I'd seen my dad's new house during our video calls, but it was strange to experience it in person. Tucked away on a quiet, shady street that bordered a forest, it was more cabin-like than a house, with a stone fireplace downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. It used to be a vacation rental, so luckily I had my own bathroom.

The coolest part about the house was the screened-in back porch, which not only it had a hammock, but also a built around a tree that grew in the middle of it, straight through the roof. However, it was what sat outside that porch in the driveway that makes my nerves tingle every time I looked at it: a light pink Vespa scooter with a polka-dot print seat.

Scooter.

Mine.

Me on a scooter.

What?

Its small engine and tiny tires could only get up to forty mph, but its vintage looks had been fully restored.

"It's your getaway vehicle," Appa said proudly when he brought me out to show it to me the first time. "I knew you had to have something to get to work this summer. And you can drive yourself to school in the fall. You don't even need a license."

"It's crazy," I'd told him. And gorgeous. But crazy. I worried I'd stand out.

"There are hundreds of these things in the city," he argued. "It was either this or a van, but since you don't need to haul around surfboards, I thought this was better."

"It's very cliche," I admitted.

"And yet, you'll look stunning driving this in your fashionista's outfits."

Man, he really does know how to sell me. "I do like the polka dots, very cute."

And a matching helmet. I therefore named the scooter Eggie, as a reference to being the maknae/baby of the family. once I'd decided on the name, I committed. No going back now. It was mine. Appa taught me how to use it - I rode it up and down his street a million times after dinner - and I would eventually find the nerve to ride it around the city, come hell or high water or drugged-out jaywalking surfers.

Appa apologizes for having to work the next day, but I don't ming. I spent the day unpacking and drving my scooter around between jet-lagged naps on the hammock. I messaged V a few times, but keeping up the illusion of what I'm doing with my summer is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it will be easier once I've gotten my sea legs here.

After my day of rest and a night with Appa playing our favorite board game, I'm forced to put my new-found independence to the test. Finding a summer job was one of my reasons for coming out here, but Appa pulled some strings. That sounded fine enough when I was back in Seoul. Now that I'm here, I'm sort of regretting that I agreed to it. Too late to back out, though. "The summer tourist season waits for no one," Appa cheerfully says when I complain.

Appa wakes me up super early when he goes to work, but I accidentally fall back asleep. When I wake up again, I'm running late, so I get dressed in a flash and run out the door. One thing I didn't expect when I loved out here is all the morning coastal fog. It keep things cool until midmorning, when the sun burns it away. Sure, the fog has a certain quiet allure, but now that I have to drives a scooter through appa's neighborhood, where it's occasionally hanging low and reaching through branches like fingers, it's not my favorite thing in the world.

Armed with a map and a knot in my stomach, I face the fog and drive Eggie into the city. Appa alreayd showed the way through his car, but I still repeat the directions in my head over and over at every stop sign. It isn't even 9 a.m. yet, so most of the streets are clear until I got to Big Hit Avenue. Where I'm going is only a few blocks away on this road, but I have to drive past the boardwalk (Ferris wheel, music blasting), watch out for tourists crossing the road to get to the beach after hanging at the IHOP for breakfast - which smells AMAZING, by the way - and OMO, where did all these skaters come from?

Just when I'm about to die some kind of stress-related obstacle, I see the cliff coming up along the coast at the end of the boardwalk and a sign: THE VOGUE PALACE.

My summer job.

I slow Eggie with a squeeze of the hand brakes and turn into the employee driveway. To the right is the main road that leads up the cliff to the guest parking lot, which is empty today. "The Palace," as Appa tells me the locals call it, is closed for training and some sort of outdoor exercise, which I can smell from here, because it stinks. Tomorrow is the official start of the summer tourist season, so today is orientation for new seasonal employees. This includes me.

Appa did some accounting work for the Palace, and he knows the general manager. That's how he got me the job. Otherwise, I doubt they would've been impressed with my limited resume, which includes exactly one summer of babysitting and several months of afterschool law paperwork filing in Gwangju.

But that's all in the past. Because even though I'm so nervous I could vomit all over Eggie's pretty speedometer right now, I'm actually sort of excited to work here. I like museums. A lot.

This is what I've learned about the Palace online: Hyesun and Jaehyun Anh got rich during the first world war when they came down from San Francisco to buy this property for a beach getaway and found 13 million dollars in gold coins hidden inside a cave in the cliffs. The couple used their found fortune to build a hundred-room sprawling mansion on the beach, right over the entrance of the cave, and filled it with exotic antiques, fabrics of the old days, large bell gowns showcasing, and odd items collected and made on trips around the world. They threw crazy fashion parties in the 1920s and '30s, inviting rich people from San Francisco to hang out with Hollywood stars. In the early 1950s, everything ended badly when Hyesun shot and killed Jaehyun before committing suicide. After the mansion sat vacant for twenty years, their kids decided they could put the mansion to better use by opening it up to the public as a tourist attraction.

Okay, so the house is definitely eccentric and weird, and half of the so-called collection isn't real, but there's supposedly some Golden Age Hollywood gown housed inside. And working here has got to be way better than filing court documents.

A row of hedges hides the employee lot behind one of the mansion's wings. I managed to part Eggie in a space near another scooter without crashing anything - yay - and then pop the center stand and run a chain lock through the back tire to secure it. My helmet squeezes inside the bin under the locking seat; I'm good to go.

I didn't know what was considered an appropriate outfit for orientation, so I'm wearing a lavender dress that has two think black straps around the waist. My curls seem to have survived the ride, and my natural makeup's still good. However, when I see a couple of other people walking in a side door wearing flip flops and shorts, I feel completely overdressed. But it's too late now, so I followed them inside.

This looks to be a back hallway with offices and a break room. A bored woman sits behind a podium inside the door. The people I followed inside are nowhere to be seen, but another girl is stopped at the podium. 

"Name?" The bored woman asks.

The girl was petite, probably around my age, with mid-length black hair. She's also overdressed like me, so I feel a little better. "Anna Nguyen," she says in the tiniest, high-pitched voice I've ever heard. She got a strong American accent. Her tone is so soft, the woman behind the podium makes her repeat her name. Twice.

She finally gets checked off the list and handed a file folder of new-hire paperwork before being instructed to enter the break room. I get the same treatment when it's my turn. Looks to be twenty or more people filling out paperwork already. Since there aren't any empty tables, I sit at Anna's.

She whispers, "You haven't worked here before either?"

"No. I'm new," I say, and then add, "in town."

She glances at my file. "Oh, you're older than me by a year. MIIS or Sunnyside? Or private?"

It took me a minute to realize what she means. "I'll start at MIIS in the fall."

"Same," she smiled, pointing to the education line on her application. After another new hire passes by, she shares more information about this place. "They hire, like, twenty-five people every summer. I've heard it's boring but easy. Better than cleaning up cotton candy puke at the boardwalk."

Can't argue with her. I've already filled out the main application online, but they've given us a handbook and a bunch of other weird forms to sign. Confidentiality agreements. Random drug-testing permission. Pledges not to use the museum wifi to watch . Warnings about stealing uniforms.

Anna is as shocked as I am.

"Competing business?" she mumbles, looking at something we have to sign, promising not to take a similar job within sixty miles of Monterey for three months after ending employment here. "What do they consider a similar job? Is this even legal?"

"Probably not," I whisper back, thinking of MINOZ LLC constantly spouting off legal advice to Eomma, like she wasn't a lawyer herself.

"Well, this is not legally my signature," she says in her American accent, making a vague, wavy scribble on the form as she wiggles her brows at me. "And if they don't give me enough hours, I'm heading straight to the nearest cave mansion within sixty miles."

I don't mean to laugh to loud, and everyone looks up, so I quickly hide my giggles and we both finished our forms. After we hand it in, we're both assigned a locker and given the ugliest vest I've ever seen. They're the color of dark green. We don't have to wear them for orientation, but we do have to wear HELLO, MY NAME IS . . . stickers. And then everyone is done sticking them to their chests, we're moving down the employee hall, through a steel door (with a sign reminding us to smile), and into the main lobby.

It's huge as we all looked around us. The entrance to the cave is at the back of the lobby, and all the walls and tiles are lit with orange lights, which is creepy. We're led across the expensive lobby past a circular information desk, a gift shop of tiny items and gowns from the 1890s, and a sunken lounge area filled with couches that might have been stolen . . . that is also the same color as our vests. I'm sensing a theme.

"Good morning, seasonal new hires," a middle aged man says. He, too, is wearing the vest with a tie that as the Vogue Palace art deco logo printed all over it. I wonder if that man-dated for the male employees, or if he bought from the gift shop with his employee discount. "I'm Mr. Lopez, the museum floor supervisor. Though all of you will be assigned team supervisors, those supervisors report to me. I'm the one who makes the schedules, and the person who approves your time cards. So you may think of me as the person you most want to impress for the next three months."

He says this with all the excitement of a funeral director and manages to frown the entire time he's speaking, but that might be because his dark blonde hairline seems unnaturally low - like his forehead is half the size it should be.

"What a ," Anna says in her tiny voice near my shoulder.

Wow. Sweet little Anna has a filthy mouth. But she's not wrong. And as Mr. Lopez begins lecturing us the Palace's history and how it attracts half a million visitors every year, I find myself looking around the lobby and checking the places I could be assigned - information desk, guided tours, lost and found, gift shop . . . I wonder which position would allow me to deal with as few disrespectful guests as possible. On my application, I checked off the boxes for "behind-the-scenes" and "working alone" preferences.

Cafe tables sit around an open balcony on the second floor, and I'm seriously hoping I don't get stuck working in food service. Then again, if I worked in the cafe, I would get to stare at not only a life-sized reproduction of a ship suspended from the ceiling, but also a skeletal sea monster attacking the ship. File that in the "not genuine" part of the Anh's collection of weird objects.

Movement catches my attention. On a set of floating slate-rock stairs that curve around the ship, two museum security guards in black uniforms are descending. I squint, not believing my eyes. how small is this city? Because one of those guards is the silver hair dude from yesterday who was pulling his drugged friend off the road. Yup, that's definitely him: the hot surfer boy with the scars on his arm.

My panic meter twitches.

"And now," Mr. Lopez says, "you'll split up into two teams and tour the museum with a member of our security. This side, please follow our senior security officer, Min Yoongi, who has worked for the Vogue Palace since it opened to the public forty years ago."

He points to the left side of the group toward an old man whose pale blonde hair is messy. He's super friendly and sweet, and though he probably couldn't stop a ten-year-old ruffian from stealing a piece of candy out of the gift shop, he eagerly steers his team of recruits to the left side of the lobby, toward a large archway marked HYESUN'S WING.

Mr. Lopez motions the surfer boy forward toward our group. "And this is Kim Taehyung. He's work worked with us for last year or so. Some of you might've heard of his family," he says in an unimpressed voice that makes me think he doesn't think to highly of them. "His grandfather was surfing legend Jonghyun 'Victorious' Kim.

A little o-oh ripples through the crowd as Mr. Lopez shushed us with one hand and grumpily tells us all to meet him back here in two hours for our scheduling assignments. One side of my brain is screaming. Two hours?! And the other side is trying to remember if I've ever heard of this Victorious Kim guy. Is he a real celebrity, or just some local who once got fifteen minutes of fame? Because the sign on that IHOP down the road says its almond pancakes to be world-famous, but come on.

Mr. Lopez heads back to the employee hall, leaving us alone with Taehyung, who takes his sweet time walking around the group to look us over. he's got a stack of printouts that he's rolled up into a tube, which he taps against his thigh as he walks. And I noticed his hair is kind of messy to seem like to be a bad-boy and y and rebellious, which might be fine for the Surfer Boy, but seem way too long and irreverent for Security Guard.

He's getting closer, and the evader in me is not happy about this situation. I try to be cool and hide behind Anna. But she's easily six inches shorted than me - and I'm only five six - so I instead just find myself staring over her head directly into Taehyung's face.

He stops right in front of us and briefly holds the rolled-up papers to his eyes like a telescope.

"Well, all right," he says with a lazy California drawl and smiles slowly. "Guess I lucked out and got the good-looking group. Hello, Anna."

"Hey, Taehyung." Anna answers with a smirk.

Okay, so they know each other. I wonder if Taehyung's the person who told her this job was "boring but easy." I don't know why I even care. I guess I'm mostly concerned that he'll remember me from the car yesterday. Fingers crossed that he didn't hear that cowardly squeal I let out.

"Who's ready for a private tour?" he asks.

No on answers.

"Don't everyone speak up at once." He peels one of the papers off his rolled-up tubes - I see EMPLOYEE MAP at the top of the paper - and hands it to me while looking at my legs. Is he checking me out? I'm not sure how I fee about that. Now I wished I'd worn pants.

When I try to accept the map, he hangs on to it, and I'm forced to snatch it out of his fingers. The corner rips off. Rude much? I give him a dirty look, but he just smiles and leans closer. "Now, now," he says. "You aren't going to scream like you did yesterday, are you?"