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“You meanSilly,” said Lilac, standing and walking behindthem.
“There you are,” said Tanya. She bent down and ran a finger under Landon’s chin. “Are you feeling better yet, honey?” She stood and almost seemed to exchange a glance with Silly Sandgrouse.A glance with a costumed mascot.“Landon was feeling blue this morning,” she said. “But Willow’s so good at cheering him up, aren’t you,honey?”
Willow crossed her arms across her chest and huffed. Lilac laughed a little to think of the little surly girl as the example ofcheerfulness.
Dropping Lilac’s hand, Landon ran toward Silly, hugging him. “Nolan!” he said, rubbing his head over and over on the creature’stummy.
“This is Silly,” said the Tildy Scout who’d walked in besidehim.
Landon glared at her as if to say she was an idiot and she actually backedoff.
“See?” said Willow. “Even a four-year-old knows Silly isn’treal.”
Landon turned around and reached a hand out toward Lilac. “Pretty Lilac,” he said, “just like Mommy. She’s nice tome.”
Lilac took his hand. His fingers were so small in her palm. She smiled awkwardly at Silly and chuckled when she realized how tall she’d become since she’d last posed for a picture with the sandgrouse. They were almost the same height now. “Willow and Landon keep telling me Silly isn’t real,” Lilac said. “But I don’t know. You look real tome.”
Silly reached a fluffy wing out and wrapped it around Lilac, pulling her into a hug with the little boy. Lilac laughed and hugged him back with her free hand. Then Silly pulled away and pecked her cheek with his spindlybeak.
“I think Nolan likes you,” said Willow in a conspiratorialtone.
“You meanSilly,” said the Tildy Scout escortagain.
“Sure,” said Willow. She reached a hand up over her mouth, but Lilac was certain she saw the edges of a widegrin.
Chapter Four
Some of theguys Nolan worked with would tell you that the best part of working the suit—the Silly Sandgrouse suit in Nolan’s case, but there were others like Tildy Tapir herself and Leah Llama—was the cute women who were interested in posing with the mascots and giving them a hug, oftentimes a glass of wine or a martini in hand. The tipsier they were, the handsier they tended to be, but Nolan had never been a huge fan of those moments. He had to keep acting in character as he squirmed his way out of pinching reach and he’d even had one brazen young woman pose for a picture only to grab him by the junk just as the phone flashed. She had been grabbing “Silly” by the junk, you see, as if that were utterly hilarity. He wished she’d have known that sometimes there were women inside that suit, too—although he doubted someone so shameless would care,really.
Besides, it was the women who’d often dealt with worse, like the frat boys—especially if they wore a human character costume like Queen Animaliao and had their faces and figures on fulldisplay.
“He’s back,” said Cheryl as she sipped her water through a straw. Her head for the “Queen Animaliao’s ball” version of the Tildy Tapir mascot rested on a table on the back wall beside Nolan’s standard Silly Sandgrouse one. The ball versions of the characters were often deployed at the same time as the standard ones, so long as they were never seen in the same room at the sametime.
The employee break room was the only place in the building they were allowed to remove their suits—unless they wanted to get fired, of course. If anyone had to go to the bathroom before it was time for their break, they had a signal for their Tildy Scout caretaker. Three bops on the Scout’s right elbow and a tap on their own heads. Then the caretaker would make some in-character excuse to the gathering crowd and take the mascot by the arm, guiding them back to the nearest break room. None of the other break rooms in the park proper were as big as this one at Tent Tildy, though, so most employees congregated here during longer breaks. Plus, there was foodhere.
Nolan hated having the resort shift in lieu of being out in the park because Earl, the resort manager, didn’t take kindly to mascots taking more than their allotted breaks. Yet the resort shift was what he got more often thannot.
“Who?” asked Nolan, his thoughts unfocused as he realized Cheryl was waiting for him torespond.
“Grabby McGrabberson,” answered Cheryl, staring Nolan down over her straw as if he were the densest man on Earth. She still had her body suit on, though Nolan had taken his top off to cool down. “He has a season pass and I swear he takes off work in the middle of the week at least once a month so he can have Tildy relatively to himself.” She looked over at Jo, dressed to the nines in her Queen Animaliao costume, her long, purple wig affixed tightly atop her page-cut brown hair. Many of the women who worked the characters kept their hair short because it was too hot in all those layers otherwise. “He’s the freak who loves feeling up Tildy. Like, he doesn’t even know if there’s a guy or a girl in there. He’s felt up guys in Tildy before. Why can’t he just focus on those curves on display in the Queen A costume? When I’m not in it, thatis.”
“Thanks,” said Jo. “I get enough of that, thank you. I also get kicks in the shin from the kids who are still mad aboutthat one timeQueen Animaliao was possessed and locked up Tildy in the castle dungeon. They shut their ears to any protests that ‘I’ was under a magic spell.” She took dainty bites of her sandwich, looking for all the world like the queen she was playing, even when onbreak.
“So what’s this I hear about Silly stealing somesugar?”
Eddie, dressed in sparkly pastel blues as Prince Beastly, Queen Animaliao’s human consort, slipped in beside Nolan and Jo, a plate loaded to the brim with pasta, veggies, and even a sandwich. Nolan felt a bit nauseous looking at it. If he ate that much in costume, he’dhurl.
Shrugging while sipping his water, Nolan then grabbed a carrot stick from Eddie’s plate and munched onit.
Eddie unfolded his napkin and tucked it carefully over the front of his regal regalia. He wasn’t dumb enough to get sauce on his pasta, but you didn’t want to get a crumb on the human outfits in particular, even if they were dry cleaned on a daily basis. “Angie told me. At Tildy’sTots?”
Everyone at the table stared at Nolan, and he gazed over Jo’s shoulder to spot Angie, his Tildy Scout caretaker for the day, across the room and eating nonchalantly with the other Scouts.Traitor.
“You got some sugar at… Tildy’s Tots?” asked Cheryl, incredulously. “One of the kids’ Tildy Scout caretakers, Ihope?”
“As opposed to a child?” asked Nolan incredulously, although he wasn’t angry. Cheryl just liked to tease like that. “I don’t know who it was. A new woman in asuit.”
“Amom?”
