Tilt-A-Whirl
an excerpt
Sadie is my best friend.
Her green eyes lit up when she saw me through the crowd. “Izzy!” she squealed, like she hadn’t seen me two hours ago before dinner, like we hadn’t been together the entire day at school, same as the day before, same as the day before that. Almost all the days, in fact, stretching back to the first day of grade six when she arrived at our school, all hip-hugger jeans and big city confidence. Her parents wanted ‘a simpler life’ and picked our small BC town because it was ‘close to nature’ and had a ‘world class’ ski hill, although they never actually skiied. Worked out pretty good for me at least because we’d been best friends ever since.
Sadie and Izzy. Izzy and Sadie. They go together well, don’t you think?
I watched her jump to her feet from where she sat waiting for me on the curb in front of the ticket tent. She darted around a pack of moms clutching strollers and sticky toddlers and threw her arms around me. She was wearing the same thing she wore to school that day—short short jean shorts and her mom’s old Star Wars t-shirt (original trilogy)—and smelled mostly like she usually did, which is to say a creamsicle, thanks to vanilla deodorant and satsuma body lotion. But now the scent was topped with cocoa butter sunscreen and grease. A few grains of sugar shimmered on her lips.
“Did you already have mini donuts?” I accused her, but I didn’t actually mind.
“I couldn’t wait. We had salad for dinner.” She grabbed my wrist and slapped on an admittance band before pulling me towards the gate. “You can get the cotton candy later. Let’s go!”
This would be our last summer together. Well, the last summer before everything changed. I was going to UBC in the fall for Forest Resource Management. It had been arranged
for years—I’d live with my grandparents, who were only a few blocks from campus in an adorable bungalow shaded by hundred-year-old maple trees. Sadie was taking a year off. Her grades weren’t stellar and she hadn’t gotten into UBC. She never quite got around to applying anywhere else.
“Oh, well, at least I can come visit you lots,” she’d say as we grinded through our final Calc problem set or frantically skimmed Great Expectations looking for quotes on the perils of ambition for our last essay. “I’m sure I can get some time off here and there.” Sadie worked a few shifts per week at the Save-On but they were going to bump up her hours come September. (Her mom thought they were bumping them up next week. They were not.) She’d had to save a lot for a car that could make it all the way to Vancouver though. God knew her parents wouldn’t be loaning theirs.
Just about the entire town was out for the year-end carnival. We didn't have a lot going on most of the time, especially once the ski hill closed for the year, but the Parent Council pulled out all the stops for this event every June. We’d already had our graduation ceremony and we wrote our last exam today. The final day of school was next week, just to pick up report cards and get our yearbooks signed. You could hear summer holidays in the buzz of the crowd and the shrieks coming from the Zipper—the restraint turned down a little, so close to freedom. I held Sadie’s hand tighter.
