6
Luke
Suddenly, Amy is cornering the market in secrets. First she claims to have more info about the Phantom, although the details, she says, are “less than sexy.” A little hung over among the eggs and frozen waffles and dreading a day ahead in the Florida sun, everyone just looks at her and nods.
“But still,” she says, stirring a third teaspoon of sugar into her coffee, “I did find out some stuff. The guy is a fur character, J. Worthington Foulfellow, and he’s played him since the first year the park opened in, like, 1972. I mean, that’s almost as long as my dad has been
alive
. He lives in a trailer parked behind the shed where they store cat litter for cleaning up oil spills and vomit.”
“Your dad?” someone says.
Amy gives this little grunt of disgust. “No, the
phantom
guy. Pay attention.”
“That’s all?” I say. “How does that make him the Phantom in any sense of the word?”
Amy doesn’t back down. “He lurkssss around the park at niiiiight.” She makes her eyes big and draws out each word like she’s narrating
The Twilight Zone.
“Soooo dooo I . . .” I say to her.
“Wow,” Jesse says to her in a deadpan, “you’re just like Nancy Drew.”
“Shut
up
,” she says, and smacks his arm.
Jesse raises both eyebrows, except that he doesn’t have any eyebrows, so he just wrinkles up his forehead. He shaved the other one off himself after the first was taken from him in his sleep. When I asked, he said, “There is beauty in symmetry,” and kept shaving.
“Okay, excuse me?” Anna says. “But who is J. Worthington Foul Whatever? Is that, like, Peter Pan?”
“Good question,” Robin Hood says, nodding. “And furthermore, do you think he’s naked inside his costume?” Anna seems not to realize this is directed at her.
“J. Worthington Foulfellow is from Pinocchio,” Mark says, gesturing with his fork. “Also known as Felonious Fox. He wears a tattered vest and a top hat, carries a brass cane.” Ella leans into him and smiles, like she is really impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Disney crap. I think maybe that’s his calling, that one day Matt/Mark will publish
The Big Book of Disney Crap,
and I almost say it, but don’t. I just know that she is smarter than that, and that right now she ought to be looking at me across the table and rolling her eyes at Prince Dork, not smiling at him admiringly like he just cured cancer—in his head, over a plate of eggs. So why isn’t she?
“I just think it’s strange,” Amy says. “You never see him.”
“Maybe he’s Walt Disney’s secret love child,” Jesse says, still chewing. “Hidden away forever inside his costume. Oh, dear
God
!” He says this last part loud enough that everyone stops for a second and looks at him, all of us laughing.
Except Ella.
I watch her, and while everyone laughs, she just half smiles. And it’s not like she is all depressed, unable to laugh, but more like she is only half here. Half-listening. Half-laughing. I think how pretty she is, her brown hair falling in strands around her face, her arms freckled from the sun, her green eyes flecked with bits of copper, and I wonder where her other half is,
what
her other half is, that keeps her from really being here. I can see it in the way she sits there, pulled into herself. Or like the way someone’s eyes lock onto nothing when they’re caught in a daze, except that’s not how she is, exactly. Her gaze is locked onto
something
, and it makes her eyes soft and distant, like she is looking at her own phantom, something far off and invisible that none of the rest of us can see, that she can’t stop looking at. I want to know what it is, and right then, sitting there over bacon scraps and cold coffee, I have to resist the urge to lean across and just ask her. But that’s not my job, I guess. I’m not the one walking off with her into the shadows of the castle. I think about that, about how that night felt when Mark walked out of the shadows and she left me, and suddenly I’m fighting back tears, blinking my eyes, pretending like I have something in them.
Amy isn’t done talking about secrets. She still has the mouse hat filled with everyone’s card.
“I feel like God,” she says. “I know everything.”
“Hey, God,” Robin Hood says, “lower the temperature by thirty degrees, okay? And make all the moms today be babes.”
Amy smiles. “I will take that under advisement.”
“It’s not like the cards are a big deal,” Jesse says. “I mean, you don’t know who wrote them. You have limited omniscience.”
“Because that’s so hard to figure out,” Amy says, smiling.
Jesse rolls a pancake around his scrambled eggs, then eats it like a wrap. “Well,” he says, chewing, “that’s my point. It is hard.”
“My sweet Jesse,” Amy says. “You know, Jesus will be royally pissed that you stole forty dollars from the collection plate when you were twelve.”
“Well, he’s your son,” Robin Hood says. “Tell him to settle down.”
Jesse chews and nods, blushing. “Okay, lucky guess. Or likely guess, I should say.”
“You will
never
guess mine,” Anna says. She adjusts the green bikini top she always wears to breakfast and smiles at us. Amy just cuts her eyes at the rest of us and slowly shakes her head.
Finally Ella does catch my eye across the table and gives me a smile with just the corner of her mouth. I know that she thinks I’m all mad at her after that night, that I’m jealous. And it probably seems that way because since that night I have been all over Cassie, giving her constant attention, telling her we should go to the beach for a week when they finally let us out of here. I even bought her a little garnet ring in the gift shop for our one-month anniversary. So, to Ella, I’m like some guy in a stupid teen movie, the guy who plays it up big with some new girl because he’s jealous, because he just wants to put the other person’s face right in it—
see what you missed?
All a game, and at the end, you know the boy and girl will get together. But this isn’t like that. “Life is not a movie,” my father used to say all the time, and he should know. The only girl I will get is the one I have. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right? Date the right girl, take the right job. It’s like a Zen riddle—why do you do what you’re supposed to do? Because it’s what you’re supposed to do. And Cassie? She’s perfect. Chip and Dale makes sense. Cinderella and Dale? No one wrote that story yet. No one ever will.
“So, Luke,” Ella says, “what was on your card?” I know she’s saying this for the whole table, but somehow, when I glance up, she is really
looking
at me, like she wants to see into me, into my bones and heart.
“His middle name,” Jesse says. “The biggest secret of them all.”
“Not bloody likely,” I say, smiling. I glance back at Ella, and she is still looking at me, waiting for my answer. Just then Cassie shows up carrying her tray—nothing but fruit—and she sits beside me.
“Morning, you,” she says, and lifts her hand to give my hair a little tug in back, then leans over for a kiss.
“You guys should switch to Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” Ella says. “Then you’d have built-in pet names. ‘Dale’ is a little low on the cuteness factor.”
I look at Ella, trying to catch her eye, wanting just then to take her away and tell her what I started to write on my card before I ran out of time, or maybe to ask what she wrote on hers. And I know this isn’t her, either—playing at the jealousy thing like there is going to be some sniping catfight. When she gets like this, pulled back, taking potshots at people, I know,
know
, that something is really bothering her.
“I was wondering,” Cassie says, “when you sing ‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’ is that like a single entendre?” Jesse laughs, but most of the others seem not to get it.
Ella just frowns at her bowl of Cheerios and looks at me as she gets up from her seat. “Nice girl,” she says.
We all watch her leave. Finally Mark thinks to get up and follow her, and I convince myself not to. “What a freak,” Cassie says, sliding her hand along my thigh. Mark runs out after her, the same stagy, practiced run he uses during the wedding every day, and I think for half a second that when he gets outside, all he will find is her shoe, lost on the cafeteria stairs. That seems about right, the same story getting told over and over, and everyone knows how it ends.
I finally talk to Ben that afternoon on the phone. He tells me that he and Dad were supposed to go to Brazil next week to look over a job site, but they had to cancel because Dad isn’t feeling too well.
“And Mom?” I say.
“She hasn’t dug out the biohazard suit yet,” he tells me, and I laugh. The whole time we were growing up, she was the most squeamish person you could imagine. One time, when I was seven, I threw up in the living room, and she just put an upside-down bucket over it and called a cleaning service. And when any of us were sick, she went around the house in yellow rubber gloves, like the kind you use to wash dishes. A scraped knee meant she just handed over the box of Band-Aids. Later on, if we wanted to be left alone, all we had to do was
act
like we were about to throw up. Now it’s Dad, who is
never
sick, and I can only imagine how freaked-out she is.
“Did Dad hurl? Did Mom move to a hotel yet?”
He laughs. “Nah. He keeps saying it’s headaches. The doctor thinks it’s just tension or heatstroke from golf. I think it’s too much work. He works all the time. See, if this was next year, I’d manage the job site, and you’d be coming with me.”
I nod at the phone until I remember that Ben can’t see me. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”
“It’ll be next year soon enough,” he says, and I feel my stomach knot up. I lean against the wall by the pay phone and glance down the hall, where Robin Hood is carrying in yet another case of beer. I’m getting a little tired of all the parties.
“Ben, are you still playing the guitar?”
“When I can. I suck, though.”
“Yeah, you do. Still driving the Honda?”
“Luke, you’ve been gone, what? Six weeks? You sound like some grandpa who wants to visit the Old Country before he dies or something. Are you homesick?”
“Nah,” I say, but in a way I am. I guess I’m thinking about the photo albums from when Mom and Dad used to go to the conventions and stuff, and how they were in the newspaper for the names they gave us, and how they still keep their costumes in the attic. And then I think how long it’s been since we even looked at the photo albums themselves, so that the thing I feel homesick for is the time when we
wanted
to look at the pictures, when we still cared about what was in them. Maybe there should be photo albums with pictures of when you used to look at your photo albums. I think about saying this to Ben, but I know he wouldn’t get it. And neither would Cassie, and maybe no one would. Then I think no, I could tell Ella, and she would get it. I wish I
could
tell her.
“Well, get your ass home,” Ben says, “and I’ll show you where your office is going to be next year. You have a better window than I do.”
“That’s great,” I say. And I try, really hard, to believe it.
That night all the girls decide they are going to move down to the second floor of the dorm and have “girls’ night,” which means . . . I don’t really know. None of us do, though we guess. Like maybe they are going to paint toenails and braid hair and talk about guys and eat chocolate.
“Yeah, right,” Robin Hood says, “and they’re going to read
Tiger Beat,
too. You guys are lame.”
“What do you think they’re doing?” Jesse says. He goes to the fridge and starts handing out cans of beer. The other Merry Men and the Army Men start arguing about their characters, who could beat whose ass.
Robin Hood shrugs. “I’m thinking white wine and naked pillow fights.”
“Okay, that was supposed to be a guess,” I tell him. “We’re not probing your fantasy life.” I take a slice of cold pizza from the box that’s going around.
“I’m a man,” he says, leaning back against the couch while he eats. “I think manly thoughts.”
“Yeah, you’re a man,” I say, laughing. “Yellow tights and kelly green tunic, dead giveaways.”
He throws a pillow at me. “And you’re what? Some androgynous rat?”
Jesse fires the remote at the TV, and for a few minutes we quiet down and watch a baseball game. Robin Hood keeps saying that all the players are lame, while Mark surfs some website about the history of the park and throws out little tidbits to us about our characters or where the least crowded bathrooms are. The Army Men and the Merry Men are across the room playing darts, or playing some drinking game that involves darts. The pizza box comes around again, and Robin Hood clicks around the channels until he settles on the Home Shopping Network, then he borrows Jesse’s cell phone to call the hotline and talk to the hosts. He gets through right away and tells them that he lost over 480 pounds using the Total Gym, while the rest of us try to keep from laughing behind him. Right there on the screen, the hosts are shaking their heads, telling him how amazing that is. Half an hour later he calls back and tells the new hosts that he now makes
all
of his family’s meals using the Solar Grill. He goes on and on about it, then, right before he hangs up, says that the Solar Grill is the greatest invention since the polio vaccination.
Jesse gets up and hands everyone another beer. “Man,” he says, “we should just go
down
there. Crash the party.”
“Okay, normally I would be all in for that,” Robin Hood says, “but they would be way, way pissed. You heard them.”
Mark looks up, takes a sip of his beer, and asks us if we realize that there are over twenty thousand different colors of paint used inside the park. The rest of us mutter something along the lines of
Wow, that’s amazing
. As much as I want to hate the guy, there is something so earnest about him that I can’t; none of us can. He always acts like some little kid who found a lizard and brought it to school for show-and-tell.