My mom was still looking at me, eyebrows raised. “Are you at least going to put on a shirt?”
It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.
“Something nice,” she said as she walked out of my room. “You know it—”
“Shows respect for the performers,” we finished together. I’d only been hearing her utter that sentence every time my family went to a concert, play, or dance performance all my conscious life.
“Well, it does,” she said, and she pulled my door shut behind her.
Even before we went inside, I could see that the Endeavor lobby was packed with families waiting to go into the auditorium, but of course when we stepped through the front doors, the very first person we saw was Callie’s dad. He looked better than he’d looked the last time when I saw him picking up Callie in his truck. He and my mom started chatting and a few minutes later the Riveras were standing next to us. As usual, they were elegantly dressed and managed to give off more of a movie-star vibe than an Endeavor-parent one. Mrs. Rivera started asking my mom if she might be interested in volunteering for some book sale and I almost laughed—was there any cause my mom wasn’t interested in volunteering for?
I knew the girls were busy with costumes backstage, but I found myself half looking around for them and feeling lonelier than I’d ever remembered feeling.
Cisco Rivera came over with his date and shook my hand. He asked how my painting was going and if there’d been any opportunities that came my way because of the national art contest I’d won. No wonder Cisco was so popular—how did a guy as cool and busy as he was remember that some random freshman who’d been over at his house once had won an art contest months ago?! I was so amazed he remembered my winning that when he introduced me to his date, I didn’t register her name. A second later someone called out, “Hey, Cisco,” and within seconds, he’d disappeared into a small crowd of people.
It was like watching the mayor of Endeavor chatting with his constituents.
Cisco’s date had long dark hair, and as Cisco high-fived a couple of his friends from the soccer team, she gave me a little what-can-you-do-with-a-popular-guy-like-that shrug. I smiled back at her, wondering if I should ask her what her name was again or just hope I could dodge the fact that I hadn’t heard it the first time, and as we looked at each other, I suddenly got the weirdest flash that I knew her from somewhere.
Was she an actress? Had I seen her in something like a sitcom or movie?
“You go to Endeavor?” she asked.
I nodded. “How do you know Cisco?” Maybe her answer would help explain this feeling.
“We met in D.C.,” she explained. “I go to college there, and Cisco was on a school soccer thing.” I realized it was crazy for me to think I knew her. Probably she just reminded me of one of the models in the J.Crew catalogs that seemed to arrive at our house hourly.
The lights dimmed, then came back up, and two girls dressed as courtiers came through the lobby ringing small gold bells.
“Come find your seats. Seats please.” The girls made their way through the crowd, which quickly began to thin now that the auditorium doors were open. Normally I would have been annoyed by how my mom put her arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the theater like I was the same age as Cornelia, but tonight I was just lonely enough not to mind her steering me to a seat.
She squeezed my hand as we sat down. “Oh, Hal, it’s beautiful.” The scrim, lit from behind, seemed to be an opaque wall of dense foliage. I’d wanted to give the audience the impression that they were staring down a corridor of trees in a forest, and I guess I’d succeeded. The truth was, I couldn’t really judge if it was any good or not and I didn’t really care. The better the show, the better Heidi Bragg was going to look. If there were a way I could have erased every leaf I’d drawn over the past week, returning the Forest of Arden to its prehistoric pre-Hal look, I’d have done so with pleasure.
The house lights dimmed, the scrim rose, and when the stage lights came up, we were in the interior of a nobleman’s house.
“As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion / bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns, / and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his blessing, to breed me well: and there begins my sadness.” The guy playing Orlando was actually named Adam, which had been its own inside joke for the cast every time he’d made this speech. Tonight, though, the guy playing Adam and the one playing Oliver managed to get through the scene without cracking themselves up.
Except for the parts where I’d had to listen to Heidi, I’d actually gotten kind of into the play with its crazy plot and its star-crossed lovers and girls dressed as boys and noblemen dressed as shepherds. But the actors might as well have been speaking Japanese—their words barely managed to penetrate my current mood. All I could think about was Callie and Nia working backstage because I’d come up with this brilliant plan to give us the chance to study Amanda’s box. Amanda’s box that I’d promptly lost. I imagined them thinking of and hating me a little more with each costume change they had to orchestrate. The thought made me literally squirm in my seat, and halfway through the first act, my mom put her hand on my arm and leaned toward me. “Are you okay, honey?” Her voice was a whisper, but the message was loud and clear: Sit still, Hal.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. As we’d left the house, I’d shoved Amanda’s watch in the front pocket of my jeans. Now it dug into my leg, but I knew if I shifted positions one more time my mom would have my head, so I just sat there, glad the pain in my thigh gave me something to focus on besides the pain in my chest.
“I might not sit with you for the second half.”
It was the end of intermission, and my mom and Cornelia were headed back into the auditorium. I’d spent the past fifteen minutes looking around the lobby for Callie and Nia before realizing that, of course, they were probably backstage.
Not that it would have mattered if they were standing next to me in the lobby. When people are ignoring you, distance isn’t what’s keeping you apart.
My mom reached forward and brushed the hair out of my eyes. “You want to sit with your friends, hon?”
“Yeah.” As I spoke the word, I realized it wasn’t even a lie. I did want to sit with my friends. The problem was, they didn’t want to sit with me.
Because they were no longer my friends.
Like she knew there was more to my answer than I was saying, my mom leaned forward and gave me a brief hug. “See you after the show,” she said, before she and Cornelia were swallowed up by the crowd.
I thought about leaving the building, but that would have meant either coming back before the play’s end or explaining to my paranoid mother why I’d headed out into the night to hoof it home alone rather than just waiting for her to give me a ride. Instead, I headed down the B corridor toward the one place I couldn’t imagine feeling lonely no matter how alone I was: the art room.
Normally I’m not one to get the jitters, but as I walked farther and farther from the brightly lit lobby, I found myself wishing the studio were a little closer to the theater. The halls were dark, and though it was a clear night, the moonlight only worked its way so far into the building. By the time I pushed open the unlocked door to the studio, I was feeling more than a little creeped out. The room was lit with a red glow from the bulb that indicates the dark room is in use. Even though I knew nobody could be in there, I didn’t bother to hit the light switch—just headed over to the ancient, paint-splattered sofa and threw myself down on it.
Lying on the sofa, I felt the watch jamming into my leg again, and this time I dug into my pocket and pulled it out. In the red light, the metal took on a lurid glow, and I traced my finger over the inscription I’d looked at so many times before. “I know you (x2) know me.”
I felt like throwing the watch across the room. Dipping it into paint thinner. Crushing it with the paper cutter.
Smashing and torturing and squeezing it until it was forced to relinquish its meaning.
The S
aint Catherine’s carnival to raise funds for needy children, taking place on the town green, was definitely an event I could stand to miss, but there was no convincing Amanda of that.
“It’ll be fun, Hal. Don’t you want to have fun?” She was standing at my front door wearing a pair of black leather pants, a black leather motorcycle jacket, and black motorcycle boots. It was very don’t-mess-with-me attire, and hers was a very don’t-mess-with-me voice.
“Carnivals aren’t fun,” I corrected her. “They’re depressing.”
“No, actually, sitting inside on a beautiful fall day is depressing. Carnivals are fun.”
In the end, it was easier to get on my bike and follow her to the green than to try and convince her I didn’t want to spend my afternoon eating cotton candy and trying to win tacky stuffed animals by hitting things with hammers or throwing quarters at chickens or whatever it is you do to win stuff at carnivals.
To my surprise, the carnival wasn’t nearly as awful as I’d imagined. There were a million little kids there laughing and running around and getting their faces painted and generally having a total blast, and the people running the games and rides were regular people, not the circus freaks I’d been picturing in my mind. By the time we got to the game where you shoot water at a duck to win a huge, stuffed bear, I was actually kind of into it.
I watched as Amanda wrapped her hands around the handle of the water gun and slipped her index finger against the trigger. She squinted at the smiling plastic ducks as they floated past us on their plastic river, and the intensity of her stare made me glad I wasn’t one of them. Out of nowhere, without turning to look at me, she announced, “I want to talk to you about your art.”
And suddenly I felt like I had a whole lot more in common with those ducks than I’d thought. “Let’s not and say we did,” I suggested, trying to keep my voice light. I reached into the bag I was holding and offered some caramel-covered popcorn in her direction. “Cracker Jack, anyone?”
“We’re not talking snack options, Hal, we’re talking about your art.” She squeezed the trigger and a duck flipped onto its back as a bell rang, signaling her success.
“No, you’re talking about my art. I’m just trying to enjoy this beautiful fall day.” I breathed deeply and made a show of looking around me. “Smell that crisp air?”
Amanda ignored my meteorologistic commentary. “It’s time for you to put yourself out there, Bennett.” Bam! Another duck bit the dust.
Watching Amanda kill helpless plastic waterfowl while she put the screws to me about my art was more than I could take. I turned and leaned my back against the counter, staring off into some vague near distance. “Yeah, about that. I’m thinking I’d like to be discovered posthumously. Like—hey, look at this! We thought he was just, you know, an amazing auto mechanic, but it turns out he was the artistic genius of the twenty-first century.”
Bam! The click of the plastic flipping over and the ding of the bell ringing let me know what had happened even if I couldn’t see it.
“Hal, what you know about cars would fit on a three-by-five index card. And as far as posthumous discovery, you know what you get to be when you’re dead?”
“Famous?” I offered.
“Dead,” she corrected me. To emphasize her point (as if it needed emphasis), she shot and killed another innocent plastic duck.
“Isn’t there some kind of limit on this game?” I asked, gesturing at the booth we stood in front of. “Haven’t you maxed out or something?”
“Don’t change the subject, Hal.” There was more than a whisper of annoyance in her voice. “It’s time for you to let people see your work.”
“I am changing the subject, Amanda.” She wasn’t the only one with the right to get pissed off. “And I’ll show people my work when I’m good and ready.”
Still holding the gun, she turned to glare at me. “Which will be when, never?”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yeah, maybe. If I want to die with a studio full of canvases and a storage space full of sketchbooks that nobody has ever seen, that’s my right.”
“No, Hal, it isn’t!” Was it my imagination or was she jonesing to spin the water gun in my direction and blast me as thoroughly as she had the ducks? “When you have talent, you have to put yourself out in the world. ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’”
Now we were both glaring at each other. “And who, exactly, are you to decide to whom much has been given?”
“Oh, don’t give me the whole, ‘Little old me, what could I possibly have to offer anyone’ routine.”
“It’s not a routine!” I was so mad I chucked my Cracker Jack to the ground. “My art is private! I’ll put it out in the world when I’m ready to put it out in the world, and if that’s never, so be it.”
Amanda stepped around the gun and thrust her finger into my chest. Hard. “Too late, Hal. I already showed your sketches to Mr. Harper. He’s entering you in the National Art Society’s high school competition.”
“What the—” I stared at her, too shocked to finish my sentence.
Amanda took her finger away from my chest. “It’s time to be a part of the world, Hal. Time to step up. ‘You’re either on the bus or you’re off it.’” She walked backward a few paces, then lifted her hands up as if asking a question.
“But—”
“And I’m not just talking about your art,” she finished.
Before I could say a thing (and what would I have said? Thank you? To hell with you?) she’d turned around and headed to where we’d left our bikes.
By the time I got my head clear enough to follow her, she was long gone.
“I still have no idea what you meant!” I shouted to the empty art room.
And to my amazement, out of the darkness, a voice answered. “Of course you don’t. I haven’t said anything yet.”
Chapter 16
I shot off the couch and spun around faster than if Mr. Richards had been standing over me with a stopwatch.
Amanda!
But the person who was standing in the open doorway wasn’t Amanda. It was Callie.
My heart was pounding, and I could barely swallow my mouth was so dry. Despite how psyched I was to see her, fear made my voice sharp. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“I . . .” How could I answer that? The past. I was talking to the past. “No one.”
“Oh.”
I half sat, half fell down on the couch, still breathing hard from my shock at hearing an answer to the question I’d been asking of a person inside my head. A second later Callie came over and sat beside me.
She took a deep breath, then spoke quickly, almost as if she’d planned what she wanted to say. I steeled myself for the attack I feared was coming.
“So I owe you an enormous apology and I’m really sorry I was so mean and I hope you can forgive me.”
“I . . . wait a second, what?” About to launch into a major apology myself, I was so totally unprepared for what she said that it took a minute before the meaning of her words sank in.
This time she turned to me, her skin pale in the red light of the bulb. “I said I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” I repeated. There was a brief silence. “Okay, I’m confused. What do you have to be sorry for exactly?”
Callie bit her lip for a second. As though she hadn’t rehearsed this part of what she wanted to say, her words came slowly now. “I am so totally the last person in the world to judge someone who falls under the spell of Heidi Bragg.”
“You . . .” I couldn’t decide which was more incredible—that Callie sounded as if she might be considering forgiving me or that she’d described so perfectly Heidi’s power. The spell of Heidi Bragg. That was exactly what it felt like—as if I’d fallen under a spell.
Which didn’t make what I’d done any less heinous.
“Callie, I am so, so sorry. I—”
“Shh.” She touched her fin
ger to her lips. “Stop, okay? It could have happened to anyone. Heidi’s smart. Scary smart. She finds people’s weak spots and she exploits them.”
I saw Heidi’s sorrowful expression, heard her fake remorse about the way she’d treated Callie. She hadn’t tried to flirt with me or flatter me. She’d known doing either of those things would have had zero effect. Somehow she’d realized there was only one way to get me to listen her—to distract me—and it was to pretend to regret what she’d done to Callie.
She’d found my weak spot and she’d exploited it.
“Thanks.” It was all I could think of to say, but I had the feeling it was enough.
Callie had shut the door to the art room behind her, and now it flew open, slamming against the wall. “We have exactly eight and a half minutes.”
Nia.
“I’ll take that as hello,” I said. Callie’s forgiveness gave me the confidence to smile at Nia.
“You’ll take it all right,” said Nia, but she was sort of smiling, too. “So this is where you came to wallow. Callie was right.”
“Hey, I resent that. I was not wallowing.”
“Whatever.” Nia waved away my protest. “The point is, we now have”—she glanced at her phone— “less than eight and a half minutes to figure out how we’re going to get that box back from Heidi Bragg and her I-Goonies. I’s for idiot, right?” Nia addressed her question to Callie.
“I think it’s for I will be underestimated at your own risk,” Callie corrected.
“I think you’re right,” Nia said, and from her voice, I could tell that even she was daunted by the impossibility of our getting Amanda’s box back from Heidi.
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