The Key to the Golden Firebird

by Maureen Johnson

  But then again, she’d brought cinnamon rolls. Who brought cinnamon rolls for heartless juvenile delinquents, anyway?

  After putting on a pair of pajama bottoms and pulling back her hair, May ventured back downstairs. Mrs. Camp was busy doing the crossword now, but she looked up on May’s approach.

  “Am I the first one up?” May asked, looking around. “It’s almost twelve-thirty.”

  “Actually, yes.” Mrs. Camp smiled. “You all must be tired.”

  Cowards, May thought. And they didn’t even have half of May’s problems.

  “So,” Mrs. Camp said, detaching a cinnamon roll from the gooey mass for May, “I heard you passed your driver’s exam.”

  “Kind of.” She smiled, automatically looking over to the key rack on the wall. The key to the Golden Firebird was no longer hanging there. Mrs. Camp followed May’s gaze.

  “Your mom told me to tell you to take your bike to work,” she said. “It’s such a nice day out. It’ll be a nice ride.”

  Okay. She knew that they were in trouble, but she gave no sign of knowing about what May had done to her son. Mrs. Camp chatted about a trip to North Carolina they were planning on taking, about her yoga class…. May stuffed down a cinnamon bun. An hour went by, and Palm and Brooks still hadn’t shown their faces.

  “I should get showered,” May said. “I have to be at work soon.”

  “Go ahead,” Mrs. Camp said, pulling a romance novel from her bag. “I’ve got lots to read. You can tell Palmer and Brooks to come down anytime they like.”

  “I’ll tell them,” May said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

  “Pete was sick this morning too.” Mrs. Camp nodded.

  May stiffened.

  “Really?”

  “He came in yesterday afternoon, after he stopped by here,” she went on. “He just didn’t look well. He went up to his room. I didn’t see him this morning either. Maybe something’s going around.”

  “Maybe.” May backed out of the room. “I’ll see if they’re up….”

  When May cautiously pushed open the door to Presto Espresso that afternoon, she was immediately bathed in an icy gale from the air-conditioning vent above the door. Everything seemed off. The milk stand had been rearranged, and there were at least ten customers sitting at various tables. Nell was behind the counter, humming to herself and filling oversized coffee filters.

  “Okay,” May said to herself, and shivered. “This is creepy.”

  Nell glanced up from her filters and coolly examined May’s sunburned figure.

  “Who are all of these people?” May asked, walking behind the counter and punching in on the cash register.

  “Some church group,” Nell said. “Can you go and refill all the coffee bins?”

  Refilling the coffee bins was a heavy, tedious job that involved pulling out twenty-pound bags of coffee beans from the back room and topping off an entire wall’s worth of plastic bins. It required using the ladder, lifting, and repacking—and it was something that May and Nell never, ever did. There was a crazy guy named Craig who worked about once a week who seemed to live to do this job.

  It took May an hour to finish. When she was done, Nell asked her to dust the wall of expensive, oversized mugs that they never sold, empty and clean the pastry case, and open a new shipment of supplies and stock the metal shelves in the storage room. These were the jobs they always did on a very occasional basis and never all at once.

  So she knows, May thought as she cut open a cardboard box full of cans of sweetened condensed milk. And this is how she’s going to get back at me.

  At first that felt fine to May. She thought it would make her miserable day go by a little faster. Unfortunately, she also had time to think about Pete, and she replayed their final conversation in her head nonstop as she stocked shelves in the gray, windowless storage room with the fluorescent lights.

  When May came out of the storeroom, it was almost seven-thirty. Nell went off on her half-hour break to go to the little health food shop up the road to get her dinner. May leaned against the counter and tried to relax. She could see the vivid sunset, an explosive orange and red and purple filling the sky.

  It was altogether too much like the flowers Pete had brought her yesterday.

  Pete—he was in her head. Every part of her brain that held a piece of information about him was firing simultaneously. She could smell his skin and his shirt. She could feel the weight of his arm over her shoulders. She could hear him laughing at one of his own jokes….

  She couldn’t lose it—not here, with Nell. She had to keep a brave face.

  Nell came back in a few minutes later with a tin container of adzuki beans, seaweed, and brown rice and set herself up at one of the tables with her food and her cell phone. May listened to her chomping away and cheerfully talking to one of her friends for the next twenty minutes about some amazing deal she’d found on a flight to Budapest. May made up little jobs for herself to keep her focus off Nell. She cleaned between the keys on the cash register with a coffee stirrer wrapped in a napkin. She scraped the buildup off the milk-foaming attachment on the cappuccino machine.

  When Nell had finished her call and food, she stacked everything up and quietly came behind the counter and glanced over at May.

  “Ann found out about what you did with your schedule,” she said as she threw away her dish.

  May’s head jerked in Nell’s direction at the sound of Presto’s owner’s name.

  “She said you can finish your shift today,” Nell went on breezily.

  Finish your shift today…. May ran the words through her mind, trying to pull meaning from them.

  “Are you saying I’m fired?” she managed to ask.

  “Pretty much.”

  “How did she find out?”

  “I told her,” Nell said plainly.

  “Why did you tell her?” May asked. “You’ve swapped shifts dozens of times.”

  “Pete told me what you did,” Nell said. “He told me what happened.”

  “So you got me fired?”

  “Right.”

  May felt slightly faint. She suddenly had a flash of how she wanted it all to end. She would dramatically take off her apron and hat, throw them on the counter, and walk to the door. At the last second she would turn and say, “I think what happened was that he realized how annoying you are, like how you never stop talking about yourself. I think that may have had a lot to do with it.” Then she would open the door and step out. Before she was all the way gone, she would add over her shoulder, “But I’m just guessing.”

  The fact was, though, it didn’t really matter anymore that Nell was irritating or even that she had just deliberately caused May to lose her job. May had disrupted something personal in Nell’s life. Nell could have really liked Pete, and May had ruined that for her. The score seemed even.

  But May did take off her apron and hat.

  “I’d like to go now,” she said.

  “Fine.” Nell shrugged. “You have to punch out and sign a form for your uniform.”

  May entered her employee code for the last time, then verified that she was returning one apron, one name pin, and one hat in good (as opposed to excellent) condition. Then she picked up her bag and headed for the door. At the last moment the guilt really started to kick in. She stopped and turned back to Nell, who had taken out a backpacker’s guide to Eastern Europe and started to read.

  “I’m sorry,” May said. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “Whatever, Ape.”

  “I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t intentional.”

  “Fine.”

  There was nothing more May could say, so she opened the door.

  “See you later, Ape,” Nell said, turning back to her book.

  “Later,” May replied as she left Presto Espresso for the last time.

  May coasted along her street. Even though the sun had just gone down, it was easily ninety-five degrees. Despite the heat, she was
n’t ready to go home yet. She skidded to a halt at the mailbox at the end of her street to cool down and watched two little kids getting dragged along by a very eager Dalmatian.

  The lightning bugs were already out in full force, looking like strings of insane, moving Christmas lights. May clasped one of the bugs in her hands, like she used to do when she was little and she and Brooks used to compete to see how many they could catch in a night. The bug wandered around her palm, not particularly concerned for its own welfare. When she opened her hand and let the bug go, it didn’t seem to want to leave her. She had to blow on it to get it moving. Finally it took off from her palm and lingered around her head, flashing its little yellow taillight.

  She turned her bike and rode around the corner and up the slight hill to Pete’s house. The Camps’ rancher sat in the middle of a fairly wild yard, with lots of trees. She stopped by the edge of the driveway, near the thick wall of shrubs that marked the edge of the property.

  She could do something, or she could spend the next days, weeks, or months of her grounding picking lint out of the carpet and wondering.

  Her hair was probably wild, and she was definitely sticky and rumpled. She knew she probably had perspiration marks under her arms, so she took care to keep them pinned to her sides.

  She knocked at the Camps’ door. There was a frantic barking from deep inside the house. A thumping as someone came down the steps. And then Pete was in front of her. His skin looked very tan against the white T-shirt he was wearing. He seemed tired.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” she asked.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Look,” she said, “this is your chance. If you want an explanation, you have to get it now. Or if you want to yell at me. Whatever.”

  It took him a minute to think this one over. He opened the door and came outside.

  “So talk,” he said.

  “Do you guys still have the glider?” May asked.

  “Yeah. Out back.”

  “Can we go sit on it?”

  Pete looked at her in disbelief, then leaned his head back to stare at the sky.

  “For privacy,” she said. “So we don’t have to stand in the middle of the lawn.”

  They made their way through the rakes, shovels, bikes, and spare pieces of wood that filled the narrow passageway that separated the garage from the house. The Camp yard was overgrown, with a slightly unstable picnic bench off to one side and a brick barbecue against the back fence. The honeysuckle bushes that they used to feast on as kids were still flourishing. The people next door were cooking dinner, and the air was hot and smelled of hamburger.

  “God,” May said, taking a deep breath, “we haven’t taken out the grill in forever.”

  Pete knocked some spiderwebs and leaves from the glider with his shoe, then pointed at it. May sat down. Pete sat on top of the picnic bench a few feet away and fixed her with a steady glare.

  She had no idea where to begin, but she had to say something.

  “I don’t know why I said all those things, but I’m sorry,” she said. “I was insane.”

  Pete said nothing to this general apology. His expression remained frozen. A cloud of gnats descended on May’s head. She waved them away, but not before getting a few up her nose. She had to snort them out. Even though she tried to do this in a very low-key way, it still wasn’t exactly attractive.

  She decided to try again.

  “Look, I know how I’ve been. I was just afraid all of a sudden, and I started saying whatever I could. I know that makes me seem really weird and unstable….”

  She could have bitten off her tongue. Now it sounded like she was talking about Jenna again.

  “Let’s just forget it, okay?” Pete said. He got up, took a broom from the walkway, and started cleaning some leaves and dirt from a corner of the patio. “It was a bad idea.”

  “What do you mean? What was a bad idea? Us? Dating?”

  “Right. So it’s over. Let’s just forget it happened.”

  “I don’t think it was a bad idea,” May said quickly. “I think it was a really good idea.”

  Pete didn’t answer. He swept.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” she added, trying to get a response, “Nell just got me fired.”

  “Yeah, that makes me feel great.”

  “I don’t know. I thought it might.”

  “Why would I be happy about that?” he asked, never once taking his eyes from his work. “Do you think it’s my fault that she got you fired? Do you think I told her to do it as part of my plan to screw you over?”

  From the way he’d said the word screw, May could tell that her words had definitely not been forgotten.

  “No,” she said.

  “So what’s your point?”

  That corner of the patio had probably never been so clean.

  May put her head down and told herself not to cry. This was not the time for that. This was the time to become a genius and say something amazing. Unfortunately, nothing was coming to mind.

  “I don’t know, Camper,” she said. “I didn’t really have a plan. I wanted to explain, but I guess I don’t have an explanation.”

  “I guess you don’t. Like I said, it was a bad idea. Can we drop it now?”

  There was a swell of emotion building up in May. It was huge. It seemed to spread over every thought in her mind.

  “Brooks didn’t have these problems,” she said, mostly to herself. “Why is that not surprising?”

  Pete stopped sweeping for a minute and leaned into the broom, looking down at the supremely clean bricks.

  “I mean, he liked Brooks the most,” May went on. “Brooks was perfect. Palmer too. It was like they had a little club. Maybe if I played sports, it would all have been okay.”

  Nothing like another little attack of Tourette’s to spice up a conversation, May thought. She really didn’t seem to be in control of her own speaking voice anymore. Pete looked like he was about to say something (maybe call for help), but the patio door opened and his mom came out. He moved on to another corner of the patio.

  “May?” Mrs. Camp said, clearly surprised to see her and even more confused by the weird silence that lingered between her son and May.

  “I was just on my way home from work,” May said. “I was giving Pete a message.”

  “Oh. Right. Does your mom—”

  “No, I know. It’s fine. I’m going home now.”

  “Okay.”

  Mrs. Camp looked between the two of them, then went back inside. Pete stood there with his broom, not moving.

  “I’m kind of in trouble,” May said. “It’s a long story. I should probably go.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  May got up and walked back through the covered passage toward the front lawn. She tripped over the Weedwacker in her haste. It didn’t matter. There was no reason why she should try to be graceful. She just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Pete coming through the walkway. He came halfway down the driveway and stopped a few feet away from her.

  “I’m sorry you got fired,” he said.

  “It’s not so bad,” May replied, grabbing her bike. “I won’t have to smell that cabbage stuff Nell eats anymore.”

  Pete leaned against the Cutlass.

  “Hey, Pete!” his mom called from the front doorway. “Can you start up the grill?”

  “Um…yeah,” he said. “Just a second.”

  His mom lingered by the door for a moment before disappearing back into the house. May could see her walking past the living room window. She was watching.

  “You’d better go start the grill,” she said.

  “I know.”

  For the first time in the conversation, May saw a look on Pete’s face that seemed somewhat familiar. He was staring off down the street, squinting just a little, wrinkling the top of his nose.

  “Why’d you say all of that?” he asked.


  “All of what?”

  “That he didn’t like you as much.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  “No, it’s not,” Pete said. “Your dad never shut up about you.”

  “Trust me, okay?”

  “How do you think I know all your grades and all your scores and stuff?”

  “You do?” That was news to her.

  “Yeah. He talked about Brooks and Palm sometimes, but it was usually about you.”

  “He never talked to me, though. Not like he did to them.”

  “Come on,” Pete said. “You always used to get those little jokes he’d put in your lunch in grade school. Or we’d come over to watch a game and he’d be quizzing you and we’d have to wait.”

  “That’s not the same,” May said. She had no idea why she was having this conversation with Pete at all. Stuff was just coming out of her mouth faster than she could keep up with it.

  “What’s your problem?” he said angrily. “You get mad at people a lot. You think they’re doing things to you. You’re pissed at Brooks, at your dad, then you got pissed at me.”

  “I already said I was sorry….”

  She was crying, she noticed. There were tears running down her face. She wondered how long that had been going on before she became aware of it. Pete was just watching her now.

  “Sorry,” she said, sniffing and wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m stupid. I’m going to go.”

  She was about to swing her leg over the guy bar when another thought came into her mind. It flew out of her mouth in the next second, unchecked.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me when I can be normal again,” she said. “I keep thinking I’ll get a letter or something. Or a call. When does it happen?”

  Pete looked like he wanted to walk toward her, but then he fell back against the car. The staring contest between them went on for almost a minute, and finally Pete exhaled loudly.