So he wasn’t going to admit right out that he’d been leaving things. I smiled too.
“I’ve been thinking,” Leo said. “What if Lisette hid the ring in the tunnels after the play the night she died? That would explain why she had it during the performance but not at the hotel.”
“That’s a good theory,” I said. “We should both keep trying to figure it out.”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “Maybe we can send each other letters about that too.”
But we both knew that the whole point of finding out about Lisette had been finding out about her together, and we both knew that there wouldn’t be any way to get to the tunnels next summer with the theater gone.
“Thanks,” Leo said when we got to my house. “For doing the tour with me even though it got us in so much trouble.”
“Thanks for asking me to be part of it.”
“I’m sure I’ll see you around,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You too.”
It was not a great good-bye.
I stood on the sidewalk and watched Leo push his bike the rest of the way up the street. I didn’t want to go inside. It felt like if I did, I would officially be fired and have no way to spend time with Leo. If I stayed outside, I could pretend like we were saying good-bye on any normal afternoon. Like we’d see each other again in the evening at the Summerlost Festival and make jokes and listen to the music and watch the night fall.
When I did go inside I walked straight through the sprinkler even though I was wearing my costume. The water spattered my blouse and skirt and made dots on my leather sandals. I opened my hands so they could get wet too. Before I went in the house, I made a wet handprint on the blue door.
“Why are you home?” Miles asked. My mom looked over from the kitchen table where she was working on more lesson plans.
“Leo and I got fired,” I said. “Because of the tour.”
Before either of them could ask me any more questions I headed for the stairs. I took off my peasant costume and put on shorts and a T-shirt and flopped down on the bed.
I heard someone open the door.
“Do you want to play Life?” Miles asked from the doorway.
I said yes because what else was I going to do. At least he didn’t seem mad at me anymore.
Miles went and got the box from his room. We set up the game together. I took the yellow car and Miles took the red one.
“Remember how Dad hated this game?” Miles asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “He thought it was all about money. And he was right. Because the person with the most money wins.”
“Maybe we should make it so the person who gets the most kids wins,” Miles said.
“Why not,” I said.
We played four games and then Miles said, “I wish we could watch Times of Our Seasons. I’m sick of playing Life.”
The two of us didn’t even put the game away. Too many pieces—all that money, all those teeny peg people and property deeds, all the cars and cards—and the house was too hot. We both flopped down in the carpet in our pile of fake money and stared out the diamond-paned window at the trees moving beyond the glass. After a while Miles got up and left, and I went over and opened the window to see the trees better. The money went scooting and skating across the floor when the hot breeze came in.
I looked at the box lid that said THE GAME OF LIFE and I thought about how Times of Our Seasons was also pretend life. None of it was real.
I thought, I’m sick of playing Life too.
ACT III
1.
When I went into the costume shop the next morning, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me.
“Hello,” Meg said. “I hear that you’re no longer employed at concessions.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Gary seemed very upset yesterday,” Meg said.
“He was. He told me that I’d desecrated the uniform.”
“Ah,” she said. “But you still plan on volunteering here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Unless you want to fire me.”
“No.” Meg looked at me with those sharp eyes. I knew it wasn’t possible to take an X-ray of me and see the murky gray mass of sadness and frustration and anger stuck around my head, my heart, my lungs. But if anyone could sense those feelings, I thought it might be Meg.
Meg had to know about the tour. And Lisette was her friend. Did Meg feel like I’d been asking her about Lisette just to find out information for the tour?