Dress Me in Wildflowers by Trish Milburn Read Free Book Online

out of adjectives.
    Farrin felt as if she were walking through molasses as she rose from her chair and approached the podium. Everything seemed magnified and yet dulled at the same time. But the sense of being watched intensified, as if the number of pairs of eyes pointed toward her multiplied with each step.
    Only eighty or ninety people, including spouses, filled the room. Some classmates hadn’t made it back for the reunion. A few barely made it past graduation, so they probably didn’t want to venture back for fear the school officials might have changed their minds and be waiting at the door to reclaim their diplomas.
    Through her occasional talks with Tammie, she’d learned that poor Tim Fanning had died during a spring break from college when he fell from a boat while deep sea fishing with his family. And Dusty Carmichael was serving thirty to life for knifing a guy outside a bar in Chattanooga. Knowing how Dusty had been in high school, he’d probably been too drunk to remember it but had opened his smart mouth one too many times and gotten himself sent to the state prison in Nashville. The drunken part, ironically, might have saved him from death row.
    Farrin’s mental roll call of her former classmates came to an abrupt halt when she realized she’d reached the podium and everyone who had made it to the reunion was watching her, waiting for her to say something interesting. Her stomach rolled when she spotted Brittany Stevens and Amber Jamison at a table to her right. She didn’t see Janie Carlisle, but two out of three was bad enough.
    Why was she letting the sight of them bother her? She wasn’t sixteen anymore, and they weren’t worth the effort it took to wonder what was going through their pea brains.
    Farrin placed her hands on the edges of the podium and began. “Graduation seems like it was yesterday, and yet it seems like it was eons ago.”
    Despite her painfully knotted stomach, the indentations she was digging into her palms with her freshly manicured fingernails, and the sweat dampening her upper lip and beneath the lower edge of her bra, she somehow made it through the speech. All the time leading up to the trip back to Oak Valley and to this night, this speech, had been worse than torture. She’d much rather have been forced to live on bread and water in one-hundred-and-fifteen-degree heat than have come back here.
    But it hadn’t been as bad as she’d feared. Once all the waiting was over and she began, the speech she’d practiced over and over on her flight and subsequent drive went smoothly. The audience laughed at the right places, nodded at the appropriate points and even gave her a standing ovation at the end. She stood there dumbfounded, wondering who the people facing her were and what they’d done with the classmates with whom she’d walked through this gym to the strands of “Pomp and Circumstance” fifteen years before.
    The trip back to the front table didn’t require the passage through molasses, though Farrin dropped into her chair with such a sense of relief she was afraid she might melt right into a puddle on the floor. She stared down at that waxed surface and wondered how they’d gotten the gym on a Friday night in October. The basketball team must be playing an away game, which she guessed could account for more of the classmate absences. After all, this was the same class that had canceled its five-year reunion for lack of interest because it had been scheduled the night before the opening of deer season.
    A delectable-looking piece of strawberry-covered cheesecake appeared in front of Farrin, and she dived into it like it was a swimming pool in the middle of Death Valley. Her waistline be damned. She could Pilates it away later, but at this moment she needed sugar and lots of it to help calm the aftereffects of the speech. What was wrong with her? The speech was over.
    “Are you okay?”
    Farrin looked up to see Tammie staring at her with a concerned expression