Summerlost (14 page)

33.

When we got home my mom told Miles to go up to his room—that no, he wasn't in trouble—and she made me come out with her to the backyard to talk.

She exhaled, a long deep breath that mirrored the sound of the wind in the trees. Pieces of hair that had come loose from her ponytail blew in front of her eyes and she pushed them away.

“Something bad could have happened to you,” Mom said.

“But nothing did.”

“I cannot have one more bad thing happen to someone in this family,” my mother said. “I cannot.”

I saw that she was right.

She could not.

34.

I wore my sandals to work. No jewelry. No watch. Not a hair out of place because I hadn't ridden my bike. My mom had dropped me off earlier to volunteer in the costume shop and she was going to pick me up after work. She said it was to keep me safe but I knew it was also to keep me away from Leo as part of my punishment.

I tried to look as perfect as possible. But it didn't matter. The first thing Gary said when he saw me was, “You've desecrated the uniform.”

I looked down at my peasant costume.

“You too,” Gary said to someone behind me, and I turned around to see Leo.

“We weren't wearing our uniforms when we did the tour,” I said. “It had nothing to do with the festival.”

“It had
everything
to do with the festival,” Gary said. He shook his head. “You used places
on
the campus of the festival as some of the tour stops.”

“No,” I said. “We used the forest. Which is part of the college campus, not the festival.”

“You put your advertising
inside
of the official programs of the Summerlost Festival,” Gary said.

He had me there.

“You can't work at the Summerlost Festival anymore,” Gary said.

Lindy opened her mouth as if she were about to say something, but then she closed it instead. Cory grinned and I wanted to punch him. Maddy and the other girls had wide eyes and one of them frowned at me, but it was a sympathetic frown. I could tell they felt bad for us, but I knew they probably also liked the drama.

“I understand that you have to fire me,” I said to Gary, “but you shouldn't fire Leo. He's your best employee. He's the only one with a proper accent.”

“It's not a real accent,” Cory said.

“Of course it's not a
real
accent,” I snapped at Cory. “Leo's not actually
from England
.”

“He's never even
been
to England,” Cory said. He sounded gloaty and glad. “He
wants
to go there but he's never been. His brother told my brother at football practice.”

I turned to look at Leo. He didn't deny it. His face looked fallen. Tired.

“Whoa,” said Cory. “I can't believe that
you
didn't even know that.”

“I'm sorry,” Leo said to me.

“You lied about that too?” Gary sounded surprised. And sad. I had never heard Gary sound sad before. “You two can go home. Send your costumes back tomorrow after you've washed them.”

As if he didn't want us there for even one more minute.

“Fine,” I said to Gary. It was weird, my doing all the talking instead of Leo. And I said it mean.

Gary looked stunned. I felt bad, because Gary was strict but he wasn't a bad person. But I pushed the feeling away and marched out. I heard Leo behind me.

“I have to walk home,” I said to Leo when we were out in the courtyard. The heat crackled the leaves under the sycamore tree, trickled sweat down my back. “My mom dropped me off. She won't be back for a while.”

“I rode my bike,” Leo said. “But I'll walk with you. If that's okay.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I walked with him to the bike rack. The cool blue water of the fountain looked perfect to me. I wanted to climb right in and let the water go over me smooth as the velvet of Lisette's Miranda costume jacket. I'd seen it today when Meg took it out of the box to steam and repair it for the Costume Hall.

“I'm sorry I lied,” Leo said after we'd walked for a while. “I told Gary I'd been to England before you even moved here so he'd let me use the accent, and then the lie kind of kept going.”

“It's okay,” I said.

“And I'm sorry I got us fired.”

“You didn't get us fired,” I said. “
We
got us fired. Both of us. I was there too.”

“It was actually my mom's idea,” Leo said. He looked sad. I didn't understand what he meant—it was his mom's idea for us to get fired? To do the tour? That didn't make any sense—but then he kept going, pushing his bike along with his head down and his eyes on the ground. “For my dad to go to England with me. I heard them talking. She thought it would be good for the two of us to do something like this. He came up with the idea to make me earn the money for the plane ticket. Probably because he thought that I wouldn't be able to do it.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I bet he was sure you
could
do it. Because he knows you.”

We walked a few more steps. The frat houses, mostly empty for the summer, had dying grass in their front yards and I could see a couple of beer cans under a bush. Everything felt white-blue in the heat, and dusty.

“Now we don't even have the concessions job,” Leo said, “so it's going to be impossible for me to earn the money in time. I've been saving all year. I can't believe it came down to this. But the worst part about getting fired is now you and I can't hang out at all.”

“I know,” I said. “But I'll be back next summer.”

It sounded so far away.

Until I met Leo I hadn't known you could understand someone so different from you so well. And we did have lots of things in common—the things we both thought were funny, especially. He made me think. He made me laugh. He loved being alive and he had big ideas and I liked being around him because of those things. And because he was a guy. The fact that he was a guy made everything sharper. A little more crackly.

“Don't worry,” Leo said. “I'll make sure you still find out about Harley. I'll keep watching and take notes. I could leave them someplace for you.”

“Like on my windowsill,” I said, feeling bold. Why not let him know that I knew? It could be a while before we saw each other again.

Leo smiled. “I think under the doormat or mailing them might be easier,” he said.

So he wasn't going to admit right out that he'd been leaving things. I smiled too.

“I've been thinking,” Leo said. “What if Lisette hid the ring in the tunnels after the play the night she died? That would explain why she had it during the performance but not at the hotel.”

“That's a good theory,” I said. “We should both keep trying to figure it out.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Maybe we can send each other letters about that too.”

But we both knew that the whole point of finding out about Lisette had been finding out about her together, and we both knew that there wouldn't be any way to get to the tunnels next summer with the theater gone.

“Thanks,” Leo said when we got to my house. “For doing the tour with me even though it got us in so much trouble.”

“Thanks for asking me to be part of it.”

“I'm sure I'll see you around,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You too.”

It was not a great good-bye.

I stood on the sidewalk and watched Leo push his bike the rest of the way up the street. I didn't want to go inside. It felt like if I did, I would officially be fired and have no way to spend time with Leo. If I stayed outside, I could pretend like we were saying good-bye on any normal afternoon. Like we'd see each other again in the evening at the Summerlost Festival and make jokes and listen to the music and watch the night fall.

When I did go inside I walked straight through the sprinkler even though I was wearing my costume. The water spattered my blouse and skirt and made dots on my leather sandals. I opened my hands so they could get wet too. Before I went in the house, I made a wet handprint on the blue door.

“Why are you home?” Miles asked. My mom looked over from the kitchen table where she was working on more lesson plans.

“Leo and I got fired,” I said. “Because of the tour.”

Before either of them could ask me any more questions I headed for the stairs. I took off my peasant costume and put on shorts and a T-shirt and flopped down on the bed.

I heard someone open the door.

“Do you want to play Life?” Miles asked from the doorway.

I said yes because what else was I going to do. At least he didn't seem mad at me anymore.

Miles went and got the box from his room. We set up the game together. I took the yellow car and Miles took the red one.

“Remember how Dad hated this game?” Miles asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “He thought it was all about money. And he was right. Because the person with the most money wins.”

“Maybe we should make it so the person who gets the most kids wins,” Miles said.

“Why not,” I said.

We played four games and then Miles said, “I wish we could watch
Times of Our Seasons
. I'm sick of playing Life.”

The two of us didn't even put the game away. Too many pieces—all that money, all those teeny peg people and property deeds, all the cars and cards—and the house was too hot. We both flopped down in the carpet in our pile of fake money and stared out the diamond-paned window at the trees moving beyond the glass. After a while Miles got up and left, and I went over and opened the window to see the trees better. The
money went scooting and skating across the floor when the hot breeze came in.

I looked at the box lid that said
THE
GAME
OF
LIFE
and I thought about how
Times of Our Seasons
was also pretend life. None of it was real.

I thought,
I'm sick of playing Life
too.

ACT
III

1.

When I went into the costume shop the next morning, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me.

“Hello,” Meg said. “I hear that you're no longer employed at concessions.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Gary seemed very upset yesterday,” Meg said.

“He was. He told me that I'd desecrated the uniform.”

“Ah,” she said. “But you still plan on volunteering here.”

“Yes,” I said. “Unless
you
want to fire me.”

“No.” Meg looked at me with those sharp eyes. I knew it wasn't possible to take an X-ray of me and see the murky gray mass of sadness and frustration and anger stuck around my head, my heart, my lungs. But if anyone could
sense
those feelings, I thought it might be Meg.

Meg had to know about the tour. And Lisette was her friend. Did Meg feel like I'd been asking her about Lisette just to find out information for the tour?

At least Meg hadn't told me to leave.

Everyone was in a hurry. Meg and the others sent me on errands while they set up the Costume Hall and got the costumes ready for the day's performances. I hunted through the boxes downstairs looking for a crown made of metal filaments, then for a pair of shoes covered in fake amethysts. I walked over to the campus print shop to pick up an order of signs that Meg needed. I matched buttons that I'd sorted earlier in the summer to costumes that needed repair. At the end of my shift, Meg gave me a list with everyone's lunch order written on it. She wanted me to go out to the concessions stand and get Irish jacket potatoes and fruit salad and lemonade and tarts for everyone.
Three raspberry tarts, two lemon, one cream cheese
, the list said.

Was Meg trying to punish me by having me go face my former coworkers?

“It's the closest place and we're taking as short a break as possible today,” she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. “If you want lunch too, you can add your order on to this and they'll bill it to Costumes. You've earned it. If you're tired, you can go home for the day instead.”

What should I do?

I wanted to stay and eat out in the courtyard with all of them. I wanted to laugh with Meg and Emily and Nate and the others at the tables under the sycamore tree and look up at the sky and see if an afternoon storm was on its way. I wanted
Gary and everyone to walk by and see that I still had friends. I wanted to slice into the salted skin of the potato and lick lemon tart filling off my fingers.

But Leo wouldn't be there. He was stuck at home.

And I couldn't face Gary.

“I think I'll go home,” I said to Meg, handing back the lunch list.

A flicker of disappointment crossed her face. Disappointment that I wasn't staying? Or disappointment that I was too chicken to take the order?

“All right,” Meg said. “Run this box back downstairs and you can be finished for today.”

• • •

I found the right spot for the box and slid it back onto the shelf with the others. All those labels, all those pieces to each beautiful outfit from summers long ago.

And then I knew.

Where Lisette's ring would be.

Who'd had it all this time.

I walked down the aisle, looking at the years until I came to the right one.

LISETTE
CHAMBERLAI
N
,
MIRANDA
.

The date was twenty years ago.

Her dress and coat were labeled and hung up on a rack with the other costumes waiting to go upstairs, but all the accessories
were still in the box. There weren't many. A few shimmery hairpins. A packet with extra buttons for the coat. And a small velvet-covered box. I opened it.

There was a ring inside. With three pale stones.

Lisette must have given it to Meg.

And now Meg was going to put it on display. Because Lisette
did
wear it in the play that night, whether it was an intended part of the costume or not.

I took the ring out and put it on my finger.

Lisette Chamberlain wore this
, I thought.

I closed the box and put it back on its shelf.