July 29. Dara’s birthday. This year, FanLand will turn seventy-five on the day she turns seventeen. If Parker makes the connection, he doesn’t say so. And I’m not about to point it out.
“Still eating alien slime, I see?” I say instead, jerking my chin toward the relish.
He pretends to be offended. “Le slime. It’s not alien. It’s French.”
The afternoon is a blur of rounds: scooping up litter, changing trash bags, dealing with a five-year-old kid who has somehow gotten separated from his camp group and stands, bawling, underneath a crooked sign pointing the way to the Haunted Ship. Someone throws up on the Tornado, and Parker informs me it’s my job, as the new girl, to clean it—but then does all the work himself.
There’s fun stuff, too: riding the Albatross to see whether the gears feel sticky; washing down the carousel with an industrial hose so powerful I can barely keep it in my hands; downtime between jobs when I talk with Parker about the other kids who work at FanLand and who hates who and who’s hooking up or breaking up or getting back together.
I finally find out why FanLand is so short-staffed this summer.
“So there’s this guy Donovan.” Parker starts into the story while we’re taking a break between shifts, sitting in the shade of an enormous potted palm. He keeps swatting at the flies. Parker’s hands are constantly in motion. He’s like a catcher telegraphing mysterious signs to an invisible teammate: hand to nose, tug on ear, tuck the hair. Except the signs aren’t mysterious to me. I know what all of them mean, whether he’s happy or sad or stressed or anxious. Whether he’s hungry, or had too much sugar, or too little sleep.
“First name or last?” I interrupt.
“Interesting question. Not sure. Everyone just calls him Donovan. Anyway, he’d been working at FanLand forever. Way longer than Mr. Wilcox. Knows the whole place inside and out, everyone loves him, really great with the kids—”
“Wait—was he here longer than Princess?”
“Nobody’s been here longer than Princess. Now stop interrupting. So he was a good guy, okay? At least, that’s what everyone thought.” Parker pauses dramatically, deliberately making me wait.
“So what happened?” I say.
“The cops busted down his door a few weeks ago.” He raises one eyebrow. His eyebrows are very thick and practically black, like he has vampire blood somewhere far back in his ancestry. “Turns out he’s some kind of pedo. He had, like, a hundred pictures of high school girls on his computer. It was some crazy sting operation. They’d been tracking him for months.”
“No way. And no one had any idea?”
Parker shook his head. “Not a clue. I only met him once or twice, but he seemed normal. Like someone who should be busy coaching soccer and complaining about mortgage rates.”
“Creepy,” I say. Years ago, I remember learning about the mark of Cain in Sunday school and thinking that it wasn’t such a bad idea. How convenient if you could see what was wrong with people right away, if they wore their sicknesses and crimes on their skin like tattoos.
“Very creepy,” he agrees.
We don’t talk about the accident, or Dara, or about the past at all. And suddenly it’s three o’clock and the first shift of my new job is over, and it didn’t totally suck.
Parker walks me back to the office, where Mr. Wilcox and a pretty, dark-skinned woman I assume is Donna, the woman who hoards all the Cokes, are arguing about additional security for the anniversary party, in the good-natured, easy tones of people who have spent years arguing without ever essentially disagreeing. Mr. Wilcox breaks off long enough to give me another hearty slap on the back.
“Nick? You enjoy your first day? Of course you did! Best place in the world. See you tomorrow, bright and early!”
I retrieve my backpack. When I reemerge into the sunshine, Parker is waiting for me. He has changed shirts, and his red uniform is balled up under one arm. He smells like soap and new leather.
“I’m glad we get to work together,” I blurt as we walk into the parking lot, still crowded with cars and coach buses. FanLand is open until 10:00 p.m., and Parker has told me that the night crowd is totally different: younger, rowdier, more unpredictable. Once, he told me, he caught two people having sex on the Ferris wheel; another time he found a girl snorting coke off a sink in one of the men’s toilets. “I’m not sure I could handle Wilcox all by myself,” I add quickly, because Parker is looking at me strangely.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m glad, too.” He tosses his keys a few inches and catches them in his palm. “So you want a ride home? I think the Chariot’s missed you.”
Seeing his car, so familiar, so him, I have a quick flash of memory, like an explosion in my brain: the windshield fogged up, patterned with rain and body heat; Parker’s guilty face; and Dara’s eyes, cold and hard, gloating, like the eyes of a stranger.
“That’s all right,” I say quickly.
“You sure?” He pops open the driver’s-side door.
“I have Dara’s car,” I say quickly. The words come out before I can think about them.
“You do?” Parker seems surprised. I’m grateful the lot is crowded, so my lie isn’t immediately obvious. “All right, then. Well . . . I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I say, willing away another image of that night, of the way it felt to know, deep down, that everything had changed; that nothing would ever be the same between the three of us again. “See you.”
I’ve already started to turn away—lingering, now, so that Parker won’t see that I’m headed toward the bus stop, when he calls me back.
“Look,” he says, all in a rush. “There’s a party at the Drink tonight. You should come. It’ll be super low-key,” he goes on. “Like twenty people, max. But bring whoever you want.” He says the last part in a funny voice, half-strangled. I wonder whether it’s a hint, and he’s asking me to bring Dara along. Then I hate myself for having to wonder it. Before they hooked up, there was never any weirdness between us.
One more thing that Dara ruined because she felt like it, because she had an itch, an urge, a whim. He’s so fuckable, I remember her saying one morning, out of the blue, when we’d all gone across the street to Upper Reaches Park to watch his Ultimate Frisbee game. Did you ever notice that he’s undeniably fuckable? As we were watching him run across the ball field, chasing the bright red disk of the Frisbee, arm outstretched—the same boy-body-arm I’d known my whole life was transformed, in an instant, by Dara’s words.
And I remember looking at her and thinking that she, too, looked like a stranger, with her hair (blond and purple, then) and the thick dusting of charcoal eye shadow on her lids, lips red and exaggerated with pencil, legs stretched out for miles underneath her short-shorts. How could my Dara, Little Egg, Nosebutton, who used to wrap her arms around my shoulders and stand on my toes so we could pretend to be one person as we staggered around the living room, have turned into someone who used the word fuckable, someone I barely knew, someone I feared, even?
“It’ll be just like old times,” Parker says, and I feel a hard ache in my chest, a desperate desire for something lost long ago.
Everyone knows you can’t go back.
“Yeah, maybe. I’ll let you know,” I say, which I won’t.
I watch him get into his car and drive off, waving, smiling big behind the glare, and pretend to be fumbling for keys in my bag. Then I walk across the parking lot to wait for the bus.