Whitney

by Jade Parker

  “Just a sec.” He gave them their ice-cream cups, took their money, and dropped it into his cash drawer. “Now what?” he asked, turning back to me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Working.”

  I scowled at him. “I can see that. Why aren’t you at the parties?”

  “They rotated me out.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. Looks like they rotated you, too.” He scooped out some vanilla ice cream — my favorite — into a cup and held it out to me.

  “I’m not on break.”

  “What are you doing out here then?”

  “Just wanted to see what you were doing.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “My getting rotated was not by choice. I’m hoping it’s just temporary.”

  “This could be temporary, too. Who knows?”

  I wondered if I went back to parties if he’d get rotated back over there. It was sure coincidental that we both got moved out of parties on the same day. Ice-cream carts were located all over the park. It was just a little odd that he was working a cart near where I was working. I couldn’t help but think that Lisa had told him that I’d moved over here so he’d moved, too — to be closer to me.

  If that was true, then maybe he really did like me in a romantic kind of way. But if that was the case, why didn’t he kiss me last night? Why hadn’t he held my hand more?

  We’d done things together two nights this week, and I was no closer to figuring us out than I had been before.

  * * *

  “Interesting,” Robyn said after I told her and Caitlin about Jake ending up working near me again.

  We met at Tsunami but decided to have lunch at the food court, so we were sitting at a table, talking quietly because other employees were also taking their lunch breaks.

  “I thought so,” I said, and I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. Even though I was still upset about not working parties, I was happy about Jake.

  “Y’all sure do move around a lot,” Caitlin said. “I don’t know anyone else who moves around as much as y’all do.”

  “Not by choice,” I told her.

  “Do you want me to go defend you?” Robyn asked. “I mean, I was there, and I didn’t think you did anything really awful. You were just trying to explain things.”

  “You’d do that?” I asked. “Defend me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Have you never had any friends?” Caitlin asked. “Sometimes you come up with the weirdest questions.”

  “I’ve had friends,” I admitted. “Just not like y’all.”

  “We have to stick together,” Robyn said. “We don’t want them to fire you.”

  “They won’t fire me.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Robyn asked.

  I thought about telling her and Caitlin the truth. But would they try to take advantage? It seemed like people were always trying to take advantage of me. I wanted to trust them. I really did.

  Instead I said, “Let’s go get an ice cream. My treat.”

  “Yeah, right, the park treats,” Caitlin said, but she got up and followed me over to the cart where Jake was dipping ice cream.

  We got in line behind the dozen or so people who were waiting. Half of them were park employees. I knew a couple of the people, the rest I didn’t. The park had more than two hundred and fifty employees, so it was a little hard to remember everyone.

  “Michael’s meeting me after work. Do we want to do something together? All of us? You know the six of us?” Caitlin asked, twirling her finger in a circle like she was lassoing us all into her little web.

  “Can’t. My dad’s coming in tonight. I want to spend some time with him,” I told her.

  “How about tomorrow night?” Robyn asked. “My mom bought a flat-screen TV. They’re delivering it tomorrow, so I thought I’d break it in with a Heroes marathon. I can’t believe Sean has never watched it. I’m going to rent the DVDs of the first season.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Caitlin said. “I’ll check with Michael.”

  Then they both looked at me. I felt like someone in a police interrogation room. “You want me to ask Jake?”

  “Well, duh, yeah,” Caitlin said. “You invited him to go get pizza.”

  “But shouldn’t the next move come from him?”

  She laughed. “You’re acting like there are one, two, three steps to getting a boyfriend. Trust me, it’s all random. You can’t plan it. So sure, ask him.”

  “Well, it could get a little awkward. We’ve never actually gone out anyplace while my dad was at home. I can usually talk Aunt Sophie into anything. Dad not so much.”

  “Well —” Caitlin began, but I cut her off, because we were nearing the front of the line, only three employees in front of us. I didn’t want Jake to overhear us talking about him.

  “Don’t say anything,” I whispered.

  “But this is a great chance for Robyn to invite him — very casually,” Caitlin whispered back.

  She had a point. That could work. Robyn could invite him and I’d just happen to be at her house. Uncomplicated. But it would still leave what he felt about me in doubt.

  “OMG! Whitney, is that you?” The voice was nauseatingly familiar.

  I spun around. Actually, everyone spun around. Marci Spencer just had that kind of cheerleader voice that got attention. The i’s — Andi and Sandi — were with her. This was bad. This was so very bad.

  They were wearing shorts and V-necked T-shirts. Each one was a different color, but so much alike that it was a little unreal. Marci’s red hair was cut short. It fluffed out in all directions, reminding me of the downy feathers on a baby chick. She had streaked parts of it blue.

  I thought about pretending that I was a doppelganger or a long-lost cousin who just happened to look like Whitney. I thought about a lot of things in those few seconds before Marci spoke again.

  “What is with that outfit?” she asked. “Are you, like, working here?”

  “Pretty awesome, huh?” Caitlin said, before I could answer with some alternate version of the truth.

  I knew Caitlin was trying to do the friend thing, but I was pretty sure that she’d never met anyone like Marci before. Marci ignored her, held up her camera, and snapped a picture of me.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “Blackmail.”

  “Why would you blackmail her?” Robyn asked.

  Ignoring Robyn now, Marci told me, “We’re here to meet with the party planners. There are some very specific things I want for my party. To make sure they happen, you’ll probably need to talk to your dad about some of them.”

  “Why would her dad care?” Caitlin asked.

  “Well, duh, because he owns Paradise Falls.”

  If I thought I could fit into Jake’s ice-cream cart, I would have climbed into it and pulled the top down. I could hear the employees whispering who’d been standing in line. I knew they were whispering about me.

  “Your dad owns the water park?” Caitlin asked.

  “You didn’t tell them?” Marci asked. “Why would you keep that a secret?”

  Because they would find a way to use it against me. Because Dad wanted me to have a taste of the real world, to be a real employee. Because I knew people would look at me differently if they knew the truth. They would either want to be my friends, hoping to score points or favors at the park or they’d resent my position and post mean things about me on the Internet.

  I’d wanted anonymity. But I could already feel the truth spreading through the park.

  “Now that I know you’re here,” Marci said, “I’ll just give you a call if we have any problems during our meeting. Remember, I always get what I want.”

  She and the i’s walked away. No one had told me that today’s party planning meeting included Marci. For the first time, I was actually glad that I’d been reassigned for the day. Charlotte and Lisa were going to have a rough afternoon.

  “Yuck. Is that the girl you were friends
with?” Robyn asked.

  “Yeah.” I turned back to the ice-cream cart. It was now my turn. I wondered where the other employees had gone. Probably to spread the news. I was a legend. I had planned an employee get-together, been responsible for movie night, and arranged a laser light show for the Fourth of July. I’d done it all without my dad being there. But I knew everyone would think I’d managed to accomplish all these things because of who my dad was.

  And in truth, I probably had. Today was the first day that anyone had ever questioned my actions, had turned down my ideas. Maybe Mr. T had been indulging me. Maybe he’d had enough.

  I waited for Jake to say something about what Marci had said, but he just scooped out our ice cream — without me even telling him the flavors. We visited the ice-cream cart a lot.

  But I wanted him to say something. I wanted him to say something mean about Marci. I wanted him to say something nice about me. I wanted to ask him what I should do. I wanted to know if he felt different about me now.

  But I didn’t say anything either. We were the silent couple, or at least silent. I still didn’t know if we were anything other than park employees who sometimes did things together.

  Robyn, Caitlin, and I went back to our table. I stabbed my little plastic spoon into the ice cream, over and over and over. I imagined it was Marci’s camera finger, the one she used to push the button for her blackmail photos.

  “So what if she posts on the Internet that you work here?” Caitlin said. “I don’t see that it’s blackmail material.”

  “She’ll find a way to make me feel like it’s a picture of me standing there in my underwear. I don’t know how she does it, but she does. And it doesn’t matter if you do what she wants or not; in the end, she always posts the picture.”

  “Soooo,” Caitlin began, “your dad owns the park. Is that the reason that anytime you want anything it happens?”

  “Of course not. It’s because I have great ideas.” And a great think tank in my dad. It was true that I always asked his opinion about the ideas, from a purely business standpoint — but I presented them, and I made them happen, hadn’t I? The real world wasn’t my dad telling people to make me happy.

  Dad wanted me to work this summer. He wanted me to work here. At first I resented it, and when I was at Splash, I didn’t help as much as I should have. I was a little embarrassed by my earlier attitude.

  But now I really liked what I was doing. I liked working in P&E. I liked making sure that people were having fun. But I was there because I was good at it, because I had amazing ideas. Not because my dad owned the water park.

  “Hey,” Sean said as he sat beside Robyn. “Shouldn’t you be finished with lunch by now?”

  “Just like a supervisor, worrying about a few minutes,” Caitlin said.

  “I’m not a supervisor anymore,” Sean said.

  “Old habits.”

  “You’re avoiding answering my question, so I take it the answer is that you’re going to be late getting back to work.”

  “Did you know Whitney’s dad owned the park?” Caitlin asked.

  Sean visibly stiffened, as though someone had just poked him.

  “You did know,” I said.

  “You knew the truth about her and you didn’t tell me?” Caitlin asked, clearly angry at her brother for keeping a secret, while I was focusing on the bigger issue. Sean had known that my dad owned the water park. He’d been really nice to me even though I hadn’t been the best of employees in the beginning. Had he cut me slack because of my dad?

  “I was sworn to secrecy,” Sean said.

  “By who?” I asked.

  “TPTB.”

  The-Powers-That-Be. In other words, the bosses. But who did those bosses include? Did they include my dad?

  “That is so lame,” Caitlin said. “You should have told me, at least.”

  “What difference does it make?” Sean asked. “You’re friends now. How did you find out about Whitney’s dad?”

  “Some girl who is going to have a major party here told us. She seemed to think it was important.”

  I knew the first time that Robyn asked me to have lunch with her and Caitlin was because Sean had suggested it. At the time, I thought he was being a nice supervisor, watching out for those who worked for him. Actually, the very first day I worked here, I had lunch with him. He asked me questions about what I liked, what I didn’t. He’d taken a keen interest in me. Now I wasn’t sure that his reasons weren’t because of my dad.

  “Why did you ask them to be friends with me?” I asked.

  He gave me a hard stare, then sighed. “Because you were assigned to my section, and my orders” — he made little quote marks in the air — “were to make sure you were happy.”

  “They ordered you to make sure I was happy?”

  “It’s no big deal. That was two months ago. Who cares now?”

  I knew it was silly to get obsessed with this, but I suddenly wanted to know everything. “Why Splash? Why did they assign me to Splash? Because it’s so easy?”

  “It may seem like it’s easy, but watching little kids playing near water is a lot of responsibility,” Robyn said, clearly offended that I found fault with Splash.

  But Sean hadn’t answered my question. He seemed to think that Robyn’s answer was all I needed. But it wasn’t.

  “So it was just random that I was assigned there?” I asked.

  “I really gotta get back to work,” Sean said.

  I recognized an escape when I saw it. I reached out and grabbed his arm before he could get out of his chair completely. “Please, Sean. I need to know.”

  He sighed and pointed to Robyn.

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Robyn was the reason I was assigned to Splash?”

  “I don’t get it either,” Robyn said. “Why would my assignment make a difference?”

  “Because we knew if there was a problem you’d know exactly what to do and wouldn’t panic,” Sean explained.

  “They thought I’d panic?” I asked. Now I was insulted.

  “Look, I don’t know. All I know is that during our first supervisors’ meeting, Mr. T asked who we would trust in an emergency to get the job done — meaning if someone nearly drowned. I said Robyn.”

  “Not me?” Caitlin asked, irritation in her voice.

  Sean groaned. “I can’t win here. I’m going.”

  “No, wait,” I said, still clutching his arm. “Your answer to Mr. T’s question was Robyn, so they put us together?”

  “Yeah. And it worked out, didn’t it? When the kid almost drowned, who did the CPR?”

  Robyn. And when a kid almost choked on his hot dog, who did the Heimlich? Caitlin. What had I done? Nothing important.

  Dad wanted me to experience the real world, but this wasn’t the real world. Disheartened, I got up. “I need to go back to work.”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter that your dad owns the park,” Robyn said.

  If only that were true. But I had a feeling it wasn’t.

  * * *

  “So is it true that your dad owns the water park?” the girl, a gift shop employee, asked.

  I was back in the Treasure Chest, walking through the store, keeping an eye out for thieves. It had been a pretty slow afternoon. I knew things would pick up just before the park closed. A lot of the guests had season passes and they weren’t interested in the stuff we had for sale here. But some were tourists, here for only the day. They’d be by to pick out a souvenir: an I Survived T-shirt or a snow globe or plastic sea creatures or seashells or sand dollars.

  I was thinking that I should buy an I Survived T-shirt, although my surviving my summer at Paradise Falls had suddenly become very questionable.

  I looked at the girl. In the shop, everyone wore little name badges. I didn’t know if it was because I was new or temporary, but I hadn’t been given one. Hers read dahlia. Like the flower. She had short black hair and milk-chocolate skin.

  “Yes,” I finally said.

&nb
sp; “Is that the reason you don’t have to do anything around here?”

  “Uh, excuse me, but I’m looking for shoplifters.”

  “Yeah, right, like that’s real work. Must be nice.”

  She walked away. She was the fourth person to ask me about my dad. Why did the questions make me feel like a loser, like I couldn’t do this on my own?

  I went up to Zach. “I’m taking a break.”

  He looked like he wanted to protest — - especially since I’d been back at work for only half an hour. Instead he said, “Okay, sure, whatever.”

  I guess he didn’t want to upset me. Maybe he thought his job was at stake. Or maybe I was useless.

  I went outside, walked over to the little rest area, and sat down on a metal bench. It wasn’t very comfortable but it survived the elements. I was wondering how I was going to survive the truth that was spreading through the park. I watched people walking by, laughing with their friends. Why was I even here?

  A shadow crossed over me. I looked over. Jake was holding out a cup of ice cream. “Everything always seems better after ice cream,” he said.

  “It didn’t help earlier,” I grumbled.

  “This is special.”

  “Yeah, what’s so special about it?”

  “It gives me a reason to sit and talk to you.”

  “Do you need a reason?”

  “Not really.” He sat down and set the cup of vanilla ice cream in front of me.

  “I’m being hard to get along with, aren’t I?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  I took a bite of the ice cream. It was soothing but not as much as having Jake sit down beside me.

  “Bad day, huh?” he asked quietly.

  “The worst. Guess you heard all that stuff Marci said.”

  “Marci? She the one with the designer friends?”

  I laughed, peered over at him. “Designer friends?”

  “Yeah, they kinda looked like accessories, like a Prada handbag or something.”

  “What do you know about Prada?”

  “My mom’s into fancy stuff. Said she’d rather have one really nice purse than ten so-so ones.”

  “I’m not sure that analogy works because I’m not sure Marci’s friends are really nice.”