Alex, Approximately

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.

“Don’t everyone speak up at once.” He peels one of the papers off his rolled-up tube—I see EMPLOYEE MAP at the top of the sheet—and hands it to me while glancing down at my legs. Is he checking me out? I’m not sure how I feel about that. Now I wish I’d worn pants.

When I try to accept the map, he hangs on to it, and I’m forced to snatch it out of his fingers. The corner rips off. Juvenile, much? I give him a dirty look, but he just smiles and leans closer. “Now, now,” he says. “You aren’t going to scream like you did yesterday, are you?”

LUMIÈRE FILM FANATICS COMMUNITY PRIVATE MESSAGES>ALEX>ARCHIVED

@alex: Do you ever feel like a fraud?

@mink: What do you mean?

@alex: Like you’re expected to act like one person at school, and another person in front of your family, and someone else around your friends. I get so tired of living up to other people’s expectations, and sometimes I try to remember who the real me is, and I don’t even know.

@mink: That happens to me every day. I don’t deal with people very well.

@alex: You don’t? That surprises me.

@mink: I’m not shy or anything. It’s just that . . . okay, this is going to sound weird, but I don’t like being put on the spot. Because if someone is talking to me, talk talk talk, it’s all fine until they ask me my opinion, like “What do you think about chocolate chip cookies?” And I hate CCCs.

@alex: You do?

@mink: Not everyone likes them, you know. (I like sugar cookies, just in case you were wondering.) ANYWAY, if someone asks me, when I’m put on the spot, I blank out and try to read their face to see what they expect me to say, and I just say that. Which means I end up saying I like CCCs, when I really don’t. And then I feel like a fraud, and I think, why did I just do that?

@alex: I DO THAT ALL THE TIME. But it’s even worse, because after it’s all over, I’m not even sure whether I like chocolate chip cookies or not.

@mink: Well, do you?

@alex: I love them. I’m a fan of all cookies except oatmeal.

@mink: See? That was easy. If you ever need to figure out who you really are, just ask me. I’ll be your reality check. No pressure or expectations.

@alex: Deal. For you, I will be my 100 percent real, oatmeal-hating self.

“It’s not my fault you’re, like, in love with me, or something!”

—Lindsay Lohan, Mean Girls (2004)

3

Porter hands out the rest of his maps while the other group’s voices fade away. We then obediently follow him to the opposite side of the lobby, through the arch marked JAY’S WING, where we trade in the crisp, too-cold lobby air for musty, too-warm mansion air.

I feel like this is the part of the orientation I should be enjoying, but I’m so rattled by Porter recognizing me that I’m not paying attention to my surroundings. I want to hang back and get away from him, but there’s only like fifteen of us, and Grace merrily drags me by the arm to the front of the group. Now we’re walking right behind him—so close, he probably thinks we’re devotees of his ass, which is pretty nice, to be honest.

“There are forty-two rooms in Jay’s Wing, a.k.a. the world’s biggest man cave,” Porter says as he stops in the middle of a drawing room filled with all things trains. Train signs. Train tracks. Victorian first-class passenger train seats with stuffed velvet cushions. At the back of the room, there’s even an old-fashioned ticket booth from London that looks to have been converted into a bar.

“Our beloved insane millionaire loved hunting, gambling, railroads, booze, and pirates,” Porter said. “The pirates, especially. But who doesn’t, really?”

Okay, so the boy’s got a certain charm about him. I’m not immune to charm. And while he’s talking, I realize he’s got a low, gravelly voice that sounds like it belongs to a video game voice-over actor—easygoing and cocky at the same time. God, I bet he’s so full of himself.

Why is he giving us this tour anyway? I thought security guards were supposed to stand around, waiting to yell at punks for putting their grimy hands on paintings.

When we head into the next area, I find out why.

“This is the slot-machine room,” he says, walking backward as he talks. The room is filled with a maze of counters, at which you can sit and play one of a hundred different antique tabletop slot machines. Looks like the rarer ones are behind ropes.

Porter stops. “You might be asking yourself at this point, Are all the rooms named after what’s in them? And the answer to that is yes. The museum owners are not creative—unless it comes to stretching out the workforce, in which case they are extremely creative. Take my job, for instance. Why pay a customer service manager to handle guest disputes when you can just send in your security team? You’ll quickly find that the irrepressible Mr. Cadaver . . . sorry, Mr. Cavadini”—he gets a few snickers for that one—“likes everyone to be able to do every job, just in case you have to fill in for someone else. So don’t get comfortable, because you, too, could be giving the next wave of new hires a tour in a couple of weeks. Better memorize that map I gave you, pronto.”