He wanted to see her, to get close enough to see if her eyes were still green. If the spell had passed, she would be a useful ally for the next two weeks. He held his card near the reader. The machine beeped and a red light flashed.
The Cast Member maintained a smile as he studied a computer screen, a practiced performance. He tried Finn’s key card himself. It flashed red. The man worked the keyboard.
“I show a Mrs. Whitman accompanying you,” he said. “You’re traveling with your mother, correct?”
“I…ah…there should be a note in my file,” Finn said, recalling what Wayne had told him about the updated arrangements.
The man waved Finn out of the line. The Keepers’ VIP guide moved to the Cast Member’s side as the others were processed through the entrance, their key cards registering green.
Finn was beginning to dislike that color.
The guide whispered to the Cast Member. She opened an iPad and began navigating.
Finn heard the man say, “The DHIs? I’m so sorry!”
The two whispered back and forth, the guide clearly pushing Finn’s celebrity status. But the Cast Member was clearly a by-the-rules man. Despite his curious glances in Finn’s direction, the grins he offered, his fingers never stopped dancing on the keyboard.
“There was a flag in the record…” the man said. “I can see that. But whatever note was there appears to have been deleted.”
The woman offered her iPad and the Cast Member read from it. He looked up at Finn. Back to the iPad.
“You see the signature,” the guide prodded.
“Indeed,” he said, his brow furrowing.
“I can try to call him directly if you like.”
The Cast Member clearly didn’t want anything to do with such a call. Meanwhile, another fifty people had passed through the checkpoint. The other Keepers were long gone, onto the ship. Finn was anxious to get aboard.
A few more keystrokes and the Cast Member told the guide, “Very well. I have him with the Philby family in a connecting room. If you would please email that document to me, I will attach it to his record and everything should be okay.” He looked up at Finn with a bright face. “Just one minute and you’re all set to go, young man.”
“Thank you,” Finn said behind a grimace. He rose to his toes again and looked back. He didn’t see anyone looking anything like his mother. And that worried him. He hurried to catch up with Philby.
* * *
“That ain’t right,” the sailor said from the boatswain’s chair, hanging by a pair of ropes from the overhead deck like a window washer. He was repainting the Dream’s freshly painted hull where some debris carried by high seas had (barely) scratched the hull’s glossy surface. The man next to him, also slung from the deck, was in fact the window washer.
“Don’t get your BVDs in a twist about it.”
“Since when do characters board the ship in costume?”
“Since today.”
“You’re a real jerk.”
“And you’re paranoid.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means it’s a maiden voyage. The first ship through the new canal. Are you kidding me? It means the rules change. Everything changes. If the Wicked Witch of the East wants to board in costume, what’s the rub?”
“That wasn’t the Wicked Witch of the East, cauliflower for brains, it was Maleficent. And the Evil Queen. And Cruella. And Jafar. Judge Frollo. If the passage is so special, why all the villains?”
“They’ve changed up every single show. You heard that. Or you read it. If you can read, that is.”
“Stuff it.”
“I’m just saying: it’s been on the bulletin board on I-95 for the past week or something.” I-95 was the main hallway connecting the crew quarters with administration offices and backstage staircases to all parts of the ship. For crew members and Cast Members alike it was similar to Main Street of a very small town and was off limits to paying passengers.
“Not the part about villains boarding in costume.”
“Will you get over that?”
The man finished his last stroke of touch-up, the paint baking in the afternoon sunshine. To look down the length of the vessel from this vantage point was to fully comprehend the vast size of the ship. It wasn’t simply big, it was huge. Monstrous. How so many thousands of tons of steel and iron could be made to float was beyond him; he confined his thinking to the sanding and the application of paint.
As the worker admired his effort, a group of stage actors arrived at the Cast Member–only gangway directly beneath the man, near the bow of the ship. At the tail end of this line were four younger actors, one of whom was wide-shouldered, thick at the neck, and wore his hair cut military short. Easily mistaken for being several years older than he was. The first of these kids swiped his key card in front of the electronic reader.