I honestly don’t know.
But I don’t dwell on it now, not with my family rushing to greet me. I peel myself out of Noah’s arms and drop to my knees to hug Gideon and Everly.
“We’re going to video call Grayson when the competition winner is announced later,” Dad says against my hair as he embraces me next. “He has his midterms this week, so he couldn’t get away to come visit.”
“That’s all right,” I reply as I hug Mom.
She says, her cheeks pink from the cold, “Sweetheart, we’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you too. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go eat before the festival starts, then we can change into our costumes.”
“Yay!” Gideon and Everly squeal in unison.
When we get to the quad a few hours later, it’s unrecognizable to me. The typically bare, sprawling green lawn is now packed with people, carnival rides, game booths, and rows and rows of display walls and pillars, currently home to over a hundred works of art.
Despite the merriment of it all, my chest tightens at the thought of seeing my painting again.
“Let’s start with the game booths,” I suggest, looking toward Gideon and Everly, knowing they’ll agree to anything involving games.
“Yeah,” Gideon says, tugging on his Spiderman mask. “I wanna play ring toss!”
I laugh, letting him grab my hand and take the lead. I glance askance at Noah, dressed in his homemade Halloween costume. He’s dressed as a painter, in a stained smock with a paintbrush tucked behind his ear and a wooden palette in his hand. He planned my costume to match and brought all the materials with him. My face is covered with bright swirls of face paint and I’m wearing a long-sleeve black shirt with the words ‘work of art’ printed on the front. The dainty wooden picture frame that Noah had spray-painted gold dangling around my neck completes the look.
It’s adorable he put so much effort into our costumes this year. It shows how much he cares. But with the uneasiness I feel about painting right now, I just feel uncomfortable. I’d love nothing more than to go back to my dorm and change into literally anything else.
The rest of my family is dressed up too: Everly as Wonder Woman, Mom as a cat, and Dad as a mouse.
“Let’s not lose track of time,” Mom tells Gideon, her glued-on whiskers wiggling with her words. “We want to make sure we have enough time to see your sister’s painting.”
“Okay,” he calls back to her, thoroughly distracted by the ring toss booth that had just come into sight.
For hours, we play ring toss, balloon pop, bean bag toss, and spin the wheel. We ride the rickety old Ferris wheel and the pendulum ride twice each, then we stuff our faces with candied apples and funnel cake. By the time I’m wiping powdered sugaroff of Gideon’s face, the night sky is pitch black above us apart from the silvery glow of the moon, not a star in sight.
A familiar voice rings out over a loudspeaker, making my jaw clench, “This year’s winner of the Lizbeth’s Halloween Festival Art Contest will be announced in five minutes.”
“Oh, we have to hurry,” Mom urges, stuffing the kid’s prizes into an oversized tote bag.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “We don’t have to rush. I don’t think I’m going to win anyway.”
“Nonsense,” Dad dismisses. “Let’s go!”
A rising sense of searing dread seeps into my core, like lava slowly bubbling over the mouth of a volcano.
The prompt for this year’s contest was ‘opposition.’ That’s it. One vague, useless word.
I have no idea if anyone will get the message I’m trying to convey with my painting, and that frightens me. I’ve never been so self-conscious about a painting before. It’s like the events that went down with Remi completely zapped my self-confidence.
As we near the rows of display walls, there’s a small wooden stage to the left of the rows, and Daniel, one of my painting professors, is standing on it with a microphone in hand.
“All right,” he says into the microphone. The screech of electronic feedback reverberates loudly through the crowd, making me wince. “Let’s announce this year’s winner.”
Dad squeezes my shoulder in excitement as Noah grabs my hand. It takes everything in me to keep it from trembling in his grasp.
“After careful deliberation, the judges chose to award the first-place prize to the artwork they felt embodied this year’s prompt, ‘opposition,’ with the most creativity and skill,” Daniel says before a dramatic pause.
A hush descends upon the quad in the wake of his words, and the crowd seems to hold their breath in anticipation.
“It is with immense pleasure that I announce the winner: submission number forty-seven, painted by artist Maeve Johnson, of Lizbeth’s sophomore class!”
