Follow My Lead: A Joy Universe Novel

by Louisa Masters

  Trav says something to Dimi as I aim my feet toward the door, and I catch enough of it to know he’s giving him my address. It’s not until we get outside that I realize if Dimi drives me home, my car will still be here. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before… I mean, one driver plus one passenger equals one car.

  “My car,” I say, stopping beside it.

  “It’ll be fine here overnight,” Dimi assures me. “It’s locked, right?” I nod. “People leave their cars here all the time, so don’t worry. And I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

  How very domestic. That’s a nice thought.

  “Okay,” I agree, because I’m tired and don’t want to mess around with logistics, not because I like the idea of Dimi picking me up for work in the morning. I take the few steps needed to get me to Dimi’s car and climb in. It feels nice to sit down again. Who knew emotional exhaustion was physically tiring as well?

  Dimi starts the car and backs out. In moments, we’re out of the lot and on the street. I break the silence.

  “I’m okay, you know.”

  He glances over at me. “I know. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give yourself time to settle. It’s not fun to have someone basically tell you you’re not good enough, and you haven’t really dealt with that. Not that I’ve seen, anyway.”

  I think about that. He’s right. Ever since it happened, I’ve been drowning myself in work. It was easy enough to do, with no assistant to help with the load, and a great way to distract myself and pretend someone didn’t refuse to work with me because of who I am. Filing a complaint with Kiara this afternoon forced me to confront that, to deal with my feeling about it—the anger, the hurt.

  No wonder I’m exhausted. And it is nice to not have to think about anything right now. I’ll just let Dimi drive me home, order takeout, and watch mindless TV for a while. Tomorrow will be a new beginning.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I hope it’s not out of your way.”

  His look this time is incredulous. “Jason, it’s Joyville. Nothing is really out of the way. Have you seen the size of the place?”

  “It’s not that small,” I protest. I’ve only been here a few weeks, but I’m getting attached already. Sure, Joyville is technically a small town, but the population is over twenty thousand and growing. “It’s going to get a lot bigger when the University of Georgia build their campus.” Construction is due to commence sometime next year.

  “True,” Dimi concedes. A tiny frown plays over his mouth. “I know a lot of people are excited about it, but I wonder if it’s a good thing.”

  I turn in my seat to face him properly, a little surprised. “You think it will ruin the town?” It’s kind of a weird viewpoint. Joyville isn’t a traditional small town that sprang up organically. It was designed and built for the express purpose of housing employees for Joy Universe. To this day, if JU was closed, the town would die. There just aren’t any jobs in the area to sustain the population without the complex. Anything that brings in a diverse source of jobs—like a college campus—has to be a good thing, right?

  “No, that’s not it. I grew up here, and I always knew if I wanted to go to college, even community college, I’d have to leave, yeah? We all knew that. You either went to work in a lower-level job at JU and hopefully worked your way up, got a minimum-wage job at one of the stores here in town, or you left. I was lucky, in that I eventually got to come back to a great job here, but I think it was good that I left. I got to see bigger towns and cities, work and live there, get experience outside JU. Move away from my parents and family and learn to cope on my own in a place where nobody knew who I was and looked out for me. If the college campus had been here, maybe I wouldn’t have left. I’d have gotten my degree, sure, and probably a job at JU, but I wouldn’t be the same person and I don’t know that I’d bring the same perspective and skills to my work.”

  I laugh. I can’t help it, and Dimi looks a little hurt before his face smooths into a blank mask.

  “I’m not laughing at you, I swear. I just…. You’re worried that local kids won’t be as well-rounded because they’ll stay close to home?”

  Silence.

  Finally, he cracks a smile. “It does sound dumb when you put it like that,” he admits, pulling out of JU’s front entrance and onto the highway. “I guess the kids who want to stretch their boundaries will go away to college anyway, and the ones who probably wouldn’t have gone will now have a chance to further their education.”

  “That’s the spirit! It’s all about perspective.” I sound a little too enthusiastic, so I dial down the cheer. “You were just overthinking it.”

  “I do that sometimes.” His voice is dry. “Another habit I get from my mom.”

  “It makes you a great manager, though.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And it’s going to help us make Joy Village Theater Company a rousing success!”

  “Jason?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can stop talking if you want.”

  I lean my head back against the seat. “Thank you. I don’t mind talking, but we should probably change the subject. I think we’ve exhausted all avenues of that conversation.”

  “What would you like to talk about?” He sounds amused now, and I’m happy I caused that.

  Wow. Seriously, I’ve never felt so honest and open as I do right now. Exhaustion is better than drugs.

  “Tell me about you,” I demand.

  “About me? There’s not much you don’t know already. I work at JU, love amateur theater, and have a big family. I’d be more interested in hearing about you.”

  I wave a hand dismissively. “Anything about me that’s interesting, you can find on Google.” Except for what my friends very carefully helped me keep out of the public domain. But I’m not talking to Dimi about the ex-who-shall-not-be-named. “Tell me what it was like growing up here.”

  He seems to think about it for a moment. “I guess it was like any small town. You’ve seen what it’s like—the town is far enough from JU that the locals and the tourists don’t mix. JU is really a separate place from Joyville.”

  “Did you go a lot? Since it was so close? There’s a discount for employee families, isn’t there?” I actually have no idea. I don’t have a family who might want to know and I haven’t tried to access a theme park except that first day when I was with Dimi and Trav, which was for work, so I don’t know if I could get in free or for a discount or whatever.

  “Sure. Employees get an annual pass every year, and any kids under sixteen are free—you just have to register them in your employee file. When you’ve worked here for two years, you get two annual passes. Dad and Gram and Gramps all worked at JU, so we all basically could come and go as we pleased—except you don’t, when you live so close. Weekdays are for school and homework, and weekends are taken up with errands and sports and all that stuff.” He chuckles. “Don’t get me wrong, we came at least a few times a year, more when we got older and friends got part-time jobs here, but it’s not like we spent every weekend at the parks.”

  “Did you get a job at one of the parks?” Part of me is delighted by the image of a teenage Dimi, maybe ganglier and not as confident, selling pretzels or something in one of those ugly uniforms.

  “I did.”

  I wait, but that’s all he says.

  “What did you do?” I prod, and he sighs.

  “Don’t laugh,” he warns, which tells me I’m going to laugh.

  “No promises, but tell me anyway.”

  The look he shoots me vows retribution should I so much as chuckle.

  “You know how the characters from Joy Inc. movies and TV shows wander around the park and take pictures with kids?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Oh my God, is he about to tell me that he was a handsome prin
ce or something? Or maybe Joy Bear? I might actually die laughing if he once walked around in a bear costume, hugging kids and gesturing wildly to make himself understood.

  “I was a handler for the ones who wear full headpieces.”

  I take a moment for that to sink in.

  “You babysat for giant anthropomorphized bears?”

  “Something like that.” He tries to sound disgruntled, but I can tell he really didn’t mind the job.

  “So you held their hands and led them around and made sure kids didn’t swarm them?” Man, he would have been so good at that.

  “There’s a bit more to it than that, but yeah.”

  “That’s actually pretty cool,” I admit. “I thought you sold hot dogs or something boring.”

  “I had a friend who did that. He thought he was too cool to be a handler and ‘hang out with babies all day.’ He regretted it when he realized he was spending his days out in the heat slinging food to bitchy customers and I was wandering around the park in fifteen-to-thirty-minute segments having kids think I was the coolest person ever.”

  Now I laugh, but he’s laughing too, so it’s okay.

  “Did you have a job when you were a teenager?” He pulls off the highway onto the exit into Joyville, and I’m disappointed to realize we’ll be at my place in a few minutes.

  “I did,” I say, wondering if we can sit in his car outside my apartment and just talk. I’d invite him up, but I’m afraid that will break the spell. We’re not quite friends yet, I think, so it might be awkward. “It was nothing glamorous—I was a stock boy at the grocery store. Little kids definitely did not think I was cool. Well, not unless I was stocking candy.”

  He’s still laughing as he turns onto my street. I like the sound of his laugh—it’s deep, like his voice, but where he’s so controlled and measured in everything else, his laugh is casual, a little uncontrolled. Listening to it feels like looking into a secret part of him.

  Or I could just be getting dramatic.

  The car comes to a stop, and Dimi says, “This is it, right?” I look out the window, and yep, there’s my building. It’s a nice building, the neighbors are decent, and my apartment is comfortable, but right now I hate it.

  Pushing down the irrationality of that, I say, “Yes. Thanks for the lift.”

  “Will you be okay?” His gaze is warm, slightly concerned still, and for a moment, I’m tempted to say no, ask him to stay.

  “I’ll be fine. I’m going to get a pizza or something and be slothful.”

  He smiles approvingly. “That sounds like a plan. I’ll pick you up at seven tomorrow?”

  That’s a little late for him—for me, too—and I grin. “Six thirty, Dimi. I’ll be fine tomorrow, I promise.”

  He agrees and waits for me to grab my things and get out of the car. I stand on the sidewalk, not moving an inch until he gives in and drives away. I don’t need him waiting for me to go inside like I might faint at any moment if he doesn’t watch me. No way do I want Dimi thinking of me as needing to be looked after.

  Even if it was nice that he did.

  Chapter Seven

  Jason

  I prepare for the community holiday party as though it’s the most important event of my life.

  Small towns are foreign to me. Before now, I’d never lived in one—and I’m not totally convinced Joyville counts, since having JU right there means access to a lot of amenities and conveniences a lot of small towns don’t have. Still, there’s a sense of community in Joyville that I just never felt living in New York. And I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. In New York, I lived in the same apartment for fifteen years, and although I knew my neighbors well enough to smile and say hello (most of them, anyway), maybe exchange holiday cards or ask to collect mail while I was on vacation (only a few of them), I didn’t actually know them. Jobs? Only if it came up in passing. Family? Same. Hopes and dreams? Please.

  Here, though… within the first two days after I moved in, four of my neighbors knocked on my door to introduce themselves and ask if I needed anything. Within the first week, I’d met everyone in the building. Sure, it’s not a huge building, but still. I’d also been given cookies, cake, and casseroles—which was a big help while I found my feet in the kitchen. Now, nearly a month later, I’m fully aware of what’s going on in everyone’s lives because they tell me. There’s no such thing as just stopping to say hello—it turns into a fifteen-minute discussion of everything that’s happened since last we spoke. Mrs. Henshall, who lives in the ground-floor apartment, likes to park her walker outside her door where she can sit on the little seat and watch everyone coming and going. I see her literally every day, sometimes twice a day, and yet she still seems to have a ton to tell me. Most of it is gossip about the other residents, which has made me utterly paranoid—what must she be saying about me?

  One of the other residents, Marcus, actually caught me hiding in the stairwell once because I didn’t want to face her. It was a catch-22 situation: stop to talk to her and be late for work, or hide in the stairwell in the hope she’d get distracted and be late for work. Lucky for me, Marcus knew immediately what I was doing and commiserated.

  “You’ve timed it perfectly,” he murmured as we both peeked into the lobby, being careful not to be seen. “Frank will come along soon and distract her. Then we just walk past, call hello and wave, and keep going.”

  “Does that work?” Would she be likely to stop us both to join the conversation? “And is that fair to Frank?”

  Marcus chuckled. “Frank is her suitor.”

  Yes. He actually used that word. It took me a moment to assimilate, and by then I could hear a man talking to Mrs. Henshall.

  “Come on,” Marcus commanded, and we walked out of the stairwell and made a beeline for the front door. “Good morning, Mrs. Henshall! Hey, Frank! Talk to you later!”

  I waved and called a greeting of my own, eyeing Frank, who definitely wasn’t one of my neighbors. Then we were outside, free!

  “Thank you,” I declared fervently, checking my watch both to make sure I wasn’t going to be late and also to note the time for future reference.

  Marcus laughed as we went toward our cars. “No problem, man. You got plans after work? Come over for a beer, and I’ll tell you about Frank.”

  I agreed and learned far more than I ever wanted to know about Frank (who lives down the street) and Mrs. Henshall’s romance. Funny how she never mentioned that any of the times she accosted me with gossip.

  Today, I will have no protection. Marcus has gone to Atlanta to be with family for the holidays, and Frank will be spending the day with his grandkids—although supposedly he visited this morning as usual. And somehow I’ve been volunteered to accompany Mrs. Henshall to the community party.

  How, you ask? Yeah, me too. I was talking to her last night, she demanded to know what my plans were for today, I shrugged and said something about being lazy, watching some movies, and maybe stopping in at the community party… and the next thing I know, she’s instructing me to come and collect her at ten forty-five precisely and that she didn’t mind if I didn’t stay at the party all day, but I needed to let her know before I left so she could make alternative arrangements to get home.

  It could be worse, right? I’m basically just giving her a lift. She could have expected me to dance attendance on her all day. And if she knows as many people in the community as I think she does, this will be a great way to meet people. Whether I’m just here for a year or for the long haul, it will be good for me to make some contacts and meet people outside of work. Maybe even start dating.

  Not Dimi.

  Whatever, I’m determined not to give her or anyone anything to criticize. Today, there will be no comments from me that can be interpreted as negative. I will be humble. I will be helpful. I will be cheerful.

  It’s all going to be okay.

/>   Which is why I’ve spent an hour trying to decide what to wear. My first choice—chinos and a dress shirt—seemed like I might be trying too hard. After all, it’s a community party, supposedly not formal. So I changed into jeans—nice ones—and a long-sleeved tee. But that was just too casual and resulted in a complete raid of my wardrobe. At moments like this, I really miss the ex-who-shall-not-be-named. For all his faults, as a costume designer he had an impeccable sense of style and could always put together the perfect outfit for any occasion.

  In the end, I go back to my first choice. Chinos and a shirt are always a safe choice for a social occasion.

  Dimi spoke to his mother, who said they would likely need savory dishes, so I made one of the few things I can actually cook well—mini quiches. The best part is that they taste just as good cold as hot and can be eaten with fingers. I grab the covered platter, check that I have my wallet, phone, and keys, and head out the door. Since I’m not trying to avoid Mrs. Henshall, I use the small elevator—the last thing I want is to develop a sudden case of klutziness and throw myself and the quiches down four flights of stairs.

  Mrs. Henshall is waiting impatiently at her front door, and I check my watch just to make sure, but I’m definitely not late. It’s still only ten forty-three.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Henshall. Merry Christmas. You look lovely.” She does. Her usual plain T-shirt and cotton skirt have been replaced with a very festive red dress that looks great against her dark skin and snow-white hair.

  She looks me up and down, then nods. “Merry Christmas, Jason. You’re such a handsome boy. Come and help me with this dish.” She stands up from the seat on her walker and lifts the covered dish that was in her lap. I shake off the disorientation of being called a boy for the first time in about twenty years and go to take it from her. It takes us a while, since even with the walker she’s not that sprightly, but we make our way outside, and I have her wait at the entrance while I go get my car. Originally I thought I might walk—it wouldn’t have taken more than twenty or so minutes—but that was before I was pressed into service as a chauffeur.