Whitney

by Jade Parker

“It was fun.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.” As far as I knew my dad’s sister had never had a boyfriend. I didn’t think she was the one to go to for advice. “I’m tired and I have work tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Sweet dreams.”

  She went back into the living room, and I went upstairs to my bedroom. After I closed my door, I touched the ladybug ring. It was a silly thing: a child’s toy, a pretend bit of jewelry. Still, when I took it off, I put it carefully in my jewelry box along with jewelry that cost a good deal more.

  Then I changed into my pajamas, climbed into bed, and curled around one of my pillows. Jake said he liked me.

  But I still didn’t know if he meant he liked me the way you like a friend or a dog or if he meant that he liked me the way you like someone that you want to be with all the time.

  “So tell us everything that happened,” Robyn demanded the next morning when she and Caitlin caught up with me in the locker room.

  “Nothing really,” I said very casually. I wasn’t about to tell them about the car-following-us fiasco that almost resulted in the SWAT team being called out.

  “Did he kiss you?” Caitlin asked.

  I almost lied and said yes. It was embarrassing to be the only one who hadn’t been kissed. Instead, I leaned in close and whispered, “He said he liked me. But no kiss.”

  And who could blame him with David hovering nearby. I didn’t want my first kiss to be in front of an audience — especially an audience who reported to my dad.

  “It’s coming,” Robyn said, like she knew some secret that was about to be revealed. “He’s probably just shy.”

  That seemed to be her explanation for all his behavior that wasn’t exactly what I wished it would be. I wasn’t so sure that he was shy. I was worried that maybe he just didn’t like me enough to want to kiss me.

  “You might need to give him more hints that you like him,” Caitlin said.

  “Hints?” I asked. “Like what?”

  “Well, according to teen mags, you’re supposed to give him little secretive looks and small smiles to encourage him. Find excuses to brush your hand over his. Guys like to feel a hundred percent certain that you’re interested, before they kiss you. They don’t take rejection well.”

  “I’m not going to reject him.”

  “He needs to know that.”

  “So what? I smile, touch him, and take off my sunglasses so he can see me giving him a secretive look? Not too subtle.”

  “Yeah, giving the looks is a problem when you work at a water park.”

  “So just smile at him,” Robyn said.

  Okay. I could do that. I had a great smile. My braces had come off a year ago, and I invested heavily in teeth-whitening treatments. After staring at a silver smile for two years, I wanted a smile that was as white as I could get it.

  With a promise to meet up with them for lunch, I headed over to the offices. Charlotte was leaning against her desk, arms crossed over her chest. Lisa was reading a sheet of paper. “This is going to be a nightmare,” Lisa said.

  “I prefer to think of it as a challenge,” Charlotte replied.

  “What’s that?” I asked from the doorway.

  Lisa looked up and rolled her eyes. “The luau. The Spencers called this morning with a few” — she made quote marks in the air — “suggestions.”

  Demands were more like it. Marci wasn’t easy to please. I had a feeling that no matter what we did, it wouldn’t meet with her approval.

  “Why don’t we meet back here for another brainstorming session after the last birthday party today?” Charlotte suggested.

  We’d met briefly yesterday afternoon. So far, we had decided to have leis. I liked Charlotte a lot, but she didn’t have much imagination. It seemed someone in her position, who was in charge of “entertainment,” should at least have a vivid, if not a wild, imagination.

  “All right,” Lisa said. She sighed. “We’ve got six parties this morning and four this afternoon so we’d better get to it.”

  “Why so many?” I asked. It wasn’t unusual to have that many on the weekend, but not on a weekday.

  “Who knows? Full moon, I guess,” Lisa said. “All the little monsters come out to play.”

  With clipboard in hand, she led the way outside. We nearly ran into Jake, who was pushing the stainless steel ice-cream cart in the direction of Mini Falls.

  “We’re gonna need extra ice cream today,” Lisa said, without breaking her stride.

  “Got it!” Jake called out to her. “Saw the message you left on my locker and the one you left on the cart.”

  I don’t know if Lisa heard him. She was power walking to the pavilion, leaving us behind. Of course it didn’t take much for her to power walk. She was almost six feet tall, so she had long legs that covered a lot of ground fast. I was all of five feet four. My legs couldn’t keep up with her. Or maybe I was staying behind on purpose so I could talk to Jake.

  “She’s control-freak central,” Jake muttered.

  “But she gets the job done.”

  He glanced over at me. “You know, when I filled out my application to work here, I thought I’d be a big, bad lifeguard. Not the scoop guy. It’s such a wimpy job.”

  “It’s an important job,” I assured him. Plus, it kept him working near me. If he was a lifeguard, I’d probably never see him. I might not have ever even met him. We wouldn’t have gotten to know each other.

  “Don’t you want to be a lifeguard?” he asked, almost like where I worked influenced where he worked. “Maybe we could work at the same pool.”

  Paradise Falls had several pools, each offering its own unique setting. I was encouraged that he wanted us to work in the same area, but I wasn’t really into the pools, especially after the near-drowning earlier in the summer. Being a lifeguard was a lot of responsibility.

  “I like working in parties because things change every day. At the pools, it just all stays the same,” I said.

  “The scenery changes.”

  Scenery was guy-talk for girls. I knew this because it was also Caitlin’s code for guys. Before she’d started dating Michael, she was all about the “scenery” at Tsunami.

  “Besides, parties are pretty much the same for me,” Jake said. “Scoop, dip, scoop, dip. You have any idea how cold my hands get?”

  “Oh, poor thing. Do you know how hot it gets standing around watching kids play?”

  “But how hard is it?”

  “Like I said, boring.”

  “I guess no one is ever really happy with their jobs.”

  “I am,” I said. “Ever since I moved to parties.”

  We arrived at the pavilion.

  “Come on, y’all!” Lisa called out to us. “We need balloons! We need setup! Make yourself useful, Whitney. I can’t do everything.”

  “I thought she liked doing everything,” I muttered.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Jake said as he headed over to the helium canister.

  “I wasn’t taking it personally.” Okay, maybe I was a little. She’d never gotten after me before. Maybe she was feeling stressed with the big luau coming up. We only had four days to prepare for it. Theoretically, I guess we didn’t have to do anything other than have the park open to the party guests, but we had a reputation to maintain so we did what we could to provide something extra.

  A storage shed was off to the side, cleverly disguised to look like a straw hut. I went inside, grabbed six sand pails, and filled them with all kinds of cheap trinkets. I put a pail on each table that had been designated for a party. Lisa had already put the reservation sign with the party’s name on it on each table. Jake was fast with the balloons. He had half the tables ready to go.

  The bells sounded, signaling the opening of the park.

  “Whitney, get to the front gate!”

  “Geez, don’t get your shorts in a knot,” I mumbled as I hurried to the front of the park.

  The gates that the customers used f
ollowed a long path past the parrot and came to an end near Tsunami. To one side was Tsunami, and beyond that Thrill Hill, which was where most of the rides and amusements were. The other side led through the shops, the food court, and on to Mini Falls, which was the kiddie zone. Since most birthday parties were for kids younger than twelve, we used the pavilions in Mini Falls so parents didn’t have to watch their kids quite so closely. Even so, Mini Falls was where Robyn and I had rescued the little boy who had nearly drowned. So although the water at Mini Falls was the shallowest in the park, we had more lifeguards per number of guests there than in any other area of the park.

  I held up a sign with the names of each birthday party on it. When someone from the group, usually a parent, approached me, I gave her or him a map and explained how to get to the pavilion where the party was being arranged. If we were doing only a couple of parties, we’d escort them, but six was just too many to handle in that manner. And people who arrived on time didn’t like waiting around for those who didn’t. Once I had everyone on the list marked off, I headed back to the party pavilion.

  It was chaos when I got there. They’d brought Robyn over to help. Sometimes they did that — recruited some of the lifeguards or ride attendants in the area to keep an eye on things or help us out.

  “Mad Mother warning,” she said as I neared.

  “Reminds me of mad cow disease,” I told her.

  “That would probably be better. She doesn’t like the location of her table.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No, the table is at the back, and she thinks that makes it seem like her child isn’t very important.”

  “The tables are assigned in the order of when people call in to make their reservations.” The big board in the office had all the tables on the grid, and we started at one side, filling in the grids as reservations came in — no favorites. It was simply first called in, first served.

  “I think Lisa’s trying to explain that to her,” Robyn said.

  I looked past Robyn. A woman with a face so red that it almost matched her hair was yelling at Lisa. Yelling about a stupid table. She was acting the way Marci did when she didn’t get her way. It made me angry that people could be unreasonable.

  I walked over. Lisa must have seen me out of the corner of her eye because she held up her hand like a cop directing traffic at a concert.

  “This is just outrageous,” the woman said. “I paid good money for this party and we can’t even see the water because all these other people are in front of us.”

  “Ma’am, I’m really sorry,” Lisa said.

  “You shouldn’t be,” I said. Both Lisa and the woman looked at me. Well, Lisa looked, the woman glared. I was wishing I’d kept my mouth shut but the park didn’t pay the employees enough for them to get yelled out. “All these other people made their reservations first. You snooze, you lose.”

  Lisa took in a sharp breath. The woman looked like a balloon with too much air in it that was about to burst.

  “I’m sure we can make this right,” Lisa said.

  “There’s nothing to make right,” I said.

  “Whitney,” Lisa growled. “I’ll handle this.”

  “But you shouldn’t have —”

  “Whitney, no matter what you say or do, you’re not going to get in trouble for it. I will. So just go away.” She made little fluttering motions with her hands, like she was trying to sweep me away.

  “Lisa —”

  “Go away. Right now. That’s an order.”

  I started to say something else, and she shushed me. That stung. I wasn’t used to getting shushed.

  I spun on my heel and walked across the pavilion. Robyn caught up with me. I must have had a determined expression on my face, because she grabbed my arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can’t just leave.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  * * *

  I thought about calling David, telling him to come back to get me. I thought about going into the general manager’s office and announcing, “I quit!”

  Only I didn’t want to quit. If the idea of Marci coming here wasn’t enough to make me quit, some witchy woman certainly wasn’t going to do it.

  Walking around the perimeter of the park, I watched people floating in the river that circled the park. More people would be there later in the day. They always hit the rides first, then relaxed in the afternoon. I was tempted to jump into the river — park uniform and all.

  Instead I kept walking.

  Maybe getting yelled at was the real world that Dad had wanted me exposed to. I didn’t understand people yelling to try to get what they wanted. I always got what I wanted and I didn’t yell to do it. I just asked for it like I expected to get it.

  It was all in the attitude.

  Of course, Lisa had pretty much shot my attitude down. And what did she mean by saying that I wouldn’t get in trouble but she would? Because she was the supervisor? Or did she know the truth about my dad?

  I finally made it around to Tsunami. If I walked a little farther, I’d hit the offices where I could go and complain. That was my plan: to tell them that I didn’t like Lisa’s attitude, but when I spotted Caitlin stretched out on a lounge chair, I decided I’d rather talk to her.

  I walked over and asked. “Why aren’t you working?”

  Caitlin slipped her sunglasses on before opening her eyes to look at me. “I’m on break. What are you doing here?”

  “I was ordered to go away.” I sat on the lounge chair beside hers.

  “Why?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “Some mother wasn’t happy with her party table. I tried to calm her down, and Lisa told me to go away, like it wasn’t my problem.”

  “Well, she is the supervisor, so technically it’s her job to take care of problems.”

  “Still, the mother was unreasonable. I was just trying to point that out.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “I don’t understand people.”

  “Me either.”

  “So what — now you’re just wandering around?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Must be nice.”

  I heard something in her voice that sounded a little catty. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not like you really work here.”

  “Of course I work here.”

  “Not really. You get to do whatever you want. The rest of us have to do what we’re told.”

  I felt so unappreciated. Parties and Entertainment might not be in charge of saving lives, but we were important. We helped to bring people to the park. “I’m doing what I was told. I went away.”

  “She probably didn’t mean far away and forever. She probably just meant away from her.”

  I sighed, shrugged. “Then she should have said precisely what she meant.”

  And I was not going to feel guilty that they had six birthday parties and a bunch of kids to deal with — without me around. They would just have to find someone else. Maybe then they would appreciate me a little more. I figured they’d need at least two people to replace me. I was that good at handling parties. I made sure people felt important.

  Caitlin rolled to a sitting position. “Don’t you ever worry about getting fired?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do, so I better get back to my station.”

  I watched her walk over the sand-covered deck to the lifeguard tower where she’d watch all the swimmers. I couldn’t imagine anything more boring that sitting around watching other people having fun. At least with the parties, I was involved. I talked with people, helped them solve problems — like when they were a party favor short or dropped their cake on the way in — took their pictures so they’d have the memories. I got to move around, dance when they brought music, sing when they didn’t. I liked what I did. It was almost like I was in charge, except when Lisa told me to go away.

  It wasn’t fair that the woman was upset with Lisa, and it wasn�
�t fair that Lisa got upset with me. We could have offered the woman free tickets so she could come to the park another day. People usually forgave anything for free tickets. That was what I had wanted to say.

  Real world indeed.

  I didn’t much like it. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about what had happened at the pavilion. An image of Marci with her professionally straightened auburn hair filled my mind. I didn’t want to think about her either. I wanted to think about something interesting, which led me to thinking about Jake. I wondered if he would have kissed me if David hadn’t been around. Should I have kissed him?

  I didn’t even know how to go about it. Oh, I knew the basics, but I didn’t know how to initiate it. Maybe he didn’t either. Weren’t we a great pair?

  Some time later I heard squeaking wheels rolling in the distance. They reminded me of the ice-cream cart that Jake pushed around. Scooping ice cream probably was the most boring job, although it did have one perk. It gave him a chance to work with me.

  “Brooding?”

  I opened one eye. Jake was standing there. His question didn’t deserve an answer. I looked at my watch. “Are the parties over already?”

  “Yep. I’m off to refill the ice-cream carts for round two of insanity.”

  When we didn’t have any parties going on, Jake set up his cart in Mini Falls and sold ice cream. It was where we’d first met. He’d been selling ice cream near Splash where Robyn and I had worked. Come to think of it, he didn’t become the permanent ice-cream party guy until I moved to P&E. I wondered if he requested the transfer. Something to think about.

  “So did the woman ever stop yelling?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Lisa gave her complimentary park tickets.”

  “That’s what I was going to suggest before I was told to disappear.”

  “She didn’t actually tell you to disappear. She just said she’d handle it.”

  “Whatever. Are you on her side?”

  “There are no sides here.” He sighed. “I didn’t really come over here to talk about work.”

  “Why did you come over here?”

  He rocked on his heels, adjusted his red visor. “I don’t know.” He started to walk away, stopped, and looked back at me. “You like baseball?”