The UFO reached maximum velocity. I let my feet slam back down. I wanted to feel like this all the time, like I was rushing through the universe, everything intense and pressed right up against my skin. The Guy gave a wild, jubilant yell. The giggling girl sounded like she was drowning. At that moment I knew every single person on the ride wanted it to go faster, faster, blood pooling at the backs of our skulls, until we were tingling and dizzy and flew apart into a million particles of happiness.
I had trouble getting my balance when we came down. The Guy rooted in his pocket for something. He took my hand.
“What—”
He pressed a five dollar bill into my palm. “You win.”
I felt weirdly sheepish. I didn’t want to take his money. “I was just kidding.”
“I’m a man of my word.”
Yes. You’re a man, a very pretty one who’s being very nice to me, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
“Fine. Let’s support the economy,” I said, waving the bill at the game stalls.
We decided the least-rigged game was the water gun race, because it had a winner every round. I paid up and sat next to a little boy whose mom stood behind him, maneuvering his arms like a puppet. On my other side was a fat drunk guy who smelled like sausage. He leered at me.
This would be cake.
I grabbed my WWII-era machine water gun and took aim at the bullseye dead ahead. The carnie counted down. Three. Two.
I brushed Fatso’s bare leg with my calf.
One.
Fssssshhhhhh.
The little boy lost before it even began. He started crying, and his mom snapped at him and seized the gun. She only managed to squirt out a tragic, flaccid little stream before her kid burst into wails and she pulled him off the seat.
“And Seven drops out,” The Guy announced, as the carnie stared at us with sullen boredom. “A sad day for Team Seven. Six has the lead now, but Five is gaining fast.”
I hit my bullseye flawlessly. My marker rose smooth and steady.
Fatso had pretty good aim, too. We were neck and neck.
I rubbed my calf along his hairy shin.
“But wait! Five is falling behind! He seems to be losing focus. Can he pull it together?”
I hooked my foot around the back of Fatso’s leg. Dragged my toes up his meaty hamhock.
Ding ding ding!
“Winner! Number Six by a landslide.”
I turned a huge smile on Fatso. “Sorry, mister.”
He wasn’t mad at all. His piggish eyes gleamed. “I got another game you can beat me at.”
“Dad,” I said brightly, “this man wants to play a different game with me.”
Fatso heaved himself off the stool, his hands up in the surrender/I-didn’t-touch-her position, and backed into the crowd.
“You’re a dangerous girl,” The Guy said softly.
I made a gun with my fingers and blew imaginary smoke away.
My choice of prize was a weepy-eyed velvet pony. It was the look on its face—soulful, hopeful, earnest—that appealed to me. I crushed it to my chest, getting my smell all over it as we strolled aimlessly through the crowd. Mostly older, drunker people now. Two veiny guys yelling, inching into each other’s faces. A man chasing a woman who kept saying it was too late, he blew it.
“I’m thirsty,” The Guy said. “You want something?”
I shrugged, which apparently meant yes. He bought two plastic cups of beer.
“How old are you?” he said again as he watched me drink.
“Twenty-one.”
“When’s your birthday?” he said fast.
My reply was just as quick. “August 17, 1992.” I’ve memorized dates for getting into clubs since the dawn of time. Last year I was born in 1991.
He relaxed, smiling, sipping. “Congratulations. You can do everything now but be the President.”
I thought about why he was so fixated on my age. What he was thinking of doing.
“Are you in college?” he said.
“Dropped out.”
“Why?”
“To strip.”
His eyebrows rose. I laughed.
“Kidding. I never went.”
We still hadn’t told each other our names. It was beginning to feel deliberate.
“You’re not from around here,” I said.
He gave me a funny look, half flattered, half perplexed. “Why do you say that?”
“For starters, stripping is a respectable profession in these parts. It’s gainful employment. Plus you don’t have an accent.”
“Neither do you.”
“Well, golly, Mr. Man,” I drawled, “you sure are right about that.”
He laughed. “So you hide it. You’ve reinvented yourself. A self-made woman.”
I think he’d been drinking earlier that night, like me. His eyes were glassy and a bit feverish.
“Maybe,” I said mysteriously, trying on the idea in my head. A self-made woman. I threw back the rest of my beer. The Guy stared at my throat, and I swanned for him as I swallowed. When my head came down my eyes were lazily half-closed, my mouth pouty. That fuck-me look I’ve used to great effect on other men.
The Guy averted his eyes. Took a drink. Scanned the crowd.
I felt stupid. I hugged the stuffed pony under my arm.
“Why are you here alone?” I said.
“What?”
“I said—”
He touched my elbow and bent close. “You want to go somewhere quieter where we can actually talk?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t let go of my elbow, and I thanked a whole pantheon of gods for that. It felt different now. His skin on my skin caused a chemical reaction. My cells were rioting.
We walked out of the carnival into the night sea of grass and stars.
I did a suave little twist of my arm until our hands joined. I pulled him through the darkness toward the picnic bench, then let go and hopped up, hugging the pony between my knees. He stopped a foot away.
“You look incredible,” he breathed.
A rush of sweet blood to my head.
“So do you,” I said, my voice also gauzy.
He moved toward me. Cool platinum starlight played off his hair, the gold sheen on his arms. He wasn’t super tall, maybe five-foot-ten, but his frame was elegantly made, lithe muscle knitting around finely sculpted bones. That muscle rippled beneath his T-shirt, and the jeans that molded to him. I pressed my palms to the splintered wood but I could still imagine them running down a hard thigh. I’m going to f**k you, I thought. Somewhere not far from here. Maybe the back of your car. The only question is how we’ll get there.
“Did you bring me out here to talk,” I said, “or for something else?”
He looked chagrined. He sat beside me on the table. The rides were shutting down, great mechanical dragons folding their wings, coiling up their segmented tails. I popped the stuffed pony behind my head and lay back, looking up at a perfect planetarium sky.
“You asked why I’m here alone.”
I glanced over at him. He stared straight ahead.
“I see the lights every night. It seems like the whole world has figured out how to be happy, but no one’s letting me in on the secret.”
There are moments, when you’re getting to know someone, when you realize something deep and buried in you is deep and buried in them, too. It feels like meeting a stranger you’ve known your whole life.
“Why’d you get on the rollercoaster?” I said.
A little comma formed in the corner of his mouth, a half-smile. “I’m starting a new job soon, and…I’m terrified, honestly. I thought that if I faced another lifelong fear, it’d give me confidence.”
“You didn’t seem scared.”
“You don’t remember me screaming.”
I grinned. “Au contraire. 08/21. Never forget. But you seemed happy.”
It should have tipped him off that I didn’t talk about his job, I talked about feelings. I was too young to care about boring adult jobs. I was still testing out how my heart worked.
He was smiling at me now. I imagined him putting a knee between my legs, holding me down. The sky felt like a huge hot aquarium, swimming with tadpole stars.
“How about you?” he said. “Why tonight?”
“I’m starting a new job too, actually.”
“What kind of job?”
High school senior.
“It’s sort of an unpaid internship. Anyway, I guess I wanted to do something the old me wouldn’t have done.”
“Would the old you have done this?”
I sat up, slowly. My body was languid and light. We were very close, mostly by accident. His stubble glittered like gold dust. The ledge of his lips cast a shadow I couldn’t look away from. “What am I doing, exactly?”
I felt the heat of his hand before it touched me, and shivered. He laid it above my bare knee. Didn’t stroke, didn’t squeeze, just placed it there like a card he’d dealt, waiting for my move.
“This?” I said. My voice had lost all body again, becoming air contained in a thin envelope of words. I mirrored his movement, rested my hand on his jeans. The denim was smooth-worn and warm.
His other hand cupped my face. Somehow he’d gotten closer without quite kissing me yet. There was a carnival smell still on us, beer and popcorn and motor grease, but all of that faded into a kind of white noise, and now I smelled him. Something between suede and smoke. The clean tang of sweat mixed into his cologne, turning into a musky alcohol. Pure delirium. I couldn’t breathe any more of this. I couldn’t get enough of it.
My body was on autopilot. Mouth opening, face tilting, everything yielding. “What am I doing?” I whispered again, and knew he felt my breath in his own mouth.
“Seducing me,” he said.
My eyes opened all the way. My bones regained solidity. Blood pumped furiously into my throat, my temple, fleeing my hands and every part of me that had wanted to be touched by him. I pulled away.
His brow creased. If we’d known each other’s names, he would have said my name then with a question mark.
Was that what I was doing? Seducing him? Another throwaway fuck?
Was that all this was?
“Did I say something wrong?”
I shook my head. But I stood up anyway, grabbed the stuffed animal, mangled it in my hands.
Again, that pained pause on his face where he wanted to say the name of this girl who was clearly upset. Funny, how our own names soothe us. It’s okay, Maise. You are yourself. Whoever that is.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“I wasn’t trying to seduce you.”
The tension went out of him. It wasn’t his fault. It was just the crazy girl and her crazy girl-feelings.
Was that unfair? Maybe I wanted to be unfair.
“Hey,” he said. He came close, his hand hovering over my shoulder blade, waiting for clearance to land. “I didn’t mean it in a bad way. If you weren’t trying, it would’ve happened anyway. You are so beautiful.” The hand retreated. “I’ve upset you.”
“No, you haven’t.”
He rocked on his toes a few times, back and forth. I’d learn later that it was his nervous habit. It endeared me then, a little—instead of retreating from anxiety, he psyched himself up to face it. “I don’t want the night to end like this. Can I take you home?”