Had she traveled nearly two thousand miles for this? It would be a tranquil place if the valley wasn’t cluttered with intoxicated youths.
It all seemed wrong now.
Hours of thought had gone into this cross-country road trip. Now here she was, smashed against foreign bodies, but completely alone in the crowd. Her friends were becoming amorphous and blending in with the rowdy cluster, but she could still see them sharing the company of a guy they had met.
That was a threesome she had no intention of joining.
The final rays of sunlight found her freckled shoulders making her gauzy tube-top stick to the salty perspiration in the crook of her back.
She fiddled with the elastic on her maxi skirt as her mind wandered back to the miens of her family members as she told them about the music festival.
Nobody in her family understood her. It was such dramatic a teenage cliché, but true nonetheless. She had always been the black sheep, a reject with different values. Her mother called it ‘a waste of time’ as her backpack laid open on the hardwood floor with her pair of white Chuck Taylors peeking out. It was simply a week long, post-graduation indulgence that her parents weren’t going to obstruct.
She shook the negative thoughts from her mind and tried to focus on the electric melodies. The songs weren’t familiar, but she found herself humming along to them, wanting to savor every moment of the music.
It was well into the midnight hour as the electronic band concluded their performance and left the stage. She considered heading off to the hotel she would be staying at and getting some well needed rest, but another band took the stage and began to strum their acoustic guitars with languid movements.
Beautiful, silky folk music surrounded the valley. The crowd began to dwindle down making it into an intimate serenade. She began to walk closer to the stage, struggling to get a better view. There was a perfect gap between the shoulders of two rather tall guys, but the space was occupied again by the time she arrived.
She dug her clean sneakers into the grass and tried to get a better look at the stage, but immediately regretted it as she tripped on the bottom of her skirt and began to fall forward. Her fingers latched onto his loose, cotton t-shirt as she fought to conceal her clumsiness.
She could feel him beginning to turn to help as an apology in gibberish started to leak from her lips. “I’m so clumsy, sorry about that,” she sighed as she noticed one of the most charming features on any human being she had seen in her eighteen years of existence. There was something in his smile, reassurance perhaps. She couldn’t help but take a mental picture of it to file away.