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A nervous community-center coordinator is thrust into a high-stakes investor meeting after a messy, heartfelt festival. In a small, weathered town, he must balance paperwork, persuasion, and eccentric neighbors to secure funding that protects the center’s everyday work rather than selling it off.
Ollie Reed's desk looked like a cathedral of labels and playlists. Post-it flags fanned out in a neon arc, three different urgent stickers lined up like traffic lights on a particularly anxious corner, and a mug declared in polite font: TOOLKIT: TEA + EXCEL. For a man whose heart beat in tidy rows and whose comfort zone had precise margins, the community center's main office was a place where chaos could, at least on paper, be turned into a schedule. He kept a playlist for comforting chaos—soft percussion, gentle saxophone, music that promised everything would be on time—and a spreadsheet called EverythingSorted-v3 that contained a tab for every volunteer, a color code for every snack, and a pivot table that made the senior knitting circle look like an elegantly organized army.
Monday was a favorable day for small towns. The stray dog had vacated the welcome mat for the week, the pottery class would steam gently in the corner, and the drumming circle up on the mezzanine would provide Ollie with a metronomic confidence he liked to borrow. He had just poured a cup of coffee that tasted faintly of municipal caution when the email arrived. The subject line was sedately celebratory: Congratulations on Your New Role. The body of the message read like a press release dressed in comfortable domestic clothing. "Dear Team Member," it began, "we are delighted to announce our new Mood Coordinator…" and somewhere usually reasonable citizens would have deleted it, thinking someone had wrongly hit Reply All.
Instead, staff knocked on the office door and burst in with a banner made of construction paper. June Alvarez, who could make a crisis feel like a blip on a radar by the way she pinched her eyebrows and gave directions, was waving a corner of the banner and smiling with the sort of confidence that said she had ordered catering for something she genuinely intended to enjoy. Dotty Pruitt, who still wore sequins on Thursdays just to keep people guessing, brandished a tambourine and asked whether Ollie accepted the honor of wearing a sash. A volunteer from the kitchen appeared with a paper hat stitched—somehow—with the word MOOD in glittery letters.
Ollie tried to say something useful. He opened his mouth to tell them there had to be a mistake: he had not applied for anything that included the word mood. The admonition he rehearsed—"I'm not a coordinator of moods, I'm good with calendars"—died on the way out. Social dynamics, he had noticed over the course of countless program meetings, were often best navigated by nodding until someone else made a correction. He accepted the glass of juice offered to him and smiled the sort of smile that could be described as apologetically blank.
He tried to find his supervisor and got an answering machine that chirped cheerfully: "I'm out doing research into community engagement—leave a message!" The message had been left three days ago. He checked the email header. It came from the broader Office of City Programming, the place that sent out memos with phrases like mandatory and please be advised and often layered them in euphemism. Attached to the message was a calendar invitation bearing a title that made Ollie's stomach execute a small, unpleasant pirouette: Proof of Community Spirit—Investors Visit. The date on that invitation was two days away.