“Well, it’s instead of playing quarters again,” Amy says.
“Tell us the rules,” I say, not so much because I want to play, but because I am tired of quarters and tired of everyone just getting drunk and stupid and making out in corners. I think the only one in the room besides me that’s on Amy’s side is Jesse, and that’s only because he’s shy half a head of hair and one eyebrow after the other Merry Men found him passed out in the bathroom.
“It’s easy. You just write down one secret on a card. One that no one knows about. Then we put all of the cards into this hat,” Amy says, lifting her set of mouse ears with SNOW WHITE stitched in curly yellow thread across the back. A gift from Jeff on our double date.
“So when do we drink?” Anna asks. Most of the guys laugh, probably less because it’s funny and more because they’re hoping to make some time with Winnie-the-Pooh’s melancholy friend.
“I’d like to help her find her tail,” whispers Buzz Lightyear.
Amy keeps on talking, probably thinking the same thing I am. That anyone dumb enough to get into her costume naked can’t really spare any brain cells. “One at a time I’ll draw a card and read the secret. Then everyone has to guess whose secret it is.”
“Sounds fun,” Luke says, and I look over at him, but he won’t meet my gaze. Ever since that night in front of the castle, he’s been going out of his way to avoid me. Or maybe he’s just not going out of his way to see me. It’s not like Dale has that many reasons to interact with Cinderella.
Amy passes out the index cards and pencils with Mickey and Donald eraser toppers. I get Mickey. The room gets quiet as everyone thinks of a secret to write on their card. Only Mark seems to know one right off, scribbling on his card, which is propped on the arm of the couch beside him.
“No fair telling us something lame. Like you have a secret desire for green olives,” Cassie says from where she is sitting on the floor in front of Luke.
“Unless you like to have green olives during sex,” one of the Merry Men says from the other side of the pool table.
“Gross,” Anna says, making Amy cut her eyes at me. From what we’ve seen, nothing seems to be off-limits for her.
“Hush,” Devin says. She has her long hair pulled up in a bun on the back of her head. It’s so dark and shiny, they just let her use her real hair instead of wearing the Jasmine wig they gave her. She’s so beautiful that part of me wanted to dislike her right off the bat, but she’s nice, too, giving everyone cookies from the care packages her mother sends her and always smiling; you can’t help but like her. Mark gets up and walks over to where Amy has the hat sitting on the table. He drops his folded card into it and picks the hat up by one of the ears, passing it to Jesse, who’s leaning against the wall. I tap my pencil against the card as I watch the hat make its way through the cluster of Army Men from Toy Story sitting around the pool table and then out onto the porch, where my fairy godmother is too busy kissing Goofy to notice.
“Ahem,” Cassie says, separating the couple long enough for them to drop their cards into the hat. Most of my secrets are too stupid. Like, I still sleep with the blanket I got when I was six. I write half an answer, then stop and tap my pencil’s Mickey head against my lips. I bite down hard on Mickey’s ear and look over at where Luke is sitting. He’s not writing, either. He’s staring past me through the sliding glass doors, his card dangling from his fingers. Cassie waves her hand in front of his eyes, breaking his concentration. His lips twitch slightly, and he considers his card again, but as soon as Cassie turns away, he looks up. This time directly at me. I think he’s going to look away again, like he’s been doing for more than a week now, but he doesn’t. And we sit there looking at each other until I feel a bump against my arm. The hat. I panic and drop my card in before I have anything much written down. I look up again, but Luke is back to staring at the card on his knee. I watch as the hat makes its way toward him. Cassie takes the hat, drops her card in, then snatches Luke’s card and drops his in, too. He starts to say something, but then he just shrugs and frowns. The hat makes its way all the way back to Amy, who drops her card in.
“Who wants to do the honors?” she asks, dipping her hand in and mixing the cards.
“You do it,” Jesse says from the floor. He’s now lying flat on his back, his eyes closed. Amy places the hat on the table in front of her and takes out a card.
“Okay,” she says, “first secret.” She looks at me and raises her eyebrows, but before she can read it aloud, someone bangs on the door.
“EMERGENCY MEETING,” a voice booms from the hall—one of the chaperones not wanting to come in and witness anything they actually have to address. “EVERYONE TO THE CONFERENCE CENTER. TEN MINUTES.” The room gets quiet for a moment, but soon everyone is talking at once. Pulling on sandals and throwing away beer bottles.
“I wonder if they settled the strike?” Mark asks, coming up behind me and placing his hand on the small of my back.
“I wonder if they found out about the fountain,” Jesse says, making the Merry Men laugh. I watch as Amy takes the inverted mouse ears full of our deepest secrets upstairs to our room.
Luke slides past me, and I almost say something, but I see Cassie on his other side, pulling him away from me. We all walk together in twos and threes across the courtyard and past the teacups, no longer spinning, grouped together as if waiting for giants to come and sip from them.
“What do you think?” Amy asks, catching up to me and looping her arm through mine.
“I don’t know,” I say, and I realize that of all the things I’ve been thinking and saying and doing, that’s about as honest as I can be. I just don’t know.
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 rollin
g 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 thin
k 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?”
Dream Factory Page 6