He stopped and looked at me and I held out a program.
“I don’t think so,” he said, pleasantly enough, and then I turned around to see Leo shaking with laughter.
“What was that?” Leo asked.
“I’m surprised you didn’t recognize it,” I said. “It’s from a little-known part of England. A very small province.” Did they even have provinces in England? I wasn’t sure. I knew they didn’t have states.
“Really?” Leo said. “And what’s the name of this province?”
“It’s Bludge,” I said, in my terrible accent, saying the first even-sort-of-British word that came to mind.
“Oh yeah?” Leo asked. “And what’s the capital city of the province of Bludge?”
Did provinces have capitals? “Bludgeon,” I said.
That made Leo laugh so hard that he almost missed a lady with two teenagers walking past. But then he switched right into the accent and she bought a program and smiled at him.
We were walking back along the sidewalk when some boys on bikes came through. An usher waved at them to stop but they didn’t.
“They’re not supposed to cut through here during festival hours,” Leo said, “but they do it anyway because it’s faster.”
When the boys came closer, I could see that they were about our age. Spiky blond hair on one, baseball hats on all the rest. Tall socks. Shiny shirts made out of fabric that looked like plastic. Coming home from some sports practice, maybe. They were going so fast that I worried they’d slam right into us, so I followed Leo’s lead and stepped over onto the grass.
As they came by, one of them knocked Leo’s hat off his head and they all laughed.
“That’s new,” Leo said. He reached down to pick up his hat. “Usually they just yell stuff at me when they come by.” I could tell he was trying to sound like he didn’t care. It was almost working. “They think they’re so wild, but they’re kids on bikes. It’s not like they’re Hell’s Angels or something.”
“They’re like Hell’s farts,” I said, and that cracked Leo up hard enough that I could see the braces on his back teeth.
I smiled too.
“That’s perfect,” he said. “They’re Hellfarts.”
We walked past the Summerlost Theater, with its flags waving merrily and its dark-painted wood and white stucco. The wooden stairs outside were worn smooth-grooved with decades of people coming to get lost in lives that were not their own.
“Did you hear?” Leo asked, when he saw me looking. “The theater’s coming down at the end of the summer.”
“What?” I said, stunned. Did my mother know? She thought of the theater as part of the town, her childhood.
“They’re remodeling some of the other buildings, but the theater’s too much hassle, so they’re starting over. They’re tearing it down and building a new one across the street,” Leo said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“I guess I haven’t been over there yet.”
“I’ll show you after our shift,” Leo said.
11.
We rode our bikes over to the east on our way home.
An entire block was missing.
“There it is,” Leo said. “They’re building the new theater here. It’s going to be part of Iron Creek’s new civic center.”
I knew what had been there before. A bunch of small, old houses, some of them beautiful. And a doctor’s office, where I’d been once for strep throat over Christmas break. My uncle Nick ran the pharmacy and so if we ever got sick while we were in Iron Creek he’d flavor the antibiotics and also put a treat from the candy counter in the bag with our medicine.
Now, instead of the houses and the doctor’s office, there was a chain-link fence and construction equipment and workers and some blue Porta Potties lined up in a row. And most of all there was the hole.
It was huge. It would have been a lot of work. Before they dug the hole, they would have had to tear everything down. Remove all the splintered boards, tear up the lawns, break up the fences, take away the glass, pull up the foundations.
And then dig, and dig.
Where did all of it go? I wondered. Everything that used to be here?
“But if they tear the theater down,” I said, “the Summerlost Festival logo won’t make sense. It’s a picture of the theater. And the logo is all over the place. On the bottles, the programs, the signs.”
“I bet they’ll keep the logo the same,” Leo said.
“Even if the theater’s gone?”
“It’s an icon,” he said. “I guess it was around for so long that it doesn’t actually have to be here anymore to have meaning for people.”
“It’s sad,” I said to Leo.
“I know.”
Neither of us used our accents so I knew we both meant it.
12.