“Welcome to the Cavern Palace. Four adult tickets?”
?e computer does all the work. I take the man’s credit card, the tickets print, Mr. Jerkface goes through the turnstile with his jerky family. Next. ?is one’s cash. I fumble a little with the change, but it’s not too bad.
And so on.
At some point, Porter slips out and we’re on our own, but it’s okay. We can handle it.
I remembered how cold the Cavern lobby was during orientation, so I wore another cardigan. Ten customers into the line, and I now realize why they nickname the ticket booth the Hotbox. No air-con inside. We’re trapped in a box made of glass from the waist up, with the sun beaming down on our faces, lighting us up like we’re orchids in a freaking greenhouse.
I strip off the cardigan through my vest’s gaping sleeve holes, but every few minutes, I have to swivel around to let someone inside the door—Carol, the shift supervisor, the guy from the information booth telling us to retake a season pass photo because the customer “hates” it, sweet old Mr. Pangborn delivering change for all the big spenders who want to pay with hundred-dollar bills. Every time I swivel around to open the ticket booth door, (A) I bust my kneecaps on the metal till, and (B) a blast of freezing cave air races over my clammy skin.
?en the door shuts, and the Hotbox reheats all over again.
It’s torture. Like, this is how the military must break enemy combatants when they want to get information out of them. Where are the Geneva Conventions when you need them?
It gets worse when we have to start juggling other things like pointing out where the restrooms are, and handling complaints about ticket prices going up every year. Is this museum scary? How come we don’t give senior discounts to fty-year-olds anymore? ?e wind just blew my ticket away; give me a replacement.
It’s a circus. I’m barely exaggerating. No wonder people quit the rst day.
Not us. Grace and I have this. We’re champs, st-bumping each other under the counter. I handle the job the best way I know how. Avoid eye contact. Play dumb. Shrug. Evade the hard questions. Point them toward the information desk or the gift shop.
If we don’t sweat away all our bodily uid, we’ll make it.
A couple of hours into our shift, things slow down considerably—as in, no one in line.
“Did we scare them all away?” Grace asks, wiping sweat from the back of her neck.
“Is it over?” I say, peering over the intercom to see around the stanchions. “Can we go home now?”
“I’m asking someone to bring us water. ?ey said we could. It’s too hot. Screw this.” Grace uses the phone to page Carol, and she says she’ll send someone. We wait.
A couple of minutes later, I hear four quick raps on the door and open it to nd Porter. It’s the rst time we’ve seen him since the beginning of our jail sentence. He hands us plastic bottles of water from the café and gives me that slow, lazy smile of his that’s entirely too sexy for a boy our age, and that makes me nervous all over again.
“You’ve both got that sweet Hotbox sheen. Looks better on the two of you than the last pair. By the way, one of them is …” He swipes his thumb across his throat, indicating that the kid quit, and not that he actually offed himself. I hope.
“Another one?” Grace murmurs.
He leans back against the door, one foot propped up, scrolling through his phone. ?e propped-up foot puts his knee in my space, mere centimeters from mine. It’s like he’s purposely trying to crowd me. “?is job weeds out the weak, Gracie. ?ey should
ash their photos over the teepees in the fake starry sky in Jay’s
Wing.”
“What time is it?”
He consults a fat red watch on his wrist with a funny digital screen and tells us the time. When I stare too long, he catches me looking and explains, “Surf watch. Swell direction, wave height, water temperature. Completely waterproof, unlike this stupid phone, which I’ve had to replace twice already this year.”
I was actually staring at his Frankenstein scars, thinking about how Grace had started to tell me something tragic about his family yesterday on the boardwalk, but I’m relieved he thought I was looking at the watch.
“How did you get to be security guard, anyway?” I ask, cracking open my bottled water.
He spares a moment’s glance from the screen and winks at me. Actually winks. Who does that? “Eighteen opens up all sorts of doors. You can vote, legally engage in any and all imaginative sexual activities with the consenting person of your choice, and —best of all—you can work full-time as a security guard at the Cavern Palace.”
“Only one of those things I want to do and don’t need any law to give me permission,” Grace says sweetly from the other side of the booth.
I don’t look at him. If he’s trying to make me uncomfortable with all of that “imaginative sexual activities” talk, he can give himself a pat on the back, because it’s working. But he’s not going to see me sweat. Except for the fact that I’ve been sweating for the last two hours in the Hotbox.
“Taran’s gone overseas for one week and you’re already turning to me to satisfy your womanly needs?” he says.
