Page 80 of A Spell for Midwinter's Heart
“What is it?” asked Rowan. Zaide shoved her phone into Rowan’s hands, revealing a page full of graphs. They illustrated a steady rise in traffic and then, suddenly, a sharp downturn.
“Metrics,” explained Naomie, “for our social media accounts.”
“What changed?” asked Rowan.
“I’ve got a guess,” said Zaide. She swiped her phone to a new tab, showing off a list of all the Goshen Group board members, one of whom was the founder of Facegram. “Fucking assholes are burying us.”
“Who?” asked Gavin, walking through the door at that exact moment. When they showed him the trail of evidence, he nodded with a frown. “Everything’s incestuous at that level. They’re all invested in each other.”
“What’s that about incest?” asked Stephan, walking in with Kel a few paces behind.
Zaide ignored him, responding to Gavin. “What the hell are the rest of us supposed to do, then?”
Rowan piped up to say, “Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Social media was never ‘the plan.’ This is a setback, but…” Her gaze found Gavin, and the way he looked at her, with total confidence, inspired her to say, “We are going to build something they don’t own. Something they can’t bury. Something uniquely us. Uniquely Elk Ridge.”
“I still don’t know what’s going on,” said Stephan, raising his thermos of coffee. “But hear, hear.”
Zaide did not look entirely convinced, but she nodded anyway, and the members of Operation Holly and Ivy gathered at the Midwinter table to plan.
For the rest of the day, they plotted and pondered, argued and evaluated. What had once been a seed germinated and sprouted with every conversation, as they bridged the divides between their unique visions of what the festivals could be. Like the grains of sandpaper in the body of a rock tumbler, their differing skills, experiences, and perspectives worked to polish away the rough exterior and reveal the gemstone beneath.
Whenever she happened through the house, Liliana evaluated their progress, pointing out gotchas they hadn’t known to look for. Zaide’s visual sketches of their concepts lent it all a sense of tangibility. Naomie offered insight into trends and marketability, and when they got stuck, she would draw them a card for inspiration.
Gavin kept them all grounded with his analysis of cost and time estimates. Kel’s ideas came out less often, zooming in from left field to mix up their perspective in the way only someone from a younger generation could, while Stephan shared a working vendor perspective that even Liliana hadn’t entirely understood.
There were times Rowan worried she wasn’t offering as much as the rest, but whenever the group would go on a tangent, everyone looked her way, and she could remind them what they’d been trying to solve. When people struggled to articulate an idea, she jumped in to ask the right questions to bring it out. She held the complete picture in her head, freeing everyone else to rabbit-hole in their specialties.
They focused on a single festival as a proof of concept to narrow things down—Gavin’s idea. “We’re better off presenting one well-polished example than a bunch of roughs,” he’d argued.
“Whole ass or go home,” agreed Zaide.
They chose the fall festival, given that Zaide had already produced dozens of sketches on the subject. It would last until Día de Los Muertos, after which the grounds would shut down for the transition to winter.
At the end of the day, Rowan emerged from a haze of sugary treats and coffee to take a few steps back and evaluate their work—its details scribbled onto a series of whiteboards. There was a tremor in the air, and she picked up that humming world song again—completely sober this time.
She danced over to Gavin, winding her arm through his. He assented to being led back to where she had been standing, though not without a quizzical quirk of his brow. Zaide, Kel, Stephan, and Naomie kept on arguing over what kind of musical act would be the best to headline a spooky festival; all prepared to die on their respective hills. Darkwave, Death Metal, Horror Punk, and Witch House were all contenders.
Rowan leaned in close to Gavin and whispered, “What do you see?”
“A group of people who have eaten way too much butter and sugar,” he whispered back with a smile. She rolled her eyes and jabbed a finger at the whiteboards, where scores of ideas stoodunder the headingThe Elk Ridge Wheel of the Year.His eyes swept along the boards.
“A plan,” he said. His eyes shone. “I see a plan.Yourplan, brought to life.”
“Ourplan,” she replied. She puffed out her chest in a silly way and continued, “And is it an economically sensible proposition, in your expert opinion?”
“Yes,” he said with a laugh. He looked down at her with those soulful eyes that she had once accused of being a front. “But more importantly: a plan I believe in.”
Swept up in his gaze, she took him by the hand and dragged him out onto the back porch. “What’s going on?” he asked with a laugh.
“Just wanted to do this…” She got up on her tiptoes and pulled him close, capturing him in a kiss. It was all tongue and teeth, hungry and hypnotic. In moments he had moved on from devouring her mouth to her neck and then on down to as much of her chest and collarbone as he could reach through the scoop neck of her sweater.
“I want to taste every part of you,” he said in a low voice.
“Please,” she gasped.
But then she remembered that they hadn’t announced their departure, and the meeting was far from over.
“But maybe not right now,” she said, slowly extracting herself from his arms. “Considering they’ll send a search party any minute.”
