Jeanine and Meg waited on a bench outside of the pavilion. Meg claimed the velocity of roller coasters made her stomach sick, and Jeanine had brought a book to read until we got to the family section of the park so she could ride the swings. They even took Dramamine to sit on a bench. Typical nonadventurous, blaming-their-boringness-on-motion-sickness parents.
While Snake and I waited under the pavilion, I spotted a guy in front of us with his young son. There was no way that kid was getting on the ride, considering the top of his spiked hair struggled to reach his dad’s thigh, but at least he was willing. His dad wore a GUNS N’ ROSES T-shirt with faded jeans, filming his son’s excitement through a silver portable camera.
“That’s you and your kid in the future,” I said to Snake, nodding in their direction.
He looked at the man and scrunched his nose. “I wouldn’t be caught dead with a Polaroid. Worst digital brand they make.”
“Not the camera, stupid. The filming your kid’s every uneventful move.”
“Oh, that.” He watched the man and the boy, his focus shifty. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You film me every time I breathe.”
“I feel like it will be different with him.”
“Why?”
Bringing up the inexorable truth that Snake would, in fact, be a dad in less than a month tore at something deep beneath the surface. Something so far-reaching, the mere mention of “your kid” dove headfirst into his complexities. A complexity he didn’t want me to know about. A complexity he might not have recognized himself.
“I think he’s going to resent me in a lot of ways,” he said. “For the way things happened.”
“Because you and Carla are so young?”
“That.” He dropped his head, knowing his hair would hide his eyes from me. “And because we won’t be together.”
“You don’t know you won’t be together. And even if you aren’t, what matters most is that you both take care of him. And don’t get in a nasty custody battle like those teenage parents on MTV, because that’s just embarrassing.”
“That’s incentive to not film our lives post-baby right there.” He grinned.
“All I’m saying is, don’t do that thing where you make idiotic mistakes and try to fix them by making more idiotic mistakes. Be in his life and don’t be a deadbeat, and you’ll be golden.”
He nodded, but I could still see him doubting. Silently mistrusting himself. Plotting how he would try to keep his son from hating him. Wondering if he was doing anything right at all.
“How did Carla tell you she was pregnant?” I asked, interrupting his self-evaluation. I was pretty sure he was failing it, anyway. “I’m sure it’s an entertaining story.”
He shook away his thoughts, beginning to smile again as we moved up in line. “She called me after school and asked me to meet her at the pond. We’d been hanging out since the party. I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend, but kept getting nervous.”
“Why? She obviously wasn’t going to say no.”
“Well, because I . . .”
He trailed off, and I could finish the sentence for him.
Because I really liked her.
“Anyway, when I got there, her eyes were all red like she’d been crying. I thought she was going to say she didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I started mentally preparing my breakup playlist for later. Pretty much everything by the Renegade Dystopia.” I rolled my eyes. “Then she told me she was pregnant. I took the news about as heroically as you’d expect . . . I threw up under a tree.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Swear. I vomited three times that night. I told my moms I had food poisoning.”
“You’re so pathetic.” I laughed. “What did you say to Carla?”
“I asked her if she was sure over and over until she threatened to push me in the pond if I asked again. When she said she was keeping it, I promised I would be there for her as much as she would let me.”
We moved farther up in line. The boy and his dad were getting strapped in, and the kid could barely see over the harness.
“And your moms?” I asked.
“They cried for at least a few days straight. Which I get, you know? I hadn’t even turned seventeen yet. I was still a kid to them. They asked if I wanted to marry her or anything, and I said no. I wasn’t sure if that made it better or worse.”
“That’s brutal.”
“It was a big mess for a few months there. Hats off to Prozac for dragging me through it.”
“You could be a testimonial for their commercials,” I joked. “Snake Eliot the Prozac poster kid.”
“I never needed it as much as I did then, I can tell you that. At least I wasn’t entirely alone.”
He wasn’t entirely alone because he had Carla. I could picture it like I’d seen it on the big screen, Snake and Carla running from their problems when things with their parents became too much, when the only two people they had were each other. I wondered if Carla ever called Snake from the side of the road at one in the morning. I wondered if he sped to her rescue. I wondered if she slept in his guest room. I wondered if it was on those nights, when no one understood them but them, that Snake told Carla that he loved her. I wondered if in the darkness of their loneliness, he really meant it.
“What about now?” I asked. He raised his brows at me. “How do your moms feel about Carla now?”
I thought about how strange Jeanine acted whenever Carla was mentioned. How no one ever talked about her except for me. It seemed like they wanted to pretend she didn’t exist.
“They like her for who she is. They just don’t like her for me.”
“Why not?”
His eyes found mine instantly. “Because they like what makes me feel good.”
I held back a smile. “That’s a slim list.”
It was our turn to board. A redheaded kid with a pale face shrouded in acne ushered us onto the ride, helping us lock the buckles on our harnesses. His quivering fingers were hardly comforting to someone who was deathly afraid of doing anything not involving having both feet planted firmly on the ground. I looked at Snake, who was sitting beside me already strapped in. Apparently, he’d been staring at me the entire time I was getting locked.
“Stop staring!” I yelled over the machine noises. “You know I hate it!”
“You said no heights!” he yelled back, a sly smirk parading on his face.
“I meant heights where we’re hanging for a long period of time!”
“Technically, we will be! You’re contradicting yourself!”
“No, I’m not! We drop fast!”
“You say one thing and mean another!”
“So do you!”
“No, I don’t!”
“You said you loved her!”
The words flew off my tongue so fast it was like we were already riding. His whole expression shifted from lightheartedness to confusion. I’d succeeded in shocking him again, but it didn’t feel like a victory that time. It felt like a loss.
The recording began to play, welcoming us to the GateKeeper and instructing us to keep hands, arms, and legs inside the ride at all times (and a bunch of other safety nonsense no one cared about). Some kid behind me was crying. The couple in front of me was taking a picture on a cell phone they were going to lose in ten seconds. And Snake was still staring, not at all in the good way.