Summerlost

by Ally Condie

  Or, “He’s here to teach us to be more like him.”

  Someone told me that they used to take away people like Ben. “My grandma’s sister was like that,” my friend Casey from church said once, “and they took her sister to this place. Like a hospital. My grandma hardly ever saw her after that. My mom says you guys are so lucky that we live now.”

  And I guess that was right, but it also seemed to me like people who said Ben was special and had no worries were as wrong as the people long ago, but in a different way.

  Because that’s crappy. What if this life was all Ben got? People said he was sweet and special—and he was—but he was also sad and angry. More than most people. He cried. His own body seemed to feel weird to him sometimes—he would jump and move like he wanted to be free of his skin. I could see him looking at us like Get me out of here and we were never sure where to take him. You can’t take someone away from their own body. And that seemed unfair. Would God really do that to someone so other people could feel like they were learning important lessons in the few minutes they spent with him?

  “He’s healed now,” they said at the funeral. “He has his perfect body. Think of how happy he must be in heaven.”

  I hated the funeral so much.

  They were so sure and I was so not sure.

  “And such a blessing that Ben and his father are together,” someone else said. “Together when it happened, and together now. Up there waiting, the two of them.”

  And that stuck with me because if there was anywhere in the world Ben hated, it was waiting rooms. This was because usually scary or painful or stressful things happened to him after he’d been in a waiting room. Someone would do a blood test to make sure his medication wasn’t giving him diabetes. Or he would be going to another new doctor who might be able to tell if he had something wrong with his digestive system. Or another one to see if there was something wrong with his skin.

  Ben wasn’t bad in the waiting room. It’s not like he threw tantrums or anything. He was just anxious. Walking, jumping, talking loudly. Looking around, wondering where the danger was and what people were going to do to him.

  So that was how I started picturing Dad and Ben. In a waiting room with beige chairs and a TV on the wall that showed a Disney movie and carpet that looked like it had bits of crayons in it but it was really colored dots they’d put in the pattern for some reason. Maybe for it to look fun. It did not look fun. Old magazines. Ben walking around worried. My dad talking to him in a low voice to try to keep him calm.

  Both of them waiting for the rest of their family to die or for God to come in and say something, whichever came first.

  The wind stopped blowing. My mother stopped sanding. When I put my hand under the pillow, the screwdriver was still there.

  And I wondered.

  Who’d given it to me?

  15.

  I couldn’t tell if our first tour customers were crazy or not.

  There were three of them, all old ladies. And they had on pink shirts with Lisette Chamberlain’s face silk-screened on the front.

  “I like that we’re doing this at dawn,” one was saying to the others as Leo and I came up to them. “It feels more sacred.”

  “Hello,” Leo said, and they jumped as they turned around.

  “We’re your tour guides,” he said. “Are you ready to begin?”

  “You’re both kids,” one lady said. She had gray curly hair. Another one had white curly hair and the third had a sleek red bob. The redhead looked sassier than the other two or maybe it was just the hair. I’ve always wanted red hair.

  “Yes,” Leo said, “we are. But I know everything there is to know about Lisette Chamberlain.”

  The ladies looked at one another. You could tell they were thinking they’d been ripped off.

  “Really,” said the red-haired lady. “You know, for example, what Lisette’s favorite color was?”

  “Purple,” Leo said smoothly. “She always joked in interviews and said it was gold to match the Oscar she’d someday win, but it was actually purple.”

  “And the date of her wedding?” another lady asked.

  “Which one?” Leo asked. “The one that hardly anyone knows about that was annulled, or the one to Roger Marin? Or do you mean Halloween? When she was a kid, she always planned to get married on Halloween and have her wedding colors be orange and black.”

  The redheaded lady burst into laughter, and the one with white hair joined in. The Lisette printed on their shirts went up and down with their boobs. But the gray-haired lady still looked sour.

  “All right,” she said. “You know your stuff. And you do only charge five dollars a ticket. Let’s see what you can tell us.”

  Leo pointed at the insurance building. “Lisette’s story begins here,” he said.

  “Wait,” said one of the women. “Aren’t we going to go inside?”

  “No,” Leo said.

  “Let me guess,” the gray-haired woman said. “You don’t have permission to go inside, and this is private property.”

  “You are correct,” Leo said.

  “So this isn’t an official tour. It’s not sanctioned by the festival at all,” she said, and now she had a grumpy look around her mouth.

  “It’s better that way,” I said. Everyone turned to look at me. Leo raised his eyebrows in surprise. I’d told him I wanted to listen the first few times on the tour so I could learn the material. “The festival’s tour would be boring.”

  Leo nodded. “That’s right.”

  The grumpy woman still didn’t look entirely convinced, so I added, “And there’s nothing to see in there anyway. It’s an insurance building now. Cubicles and office furniture and that’s it. It’s easier to imagine the scene if we stay out here. The outside of the building is much like Lisette’s mother would have seen it as she came inside, ready to have her baby. Did she have any idea that her daughter would turn out to be one of the greatest actors of our time?” I glanced over at Leo. I was out of material, since I didn’t actually know very much about Lisette other than the basics.

  Leo grinned. He’d caught my cue the way my dad and I used to catch the ball when we got a good rhythm going throwing to each other in the front yard—seamless, smooth.

  “We know that Lisette’s mother took a list of names with her to the hospital,” Leo said. “She did not know whether she was having a boy or a girl, and she had five names listed for each gender to choose from. I’m sure that the three of you already know which names were on that list.”

  “No,” said the red-haired lady, a little smile crossing her face. “We don’t.”

  16.

  The cemetery came last.

  Leo and I walked away from the ladies for a minute to give them a chance to pay their respects.

  “We are so going to get caught,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I swear we won’t. I’m very good at reading people. I don’t put the flyers in every program I sell. I only give them to people who look promising.”

  “What if someone drops one? Or it falls out in the theater or the courtyard?”

  “The janitors sweep up the whole place right after the performances,” Leo said. “It’s not like they’re going to look at every piece of trash. And I keep an eye out. Don’t worry about it.”

  “All right.”

  “By the way,” Leo said. “That was amazing. Back at the hospital. When you jumped in to help get them to stay.”

  “I thought about it last night. I realized they might give us a hard time because we’re kids, so I wanted to have something to say if they did.”

  “We make a good team,” Leo told me. “You think ahead. You’re smart.”

  I fought down a smile at the compliment. “You’re smart too. You know everything there is to know about Lisette. How did you find out so much?”

 
“I’ve read every interview she ever gave,” Leo said. “And I read When the Curtain Fell: The Unauthorized Biography of Lisette Chamberlain. Some of the actors say they’ve seen her ghost. She appears in the tunnels, late at night, after the play ends. I’ve got to get in there.”

  “Can you take a picture of us?” one of the ladies called.

  “Sure,” Leo said.

  It surprised me how much I liked giving the tour and learning about Lisette. I’d thought it might be hard, but it wasn’t. She was like a character, someone I was learning about from a book or watching in a show. Long gone, far away.

  When we got closer we could see that the ladies’ eyes were red. From crying over someone they didn’t even know, who had been buried decades before. My chest felt tight and I had to bite my lip to keep from saying something.

  We walked the ladies all the way back to their car at the old hospital—about a mile, but none of them complained. They kept talking to Leo about Lisette’s performances and had he watched them all and which was his favorite.

  “Thank you,” the red-haired lady said. Some of the insurance office workers had started to pull into the parking lot, but we stood under a big pine tree and I didn’t think they could see us. “This was wonderful. I’m sorry we doubted you at first.”

  “No problem,” Leo said. “You can make up for it by telling all your friends.”

  He had them wrapped around his little finger, even the gray-haired lady. They laughed and all three of the Lisettes on their shirts moved up and down.

  “Here’s fifteen dollars for our tickets,” said the gray-haired lady, “and ten as a tip for your expertise.” She handed him a twenty and a five.

  We walked down the block to the bank so Leo could get the twenty-dollar bill changed to pay me. “You don’t have to do that right now,” I said. “You can wait until the end of the week and take care of the money all at once.”

  “I’d rather get it done right away,” Leo said. The bank was one of the older buildings in town, made of gray stone. It looked old-fashioned, like a bank in a movie, with gold lettering on the window and an iron railing for the stairs. I started toward the front entrance but Leo motioned me to come around to the side. Then he walked right through the drive-through and took out the plastic container that takes money and checks into the bank.

  “Cars shouldn’t get to have all the fun,” he said. He put the twenty-dollar bill in the container and put it back in the tube, where it shot through to the teller. She looked up from her spot at the window at Leo and said, “Can I help you?” in a tone that actually said, What do you think you’re doing?

  “I’d like to change this twenty into two tens,” he said. “Please.”

  I thought for a minute she wouldn’t help us, and she never did smile, but when she sent back the two tens there were also two lollipops inside the container. One red, one butterscotch.

  “Which one do you want?” Leo asked me as we walked away.

  “I’m too old to get candy at the bank.”

  Leo raised his cartoon-devil eyebrows and started opening the red lollipop. He handed me the butterscotch one and I put it in my pocket to give to Miles later.

  Leo gave me one of the tens and kept the other. He also kept the five, which meant he got fifteen dollars and I got ten. Which seemed fair, since he’d done more of the work and planning.

  “When you start talking more on the tours, we’ll split it evenly,” he said. “And maybe we should have some shirts made. Those ones the ladies had on were genius. I bet we could sell a bunch.”

  “You love making money, don’t you,” I said. Then I wished I hadn’t because he also obviously liked people. It wasn’t totally about the cash.

  But Leo didn’t mind at all. “Oh yeah. I love money. And I want to have a lot of it.”

  “What is it you’re saving up for?”

  “I’m saving up for a plane ticket to England.”

  I should have known.

  “And I have to earn the money soon,” he said. “I need to be in London in two months, and plane tickets are going to start getting more expensive the closer I get to my departure date.”

  “Why do you have to be there in two months?” I asked. “That’s right during school.”

  “Barnaby Chesterfield is playing Hamlet onstage in London,” Leo said. “And I need to be there to see it.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s the greatest actor alive,” Leo said. “And I’m going to be able to say that I saw him do Hamlet in person. It’s going to change my life.”

  Barnaby Chesterfield was a famous actor. Like Lisette Chamberlain, he had been a stage actor before hitting it big on TV and in the movies. And even though I might not know everything about Lisette Chamberlain, I did know a lot about Barnaby Chesterfield.

  My dad and I used to watch Darwin, the show where Chesterfield got his big break, together. We both loved it because we loved science fiction and science and alternate realities, and Darwin was about a brilliant scientist who lived in the future. My mom and the boys weren’t into it like we were, although sometimes Ben would stop and watch for a few minutes because he liked the sound of Barnaby Chesterfield’s very deep voice. Ben always liked different sounds, things that had resonance.

  “How is it going to change your life?” I asked Leo.

  “I’ll be in the presence of greatness,” he said. “I think I was born for greatness too.”

  I wanted to laugh at him, but the truth was I used to think the same thing. Just a tiny bit, in my heart. I felt like there had to be something special for me to do. But lately I didn’t think that anymore. And even when I had, I never said it out loud.

  “What kind of greatness?” I asked.

  “I’m still not sure,” Leo said. “But I have ideas.”

  “That Hamlet has been sold out for months,” I said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “It was in the news,” I said. “It sold out faster than any other London stage show in history.” It made headlines in the weeks after the accident. Every time I saw the words Barnaby Chesterfield I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.

  “We bought the tickets last year right when they went on sale,” Leo said. “With my dad’s credit card. I had the money so he let me do it and we got one for him too. So I can go, and my dad’s going to come with me, but I have to earn the money for my own airfare. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close.”

  “And if you don’t?”

  “We can sell the Hamlet tickets to someone else, no problem,” Leo said. “The theater will buy them back because the demand is so high. But the deadline my dad set for me to have the money for the plane tickets is coming up. I don’t have enough money yet.”

  “And we don’t make very much money selling concessions.”

  “Right,” Leo said. “I need to supplement my income. That’s why I came up with the tour.”

  We were almost to our street. “Do you want to come eat breakfast at my house?” Leo asked.

  I did and I didn’t. Mostly I didn’t want to see him with his normal family eating breakfast together. My family ate cold cereal on our own whenever we felt like it because my mom, who used to get up super early, now got up at the last possible minute. She stayed up too late. This summer because she was building the deck; during the school year it had been lesson plans and grading. She had to tire herself all the way out, she said, before she could fall asleep.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Maybe another time.”

  “Okay,” Leo said. “I’ll see you at work.” I watched him go the rest of the way home and walk up the steps to his house.

  As soon as he’d gone inside I wished I’d said yes instead.

  17.

  I sat out in the backyard eating a bowl of cereal and looking at the mess that was our deck. My mom came outside. She had her gym c
lothes on.

  “All done running?” she asked.

  I nodded. It seemed less like lying if I didn’t say the lie. “Look,” I said. The birds had started swooping around, big and dark and freaky. “Do you think they might be eagles?” I asked, even though I knew they weren’t.

  “Turkey vultures,” my mom said. She gave me a kiss on the top of my head and said, “I’m going to be late. I’ll see you soon, sweetie.”

  The vultures hovered for a minute more, and then they started to settle in the tree. Once they were deep in the leaves, I couldn’t see them.

  18.

  Every day my mom went to her exercise class and then to run errands and I was in charge of Miles.

  Every day we did the same thing. We made peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches with chocolate milk for lunch and then we watched a really bad soap opera that my mother would never in a million years have let us watch. But she didn’t know. We pretended we did crafts and played games. That’s what we always said we’d been doing when she came home.

  The soap opera was called Times of Our Seasons, which didn’t actually make sense when you thought too hard about it. It always started with the scene of a beautiful woman and a handsome man walking along a beach and then a ticking clock was superimposed over them.

  Our favorite character was named Harley, and she had been buried alive (and I mean buried, like in a coffin in the ground and everything) by her archnemesis, Celeste. Inside the coffin, there was this walkie-talkie thing that Celeste used to talk to Harley and a tube where Celeste sent food down. That was it. Harley had to lie inside that box, day after day.

  We had to see her get out.

  Times of Our Seasons had lots of other drama too. Death and divorce and everything else besides.

  You might think this would be a bad choice for two kids who had lost a parent and a sibling in an accident.

  But it was so fake it was perfect.

  “Hurry!” Miles shouted from the family room. “It’s starting!”