The Shells Of Chanticleer (21 page)

“No. Leave me alone. So this …” I pointed to him and then myself, “… this is all set up, fake. I think that finding out what is going on with me is your mission. I must have made you all pretty nervous if they had to sic you on me 24/7. Well I don’t want to be some pity party you spend time with to keep me away from Bing or Zooey or whoever is the most contagious or whatever you said earlier.”

“No, it isn’t what it looks like,” he blurted. “They only sent me to you for your own good.”

I closed my eyes at his admission, absolutely stunned that he wasn’t denying it. I felt officially stupid—so stupid and so right at the same time. Our friendship had not happened naturally. Of course he was too good to be true. How embarrassing. He hadn’t picked me out. How could he have? I had only been there a few days when we met; no one knew me.

I could feel my face turning red and I wanted to die and be back in my room, alone. I had to resist the urge to stomp away from him because I wanted to keep him talking and get all the details. He owed me the truth, all of it. I wasn’t one of those people afraid to hear the truth. I stayed calm to make sure I got it.

“So are you in cahoots with the staff here? When did they send you? Was it the festival?”

“Yes.”

“So we didn’t meet accidentally. Were you following me?”

“Well, yeah. I was there in the doorway when you arrived; you got there pretty late. You looked so pretty that night, Macy. I saw you come in but you looked right past me. Then you and Zooey were hard to keep up with.”

It was hard to hear him admitting it, but at least he didn’t lie. I kept going. “Good thing for you that I got stuck in that crowd in the dance hall, huh? Well I suppose you would have engineered our meeting one way or another. So were you worried when you couldn’t find me the next morning at Summer Hall because I was at Paolo’s? Were you supposed to be with me when Poppy’s shell showed up? You cut it close there, if you were.”

He flushed and then smiled. Shaking his head, he splashed his hand into the water, mad. “Well yeah, I mean, why would I think to look for you there? When you weren’t in Summer Hall I panicked a little, trying to find you.”

“So I’m not as predictable as all of you thought, am I? At least I made you sweat a little that time.” It was ironic to me that I had spent my life looking over my shoulder, convinced that I was being followed, yet had been completely clueless when it was happening right under my own nose.

“I know it sounds bad but if you listen to me you’ll see that it isn’t really. You were in a bad place; you were going in the wrong direction. Bing wasn’t helping you, and I could.”

“Alright, maybe Bing shouldn’t have shown me the shells, but he did it because he believes in the truth, and I think he believes in me more than anyone else here. More than you apparently. I may ping too much about the shells and Sinclair but I don’t fool people into thinking I’m their best friend when I’m not. I would never do that to you. I hope whatever they are paying you, it’s worth it. I don’t need you.”

I kept my distance from him, knowing that he could talk me out of arriving at the whole truth. A part of me wanted the easy way out. I think he sensed that, and he slowed the conversation down, trying to regain the sweet tenor that marked our times together.

“Macy, what was I supposed to do, ask them to replace me with someone else because I liked you too much? You always want to know everything, but you don’t always know what’s best. Don’t be so impatient. Let things play out the way they would. It’s complicated here, more complicated than you know. But that doesn’t have to change me and you.”

“Complicated? That’s your best defense? That’s how you want to describe it?”

I felt like giving up. He would never let me be angry about anything. It was always that I never understood, I was always just too worried. The situation was almost comical. Obviously Sebastian was their hidden weapon, friendly, likeable, and when he put on the full court press with that Greek god hair and that slay-me smile, there wasn’t a girl he couldn’t wrap around his finger. Just add water and
voila
! Instant love connection. Only not.

“Macy, do you really think that my heart isn’t in this? Do you really think I am that cold and calculating?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Explain why you haven’t been honest? If you want me to believe you aren’t just a jerk, tell me everything right now, don’t leave anything out.”

“Don’t ask me that.”

“Then don’t talk to me anymore,” I said, making a move to leave, but he blocked me. Folding my arms in front of me, I waited.

“If I do, can you promise me you won’t fly off the handle, that no matter what I say you’ll try and understand?”

I sighed. “Yes, of course.”

“I hope so,” he responded. He didn’t look like he believed me.

Silence.

“Go on,” I urged him impatiently. “Explain yourself.”

“Alright. So, first off, I will admit that I didn’t just arrive here from your world. I’ve been here a long time, longer than you can imagine. I don’t do coursework; I’ll never be a shell because I’m staff. As for me following you, please consider that you are completely overreacting. You aren’t the only one we’ve ever kept a close eye on. You are not a special exception. You have no idea what it takes to run this place, to make it work, to keep all these fragile personalities from going over the edge. You only have yourself to think about. But we have hundreds of you to consider, all the time. Don’t judge me harshly. I don’t deserve it.”

Out of that barrage of excuses I only remembered one word—staff. I shut down after that, aghast at the degree of manipulation that was going on. I was a rookie playing with the big boys and clearly out of my league. Even with my overactive imagination I had not dreamt of that. He might as well have said he was an alien. We were no longer equals. No wonder they never threw the 700-page woman’s issues book at me. They wanted me to be distracted by him. It was their plan.

Then, remembering all our moments together, my stomach soured. We were more than friends … was that part of the plan too? Crossing that line to keep me in line wouldn’t be beyond the powers that be there, would it? No. Heck, the staff would drug you and take you from your bed at night—a little extracurricular kissing would hardly faze them. I went for the jugular.

“So let me ask you this: does it make your job less complicated if you kiss your assignments? Does Crispin Sinclair encourage you to enjoy yourself? Is that one of your perks? I bet they wanted to know what it was like too. Did you give them details?”

I started to splash my way out of the pond but Sebastian was quick. He grabbed me by the arm and squeezed my wet skin tightly. “How can you say that about me?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“I’m not going to apologize for being who I am. But don’t think you are only a project to me. Don’t be offended that I want to be there with you or think that I was only following orders. You don’t have to make it into something negative. Aren’t we having fun together? Who cares how we met? The only thing that matters to me is that we did. You don’t have to be mad.”

“I’ll do whatever I want,” I retorted.

I tried to think of an explanation that would make his subterfuge palatable to me or at least reduce it to nothing but a silly misunderstanding, but Sebastian was staring at me, speechless. I knew he hadn’t planned on the truth coming out. Of course he was desperate for me to think it wasn’t all bad. I had no idea what kind of trouble he would get in for blowing his cover.

I had heard enough. I couldn’t trust him anymore. I had fallen for a pretty face; it was the oldest trick in the book. I had to pick up my tattered self-respect and move forward.

“I think we’re done here,” I announced, as I twisted my arm out of his grip. There was a red mark on my skin where he had held tight, but only for a second before it disappeared.

“Don’t try and follow me anymore,” I sneered.

I splashed out of the pond, pushing one of the buoyant yellow flowers out of my way. It went spinning around, lazily, happy in its pond—the opposite of how I felt.

I pounded down the path, leaving the tropical summer scents and my illusions behind, barely stopping to snatch up my sweater from where we had dropped them. I snickered as I saw his white sweater crumpled next to mine – his disguise worn everyday to get into character. To me, it had been a symbol of the equality inherent between us. Now I knew that white sweater meant nothing. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that in Chanticleer, where the real and surreal were combined, where the sky was pink and not blue, that they would do whatever was necessary to make their schemes work.
Blue sweater, white sweater, I bet he has a drawer full of both.

I pounded down the path unconsciously. After a while, I looked behind me. The path was empty; I was no longer being followed. I kept my emotions together in public, but when I got back into my room I burst into tears.

That place I thought was no more than a simple summer camp for scaredy cats was getting more confusing the longer I stayed. I loved my friends and the food, the festivals and the warm caramel sugar. I loved the wild rush of surviving a fall off the bridge in the Fir Forest. Everywhere I turned there was something beautiful to look at, and it all just sucked me right in. It made me forget my real life and made me feel I was in a family and that I was truly cared for.

But then there was an undercurrent that wasn’t so simple. There was a battle going on between us, not to lose each other, not to fail ourselves, not to lose sight of the end game, not to end up yellow and hard-boiled in the display case. I’d thought Sebastian was just like me, that he had liked the look of me and struck up a friendship. I had wanted the fairy tale, and I had been swayed by those feelings of familiarity that persisted with him, that we had known each other in the past, that we were meant to be together.

I laughed ruefully at the obvious flaw in my thinking. I would not have had those déjà vu feelings about him if he had been average looking. I had been romanticizing our relationship and imagining it as some grand, cosmic plan when it wasn’t.

Where was my radar for being played? It didn’t exist. He had said it himself: I would never be smarter than him. It was humiliating how easily I’d attached myself to him. I never thought about my life at home anymore, I was actually dreading the end of my stay in Chanticleer, and thinking about ways to prolong it so I wouldn’t leave Sebastian. But Sebastian wasn’t like me. He was staff and I would be the one going away, forgetting him forever.

In reality, I was still lying in that hospital bed, close to death. If I survived, then I would always live without him. I would be back at home, going online, running, stuck in school in a world that he would never re-appear in, and that simply did not appeal to me anymore.

As for what to do next, I wasn’t sure. How could I ever in good conscience ignore the web of lies he had spun? The false reality he had sucked me into? Every time he put on that white sweater, he lied to me. Every time he sat in the library with me, reading a packet of papers that were no more than a prop to him, he lied to me. He committed lies of omission and lies of partial truths. No wonder he messed up in the pond and let his cover slip.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!

I sat on the bed and tried to turn my heart against him, but it stubbornly refused. He had insisted I was overreacting, and now those were the words that kept coming back to me. Even if I had been an assignment, I thought there was a chance that his feelings were still real. Maybe he felt guilty for crossing a line with me? Did he regret it? Or did he do it on purpose, to increase his hold on me? I flinched, remembering how quick I had been to go with him wherever he’d wanted. Meet outside at night? What time? Stay out all night with me? I’m there.

There was a knock on my door. I went to the mirror and tried to wipe the moisture out of my eyes. Someone knocked again, persistently. I opened the door, not in the mood to be friendly. It was Violet.

“Hey, I was right behind you. Didn’t you hear me calling?” Then seeing my face she exclaimed: “What’s wrong? Were you crying?”

I didn’t mean to get emotional, but I couldn’t hide my tears. “It’s Sebastian.”

“Oh no, did he tip back home?”

“No, he didn’t.” I shook my head. “In fact, that’s the one thing he’ll never do. I just found out he’s not one of us. He’s been fooling us all along. He’s staff.”

“Ewww. Are you sure? How did you find out?”

“Oh, I’m sure. He admitted it. Did you know? Did Bing ever say anything to you?”

“No, I didn’t know. Bing must know too, but no, he never said anything to me.” Violet bit her lip, thinking. “Let’s get out of here, let’s talk where no one can hear us. You better put your sweater back on. Why is it off anyway?”

“I was at this jungle pond with the big flowers. Have you ever been there?”

Violet shook her head no. I changed out of my soggy clothes and was pulling my sweater back over my head when I realized it was way too big on me. In my rush, I had grabbed Sebastian’s sweater by mistake. Mine must be still left on the moss ledge, if Sebastian hadn’t taken it. I would have to go back and get it. I threw Sebastian’s in the corner of my closet, rolled up in a ball.
He can live without it
.

“Let’s walk back to that pond,” I suggested. “I left my sweater there. I think I can find it again.” I had a lot of questions to ask her, and the pond was a bit of a walk, so it was a perfect destination. Sebastian would be long gone.

“You know Violet,” I said, once we cleared the town center. “When I first came here, I thought it was a pretty simple place. Do your coursework, eat great food, and drink warm caramel sugar. But now I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I thought Sebastian and I were friends but he’s been watching me. He said they do it all the time, that they have to keep this place running smoothly and I shouldn’t take it personally. But I don’t know. I mean, wouldn’t you be mad? Did anyone ever watch you like that? What about Bing?”