“All day,” Connor confirms. “And just wait until it repeats. It repeats about every ten minutes.”
“How could you do this to me?” I groan. “I thought I was your favorite person.”
“You are,” he says. “It’s just that it was between you and getting fired, and, well…I’m not losing my job. I had to suffer through Wonderkidz too.”
He logs me into the register and sets up my cashbox. I lean against the counter and cross my arms. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Oh, but I do,” Connor says. He hoists himself up onto the counter, breaking the Five Banners rule that says no sitting on counters, but whoa a flash of white freckled belly and my cheeks are so hot I’m afraid the plush lightning bolts I’m leaning against might actually crackle and burst into flame. “Or I’ll get fired. But Lizzy is coming in at lunch. I could conceivably beg Cynthia to switch her out for you come lunchtime.”
“I will kill someone if I have to,” I say, and I’m only half-joking.
“Let’s not go that far,” he says, which is good, because I don’t ever want to have to go that far again. He folds his arms across his chest. “Answer three questions right and I’ll let you switch.”
I uncross my arms and prop myself against the wall behind me, leaning toward him. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were to fall against his legs. I wonder what baling hay does to a person’s legs. “Fire away.”
“First question.” His voice deepens and snaps like a weatherman’s. “What is this year’s official Five Banners corporate motto?”
Easy for anyone who’s read the employee handbook. Which I have. “Safe! Friendly! Clean!”
“Correct. And, apparently, if you’re safe, friendly, and hygienic, you can go ahead and steal as much money as you want.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Kidding, obviously.”
I follow his eyes. He’s staring at a camera, its red light an unceasing eye. “Even if you weren’t kidding,” I say. “No stealing allowed. That’s also in the handbook.”
“No bonus points for that, smarty-pants,” Connor says. “Though, nice try.”
“I wasn’t trying for bonus points.”
“You so were,” he says. “Okay, second question. How did Skywoman’s husband die?”
“Trick question,” I say immediately. “Her first husband, a cop, was killed when he attempted to apprehend the Blade after she’d murdered his commander and slipped into his commander’s skin like one of the costumed characters here.”
“Nice analogy.” He leans in, eyes lighting up.
“Her second husband,” I continue, “is not dead, as any Skywoman fan would know. Her second husband was one of the Blade’s henchmen, spying on Skywoman. When Skywoman discovered his trickery, she tried to kill him, but the Blade swooped in at the last minute and stopped her with a kiss, the only thing that could possibly have stunned Skywoman enough to stop her in her tracks, and that gave them time to escape.” I flip my hair over my shoulder. “As any true Skywoman fan would know.”
“You’re a true Skywoman fan, eh?” He sounds amused. “I should’ve known.”
“Why should you have known?”
His eyes are narrowed in thought; they set off the creases that light up when he smiles. “Because I just should have,” he says. “You seem like the type of girl who would like Skywoman. Are you one of the Sky-fanatics?”
“No,” I say defensively, and it’s true, because I terminated my membership in the online Skywoman fan club two years ago. Though at this point I have enough letters from Skywoman on official Silver City stationery, and secret decoder rings for deciphering their hidden messages, to start a Sky-fanatic branch of my own. “Why, do I seem like a nerd?”
He laughs and swings his legs. His feet thump emphatically against the side of the counter; on the upswing, they nearly brush against my side. “No! You just seem like the kind of girl who would like Skywoman. Like tough, and smart. Like you don’t take any crap. Stop trying to distract me from my third question.”
I raise an eyebrow. “If it’s anything as easy as your first two questions, I’ll be out of here at noon on the dot. Sorry, Lizzy.”
His legs stop and slam against the counter. His sudden smile is the sun breaking through the clouds. “What instrument does my little brother, Zach, play in the jazz band?”
My mouth falls open. “That’s not a fair question!”
“Really? I don’t remember setting down rules.” He raises an eyebrow. “Guess you forfeit.”
“Never!” I chew on the inside of my mouth. “The trumpet.”
“Nope.” He swings himself down from the counter, launching himself forward and landing only a few inches from me, and leans in. Heat radiates through his polo and cooks me from the inside out, a human microwave. He smells like Axe and detergent and a trace of something musty, cigarette smoke maybe—not strong enough for him to be a smoker himself, but strong enough that he must live in a smoker’s home. “Bari sax. Sorry.”
Our noses are only inches apart. I could lean forward. I could catch his lips on mine. I could feel his heartbeat against my chest. I can already feel it, or at least I feel like I feel it. Maybe I’m just feeling my own.
Before I have the chance to do anything, he clears his throat and jolts away, hitting himself on the counter. Freckles glow on his red face like miniature suns. He coughs again. “Sorry,” he says. He’s looking at the floor, the walls, the ceiling, anywhere but at me.
Do I repulse him that much? I swallow hard and lean back. It’s probably for the best anyway. I had an everything bagel for breakfast. I would have tasted like garlic and onion. “You should apologize for that last question. So not fair. I call redo,” I say.
He smiles, but there’s something distant about it. “No redos,” he says. “That’s also a Five Banners company motto. Didn’t you read the manual?”
He doesn’t duck in time to avoid getting smacked with a plush Blade.
“Maybe I’ll still try to let you switch at lunch,” he says. “Maybe. If you’re nice to me. Kissing my feet wouldn’t hurt.”
“The stench would probably kill me,” I say. “Which, come to think of it, is probably preferable to being stuck here all day. Go ahead, take your shoes off.”
His laugh trails behind him as he leaves, fading into the screech of the singing hellspawn above.
The wait until lunch is the longest four hours of my life. Connor makes it slightly more bearable, popping in every half hour or so to pick something up or authorize a return or let me hit him with one of many assorted plush weapons. At a hard-fought one o’clock, he returns, and with a guest.
“Hi, Katharina,” I say cautiously. Of course he’d bring her to cover my lunch. I haven’t forgotten the feel of her fingers digging into my shoulder.
Her smile is bright and cheerful. “Hey, Scarlett.”
“So, don’t hate me,” Connor says, “despite your loss at our entirely fair wager, I still went and tried to get you moved. You’re welcome. But Cynthia—really sweet woman—told me I can’t move someone without good cause.”
“Are my bleeding eardrums not good cause?” I clamp a hand to the side of my head, stretching my lips into the most grotesque grimace I can possibly form.
He moves in closer and looks me right in the eye. I stare back, noticing, from the corner of my eye, Katharina staring too. “For your ears, anything.” He’s so close I can smell him again, though after all his running around in the heat, there’s a salty tinge of sweat to the scent of Connor. “Except my job, and that’s what Cynthia will take if I move you. Sorry. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”
I feel a smile twist the corners of my lips, like paper curling above a candle flame. “You’d better,” I say. “I’ll be waiting.”
“Go ahead and wait,” he says. “I dare you. Hold your breath.”
I would be tingling inside if Katharina weren’t still staring. “Well, if you’re going to make it up to me, I suppose I’ll come back after lunch.”
“You’d better,” he says. “Because I’ll be holding my breath too, and I can only hold it for exactly one hour.”
“You must be a star at pool parties.”
Though Connor doesn’t come with me this time, I still take his regular table. Rob joins me. “Did Connor say you could sit here?” he asks, and he seems entirely serious.
“He didn’t say I couldn’t sit here,” I say. I’m already eating my pizza, after having sponged off an entire five napkins’ worth of grease. I’m not moving now.
Rob glares at me for another few seconds, then relaxes. “I’m just kidding,” he says. “You’re Connor’s new favorite person. Of course you can sit here.”
“I can’t believe I’m still his favorite person,” I say. “I’m impressed. If I remember correctly, you told me he has a new favorite person approximately every seven minutes.”
Rob stares at me a moment too long. “Yeah,” he says at last. “Usually he does.”
All the rest of the way through lunch and all the rest of my walk back to Wonderkidz, during which I’m stopped no fewer than six times to give directions, I can’t keep a smile off my face.
“Hey,” I say to Katharina, the smile still flitting about my cheeks and, I’m sure, making me look the fool.
“Hey,” she says back. She is not smiling. She looks like she’s taken a big bite out of a ruby-red watermelon slice and discovered too late it’s a plush replica. “Have a good lunch?”
“Great,” I say. “I ate with Rob. He showed me his tattoo.” A mountain of skulls, dripping with blood and topped with roses and spikes.
“Gross, isn’t it?”
“Terrible,” I say happily. “Just imagine what it’s going to look like when he’s eighty-five.”
“I have,” she says. “So. You like Connor?”
The smile slips off my face and falls with a splat onto the floor. My finger freezes halfway through typing in the pass code to unlock my register. “Of course I like Connor,” I say. “I like Rob. I like you. I like everyone I’ve met here. Everyone who has eyebrows, at least.”
“No,” she says, the very word a challenge. “I don’t mean like him like that, and you know it. You like Connor.”
“He’s a nice guy,” I say. Evasive maneuvers, stat. “I hope he doesn’t have a tattoo like Rob’s. Hey, have you ever thought about getting a tattoo? I’ve been thinking about it.”
“You totally like him,” she says. Her face is the sun; I can’t look directly at it, or I’ll get burned. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. A lot of girls like Connor. He’s a big fat flirt.”
I want to ask her to elaborate, but if I ask her to elaborate, it’ll be even more obvious that I like him. Evade, evade, evade. “If I were going to get a tattoo, I would probably get it on my ankle,” I say. “Maybe a butterfly. Or hey, the Five Banners logo. Maybe I’d get a raise. Hey, look, customers!”
I’ve never been so glad in my life to see customers—excuse me, guests. It’s a family, a man and a woman and their little son. “Let me help you,” I tell his parents. “Whatever you need, I can help.”
“I want a Wonderman,” the kid says.
“Wonderman? We have lots of Wondermans!” I say. “Anime Wondermans, stuffed Wondermans, action figures, we’ve got it all!”
Katharina pokes me hard between the shoulder blades. I flinch. “Hey, Scarlett,” she says. “Cover me for a second? I have to make a call.” She’s got her phone in her hand, already unlocked.
“That’s fine,” I say. Anything to get her out of here. Her questioning is starting to make me feel like I’m back at the police station. They questioned me for hours after they found me, trying to gather what had happened to me and how I’d come to be wandering alone and barefoot down the side of a major highway. I can still viscerally recall the shock on their faces when they saw the bottoms of my feet, which were torn and bloody. I hadn’t even noticed. I’d felt nothing.
I match the kid with his perfect Wonderman, and he leaves smiling, which makes me feel like I’ve done a good thing. Their departure leads into Katharina’s return. She’s smiling now too. “All okay?” she asks.
“Fine,” I say. “It was a success.”
“Glad to hear it.” She’s still smiling, and it unnerves me because it’s not a cheerful smile or a glowing smile, the way mine felt. It’s more of a smirk than a smile, really, a twist to her lips that says, I know something you don’t know.
I don’t ask her anything. She might want me to ask her something, but I don’t want to play into her hand, whatever it is. And she doesn’t say anything, no loaded comments, no leading questions. She just hums and hums something tuneless that matches up suspiciously with the screeching hellspawn.
She stops humming and breaks into a wide smile when someone walks through the entrance to our store. “Cady!” Katharina says. “Glad you could make it. I thought you’d be on lunch now.”
The girl—Cady—grins back at Katharina. “Of course,” she says. “I could use a good surprise today.”
Surprise? I study this new girl as she and Katharina jabber, throwing around names of park people and places. I hear Rob pop up, and the elusive Cynthia, but then I tune out.
Cady’s small and thin, flat as a little kid, though she’s clearly my age, or close. She’s wearing a green shirt and the red-lined name tag that translates to assistant manager, like Connor and Rob, and her bleached-blond hair sticks up in spikes all over her head in a pixie cut. “Hey, I’m Cady,” she says. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“No, we haven’t,” I say. “I’m Scarlett. It’s my second day.”
She flutters her fingers at me. Rings are forbidden by the Five Banners dress code, but she’s got on three of them, chunky silver ones. “How do you like it so far?”
“I like the people.” Connor’s smile flashes through my mind, and I worry for a moment that Katharina is going to go off on me and him again, but she doesn’t. “I was into Skywoman a lot as a kid, so it’s kind of cool to be working—”
“Hey!” Cady’s smile is a sudden, bright flash, and it’s definitely not aimed at me. I look over at the door to see Connor standing in the entryway. My heart skips a beat. It’s like Katharina’s prodding has brought my feelings bubbling to the surface, dinosaur bones rising from an oil pit after millions of years under the earth. I’ve read about crushes, and I’ve thought guys were cute before, but I’ve never felt it like this, like I want to burrow in between his arms and stay there for a while. Not so long that I’d feel trapped, but a while.
“Hey,” Connor says, still standing in the doorway. I wait for him to come in, to blind us all with his smile, but he just stands there, hovering awkwardly with his hand on the doorframe, as though he’s not sure whether he’s coming or going. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Katharina says. Her grin looks like a shark’s. “Cady just wanted to say hi.”
Connor finally shows a smile, but it’s even less convincing than Katharina’s. It makes me think of the way monkeys bare their teeth in submission. “Well, hi. I have a lot to do today. I should really go.”
A lot to do today? He didn’t have a lot to do today when he was asking me totally unfair questions about his brother.
“Wait.” Cady trots toward him, her smile still bright, and then she’s pulling his face to hers.
They’re kissing.
They’re kissing.
Cady and Connor are kissing.
Connor is kissing someone, and that someone isn’t me.
I feel like somebody’s kicked me in the stomach and sucked all the breath out of me. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
I look away because I have to look away or I’ll fall over, and I see Katharina watching me. I struggle to compose myself, but there’s only so much I can do against the way I’m feeling right now.
I look back when I hear Connor clearing his throat. He’s pushed himself into the doorway as far as he possibly can without actually being outside. Cady
has retreated a few feet and her smile is wavering now, like I’m looking at her through a glass of water. “Cade,” Connor says quietly. “Maybe we should talk.”
Cady shakes her head. Hoop earrings go swinging. “Nope!” she says. “I don’t think we need to talk. I just…I needed to see you.” Her voice trembles, and Connor sighs.
“Cade…” He reaches out and takes her into his arms again, though thankfully they don’t kiss. He just holds her tight against him, and his eyes meet mine over her shoulder. I glance away.
“Cady and Connor started here on the same day two years ago and it was love at first sight,” Katharina says for what must be my benefit, because surely both Cady and Connor know when they met. “Don’t they make the cutest couple?”
All the words I have shrivel up and die in my throat. I nod weakly. The floor is very interesting today.
“We’re—” Connor starts, but Katharina interrupts him.
“Cady was the last person to see Monica the night she…you know,” Katharina says, again for my benefit. A choked sort of sob comes from Cady’s direction, and Connor sighs again.
“The police called me out to talk again today,” Cady says. Even choked up, her voice is small and pert and adorable, like her nose.
“Haven’t you already talked to them?” Connor says. His voice is sober.
“Like three times.”
I look back up to see Cady’s freckles standing out in sharp relief against her paling cheeks. “I don’t know what else they want. I told them everything. Do they think I don’t want to help them find her? I love her. We were friends.” She catches her bottom lip between her teeth. “Are friends. We are friends.”
“Cade.” Connor holds her tight against him. I clench my teeth together till my jaw hurts and turn to Katharina so I don’t have to see how perfectly their bodies fit together. I expect her to look triumphant somehow, like she’s won, but she’s doesn’t. Her expression is written in a language I don’t know; I can’t even read that alphabet.
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