Dream Factory Read online

  I have to change into my brunch gown before heading over to the castle. “Need help?” Amy asks, stepping into the changing room. I turn and let her pull at my zipper. After the skirt-in-stocking incident last week, I’ve taken to wearing shorts under my gowns. Around us, girls are suiting up for the day. Jessie from Toy Story leans toward the mirror, using a brown eyebrow pencil to give herself freckles.

  “How sweet would that be?” I ask, nodding in her direction. “Jeans.”

  “I may never wear a dress again,” Amy says, pulling at her bodice. “It could be worse though.”

  I step out of my blue gown and hang it back up on the rack. “How’s that?” I take my pink dress, my hanging-around-the-castle dress, from the hanger and begin pulling it on. “I mean, besides the animals,” I say, watching as Winnie the Pooh adjusts her head in the mirror.

  “What about Julie?” she says, nodding over my shoulder to where a girl with long red hair is adjusting her seashell bikini top. “Or even Devin?”

  “I agree that sitting around in the stinking grotto all day with your legs jammed into a plastic fish tail while prepubescent boys try to cop a feel through your shells would suck, but how is Princess Jasmine any worse off than us? I mean, at least she gets to wear pants.”

  “Yeah. See-through pants. That and a tiny halter top. Can you say five hundred crunches a day?”

  “True. Not to mention that jerk who plays Aladdin. What’s his name?”

  “You just don’t like him because he got you in trouble.”

  “I still can’t believe he told on me for that.”

  “Ella, you told a little girl that you hated the color pink.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “So not the point,” Amy says, but I can tell she’s having a hard time keeping her smile in check. “You do, of course, understand that the color pink is nearly synonymous with the Princesses, don’t you?”

  “Well, duh,” I say, spreading the skirt of my dress wide. That does it. We stand there grinning at each other for a moment before Stacy claps her hands and tells us that we need to get a move on. “See you this afternoon,” I say, picking up my parasol (pink to match my dress).

  Amy waves at me with the back of her fingers as she hurries out the door toward the Haunted Forest. I follow more slowly. The castle’s less than a quarter mile from anywhere in the park. There, I know, little girls are eating star-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking apple juice out of teacups while they wait for me to arrive. For sixty dollars each, they get brunch, a souvenir photo, a Cinderella doll, and their own golden crown.

  It’s hot outside, and the park is starting to fill up. I walk past the shrubs trimmed to resemble Mickey and Donald and Goofy. Two little girls pick at a cloud of blue cotton candy. Their blue lips frame blue teeth as they smile at me. A boy with a green baseball cap sticks his tongue out at me, purple from his snow cone. A family cuts in front of me, and I have to stop short to avoid running into them. Mom is pushing a double stroller filled with two kids, a backpack, two animal-shaped sippy cups, an umbrella, and something blue and green and shiny. Dad keeps folding and refolding a map, trying to make it go back to its original shape. He is following his wife so closely that he keeps stepping on the back of her flip-flops and hitting her in the back of the head with the edges of the map.

  It’s because the little boy is trailing behind them and doesn’t look at me that I notice him. In one hand he holds a giraffe by its neck, its head bent at an impossible angle from too many games of hide-and-seek, too many nights snuggling under the covers, and too many times crammed into carts at the grocery store. His other hand is clutching the ribbon attached to a Mickey Mouse balloon. It’s one of the double balloons, a blue mouse head inside a clear bubble. Mom stops the stroller and grabs the map from Dad.

  I pause by the waterfall and watch as the boy pulls on the ribbon, making Mickey’s face dip toward him and then bounce back up into the air. Mom and Dad are moving again, but the little boy stays where he is, eyes glued on the balloon. He doesn’t move from his spot even when a woman nearly hits him with her shopping bag brimming with mouse ears and Tinker Bell wands. Whether it is the jostling crowd or the tug of his father’s hand, suddenly the balloon bounces up much higher than before, but this time there isn’t anything to stop its ascent.

  “My balloon,” he says, much more softly than I would have imagined.

  “I told you to hang onto it,” his father says, pulling him forward.

  “I did,” I hear him say as he is pulled past me.

  “Not tightly enough.”

  The balloon dips twice in the air before it catches a fast moving air current and sails off over the lagoon. It grows smaller and smaller in the sky until I can’t see it at all anymore. The cobblestones are tricky to navigate, especially in high heels. Especially when you’re late. You have to watch where you place each foot to avoid falling, but instead of watching the road in front of me like I should, I keep finding myself staring up at the sky.

  2

  Luke

  “Luke, we have some costuming issues,” Mr. Forrester says to me, tapping his wedding ring on his chair. “Your name has come up.”

  I nod at him, twitching my foot so that the loose string on my Chucks makes its own tap-tap against the floor beneath his desk. On top of the desk, there’s a framed picture, like you’d expect, but instead of wife and kids, it’s just him, in a suit, smiling while he receives a gold statuette shaped like Mickey Mouse. Beside the photo is a desk calendar, “Daily Affirmations for Corporate Survival.” I’m not sure I understand what that means. Today’s affirmation is “A Knowing Smile Is Your Best Weapon.” Mr. For rester also has a Mickey Mouse-shaped pencil sharpener, ashtray, wastebasket, and Oriental rug. The ashtray has a cigar butt resting on Mickey’s ear. The phone on his desk, like those of all the management people here, is an actual plastic statue of Mickey Mouse holding the receiver in his white-gloved hand. I imagine Mr. Forrester shouting into that phone, maybe firing someone, while Mickey covers his ears and asks why everyone can’t just be friends. Then again, it might be me who’s about to get fired, so suddenly the whole idea is not so funny. I keep watching my hands, cracking my knuckles, still surprised some days to look down and see actual human fingers instead of fur-covered paws.

  Mr. Forrester adjusts his tie clip and purses his lips. “Luke,” he says, “I want you to imagine I’m a six-year-old boy. A towheaded youngster who has come with Mom and Dad to the happiest place on earth. Are you with me?”

  “What does towheaded mean?” I say, just to mess with him. “Is that like a birth defect?”

  “No, Luke, it means blond. Blond hair. With me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I tell him, playing along, and then suddenly I do see it, Mr. Forrester in an OshKosh jumper with kangaroos on the pockets, except he still has his silk tie and his wingtip shoes. He’s polishing the toe of one of those shoes right now with his fingers. My dad has the same kind of shoes, a pair in brown and a pair in black. I will never figure out why somebody thought a pattern of swirly holes was a good look. And it’s weird. My brother graduated college and went to work for Dad at the drilling company, and now he has those same shoes. It’s like wingtip shoes are your ticket into adulthood, or maybe the big secret is that your college diploma is really just a gift certificate for Pic ’N Pay Shoes, and you redeem it the next day. For girls, maybe it’s those bulky, serious-looking suits with the shoulder pads, or maybe some kind of hair. I don’t know. All I know is, I don’t ever want those shoes.

  Mr. Forrester looks to the ceiling now as he talks. “I’m a six-year-old boy proudly wearing my mouse ears with my name stitched on the front. Let’s say Jimmy, for argument’s sake.”

  “I was thinking Reggie,” I say. He gives me a knowing smile, just like the calendar says to.

  “Okay then, Luke. That’s fine. Little Reggie is walking along happy as can be, and then happens upon what scene? Do you see where I’m going with this? He sees Dale�
�with Chip nowhere around—sprawled on the ground, presumably dead, and as if that weren’t enough, our little cartoon friend is decapitated, his head beside him.” He picks up a paper clip and tosses it into the plastic coffee cup on his desk. “Luke, we could be talking about a lifelong trauma.”

  I take a deep breath. “Mr. Forrester, it was ninety-seven degrees that day; I had just done a parade. I was hot. I took off the head and stretched out in the shade. It was five minutes.”

  “Three reports,” he says, then picks up the reports and tosses them back down. “Lifeless chipmunk body, head in the grass. Then what? You let your head roll down the grassy knoll. One mother screamed. We could be sued. It’s my job.”

  His job, despite the big-deal office and all the Mickey crap, was pretty low on the totem pole, everyone said. He was officially the Fur Character Coach, in charge of anyone inside the park who has to wear a head—Goofy, Donald, Daisy, Winnie the Pooh—all the fur characters. Of course, with the heat and claustrophobia it’s the worst job in the park unless you count cleaning toilets, and for corporate climbers fur coach is the worst job in management. Everyone knows Mr. Forrester wants to work his way up to Princess Handler, which actually seems like a disturbing job title for a middle-aged man.

  “What if I faint?” I ask him. “What if I don’t take a break, and I just faint? Wouldn’t that be a lot worse for you to see, assuming you’re a six-year-old girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “A six-year-old boy?”

  While he thinks about this he picks up the cold cigar butt and taps it against Mickey’s nose. Every time I see anything Mickey, I can’t help singing that song inside my head. M-I-C . . . See you later. That’s what I would like to say right now to Mr. Forrester. He shows me the cigar butt before throwing it into the trash. “Don’t ever start,” he says. “They killed my dad.”

  “I won’t.”

  He nods. “You have to suck it up, Luke,” he says. “You’re Dale, for godsakes. A household name. Show a little pride.”

  Actually, if being a fur character is the worst job in the park, then being Dale has to be the worst job among the fur characters. When I got the gig and told my mom and dad and brother, all of them were like, “Who?” And I mean, it makes sense. Someone out of the blue says, “I play Dale,” then that would be the question to ask, and I always, always have to say, “You know, as in Chip and?” Say Goofy, say Donald, it’s automatic. Dale is not automatic. Ashtray Mickey has two black eyes from the cigar butt, like he’s been in a fight. I nod at Mr. Forrester. Really, if I lose this job, then I have to temp at my dad’s office again, like I did last summer, and somehow that striped necktie makes me suffocate worse in the AC than the fur head does in the heat. When I got this job, my dad told me one of his “wise stories” about how one summer he had a job driving an ice-cream truck, selling Good Humor bars. The next summer he was off to N.C. State. He tells the story and then tells me to go ahead, get it out of my system, and sometimes when I’m inside the costume, down inside the fur and plastic and latex looking out through the mesh, hearing my own breath, breathing my own sweat, watching my paws shake hands with some kid for the five-hundredth time that day, I think, At least I’m someone else, at least I can stay in here, hidden, where my dad can’t find me, where the drilling company can’t find me, where the wingtip shoes can’t find me. I’m the only one who knows I’m in here, and maybe I never have to come out, never have to get myself out of my system. I tell Mr. Forrester that being Dale is my vocation, my calling, my mission in life. I tell him I want to make memories that last a lifetime. I put my heart into it, the way I do when I’m talking to Dad or the principal at school, and I can tell he believes it. In his job he has to believe it. I’m pretty good. So good that, for half a second, even I believe it.

  Sometimes I talk to the Dale head. I creep myself out doing it, like I’m going to turn into one of those ventriloquists in the movies who sits by while his dummy commits murders, and the whole time you know it’s him, not the dummy, since he’s crazy as hell. But I don’t want to kill anyone, and during breaks, the Dale head is just sitting there grinning at me like I can do no wrong, and so I talk to it. I mean, who else? That jerkwad they hired to play Prince Charming? Prince Dumb-ass, maybe. I mean, this guy is not smart, too much chlorine in the gene pool. The other day at breakfast he said he’s not supposed to eat Grape-Nuts cereal because he’s allergic to nuts. I don’t even know the guy’s name, only that since he came, he is always hanging around Ella. Always. That, and he looks like one of the Hardy Boys.

  And as for the hitting on Ella part, I don’t like that. I look down at Dale’s head and say so.

  “Dale, I don’t like that,” I tell him, because right now Biff or Kip or Whoever is following after her, again, touching the satin ribbon that’s gathered at the small of her back, and then she runs off and he chases after her, running so hard his epaulets are bouncing.

  “His epaulets are bouncing,” I say to Dale, only because I like saying it. Dale keeps grinning at me from his side of the bench, wide-eyed. His personality is pretty one-dimensional. He will never understand her, I tell Dale. Not ever. I bet they could be married for like ten years, and he would never even make her laugh unless he slipped on a banana peel or something.

  “Talking to your own head again?” I look up, and Cassie is drinking a bottle of water, standing over me.

  “It’s my hobby,” I say to her. She sits down in front of one of the five fans that are always blowing in the break tent and rubs the dripping bottle across her forehead.

  “Yeah, I wonder what Freud would have to say about that.” She takes a long swallow and sets her own head down on the grass between her feet.

  “Sometimes a disembodied chipmunk head is only—”

  “Okay, Luke. You know Mr. Forrester told us to take our breaks together. We’re supposed to be Chip and Dale, not Chip or Dale.” She pours some of the water over her head and lets it drip off the end of her blond ponytail. She plays lacrosse and is in better shape than anyone I’ve ever met. I think she takes her breaks not because she wants to but because she’s supposed to.

  “Sorry, Cass,” I tell her, reaching out to hold her hand. And I am sorry. We have kinda-sorta been dating the last three weeks. My mom would call her a “great catch,” the way she sometimes does, as if girls are fish, or maybe line drives over the centerfield wall. And I know she is . . . pretty, blond, sexy, athletic, smart. She is on her way to Brown in the fall, to major in prelaw and women’s studies and French. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a triple major. When she got the letter about her scholarship, she ran around all excited, and everyone congratulated her, and I kissed her, then wondered out loud if Brown was the only university in the country named for a color. I really did wonder, like, is there a White? Gray? That sounds pretty likely, actually. Black? I don’t think so. Then she got mad at me for saying it, and I didn’t even understand what she was mad at. I really do like her. I like walking around the park with her at night, holding hands. I like kissing her. Except I always wonder if it just feels like I like her in the way I’m supposed to, or maybe because I’m supposed to. How do you know when you really like someone? Or love someone?

  Cass stands behind me and pours water over my head, the icy finger of it running down my spine; then she leans over, tips my head back, and kisses me, another finger down the spine. She can kiss, for sure, but once we ended up making out in the costumes, and that was just a little too weird. Even for me. At least we took off the heads.

  “Secret party Saturday, basement of the dorm,” she says. “We’re in charge of music. I suggested a costume party, but that idea didn’t go over too well.” She gives my hair a little tug with her fingers. “That was a joke, sweetie.”

  I nod, trying to tune in to what she’s saying, but instead, I’m watching Prince Moron, who is right now in one of the other break tents with Ella, pretending again that he doesn’t understand their waltz steps, just so he has an excuse to p
ut his hands on her.

  “Sam?” Cass says.

  I look back at her. “Nope.”

  “Not some variation? Samuel? Samson?”

  “Not even close. So cold you’re freezing.”

  “I wish. Tell me.”

  “Never.” I blow on my hands, still trying to cool off. Break is over in five minutes. Sometimes I just can’t face going back out there, dancing another dance, shaking another five-year-old hand, hearing some redneck with a mullet make another joke about the Chippendale dancers.

  “Stuart,” Cass says.

  “You said that yesterday.” She is obsessed with figuring out my middle name, which I will never, never tell anyone. Make me do the Acorn Dance in the Sahara for ten busloads of ADD-afflicted second graders during a Ritalin shortage, and still I won’t tell. No one, ever. Luke S. Krause is my full and given name. The End.

  “Slappy,” Cass says, and kisses me again.

  “Ooh, so close,” I tell her, cupping her face. Across her shoulder, in the other tent, the Hardy Boy Prince is showing Ella how he can fill his mouth with gas from his butane lighter, then make a flame shoot out. His lone “bad boy” trick, and he doesn’t even smoke. He did it at breakfast right after the big Grape-Nuts scare, and everyone applauded while I sat there hoping for some tragedy the coroner would later term “cranial explosion.” No such luck.