—1—
When you’re eighteen, there’s fuck-all to do in a Southern Illinois summer but eat fried pickles, drink PBR tallboys you stole from your mom, and ride the Tilt-a-Whirl till you hurl. Which is exactly what I was doing the night I met Him.
It was the kind of greenhouse August heat that feels positively Jurassic. Everything was melting a little: the liquid black sky, the silver gel-penned stars, the neon lights bleeding color everywhere. All summer there’s a carnival a mile from my house, in a no-man’s-land rife with weeds and saw grass, a sea of flat earth. It feels like the edge of forever out there. I cracked a tallboy and it echoed like a rifle shot. I took a swig of that pissy weak stuff, savoring the coolness. I was sitting on a picnic bench, watching the rollercoaster go up and down and up again, the joyous screams phasing in and out like a distant radio station. Rollercoasters scare me, and it has everything to do with me losing my stuffed bunny George when I was five. George fell from a hundred feet in the sky when I threw my hands up in cruel, careless glee. Mom sewed new eyes on, but I cried and cried and said he was dead until she let me bury him in the backyard. We made a coffin out of a Fruit Loops box. Mom, so drunk she was crying too, gave the eulogy.
So maybe part of why I was out here tonight was because I was tired of being a kid, stuck with kid fears and kid memories. Senior year would start in two weeks. I wanted to go in already an adult.
I pounded the last of the beer and crushed the can on the bench.
My name’s Maise, by the way. Maise O’Malley. Yeah, I’m Irish as hell. But you probably knew that from the drinking, right?
I went into the carnival. Apparently, a breaking news bulletin had just gone out about my legs: ten pairs of wolf eyes looked up instantly, then moved down, up, down, the old broken elevator gaze. It’s always the older guys, too. But I’m kind of screwed up from growing up without a father, and I like when they try to daddy me.
“Try” being the operative word, as Mr. Wilke says.
But we’ll get to him.
I smiled at no one, sauntering past stalls stuffed with popcorn and pretzels and corndogs, flavor ice and cotton candy. The air was drugged with sugar and salt. It made my head spin. A bell rang nearby and someone whooped triumphantly. I passed the rigged games—milk bottles, darts—where people stubbornly threw money at the carnie, desperate to win some giant lice-ridden teddy fresh out of a Taiwanese sweatshop.
Mr. Wilke says I’m both cynical and worldly for my age. I choose to take them both as compliments.
I wasn’t ready to face the rollercoaster yet, so I rode the merry-go-round for a while, going for the full Lolita effect as I raised a leg high and slowly, slowly draped it over a painted horse, reveling in how uncomfortable I made the actual dads. One stayed seated when the ride ended, waiting for his erection to go away. His kid pulled at his sleeve, oblivious. I raised an eyebrow coolly. Too bad I didn’t have any bubblegum.
Finally the beer had charged up my blood. I marched over to the YOU MUST BE THIS TALL sign. The line was short. It was getting late, for a weeknight.
Then I saw the name of the rollercoaster.
Deathsnake.
I almost turned around right there. Stupid, yeah, but PTSADS doesn’t care how stupid a trigger is.
If you need me to spell that out, it’s Post-Traumatic Stuffed Animal Death Syndrome. I thought it was pretty funny. Mom and the psychologist did not. The psychologist said I had substituted George for Dad and I actually had post-dad syndrome. I told her George was a f**king bunny.
Anyway, Deathsnake.
“You getting on?” the carnie said. He had so much acne he looked like a halftone comic, like when you peer really close at a newspaper and everything that looked solid is just little dots.
I gave him my ticket.
The a**holes on this ride had decided to take every single car except the front. Again, I almost turned around. I did turn, actually, and saw a guy behind me, so I turned back and got into the empty car because I was not going to chicken out in front of the entire universe. Best Case Scenario: I close my eyes for four minutes and get a free blowdry. Worst Case Scenario: I fall from a hundred feet in the air, and there’s no sewing my eyes back on.
The door to my car opened.
It was the guy. He raised his eyebrows questioningly, and I shrugged. He got in.
At least I might die next to a hot guy.
Revised Worst Case Scenario: I throw up on him, we both die.
“You’re pretty brave,” he said, lowering the bar over us. “Must be a veteran, sitting up front.”
“It’s my first time,” I said. Well, first time on my own terms.
He smiled. It lit his face like a camera flash. “Mine too.”
Then Deathsnake lurched forward, toward doom.
It’s a trick, the way it starts. There’s a loud, creepy ratcheting, like some massive clockwork grinding beneath you, but the car just farts along inconspicuously. People behind us were talking about stupid shit. Some girl told someone to put away his phone and I prayed that he wouldn’t and that it was expensive. The guy next to me looked out over the fairgrounds as we ascended, and I peered past him, but my attention was split. Beyond him, a confetti of lights and fey music, all the ugly carnie weirdness rendered magical thanks to distance. But my eyes kept catching on his face. From below it was traced with red neon, from above with metallic moonlight, sketching out a bold, almost sulky chin, lips that looked too soft and sensitive for a man. His eyelashes were a fringe of furry gold. I couldn’t see his eyes from this angle.
He looked over suddenly and I whipped my head away. “What a view,” he said.
“Tell me about it,” I mumbled.
I could feel him smiling.
“Oh, shit,” someone said behind us.
And we dropped.
I’m not going to do the whole rollercoaster/falling in love metaphor. I didn’t fall in love with him up there. Maybe I fell in love with the idea of love, but I’m a teenage girl. This morning I fell in love with raspberry jam and a puppy in a tiny raincoat. I’m not exactly Earth’s top authority on the subject.
But when we crested the first peak and the world sprawled beneath us like a tangled-up string of Christmas lights and then we plunged toward it at lightspeed, the guy and I reached for each other’s hands spontaneously and simultaneously.
And I felt something I’ve never felt before.
You can call it love, or you can call it freefall. They’re pretty much the same thing.
When Deathsnake glided to a stop, we both looked like we’d stuck our fingers in electric sockets. Einstein hair, Steve Buscemi eyes. The guy had screamed more than I did. I mostly laughed, at his screaming, at my fear, and finally at how good it felt to be alive right then and there. Not once had I thought of George or my mother or my sad life.
The guy—who I mentally upgraded to The Guy, capital letters—offered me a hand out of the car. We still had shit-eating grins plastered on our faces.
“Thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“Helping me lose my rollercoaster virginity.”
I don’t think he meant to flirt, but he blushed anyway. He looked at me a little closer.
This is the part where they realize you’re jailbait.
“How old are you?” he said, right on cue.
“Old enough.”
I love what that does to their faces. Old enough to…fill in the blank.
But The Guy only smiled. “I don’t want your parents to think I’m some creep.”
He could have said, I’m a teacher, and everything would have been different.
“I’m here by myself,” I said. “All that matters is whether I think you’re some creep.”
“Do you?”
“Let’s test that hypothesis.” And I headed for the exit.
I knew exactly what he was seeing from the rear view. The cutoff jean shorts, the creamy legs sleek and slender as a filly’s, the tight tee, the cascade of burnished chestnut hair. I was, perhaps, very slightly, flouncing. Normally I’m cool and collected. But I was giddy from the heights and this beautiful man paying attention to me. I still hadn’t really seen him head-on, so in my mind he became a pastiche of male models and movie stars.
“How do you feel about centrifugal force?” I said over my shoulder.
“Totally against it.”
“Great. Next up is the Gravitron.”
The line here was longer, and when he caught up we turned to each other, and I did a double-take.
There was the sensitive mouth I’d seen earlier, the lips that looked made for poetry and murmuring sweet French nothings in cologne commercials. Je te veux, mon chéri. But now there was a whole face to go with them, and that face—oh my god. You know when a swimmer gets out of a pool, and they’re radiant and flushed, mouth open a little, eyelashes dewy and sparkling, squinting like they’ve just come back from another world? He had that look, permanently. Like he wasn’t really from here. He was some beautiful thing coming up from a beautiful place, squinting amiably at our brightness and filth. I could give you the technical specs—cheekbones high and chiseled, straight patrician nose, tall forehead, boyishly handsome—but it was the expression that made him beautiful.
He’d said something to me and I was just gaping like an idiot. “What?”
That smile again. Like a flashbulb going off, freezing you in the moment.
“Did you know you can walk on the wall while it’s spinning?”
“Really?”
“It’s nuts. You’ll feel like a superhero. They won’t let you do it now, but if you hang around till closing and slip them some cash, they’ll look the other way.”
My eyes must have lit up at this. The Guy leaned in suddenly, tilting his face.
Heart attack.
But he just stared at my eyes, as if searching for a stray eyelash. A free wish.
“What are you doing?” I whispered, hoping I didn’t have beer breath.
“Green,” he said, and leaned back. “I wanted to know the color.”
“Why? So the police can identify my body later?”
Thankfully, he laughed. We handed over our tickets.
“Five bucks says you scream,” I said.
“Deal.”
They strapped us to the wall. Lights went off. Marquees blinked on. The giant steel saucer began to spin. They were really going for the UFO effect here.
“Someday they’ll make spaceships like this,” I said. “So the astronauts can walk around.”
“Like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.”
“What?”
“The movie. You’ve never seen it? It’s a classic.”
That was the first time I felt the difference in our ages.
“How old are you?” I said.
“Old enough,” he said, and we both laughed.
My bones stuck to the wall like magnets. I tried to raise my arm, but it weighed a hundred pounds. The boards we were strapped to raised off the floor, our shoes levitating. A girl near me giggled uncontrollably. The saucer was still accelerating, flattening my insides, making me feel both weightless and infinitely heavy. I tensed my legs and raised them straight out, sitting in midair. The Guy grinned at me. His gaze lingered on my legs, and the edges of his grin softened, and even though my stomach was a pancake, something in it fluttered. Little two-dimensional paper butterflies.