He reached up and rubbed some of the white makeup off his face with his fingers, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Spencer held no real surprises for them. They had, after all, also seen him arrive home from the “opera singing weekend” in high school with none of his own clothes, wearing only a tiny pair of pink girl’s pajamas. They nodded and busied themselves at the desk, sifting through the mail, checking the computer and phone for messages. When they were both bent over the desk, Spencer jerked his thumb toward the dining room door and mouthed the words, “They’re still in there.” Lola looked staggered and bit her lower lip.
“Why is the desk so sticky?” her dad asked, retracting the elbow he’d set on it.
“That was me,” Scarlett said. “I…spilled a Coke. Sorry. Have to clean it up.”
A noise came from the dining room. It could have been anything. A piece of the stage giving out. A sword hitting a wall. A unicycle falling over. And just under it, a tiny, tiny laugh. Spencer reacted almost as quickly as it happened, breaking into a massive coughing fit that drew even more attention.
“Ugh,” he said, banging on his chest. “God, so many smokers in the cast. I think, I think I have secondhand smoke disease.”
Again, their parents stared at him for a moment, and decided to dismiss it as Spencer doing something a bit odd, probably to cover up something he had personally done that they really didn’t want to know about.
“I put some mousetraps down in the kitchen earlier,” her dad said, walking to the door. “I’m going to check them, then I’m going to bed.”
Spencer and Scarlett unconsciously moved closer together to guard the way. There was nothing to be done to stop him. And then…Marlene spoke.
“There’s something in my room,” she said. “I think it’s a mouse, too. You have to come there first.”
“There’s one in your room? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Don’t worry about these,” Spencer said. “I’ll get them. I’m in the mood to kill something tonight, anyway. Why don’t you guys go to bed? You look beat.”
“Yeah,” her mother said with a yawn. “They’ll be there in the morning.”
The three of them went to the elevator, leaving Scarlett, Lola, and Spencer behind. When the coast was clear, they opened the doors and released the cast.
It had been decided to keep as few people in the hotel as possible, to reduce the risk of being heard and getting caught. Only Eric and Trevor remained behind. While Lola and Scarlett carefully restored the Metro and Sterling Suites to order, Spencer, Eric, and Trevor worked all night taking apart the stage. They formed a human chain at four-thirty, passing all the pieces of the now-dissembled set down the line to the illegally-parked van. All the bedding and curtains that had been taken down were replaced in their respective rooms.
By a little after five, Scarlett was feeling like a zombie, making her way up and down the basement stairs in the endless cycle of moving tables. She had mostly been partnered with Trevor in the carrying sequence, but this time, she turned to face Eric.
“Hey,” he said. He sounded as tired as she felt.
“Hi.”
They’d been working side by side for almost eighteen hours, so the greeting was technically pointless. Eric sat on the edge of one of the remaining tables and rubbed at the traces of white makeup around his jawline. His bruise was barely visible in the dim light.
“I feel like we were talking just a minute ago,” he said. “I was trying to explain myself, and then everything blew up around us. Nothing ever goes normally around here, does it?”
“I guess it depends on what you think normal is,” Scarlett said, not looking up. Looking up would be a disaster. She pretended to have an unnatural and absorbing interest in the containers of chemical de-icer on the ground by their feet. When you really put your mind to it, you could get interested in anything. You could almost like chemical de-icer.
It was a good thing, too, because it was only through the power of de-icer that she could withstand the next sentence.
“All I want to do is kiss you,” he said in a low voice. “It’s taking all I’ve got not to do it.”
Scarlett could almost hear a circuit in her brain sizzling its way to extinction.
“So why don’t you?” she asked.
“Because I don’t know if you want me to. Do you?”
More than anything. Almost anything.
“Do you really think you’ll dump me when you get to NYU?” she asked.
“Right now, no. But I don’t know who I’ll be then, once I’m there, once it all starts. Does that make sense? Am I the worst person in the world?”
There was probably some stupid self-help book out there that said this particularly brand of honesty was healthy and wonderful, and if Scarlett ever found that book, she was prepared to rip out those pages and eat them.
“I kind of hate that you tell the truth,” she said, her voice cracking a little.
“Me, too.”