Page 33 of What Maple Heard

Cade

Okay. I have a confession to make.

Aurelia Maplewood, Keeper of the Autumn Leaves, was single-handedly the most terrifying thing I had ever done in my life.

Even more terrifying than being a twenty year old kid in a suit standing in front of a room full of old, hot-headed, stubborn men who all thought I was out of my mind for wanting to buy a company that was basically already dead, and somehow convincing every single one of them that it was a great idea.

That had been terrifying. But at least it did not involve a leaf-green leotard squeezing my crotch.

The leotard was tight. Not snug. Not form-fitting. Tight in a way that required me to suppress an unsettling urge to itch my crotch like a madman every single day, for six hours straight. In front of twelve kids and Maple and Nancy. And I had been suppressing it, quietly and professionally, with a tight smile on my face. Yes, that was tight too.

Honestly? That alone was fair punishment for the shit that came spewing out of my mouth that night. The leotard was justice. Plain, Cruel Justice.

And then there was the pulley.

Here is something I did not know about myself until Aurelia Maplewood entered my life: I was apparently terrified of being lowered slowly through the air on a small wooden platform while wearing a tutu. I had jumped out of a plane. I had hung off the side of a cliff. But something about the combination of the platform, the slow descent, the tutu, and the fact that my parents would be in the front row when that happened turned my legs into mush.

And I flailed.

There is no dignified way to say it. My arms would go out. My legs went out. The tutu rose, and the leotard became very, very visible to the entire audience. My parents, who named me after my grandfather and sent me to the best schools in the country and introduced me at every gala as the Managing Director of Sonnenberg Constructions, would be sitting in folding chairs watching this happen.

Well. That was something the small town paparazzi from The Chestnut Herald would fall on top of each other to capture.

But I was willing to do all of it. Every bit of it. If standing in front of the whole town in a fairy costume was what it took for Maple to see how sorry I was — how genuinely, completely, no-qualifier-attached sorry I was — then I was going to be the best Aurelia Maplewood this town had ever seen.

I would have danced naked on that stage if she needed me to.

I would have asked my parents not to come first. But I would have done it.

To make the performance fractionally less catastrophic, I had started coming in early to practice.

Maple had given me an extra set of keys three weeks ago so I could get in before the kids arrived to sweep and mop. I had been using those keys every morning at five-thirty to come in and run my lines, practice the twirl, and work on the shrill voice.

The shrill voice was a work in progress.

Aurelia Maplewood, according to Maple, had a voice like a small woodland creature who had inhaled helium. I had been practicing this voice in the empty studio every morning for a week. I had gotten better. I had also accepted that if anyone ever heard a recording of this practice, my entire professional reputation was over.

Worth it.

This particular morning I was mid-twirl in the studio, full tutu, working on keeping my arms in the right position while also not wobbling, which I had not yet mastered, when I heard the front door open.

I froze.

It was five-thirty in the morning. It was dark outside. Nobody should be here at five-thirty in the morning except me.

I switched off the studio light. I tiptoed out into the dark hallway, moving very carefully, very quietly, like a man who was absolutely not wearing an orange tutu and therefore had every right to be moving through a dark hallway at dawn—

I walked directly into something.

Something large and ceramic came hurling in the other direction.

There was a crash — not of breaking ceramic, thankfully, but of impact with a person— and a sound came out of my mouth.

I need to pause here and describe the sound.

It was shrill. It was high-pitched. It was, ahem, a shriek. The shrill voice I had been practicing for a week came out involuntarily, at full volume, in a dark hallway at five-thirty in the morning, and I sounded exactly like Aurelia Maplewood being startled by a woodland predator.

I hit the floor.