Her stomach was protesting loudly against the turkey sandwich she’d had for lunch, and her palms had an annoyingly clammy sheen to them. It was ridiculous. She was not supposed to be nervous before a pageant. It wasn’t her MO. But apparently her body hadn’t been advised of that today. Out on the water, a small sailboat rocked in the distance, the words Fall Festival splashed across the sail in orange. Tenley knew that down on Echo Boulevard, the FESTivities—as the signs all said—would be in full swing. She couldn’t help wishing, for just a second, that she could be there, riding the carousel and sucking on a whale pop and trying to guess how many lobsters were in the aquarium-sized tank. When her dad was still alive, they always used to do the lobster guess together. He was always so sure they’d guessed right, even though they never did. The person who guessed closest won a fishshake—a milk shake with gummy fish in it—from the Crooked Cat Diner, so every year at the end of the Festival, her dad would buy them two fishshakes and say, “See, I knew we’d win!”
