The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  Lacking an option, she parked a few spaces over and hoped that no one would notice. Then she jumped out of the driver’s seat and sat on the back bumper as if she’d been waiting there for ten minutes. Her mother appeared to notice nothing amiss when she came out, but the look on Palmer’s face clearly showed that she knew something was up.

  “So, I got back down there,” Brooks said with a laugh, “and May decided she was tired. So she went home.”

  “She walked home?” her mom said, concerned.

  “Yeah. I think it was all the sun. She said she wanted to go back and take a cold shower.”

  Even Brooks was staggered by the speed of her own lie. Palmer eyed the parking space.

  “We should get back, then,” her mom said.

  As they rode back to the camp, Brooks felt herself hitting the wall. She was exhausted in every way. All of the confusion and adrenaline had worn her out. And her mind kept replaying the moment she couldn’t find May on the beach. She saw herself looking out at the water, not knowing if her sister had wandered drunkenly into the surf. It wouldn’t go away.

  May obviously wasn’t around and waiting when they got back, so Brooks had to continue the act by jumping up and going to the bathhouse to check on her. She walked over, wandered around for a second, stared at the wet toilet paper on the ground, and returned with a false report of May’s well-being.

  “Well,” said her mom, yawning, “I’m heading in. I’m beat.”

  Both Palmer and Brooks received a kiss on the forehead. After she went inside, Palmer scowled at Brooks suspiciously. Brooks could feel her skin breaking out in goose bumps.

  “What?” Brooks asked, trying not to look nervous.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sitting here.”

  “Want to go to the batting cage?” Palmer asked.

  “Not really.”

  “I can’t go by myself.”

  “Palm, why don’t you watch TV or something?”

  Palmer fell silent for a moment, picking at a rip in the plastic tablecloth.

  “I may just sleep out here,” Brooks said, faking a long yawn. “Everybody keeps saying you can see shooting stars.”

  The idea that Brooks would spend a night at the beach staring at the sky was extremely implausible, but she acted on it, grabbing one of the beach towels and spreading it out on the ground. Palmer couldn’t seem to make anything of her motives and soon gave up and went inside. Brooks had to wait almost two hours for Palmer to go to bed before she could move her charge. This stirring caused May to be ill once again, after which she wanted to walk around the park to work off some of the dizziness. By three in the morning, Brooks was finally able to tuck her in and fall into her own bunk in exhaustion.

  “So May’s drunk?” said a voice from the shelf-bed above her. “That’s a switch.”

  Brooks rolled toward the wall and put her pillow over her head.

  14

  “Happy Fourth of July!”

  At ten in the morning May’s mother threw open the flimsy piece of plastic that served as their bedroom door. Blistering sunlight poured in. May’s head was revolving slowly. Pain was everywhere.

  “Palmer and I are headed to the beach,” her mom said, pulling her large plastic beach bag over her shoulder. “Want to put on your suit and come?”

  “No…”

  “Okay. See you later, sleepyhead.”

  May pulled her sleeping bag over her head for protection.

  “How are you feeling?” Brooks said, standing in the sunlight, looking disgustingly tall and healthy, her blond hair loose. May felt like a small, gnarled sewer creature, something that recoiled from the light.

  “Drink this,” Brooks said. She held a Gatorade out to May. May struggled with the cap, so Brooks opened it for her and passed it back. May’s thirst was overwhelming, and she drank the whole bottle in about a minute. Brooks took it from her, disappeared for a moment, then returned.

  “Take these,” she said, holding out two pills and a glass of water.

  “What are they?”

  “Medicine.”

  Okay. May could deal with medicine. Didn’t matter what kind, really. She took the pills. She decided to experiment with standing up. Maybe she would feel better that way. She pulled herself out of the bed and into the living area. She didn’t remember coming to bed. She had glimpses…walking, being outside on the ground. She was covered in bug bites.

  “What happened last…?” But as soon as she started the question, it started coming back in flashes and spurts. Brooks and her bottle. The arcade. The sand. The phone.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “What?”

  May put her hand over her mouth. Brooks dove into the cabinet and quickly produced a large plastic popcorn bowl. She shoved this under May’s chin, but May brushed it away. Her problem wasn’t physical.

  “I need to go back to bed,” May said, heading into the bedroom and slamming the door. It bounced back open.

  “What?” Brooks asked again.

  “You should really leave me alone,” May said. “You should go as far away from me as you can.”

  May spent the majority of the day sleeping in fitful bursts. All of her movements were tailored to find the exact position in which her stomach would stop heaving and the flashes of pain would stop running through it. She kept sliding around on her slippery sleeping bag, which covered her tiny bed. Her pillow always seemed to be in the wrong place. One minute she’d be hot and sticky, her sunburn throbbing, and in the next second a shuddering chill would ripple through her.

  When she hadn’t emerged by three in the afternoon, her mother returned to examine her. Fortunately for May, her symptoms mimicked the sickness that resulted from excessive sunburn. She was smeared in aloe vera, forced to drink bottles of water and take a few aspirins, and told to stay out of the sun as much as possible for the remainder of the trip. May was fine with all of this except for the aloe, which made her shiver even more.

  It took until evening for May to find the strength to get up and eat a little dry cereal for dinner. She was sick of being in the tiny bedroom, so she agreed to come along and watch the fireworks. Gingerly she pulled on a pair of running pants and a sweatshirt and slunk along behind her mother and sisters to the boardwalk. They got four Orange Juliuses and found a prime piece of railing to stand along, not far from where May and Brooks’s escapade had started the night before. Just the smell of the beer was enough to almost cause May to relapse.

  “Isn’t this nice?” their mom said, throwing her arms over May and Palmer’s shoulders.

  Palmer shot May an angry look, which May didn’t even feel like analyzing.

  The fireworks began popping over the water, and the crowd started the obligatory oohing and aahing. May’s brain was elsewhere. The illness had filled her mind with morbid thoughts, and now everything she’d been experiencing for the last few days took on a different cast. She was thinking about the word love. That much she could recall from the nightmarish montage of barfing, crawling, walking, and rolling around on the ground. She had used the full “I love you” construction. Not even “love ya!” or “I totally love you!”—either of which might have meant she wasn’t serious. With every boom in the sky, she heard the word.

  The air grew a bit cooler, and she leaned into her mother’s fleece pullover. Her mother gave her ponytail a gentle tug.

  There was another thing that was even harder to grasp, and she wasn’t sure why this hadn’t dawned on her before: They had cheated on Nell. Or Pete had, but she had definitely been a part of it. She was definitely in the middle of things now—she was the other woman. The more she thought about it, the weirder and more wrong it got.

  For May, this was a very disturbing transition from a pleasant fantasy to a harsh reality, like a rude awakening in a horror movie—one of Pete’s favorite devices, which he had explained to her several times. It went like this: Some indestructible serial killer slays half the high school. The
n in the end, right after the massacre, the only surviving character wakes up on a sunny morning. All the blood is off the walls. The severed head is no longer sitting on top of her dresser. She looks around with an expression of infinite gratitude and says, “It was all a dream….” At that moment the killer pops out of the nightstand wearing her deceased boyfriend’s football jersey and wielding an ax. Everything goes black, but you know she is so dead….

  That was what it was like for May. Just without the ax.

  “What do you think, guys?” her mom enthused. “Pretty good spot, huh?”

  May numbly watched another explosion on the horizon.

  “It’s going to be a shame to have to go back tomorrow,” her mom went on. “It’s been great being here, all of us. But back to reality, I guess…”

  15

  May had been home all of an hour, and she’d spent most of it sprawled on her bed with her legs flipped over her head, yoga style. This was her thinking position. She assumed it in times of crisis to encourage blood flow to her brain. All it was doing for her now was making her stare at her calves close up. She needed to shave.

  The phone rang, jarring her meditative flow.

  “May!” Palmer screamed up the stairs. “It’s Camper!”

  She wasn’t ready for this conversation yet.

  “Hey,” he said as May got on the phone. She could hear the smile in his voice. “I was wondering if I could drop by. Are you busy, or…?”

  “We’re…” May glanced around her room for something she could be doing but came up with nothing. “I’m burned. Really burned. I’m covered in aloe. I’m sticking to my sheets. It’s gross.”

  “You always look good.”

  Every alarm in May’s head went off.

  “No, I mean I’m in pain. I feel a little sick. You know what it’s like when I get burned.”

  “Right,” Pete said. “Want me to bring you something? Ice cream?”

  “I was going to try to go to sleep.”

  “Oh,” he said. The disappointment in his voice was clear.

  “But it’s only because I have the test in the morning. I have to try to be able to move and not be too swollen.”

  “Need a ride there?”

  “My mom is taking me. I think she feels obligated since she didn’t teach me.”

  “Afterward?”

  “Oh,” May said. “Yeah. Sure. Come by.”

  She cringed at her obvious lack of romantic suavity.

  “I’ve really missed you,” he said eagerly. “We should talk. You know. Maybe tomorrow. Or now, if you felt like it. But if you’re tired…”

  “We should,” she replied, trying to sound equally as excited. “But we should do it in person.”

  “Sure,” he agreed quickly.

  The line went quiet.

  “You’re tired, huh?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I guess I should sleep.”

  “So I’ll see you tomorrow?” he said. “Around noon?”

  “Great. See you tomorrow! Bye!”

  May hung up quickly. She was pretty sure that there had been a real possibility that he was going to hang up with an “I love you,” and that would have caused her to take a running leap out of her window.

  May slid off her bed and pulled out the flat drawer along the top of her desk. She reached into the space underneath, retrieved an envelope, and shook out the contents. Seven Polaroids fell out. The famous Peter Camp photos. They’d had great plans for the pictures at the time that they were taken. They were going to post them online. But in the confusion that followed, they’d been put away and forgotten.

  May arranged them on the desktop and turned on the light. They really were very blurry. Still, she could see enough. She could see that he had been much skinnier last year; he’d developed muscles recently. It appeared that he had very few freckles on his back. The “good butt shot” was not only an excellent photo, but it revealed a really good butt as well. The much contended issue of size was still impossible to resolve, however, even when she squinted and held the photos up to her desk lamp.

  She put the photos back into the envelope quickly. She sometimes had the strange fantasy that her father could see her whenever she was doing something embarrassing, as if the dead watched the living like they were the cast of a reality show. And as on a reality show, no one would want to see the boring, virtuous parts. The bits when she was studying or when she got to work five minutes early, May was sure these were edited out. But the sight of May hunched over a photo of a naked Peter Camp—that would be included.

  “I need sleep,” she said to herself, crawling under the quilt. “I’ll know what to do tomorrow.”

  Palmer sat on her bed, staring at the bronze canister. It was the first thing she’d wanted to see when she got home. She felt weird being away from it now. She didn’t like leaving her dad alone in the house while they went to the beach. Using the corner of her pillowcase, she wiped away the smudges her fingers had made.

  Though she was glad she’d found it, having the canister presented some problems. One, she didn’t necessarily want to be its keeper. That seemed like a scary, eternal responsibility. The second was that now that she’d found it, she’d lost her desire to go through the house at night. That had been her only occupation, and now it seemed to be gone.

  It had been all right at the beach, sleeping in close quarters with everyone, having Brooks and May right there with her. But now that she was home, Palmer was afraid. She was going to have to go back to the horrible feeling of waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. And she would have nothing to do but sit and wait until she finally managed to drift back to sleep—and that sometimes took hours.

  This was not the time to be sleepless. She was already behind the other players at the camp because she’d missed the first days. The thought of games rarely made her nervous, but tomorrow she’d be playing with strangers. They’d probably be girls a lot older than she was, most of them the best players from their schools. And there might be scouts in the crowd.

  She leaned back on her bed and hung her head upside down over the side. She counted her trophies. There were twenty-one, all lined up on the special shelf her dad had put up above her dresser. When her head filled with blood, she pulled herself upright and looked at the canister again. She needed to do something with it, or she was going to go crazy.

  It suddenly dawned on her—May. She would tell May what she had done, and May would have a good answer. Even if she had gotten wasted over the weekend, May was still the responsible one.

  Palmer slipped off her bed and went down to May’s door. She knocked once, then let herself in. May was sitting in bed, reading a book.

  “Could you wait for me to say, ‘Come in,’ for once?” May asked, looking up in annoyance.

  Palmer shifted from foot to foot. How did she explain this?

  “What did Pete want?” she asked. The second the words were out of her mouth, Palmer realized her mistake. She had blown it.

  “You have to stop it, Palm,” May said, sitting up on her elbows. “Stop watching everything Pete and I do.”

  “I’m not—”

  “I’m really tired,” May said, putting down her book and reaching over to turn out the light. “I have this stupid test in the morning. Would you please let me sleep?”

  Palmer felt like she was going to cry. She wanted to tell May what she had sitting against the Orioles pillow on her bed. She wanted to tell her about her nights of prowling, and the horrible pain in her chest, and the terrible fear.

  “Please, Palm.” May groaned. “Go.”

  There was just something about her that annoyed people, that made them ask her to leave. Not knowing what else to do, Palmer turned and went back to her room.

  16

  Since she’d been practicing in Pete’s car, May decided to take the Firebird for her exam. It was a little more similar in feel and in size than the minivan. Now that she was here, though, she wondered if it was way too old or
too weird for the exam. Maybe you needed a car that didn’t look like it had been stolen from the Smithsonian.

  Her new examiner, a stern-looking man with a crew cut and raw red circles under his eyes, seemed much more interested in the car than in his examinee. He walked around it, inspecting it minutely.

  “Firebird 400,” he said, throwing open the door and taking the permit he was meekly offered. “Sixty-seven, right? Someone in the family a car buff?”

  “My dad.”

  “He do the restore?”

  “The what?”

  “Okay.” He glanced at the permit. “May-zee. Maize-eee. Mayzie? Give me your hazards while we’re here.”

  As May demonstrated all the requested functions, she felt more like a model demonstrating a car in a showroom than someone taking the driver’s exam. Her examiner even wanted to see the latch that released the convertible top.

  “All right,” he said, satisfied that she knew the controls. “Let’s get moving.”

  One thing became immediately clear as May started moving the car forward—Pete had prepared her well for this. The lessons had helped, but what really boosted her confidence was the fact that she’d had so many nerve-racking experiences in the car with him. Nothing the examiner could do really rattled her. Even when she struck an orange cone on the serpentine and caused it to wobble or when she was clearly going too slowly on her thirty feet in reverse, her nerves remained steady right to the end of the course. She was actually shocked at how easy it was.

  “Congratulations,” the man said, checking off some boxes on his form. “Pull over in front of the building.”

  “I passed?”

  “Yes,” he said, handing her back her card and a form. “Take this inside. And tell your dad he’s got a nice car here.”

  “Sure.” May nodded, pulling into the directed spot. “I’ll tell him.”

  It took only a few minutes to have the permit verified. When she came back out, the examiner was gone and her mother was sitting in the passenger’s seat, grinning broadly. May got into the driver’s seat.