Starstruck (3 page)

E
VIE HAS BEEN AT BAND CAMP
all weekend. A lot of people think band camp is lame, but she’s on the band front, which is the small subset of band that is right up there with the cheerleaders. That’s probably because they wear skintight leotards with butt-cheek-baring skirts, which makes them just about everything the football players are looking for in their girlfriends. Granted, Evie has talent. She twirls a baton and has been able to do so since she was six. The first time I picked one up, I knocked myself unconscious. But Evie is a natural. And she loves twirling so much that this morning, Labor Day, the final day of camp, she jazz-kicked her way into the store for a carton of OJ and a couple of donuts, even though it was only six. She was wearing short shorts and a T-shirt and had a bag slung over her shoulder and was shivering in excitement (or perhaps because it was a bit nippy and her shorts went all the way up her butt crack) as she waited for her best friend Becca’s mom to pick her up. She even practiced some tosses and moves she learned at cheerleading camp this summer, just to make sure she “still had it” or something. The old ladies in the store smiled at her, then growled at me for not getting their Danishes fast enough.

It’s ironic that it’s Labor Day, because what have I been doing for my last day of freedom before my junior year? Working. Working like crazy. Because of Evie’s extracurriculars, I’ve been picking up the slack at the bakery the entire weekend. I know there are child labor laws that prevent this, but there must be a loophole in there that says if the child belongs to you—i.e., you pushed said child out your hoohah—you may disregard any regulations designed to prevent said child from collapsing in exhaustion.

Here it is, the day before school starts, and I look like a zombie. A zombie who has eaten half the junior class, but a zombie nonetheless. Yeah, Billy totally let me down. I’ve been working out with him and his cult every night for an hour, and I’ve gained three pounds! And with my triangle hair, I’m sure to make everyone jealous tomorrow.

When Wish sees me, that will really make my life complete.

My mother comes in from the back, looking seriously put out. She has her hands on her hips and there’s flour dotted in her hair. “They’re not here yet?”

I shrug. “Who?”

She looks at me, clearly disappointed that I don’t breathe this business the way she does. “The winter help.”

I check the clock. It’s one exactly. “What time were they supposed to be here?”

She puckers her lips. “One.”

“It’s one right now.”

“So. If they walk through the door right now, or anytime later, that means they’re officially late. And what kind of example does that set, if they can’t even show up on time on the first day of work?”

Knowing the type of people my mom has gotten to be the winter help for the past few years, I think the woman probably got her walker stuck in a crack on the sidewalk or lost her direction because of Alzheimer’s. We have to get new help year after year, because our winter help always dies from old age over the summer. It’s not my mom’s fault; those are the only people around during the winter, because this island becomes a graveyard. All the rich people with kids usually move to their winter homes on the mainland, so I end up taking the short bus to school.

The bell on the door jingles. Standing in the doorframe, his head directly in front of the Fresh Baked Bread! sign, is a kid with so many tattoos on his arms I can’t even be sure he has skin. He’s darting his chin back and forth as if watching a tennis match, and he looks a little lost, not like he wants a cruller. His hands are clenched over a paper bag, and he’s wearing army fatigue pants and a rumpled, sleeveless tie-dyed shirt. I turn to my mom and mouth, “Is that him?”

She gives me a worried look and nods.

“He, um, looks like an escaped convict,” I whisper.

She tightens her lips and says, “They promised me he didn’t do anything bad,” and before I can ask her who she meant by “they,” and what she meant by “bad,” she’s giving him her famous fake smile. “Chris?”

Oh, no. My mom hired a criminal. She must have killed off all the old people on the island, and this was her only option.

He nods and gives a slow, easy smile, one that means he either wants to rip her head off or buy a puppy. I can’t tell which, because his eyes are completely covered by a mass of black pseudodreads. “Christian,” he mutters.

She turns businesslike. “I’m Tammy Reilly. This is my daughter Gwen. She’ll give you a feel for your duties.”

I expect him to get hung up on the space below my boobs, where all my fat is, but he doesn’t. He just gives an almost imperceptible nod and looks around the room. He even inspects the far corners of the ceiling, maybe looking for pink elephants or whatever, and that’s when his hair flips back and I get a look at his eyes. They’re bleary. I think he’s high, but I don’t bring this to my mother’s attention, because I can’t speak.

My mother is going to make me work with a criminal.

“So,” I hear her say, “if you need anything, just call. I’ll be upstairs working on the ledger.”

Correction: My mother is going to make me work with a criminal
alone.

By the time my vocal cords start to thaw, I hear the screen door out back close and my mom’s feet shuffle up the rickety staircase to our apartment.

She’s left me alone with a criminal.

I take a step backward and clap my hands together to keep them from shaking. “So!” I say, as if I have some idea what to follow that with.

I don’t.

He stands there for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he holds out his paper bag and shrugs, as if to say, “What should I do with this?”

“Um, yeah, you can put that back here,” I say, motioning into the back room. “And I should get you an apron.”

Though I’ve walked through the door to the back room—where we keep trays of extra food to restock the shelves, boxes and bags and supplies, and the lockers for employees—a million times, I somehow end up tripping over my feet. I figure one of my no-name Keds knockoffs must be untied, but no, they’re both fine. I am just an idiot.

I open a locker for him and then pull a clean apron from the stack. I usually feel all sweaty when I meet people. Maybe it’s because I’m usually all sweaty. It’s one of the reasons I don’t go to the beach, and it’s why antiperspirant is my best friend. But now the sweat is cascading off my forehead like Niagara Falls.

“Um, I guess I’ll show you how to use the cash register first,” I say, wondering if that’s a good idea. He can just knock me over, steal the money, and be gone. Well, maybe not knock me over, but the rest would be pretty easy, since I’m not sure I can use my Tae Bo moves for real-life situations. However, since I just cleaned out the register and there’s probably no more than fifty dollars in it, I figure it’s no major sacrifice.

I give him the rundown, something I’ve done with all our employees. He doesn’t ask a thousand stupid questions, not like the old ladies I’m used to training. He just nods, and when I ask, “Got it?” he gives me a smile. Not a nice, cheery one, though. That would have put me at ease. This one is decidedly Joker-like. Creepy.

As I’m explaining our pricing for cookies and how to use the scale to weigh them, I realize he’s not paying attention. He’s looking out the window. I follow his line of vision, expecting to see a girl in a bikini or something, but I see nothing. There’s a house across the street that’s being gutted, and a huge Dumpster outside, filled with broken glass glinting in the sunlight, but that’s about it. I raise my voice. “And a full pound will fit in one of these boxes. Okay?”

His nod is barely there.

“I’m not really good at math, so I keep a pencil and paper nearby, or sometimes I do the calculation on the box or bag itself. But if you’re good at math, you can just do the calculations in your head.” I realize I am babbling too much, and too happily. “Um. Are you good at math?”

He shrugs.

I wish he would talk a little more. I mean, is he practicing for mime school? Still, I’m sure, despite his freaky appearance, there are lots of things we have in common. A month from now, I’ll probably look back at this and laugh at myself for thinking this guy was the scariest person I’d ever met.

I hope.

All right, I give up. I have more important things to do with my life than deal with the Freaky Silent Type. Like sleep. “Yeah. Well, the price list is on the wall behind the register. If you need anything, we’re upstairs. Just pick up the phone and dial one. Okay?”

I’m about to turn around when I realize that the entire lower half of his face (which is all I can see) has turned a little red. Is he blushing or choking on a piece of gum? Then his mouth opens and he says, in a tiny, fragile voice, “May I have a cupcake?”

May I have a cupcake? It’s so childish, like something I’d expect a preschooler to say. Or Oliver. I can’t help it: I burst out laughing.

He tilts his head to the side, obviously wondering if I’m having a convulsion.

“I’m sorry. Yeah. You can. And there’s milk and juice in the fridge case. Help yourself.”

He reaches into the case and pulls out a chocolate-frosted cupcake. Then he shoves the entire thing into his mouth, and in one swallow, it’s gone. I can almost see the outline of it traveling down his throat, like a mouse being devoured by a snake. I gag. “Um, you can have another. Human bites, though, this time. Don’t want to have to call 911 on your ass.”

I laugh—it’s almost a snort, but I catch myself in time—and realize that the whole “calling 911 on your ass” thing is entirely too cool for the normal Dough Reilly to say. I usually sound stiff, like a walking dictionary. I think I’m feeling emboldened by his goofy “Can I have some more, sir?” impersonation.

He takes a second one and is still chewing when he opens his mouth and says, “Thanks.”

Seeing that he has kind of green teeth—and what’s that? A pimple on his chin?—gives me even more courage. He’s not scary at all, just a regular pussycat. I’ll definitely be laughing this off by next month. “So, you’re not from around here,” I say, leaning over the counter.

He shakes his head and swallows, then goes over to the fridge. I expect him to expand on that, but he doesn’t. He just looks out the window again, toward the Dumpster.

I figure I can have a conversation with myself, then. I’m used to being my own company. “I knew that. We don’t get many new faces around here.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m from out west.”

Wow, first time he offered up information about himself. However, considering that we’re on an island on the East Coast and just about all of the United States is out west, I can’t say this is very revealing. “Cool. You mean, like, California?”

He shrugs. Scintillating conversation.

Still, he’s a pussycat. A cupcake-loving little pussycat, I remind myself as I start to consolidate the donuts onto as few trays as possible, which really does not need to be done. “Anyway, you can do this, if you want,” I motion to the trays. “Then put the trays in the back. The bakers wash the morning ones, but you’ll have to wash all the rest after we close. It helps to keep things neat.”

Suddenly, I’m aware that he’s completely invaded my personal space, because I can feel his breath on my ear. I stand stick straight and swallow. “Does it matter where a person comes from,” he hisses, “when they’re never going back?”

Then he moves away and plucks another cupcake from the tray. I take a deep breath, and the guy goes right back to being Mr. Scary.

“M
OM,” I SAY BEFORE
I’ve even opened the screen door to the apartment, “can you please explain to me why you thought it would be a good idea to leave your innocent daughter alone with a potential serial rapist?”

But then I realize that I’m talking to an empty room. The ledger is out on the kitchen table, and the ceiling fan has blown some of the bills onto the linoleum floor, but the plastic chair Mom usually sits in, whining and moaning, is empty.

I figure she’s probably gone to the bathroom to get a tissue to blow her nose, but as I walk farther into the room, I hear it: giggling, coming from her bedroom.

If you know my mother, you know that she is the most non-giggly person on Earth. She stopped giggling, I think, a little before my dad left, and never started again. She works sixteen hours a day, so she’s more of a businesslike, head-on-straight type, who only thinks of the practical. Which is why I have nothing but serviceable, lacking-any-semblance-of-style clothes to wear tomorrow. Goofing off, playing games, enjoying life—these do not exist in her world.

I stand in the doorway of her room and see her lying on her bed faceup. She’s twirling the phone cord in her hand like a teenager and saying, “Oh, but you don’t!” in some flirty tone I think should be reserved for paid escorts. Not moms. Ew.

Mom flirting is one of those arts that should be buried forever, like contra dancing.

But wait. Who is my mom flirting with?

She jumps up when she sees me, and her tone quickly turns businesslike. “I’ll talk to you later,” she says, and almost hangs up before she finishes speaking. Then she grins. “So!”

“Whatever, Mom. I’m not three. Who was that?”

“Who? Oh. The bagel deliveryman.”

“You’re dating the bagel delivery guy?”

She is biting her lip, kind of like a sex kitten. “What? No. I was just scheduling our deliveries for the fall season.”

“And flirting.”

“I was not,” she says resolutely, sitting down at her ledger. “Seriously, Gwen. I am too busy to flirt. Besides, it doesn’t hurt to be nice to our vendors. I don’t want him blabbing all over the island that we don’t bake our own bagels.”

“Oo-kay,” I say, even though I don’t believe it. We get a dozen bagels delivered every day and we usually end up throwing them out, because only a couple of people on the island eat them, and one of them is this senile geezer who vowed to write a letter to the governor of New Jersey decrying our establishment as anti-Semitic if we stopped supplying them. I need to let the flirting thing drop, because the fact that my mom might have a sex life is not something I want to think of right now. Actually, it’s not something I want to think of ever.

Of course, not wanting to think about something is a sure way to end up thinking about it. I try to wipe the image out of my mind, but I can’t remember the thing I wanted to talk to her about. Oh, right. Mr. Scary. Mr. Potential Rapist. “Um. Yeah. Why did you hire that guy? Did we officially kill off all the normal citizens of Cellar Bay? Or did he?”

She waves her hand at me. “He’s fine. He’s Melinda’s grandson.”

“He is?” I blurt out. Now that I think of it, it does totally explain why he doesn’t have a decent haircut.

She nods. “I’ll admit I didn’t know what to expect. Melinda just told me that her grandchild, Chris, was coming to town and really needed a job to get back on his feet again. And I think I owe her a favor.”

She’s admiring my atrocious haircut again. I reach into the refrigerator and pull out a Vitaminwater. “Get back on his feet?”

“I don’t know what she meant. It’s all ancient history, anyway. And I’m not going to pry. He just came to stay with Melinda because his mother is traveling in a show.”

“You mean the prostitute?”

“She’s in show business,” Mom says, correcting me, lifting her chin as if it’s the noblest profession ever. Unfortunately, my mom fails to realize that most traveling show people are psychotic, restless souls, many of whom have horns growing out of their heads or other freakish characteristics that make them worthy of an audience. And any offspring of a woman who wears skintight snakeskin dresses cannot be sane. Period.

I clear my throat. “Did you get references?”

“I don’t need references. Melinda is a good enough reference for me.”

“But do you even know anything about him?”

“Like?”

“Like how old he is. Whether he can handle money. Whether he counts decapitating small animals as one of his hobbies.”

She glares at me. “He’s eighteen. And he’s fine.”

“But he freaks me out,” I say weakly.

This comes out as a this-conversation-is-over growl: “Luckily, you will be in school and won’t have to deal with him.” And she turns back to her ledger.

Right. Luckily, I’ll be at school. Never thought I’d be saying that.