The Tiara on the Terrace

by Kristen Kittscher

  “Sundae inspection in FOUR minutes!” Barb Lund blared through her megaphone again as Grace and I hopped off the last scaffolding rung and scooted past her to get more chopped strawflower petals. “And Zimball!” she shouted up to Rod on the Root Beer float. “Where’s your dad? I need him to help adjust the starboard confetti cannons, pronto!”

  Poor Mr. Zimball. Rod’s dad was very high up in the Festival ranks, but he was so nice that Chairman Barb was constantly roping him in to help with something or other. We’d only been volunteering three days, and he’d already fixed the flat tire on her golf cart, oiled her squeaky office chair, and sanded down a splintery scaffolding board. And those were just the things I happened to witness.

  Grace linked her arm with mine and we headed to the flower refill station at the back of the warehouse, passing dozens of colorful floats that featured everything from giant cartoon figures to replicas of Ferris wheels and palm trees. Festival rules said that every inch of the float had to be covered with organic material of some kind, so buckets of bark, seeds, flowers, seaweed, and every type of plant you can imagine lined the aisles. Petals drifted in the air like snowflakes, and Barb Lund’s favorite eighties oldies echoed through the warehouse.

  “Have you asked Rod if he wants to sit with you at the Royal Court announcements yet?” Grace asked as Mr. Zimball hustled past us in his trademark Festival root-beer- brown business suit with another “Brown Suiter,” as we called all the Festival officials.

  I guess she thought I couldn’t embarrass her with spy-game talk if we focused on my love life instead. “Not yet,” I mumbled. “I think I should ask him to go to something else with me, don’t you? It’s too weird.”

  Grace didn’t have any crushes, not unless you counted my older brother, Jake, who was a high school junior—and that crush was obviously the result of early brain injury and/or serious vision impairment. Being homeschooled meant limited romantic options.

  “I mean, it’s not like it’s a dance or something,” I explained. “He probably has to sit with his family. They’ll be sitting on the terrace with all the VIPs, I bet.”

  Grace sighed. “He likes you. It’s so obvious. He’s just shy! If you ask him, he’ll know you like him, too.”

  “And if he says no?”

  “He’s not going to say no. And if he did? He doesn’t understand what he’s missing.” She hugged my arm closer to her side. Just then another Brown Suiter zipped past us on one of the motorized white Festival scooters, a clipboard tucked under her arm.

  “Royal page sign-ups!” someone squealed from the Girl Scouts of America’s Beary Happy Family–themed float. It was like someone had blown a whistle. Before the Brown Suiter had even slowed to a stop, a mass of khaki-uniformed girls streamed away from their decorating stations, their badge sashes flapping as they raced past a surprised Goldilocks and the Three Bears huddled around a fake Girl Scout campfire. Just Right, read the loopy cursive script at the front of the float underneath them. Nothing felt “just right” about it.

  Our good friend Trista Bottoms got caught in the crush of the crowd. Wearing her own version of a scout uniform—a khaki cargo vest that she’d sewn all her Girl Scout badges onto—she stood in front of the Beary Happy Family float like a boulder in a rushing rapids. The big mop of dark curls that sprang from her head made her seem bigger than she was. As a second wave of middle-school girls from other floats jostled by her, she turned toward us with a helpless shrug. Grace and I shot her a sympathetic look.

  “Excuuuuse me!” an annoyed voice whined behind us. Grace had accidentally bumped into Marissa’s sister, Kendra Pritchard, who was carrying a basket of sunflower seeds. Kendra brushed off her uniform and flashed us a death stare, which hardly seemed right coming from a Girl Scout.

  Grace apologized, but Kendra was flouncing back to her station on the Beary Happy Family float, stopping to give Marissa an encouraging pat on the back as she waited to sign up for the auditions.

  “I think she put some kind of a hex on us,” Grace muttered to me.

  “She’s just afraid we’ll audition for royal pages and beat out Marissa,” I joked.

  Grace clapped her hands together. “Oh my gosh, how perfect would that be?” she asked, a glint in her eye. The flyaway hairs that had broken free from her ponytail gave her a wild look.

  “I was kidding!” I backed away. I couldn’t tell if the drifting petals made the air feel hazy or if Grace’s suggestion made me feel woozy. It was probably both.

  “We can all audition together,” she said, breathless. “Think of how much fun it’d be if we made it!” She turned to Trista, who’d finally waded upstream and made her way to us. “Right?”

  Trista bumped her fist against ours in greeting. “How much fun?” she asked in her booming voice. “Let’s see. Living in a mansion for a weekend waiting hand and foot on high schoolers who believe they are actual royalty.” She pretended to do some mental calculations. “I estimate roughly negative 3.5 tons of fun. Possibly less.”

  I laughed. “What, you don’t want to buff Lily Lund’s toenails every night?”

  “You guys,” Grace scowled. “It wouldn’t be like that! A whole long weekend together, twenty-four/seven. Festival parties. Cool traditions. Riding on the Royal Court float!” She practiced her pageant wave and blew a kiss to an imaginary crowd.

  Trista and I traded a look. I think we both would’ve rather grated cheese all over ourselves and spent the night in a rat-infested sewer.

  “I’m not sure we’re royal page material,” I said. The Festival claimed the Royal Court wasn’t a beauty contest—that they were just looking for the “ABCs.” That is, girls who were “Articulate, Bright, and Charming.” Still, I’d never seen a middle-school page as short as me or as wide as Trista. Not even once.

  “Don’t be silly.” Grace rubbed red mum petal dust into her fingers, then swiped each of my cheeks. “All you need is a liiiiittle bit of blush.”

  “What’re you talking about?” I smiled mischievously as I repeated the Royal Court judges’ famous advice to contestants. “We just need to be ourselves.”

  “Ha!” Trista snorted, ducking out of the way as I grabbed a huge handful of petals and launched myself forward. I tugged on the collar of Grace’s T-shirt and tossed the petals down her back. Grace squealed, then filled both her hands and returned the favor.

  “Hey, there,” a voice called out behind us. My heart skipped a beat as I turned to see Rod Zimball. He put down his flower bucket and gave a little wave. White petals were caught in the crests of his dark curls like whitecaps, and his hazel eyes shone. The only way he could’ve possibly looked any cuter was if he were cradling a baby panda.

  He cocked his head and squinted at me. Thanks to Grace’s “blush,” I was pretty sure I looked like Ronald McDonald.

  I followed his gaze to the trail of petals spilling from the bottom of my shirt and collecting on the warehouse floor in a puddle.

  I felt the rest of my face blaze as red as my cheeks.

  “Did I hear you guys say you’re trying out for pages?” he asked. “You have to go for it,” he said.

  I scanned his face for signs that he was teasing. But he blinked back, his expression as sweet and serious as could be. A warm tingle spread through me, and I stood up straighter. It wasn’t until I tried to catch Grace’s eye that it hit me. Tall and thin, with hair as long and glossy as all the Royal Court front-runners, she’d snag a spot as a page in a millisecond. The tingle faded, and my insides hollowed. Rod wasn’t talking about us, he was just talking about Grace.

  “No time this year,” Trista replied abruptly. She hooked her thumb in one of the pockets of her cargo jacket. “Float engineers need some backup.”

  “Too bad.” Rod shrugged, not at all thrown by how seriously Trista had taken his question. “I doubt you’d even have to try out.”

  I must’ve looked confused because he looked right at me and raised his eyebrows. “Town heroes as Royal Court pages? People would
love it!” He wiped his hands on his jeans and picked up his bucket again. “There’s no way you wouldn’t get a spot.”

  If my face was red before, it was on fire now. What was I thinking? Of course that’s what he’d meant.

  I smiled back. I tried to brush petals from my own head, but my hands were so sticky with glue that I yanked out some of my hair. Then—because hands shouldn’t sprout long brown hair and flowers—I clasped them together in front of me. Maybe, someday, I would be able to unclasp them.

  “You call that a line, ladies?” Barb Lund’s thundering question made us jump. She was waving her hands at a group of seventh-grade girls, trying to steer them past the Girl Scout float to the sign-up clipboard. “Now let’s see those patooties in single file, PDQ!” she barked at them.

  “Patooties?” Rod’s forehead wrinkled. “I feel like I need a translator,” he said.

  “That would be bomb diggity,” I said, imitating Barb’s awful slang. Rod laughed.

  “You think the Floatator would be in a better mood,” Grace said. “Just three hours till Lily’s crowning, after all.”

  “Unless Lily doesn’t make the cut,” I said.

  The three of them chuckled as if I’d cracked another joke. Barb Lund had been preparing her daughter, Lily, to be on the Winter Sun Festival’s Royal Court since shortly after her birth—even before, if you count the parade anthems Barb probably blasted to her in the womb. If the judges rejected her, Luna Vista could likely expect to be visited with seven years of plagues, starting with swarms of locusts personally imported from the Sahara Desert by one very, very angry Ms. Barbara Ridley-Lund.

  “Passing over a Ridley in an anniversary year? Not gonna happen,” Rod said.

  I followed his gaze to the dried-flower-cutting tables where Lily Lund was working next to a group of gorgeous senior girls who were obvious Royal Court front-runners. Like me, Lily never would have ordinarily been royal material, no matter how hard Barb worked at it. Lily was taller than I was, but not a whole lot, and she had dull brown hair, thick glasses, and unfortunate bangs that she tried to curl to control a cowlick. I assumed her glasses were absolutely necessary—otherwise, Barb would have forced contact lenses on her long ago. Clustered near her, with their identically cut silky blown-out blond hair, glossy lips, and crazy long legs, her Royal Court–hopeful friends looked like a single strange but beautiful alien life-form. One of them flipped her hair over her shoulder and whispered something to the girl next to her. I felt like I could smell her shampoo from where I was standing until I realized it was just the overpowering scent of mums and roses.

  I sneaked a glance at Rod as he watched them and wondered if he thought they were pretty. Then I wondered if I’d ever look like them when I was in high school. It was hard to imagine. Something about them seemed faded and weirdly stretched out, like a Photoshopped magazine picture.

  “C’mon,” Grace said. “We only have two more minutes until Lund—”

  A bone-chilling shriek rang out next to us. We whipped around to look.

  “What the heck . . . ?” Trista’s mouth fell open in surprise.

  There, beside the campfire feature of the Beary Happy Family float stood Kendra Pritchard, her face twisted in horror.

  A wisp of smoke hovered over her head.

  Chapter Three

  Fire in the Hole

  Kendra Pritchard unleashed another bloodcurdling scream as she slowly backed away from the float. Behind her, a group of Beary Happy Girl Scouts froze in confusion before two rushed to her side, nearly tripping over the float’s s’more replica on the way. A smell that reminded me of an early experiment with my mom’s curling iron hung in the air.

  “Looks like her hex rebounded,” Grace joked, but her worried expression didn’t match it.

  Barb Lund whipped her megaphone out so fast it felt like she was in a duel in some old Western. “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!” she cried out.

  “Pyrotechnics test misfire,” Trista clarified when she saw my ashen face. “We’d better clear out.” The tools on her leather utility belt clanked together as she broke into a jog past the Royal Court float near the warehouse door. “Sparks must’ve singed her hair. She got off easy. One of these days the Festival’s going to learn the hard way that flames and ten thousand pounds of palm fronds don’t mix.”

  “She’s screaming like that over her hair?” Grace asked, looking back to Kendra Pritchard and the Girl Scouts. They weren’t the only ones treating her hair accident like a national state of emergency. Kids at the nearby flower-cutting tables poured forward to help, but a Brown Suiter held up his hand and murmured urgently into a tiny radio microphone clipped to his lapel. Seconds later several officials on scooters buzzed into the warehouse and came to a screeching halt in front of the Girl Scout float.

  Barb Lund didn’t need any convincing to raise her megaphone. “Keep the area clear!” she shouted so urgently you’d have thought armed troops were invading. “I repeat, keep the area clear!” She shooed us toward the large, open warehouse door.

  My legs felt shaky as we streamed onto the Ridley Mansion grounds. I tried to convince myself it was from balancing on the scaffolding so long, but the nervous fluttering in my stomach wouldn’t let me. Grace hung back, craning her neck for a better view. I looked over her shoulder. Kendra Pritchard hiccuped sobs as a Brown Suiter gently led her away. The two Girl Scouts who’d rushed to Kendra’s side wobbled behind them, their faces a sickly gray green.

  Murmurs rushed through the crowd as we headed up the stone path under the rose arbor toward the mansion. “She burned off her hand,” a girl next to Grace said, eyes so wide I worried they might launch themselves right out of her head.

  “No, she found a hand,” another voice chimed in. “I saw it. I swear.”

  “Just a hand, like, sitting there?”

  “C’mon, people,” a slouchy eighth grader ahead of us scoffed. “They found a bomb. This parade is totally the perfect terrorist target.”

  Maybe he sounded so convincing because his voice had already changed, but suddenly I was sure the warehouse was about to explode, turning tiny bits of plastic bear replica into speeding projectiles. I fought the urge to run. Better to die by fireball than be the girl who ran for her life because Kendra Pritchard singed an eyelash.

  I tried to calm down by reminding myself that Festival officials were the leading experts in overkill. The year before they’d practically called in the National Guard when bugs infested the rose crop. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they’d ordered up a SWAT team to clear out some dead field mouse barbecued in a float pyrotechnics test.

  Grace strode ahead of me, her watch glinting in the sun as she undid her ponytail and let her long hair flop over her shoulders. From behind, she could have been part of the Royal Court front-runners’ shiny-haired crew. A couple of months ago, she would have been begging me to hang back and investigate. Now that seemed to be my job.

  “Grace, wait up.” I jogged to catch up. “Don’t you think we should check it out?” I nodded toward the float barn.

  “Nah, it’s probably nothing. You know how Kendra is.” Grace tossed her hair over one shoulder. Her eyes flicked to Marissa and the twins.

  “Sure doesn’t look like nothing,” I said as three police cars came blazing down the mansion’s side driveway toward the float barn, lights flashing.

  We watched as the officers spilled out of their cars and jogged inside. A gleam came in her eye. She was curious. She had to be.

  “C’mon, Agent Yang.” I nudged her. “One last mission. For old time’s sake? Then we retire for good. Promise.”

  “I don’t know, Sophie.” Grace looked back as Barb Lund marched the troops toward the mansion, her sturdy arms swinging. “It’s not worth landing on the Watch List for.”

  “Lund’ll never even notice,” I lied. The truth was, I’d have scrubbed down ten port-a-potties with toothbrushes if it meant Grace would go back to being her old spy self.

&nbs
p; “Officer Grady’s on the scene,” I said, pointing.

  “Uh-oh. They’re doomed.” Grace smiled. Officer Grady had nearly botched Deborah Bain’s capture a couple of months ago, but we’d set him straight. Grace bit her lip and looked back to the group heading up the path.

  “Don’t tell me you’re worried what they’ll think,” I said, jerking my head toward Marissa and the twins.

  “Of course not,” Grace said, but she didn’t sound convincing. “Okay. Five minutes,” she said, holding up five fingers.

  I broke into a grin and slapped her hand as if she’d been angling for a high five. Then we launched ourselves toward the warehouse. As we raced ahead, half crouching, a burst of happiness surged through me and I could practically hear the Mission: Impossible soundtrack swelling up in the background.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” I said, as we flattened our backs against the warehouse metal siding, spy style.

  Grace laughed. “Roger that.”

  She jerked her head toward the open door, counted down silently on her fingers, then flashed me a signal before springing around the corner. I followed, trying to keep my sneakers from squeaking on the polished warehouse floor as we crept up to the ocean-themed Royal Court float, its rippling blue “waves” rolling toward a huge figure of a grassy-bearded Neptune at the front of the float. We climbed aboard, slipped past the giant half clamshell where the Court would wave from on parade day, then tucked ourselves into hiding behind two leaping dolphins along the side of the float.

  Slowly, we peered over their sunflower seed–decorated backs. Grace leaned forward and—cupping both hands behind her ears—opened her mouth wide. She looked as if she were imitating a surprised fish. “Spy trick,” she whispered to me when she saw the look on my face. “Helps you hear better.”

  I imitated her, trying not to laugh. She was back in the game. But my giddy, happy feeling fizzled away as soon as I saw the expression on Officer Grady’s face. He stood with his hands on his hips next to the Girl Scouts of America Beary Happy Family float, frowning. Goldilocks and the Three Bears posed stiffly in their Girl Scout uniforms, flashing toothy daisy-petal grins as other officers swarmed around, taking pictures of the float from every possible angle. Meanwhile, a gangly, pink-faced officer who couldn’t have been all that much older than my brother Jake roped off the area with yellow crime-scene tape. A deputy kneeled by the fake campfire, muttering and jotting down notes.