“What does towheaded mean?” I say, just to mess with him. “Is that like a birth defect?”
“No, Luke, it means blond. Blond hair. With me?”
“Yes, sir,” I tell him, playing along, and then suddenly I
do
see it, Mr. Forrester in an OshKosh jumper with kangaroos on the pockets, except he still has his silk tie and his wingtip shoes. He’s polishing the toe of one of those shoes right now with his fingers. My dad has the same kind of shoes, a pair in brown and a pair in black. I will never figure out why somebody thought a pattern of swirly holes was a good look. And it’s weird. My brother graduated college and went to work for Dad at the drilling company, and now he has those same shoes. It’s like wingtip shoes are your ticket into adulthood, or maybe the big secret is that your college diploma is really just a gift certificate for Pic ’N Pay Shoes, and you redeem it the next day. For girls, maybe it’s those bulky, serious-looking suits with the shoulder pads, or maybe some kind of hair. I don’t know. All I know is, I don’t ever want those shoes.
Mr. Forrester looks to the ceiling now as he talks. “I’m a six-year-old boy proudly wearing my mouse ears with my name stitched on the front. Let’s say Jimmy, for argument’s sake.”
“I was thinking Reggie,” I say. He gives me a knowing smile, just like the calendar says to.
“Okay then, Luke. That’s fine. Little Reggie is walking along happy as can be, and then happens upon what scene? Do you see where I’m going with this? He sees Dale—with Chip nowhere around—sprawled on the ground, presumably dead, and as if that weren’t enough, our little cartoon friend is
decapitated
, his head beside him.” He picks up a paper clip and tosses it into the plastic coffee cup on his desk. “Luke, we could be talking about a lifelong trauma.”
I take a deep breath. “Mr. Forrester, it was ninety-seven degrees that day; I had just done a parade. I was hot. I took off the head and stretched out in the shade. It was five minutes.”
“Three reports,” he says, then picks up the reports and tosses them back down. “Lifeless chipmunk body, head in the grass. Then what? You let your head roll down the grassy knoll. One mother screamed. We could be sued. It’s my job.”
His job, despite the big-deal office and all the Mickey crap, was pretty low on the totem pole, everyone said. He was officially the Fur Character Coach, in charge of anyone inside the park who has to wear a head—Goofy, Donald, Daisy, Winnie the Pooh—all the fur characters. Of course, with the heat and claustrophobia it’s the worst job in the park unless you count cleaning toilets, and for corporate climbers fur coach is the worst job in management. Everyone knows Mr. Forrester wants to work his way up to Princess Handler, which actually seems like a disturbing job title for a middle-aged man.
“What if I faint?” I ask him. “What if I don’t take a break, and I just faint? Wouldn’t
that
be a lot worse for you to see, assuming you’re a six-year-old girl?”
“Boy.”
“A six-year-old boy?”
While he thinks about this he picks up the cold cigar butt and taps it against Mickey’s nose. Every time I see anything Mickey, I can’t help singing that song inside my head.
M-I-C . . . See you later.
That’s what I would like to say right now to Mr. Forrester. He shows me the cigar butt before throwing it into the trash. “Don’t ever start,” he says. “They killed my dad.”
“I won’t.”
He nods. “You have to suck it up, Luke,” he says. “You’re
Dale
, for godsakes. A household name. Show a little pride.”
Actually, if being a fur character is the worst job in the park, then being Dale has to be the worst job among the fur characters. When I got the gig and told my mom and dad and brother, all of them were like,
“Who?”
And I mean, it makes sense. Someone out of the blue says, “I play Dale,” then that would be the question to ask, and I always, always have to say, “You know, as in Chip and?” Say Goofy, say Donald, it’s automatic. Dale is not automatic. Ashtray Mickey has two black eyes from the cigar butt, like he’s been in a fight. I nod at Mr. Forrester. Really, if I lose this job, then I have to temp at my dad’s office again, like I did last summer, and somehow that striped necktie makes me suffocate worse in the AC than the fur head does in the heat. When I got this job, my dad told me one of his “wise stories” about how one summer he had a job driving an ice-cream truck, selling Good Humor bars. The next summer he was off to N.C. State. He tells the story and then tells me to go ahead, get it out of my system, and sometimes when I’m inside the costume, down inside the fur and plastic and latex looking out through the mesh, hearing my own breath, breathing my own sweat, watching my paws shake hands with some kid for the five-hundredth time that day, I think, At least I’m someone else, at least I can stay in here, hidden, where my dad can’t find me, where the drilling company can’t find me, where the wingtip shoes can’t find me. I’m the only one who knows I’m in here, and maybe I never have to come out, never have to get myself out of my system. I tell Mr. Forrester that being Dale is my vocation, my calling, my mission in life. I tell him I want to make memories that last a lifetime. I put my heart into it, the way I do when I’m talking to Dad or the principal at school, and I can tell he believes it. In his job he has to believe it. I’m pretty good. So good that, for half a second, even I believe it.
Sometimes I talk to the Dale head. I creep myself out doing it, like I’m going to turn into one of those ventriloquists in the movies who sits by while his dummy commits murders, and the whole time you know it’s him, not the dummy, since he’s crazy as hell. But I don’t want to kill anyone, and during breaks, the Dale head is just sitting there grinning at me like I can do no wrong, and so I talk to it. I mean, who else? That jerkwad they hired to play Prince Charming? Prince Dumb-ass, maybe. I mean, this guy is
not
smart, too much chlorine in the gene pool. The other day at breakfast he said he’s not supposed to eat Grape-Nuts cereal because he’s allergic to nuts. I don’t even know the guy’s name, only that since he came, he is always hanging around Ella.
Always
. That, and he looks like one of the Hardy Boys.
And as for the hitting on Ella part, I don’t like that. I look down at Dale’s head and say so.
“Dale, I don’t like that,” I tell him, because right now Biff or Kip or Whoever is following after her, again, touching the satin ribbon that’s gathered at the small of her back, and then she runs off and he chases after her, running so hard his epaulets are bouncing.
“His epaulets are bouncing,” I say to Dale, only because I like saying it. Dale keeps grinning at me from his side of the bench, wide-eyed. His personality is pretty one-dimensional. He will never understand her, I tell Dale. Not ever. I bet they could be married for like ten years, and he would never even make her laugh unless he slipped on a banana peel or something.
“Talking to your own head again?” I look up, and Cassie is drinking a bottle of water, standing over me.
“It’s my hobby,” I say to her. She sits down in front of one of the five fans that are always blowing in the break tent and rubs the dripping bottle across her forehead.
“Yeah, I wonder what Freud would have to say about that.” She takes a long swallow and sets her own head down on the grass between her feet.
“Sometimes a disembodied chipmunk head is only—”
“Okay, Luke. You know Mr. Forrester told us to take our breaks together. We’re supposed to be Chip
and
Dale, not Chip
or
Dale.” She pours some of the water over her head and lets it drip off the end of her blond ponytail. She plays lacrosse and is in better shape than anyone I’ve ever met. I think she takes her breaks not because she wants to but because she’s supposed to.
“Sorry, Cass,” I tell her, reaching out to hold her hand. And I am sorry. We have kinda-sorta been dating the last three weeks. My mom would call her a “great catch,” the way she sometimes does, as if girls are fish, or maybe line drives over the centerfield wall. And I know she is . . . pretty, blond, sexy, athletic, smart. She is on her way to Brown in the fall, to major in prelaw and women’s studies and French. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a triple major. When she got the letter about her scholarship, she ran around all excited, and everyone congratulated her, and I kissed her, then wondered out loud if Brown was the only university in the country named for a color. I really did wonder, like, is there a White? Gray? That sounds pretty likely, actually. Black? I don’t think so. Then she got mad at me for saying it, and I didn’t even understand what she was mad at. I really do like her. I like walking around the park with her at night, holding hands. I like kissing her. Except I always wonder if it just feels like I like her in the way I’m supposed to, or maybe
because
I’m supposed to. How do you know when you
really
like someone? Or love someone?
Cass stands behind me and pours water over my head, the icy finger of it running down my spine; then she leans over, tips my head back, and kisses me, another finger down the spine. She can kiss, for sure, but once we ended up making out in the costumes, and that was just a little too weird. Even for me. At least we took off the heads.
“Secret party Saturday, basement of the dorm,” she says. “We’re in charge of music. I suggested a costume party, but that idea didn’t go over too well.” She gives my hair a little tug with her fingers. “That was a joke, sweetie.”
I nod, trying to tune in to what she’s saying, but instead, I’m watching Prince Moron, who is right now in one of the other break tents with Ella, pretending
again
that he doesn’t understand their waltz steps, just so he has an excuse to put his hands on her.
“Sam?” Cass says.
I look back at her. “Nope.”
“Not some variation? Samuel? Samson?”
“Not even close. So cold you’re freezing.”
“I wish. Tell me.”
“Never.” I blow on my hands, still trying to cool off. Break is over in five minutes. Sometimes I just can’t face going back out there, dancing another dance, shaking another five-year-old hand, hearing some redneck with a mullet make another joke about the Chippendale dancers.
“Stuart,” Cass says.
“You said that yesterday.” She is obsessed with figuring out my middle name, which I will never,
never
tell anyone. Make me do the Acorn Dance in the Sahara for ten busloads of ADD-afflicted second graders during a Ritalin shortage, and still I won’t tell. No one, ever. Luke S. Krause is my full and given name. The End.
“Slappy,” Cass says, and kisses me again.
“Ooh, so close,” I tell her, cupping her face. Across her shoulder, in the other tent, the Hardy Boy Prince is showing Ella how he can fill his mouth with gas from his butane lighter, then make a flame shoot out. His lone “bad boy” trick, and he doesn’t even smoke. He did it at breakfast right after the big Grape-Nuts scare, and everyone applauded while I sat there hoping for some tragedy the coroner would later term “cranial explosion.” No such luck.
“I don’t know why he bothers you,” Cass says, following my gaze over to them.
“Who?”
Cassie smirks. “They probably deserve each other. She’s so weird. I mean, just the other day I saw her standing out in front of the castle, and she’s just standing there, like she’s all sad, looking up into the sky. That’s pretty strange, Luke.”
I nod, looking up at Cass’s perfect white teeth, her blue eyes. I guess that’s why it bothers me so much. Ella
is
kind of strange, a round peg plunked down in the middle of the square old world, and I know that doofus is about a million years away from ever getting her. So it’s just sympathy, I’m thinking. Or empathy . . . I forget the difference. Like once I read in some gardening article that if you put a watermelon blossom inside a plastic milk jug, then you can grow a square watermelon. I feel sorry for the watermelon. Yesterday I asked Cass—when they finally let us out of here—to go with me out to this place called Shell Island. When the tide washes out there at dusk, all these huge tidal pools are left behind, and they’re filled with starfish, anemones, urchins, barnacles, crabs . . . everything, and I can spend two hours just watching, until it’s too dark to look. When I asked her to go, there was a long and puzzled look, and then her face brightened. “Can we get beer?” she asked.
I don’t know how to explain why beer ruins the idea of seeing the tide pools. I just know it does.
Break is over, and we put our heads back on. Cass rubs our vinyl noses together, then mimes putting her paws over her heart. She does this sometimes during the parade, and twice Mr. Forrester has called us in to remind us that Chip and Dale are not gay. We high-five each other and make our exaggerated stroll back out onto the streets of the park, holding paws. Paw-holding is okay. Cass is carrying a large Styrofoam acorn in her other hand. I feel hidden, not just inside the suit but inside myself, hidden in a way that makes the heat tolerable, makes Mr. Forrester tolerable. Hidden in plain sight, which has been my strategy for surviving family and school and just about everything else. Maybe life in the suit is like life in the tide pools . . . the world of yourself is both large and small, and that bigger world is just some idea of an ocean, something deep and dark you struggle to recall.
“We’re on, Slappy,” Cass says, and the show begins.
That night after the fireworks and late dinner in the dorm and too much coffee for me, I can’t sleep. We aren’t supposed to leave the dorm after lights-out, but most of us do all the time, anyway. The chaperones have their own little apartments, and they are clueless. I walk outside a little after one in the morning, according to the clock tower, and it’s the only time I can really say I like the park. There is enough of a breeze to cool things off a little, and I like the emptiness, like how it feels. Like maybe way back someone believed this place really would seem magical, full of wonder . . . all the crap you hear around this place every day, but everywhere else only at Christmas. Maybe they thought it would seem like another world, set apart from the real one, instead of just the real world on hyperdrive—more selling, more money, more worn-out families, more hype. Like Dr. Frankenstein thinking he’s creating life—before the monster started killing. The romance of not knowing anything. As I’m thinking all of this, moving toward the castle, the silhouette of someone sitting on one of the benches takes shape from out of the dark, and then that someone turns into Ella, arms around her knees, gently rocking back and forth.