waited for my review. I recognized Bree’s tone. It wouldn’t be good.

“We had to leave those old people outside in the heat. At least Stephanie could have told me to bring fans and extension cords.”

Bree continued to berate the air for what felt like half an hour before she noticed me. Wherever I had gone, she apparently hadn’t noticed.

When she looked at me, I began my apology. “I know… I was awkward. I didn’t ask the right questions. I looked uncomfortable. I—”

“Huh?” Bree asked. “No. You were, you were fine. Good even.”

“Thanks,” I wondered aloud. I had expected to feel the fire that was my sister aiming for an achievement.

“Yeah. It seems like you’ve really gotten the hang of this politician shtick.” She smiled at me like she was impressed I had learned to tie my shoes. I appreciated my big sister for trying to compliment me in the only way she knew how. It was all I was going to get.

“I guess.” I didn’t feel like I had gotten used to anything. Making small talk still felt like speaking a foreign language. Asking for votes was opening a vein. I wouldn’t even try soliciting donations.

The longer Bree paced, the more I allowed myself to forget what had happened in the Square. I told myself that it had just been a daydream—even if it had felt more like a nightmare. I hadn’t dissociated. I had just gone away for a while. That was healthy.

“How did you feel about it?” Bree asked. I had not expected that. I didn’t have time to calculate the correct answer.

“I…I made it,” I said with a forced laugh. “It’s still scary, but I think I’m—”

Like giving directions to the interstate, Bree answered, “You’re doing fine. There’s nothing to be scared of. Just think of all the people in their underwear.”

I had never understood that lesson. I knew Bree had learned it at the community theatre and then passed it onto me, but it never helped. I wish not being scared was as easy as that.

“Yeah. That’s good advice.” I really did love her for trying. It was what she did best.

We sat in silence for a moment. Bree started to take notes on the rest of the week, strategizing how to make up for the meet and greet. I stared out the window streaked with grime on the inside. A rabbit hopped past the window. I couldn’t be sure because of the grime, but the rabbit’s hide looked cherry red.

Bree looked up for a moment. “Can you stop that?”

“Sorry. Stop what?”

“You’re humming.”

I didn’t know I was, but I stopped as she requested. I wasn’t sure I could stop anything else that was happening. I didn’t need to ask her what song I was humming.

“Honestly…” Bree stared at me. Her eyes tried to hide her concern. In our lives, the word “honestly” never meant anything good.

I interrupted. “I think the stress may be getting to me. Just a little. I’m fine. I probably just need to walk more and eat better.” I thought I should probably stop drinking too.

Bree’s fear broke through. She didn’t scream, but her perpetual momentum paused. “Mikey,” she soothed. “Are you okay?”

I knew what that meant. That’s what she had asked when our parents stopped calling. After the hospital.

One minute, I had been giving a speech for my campaign for student body president. The next I felt like I was going to die at the podium. Then I was in a bed under fluorescent lights. The doctors called it “extreme exhaustion” and gave me a prescription for Prozac. I spent the spring semester of my junior year taking classes from Bree’s apartment.

“I’m good.” I had learned the words that would stop this conversation. “I promise.”

This time, it didn’t work. “If you need to take a break, we can spare a day.” Bree’s offer was genuine, but I could tell it pained her to make it.

When I lost the student election, Bree told me not to blame myself. My parents didn’t say anything. I wondered if they even remembered—or cared. Looking in my sister’s scared eyes, I scolded myself. My mind cost me my last election. I couldn’t let it cost me this one. I couldn’t be weak again.

“I think you might combust if we did that,” I deflected. “No. I’ll just rest tonight. I can make it to the debate.”

Bree’s eyes were still scared, but she persisted. We really needed to continue the campaign. Everyone was watching us. “Okay. Well then, tomorrow is senior day at the gym…”

I tried to keep my promise to rest. I put down my phone at 9:00. I took melatonin. I lit a vanilla candle. I even had a large glass of a new bottle of cheap red wine. My mother always used alcohol to help my father rest when he was particularly…frustrated.

 It was no use. Even in the deep black of my apartment, my mind wouldn’t stop showing me pictures. The darkness was the same as the void behind the streets’ manicured storefronts. The burning candle’s soft glow looked like the sourceless light of the handmade sun in the Square. It was like I never fully left it. I did my best to rest, but my eyes were afraid to close.