'Someday you'll be sorry,' he told her with quiet sincerity. 'A relationship based on lies is no good, Sarah.'
She gave him a very moist raspberry.
After the carousel came the mirror maze, a very good mirror maze as a matter of fact, it made her think of the one in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the little-oldlady schoolteacher almost got lost forever. She could see Johnny in another part of it, fumbling around, waving to her. Dozens of Johnnies, dozens of Sarahs. They bypassed each other, flickered around nonEuclidian angles, and seemed to disappear. She made left turns, right turns, bumped her nose on panes of clear glass, and got giggling helplessly, partly in a nervous claustrophobic reaction. One of the mirrors turned her into a squat Tolkein dwarf. Another created the apotheoeis of teenage gangliness with shins a quarter of a mile long.
At last they escaped and he got them a couple of fried hot dogs and a Dixie cup filled with greasy french fries that tasted the way french fries hardly ever do once you've gotten past your fifteenth year.
They passed a kooch joint. Three girls stood out front in sequined skirts and bras. They were shimmying to an old Jerry Lee Lewis tune while the barker hawked them through a microphone. 'Come on over baby,' Jerry Lee blared, his piano boogying frankly across the sawdust-sprinkled arcades. 'Come on over baby, baby got the bull by the horns ... we ain't fakin ... whole lotta shakin goin on...
'Club Playboy,' Johnny marveled, and laughed. 'There used to he a place like this down at Harrison Beach. The barker used to swear the girls could take the glasses right off your nose with their hands tied behind their backs.'
'It sounds like an interesting way to get a social disease,' Sarah said, and Johnny roared with laughter.
Behind them the barker's amplified voice grew hollow with distance, counterpointed by Jerry Lee's pumping piano, music like some mad, dented hot rod that was too tough to die, rumbling out of the dead and silent fifties like an omen. 'Come in, men, come on over, don't be shy because these girls sure aren't, not in the least little bit! It's all on the inside ... your education isn't complete until you've seen the Club Playboy show...
'Don't you want to go on back and finish your education?' she asked.
He smiled. 'I finshed my basic course work on that subject some time ago. I guess I can wait a while to get my Ph.D.'
She glanced at her watch. 'Hey, it's getting late, Johnny. And tomorrow's a school day.'
'Yeah. But at least it's Friday.'
She sighed, thinking of her fifth-period study hall and her seventh-period New Fiction class, both of them impossibly rowdy.
They had worked their way back to the main part of the midway. The crowd was thinning. The Tilt-A-Whirl had shut down for the evening. Two workmen with unfiltered cigarettes jutting from the corners of their mouths were covering the Wild Mouse with a tarpaulin. The man in the Pitch-Til-U-Win was turning off his lights.
'You doing anything Saturday?' he asked, suddenly diffident. 'I know it's short notice, but...'
'I have plans,' she said.
'Oh.'
And she couldn't bear his crestfallen expression, it was really too mean to tease him about that. 'I'm doing something with you.
'You are?... Oh, you are. Say, that's good.' He grinned at her and she grinned back. The voice in her mind, which was sometimes as real to her as the voice of another human being, suddenly spoke up.
You're feeling good again, Sarah. Feeling happy. Isn't it fine?
'Yes, it is,' she said. She went up on tiptoe and kissed him quickly. She made herself go on before she could chicken out. 'It gets pretty lonely down there in Veazie sometimes, you know. Maybe I could... sort of spend the night with you.'
He looked at her with warm thoughtfulness, and with a speculation that made her tingle deep inside. 'Would that be what you want, Sarah?'
She nodded. 'Very much what I want.'
'All right,' he said, and put an arm around her.
'Are you sure?' Sarah asked a little shyly.
'I'm just afraid you'll change your mind.'
'I won't, Johnny.'
He hugged her tighter against him. 'Then it's my lucky night.'
They were passing the Wheel of Fortune as he said it, and Sarah would later remember that it was the only booth still open on that side of the midway for thirty yards in either direction. The man behind the counter had just finished sweeping the packed dirt inside for any spare dimes that might have fallen from the playing board during the night's action. Probably his last chore before closing up, she thought. Behind him was his large spoked wheel, outlined by tiny electric bulbs. He must have heard Johnny's remark, because he went into his pitch more or less automatically, his eyes still searching the dirt floor of his booth for the gleam of silver.
'Hey-hey-hey, if you feel lucky, mister, spin the Wheel of Fortune, turn dimes into dollars. It's all in the Wheel, try your luck, one thin dime sets this Wheel of Fortune in motion.'
Johnny swung back toward the sound of his voice.