“And you?”

“My name’s Gemma,” she says. “I’m visiting. I grew up here, though.”

“Really!” Holly says. “Not a lot of townies at this shindig, I’ll tell you.”

Townies? Gemma laughs. “I could find you a few.” This was a lie—Gemma’d kept in touch with literally no one. “Want to hear why it’s evil to celebrate Halloween?” (This was also a lie. Plenty of religion in Gemma’s town, sure, but they had Halloween; it’s not like this was Winkler or anything.)

“It would be because of my heritage,” Holly says dryly. “Are you Menno too, by any chance?”

“I’m a Friesen,” Gemma says, her eyes drifting back to the landscape below. “You?”

“Holly Driedger’s the full name, my mom’s a Penner! My folks aren’t super churchy or anything, though.”

“Lucky you.”

Holly blew smoke to her side. “I’ve said that to myself a couple times.” Didn’t miss a beat, this one.

The woman in the big grey wig walks past them. “Holly,” Gemma says, “Is there a theme to this costume party?” “That would be biophilia, madame!”

Gemma raises an eyebrow.

“Oh!” says Holly, again with the gleeful raised finger. “Funny you should ask! I, too, did not have that word in my immediate vocabulary.” She pulls out her phone. “‘Biophilia is the love of life or living systems.’” She puts her phone back in her bag. “True facts.”

“What are you, then?”

“I”—Holly twirls in her skirt—“am the love of movement.”

Gemma chuckles. “I like the clouds.”

“Thanks, friend!”

“Hey,” Gemma suddenly says, pointing down. “This building. Do you know when it was built?”

But Holly is now looking away from her, scanning the crowd, and if she has heard Gemma, she does not respond.

Then Ava walks toward them from the crowd like a mirage, her cheeks flushed under her red-black hair and her dress spotty with sweat. “The lady herself arrives,” Gemma says to Holly, loud enough for Ava to hear.

“She’s never been much for a bold entrance.”

“Is that so?” says Ava, and then leans down to kiss Gemma on the lips.

“Looks like you lovebirds need more drinks!” Holly scampers away.

Gemma laughs. “Your friend’s a trip.”

Ava grins. “Yeah, hey? Holly’s one of my favourite people.”

Down on the ground, a firework goes off. Then three or four more in rapid succession. They’re coming from the west, by the lake. It’s hard to see with the sun. Ava looks confused. “Wonder what that’s about.”

“Probably just kids,” Gemma says, more quietly than she intended. “Happens all the time.”

When Gemma last visited town, in her early twenties, she’d come in boy mode. In winter, with her ex, to help her dad pack up the old bungalow on Nelson Street and move east. The ex had sat around while Gemma and her dad sweated in their snowsuits, but then at night she got restless, so Gemma said, “We could go to the lake.” On the way down to the ice, they pushed each other into snowbanks. That relationship hadn’t exactly been good—her ex had been code-pendent, and Gemma’d been attempting to transition, and neither girl had known how to deal with herself, let alone each other. Those were years of Gemma’s life buried in another person’s mental anguish, years subsumed into one girl’s poorly lit bedroom above Qu’Appelle Avenue. But that time on the lake was real nice. It’d been a postcard-classic Manitoba winter night: bright moon, still air, freezing but not that freezing. Even now, Gemma can perfectly picture her ex laughing, spinning on the ice, kicking up snow, construction-orange mittens on her hands.