Chapter 8 Page
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”WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?” CARMEL asks as I walk into the staff kitchen. It’s the brief afternoon pause right after two, when the rush of guests checking out or eating lunch has ebbed and the day’s new guests haven’t yet reached full mass.
“It’s my day off.” I open the fridge and take out a leftover sandwich wrapped in brown waxed paper.
Carmel is the head chef at Bristlecone, the resort’s restaurant, and she and Ty, the food truck cook, bring leftovers in here for us to eat so they don’t go to waste.
They’re both at least a decade older than most of the staff.
They, and Sonnet’s manager, Colby, take care of us in a sort of non-coordinated, completely unofficial way—with the food, with checking in on us, stuff like that.
At the end of every summer, Carmel gathers all the staff together and takes a picture because, as she says, We’ll never have exactly the same group again.
“Lucky you.” Skye’s sitting at one of the tables.
As usual, there’s a hint of snark in her tone.
As usual, I ignore it. There’s nothing lucky about having a day off.
We all have them once a week. Skye’s one of those girls from LA who decided to work here for the summer because they believe they’re outdoorsy and cool.
Eventually they learn they’re not actually as outdoorsy as they thought; they’ve just had parents rich enough to buy them all the gear and experiences they want.
It can be a rude awakening.
Still, Skye is having a good summer, even though she hates the bunk tents the staff sleep in (she’s not into “communal living”).
She’s amassing more and more followers every day on LikeMe.
On her days off she packs designer dresses in her backpack, hikes to different picturesque locations in the park, and takes pictures to post on social media.
Malcolm, one of the other employees—the one who’s sitting with her now and who has dirty-blond hair and gentle, deerlike brown eyes—goes with her whenever he can.
They’re together. They’re the two hottest people here, so it’s inevitable, although for a minute at the beginning of the season Skye was crushing on Ty (even though he’s way too old for her) and Mal seemed pretty into me.
This is my third summer working at Sonnet.
I’ve been here ever since I graduated from high school, and I’m one of the few employees who stay on year-round.
It’s a good place, much better than the wedding venue where I used to work with my grandma.
Colby, our manager, trusts me. We started in our different positions at around the same time.
He’d been to a fancy Ivy League university back East and majored in hotel management (I didn’t even know you could major in that).
He ran a couple of hotels in the Pacific Northwest before taking the job at Sonnet, and he’d never even been to Eden before.
He always says I saved his life that first summer.
In theory, Colby and I should not have that much in common.
He’s at least ten years older than I am, he’s grown up in places with lots of water and money, he’s charismatic and genuine, while I’m quiet and hide all the time.
But for whatever reason, we clicked right away.
So when he told me he needed to be gone for a while to handle a personal matter and asked if I thought I could take care of things here, I said yes.
Of course. He already lets me do some of the things that are technically the manager’s job, so I’ve had experience with nearly everything he needs me to do.
I like the round-robin style of working at Sonnet. The staff takes turns manning the reception desk, the gift shop, the food truck, and waiting tables at Bristlecone. I don’t wait tables, though, since I’m not twenty-one and can’t serve alcohol.
We also don’t cook. Ty and his backup cook handle the food truck, and Carmel and her line cooks handle Bristlecone.
They are the most experienced of the staff, with prior catering and restaurant experience.
They live year-round in Spring Creek, the closest town, since Bristlecone and the food truck don’t close in the off-season.
(Off-season tourists still want a fancy place to eat, and the food truck travels around to festivals or events in towns near here.)
We also don’t help with housekeeping, unless it’s to light the fires or bring over fresh linens and towels on one of the golf carts.
There was a theft a few years ago, so the housekeeping staff are well vetted.
They’re locals who come in and take summer jobs.
The people around here don’t make much money, so you often see them picking up extra work during the summer—housekeeping (usually women) or working for the city keeping up the parks and the cemetery (usually men).
It’s awkward and depressing as hell whenever I run into my old biology teacher Mrs. Phillips at the resort, but we’ve both settled on pretending that we don’t know each other from before.
We act like we only know each other from now.
“Hi,” she says. “Hi,” I say back, colleagues now, and we step around each other and on we go.
“What have you been up to today, anyway?” Carmel sits down at the table across from me.
“Not much,” I say. “Went for a drive.” I lift my sandwich, hold it in Carmel’s direction as if to toast her. “This is great. Thank you.”
“No problem,” she says. “Your car still running okay?”
My car, a hand-me-down from my sister, is a red Chevy Blazer so old that it has a CD player inside.
It’s a long-standing joke among some of the staff, but not Carmel.
She knows how it is to stretch something out years longer than expected, to be grateful every day that you don’t have to face that particular expense yet.
When the Blazer broke down last summer, she referred me to her brother, a mechanic who gave me a discount.
“It is,” I say.
“Where’d you drive?” Skye asks, nosy, and because it’s her, I shrug and say, “Around,” without giving any specifics.
She’s trying to suss out even more places for LikeMe; she knows I have places I don’t tell her about.
She doesn’t understand the finding of things, the wandering and coming upon them, or having someone show you because they want to share them with you, not because you expect them for the asking.
Often on my days off I like to take this long drive called the Devil’s Backbone.
It’s an old road that winds up and over a nearby mountain to another small town called Story, and it’s terrifying.
The road is only wide enough for a single vehicle, and in lots of places the drops on either side are sheer and absolute.
When I get to Story, I head to the grill and get lunch to go, which I eat outside on one of the picnic benches on the lawn.
It’s my one splurge—the lunch, and the gas it takes for the drive.
Then I drive back along the Backbone to Sonnet.
I like driving. I like the dusty old smell of the Blazer and rolling down the windows to let the clean air in.
But today I went into Spring Creek to get a few things I needed.
On my return, a few miles before the turnoff to the resort, I took a right up another road to the top of the Underground trailhead.
The parking lot gravel crunched under my feet as I walked over to the trail register, looking at the names written down for today.
As I scanned them, I thought, There’s no way, there’s no way…
They did it. They wrote their real names, including Hope Hanover.
Why?
I stood there, shaking my head, not sure if I was impressed or appalled by the way they’d put it out there, the names, how they announced that they were going into the canyon. Anyone who wants to come looking will know where to find them.
I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the log. Of course, I already knew from listening in on them the night before that they were planning on hiking the Underground today. But it was nice to have confirmation.
It’s hard not to eavesdrop when you’re staff.
The guests sit around outside the firepits and talk loudly.
The outdoor air on their skin and the drinks in their hands make them free and easy with what they say.
If you do happen to get noticed, you always have a good excuse as a member of staff.
You’re checking to make sure they don’t need anything; you want to let them know about yoga or a hike or a mindfulness gathering in the morning; the cook told you that tomorrow there will be this special or that; what do they think of the stars?
They love them, always. They love the stars, even if they haven’t bothered to look up at them until you ask what they think.
If anyone had noticed me last night, I could have given plenty of reasons for being there. But I didn’t need to.
No one saw me.
Skye elbows Malcolm, and he leans across the table toward me.
“Hey, Page,” Mal says. “Speaking of days off.” He’s handsome, and he’s funny and nice and smart, which means it’s easy to feel nothing for him now that it’s clear he’s into Skye.
I think it’s easier to shut down when you can forget that people are real.
When you can turn them into a character in a movie, someone you’re never actually going to know, only watch.
“Why do you all have this thing for Page?” Skye asked Mal once, when they were in our tent and I was in my upper bunk and she forgot to check to see if anyone else was there before they started making out. “Is it the hair?”
“The hair?” Mal asked. “What do you mean? Her hair’s always in a ponytail. Or a braid.”
“Exactly,” said Skye. “She’s very granola. People can be into that.” She snorted with laughter. “Wait. Do you think she’s a sister wife? One of those fundamentalists? Don’t they always wear their hair in braids?”
“A what?” Mal asked.
That was when I chose to roll over in my bunk. They froze, and then they left, Skye pissed yet again about the lack of privacy. In her real life she’s a guest at places like Sonnet.
“What?” I ask Mal now. Behind him, the door swings open and Ty and his backup cook, Evan, come inside.
They wave to us, and Ty grabs a sandwich from the fridge and stands in front of the bulletin board with all of the staff pictures to eat.
Avoiding Skye, I think. Evan takes his food and leaves, probably for the staff tent.
I’m not the only one around here who likes privacy.
But right now, with Colby gone and other things on my mind, I have to stay in the mix.
Skye heads out, too, leaving Mal to do whatever dirty work she wants done without her.
“Someone was saying there’s a ghost town around here,” Mal says. “We want to go tomorrow.” He holds out his phone. “But it’s not showing up on my Google Maps.”
He’s asking about Afton, I realize. The small, abandoned ghost town with the brief, complicated history that no one’s lived in for decades.
Skye’s tag-teamed Mal in, since she knows I won’t tell her.
I can picture how they’ll experience the town, Skye and Mal, laughing and walking down the street holding hands, making fun of it, talking about how hot and dusty and boring it is, but ooh, wait, Skye will say, this works, and she’ll take off her backpack and find the gauzy white dress she packed inside, and as the sun is starting to come down, she’ll slip into one of the abandoned buildings and change, Mal watching, the hem of her dress trailing across the dusty floor, and she’ll stand in front of the house, backlit by the sun, leaving nothing to the imagination.
“Sorry,” I say. “You can’t go there. No one can.”
“Why not?” Mal asks.
“They had a sewage line rupture a few years ago,” I lie.
I need to think of something that will keep Skye away.
The chain across the road and the NO TRESPASSING: CLOSED TO VISITORS sign won’t do the trick.
“No one’s lived there in forever, so they didn’t bother repairing it.
Now it’s turned into kind of a biohazard.
They’ve had the road blocked off for years. ” That last part, at least, is true.
“Oh, okay, thanks,” Mal says, nodding, his smile a white flash against his tanned skin. “Good to know.”
“No problem,” I tell him.
I don’t feel one bit guilty for stretching the truth.
You’d better have a good reason if you want to walk among the ghosts.