One

The whir of departing planes was omnipresent, only slightly dulled by the hum of conversation around me. It’d been four years since I’d been in this airport�"�"hugging my mother goodbye, telling her I’d call her once I landed in Rome. It seemed unreal that I was actually returning to my hometown. I’d promised myself that, when I was accepted into my abroad program five years prior, I’d never set foot inside of it for more than a visit. Yet, here I was, ready to begin a career in the same town I’d achieved every other milestone in. 

Fairfield felt almost inescapable. People born there more often than not died there, and people who left for longer than a couple of weeks were few and far between. It was rare to gain new faces in Fairfield, and even when it happened, those who moved in were there to stay.

Fairfield was eerily disconnected from the larger population bordering it. Some felt contended in this bubble, but I was suffocated by the stagnation of life within the borders. The routine was crushing. Day in and day out, you woke up in the same house, went to the same place, saw the same people and returned home to have it repeat the next day. 

To say I was embittered by my return was an understatement.

I pulled out my phone and shot my mom a text. I’d asked her to pick me up from the airport not long after I’d told her of my job offer.  Her acceptance had been eager, with such fervor in her tone that it only made my attitude more petulant. 

But then, my mother had made it no secret that she hated to see me go. My mom, like the rest of my family, had been born and raised in Fairfield. Her sense of pride in our city was cringeworthy. She was actively involved in the PTA and Fairview Welcoming Committee, and she’d encouraged me my entire school career to join my school’s own welcoming committee. I’d never obliged, but both of my sisters, Tawny and Blaire, had joined their respective committees. 

My sisters loved living in Fairfield. Blaire, my younger sister, was engaged and ready to nest in a house not a full block away from our childhood home. Tawny, my older sister, was attending a community college a town away, making a thirty-minute commute for each class. She had plans of accepting a job as a dental assistant at Fairfield Dental as soon as she’d graduated. My sister’s had never imagined a life outside of Fairfield, and all their plans from the future had always taken place within the city limits. 

I was the only one not contented by life inside of Fairfield’s barriers. 

The dedication to Fairfield so encompassed my mother that she’d given all three of her children names meaning, in some respect, “field”. Tawny got out of this the easiest, with a name that meant field in Irish and “golden brown” in English and “field” in the Irish my mother pulled it from. But my name was inseparable from Fairfield. No matter how far I got from Fairfield, my name and family always tied me back to it. 

“Hadley!” I turned at the sound of my mother’s voice and smiled, jogging over to embrace her. As little as I wanted to be back in Fairfield, seeing my mother again was a welcome side effect. 

    “Hey, mom. Thanks for coming and getting me. I know it’s a long drive.” 

It took an hour and fifteen minutes to get from Fairfield to the state capital’s airport, traffic allowing. My mother hated driving; something I’d inherited from her. Highway driving was even worse, so I knew she must have been desperate to get me home if it meant accepting the responsibility of such a long drive. 

“Honestly, it’s no problem.” She released me from her arms. “I’m just so glad to have you back home. All of your classmates have been asking about you.” 

I grimaced. My classmates had never been the nicest to me; in Fairfield, the reputation you made stuck with you, no matter how early you forged it. “I see. I only keep in contact with Darcy, I guess.” 

Darcy, my childhood best friend, was my only friend in Fairfield. Besides my family, she was the only resident of Fairfield that I loved and missed. And she, like me, had escaped the moment she could. She was in California, now; chasing dreams of becoming an actress. 

“They’ll be so excited to see you.” She flitted her hand out as if to wipe the wry expression off my face.

Despite her reassurance, I was skeptical. But, I hoped, perhaps a bit naively, that she’d be proven right.

    As I got into the car, I got the first good look at my mother that I’d had since I’d left for Italy. She’d aged in the past four years. My mom had always been casual about the aging process, and it was easy to see why. It suited her. The passage of time had greyed a few of her hairs, striping the gentle blonde color she’d passed onto Blaire and I. What had once been faint wrinkles had deepened and grown in number, with fresh lines that had begun to frame her hydrangea blue eyes. They added a sense of distinction, painting her face delicately with wisdom, and her once taught skin was beginning to soften. 

She was beautiful. It filled me with pride to know I’d inherited most of my appearance from her, the only differences between our faces being the freckles sprinkling my cheeks and our noses. I was the only child who had failed to inherit our mother’s dainty nose. Instead, I'd gotten my father’s, with a slight bump on the downward angle and nostrils that flared out ever-so-slightly more than my mother’s. None of it worked as well on me as it always had on my mother, but part of that had to be attributed to the tall and lean frame I’d gotten from my father’s side. Tawny, Blaire and our mother were all 5’2”, adorably petite with subtly pear-shaped bodies. And though I was fair from flat, I had a more rectangular shape. I was far from ugly, but in our family, I’d always felt like the 5’6” black sheep. 

I opened the door to my childhood home  and was greeted instantly by my family dog, Feather, who was so overjoyed to see me it sounded as if someone had been torturing her in my absence. I laughed and gave her a scratch behind her ears, patterned with a loving kiss on the head. 

“Hi, pretty girl!” I gave her a scratch under the chin, a grin stretching from one ear to the other. “I missed you, yes I did! I missed you a whole bunch!” Something about Feather always brought out a part of me I hated to admit existed; a deeply stupid, sentimental girl with a baby voice. Feather loved hearing me speak in it so much, though, that it was almost impossible not to let my love for her seep through. 

My mom smiled lovingly, which, despite my age, still brought some heat to my cheeks. I stood up and gave Feather a pat, a silent instruction for her to leave. “Where are Blaire and Tawny?” 

“Blaire will be coming later. She’s so excited for you to meet Garrett.” 

I nodded, something in my twisting up at the mention of Blaire’s fiancé.  “And Tawny?” 

“Tawny has class until just after noon, but she’ll be coming as soon as she’s done.” 

I walked over and gave my dad a quick peck on the cheek, smiling at him. “Okay. Then I was thinking I would walk over to Greg’s and get some of their pizza.” I hadn’t eaten in a few hours, and one of the few things I had loved and missed about Fairview had been the pizza they kept warm under the heating lamp. It was far from gourmet pizza, but sometimes there was nothing like a greasy, gooey gas station pizza. 

I’d spent a lot of time in my teen years walking back and forth between my house, Fairfield’s public pool and Greg’s, filling my stomach with slices of pizza and diet coke. My mom’s smile indicated that she remembered this as clearly as I did. 

“Alright. Have fun. Bring me back a candy bar?” 

“Of course.” 

The route to Greg’s was so familiar to me that it was almost automatic, my legs carrying to their large sliding doors without so much as a fleeting question about where to go. I walked in as the doors parted for me, already zeroing in on the pizza warmer. It took me about three steps to realize its absence. In its place stood a gaudy display of thickly frosted cookies,  standing proud in the area I was so used to the pizza occupying.  It caught me so off guard that it felt as if my brain flickered, a faulty fluorescent light unable to decide if it wanted to keep fighting or give up entirely. 

“Welcome to Greg’s, how may I help you?” 

I jumped, startled by an unfamiliar voice, and spun on my heels to meet eyes with the cashier. Amusement coated her words, and her lips were pulled into a relaxed smirk. It dawned on me that my confusion must’ve been vivid against my features, eyebrows risen high and eyes blown wide. 

She was taller than me, her lips eye level with me. Even though they were stretched by her wry smile, they were plump and painted cherry red, pulling your attention straight to them. My eyes lingered on them for a few seconds, before raising up to meet a set of eyes such a dark ebony that I could see myself in them, tiny, upside-down and confused. Her smirk faded, and I realized I was staring. My brain finally revved back up, all the lights flashing back on. 

“I don’t know you,” I spoke aloud, and a cringe drew me back. She knew that. She knew we’d never met. Clearing my throat, I tried again. “I mean, we haven’t met.” 

She laughed, bouncy and accented with a rasp. It filled the room, surrounding me in its resounding volume. Something about it melted the unexpected anxiousness off of me, rolling off of me and into a puddle at my feet. 

“No, we haven’t. Everyone I meet here tells me that.” 

I blinked once, twice, three times before it hit me what that meant. “You didn’t grow up here, then.” 

“No, I’m new. I moved here just three weeks ago.” 

“You’re new?” It was something I’d never experienced before, meeting someone who’d willingly moved into Fairfield. Sometimes I forgot that Fairfield existed to the outside world, that it wasn’t completely detached from the rest of society. The people I knew in kindergarten were the people I knew now. No additions, no subtractions. 

“Mmhm, newer than anyone else here, it seems.” She pulled her waist-length hair up and into a tight ponytail, uncloaking the name tag she had hidden underneath the billowing charcoal hair. Cassidy. I had yet to say it aloud and already I could feel it rolling off my tongue. “Everyone who meets me doesn’t seem used to meeting new people! Not going to lie, it’s going a bit eery.” 

I agreed, of course. But some indoctrinated city pride kept me from voicing that to an outsider. I’d often expressed my resentment for Fairfield to Darcy, but Darcy understood. This girl, a foreigner to the Fairfieldian lifestyle, couldn’t even begin to fathom my discontent. 

“Well, you know. We’re a tight knit community, I haven’t seen anyone move in…ever. And I’ve only seen two people leave.” 

Something in her ebony eyes sparked to life, zipping over my body. I couldn’t read her thoughts, but her eyes were so animated with whatever she was thinking that I couldn’t help but wonder, my attention wrapt. 

“S**t. It almost sounds like the beginning to a horror story. People, cut off from society, unnaturally happy and perky, ignorant to outside life. A giant question mark to the rest of the world; no one who has made it in has ever made it out again. The only proof that they’re still alive being an ominous, scripted postcard talking about how happy they are in their new, cheery little town…” Her voice trailed away with her thoughts, and you could see the words churning within her mind, spinning a tale of brainwashing cults and unsolved disappearances. For a second time, I was taken aback. It was as if she’d found a way to word my feelings in a way I never had, in a way I had never begun to turn into sentences. 

Unsure of how to react, an awkward titter burbled out of me. “I don’t know about question marks or ominous postcards. I just know community is huge here.” A short silence hung between us. She was looking off at some point in the distance, thoughts taking her far “Anyway, your name tag says Cassidy? I’m Hadley. It’s nice to meet you.”

I’m not sure if it was the sound of name or just a coincidence, but her eyes settled back on me. I wondered what had taken her away from Fairview. Something in me wanted so desperately to know where she’d been. 

“Yeah, Cassidy. You can call me Cass, if you want.” She cleared her throat, gathering her hair into her hands. She arranged it into a ponytail, messy and quick. Even tied up, her hair fell past her shoulders. Something about this action, so incredibly simple, mesmerized me. “Do you need help with anything?”

I was yanked back into the moment, into my life, back in Fairview, and for a fleeting moment, I felt as if I almost understand where Cassidy had been just a few moments before. 

My brain stuttered back into motion, grinding in an attempt to catch up with the situation. 

“Oh,” my voice was so hoarse that I wondered if Cassidy could tell that I had to reenter my body. “The pizza spinner. Do you know where it is?” 

Cassidy smiled, and my heart screeched to a halt. I drew in a breath, my whole body out of sync with itself.

“We moved it to the back, near the microwave and the frozen burritos.” 

I felt as if my legs were quaking underneath me, unsteady from the experience of something as simple as meeting a cashier. I’d never felt like that before�"�"such a surge of enthrallment, knocking all of my senses out of whack. I felt emotionally jet lagged, as if this girl had flown me around the globe in a matter of seconds. 

Something about it troubled me so deeply, that I purchased my slice of pizza and a diet coke without so much as another word. She told me the price, but it just floated over me, past my ears without making contact with my brain. I stumbled out of the gas station, and everything still felt weird�"�"and for the first time in my life, I wasn’t hungry for Greg’s pizza.