“We-e-ell, this is not legally my signature,” she says in her pretty English accent, making a vague, wavy scribble on the form as she waggles her brows at me. “And if they don’t give me enough hours, I am heading straight to the nearest cave mansion within sixty miles.”
I don’t mean to laugh so loud, and everyone looks up, so I quickly quash the giggles and we both finish our paperwork. After we hand it in, we’re both assigned a locker and given the ugliest vests I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re the color of rotting jack-o’-lanterns. We don’t have to wear them for orientation, but we do have to wear HELLO, MY NAME IS . . . stickers. And when everyone is done slapping them onto their chests, we’re herded down the employee hall, through a steel door (with a sign reminding us to smile), and into the main lobby.
It’s huge, and our footfalls bounce around the rock walls as we all crane our necks, looking around. The entrance to the cave is at the back of the lobby, and all the stalagmites and -tites are lit with orange lights, which only ups the creep factor. We’re led across the expansive lobby past a circular information desk, a gift shop that looks like it was transported from 1890s London, and a sunken lounge area filled with couches that might have been stolen from the set of The Brady Bunch . . . all of which are the exact color of our ugly vests. I’m sensing a theme.
“Good morning, seasonal new hires,” a middle-aged man says. He, too, is wearing a pumpkin vest with a tie that has the Cavern Palace art deco logo printed all over it. I wonder if that’s mandated for the male employees, or if he bought it from the gift shop with his employee discount. “I’m Mr. Cavadini, the museum floor supervisor. Though all of you will be assigned team supervisors, those supervisors report to me. I’m the one who makes the schedules, and the person who approves your time cards. So you may think of me as the person you most want to impress for the next three months.”
He says this with all the excitement of a funeral director and manages to frown the entire time he’s speaking, but that might be because his dark blond hairline seems unnaturally low—like his forehead is half the size it should be.
“What a woeful twat,” Grace says in her tiny voice near my shoulder.
Wow. Sweet little Grace has a filthy mouth. But she’s not wrong. And as Mr. Cavadini begins lecturing us on the Cave’s history and how it attracts half a million visitors every year, I find myself looking around the lobby and scoping out the places I could be assigned—information desk, guided tours, lost and found, gift shop . . . I wonder which position would allow me to deal with as few disgruntled guests as possible. On my application, I checked off the boxes for “behind-the-scenes” and “working alone” preferences.
Café tables sit around an open balcony on the second floor, and I’m seriously hoping I don’t get stuck working in food service. Then again, if I worked in the café, I would get to stare at not only a life-size reproduction of a pirate ship suspended from the ceiling, but also a skeletal sea monster attacking said ship. File that in the “not genuine” part of the Davenports’ collection of oddities.
Movement catches my eyes. On a set of floating slate-rock stairs that curve around the pirate ship, two museum security guards in generic black uniforms are descending. I squint, not believing my eyes. How small is this town, anyway? Because one of those guards is the dark-haired dude from yesterday who was pulling his drugged-up friend off the road. Yep, that’s definitely him: the hot surfer boy with the Frankenstein scars on his arm.
My panic meter twitches.
“And now,” Mr. Cavadini says, “you’ll split up into two teams and tour the museum with a member of our security. This side, please follow our senior security officer, Jerry Pangborn, who has worked for Cavern Palace since it opened to the public forty years ago.”
He points the left side of the group toward a frail wisp of an old man whose white hair sticks up like he just exploded a beaker of chemicals in a science lab. He’s super friendly and sweet, and though he probably couldn’t stop a ten-year-old ruffian from stealing a piece of candy out of the gift shop, he eagerly steers his team of recruits to the left side of the lobby, toward a large archway marked VIVIAN’S WING.
Mr. Cavadini motions the surfer boy forward toward our group. “And this is Porter Roth. He’s worked with us for the last year or so. Some of you might have heard of his family,” he says in a bone-dry, unimpressed voice that makes me think he doesn’t think too highly of them. “His grandfather was surfing legend Bill ‘Pennywise’ Roth.”
A little o-oh ripples through the crowd as Mr. Cavadini hushes us with one hand and grumpily tells us all to meet him back here in two hours for our scheduling assignments. One side of my brain is screaming, Two hours? And the other side is trying to remember if I’ve ever heard of this Pennywise Roth guy. Is he a real celebrity, or just some local who once got fifteen minutes of fame? Because the sign on that Pancake Shack down the road proclaims its almond pancakes to be world-famous, but come on.
Mr. Cavadini heads back to employee hall, leaving us alone with Porter, who takes his sweet time strolling around the group to look us over. He’s got a stack of printouts that he’s rolled up into a tube, which he whaps against his leg as he walks. And I didn’t notice it yesterday, but he’s got a little light brown facial scruff going on—the kind of scruff that pretends to be bad-boy and sexy and rebellious, but is too well groomed to be casual. Then he’s got all these wild, loose curls of sun-streaked brown hair, which might be fine for Surfer Boy, but seem way too long and irreverent for Security Guard.
He’s getting closer, and the evader in me is not happy about this situation. I try to be cool and hide behind Grace. But she’s easily half a foot shorter than me—and I’m only five five—so I instead just find myself staring over her cropped hair directly into Porter’s face.
He stops right in front of us and briefly holds the rolled-up papers to his eye like a telescope.
“Well, all right,” he says with a lazy California drawl and grins slowly. “Guess I lucked out and got the good-looking group. Hello, Gracie.”
“Hey, Porter,” Grace answers with a coy smile.
Okay, so they know each other. I wonder if Porter’s the person who told her this job was “boring but easy.” I don’t know why I even care. I guess I’m mostly concerned that he’ll remember me from the car yesterday. Fingers crossed that he didn’t hear that cowardly squeal I belted out.
“Who’s ready for a private tour?” he asks.
No one answers.