"Yeah?"
"I'm starting to miss Brig."
18
Iput on the darn costume.
I mean, what was I going to do? Aunt Ruby was counting on me. And Shelley and her friends from school were planning to walk in the parade with me and help me throw candy.
Funnily enough, the minute I had the darn thing on, Aunt Ruby found me.
"Tess! You look adorable!"
"I look like what happens when palm trees go to die," I said glumly, looking at myself in the mirror in the tent that served as the parade changing area.
"You have to put on the head!"
The costume's head was a giant, rounded, vaguely palm-leaf-looking thing, with a clownlike mouth and two giant googly eyes. I wondered every year why kids didn't run screaming.
"You're no longer related to me," I told her.
"Look at the bright side, honey—"
I stared at her, safely dressed in her mayoral festival clothes of a lightweight summer suit in a lovely shade of pale blue, and bared my teeth. "There is no bright side."
"At least it doesn't smell like vampire farts. By the way, did you ask Carlos—"
"Argh!"
I started to walk out of the tent but she grabbed my hand, er, leaf.
"Tess! You can't go out without your head on! You'll destroy the magic of the Swamp Cabbage Festival!"
Now she was speaking in exclamation points. Shelley must be rubbing off on her.
"This is not Christmas, Aunt Ruby. I am not Santa Claus. I am an unhappy person dressed up like a cabbage. No children will be harmed by seeing my real head."
"Tess." She tapped her foot, and I sighed.
"Fine."
I put on the head.
"Thank you, dear."
Aunt Ruby bustled off toward the jams booth, but I started to trudge over to the spot in front of Dead End Hardware where the parade floats—if you could call them that—were lining up.
The definition of "float" in a small town is very flexible.
The Peterson brothers always drove riding lawn mowers. A few people rode horses. Wolf Construction drove one of their bulldozers. John Luke Arnold had even walked an alligator on a leash right down Main Street one year.
That had been epic.
On the way there, I passed a lot of people I knew, but I didn't have to stop to talk, because nobody knew the giant green fungus tree was me in disguise. I saw Yasmine at her Tarot booth and waved and she waved back, because she probably knew who I was.
It was a magic thing.
Granny Josephine and Sue-Ellen Bishop were chatting by the lemonade tent, and Mr. and Mrs. Frost were talking to Mr. and Mrs. Quindlen in line for the Tilt-a-Whirl, which seemed like a bad idea to me, but they only had aYOU MUST BE THIS TALLsign up, not aYOU MUST BE THIS AGEsign. I hoped they didn't tilt and whirl their old bones too much.
