Costume Party Fallout

I was in the back of Aya's bookstore moving a trunk of old theater costumes because she asked me to, and because that's what friends do. Jeremiah Sikes, thirty-five years old, bridge inspector by trade, stockroom helper by favor. That's me.

Aya has owned the store for eight years and I've known her for ten, back when we both worked at the warehouse off Route 9. She called me Thursday night and said the trunk had to move from the corner by the furnace to the middle of the stockroom so the appraiser could see it Saturday. Simple job. One trunk. Should have taken ten minutes.

Then Cass showed up.

I'd met her two months earlier, on a Tuesday, when she came in looking for a used copy of some novel about a pharmacist. She was twenty-eight, worked as an analyst for one of the regional pharmacy chains, and she talked fast. She was also, I'll admit, easy to look at. But nothing happened between us then and nothing was supposed to happen ever. Keep that in your head, because I didn't.

"Jeremiah, right?" she said, coming through the stockroom door. "The trunk guy."

"I'm not the trunk guy. I'm the guy helping move the trunk."

"Same thing. Aya, I need to look in that thing. Tonight. Like right now tonight."

Aya was sitting on the worktable with a mug of tea going cold beside her. "It's appraising inventory, Cass, not a costume shop. And we close at nine."

"It's eight forty," Cass said. "Please. I'll explain while we open it."

So Aya let her explain, which turned out to be a mistake, though a pretty funny one in the end.

Here's the setup, the way Cass told it. Her ex, Dominic Perez, manages the pharmacy across the street. They dated for a year and he dumped her six months ago, and since then she's been in what she called a competitive grieving period. There's some farewell party tonight for a coworker, going late, everybody bringing whoever they're seeing, and Dominic made some comment at the holidays about how she'd show up alone.

"So I'm bringing a date," Cass said. "A fake date. A borrowed date. You don't have anybody available, do you, Aya?"

"I have a husband and two kids and a store that closes in twenty minutes."

"Aya, come on. I just need one costume out of this trunk and a plan. Dominic works until midnight. If he sees me walk past the pharmacy window with some tall handsome guy at eleven thirty, dressed like we're going somewhere better than his party, it'll eat him alive."

"Who's tall and handsome?" I asked, which was dumb, because I already knew the answer the second it left my mouth.

Cass turned and looked at me the way you look at a vending machine when you realize it takes the exact crumpled dollar in your pocket.

"You're not busy," she said.

"I'm helping move a trunk."

"You're moving it for me. Perfect. It's fate."

"It's not fate, it's a trunk."

Aya was laughing into her tea at this point, which I want noted in the official account, she thought it was hilarious. "Just do it, Jeremiah. You've got nowhere to be. And maybe she'll buy that novel about the pharmacist as a thank you."

So that's how I got drafted. No contract, no pay, no sense. She paid for the book at least.

The trunk was one of those old steamer things with leather straps and brass corners, and inside was a jumble of costumes from some community theater that went under in the nineties. Capes, a tricorn hat, something with sequins, a velvet coat with the shoulders torn out.

"The plan is simple," Cass said, digging through it. "We dress up a little, just enough to look like we're headed to a costume thing, a party with a theme. We walk past the pharmacy window slow. Dominic sees us. I wave. We keep going. Done."

"Walk past and wave," I said. "That is the entirety of the plan."

"That's the whole plan."

"You didn't even change out of your work clothes."

"I'm changing here, genius. That's why I need the costumes. I brought a dress in my gym bag, I was headed to the gym on Ferry Street anyway, it's a block from here. Now help me find something that fits you."

The first thing I tried was the velvet coat. It went on fine and then refused to come off, because the left sleeve was torn inside and my watch caught in the lining. While I was standing there with one arm up as if surrendering to state troopers, the front bell dinged and a customer walked in. Cass went out to cover the register, since Aya was in the back office doing the drawer count, and I heard the whole conversation through the door.

"Do you work here?"

"Sort of, tonight."

"Where do you keep your books about lighthouses?"

"Probably the second shelf near the window, but honestly I just got here and I'm not sure I'm allowed to say."

I got the coat off by unclipping the watch and losing the pin from it somewhere in the sequins. Second costume was a matador outfit, or what was left of one. The pants fit until I bent over to pick up the hat, and then there was a sound like a tent pole giving up, and Cass laughed so hard she had to sit down on the worktable.

"Okay, okay, that one's out," she wheezed. "Try the pirate one."

The pirate shirt was fine. The pirate belt was fine. The pirate boot was where it went wrong, because the left boot had a sole attached by about four threads and it came off entirely when I took a step, and I went down into a shelf of unsold inventory, which went down into the next shelf, and for about six seconds it was dominoes in there. Cass grabbed my arm and hauled, and I came up holding a hardcover about Civil War railroads and one false pirate beard.

"Are you okay?" she said, still half laughing.

"Peachy. There's a beard in my hand and I don't know whose it is."

"Keep it. It suits you."

Meanwhile the lighthouse guy was still up front. We heard him ask Aya, who had come back out, whether the store had a restroom, and we heard her say yes and then mutter something under her breath about how the register drawer had eaten a twenty.

Third costume was a cavalry officer thing with gold braid, and honestly it looked good. Cass held it up against me and went quiet for a second, and I felt about nine feet tall. She'd changed into her own dress by then, a green one from her gym bag, with her hair let down, and I'll say plainly it did things to me that I wasn't planning on. She was twenty-eight, I was thirty-five, and the math of that is fine, but the situation was still supposed to be fake.

"That's the one," she said. "You look like a jerk in a movie. Dominic will hate you instantly."

"Great. A mission."

Then the store phone rang, Aya answered it, and when she hung up she came back to the stockroom doorway with her arms crossed.

"That was the landlord. There's a problem with the back door latch and a guy is coming at seven tomorrow, so I'm closing early. Right now. I'm locking the front."

"It's eight fifty-eight," Cass said.

"And I've had a lighthouse man, a phone call, and a drawer that stole a twenty. Goodnight."

She went and locked it. Deadbolt, chain, the little bell guard flipped down, the works. Which mattered about four minutes later, because Cass went to close the trunk lid and the right hinge, old brass, brittle as a soda cracker, snapped clean off. The lid flopped sideways, caught the edge of the worktable, and the whole trunk tipped. Out came twenty years of unsold costumes, and with them a busted cushion from the bottom that released what I'd guess was two pounds of loose feathers.

Feathers everywhere. On the shelves, in my collar, in Cass's hair, floating in the tea Aya had abandoned. It looked like a pillow had died in there.

And in the middle of that, Cass's phone buzzed. She dug it out of her gym bag, read the screen, and held it up so we could see. Dominic. A text that said, verbatim: u bringing a date tonite or what, party's after close

"Oh no," she said.

"Oh no what, it's going according to plan," I said. "You wanted him to ask."

"Yeah, but now he's asking, which means he cares, which means I have a couple of hours to get across the street looking like I'm going somewhere fantastic with a man in a cavalry coat, and I'm standing in a blizzard of feathers in a