Summerlost

by Ally Condie

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “This might be my last chance to see Leo before I leave for the summer.”

  “It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” he said. Why did everyone keep saying that?

  “It’s actually not,” I said.

  “Okay,” Zach said. “Harley’s coming back onscreen now. I’ve got to go. How does she go to the bathroom in that thing, anyway?”

  “It’s one of the great mysteries of our time,” I said, but he had already hung up.

  6.

  Midnight felt late, impossibly late, and strange. The houses were dark and the streetlamps not bright enough for you to be sure what street you stood on, what year you lived in. I stood to the side of the lamppost, in the shadows. The sound of sprinklers coming on made me jump and turn at the whispers of water.

  Leo’s house looked dark.

  What would I do if Leo didn’t come? Would I go see the tunnels by myself? Walk through them alone?

  But then I saw him, a dark shape moving on his bike. I breathed in the smell of summer, the grass, the wind, the world warm and wide and tall and, in this moment at least, not coming down in pieces the way it did in fall and winter, leaves and snow.

  “You’re here,” I said. “Zach gave you the message.”

  Leo hopped off his bike. He’d followed instructions. He’d worn all black. He stood right under the streetlamp and I could see him grin at me and his eyebrows go up.

  “So where are we going?” he asked.

  “To the festival,” I said. “Where else?”

  “We’re going to get in trouble,” he said. “Our parents are going to kill us.”

  “They might. But at least we’ll die having seen the tunnels under the theater.”

  “What?” Leo asked. “We can’t do that.”

  “We’re not breaking in,” I said. “That’s the best part. Meg is going to let us in.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Leo said, but I could hear in his voice how much he wanted to believe me. “Meg’s going to let us in? How did you talk her into that?”

  “I have ways,” I said.

  “Wow,” Leo said, and then he hugged me, fast. He felt warm and smelled good like laundry and for a second I wanted to put my head on his shoulder and stand there for a minute. We take care of each other, I thought. I knew.

  Then it was over. Leo stepped back and I shifted my backpack straps over both shoulders. The flashlight inside felt heavy.

  “So Zach knows you’re with me,” I said. “And I left a note on my pillow for my mom saying that we went to the festival to meet with Meg.” Our parents were going to lose it if they woke up and found us gone, but at least this way they’d know where we were. “Do you think anyone heard you leave?”

  “No,” he said. “What about you?”

  “I’m good too.” I’d taken the stairs so slowly I thought I’d scream, but I hadn’t made any noise. Miles and my mom both seemed fast asleep.

  “All right.” Leo swung his leg over his bike. “Let’s go see a ghost.”

  7.

  The fountain still shone with light, but the theater and the administration building were dark.

  We went to the side of the main building, and when we got close enough, we could see a faint slice of light under one of the doors. When I tried the door, it was unlocked. Once we took a few steps inside, I saw another sliver of light at the bottom of the stairs, this time in the costume shop.

  I turned on my flashlight and Leo and I went down the stairs together.

  Meg looked up when we pushed open the door. The fluorescent lights hurt my eyes but I could still see how tired she looked. She pulled a pin from a costume and stuck it in the strawberry pincushion on the table and I noticed that her fingers were curled in, like they had been sewing so long they couldn’t go straight. I’d never seen them like that before. She was working so hard.

  I wished I hadn’t taken the ring.

  “So you’re ready to see the tunnels,” Meg said. “And maybe a ghost.”

  I couldn’t find my voice so I nodded.

  “I see you brought flashlights,” Meg said. “Good.”

  It felt strange to look around the costume room and see it abandoned; almost as strange as it had felt outside when we crossed the empty courtyard. Everyone else in the world seemed asleep. Gone.

  Meg took us out into the hallway where she’d let us through to the concessions area. But this time, she went to the doorway straight ahead and unlocked it. “Be back in half an hour. That’s when I’m leaving and I need to lock up.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Leo said.

  “I’m not joking,” Meg said. “If you aren’t back in half an hour, I’m still going home. I’ll lock up and get you in the morning. I’m exhausted from getting the Costume Hall put together and I need my sleep.”

  Leo looked at me as if to say Would she really lock us in? and I tipped my head as if to say She could. Even though I didn’t think she would do it, there was no way I was going to be late. I couldn’t disappoint her again.

  “I promise,” I said. “We won’t keep you waiting.”

  8.

  We were finally, finally, in the tunnels.

  The rumors weren’t true about the ceilings being so low that we had to crawl, but there were times we had to duck our heads. There wasn’t room for us to walk side by side. Leo shone his flashlight around on the wall when we first started and found a light switch. When he clicked it on, fluorescent lightbulbs lit up all the way down the main tunnel, but everything was still dim and gray.

  I’d pictured something ancient, rotting wooden beams, packed dirt for a floor. Something that felt like a mine, maybe, or the catacombs of Paris.

  But it was only a narrow hallway with other small hallways branching off it and then ending. Dirty gray paint on the walls. Cement floor, cracked in places. Pipes on the ceiling.

  It was even eerier this way.

  I could imagine every bad thing happening in here. Old bad things. New bad things.

  I opened my mouth to tell Leo that I was afraid, but he said something first.

  “Do you think we’ll see her?” he asked.

  I thought about what Meg had said. About how we’d only see Lisette’s ghost in the tunnels if we’d seen her there in person. I knew exactly what she meant. I saw Ben and my dad so many places even though I had never actually seen them since they died. It was hard to explain but easy to understand if you’d lost someone you loved.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “This is the way to the theater,” Leo said after a minute. “See?”

  A black cardboard sign with gold printing said TO THE STAGE with an arrow on it. The edges of the cardboard were coming apart and looked soft, like a sponge.

  “She could have hidden the ring anywhere,” Leo said. “Should we stay in the main tunnel? Or go off to the side?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I know where the ring is. I’ll tell you. When we get to the stage.”

  “What?!?” Leo said. “Tell me now!”

  “Meg has it,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on the rest later.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Leo said after a pause.

  “Let’s try one of the side tunnels,” I said.

  We turned left and felt our way down the walls, getting dust on our fingers and flickering our flashlights around. The tunnel ended in a cement wall. “Where do you think this went?” Leo asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but it looked like it had been blocked off for decades, from before Lisette’s time. My hands felt smudgy with dirt.

  “We don’t have a lot of time left,” I said. “Maybe we should go where we know she went. Out to the theater.”

  “Right,” Leo said.

  The actors and crew for the play
would have walked back down the main tunnel only an hour or so before, when they finished the performance. But it didn’t feel like that, with the dim bulbs and the cracked tile and the quiet and the creaking. It felt like no one had been there in years.

  We came to a sign, gold printing on black cardboard like before.

  QUIET, it said. PERFORMANCE ABOVE.

  “We’re right below the stage now,” I said. The tunnel opened up into a bigger space, with more pipes and a ladder and a door labeled DRESSING ROOM.

  “Let’s try it,” Leo said.

  Inside we found two mirrors with lightbulbs around them, five chairs, a garbage can, a fan, and a tiny fridge. I opened it up and found bottles of festival water, a moldy orange, and a candy bar. A few lipsticks and a comb and a bottle of makeup remover had been left on the tables. The chairs looked newish, like office chairs from Kmart or something. But the mirrors looked old. I leaned in, wondering who I might see.

  Only me. And Leo.

  “They probably use this for some of the fast changes,” Leo said. “Since the other dressing rooms are back down the tunnel near the costume shop.”

  “I’m sure Lisette came in here,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  Leo shone his flashlight on all the corners of the room. Spiderwebs. Cracks in the wall. A bobby pin, the shiny silver lid to a tube of lipstick. The empty room felt thick with memories, but none of them were ours. We could imagine, but we couldn’t know.

  Leo and I went back out into the larger space under the theater and I shone my flashlight on the ladder in the middle and the sign hanging near it.

  TRAPDOOR.

  “Let’s go up,” I said to Leo. “You first.”

  The ladder was made of black wood with white tape on the rungs that caught the light so you knew where your next step should be. I heard Leo push on the door at the top, and it swung open to more black. I held on to my flashlight with one hand and started to climb.

  Leo was waiting for me at the top. We came out onto the stage in the dark. Without saying anything, we both switched off our lights.

  Rows and rows of seats in front of us.

  They could be full, they could be empty. It was too dark to see.

  “The actors say that when you’re onstage, the lights make it too bright to see the audience,” Leo said.

  So this was like that, only dark instead of light.

  The breeze still smelled like last night’s rain. It came in through the open roof of the theater and stirred the dark leaves behind us, the ones from the forest of Arden.

  Lisette would have stood right here. It was where she stood for The Tempest. What did she see, if anything, in the audience that night? What did she see in Roger Marin’s eyes?

  “So about the ring,” Leo said.

  “I found it in the costume shop,” I said. “In the box that had part of Lisette’s costume for the display.”

  “And you asked Meg about it?”

  I wanted to tell Leo the truth. “Yeah,” I said, “but first I stole it.”

  “You stole it?”

  “I took it,” I said, “and I put it on my windowsill.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone had been leaving things there for me all summer,” I said. “Not every night. Every couple of weeks or so. For a while I thought it was you. But it wasn’t. Anyway, that’s why I took the ring. I put it on the windowsill for whoever was leaving stuff.”

  “Did you think it might be Lisette?” Leo asked.

  “Sort of,” I said. I didn’t want to explain that I wanted it to be Ben. Not even to Leo.

  “Did anyone come?”

  What if she had come? Lisette, slipping up to my window in her Miranda dress, her eyes bright?

  What if Ben had come, quiet, smiling, with his hair sticking up in back and his favorite blue shirt, worn soft with wear? Would I have reached out to try and touch him, or would I have been grateful just to see him?

  “Yes,” I said. My voice didn’t work. I tried again. “Yes. Miles. He was the one leaving things.”

  “That was nice of him,” Leo said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He told me I had to return the ring. So I did.”

  “Was Meg mad?”

  “A little,” I said. “But she let us come out here.”

  “We should probably go back,” Leo said.

  “I know.”

  Neither of us moved.

  What if we think we’re alone, I thought, but we’re not, and there are creatures all, all around us, watching? Ghosts in the audience? Birds high in trees?

  I turned on my flashlight. Leo did the same. “You go first,” I said, swinging my light toward the trapdoor. When he opened it up, some of the light below seeped onto the stage. He went down. I watched the top of his head. “One second,” I called to him, “I’ll be right there,” and I shut the trapdoor and flicked off my light.

  I stood there all alone onstage in the dark. I closed my eyes.

  “Dad,” I said. “Ben.”

  I flicked my light back on but I didn’t shine it over the seats to see who might be there. I said their names. I left the stage.

  9.

  Leo and I went back and found Meg in the Costume Hall. “I decided I’d do this one tonight,” she said. I looked into the case and saw Lisette’s costume from The Tempest. The mannequin already wore the dress and the jacket. Meg smoothed down the cuff, her hand lingering on the blue-gray velvet.

  “You’re three minutes late,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I designed this costume for Lisette,” Meg said. “She loved it.” She reached into her pocket and took out the ring, slipping it onto the mannequin’s finger. I heard Leo draw in his breath.

  “It’s not the real ring, you know,” Meg said. “It’s a replica.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Then where’s the real one?” Leo asked.

  “I sold it,” Meg said. “That’s what Lisette wanted me to do.”

  Meg let go of the mannequin’s hand and closed the display case. “She took the ring off and gave it to me in the hallway right after the show ended that night.” Meg smiled. “She told me to sell the ring and give the money to Gary.”

  “Gary?” I said.

  “He’s been here a long time too,” Meg said. “He was working concessions back then. It was his first job. His car had broken down and he didn’t have enough money to fix it. He loved that car. Lisette could have gone home and written him a check, of course, but this was a grand gesture. Impulsive. In the moment. That was like her. She said at least something good would come out of her marriage to Roger.”

  “Roger went to see her at the hotel that night,” Leo said. “Do you think he killed her?”

  “No,” Meg said. “I don’t.” She was looking at the photo of Lisette wearing the costume at the back of the display case. “He wasn’t that kind of person. He was a jerk and a mediocre actor, not evil. But he didn’t deserve her. And during her last trip home to the festival, Lisette finally saw that.” Meg’s face fell. “Once Lisette knew something, she knew it. I wish she’d had more time. To fall in love again. To perform again.”

  I watched Meg, looking at the mannequin and the photo of Lisette. How hard would it be to have to swallow down your own feelings and bring the image and memory of your friend back to life?

  Meg turned away from the display case and our eyes met.

  “I still sold the ring, even after Lisette died,” Meg said. “But I had this replica made later, for the Costume Hall. I wanted the display to truly represent her last performance.”

  “Did Gary get to keep his car?” Leo asked.

  “Yes,” Meg said. “He was so happy. I didn’t tell him where the money came from, of course. I told him it was an anonymous friend. But I think he figured it out
.” She frowned at me, and then at Leo. “Gary can seem uptight,” she said. “But he worked very, very hard to get his job. He works very hard to keep it. He knows the festival inside and out, and he loves it. It’s a place where he belongs.”

  While she said that, I thought about Gary, and imagined him talking about England, and the way he wanted everything to be exactly right, and suddenly I knew. What I should have known all along. My throat and eyes and heart felt like I was going to cry.

  Gary was like Ben.

  Not exactly. But similar. And I hadn’t put it together until now because Gary was older and had come a long way and we would never know if Ben could have come that far or found a place that felt as right to him as Summerlost did to Gary. We would never ever, ever know.

  I blinked and tears went down my cheeks. I wiped them away fast.

  “It’s like his kingdom,” I said. “It’s where he’s the most safe.”

  “Yes,” Meg said. She handed me a tissue, and I knew that she understood what I’d realized. I knew she must know about Ben.

  “The last I knew of Lisette was that she did something nice for her friend,” Meg said. “And that she was full of life and ready to move on. It’s a good way to remember someone.”

  I want a good way to remember, I wanted to say to Meg. I want to stop crying. I want everything in the world to stop breaking my heart.

  10.

  “No ghost,” I said to Leo as we rode our bikes home.

  “That’s okay,” Leo said. He veered around something on the sidewalk that looked like a mysterious silver grenade but turned out to be a soda can.

  “Would you have wanted to see Lisette’s ghost?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Leo said.

  I bumped over an uneven sidewalk crack that had grass growing out of it, furred and dark in the dim light.

  “But I did see the tunnels,” Leo said. “Thanks to you.”

  We stopped in front of my house. Leo’s house, across the street and down a short ways, was still dark.

  We were home and nearly home.

  I almost said I’m sorry about Barnaby Chesterfield but I didn’t want to ruin anything. So I asked Leo something else. “Why did you ask me to do the tour so soon after you met me? You hardly knew me.”