We find a spot in the middle of the theater, our butts sticking to the metal seats as we sit shoulder to shoulder with every co-worker we’ll have for the next few months. Seb and Marcus plop down next to us, chattering away about their job assignments. Seb’s in the rabbit costume again—now I’m wondering if Mr. Prendergast just copied the costume list from last year—and Marcus got the water park since he’s already CPR certified.
This is Seeley’s and my second year, but only the first one that I’ll be considered a full-fledged member of the team. Yet another hazard of having an August birthday: everybody else in my grade got their driver’s licenses and upgraded working papers way before me. Luckily, my dad has been doing Mr. P’s books since the dawn of time, so even though the official stance of the park is you have to be sixteen to work here, Dad fixed it so I could start last year when Seeley did. There were tons of rules about what I could and couldn’t do, but at least I was with my best friend.
And okay, I definitely hoped for a cooler job assignment this year, literally and figuratively, but whatever. I can work with this. No matter what, I’m still determined to make this the absolute best, most carefree, oh-my-god-remember-the-time-I-can’t-even-believe-you-did-that summer ever. But first, I gotta survive Magic Castle’s orientation.
Seeley looks over to the side, and I follow her line of sight, scanning the crowd for familiar faces. Angie waves from across the way, and I wave back, even though she probably really only means it for Seeley. I notice Nick and Jessa off to the left, along with a group of the other pirate divers home from college. Jessa says something I can’t make out and they all laugh, because of course they do; she’s funny and perfect and gorgeous and will probably still be cast as the park princess even when she’s 57,000 years old.
“You’re staring,” Seeley whispers, leaning into me. “Young loooove.” She giggles, ducking her head. Good thing too, because I was about to flick it.
Feedback from the microphone screeches loudly across the audience, cutting me off before I can respond. I glance at Seeley to let her know this isn’t over, but she crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue so I know that it is.
I turn my attention back to the stage, my eyes glued to Mr. P and the way the straps of his suspenders strain as he steps out and bows. He taps hard against the mic in his hand, which sends more thunder roaring across the crowd, followed by a jolt of screaming feedback.
“I guess this is on.” He chuckles, his mustache twitching under his nose. “Welcome back for another great year.” This is followed by an obligatory round of applause. Only some of us mean it. I, for one, definitely do.
“It’s going to be a great year here at Magic Castle Playland. A great, great year,” he snuffles. “And also, a very special year—”
Seeley gives me a look and I give her one right back. We heard this same speech last year, and we’ll probably hear it a thousand times more before we’re totally grown.
“—because this will also be our last year here at Magic Castle Playland.”
Or maybe not.
I can’t even hear what he’s saying anymore, my focus narrowed to a tiny pinprick of screaming inside my head while I stare at Seeley. Places like Magic Castle Playland don’t just close. That’d be like Disney shutting down its whole operation overnight, or rather a small, super run-down, beat-up, falling- apart, probably-wouldn’t-pass-any-sort-of-official-inspection version of Disney. But still.
A bunch of voices clamor at once, everybody talking over each other and drowning one another out. Mr. P makes a downward gesture with his hands, urging us into silence. I look around wide-eyed at everybody else, confusion and disbelief twisting our faces into caricatures of ourselves.
I swallow hard. “This is a joke, right?”
Seeley shrugs.
“I’m sure you all have questions, and we’ll get to those later. For now, we need to keep our focus on opening day,” he says, as if he didn’t just cause a nuclear explosion among his staff. He keeps talking, rambling on about team meetings and schedules like everything’s fine, even though it definitely isn’t, while I sit here trying to hold it together.
“Okay, guys, it’s our last year here. Let’s go out with a bang,” he says finally, dabbing the sweat off his face with a rag. “Metaphorically speaking, naturally.”
And then he’s gone, and I’m stuck in place with my jaw hanging open trying to figure out what just happened.
“Wow.” Seb stretches his arms up. “I can’t believe he’s closing Magic Castle.”
I’d say something, but the panic alarms are still sounding in my head, and I can’t form an actual thought . . . so instead I focus on Seb’s forearm, and how the scar he got skateboarding last year—an unfortunate accident with a fence that he claims came out of nowhere—crisscrosses over his dark brown skin.
“He’s old, and this place is falling apart,” Marcus says. “It sucks, but it’s not like it was going to be open forever anyway.”
And okay, that snaps me out of it. “Of course it was supposed to be open forever!” I try to run my hands through my hair, but they get snagged up in the frizz. “Guys, come on. This isn’t like when Arby’s closed and we were all, ‘Oh, that sucks, now we have to drive ten minutes away to the McDonald’s.’ This is our park! It’s been the one constant in our whole, dumb, messed-up lives. We can’t walk away from it.”
“What choice do we have, Lou?” Seeley asks. Her words are quiet and soft, like if she says them too loud I might shatter.
I take a deep breath and stare down at all the little designs she’s drawn on my Converse. “I don’t know.”
Seb tugs on my hair, and I flick my eyes to his. “Come on, Elouise. We gotta get down to the costume crew meeting. I’ll walk with you.”
“Okay.” I swallow hard and nod, attempting to steel myself for the next meeting, the one where I’ll have to sit next to Jessa and try not to rip her dress off like one of Cinderella’s jealous stepsisters. I am Drizella on her worst day when it comes to her. I can’t help it. She stole my prince, er, diving pirate or whatever.
“Try not to kill her,” Seeley whispers as Jessa and Nick walk by. I raise my eyebrows but don’t make a peep; it’s freaky how well we know each other.
I mean, it’s not that I hate Jessa or anything. You pretty much can’t. She’s perfect; totally, utterly, 100 percent perfect. She’s sweet and kind, and disgustingly beautiful. She’s the kind of person who would probably get out of her car to help a turtle cross the road, the kind of person whose teeth are straight even without braces. I literally have no rational reason to hate her. None. Zero. And Seeley tells me this on the daily.
Except Jessa’s the princess, and I’m the hot dog. And she’s got Nick, and I’ve got a farmer’s tan, a dog that ran away, and a best friend that everybody seems to like way more than me.
Jessa went to the private school one town over, and Nick went to mine, but they met at the park’s orientation last summer. I guess that means they’ve been together for about a year, if you count all the times they broke up and got back together—which I personally don’t, even though they still talked and hung out during their “breaks.” I think the whole thing is weird. I think it’s even weirder that breaking up was always her idea. Why would she ever do that?
And if you don’t count the breaks, they’ve only been together for like six months tops and they weren’t even consecutive. That’s not that serious. I mean, yeah, my last relationship barely lasted six weeks, but we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about them.
People even have a name for them, a ridiculous combination of both their first names: Nissa. God, people are so annoying. Even more annoying because I’ve been trying to get everyone to call me Elle instead of Elouise for the better part of a decade, and all these two have to do is kiss and they’re blessed with a nickname. It makes me want to scream. Except I can’t because they are literally walking five feet in front of me, and that would be weird.
Seeley waves as she and Marcus cut left to go meet with the other ride operators and water park people, while Seb and I follow Nissa down the path. I don’t even know why Nick’s over here, to be honest. Okay, yes, his dive pool is right around the corner from the little castle where Jessa and I have to meet the rest of the costume crew—not that Jessa even really counts, since she’ll spend most of her day in a beautiful gown riding around a cool fountain while the rest of us are busy trying not to die of heatstroke—but still.
Nick stops short when we get to the castle, pulling Jessa into a kiss right in front of us. I watch with a frown, trying really hard not to think about last summer, when it was just me and him and a broken-down car in the pouring rain. Come on, if that’s not the epitome of a teenage dream, I don’t know what is.
I mean, there I was, furiously pedaling my trusty Schwinn through the nastiest pop-up shower ever, cursing my luck that the storm clouds couldn’t wait the ten minutes it takes to bike from my house to Seeley’s before unleashing their fury on the world. I took a sharp turn onto Route 50, and boom, there was a very rain-soaked Nick Mulholland looking under the hood of his car like it was about to bite him.
For a half second, I thought about just pedaling on by—the whiteness of his teeth and the clinginess of his T-shirt triggering some kind of instinctual fight-or-flight response in my brain. But no, I was not about to give in to that. I know a little something about cars thanks to Seeley’s dad, and if Nick needed a knight in shining armor to come fix his, then dammit, I was going to be that knight.
The more my bike slowed, though, the more my heart sped up, and just when I thought I was having an honest-to-god heart attack, Nick looked up and gave me that face—you know the one: Squinty-Eyed-Cute-Boy-Smirking-in-the-Rain™.
It was like the whole world went quiet right then, and he said, “Hey, Elouise, what’s a pretty girl like you doing out in this mess?”
I didn’t even know what to do with that. People don’t really go around calling me pretty—I mean, I’m not a beast or anything, but when your best friend is Seeley Jendron it’s kind of hard to compare—so anyway, I just sorta stared at him for a minute, and then I got off my bike and walked over to his car without saying a word. I am so smooth like that.
I started messing with the spark plug wires, just making sure everything was connected at first. Nick watched what I did, and then reached in and started doing it too. We worked shoulder to shoulder until we got it started again. Eventually I did talk to him—I’m not a total space cadet—and right before I left, he wiped a little grease off my face and gave me the biggest smile.
Now, if this were a movie, he totally would have kissed me right then, and it would have been AMAZING, and then we would have lived happily ever after and had lots of little floppy-haired, squinty-eyed babies or something. But that’s not what happened because, hi, I’m Elouise. I’m the hot dog. So no. We didn’t kiss. Instead he leaned forward a little and . . .
. . . started sneezing. Like uncontrollably. So no, no kiss, but still, total magic. He even offered me a ride home, but it had stopped raining by then and I didn’t think my bike would fit in his car anyway.
I swear he looked disappointed when I said no, and right before I pedaled away, he said we should hang soon and to make sure I found him at orientation. I thought my head was gonna explode. I’d been swooning over him since he transferred to my school a few months earlier, and now he was asking me to hang? Unbelievable.
So, the next day, I marched right up to him at orientation, totally prepared to say that he was sure to be my favorite diving pirate ever and yes, let’s hang out in a way that doesn’t involve rain and loose spark plug wires. But right as I got to him, Jessa fell in his lap.
Literally.
She literally fell in his lap.
She was trying to climb over the seats to get to her friend, but her flip-flop got stuck, and she went ass over elbows onto his legs. I’ll never forget the expression on Nick’s face when he looked down at her—it was the way he looked at me the night before times about a million.
I mean, it makes sense, I get it. I have eyes. But for one bright, shimmering second, the universe considered giving me everything I ever wanted. It was right there at my fingertips, and it was amazing. I want it back. I want—
“Earth to Elouise.” Karen, my team leader, snaps her fingers in my face, snagging my attention to her. “Come on,” Karen continues in that stuck-up voice that only two semesters of college can give you. “We’re all over here.”
I don’t know why it always seems to happen like this when people go away to school, but it does. Last year, Karen was awesome. We hung out the whole summer. But apparently, a couple semesters a few hours down the highway has turned her into little miss finger snapper. Whatever. I hop up on the ledge near Seb, but he’s too busy talking to the girl next to him to really notice. I watch him run his hands back and forth over his curly black hair, like he does whenever he’s nervous. He’s been growing it out for a while now, after a lifetime of having a close fade.
Karen stands in front of us, tapping her pen on the clipboard. There’s a sticker on the back of it from her school, and I wonder if personalizing a clipboard is one of the perks of being a team leader. Also, I wonder where she got the sticker. Was she packing her bags, ready to head home, when suddenly she decided she just had to have a sticker for her shift leader clipboard? Or did she buy too many stickers and not have enough places to stick them? Is this the sad last sticker, the one without a home, without a purpose? I wonder if I’ll get a sticker for my clipboard someday, but then I remember there won’t be a clipboard because Mr. P is closing things down.
Wonderful.
Everything gets a little fuzzy and warm. I can’t imagine not having this place. No matter what happened in life, no matter what changed or who left, this place was always here. Crap, I can’t handle this right now.
Jessa plops down beside me, letting her legs kick and dangle excitedly beneath her. “Hi.” She grins. “Did you have a good year? How was junior prom? Have you started thinking about colleges yet? Fill me in.”
“It’s good,” I say, and drop my head back because she just asked me thirty-seven million questions and “It’s good” answers exactly none of them. Okay, deep breath, start over. “School was good. Prom was fun—Seeley and I went alone together. And I’m pretending college is not a thing until my guidance counselor makes me.”
Jessa looks at me with wide eyes. “Oh my god, my mother was already sending me for college visits sophomore year. You really should be thinking about this by now, Elouise.”
“Noted.” I sigh, wishing we could talk about anything else.
Jessa looks away, her perfectly curled hair swaying in the gentle breeze. A group of people walks by, and she waves. I don’t recognize them, but that’s not unusual; Jessa knows everybody. It’s like she’s part of the welcome packet or something: here’s your uniform, here’s your W-4, and here’s a beautiful blond princess to highlight how absolutely inadequate you are.
Silence settles over us, and I realize this is my cue to say something great, something important and relevant and interesting.
“Did Nick take you to prom?” I ask, like I don’t know, like I wasn’t there with Craig, the boy who runs the water pistol game, even though I’m a year younger and go to a completely different school. We even all took a picture together and laughed about being the Magic Castle crew. My foot is so far down my throat, all I taste is sock.
Jessa opens her mouth to say something but snaps it shut when Karen comes back flipping through pages in front of her and underlining something with her pen. “Hey, Jessa,” she says, like it’s a relief just to say her name.
“Hey, Karen, how was school? When did you get back?”
“Last week,” she says. “It’s so weird being back home, living with my parents again.” Karen shakes her head like she’s some wise thirty-year-old and not some nineteen-year-old kid with the same exact posters on her wall that I helped her hang last year.
“I bet,” Jessa says. “I can’t wait for college orientation.”
Karen smiles all patronizing-like. “Orientation is a very important part of the freshman experience. Where are you going again?”
“Vassar.”
Of course she is.
“I can’t believe this is going to be our last year here.” Jessa’s voice sounds a little sad, like she’s upset about it too.
I glance up, gripping the edge of the retaining wall a little tighter and letting the busted concrete scratch against my palm. This is my place, not theirs, and I’m ill-equipped to share my grief today. These two have everything—the nice houses in the better town, the parents with fabulous marriages, the great relationships, the perfect colleges—the least they can do is leave me alone to wallow in this dirt pile of an amusement park that I call home.
Karen snaps her gum. “Mr. P must be really bad off to close it.”
“He has a grandkid in Boca,” I blurt out, thinking back to all the conversations I’ve overheard while my dad did his books. I mean, yeah, I’m mad he’s trying to close the place, but the idea of someone else talking shit about him really pisses me off.
Karen narrows her eyes and does that half-laugh thing people do when they think they’re better than you. “Okay, well, whatever,” she says. “Anyway, Jessa, you’re the princess again, and Ari is the prince. You’ll need to get with him to plan your act.” She turns back toward me, pointing the pen right in my face. “And you, you’re the hot dog. Stay around the food service area. Got it?”
“Got it, boss.” I salute, biting my lip to keep from laughing.
When Karen is far enough away to be out of earshot, Jessa bursts out giggling. “Oh my god, she’s taking this whole team leader thing a little too seriously, don’t you think? It’s like, calm down, you’re barely six months older than me.”
“I know, right?” I nod, grinning back at her, because okay, maybe Jessa’s not so bad at all.
But then Nick walks up, water still dripping from his dive shorts, and it all comes rushing back: the car, the almost-kiss, and Jessa’s terrible chair-climbing skills.
Scratch that. Jessa is the literal worst.