That old chestnut.
Still, neither of us had come closer to each other than where we sat right now, with the parking brake between us. No touching, no nothing. I think we were both afraid to look each other in the eye. I was definitely afraid to look at his hand on the gearshift. Nay! Here there be dragons!
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“A toddler-free zone.”
No interruptions. Flutters went through me. I wasn’t sure if I trusted myself. Or us. But I also wasn’t telling him to turn the Jeep around, either. And when Eddie’s face popped up in my head, I brushed it aside along with the guilt I was accumulating.
I’d deal with that later.
When we got into town, we crossed over the river behind the dam, and for the first time, I didn’t want to curl up inside myself. Fen gave me a look and nodded, as if he understood. Then he turned right and drove a couple blocks away from the Strip.
This was familiar territory, especially when we passed a massive field full of ruts used for parking, and across from it, a smaller paved lot near a large park gate—one that’s built to look like the entrance to a medieval town. The sign near the gate readCONDOR PARK AND AMPHITHEATER.
“Um…? I thought you were excommunicated from the festival biz. Why are we coming here?”
“I am,” he assured me. “We’re cutting through. Be prepared to see firearms.”
“What?”
“Kidding,” he said, driving through the paved parking lot. “Mostly.”
Parts of the park were open to the public, except during paid events, so there were park visitors walking through a turnstile area guarded by park rangers, and plenty of others at minivans with strollers and sun hats, heading to a puppet show at a children’s stage in the woods. But Fen was driving past all that. Past the performing arts center and the shiny office building, where his father worked, to a locked gate in front of one of the main festival fields: Avalon.
Not open to public.
Fen jumped out and ran to the gate in long black shorts and a faded black T-shirt with Mozart’s portrait and name in a heavymetal font. He punched a code into the gate lock. The bar lifted, and he jogged back to the Jeep just in time to drive through before it closed again. He laughed to himself. “Whoo! You can lock me out, but you can’t lock out my mother, asshats!”
“That was…?”
“My mother’s code. They’ll change it next week, but she’ll just give it to me again. It’s fine, don’t worry. Hold on to the pup. This gets bumpy.”
He drove at a slow speed through a field I’d been in many times as a guest—once backstage with Mad Dog and Velvet—but never before the festival started. Never this early. Condor had several festival fields with stages, but Avalon was for camping. Half of it was pitch-your-own tent—the jokes abounded—but right here was Merry Village, where you could rent a tiny medieval-style tent, complete with cots and Wi-Fi, and walking distance to pop-up “shops,” which were run out of trucks and stalls.
It was so strange to see it being erected. All the little gray tents, flat on the grass, waiting to be put up. Some already had their red flags waving on top. Several workers were hammering in stakes as we drove past, and they looked up at us but didn’t seem bothered when Fen lifted his hand and waved.
“I always wanted to stay in one of those,” I said. “They’re so expensive. Who can afford two or three thousand dollars for one weekend? I don’t understand how they fill these things.”
“And yet they sell out in minutes every year,” Fen said. “Nearly all profit at this point. The tents were a couple hundred each, custom made, and the cots were cheap in bulk. It’s just the labor ofgetting them put up and paying minimum-wage employees to check in the tenters during the festival. Half a million net in my dad’s pocket.” He snapped his fingers. “And that’s not including all the shit Festival Freaks buy over the weekend.”
I was shocked. Eddie would brag about the tents, but he never explained it to me like that.
“I should write a festival exposé,” Fen said, mouth upturned. “Piss my father off.”
I laughed. “Haven’t you already pissed your father off?”
“Rage momentum,” he said. “You have to keep upping the stakes, otherwise, what’s even the point?”
He was teasing, but for the first time, I heard sadness behind the bitterness. And as we drove away from the tents, I was bothered by it, because I didn’t want him to hide things like a hurt dog, limping on a hurt paw and pretending everything was okay because weakness equals death.
But I put it out of my mind. I grew up around limping dogs; I knew how to hide too.
At the end of the field, he turned down a dirt service road that looped around the back of the field, and then took another that headed into the woods, once he’d skirted around aKEEP OUTsign on a chain, which was easy enough to get past in his Jeep. Now I thought I understood why the tires were always muddy.
After a few minutes, the trees got taller. Much taller. I spotted a state park sign—one for rangers, not for the public. There was a place on the shoulder to park near a trail, and Fen pulled the Jeep over.
“Have you ever been down here?” he asked.
