@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 fteen 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.
“?ere 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 lled with all things trains. Train signs. Train tracks. Victorian rst-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. “?e 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 nd out why.
“?is is the slot-machine room,” he says, walking backward as he talks. ?e room is lled 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. ?e 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 nd 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 ll 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.”
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 lled with: fake mummies (Mummy Room), weird Victorian medical equipment (Medical Equipment Room), and walls of aquariums (Aquarium Room). ?ere’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 replaces. 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 rst oor, the maze opens up to a gigantic, dark room with a double-high ceiling. ?e walls are all fake rock, and a night sky rigged with LED stars twinkles above stuffed buffalos and mountain lions, a glowing fake camp re, and a bunch of teepees—which several members of the male half of our group decide to explore, like they’re ve-year-old boys. It smells like musty leather and fur, so I opt to wait by the fake camp re 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.”
“?at’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. ?en 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.
