At first I think I must be mistaken. It’s a coincidence, or a visual trick, some piece of trash inadvertently blown into the branches. Still, I find myself running downstairs, ignoring my aunt, who calls out, “I thought you were taking a nap,” and bursting out the front door. I’m halfway to the oak tree before I realize I didn’t even stop to put on shoes; the ground is cold and wet beneath my socks. When I reach the oak tree and see the FanLand T-shirt swaying, pendulum-like, on the breeze, I laugh out loud. The sound surprises me. I realize it’s been a long time—maybe weeks—since I laughed.
Aunt Jackie’s right. Parker’s home.
He opens the front door even before I can knock, and even though it has been only two months since I’ve seen him, I hang back, suddenly shy. He looks somehow different, even though he’s wearing one of his usual nerdy T-shirts (Make Love Not Horcruxes) and the soft jeans still traced with ink from where he got bored in calc senior year and started doodling. “You cheated,” is the first thing he says.
“I’m a little too old to fit through the fence,” I say.
“Understandable. I’m pretty sure the fort has been commandeered by old patio furniture, anyway. The chairs launched a pretty major offensive.”
There’s a beat of silence. Parker steps out onto the porch and closes the door behind him, but there are still several feet between us and I can feel every inch. I tuck my hair behind my ears, feeling, for just one second, the pattern of imagined scars beneath my fingers, the way it felt to be her.
Guilt, Dr. Lichme told me matter-of-factly. On some level you believe you were permanently damaged by the accident. Guilt is a powerful emotion. It can make you see things that aren’t there.
“So you’re home,” I say stupidly, after the silence stretches on a second too long.
“Just for the weekend.” He takes a seat on the old porch swing, which creaks under his weight. After a moment’s hesitation, he pats the cushion next to him. “It’s my stepdad’s birthday. Besides, Wilcox called and begged for my help shutting down for the season. He even offered to fly me back himself.”
Tomorrow FanLand will close down for the season. I haven’t been back to FanLand except for once, with Sarah and Maddie Snow. I couldn’t stand the way that everyone greeted me, with fear or gentle reverence, as if I were an ancient artifact that might disintegrate if mishandled. Even Princess was nice to me.
Mr. Wilcox has left several messages for me, asking whether I’d be up for helping tomorrow and attending the end-of-the-season FanLand pizza party. So far, I haven’t responded.
Parker uses his feet to move us back and forth on the swing. Every time he shifts, our knees bump together. “How’ve you been?” he asks. His voice has turned quiet.
I tuck my hands in my sleeves. He smells the same as always, and I’m half-tempted to bury my head in his neck, and half-tempted to run. “Okay,” I say. “Better.”
“Good.” He looks away. The sun has started to sink, pinwheeling golden arms through the trees. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“Yeah, well, I’m fine,” I say, too loudly. Worried means there’s something wrong. Worried is what parents and shrinks say. Worried is why I didn’t want to see Parker before he left for New York, and why I didn’t respond to any of the messages he’s sent me since he arrived at school. But Parker looks so hurt, I add, “How’s New York?”
He thinks about it for a minute. “Loud,” he says, and I can’t help but laugh a little. “And there are definitely rats, although so far none of them have attacked me.” He pauses. “Dara would have loved it.”
The name falls between us like a hand, or a shadow passing across the sun. Just like that, I feel cold. Parker picks at a bit of denim unraveling at his knee.
“Look,” he says carefully. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about what happened this summer.” He clears his throat. “About what happened between . . .” He ticks a finger back and forth between us.
“Okay.” I wish, now, that I hadn’t come. Every second, I expect to hear him say it: It was a mistake. I just want to be friends.
I’m worried about you, Nick.
“Do you—?” He hesitates. His voice is so quiet I have no choice but to lean in to hear him. “I mean, do you remember?”
“Most of it,” I answer cautiously. “But some of it feels . . . not exactly real.”
There’s another moment of silence. Parker turns to look at me, and I’m achingly aware of how close we are—so close I can make out the faint, triangular scar where he once took an elbow to the nose during a game of Ultimate; so close I can see a little bit of stubble across his jaw; so close I can see his eyelashes tangled together.
“What about the kiss?” he says, his voice raw, as if he hasn’t spoken in a while. “Did that feel real?”
Suddenly I’m afraid: terrified of what will come next or what won’t. “Parker,” I start to say. But I don’t know how to finish. I want to say I can’t. I want to say I want to, so badly.
“I meant what I said this summer,” he rushes on, before I can say anything. Then: “I think I’ve always been in love with you, Nick.”
I look down, blinking back tears that overwhelm me, not sure whether I feel joyful or guilty or relieved or all three. “I’m scared,” I manage to say. “Sometimes I still feel crazy.”
“We all go a little crazy sometimes,” Parker says, finding my hand, interlacing our fingers. “Remember when my parents got divorced, and I refused to sleep inside for an entire summer?”
I can’t help it; I laugh, even as I’m crying, remembering skinny Parker and his serious face and how we used to hang out together inside his blue tent eating Pop-Tarts straight from the box, and Dara would always shake the leftover crumbs onto her tongue. I swipe the tears away with a forearm, but it doesn’t do any good; they keep coming, burning up through my chest and throat.
“I miss her,” I blurt out. “I miss her so much sometimes.”
“I know,” Parker says softly, still squeezing my hand. “I miss her, too.”
We stay like that for a long time, side by side, holding hands, until the crickets, obeying the same ancient law that pulls the sun from the sky and throws the moon up after it, that strips autumn down to winter and pushes spring up afterward, obeying the law of closure and new beginnings, send their voices up from the silence, and sing.
September 27
“Oh my God.” Avery, Cheryl’s daughter and my maybe-soon-to-be stepsister, shakes her head. “I can’t believe you got to work here all summer. I had to be at my dad’s insurance company. Can you imagine?” She mimes holding a phone to her ear. “‘Hello, and thank you for calling Schroeder and Kalis.’ I must have said that, like, forty times a day. Holy shit. Is that a wave pool?”
When I told Avery I was going to spend the day helping shut down FanLand, I assumed she would want to reschedule our mandated girl time. To my surprise, she volunteered to help.
Of course, her version of helping has so far involved stretching out on a lawn chair and occasionally switching positions to maximize sun exposure, while offering up a stream of random questions (“Do you think there are so many one-legged pirates because of sharks? Or is it, like, malnutrition?”) and observations that range from absurd (“I really think purple reads more nautical than red”) to bizarrely astute (“Have you ever noticed that really happy couples don’t feel the need to, like, hang on each other all the time?”).
Weirdly, though, I’m not totally hating her company. There’s something comforting about the never-ending rhythm of her conversation, and the way she treats every subject as equally important or equally trivial; I’m not sure which. (Her response earlier this summer to finding out I was in a psychiatric ward: “Oh my God! If they ever make a movie version of your life, I totally want to be in it.”) She’s like the emotional equivalent of a lawn mower, digesting everything into manageable, uniform pieces.
“How’re you holding up, Nick?” Parker, who’s helping dismantle the awnings at one of the pavilions, cups his hands to his mouth to shout to me across the park. I give him a thumbs-up and he grins wide, waving.
“He is so cute,” Avery says, inching her sunglasses down her nose to stare. “Are you sure he isn’t your boyfriend?”
“Positive,” I say, for the hundredth time since Parker dropped us off. But even the idea makes me feel warm and happy, like I’ve had a sip of really good hot chocolate. “We’re just friends. I mean, we’re best friends. Well, we were.” I exhale hard. Avery is staring at me, eyebrows raised. “I’m not sure what we are now. But . . . it’s good.”
We have time. That’s what Parker said to me last night before I went home, taking my face in his hands, planting a single kiss, lightly, on my lips. We have time to figure this out.
“Uh-huh.” Avery looks at me appraisingly for a second. “You know what?”
“What?” I say.
“You should let me do your hair.” She says this so firmly, so adamantly, as if it’s a solution to the whole world’s problems—exactly the way Dara would have said it—I can’t help but laugh. Then, swiftly, I get the deep ache again, the dark well of feeling where Dara should be and always has been. I wonder if I’ll ever think of her again without hurting.
“Maybe,” I tell Avery. “Sure. That would be nice.”
“Awesome.” She unfolds, origami-like, from her lounge chair. “I’m going to get a soda. You want something?”
“I’m okay,” I tell her. “I’m almost done here, anyway.” I’ve been stacking chairs around the wave pool for the past half hour. Slowly, FanLand is collapsing in on itself, or retreating, like an animal going into hibernation. Signs and awnings come down, chairs get carted into storage, the stands are shuttered and the rides padlocked. And it will remain, silent and still and untouched, until May—when once again, the animal will emerge, sloughing off its winter skin, roaring with sound and color.
“Need any help?”
I turn and see Alice moving down the walkway toward me, hauling a bucket of filthy water in which a sponge is bobbing slowly across the surface. She must have been scrubbing down the spinning carousel; she insists on doing it by hand. Her hair is in its trademark braids, and with her ripped T-shirt (Good things come to those who hustle, it reads) and visible tattoos, she looks like some gangster version of Pippi Longstocking.
“I got it,” I say, but she sets the bucket down anyway and falls in next to me, slinging the chairs easily into towering Tetris formations.
I’ve only seen her once since I came back from the hospital, and then only from a distance. For a minute, we work together in silence. My mouth feels suddenly dry. I’m desperate to say something, give her some explanation or even apology, but I can’t come up with a single word.
Then she says abruptly, “Did you hear the good news? Wilcox finally approved new uniforms for next summer,” and I relax, and know that she won’t ask me anything, and doesn’t think I’m crazy, either. “You are coming back next summer, aren’t you?” she says, giving me a hard look.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I hadn’t thought about it.” Strange to think there will even be a next summer: that time is moving on, and carrying me along with it. And for the first time in over a month, I get just the barest flicker of excitement, a sense of momentum and good things coming that I can’t yet see, like trying to catch the tail end of a colored streamer dancing just out of reach.
Alice makes a disapproving noise, as if she can’t quite believe that everyone else doesn’t have the next forty years mapped, plotted, planned, and adequately scheduled.
“We’re going to get the Gateway up and running, too,” she says, heaving the last chair into place with a grunt. “And you know something? I’m going to be first in line to ride that puppy.”
“Why do you care so much?” I blurt out, before I can stop myself. “About FanLand and the rides and . . . all of it. I mean, why do you love it?”
Alice turns to stare at me, and blood rushes to my face; I realize how rude I must have sounded. After a moment, she turns, lifting her hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun. “See that?” she says, pointing to the row of now-shuttered game booths and snack vendors: Green Row, we call it, because of all the money that changes hands there. “What do you see there?”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“What do you see there?” she repeats, growing impatient.
I know this must be a trick question. But I say, “Green Row.”
“Green Row,” she repeats, as if she’s never heard the term. “You know what people see when they come to Green Row?”
I shake my head. I know she doesn’t really expect an answer.
“They see prizes. They see luck. They see opportunities to win.” She pivots in another direction, pointing at the enormous image of Pirate Pete, welcoming visitors to FanLand. “And there. What’s that?” This time, she waits for me to respond.
“Pirate Pete,” I say slowly.
She squawks, as if I’ve said something funny. “Wrong. It’s a sign. It’s wood and plaster and paint. But you don’t see that, and the people who come here don’t see that, either. They see a big old pirate, just like they see prizes and a chance to win something on Green Row, just like they see you in that awful mermaid costume, and for three and a half minutes they let themselves believe that you’re actually a frigging mermaid. All of this”—she turns a circle, sweeping her arms wide, as if to embrace the whole park—“is just mechanics. Science and engineering. Nuts and bolts and gears. And you know it, and I know it, and all the people who come here every single day know it, too. But for just a little while, they forget to know it. They believe. That the ghosts on the Haunted Ship are real. That every problem can be solved with a funnel cake and a song. That that”—she turns and points to the high metal scaffolding of the Gateway, stretching like an arm toward the clouds—“might really be a gateway to heaven.” She turns back to me and suddenly I feel breathless, as if she’s not looking at me but into me, and seeing all the ways I’ve screwed up, all the mistakes I made, and telling me it’s all right, I’m forgiven, I can let go now.
“That’s what magic is, Nick,” she says, her voice soft. “It’s just faith. Who knows?” She smiles, turning back to the Gateway. “Maybe someday we’ll all jump the tracks and lift off straight into the sky.”
“Yeah,” I say. I look where she’s looking; I try to see what she sees. And for a split second I find her, silhouetted by the sky, arms outstretched like she’s making snow angels in the air or simply laughing, turning in place; for a split second, she comes to me as the clouds, the sun, the wind touching my face and telling me that somehow, someday, it will be okay.
And maybe she’s right.