When They Fade by Jeyn Roberts Page A

quickly looked away. “Safer, too,” I added under my breath.
    “Let’s worry about that later,” Andrea said, ducking behind me as two little kids rushed past. “Come on. Let’s go check things out.”
    Andrea paused to ask the peace sign girls where we might find the stage, and the topless one pointed us in the right direction.
    “Just keep walking. You can’t miss it. It’s huge. Stay groovy.” She flashed the peace sign again and then lay down on her towel.
    “Did you see her eyes?” Andrea whispered as we walked off. “I’d say she’s been grooving all day.”
    “Probably most of last night, too,” I said with a grin.
    “So many people,” Andrea said. Her eyes sparkled with excitement. “I’ve never seen so
many
in one place.” She paused to check out the faded jeans of some gorgeous, long-haired young men as they walked past. “How come they don’t look like that back at home? Seriously, I’m in heaven. That’s got to be it. We died back on the road and now we’re here.”
    I caught the eye of a guy with a straw cowboy hat covering his curly dark hair. He smiled at me. Andrea was right. The men from North Carolina weren’t nearly as interesting as the ones we were now seeing. Of course, our town of Dixby only had about a thousand people, and the majority of them were over the age of thirty. Most of the guys our age were high school dropouts like my brother. Boys who spent their days working down at the factory, driving trucks like Dad, or hanging around the mechanic’s shop, hoping to get a job fixing cars like Marcus. Going to college wasn’t usually a viable option in our town. People didn’t leave. They settled in and dug deep roots.
    Me? I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to see all corners of the earth and everything in between. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, trapped in a small town with a family she never wanted. Maybe if she’d gone off and experienced things first, she wouldn’t have needed to run away in the middle of the night.
    I planned on living life before I settled down. Being at Woodstock would be my first adventure in a string of many. I had plenty of wild oats to sow. A million lives to live. And so much music to hear.
    Andrea let out a low whistle. Somehow, in the time it took us to park the car, the traffic seemed to have tripled.
    Hundreds of parked cars blocked the roads. People set up shop selling all sorts of things. Thick, juicy slices of watermelon for fifty cents: green rinds littered the ground. Corn on the cob seemed quite popular: lots of people had kernels and butter smears stuck on their faces. Bare feet kicked around empty bottles of Coke. Love beads were passed around, beautiful bright colors in all sizes and styles. A few people sold clothing out the backs of their vans: Leather belts and bell-bottom jeans. Peasant shirts. Long, flowing skirts. Andrea and I paused a few times to feel the quality of the cotton and press the beautiful items against our skin to compare sizes.
    And although no one straight-out advertised, several people whispered to Andrea and me as we walked by, offering drugs to sweeten our experience.
    I smiled nervously, turning everyone down. It wasn’t that I was against weed; I’d smoked once or twice. But I’d never really enjoyed it the way others seemed to. People said marijuana was supposed to enlighten the mind. All it did was make me tired and paranoid. It made me want to curl up in a ball and hide away from the rest of the world. Hardly mind-blowing, in my opinion. And not the sort of feelings I wanted to explore that weekend. So when Andrea offered to buy some, I shrugged her off. She could do whatever she wanted, but I had come to hear the music. That was a natural enough high for me.
    The closer we got to the stage, the busier things became. Soon we were elbow to elbow with all sorts of people. A group of feminists handed out pamphlets and I took one, putting it in my purse for later. We were women of the