AFTER
JULY 23
Nick
“It still works, you know.”
I haven’t realized I’ve been staring up at the Gateway until Alice comes up behind me. I take a step backward, nearly planting a foot in the paint tray.
She pushes a strand of hair back from her forehead with the inside of her wrist. Her face is flushed, and it makes her eyes look light brown, nearly yellow. “The Gateway,” she says, jerking her chin toward the huge metal spire. “It still works. Wilcox gets it inspected every summer. He’s determined to run it again. I think he feels bad, you know, like as long as the Gateway stays off-limits it means it really was his fault. The girl’s death, I mean. He has to prove the ride is safe.” She shrugs, scratching the tattoo below her left ear with one blue-paint-splattered finger.
When we’re not working the rides today, everyone on shift has been tasked with concealing evidence of last night’s vandalism. Sometime just before closing, a few idiots with graffiti cans went around decorating various signs around the park with crude illustrations of a certain part of the male anatomy. Wilcox seemed unfazed this morning. I later heard this happens at least once a summer.
“He petitions the park advisory department every year.” Alice sits down on a small plastic bench shaped like a tree stump. It’s rare that Alice sits down. She’s always moving, always directing things and calling out orders and laughing. Earlier today I saw her climbing up the scaffolding of the Cobra to get to a kid’s backpack that had somehow, inexplicably, become stuck in the gears—swinging, spiderlike, between structural supports, while a small crowd of FanLand employees had gathered, some to cheer her on, some begging her to get down, others scouting for Mr. Wilcox and Donna.
I watched Parker watching her, head tilted up to the sky, hands on his hips, eyes sparkling, and felt—what? Not jealousy, exactly. Jealousy is a strong feeling, a feeling that twists your stomach and gnaws your insides to shreds. This was more of a hollowness, like being really hungry for such a long time that you kind of get used to it.
Did he ever look at Dara like that? Does he still?
I don’t know. All I know is that he used to be my best friend, and now he doesn’t look at me at all. And my other best friend isn’t speaking to me. Or I’m not speaking to her.
Last night, seized by an old impulse, I went up to the attic just to check on her and saw she’d added a new sign to her door. Made of pale-green construction paper and decorated with hearts and badly drawn butterflies, it read simply: DON’T EVEN FUCKING THINK ABOUT IT.
“Mature,” I shouted through the closed door, and heard a muffled laugh in response.
“The girl’s dad—his name is Kowlaski, I think, or something like that, something with a ‘ski’—shows up every year and argues that the ride should stay closed,” Alice goes on. “I guess I understand both sides. The ride is really fun, though. At least, it was. When it’s powered up, all these tiny lights come on, so it looks like the Eiffel Tower or something.” She pauses. “They say she still cries out at night.”
Even though the day is dull and flat and windless, hot as metal, a tiny shiver lifts the hairs on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?”
Alice smiles. “It’s stupid. It’s just something the old-timers say when they’re working the graveyard shift. Have you worked the graveyard yet?”
I shake my head. The graveyard shifters—known at FanLand as the grave diggers—are responsible for closing up the park every night, securing the gates against break-ins, hauling trash, emptying the grease traps, and securing the rides and lulling them back into their nightly slumber. I’ve already heard horror stories from the other employees about shifts stretching until well past midnight.
“Next week,” I say. “The night before”—Dara’s birthday—“the anniversary party.”
“Lucky you,” she says.
“The girl,” I prompt her, because now I’m curious. And it’s a relief, weirdly, to talk about the girl, long dead, long broken up into echoes and memories. All morning, the talk has been of Madeline Snow. Her disappearance has sparked a three-county-wide manhunt. Every newspaper is plastered with her image, and the flyers have just multiplied, sprouting like fungus over every available surface.
Mom can’t get enough of it. This morning I found her sitting in front of the TV, her hair half-straightened, clutching her coffee without drinking.
“The first seventy-two hours are the most important,” she kept repeating, information I’m sure she’d regurgitated from a previous news report. “If they haven’t found her yet . . .”
A digitized clock in the upper right quadrant of the TV tracked how long it had been since Madeline had vanished from her car: eighty-four hours and counting.
Alice stands up, shaking out her legs, though she can only have been resting for five minutes. “It’s just a ghost story,” she says. “Something they say to the newbies to freak them out. Every park has to have a resident ghost. It’s, like, a law. I’ve closed shop here plenty of times, and I’ve never heard her.”
“Didn’t Mr. Kowlaski . . .” The question sticks in my throat, huge and gummy. “Didn’t he once tell you that you reminded him of her?”
“Oh, that.” She waves a hand. “Everyone thinks he’s lost his marbles. But he hasn’t. He’s just lonely. And people do crazy things when they’re lonely. You know?” For a moment, her eyes laser-beam onto mine, and I feel a tiny hitch of discomfort in my chest. It’s like she knows something—about Dara, about my parents, about how we all fell apart.
Then Maude comes stalking down the path toward us, shoulders hunched, like a linebacker charging toward a touchdown.
“Wilcox sent me,” she says, as soon as she sees us. She’s out of breath and annoyed, obviously, to have been sent to deliver messages. “Crystal didn’t show.”
Instantly Alice turns businesslike. “What do you mean, she didn’t show?”
Maude scowls. “Just what I said. And the show’s in fifteen. There are already, like, forty kids waiting.”
“We’ll have to cancel,” Alice says.
“No way.” Maude has a BE NICE OR LEAVE pin staked to her T-shirt, just above her right nipple, which is both (a) hypocritical and (b) definitely not part of the FanLand dress code. “They already paid. You know Donna doesn’t do refunds.”
Alice tips her head back and closes her eyes, as she does when she’s thinking. She has a thin neck, and an Adam’s apple as pronounced as a boy’s. Still, there’s something undeniably attractive about her. Her dream, she told me once, was to run FanLand after Mr. Wilcox. I want to get old here, she said. I want to die right on that Ferris wheel. At the high point. That way it’ll be a quick trip to the stars.
I can’t imagine wanting to stay at FanLand, and don’t know what she sees in it, either: the endless procession of people, the overflowing trash bags and sticky pulp of mashed-up french fries and ice cream coating the pavilion floors, the toilets clogged with tampons and plastic barrettes and spare change. But lately I can’t imagine wanting anything. I used to be so sure: college at UMass, then a two-year break before graduate school for social sciences or maybe psychology.
But that was before Dr. Lichme, and lipstick-toothed Cheryl, and the accident. And those dreams, like my memories, seem to be floundering, caught in murky darkness somewhere just out of reach.
“You can do it.” Alice turns to me.
I’m so surprised that it takes me a second to realize she’s serious. “What?”
“You can do it,” she repeats. “You’re Crystal’s size. The costume will fit you.”
I stare at her. “No,” I say. “No way.”
She’s already gripping me by the arm and piloting me back toward the front office. “It’ll take ten minutes,” she says. “You don’t even have to say anything. You just have to swan around on a rock and clap your hands to the music. You’ll be great.”
Once a day, a group of FanLand employees does a musical performance for the little kids in the big sunken amphitheater. Tony Rogers stars as the singing pirate, and Heather Minx, who is four foot eleven in a pair of platform wedges, dons a huge, ruffled parrot costume and accompanies him with various well-timed squawks. There’s also a mermaid—Crystal, normally, strapped into a shimmery, sequined tail and wearing a fine nylon long-sleeved top with the image of a bandeau shell bikini imprinted on it—to clap and sing along.
I haven’t been onstage since I was in second grade. And even that was a disaster. In our second-grade production of Chicken Little I completely forgot my cue—and then, in a desperate rush to make it out of the wings before the musical number ended—ran smack into Harold Liu and ended up knocking out one of his teeth.
I try to detach my arm from Alice’s grip, but she’s surprisingly strong. No wonder she scaled the Cobra this morning in five minutes flat. “Can’t you get Maude to do it?”
“Are you kidding? No way. She’ll terrorize the children. Come on, do it for me. It’ll be over before you know it.” She practically pushes me into the front office, which is empty. She skirts around the file cabinet and bends down to retrieve the mermaid costume from the corner, where it is folded neatly and sheathed in plastic after every performance. She removes it from its protective covering, shaking the tail out and releasing the faint smell of mildew. The sequins shimmer in the dull light. I fight the wild impulse to turn and run.