I’d never had to lie in wait for someone before. It was kind of hard. I put the bike on the sidewalk that led up to our house. Then I sat on the steps wearing the helmet so that I’d be ready to go the minute he came by. I sat behind the porch pillar just in case, even though he’d never noticed me before.
It didn’t take long. As soon as he was two houses past ours I jumped on my bike and followed him.
He rode straight down the street. He stopped and waited for a light so I stopped too. I made it through after him.
He headed in the direction of the college campus. We rode past fraternities that used to be regular houses. One of them had a rope swing hanging from a tree out front, and another had a yard that was nothing but gravel.
Then we came to the best part of the campus, the forest. It was my dad’s favorite part because of the pine trees that grew there. They were almost as old as the school and stood very tall and straight. The groundskeeper put Christmas lights on the tallest one every year.
The forest was big enough to feel quiet but small enough that it didn’t feel creepy. A waterfall and a couple of sculptures were hidden among the trees. And outside of the forest was a grassy quad where my mom used to play Ultimate Frisbee when she was a teenager.
Nerd-on-a-Bike turned into the forest and rode down the squiggly sidewalks under the trees.
He rode past the quad.
He rode toward the middle of campus to the theater, which looked like it got picked up out of old England and set right down in Utah. And then I realized where he was going.
The Summerlost Festival.
Of course.
I should have known.
The Summerlost Festival in Iron Creek was the third-biggest Shakespearean festival west of the Mississippi River. It happened every year on the college campus during the summertime. A big billboard told you all about it as you came into town:
LOSE YOURSELF IN SUMMER AND GO BACK IN TIME AT THE SUMMERLOST FESTIVAL
The Greenshow they did out on the lawn before the plays was fun and also scary because they sometimes pulled people out of the audience to be part of it, and there were always crazy props. One time they had my dad get up to be a prince in a skit. He had on tan shorts and a blue polo shirt like he usually did when he was on vacation. The actors in their tights and peasant dresses surrounded him. He had to wear huge wooden shoes and stomp around on the tiny stage on a quest to rescue one of the actors, who had been cast into a deep sleep by a witch’s spell. My dad had to pretend to kiss her. His face went so red. “My prince!” the princess exclaimed to my dad when she woke up.
My mother could not breathe, she was laughing so hard. When Dad sat down, he shook his head. I knew he’d hated it, but he’d been a good sport. Mom hugged him and I felt proud of him even though it had been sort of awful to watch.
Another time, a few years later, we came to see the show and Ben was having one of his hard days and couldn’t stop screaming and yelling. Finally my mom took Ben away to the grassy quad and he rolled down the hill over and over, like a puppy. When he came back, happy and big-eyed and sweaty, he even sat on my lap in a kind of curly way like a puppy would have, but he was a boy.
My brother was a boy and now he’s not anything.
8.
“Hello,” someone said, and I looked up. Nerd-on-a-Bike. He’d caught me. My face must have looked funny thinking about Ben because the boy’s face changed. He’d looked as if he was going to say something to me, like he’d had all the words ready to go, and then he said something else instead.
“You live on my street,” he said. He had dark hair and freckles. I expected his eyes to be brown, but they were hazel. “In the Wainwrights’ old house.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I was going to ask why you were following me.”
“I wanted to see where you were going dressed like that,” I told him. “I should have realized. The festival. Do you work here?”
“Yeah.”
“How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
So I could work too. The thought seemed to come out of nowhere. I didn’t know I wanted a job. I didn’t know what I wanted, except to go back to how things used to be, and that could never happen, but I wanted it so bad that it didn’t leave room to want much else.
“Are they hiring?” I asked.
“We can find out,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Cedar Lee,” I said.