“I’m afraid I couldn’t like him without a spice of human naughtiness.”
—Little Women
The whine of the handheld vacuum sucking up dead bugs and dust balls muffled the ding of the bell over the gift-shop door. A week had passed since the so-called media preview, bringing us ever closer to May. Little by little, we were getting ready for the season, though when it came to dirty jobs like this one, “we” mostly meant me.
I thought about crawling out from under the display table to see who’d walked in, but it was most likely Amy raiding the candy. Or Meg, since the store was the one part of the business that interested her. She liked to say she was rearranging the jewelry displays and then spend an hour trying things on. That was what Mom referred to as everyone helping in their own way.
“Bad time?” asked a voice that did not belong to either of my sisters.
I crab-crawled backwards so fast the back of my head probably had splinters from scraping the underside of the table. “Um, hey. Hudson?”
It sounded like I was iffy on his name, when the real mystery was what he was doing here. Mom hadn’t breathed a word about a return visit. If she had, I might have showered after my morning run.
He held out a hand, but I didn’t take it. My palms were sticky with grime, and I wasn’t convinced he had the strength to lift me without injuring himself.
“You’re back.” I scrambled to my feet. “Obviously.”
“Not an astral projection,” he agreed, gaze straying to my legs. Hopefully he was checking out the muscles, not whatever filth I’d picked up under the table.
“Just passing through?” I tried to sound casual, but I could tell from the twitch of his lips that Hudson saw through me.
“Nope.”
My heart did a somersault. I should have been hearing cash-register sound effects, but I was mostly thinking about the guy standing in front of me in another faded concert T-shirt, with the clunky glasses that did nothing to hide his laughing eyes. “Really?”
“There was stiff competition from the clogging dynasty, but you edged them out.”
“Put that in your wooden shoes, losers.”
Hudson leaned closer, like he was about to share a secret. “I don’t want to say it was my influence, because Andrea doesn’t give a shit what I think, but you definitely had my vote.”
“Thanks. I think?”
“Don’t mention it. You can pay me in old candy.”
He grinned at me before turning in a slow circle. “Pretty rad you have your own store. This would have been my dream as a kid.”
“It’s no Dollar General, but we try.” I watched Hudson spin a rack of embossed leather bookmarks. “How long will you be here?”
“Sick of me already? That hurts.” He pretended to trace the track of a tear down his cheek.
“I don’t know how long this kind of thing takes. We’ve been written up before, but it was more like ‘Top Ten Things to Do If Your Car Breaks Down on This One Stretch of Highway.’ And we were number nine.”
“I don’t know if we can top that kind of hard-hitting journalism, but we’ll hang around for a few weeks at least. Sounds like there’s a big event May first we absolutely cannot miss?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I made an executive decision not to think about Hudson witnessing the school tours, because the alternative was to collapse in a heap of boneless flesh and humiliation.
“Your mom and my mom are working out the details right now.”
“Like what?”
“You have to be nice to me. It’s in the contract.”
“Well, forget it, then.”
He threw a grin over his shoulder before wandering to a wall-mounted display of books. Or, rather, book.
“It’s mostly waivers and releases. Letting us take pictures. That kind of thing.” His head scanned back and forth like he was at a tennis match. “That’s a lot of Little Women.”
“Especially considering everyone who comes here has already read it.” I pulled a dust rag from my waistband and half-heartedly brushed off a few spines.
Hudson plucked a book from the shelf and turned it over to read the back. “Is it just different covers? For people who want to collect them all?”
“Mostly. There’s a shorter version for kids. Less death.”
“But the strangling scene is my favorite.”
“Yeah, well. That was a one-time-only special.”
“Lucky me.” Hudson moved to the section catering to our younger clientele. From the barrel we had repurposed as a display, he grabbed a pink calico bonnet and set it on top of his head like a maraschino cherry. “How do I look?”
“Fetching. All you need is the matching parasol.” Only the most loaded visitors shelled out for dress-up gear, so the clothes tended to hang around until they were too faded and limp to sell.
The door to the storeroom opened and Meg emerged, blowing on the top of a soda can.
“Do you have the candle catalog?” She took a sip of warm Dr. Pip, the least popular of our off-brand beverages. “The Sweet ’n’ Glow one, not Summer Scentsations.”
It always took a few seconds to adjust to Shopping Meg, who was approximately two thousand times more focused than Regular Meg. And yet even in this rare moment of being tuned in, she had no clue that I was the last person on the planet who would care about overpriced blobs of wax.
When I shook my head, she glanced at the counter, knuckling aside a padded envelope. Sighing, she turned to go.
“That’s it?”
Meg shrugged. “I don’t see it.”
She slipped out of sight, sucking on her lukewarm soda. Hopefully I’d never be buried under an avalanche and need to rely on my sister to lead the search party.
Hudson leaned out from behind a display. “Is this what I think it is?” His arm swung forward to reveal a doll with yarn braids, stitched-on eyes, and a green plaid dress. Grinning, he held the cloth face next to mine. “The likeness is uncanny. Except for the outfit.” He snuck another look at my legs. “I can’t believe you have your own doll.”
“It’s not my doll.”
“You know what I mean.” He lifted the skirt to peek underneath.
“Uh, creepy much?”
“I thought it might be a puppet.”
“Ha. They wish.” The image was a little too close to the truth for comfort.
Hudson handed me the Jo March doll. “Hold this a second.”
“What? Why?” I was still sputtering when he took out his phone and snapped a picture.
He glanced at the screen, smiling at what he saw. “Nice.”
“I bet.”
“What’s behind the glass?” He lifted his chin at a display case mounted on the wall.
“You know how in the book Amy’s supposed to be artistic? This is IRL Amy’s attempt to ‘embody all aspects of her character.’ She hasn’t really found her medium yet, so she keeps experimenting.”
He bent to squint at one of the objects behind the protective panel. “Is that a Pokémon?”
“From her ‘sculpture’ phase.”
“Michelangelo better watch his back.” He edged a few inches to the side, pointing at a rumpled sheet of paper. “Self-portrait?”
“I think it’s actually supposed to be Taylor Swift.”
“Watercolors are tricky.”
“Apparently. FYI, her new thing is flower arranging, so don’t set down your water glass unless you want to find a bunch of dried plants in it.”
He moved off, leaving me to wonder if I’d come across too harsh. It wasn’t that I cared how Amy spent her spare time, or whether her art sucked, except when I was supposed to pretend it didn’t. What bugged me was that she acted like borrowing her personality from a book made her a better daughter. As if you could measure love by the number of times you hung out at the paint-your-own-ceramics place.
“What’s this?” Hudson had stepped around a shoulder-height divider into the far corner of the store. “Oh. Oh wow.” Even before the flash went off, I knew what he’d found.
“Those are really old.” I joined him in front of the framed array of eight-by-ten photographs that lined the back of the store. It was a Wall of Shame, preserving the costumed version of our childhood. Way more pictures existed of Young Me onstage than off, in case anyone wasn’t clear on Mom’s priorities.
“But Jo. The memories.” He put a hand to his heart while pretending to admire an image of me with my hands clasped, like I was praying for someone to fix my criminally short bangs. “So precious.”
I grunted. He was rubbing up against a subject I preferred to drop. And then bury in a deep hole. With a haunted subdivision built on top.
“How old are you here?”
“Ten or eleven, maybe?” Like I didn’t know. The bangs were a dead giveaway. In fifth grade there had been a minor outbreak of bobs among the girls in my class. When I asked if I could chop my hair off too, Mom explained that Jo needed long hair, because of the famous part in the story where she sells it when her father gets sick. She offered bangs as a compromise.
In hindsight, that was the line in the sand—or, rather, across my forehead. The beginning of the end.
“Did you do that to yourself?”
“Believe it or not, my mother paid someone.”
“What’s this one?” He pointed to the picture two frames over. “I’m guessing from the tinsel it must be Christmas?”
I sighed from the bottom of my soul. “Every friggin’ year.”
“That’s pretty much how holidays work.”
“We do that scene for the school tours,” I clarified. “Even though they’re in May.”
“Right.” He squinted at the photo. “Who’s the rando? Did somebody rush the stage?”
“You mean Beth?” I pointed at that year’s version, Ruby Xie. She’d been one of my favorite fake sisters. Not too sappy, mostly punching the clock with us because as summer jobs went, pretending to be sick was easier than peddling fast food.
“What happened to her?”
“She graduated, so we hired somebody else the next summer. The circle of life. Or death, in this case.” I pointed out a few of the other Beths we’d employed in the past, including the memorable summer my cousin Jasper had filled in for a week while that season’s Beth went to a music festival in Tennessee.
“Who’s your Beth this year?”
“We’ll find out Tuesday.” I hesitated, not sure how deep of a dive he and Andrea were planning. “Are you coming to auditions?”
“Will you be there?”
“No choice.”
“Okay, then. Sign me up.”
“If you’re sure you can handle that much excitement.”
“Is it like a cattle call? Hundreds of hopefuls lining up with their headshots?”
“I think the most we ever had was seven. Which is a lot when you consider what they’re signing on for.”
“Pink bonnets?”
“Ritual humiliation.” Though at least our Beths, like Laurie, didn’t have the added layer of Meet my bizarro family, to whom I am genetically related! I stretched a hand to the nearest photo, covering my face with the pad of my thumb. “Imagine your face here. Now picture your entire social circle staring as you make speeches about being virtuous and sweet.”
“I figured it was mostly tourists. Do people give you crap?”
“Not to my face.” It would almost be better if they did tease me. That would mean it was okay to laugh, instead of being too horrified to mention my not-so-secret shame. “But I can feel them looking at me.”
“And that’s bad?”
“I just want to be the one who gets to decide what people see. Of me.”
Hudson lifted a faux quill pen from the display on the counter and pressed the ballpoint against his palm. “Defining your own brand is crucial.”
It sounded a little like something Laurie would say, though I was sure Hudson meant it in a more intellectual way. “Or getting to decide if you even want to have a brand.”
He returned the pen to the canister. “As opposed to what?”
“Being normal. Anonymous.”
He held up his phone. I blinked as the flash went off in my eyes.
“Excuse you.”
“Sorry. It’s just—photography helps me see things. You know?”
I shrugged, because I wasn’t sure I did know, but Hudson didn’t look up from his phone.
“Nope,” he said, still studying the screen. “Doesn’t track.”
I moved to stand beside him, wondering what Hudson saw in a picture of me with a display of Little Women coloring books peeking from behind my shoulder. “Our fine selection of souvenirs?”
“You blending in with the crowd.”
“Because I’m so weird?”
“I’m saying this is not a girl who disappears.” Slipping his phone back in his pocket, Hudson smiled at the flesh-and-blood me.
It was like another flash going off, this one inside my brain. I wasn’t used to compliments, unless you counted the backhanded ones from my mom. Good job not antagonizing your sister today, Jo. So nice to see you in a dress for a change!
“It would be cool if I could, though. Cut ties and vanish. Later, haters.” I pictured an empty spot in the middle of the stage, maybe a puff of colored smoke.
“Yeah.” It was almost a sigh, his voice softening with surprise. He studied my face like he’d discovered something new there. “Let me know if you figure out that trick.”