Alex, Approximately

Ugh. Great. I don’t like the sound of this. Maybe it’s not too late to apply for that cotton-candy-vomit-cleaner-upper job Grace was talking about earlier.

Over the next half hour or so, Porter breezily snarks us through the rooms in this wing. Rooms filled with: fake mummies (Mummy Room), weird Victorian medical equipment (Medical Equipment Room), and walls of aquariums (Aquarium Room). There’s even a collection of sideshow oddities housed inside a gigantic circus tent. It’s major sensory overload up in this place, and it’s all blurring together, because there’s no rhyme or reason to the mansion’s layout, and it’s all twisty turns and secret staircases and hidden rooms behind fireplaces. If I were a museum guest and had several hours to waste, I’d be thrilled. Total eye candy everywhere. But knowing I was supposed to memorize all this? Headache city.

At the end of the first floor, the maze opens up to a gigantic, dark room with a double-high ceiling. The walls are all fake rock, and a night sky rigged with LED stars twinkles above stuffed buffalos and mountain lions, a glowing fake campfire, and a bunch of teepees—which several members of the male half of our group decide to explore, like they’re five-year-old boys. It smells like musty leather and fur, so I opt to wait by the fake campfire with Grace.

Unfortunately, Porter joins us. And before I can slip away, he points to my name-tag sticker. “Were your parents obsessed with the circus when you were born, or did they have a thing for Irish cream whiskey?”

“Probably about as much as your parents liked wine.”

He squints at me. “I think you mean beer.”

“Whatever.” Maybe I can duck into the teepee with the others. I pretend to be looking at something across the room in hopes that he’ll ignore me and move on, a low-level evasive tactic, but one that usually works.

Not this time. Porter just continues talking. “And yes, my parents did name me after beer. It was between that and Ale, so . . .”

Grace playfully pushes Porter’s arm and chastises him in her tiny, British voice. “Shut up, they did not. Don’t listen to him, Bailey. And don’t let him start with the name thing. He called me Grace ‘Achoo’ for half of junior high . . . until I tripped his ass in gym class.”

“That’s when I knew you were harboring a secret love for me, Gracie, so I felt sorry for you and gave you a break.” He ducks away from her swat and grins, and I kind of hate that grin, because it’s a really nice boyish smile, and I’d rather it wouldn’t be.

Grace, however, is immune to its power. She just rolls her eyes. Then she volunteers more info about me. “Bailey’s new. She’ll be going to Brightsea with us in the fall.”

“Oh?” Porter says, lifting a brow in my direction. “Where are you from?”

For a moment, I genuinely don’t know how to answer. I’m not even sure why, but my brain is hung up on his question. I can’t tell if he’s asking what neighborhood my dad lives in. Maybe I should just say DC, because that’s where I’ve been living with Mom and Nate—or even New Jersey, where I was born and raised. When I don’t answer immediately, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with me. He just stares expectantly, waiting for an answer, and that makes me choke up even worse.

“Probably Manhattan,” he finally says, looking me over. “Just going by the way you’re dressed, like you’re headed to a Mad Men cocktail party. If you’re going to stand there and make me guess, that’s my guess.”

Was that a slight? How was I supposed to know that the orientation dress code was going to be shorts and flip-flops? No one told me! “Um, no. Washington, DC. And I guess you’re supposed to be part of some local famous family or something?”

“My granddad. Got a statue in town and everything,” he says. “It’s tough being legendary.”

“I’ll bet,” I mumble, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

He squints at me and sort of chuckles, as if he’s not sure how to take that remark. We glare at each other for several long seconds, and suddenly I’m extremely uncomfortable. I’m also regretting I said anything to him. None of this is me. At all. I don’t argue with strangers. Why is this guy getting under my skin and making me say this stuff? It’s like he’s provoking me on purpose. Maybe he does this with everyone. Well, not me, buddy. Find someone else to pick on. I will evade the crap out of you.

He starts to ask me something else, but Grace interrupts—thank God. “So, which job here is the best?” she asks Porter. “And how do I get it?”

Snorting, he crosses his arms over his chest, and his jagged scars shine in the fake campfire light. Maybe Grace will tell me where Porter got the scars; I’m definitely not asking him.

“The best job is mine, and you can’t have it. The next best is café, because you’re above the main floor. The worst is ticketing. Believe me, you do not want that shit.”

“Why?” I ask, self-preservation trumping my desire to avoid interaction with him. Because if there’s a position here I need to avoid, I want to know about it.

Porter flicks a glance at me and then watches the males in our group emerge from the big teepee, one by one, laughing at some joke we missed. “Pangborn says every summer they hire more seasonals than they can afford, because they know at least five of them will quit the first two weeks, and those are always the ones running the ticket booth.”

“Seems like information desk would be worse,” Grace says.

“It’s not, believe me. I’ve worked them all. Even now, I spend half my day at ticketing, fixing problems that have nothing to do with security. It sucks, big-time. Hey, don’t touch that,” he calls out over my shoulder toward a guy who’s sticking his finger in a buffalo’s nose. Porter shakes his head and grumbles under his breath, “That one won’t last a week.”

Everyone is done exploring this room, so Porter leads us out of the Wild West and through the rest of the wing, taking a path that snakes back around to the lobby—which is empty, because we’ve beaten Pangborn’s group. While we wait for them, Porter corrals us all next to a panel in the wall near the lost and found and flips it open. Inside is a small cubby where a black phone hangs.

“I know what you’re all thinking,” he says. “This might look like an antique, but it isn’t a museum display—shocker! See, a long time ago, people used telephones with cords. And even though you might find a few rare examples of technological advances in this museum, like the 1990s security cameras, or the junked printers in the ticket booth, the museum phone system is not one of them.”

He picks up the receiver and points to three buttons on the side. “You can make outgoing calls on these, but unless it’s an emergency, you’ll probably get fired. The only reason you should ever use this fine antique is for intercomming. This green button, marked ‘SECURITY,’ will allow you to call me if there is some emergency you can’t handle alone. Like this—” He presses the button, and a little radio on his sleeve beeps. “See? It’s magic. O-o-o.”

Then he points to the red button. “This one marked ‘ALL’ pages the entiiiire museuuuum,” he says like he’s yodeling across a canyon. “The only reason you’d do that is if you work in information and are telling everyone the museum is closing or on fire. Don’t use it.”