I looked over at Toby. He’d popped a Johnny Cash tape in the cassette player and was singing both parts of “Jackson.” For a second, I thought of showing that wolf to him, but then I caught myself. Finn had probably already shown him. It would just be another piece of old news.
We didn’t say much for the rest of the drive. The car sped past exits for White Plains and Harrison, and even though I’d been past those places hundreds of times, they looked strange and unfamiliar that afternoon. One minute it was a regular school day and I was about to get on the bus home, and the next there I was in the Playland parking lot with a guy in a tweed jacket, chewing strawberry gum.
Only a few cars were there, and we got a spot right near the entrance. Toby’s jacket was rumpled from the drive, and he smoothed it with both hands. Looking at him out in the open, I thought he looked mostly the same as last time except for maybe his eyes. Maybe his eyes looked a little bit bigger.
Toby paid for us both, which was good because I didn’t have any money on me. Next to the ticket booth there was a big, noisy fountain. Toby looked at it, then stepped in closer to me, leaning down. “This thing I want to show you, it’s right at the back. Promise me you’ll like it, all right?”
“I can’t promise that.”
He smiled. “Of course not. Good answer.”
We walked down the main path, the one called Knickerbocker Avenue. We went past all the rides I’d been on before with Greta. The swings, that rickety old Dragon Coaster, the Scrambler, the Spider. Greta was always the one who wanted to go on the scariest, fastest stuff they had. I was always the one who got dragged into going on with her, even though it made me sick as anything.
We kept walking, and even though there was almost nobody at Playland that day, the whole place smelled of popcorn and hot sugar. Like someone was cooking that stuff just for the smell of it. Just so people knew they were supposed to have fun there. We passed a line of skeeball machines and the shooting gallery where there were creepy-looking hillbilly figures that popped up out of barrels. Toby pointed over to a narrower path on the right.
“Here,” he said. “Finn said you like history, the past and all that, so . . .”
Again I had the weird realization that Toby knew all kinds of things about me, while I knew next to nothing about him. It didn’t seem fair. Not at all. Every time I thought about it, about Toby and Finn talking behind my back, I felt a hot surge of anger in my chest.
Toby stopped in front of a booth with the name Images of Yesteryear painted on a sign above. Display boards with sepia-toned photos of people in old-fashioned clothes were spread out on the sidewalk in front of the booth. There were pictures of whole families or sometimes just kids or once in a while there was one with a single man or woman. Some were wearing Wild West stuff. One guy had on a Civil War uniform and sat scowling with a rifle and a Confederate flag across his lap. A woman stood behind her daughter, both of them squeezed into snug Victorian dresses. Some of the pictures really worked, because you couldn’t see that the people weren’t from the past. With others it was obvious. Not the haircuts or anything, sometimes it was just a little smirky look that gave it away.
“So? What do you say?” Toby sounded nervous. Like he’d suddenly realized that this was a weird place to bring me.
I’d seen photo places like this before, lots of times, but nobody in my family was ever interested in doing it.
“I don’t come out good in pictures,” I said.
“Sure you do. I’ve seen that portrait.”
“That’s different,” I said. And it was. A portrait is a picture where somebody gets to choose what you look like. How they want to see you. A camera catches whichever you happens to be there when it clicks.
“It won’t be,” he said. He walked around to the other side of the picture board so I couldn’t see him. “If you want,” he said, “we could go together.”
I shook my head. But then I thought about it. It would definitely make it less embarrassing if it wasn’t just me sitting there like a weirdo by myself. I didn’t even know what time it was, and I had no idea if anyone at home had noticed I was gone, but I suddenly felt like I really wanted to do this thing.
“Oh, okay. I guess. If you want to.”
“Pardon?”
“Okay. Both of us.”
Toby’s head appeared from over the top of the board.
“Brilliant,” he said, grinning.
A woman who was probably in her fifties, with eyeshadow in three different shades of blue, sat on a stool behind the booth. She was reading a copy of People magazine with a picture of Paul Hogan from “Crocodile” Dundee on the cover. When she heard Toby she put down her magazine, creasing it to save her page.
“Two, please,” Toby said.
“Two?”
“Yes, there are two of us who’d like to have our photos done.” Toby gave her the same smile he’d just given me. A kid smile. That’s what I’d call it. The woman looked at Toby, then me. Then she looked harder at Toby, like she was sizing him up, trying to figure something out about him. After a few seconds she seemed to come to a decision. She reached into a drawer and pulled out a price list.
“Okay, well, what I suggest is that you have a look through some of our costumes. Feel free to try a few on and then let me know what you want. Okay? There’s lots of his ’n’ her stuff back there.”
We both nodded. The woman unlatched a swinging door that opened up into the rear of the booth.
“Did you see that?” Toby whispered.
“See what?”
“I think that woman thought we were a couple.”
“Gross,” I said.
I don’t know how long we spent browsing through the costumes. I tried on a Victorian dress and a medieval one. They looked okay, but in the end I settled on a ruby-red and gold Elizabethan dress. It was low cut, but since I didn’t have any boobs it wasn’t too embarrassing. Toby decided on a Revolutionary War soldier’s uniform. It was blue, and when I told Toby blue was the American color, he said he didn’t care. Plus, he said, the photo would be black and white, so nobody would ever know. I thought he really looked like a soldier in that uniform. Like someone who’d seen all kinds of terrible things. He stood against the wall, with his fake rifle on his shoulder.
We waited for the woman to get her equipment ready. She set up a tripod, then took a closer look at us.
“I don’t think you understand,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Well, you have to stick with one era. You can’t go combining different times. See?”
“It’s okay,” Toby said. His voice was calm, convincing. “We know what we’re doing.”
“Sir, you don’t seem to understand,” the woman repeated, folding her arms across her chest. “We just don’t allow it. You can’t mix time periods, and that’s that. Like I said, there’s plenty of his ’n’ hers.”
I looked down at my feet. The Elizabethan shoes they had were too small, so I’d left my heels hanging out. I felt Toby’s hand land on my shoulder and it made me feel like we were in something together. I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel that with him, but right then, with that lady acting so stupid, I did.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, excuse me, but if we’re paying for the photo, why should it make a difference what costumes we choose?”
“I don’t want to get too technical on you, but there’s the backdrops for one thing. . . .”
“We don’t care if the backdrop doesn’t match. Choose something halfway between the two of us. We’re really not bothered about the background.” Toby’s voice had lost its soft tone. I could see that the woman wasn’t going to budge.
“Look, sir, take a look at every single picture we’ve got out front, okay? Tell me if there’s a single one that mixes eras. Okay? Now, I can hear you’re foreign, and I don’t know how they do things where you’re from . . .”
Toby didn’t know what to say to that. There was a silence. All of us waiting for someone
to shift.
“I’ll change,” I said in a voice that was almost a whisper.
“What’s that, hon’?” the woman said.
“I said I’ll do it. I’ll get something colonial.”
“No, June. This is for you. We’ll find someplace else. There’s got to be a place where we can do whatever we want.”
But there was no place else. I looked at Toby and had the panicky thought that maybe I would never meet anyone again who would do this stupid thing with me. Never. And then what? And then where would I be?
“No,” I said. “I want to.” We looked at each other for a second, and then Toby bowed his head.
“Why do things always have to be like this?” he said. “I’ll do it, then. Give me a minute to change.”
I nodded and Toby disappeared. The Elizabethan costume didn’t fit him right. It was too short, and the tights made it so I could see how thin his legs were. Too thin. That’s what I thought at first, but then I looked again. It wasn’t as if I’d seen a lot of guys in tights. Especially not skinny guys like Toby. Maybe that’s what their legs looked like. Maybe the stories weren’t true. Maybe he was just an ordinary friend of Finn’s. Not special. Just ordinary, like me.
The woman apologized for all the fuss, then told us to experiment with different poses while she snapped the pictures. I didn’t know how most of them would turn out. In one, Toby put his bony arm around my shoulder and whispered, “Don’t be afraid, June,” in my ear. Occasionally, Toby would give me a look out of the corner of his eye and it was like he’d known me forever, which was creepy but at the same time kind of hard not to like, and suddenly the whole thing seemed so ridiculous it took everything I had not to burst out laughing.
“That’s a wrap,” the woman said.
She told us she’d get the picture to us as soon as she could.
“After all that, we can’t have it now?” Toby said.
“Of course not. It has to be processed.”
Toby looked like a kid who’d just been told he can’t wear his new shoes out of the shoe store.
“All right, but we need two copies.”
The woman wrote on a pad. “That won’t be a problem. By the way,” she said, “where are you from?”
Toby didn’t say anything at first. He looked over at me. Then he squinted and looked the woman straight in the eye. “Someplace very foreign,” he said in a mysterious voice. “Both of us. We’re from far, far away.”
On the way home, we agreed we’d tell each other one Finn story each. Toby told me about this time Finn talked him into driving to a beach on Cape Cod that he and my mother used to go to on vacation when they were kids. Toby was an awful storyteller. He rambled on, going back to fill in stuff and stumbling over his words and taking big breaks while he figured out exactly how things went. Still, it was okay, because it was stuff about Finn I’d never heard before. The story didn’t really have any point, but it ended with Finn and Toby both being freezing cold because Finn had convinced Toby to sleep out on the beach for the night. By the end I was kind of sorry I’d heard it, because it just made me wish that I had been there too.
The story took up most of the car ride home, so there was no time for my story, which I was glad about. I’d gotten a brand-new Finn story and I didn’t have to give a thing away.
I didn’t know what time it was, but I asked Toby to drop me off at the library. I could walk home from there. We sat for a few seconds, not saying anything. There were no clocks or watches in that car, and I thought I might have found my bubble. A small blue bubble where there was no time and Finn might be hiding in the glove compartment. It felt like opening the door would burst everything.
“Do you want another piece?” Toby held out a chunk of his strawberry gum and I took it.
“It’s probably way late. I’ll probably be in big trouble.”
“Here, then.” Toby rolled down his window. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a penny. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger. Then he popped it into his fist and hurled it out across the parking lot. “For luck,” he said. “Go see if it’s heads.”
I didn’t want to tell him that it didn’t work that way. That lucky pennies could happen only by accident. I put the folder of sketches in my backpack, then opened the door.
“Well, bye, and thanks—I guess it was kind of fun.”
“Come see me, all right? At Finn’s. And if you need anything. Anything at all . . .”
“You said that last time.”
“Because I mean it. I do.”
I closed the door and walked toward the place where the penny had landed. I knew you couldn’t make luck that way, but still I kind of hoped it was heads. I started to run to the spot, but even from a few feet away I could already see it was tails. I bent and picked up the penny anyway. Then I turned to Toby and gave him a smile and the thumbs-up. He didn’t need to know.
Twenty-Seven
Greta was the only one home when I got there. Tax season was starting to get into the heavy stage. “Crunch time,” my parents called it, which meant they barely made it home by eight o’clock most nights. Greta was lying on the couch, watching an episode of Fame she had on a videotape. Leroy was standing with his hands on his hips, mouthing off at the ballet teacher as usual.
Almost a week had gone by since the party, and what happened in the woods had still never come up between us. I still wondered how Greta could have found her way to my exact spot, but there was no way to ask her. Not without giving away everything I did in the woods. I watched her sometimes, when we were waiting for the bus or eating dinner, trying to see if she remembered any of what she’d said, but there was no sign that she did. When she heard me come in that night, she smiled.
“Big. Trouble.”
“What?”
“Well, where have you been?”
“Why do you care?”
Something about being out with Toby, about traveling so far from home with nobody knowing, made me feel powerful. I stood there looming over Greta, and suddenly she seemed small and sad. Then she clicked off the TV and sat up straight, and like always she was the one in control again.
“So?”
“Library, okay? With Beans. Is that interesting enough for you?”
A huge smile spread across Greta’s face, and she kept staring at me like she was waiting for me to understand something.
“What?” I said.
“So they were having a child prostitute look-alike day down at the library?”
“What are you talking about?”
She clicked the TV back on and turned away. Then she said, “Nice makeup,” and my heart felt like it was falling right through my stomach. I was still wearing tons of photography makeup. Neither of us had wanted to put it on, but the Playland woman had insisted. Toby wiped his off as soon as it was over, but I didn’t. It wasn’t exactly that I liked the way it looked. It was more that it felt good to look different than I usually did. And, okay, maybe prettier.
It turned out my parents were having dinner with a client that night, so I ladled a bowl of chicken and rice soup from the crockpot and sat at the kitchen table. It was hard not to march back into the living room and tell Greta all about Toby; I knew it would make her jaw drop to the floor. I would have loved to tell her how he’d asked for me. How he came looking for me. I wanted to open up that folder of sketches and shove them right in Greta’s face and say, “Look. See? I know all kinds of things you don’t.” But of course I couldn’t do that.
The soup was hot and salty, and I ate it as fast as I could. Then I went straight up to my room and turned on all my candles. I had this set of six flickering electric candles that Woolworth’s was selling out cheap after Christmas last year. The flame was way too orange, but they were the best I could do. My room has two windows, and I put one candle in each. I clustered the rest of them on my desk. When I have my own house I’ll have real candles everywhere. Candelabras on mantelpieces and big candle chandeliers hanging f
rom the ceiling. Even if I end up in some poky apartment somewhere, I’ll make it like a whole other time. People will ring my bell and, when I open the door, they won’t be able to believe their eyes.
I told that to Finn once. We were at an exhibit of sixteenth-century Turkish ceramics at the Met. We were standing in front of these intricately painted blue and white candleholders, and I was telling him exactly how my house would be one day. Finn turned to me, smiling, his eyes bluer than ever, and he said, “You’re a romantic, June.”
I was standing close to Finn, right up next to him so I wouldn’t miss a word of what he knew about the exhibit. At once I stepped away and blushed so hard I could barely breathe. It felt like all the blood in my body had swum up to my face, leaving the skin around my heart completely transparent.
“Am not,” I said as fast as I could. I kept my face turned away, scared Finn would see how embarrassed I was. Terrified he’d be able to read every weird thought I’d ever had.
When I finally glanced back, I saw him giving me a funny look. Just for a second. A little flash of worry shot across his face. Then he smiled, like he was trying to cover it up.
“A romantic, you barnacle, not lovey-dovey romantic.” He leaned over like he was about to nudge my shoulder with his, but then he pulled away.
“What’s the difference?” I asked cautiously.
“Being a romantic means you always see what’s beautiful. What’s good. You don’t want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.”
I breathed out. That wasn’t so bad. I felt the blood ease away from my face.
“Well, what about you?” I dared to ask Finn. “Are you a romantic?”
Finn thought about it. He looked right at me, squinting, like he was trying to see into my future. That’s what it felt like. Then he said, “Sometimes. Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not.”
Tell the Wolves I'm Home: A Novel Page 12
