“Yup. It’s a mansion, all right,” Alice said, staring out at the manicured gardens that stretched past the guesthouse and the pool house and the tennis courts.
Jean and Gordie had just extracted the suitcase from the Range Rover and were hauling it down to the house’s basement entrance. We entered through the sliding doors into a velvet-curtain-lined movie theater with leather reclining chairs and a fully functional popcorn machine.
“So will your butler be joining us?” Jean said, staring at the row of stocked candy jars.
“Can you guys not judge me for having excessively materialistic parents?”
“No judgment here,” Jean said, dumping a scoop of chocolate-covered nuts into his hand as Gordie knelt down in front of the suitcase.
“I’m dying to know what’s in this thing.”
“I think we should wait for Val. Right?” Alice had a point.
“Let’s check out Greg O.’s blog.” Gordie pointed a remote at the movie screen and a search-engine window appeared. Gordie had somehow figured out how to optimize Greg O.’s blog, and random people were starting to log on.
“KINKY 3? Really, Alice?” I said, flinging off my sandals.
“I’m not KINKY 3. I’m CECIL, after my first dog,” Alice said.
“I’m PIERRE, after the rest of my name,” Jean said with his mouth full of candy.
“I’m CAKES,” I said. “My ex used to call me Sadie Cakes.”
“Aw. How endearing. My ex used to call me KINKY 3.” Gordie smiled at me and scrolled through Greg’s blog.
I was curious to know if Gordie’s ex was from our school. The only guy I ever saw him with was Reid, and Reid was straight. I knew so little about Gordie Harris since I’d stopped stalking him.
“Why are you staring at me?” Gordie said. “Do I not look like a KINKY 3?” His smile was much straighter since he’d gotten his braces off.
“Look, somebody wrote ‘OMG! I’m obsessed with the Mayans. Can you PM me? Kaycee from Seattle,’” I read.
“Our little plan is working,” Jean said.
Val finally showed up well after eight. “Sorry. I had to entertain Javi so he didn’t get pissy.”
“Okay. TMI,” Jean said.
“Not that kind of entertain, you pervert.” Val went over to Jean and flicked him on the arm. “This is the most amazing house I’ve ever seen, including in magazines.”
“Okay, Val is here. Come on. Let’s do this,” Gordie said.
I unhooked my necklace, pulled off the key, then paused. When I’d asked them all to help me, I had welcomed the moral support, but now I almost didn’t want to open the suitcase. It meant sharing the contents with four people I barely knew. It also meant unleashing a promise I had no idea how to keep.
“Open it, open it,” they all chanted.
I slid the key into the rusted metal keyhole and turned it to the right until we heard a click. Gordie grabbed the leather handle and pulled upward. My heart pounded.
We stared down at a pile of neatly stacked items: a men’s pin-striped suit, a satin robe, a wooden umbrella with a metal tip, an ancient pack of cigarettes, a leather shaving kit.
“So you said the old dude was adamant about you getting this suitcase?” Jean said.
“Yes. But he’s ninety-seven years old and hooked to a morphine drip. Clearly, he’s a little delusional.”
We sat on the floor and removed the items one by one.
Alice pulled out the suit and rummaged through the pockets. She found a striped handkerchief and a book of matches from a restaurant on Thirty-Fourth Street in New York.
“Handkerchiefs are gross,” Alice said.
“Nice suit, though,” Jean said.
I picked up a small metal box tucked between the robe and a folded cloth garment bag and opened it quickly. “What the hell is this?” I sifted through dozens of hairpins like the ones the Gatsby women wore. There were silver ones, gold ones, ones shaped like feathers, like flowers, adorned in pearls.
I dumped the hairpins onto Gordie’s thick beige carpet.
“Why would a guy have a tin of hairpins?” Val said, examining a long, pearl-studded one.
I shivered. “I don’t want to know. I. Don’t. Even. Want. To. Know.” It was as if these simple objects were channeling the evil-lizard energy.
Jean held up the folded cloth garment bag, the last item in the suitcase. Alice undid the leather buckles and pulled open the bag.
An oversize rag doll with button eyes and red yarn hair tumbled out.
“Okay, this is too disturbing. I can no longer deal with this level of creepiness.” Jean dropped the bag.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, well. I’m glad I’m now the proud owner of vintage men’s clothes, hairpins, and a freakish doll.” I was sort of relieved that the contents of the suitcase hadn’t been more insidious. I still intended to honor my promise to Mr. Upton. Maybe I’d donate the suitcase to the Smithsonian or something.
Gordie stored the badly repacked suitcase in his furnace room behind the Christmas boxes. I needed some sea air to get the lingering smell of mothballs out of my nose.
I took another breath. “Anybody want to go to the beach?”
It was Jean’s idea to build a Mayan temple out of sand and post a picture of it on Greg O.’s blog. He announced that sand castle building was his domain and we needed to follow his instructions. We dutifully obeyed and, upon unearthing a hardware store in the back of Gordie’s Range Rover, we got to work.
“Shovel,” Jean yelled. Gordie went to get it.
“Bucket,” Jean yelled. Val went to get it.
We couldn’t stop until our temple was immense and perfect.
The sky was white with stars when we finished digging the moat.
Jean wouldn’t let us look at the front of the temple until he had finished it.
“Done,” he said as the rest of us scavenged in Gordie’s car for snacks.
Jean revealed the incredibly detailed, smiling Mayan face he had carved into our temple with just a pencil and an eyebrow brush.
“Genius” was all we could say.
I took pictures and posted the best one on Greg O.’s website with the caption We built this for you. Hope you like it.
I took another picture of the five of us smiling in front of the moonlit sea and sent it to Shay with the caption Portrait of Randomness.
Gordie stood over the sand temple shaking his head. “I’m sorry, people, but I really want to roll on this.”
“No way. You can’t roll on our masterpiece,” Val said.
Jean and Gordie exchanged glances.
“It’s either we roll on it or the ocean rolls on it. Somebody’s going to flatten this thing. It might as well be us,” Jean said.
In a split second, Jean and Gordie face-dived into the temple. Alice followed. I looked at Val and shrugged. We dived and punched at the sand and rolled over the damaged structure. Alice started to sing, “Roll, roll, roll your boat, gently down the stream.” We all laughed and sang and rolled until there was hardly a trace of our sand temple left.
We collapsed on our backs and stared at the sky.
“Ow.” I turned on my side, wincing from the battering I had just inflicted on my tender rib cage.
“Sooo, is anyone thinking what I’m thinking?” Jean said, sitting up.
“You mean, naked in the ocean?” Gordie said.
“Precisely.”