It’s the blue gondola car hooked on the back that surprises me. At first, I was just mad, hearing my flip-flops slap against the soles of my feet as I walked away into the darkness, the noise hitting the buildings all around me and echoing into the night. As if I give a damn about how Cassie kisses. I stop in front of the banner advertising Cinderellabration, inviting guests to JOIN THE HAPPIEST CELEBRATION ON EARTH. “Not bloody likely,” I whisper to the cartoon image of Cinderella beaming out at me. I keep walking past the entrance to Fantasyland and into Adventureland. I walk up the steps to the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, ducking behind a tangle of vines when I see the light of a flashlight bobbing in the dark. I sit against the base of the tree and wait for the guard to pass. Getting caught by security and receiving a lecture from Evelyn isn’t how I want to spend the rest of the evening.
It’s funny how even when it’s just you in your head, you try to pretend like nothing’s wrong. Like everything is just fine, thanks for asking. It’s not like I’ve never thought about Luke that way—in the more-than-just-friends way. I mean, he’s smart and funny, and the look in his eyes when he thinks he’s just gotten one over on me almost makes me want to fall into them, but that’s the thing that stops me—the desire for that falling and the knowledge that sometimes when you let yourself fall, you just end up splattered across the rocks.
The flashlight beam bounces off the acacia tree in front of me, making me squeeze farther back into the shadows. The rough bark pulls at my hair as I look up into the branches of the tree. If I concentrate hard enough, I can almost imagine that I’m sitting on an island out in the middle of the ocean waiting for a ship to come and rescue me. Maybe that’s the real problem. I keep waiting for someone to come along and take my hand and tell me it’s okay and they’ll help me find my way back home. But it’ll never happen.
A giggle from the other side of the fence makes me sit up and look over at the flashlight. Not a security guard at all. Two shapes are outlined against the log fence that separates the Tree House from the Lost Boys Campground. Another giggle, and then a low voice and more laughter, this time quieter. I push myself back to standing and peer into the darkness. The spill of the light actually makes it harder to see their faces than if they were in the dark, too. All I can see are two pairs of legs, one ending in pink flip-flops, the other in deck shoes. I step forward toward the railing, hoping to see under the low branches, but the snap of a stick under my foot makes them shut off their light. I hold my breath, counting silently in my head, waiting for them to move forward again.
“Just the wind,” the low voice says, but the light doesn’t come back on. I back up into the shadows again, this time wedging myself between two bunches of hanging vines.
“Are you sure it’s up here?” the other voice asks. This one I recognize—Cassie. Then I hear the flutter of pages. The list. The other voice is Mark’s.
“Just around the bend in the stairs,” he says, ducking his head under the closest branch. “Careful,” he says, and I see him reaching back for Cassie’s hand to help her step across a chain designed to keep visitors off the grass. I lose sight of them as they walk under the stairs and up to the trunk of the tree. “See?” Mark says. “You can see the outline of his ears here and here.” I imagine him tracing his finger along the bark, drawing the outline of a mouse over the wood.
“Okay,” Cassie says. “Ready?” A sharp flash of light from under the stairs. A giggle again, this one fainter. More intimate. They step out from under the stairs, Cassie clutching at the back of Mark’s shirt. They stand in the middle of the sidewalk, blinking against the darkness, then start to walk toward Peter Pan’s Flight, slowly, letting their eyes readjust to the night. Cassie places her hand in the middle of Mark’s back, as if to steady herself. “I can’t see anything,” she says, her voice soft.
“Me neither,” Mark says, smiling over his shoulder at her.
I sit back down on the wooden steps and lean back against the tree trunk, tilting my face up toward the upper branches again.
It’s funny,
I think.
Neither can I.
Ash and I didn’t fight. I mean, sure, in the who-gets-the-last-Toll-House-cookie way, but not in the big I’m-going-to-kill-you way that I’ve seen in the park, where brothers and sisters look like they would gladly trade each other for one of those character-shaped juice boxes if they could. I think it might be partly because we were so close in age—only a little over a year apart. Also partly because he was a boy and I’m a girl. No clothes or Barbies to fight over. But I think the real reason we got along so well was the fact that from the day I was born, our father told us that we
had
to get along. There wasn’t a choice involved. If Ash got invited to a birthday party, so did I. If I had skate night with my friends, Ash could come along. He was my best friend—even when I was eight and I crashed his secret scout campout, making it so he had to walk me home in the dark while everyone else got to tell ghost stories and eat s’mores. And even when he was a senior and I sprayed his car with shaving cream for graduation and the cream accidentally started eating away at his paint job before we could get it all washed off. Even when I went with my parents down to Yale for Parents’ Weekend and I got food poisoning from warm potato salad at the picnic and ended up puking on his roommate’s bed.
Ash was always the smart one. The one who could always make me laugh. The one all my girlfriends had crushes on. It’s safe to say I practically worshipped him. That’s not to say he didn’t have faults. He was a slob. He couldn’t make a peanut butter and jam sandwich without making the whole kitchen sticky. He was often hard to read—off in his own world, his own head, barely there. I sometimes wonder if that was why he had the accident. If maybe he was thinking about an exam he just took or about a girl he just met, or even just dreaming about nothing in particular. Letting himself drift as he slid along the dark forest road until a deer jumped out or an icy spot hooked his wheel and his car flipped clear off the road and down the slight rise before it came to rest at the base of an old pine tree.
The police officer told my parents that he died instantly, that he didn’t feel a thing, but I suspect they tell everyone that. They say it was about half an hour before another car drove along that same bit of road, the back way from Ellsworth to Machias. That it was another twenty minutes before the volunteer firemen from Cherryfield could get to the site of the accident and cut a hole through the side of the car so they could pull Ash free from the wreck. I hope it was like that—instantaneous. That he didn’t have to sit there and slowly fade away, because I know what he would have been thinking about then. I know while lying there in the cold darkness, drifting, he would have been thinking about me.
“Do you know who speaks Elvish?” Amy spears a kiwi wedge with her fork.
“Need a translator?” I ask. I’m trying to stuff breakfast into me and leave before I run into Luke or Mark or Cassie.
“It was on one of the cards,” she says around her bite of kiwi. “I’m thinking Robin Hood.”
“You know you’re either going to have to reopen the game or burn those cards, don’t you?” I take another bite of oatmeal.
“I like knowing everyone’s secrets,” Amy says, spearing another bite of fruit, a strawberry this time.
“It’s not like you know who they all belong to.”
“Some. The rest I’m working on.”
I take a sip of my coffee and look up as the door opens again. A couple of the Merry Men walk in.
“You done?” I ask, pointing to Amy’s plate, which is still half-full. She squints at me, but when I don’t say anything, she just nods. We walk over to the plastic tubs along the back wall. One for scraps. One for silverware. One for plates and mugs. We go out into the courtyard. Early in the morning is the only time it’s even half-pleasant out. Beside me Amy munches on an apple she took out of her sweatshirt pocket.
“You’re not supposed to take food out of the cafeteria,” I say, heading toward the picnic table under the trees. “I think that’s rule number seven.”
“You obviously didn’t read the memo with the cafeteria rule addenda,” she says, climbing on top of the table and resting her feet on the seat. “It said that portable food could be taken out of the cafeteria in an emergency.” I sit beside her and pull my sunglasses out of the kangaroo pocket of my sweatshirt and put them on.
“Is this an emergency?” I ask.
“You tell me.” We watch a seagull pick at the remains of what looks to be a slice of pizza.
“It’s complicated,” I say, resting my palms on the table and leaning back.
“Love always is.” She pitches her apple core toward the trash can. It misses, bouncing into the grass. Her voice is soft, almost carried away by the breeze. “Ella, let me ask you something.” She turns to look over her shoulder at me, and I nod. She looks forward again, watching the seagull peck at the apple core, trying to free its seeds. “If you had a choice to make between doing something safe and doing something that could either make you really happy or completely blow up in your face, what would you do?”
I watch the seagull try to fly with the core in its beak, dropping it each time it gets more than a few feet off the ground.
“I guess it depends.”
“On what?”
“I’d do a cost analysis on it. You know, figure out what I would stand to gain versus what I would stand to lose.”
“What if it’s everything either way,” Amy asks. “And it doesn’t depend on you, but on something you can’t control?”
“Sounds like a bad risk,” I say. The seagull grabs at the core again, pressing it into the ground for leverage.
“Yeah,” she says softly, resting her chin on her hand, making her bangs fall over her eyes. The seagull hops once, then twice, before rising into the air. He banks hard and flies over us, the apple core clutched tightly in his beak.
“How many?” I ask, fiddling with the clips on my earrings. I had to get new ones from the props department. The pearlized coating was starting to peel off the old ones, making it look like they had leprosy.
“I don’t know,” Mark says around a yawn. Besides the dark circles under his eyes, he’s still as handsome as ever.
“Ballpark.”
“A hundred.” I raise my eyebrow. “Okay,” he says, “maybe more. I don’t know. Cassie’s in charge of the list. Not me.”
“What are you in charge of ?” I ask. My voice sounds funny in my ears. All bumpy and pointed. I told myself last night and this morning that I wasn’t jealous, but I can hear it in my voice.
“Ella, what’s wrong? Didn’t you sleep well?” Mark stifles another yawn, which makes his eyes water.
“Better than you, I guess.” I fluff the sleeve of my dress, trying to keep from looking at him. I’ve decided to try harder, and maybe feeling jealous is part of that.
Mark is a good guy,
I tell myself.
He’s polite and kind and pleasant and . . .
I try to think of another synonym for
nice
, but I can’t.
“She’s brutal. I wanted to stop at two, but she wanted to keep going.”
“And what Cassie wants . . .”
Mark puts his hand on my arm, just above my elbow. I finally look at him, watching as he tries to swallow another yawn. I smile at him, and he smiles back.
“Hey, Cassie doesn’t get this,” he says, bending and kissing the side of my neck. The music on the stage changes as the mice push through the curtains and past where we are standing. “Don’t be mad, please.” He kisses me again, letting his lips brush the top of my shoulder. “I told you I was sorry about last night. The time just got away from us.”
“I’m not mad,” I say, turning to face him. And it’s true. I’m not. At least not anymore. He bends down to kiss me again—on the mouth this time. His lips are soft and warm and slightly sweet from the lemon drop he just finished. “Mmmm,” I say, my lips still brushing his. It’s an act, like the one we are about to do for thousands of people. Only this one is just for Mark, and maybe for me. I keep telling myself that if I just keep floating along, no one will get hurt. I’ll do my time here, and when they finally resolve the strike, I’ll head back up north again. If I keep kissing him and letting myself be kissed, it will look like a love story. The music changes again, and Mark takes my hand.
“You ready?” he asks.
“As I’ll ever be,” I say. But saying it aloud scares me. What if it’s true? That all this safe fantasy and pretend magic is all I can handle? What happens if your make-believe turns into make-do? Mark pushes aside the curtain for me, and I step out onto the stage and into the sunlight. A banner flutters in the breeze near the side of the stage. WHERE DREAMS COME TRUE . . . and I wonder if that’s right. Are they
your
dreams that come true, or someone else’s? Dreams that are packaged and advertised and sold by a marketing team so good that you begin to believe they
are
your dreams and they actually have come true. Mark slides his hand around my elbow and leads me up the steps toward the waiting throne. The crowd grows quieter as we near the top. Mark steps forward and takes the crown from one of the footmen. He lifts the crown over my head and pauses for a moment as the audience applauds. This is where it happens. This is where the dream factory chugs away day and night, making you want only the things you can buy off a shelf and take home with you. Mark places the crown on my head and the music starts and the crowd claps and the mice dance. Here is where they tell you, if you only believe, you, too, can live happily ever after.
10
Luke
The first thing I think is,
I have to tell Amy
.
For a minute I can’t think of his character name—Foul-weather? Foulmouth? Actually, that would be pretty funny. J. Worthington Foulmouth, and all his animated movies are rated R. But no, as soon as I say
that
to myself, I remember . . . Foulfellow. His costume is unmistakable—a giant fur fox head that looks about ten times heavier than my Dale head, a big green top hat, cape, cane, spats—all of it just the way Mark described. I’m thinking, too, that he must be on break because he’s sitting on the ground with his back against a palm tree, and he’s eating a plate of nachos. The weird thing is the way he slips a nacho, dripping melty cheese, up under his fur head and, I assume, into his mouth, but it doesn’t really look like that. The move is so deft that I can’t even see the character head move, and it pretty much looks like one of Pinocchio’s friends is just hanging out and eating nachos. I can’t see how he does it. I mean, all this week Cassie and I are supposed to give out these rubber pencil toppers of Chip and Dale, only I can never pick up the little Dales when I’m wearing the fur hands, no matter how hard I try. I end up just reaching into the bag and scattering them on the ground, and Mr. Forrester has already yelled at me for it twice. “The pencil toppers are not birdseed,” he told me. Of course, sitting around and eating nachos is also a mortal sin in the Church of Mr. Forrester, but what’s he going to say? The guy is on
break
, trying to have lunch, and still he’s greeting little kids, shaking hands, posing for pics, all of it. A true believer.