Make or Break by Catherine Bennetto

Author:Catherine Bennetto [Bennetto, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘Good morning ma’am, is that Jess?’

‘Yes,’ I said down the apartment phone. I could hear laughter and cheers and the sound of a car radio in the background.

‘This is security at the front gates. I have Jimmy here.’

I heard a cacophony of voices repeating, ‘Hi Jess! Hi Jess! Hi Jess!’ I giggled, told the security guy to let them in, grabbed my daypack and skipped out of the door.

Jimmy and his friends only had a day pass to the festival so we were leaving early, and when I stepped out of the apartment building at 7 a.m. and crossed the paved drive to the waiting van the air was fresh on my bare shoulders. In the van were Gus and Bryn from the art studio, their girlfriends, the Hispanic kitchen hand from Sylvie’s and another guy who was unbelievably good-looking whom I’d not met before. They were all jammed in with their tanned limbs, big smiles and their rough-and-ready stubble (not the girls). Every other available space was filled with inflatable rubber rings, water bottles, boxes of beer, colourful towels, straw hats and spare pairs of board shorts. It was an explosion of summertime supplies. I sat next to Jimmy and was introduced to the people I didn’t know.

‘Can I borrow your phone?’ Jimmy said.

I raised my eyebrows at the phone in his hand while trying to find enough space for my feet.

Jimmy rolled his eyes. ‘Ian changed my phone to Greek and these bastards,’ he shot his friends in the back a good-natured scowl, ‘won’t lend me theirs so I can figure out how to change it back.’

‘We’re Team Ian!’ his friends hooted.

I giggled but handed over my phone. I was definitely Team Jimmy.

After we swung into a café and picked up iced coffees and fresh juices we were on the road amid in-jokes, singing, friendly ribbing and laughter. We made only one toilet/refreshment stop at a dusty roadside place that looked like it ought to have been on Route 66 in the 1980s. The heat as we clambered out of the van and tossed all the tumbling summer paraphernalia back in was intense even at 9.30 a.m.

An hour later we turned off the highway onto a dirt track and then drove through a grassy field to join a queue of cars, pick-ups and vans all looking like ours: dusty, full of tanned people and inflatable dinghies and emitting music and laughter. It took forty-five minutes in the slow-moving queue to reach the entrance of the festival. We handed our tickets to a girl dressed in a tie-dye vest, cut-off black denim shorts, cowboy boots, two flower leis, one pink, one yellow and a straw panama hat with another multi-coloured flower lei wound around the crown. She had gold temporary tattoos down her thin, tanned arms and greeted us all in Afrikaans first then English. Similarly dressed men and women directed us to park in a field on the edge of a high bank.

‘Wow,’ I said, once I’d extracted myself from the sweaty van and stood on the edge of the field.

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