We rode the Spin-Dry.

We rode the Barrel Roll.

We rode the Spraymaker, our little boat crashing into the water at the bottom, soaking us from head to waist, the drops shimmering in the neon lights of the fair on our Danny Dolphin ponchos.

The Elevator, the Ferris wheel, we left for last. It was on Pier Two so we had to cut back to the boardwalk and keep walking. We passed the stalls lined up on the ocean side of the boardwalk—the Pro Basketball Challenge, the T-Rex Ring Toss. Now, when I saw these places, I noticed the stacks of plush toys on the back walls. The prizes—all delivered by you. The thought of you gave me a strange feeling inside, something unfolding in my stomach, some delicate carapace turning to wings.

He might be close by, I thought. Driving his truck. His arm resting on the door …

“Control yourself, slut,” said the voice. “You’re like a ***** in heat.”

“After six,” I said automatically.

“It is,” said the voice.

Dammit.

Paris and I kept going toward the wheel. As we walked, we could hear the patter of the kid running the basketball game.

“Come on by,

Give it a try,

We’ve got prizes money can’t buy …”

Paris was looking around like someone transported from the seventeenth century.

“This is amazing,” she said.

“You haven’t been before?”

“No.”

“Never? But you live, like, one block away.”

“I know.”

“Your parents never took you? In the summer or—”

She held my eyes for a moment. “No.”

“Oh. Sorry. Of course. So why didn’t you go on your own? Or with Julie?”

“I don’t know. I think I was waiting for you to come along.”

Silence. I didn’t know what to say to that.

Then she grabbed my arm. “Anyway, it’s awesome. The guys doing little poems, to draw in players, you know? It’s like … Like something out of a story. But it’s real. You know?”

“It’s just patter,” I said.

“Pat—”

“Patter. Everyone has a different one. I—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

We’d stopped now. There were people separating and streaming around us, like those illustrations of air going around a plane’s wing.

“You were going to say you could do it, weren’t you?”

“No.”

“You were.” Her eyes were flashing in the electric light of the stores and stands. We were right in the middle of the pier; it was like being inside a pinball machine. People and music and games all around. “You totally worked one of these things, didn’t you?”

My shoulders slumped. “Basketball hoops. Two summers.”

“Oh, Cass. You’re doing it. Your patter. You’re doing it for me right now.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Paris, there are people.”

“Pretend they’re not there. I do it all the time, with clients. It’s easy.”

An uncomfortable moment.

“Yeah, okay, TMI,” said Paris. “But you’re still doing it.”

“No way.”

“Please. I’ll be your friend.”

“You’re already my friend.”

“Curse your fiendish intelligence. I’ll buy you a pony.”

“I don’t want a pony.”

“I’ll buy you—”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “If it’ll shut you up.”

Paris clapped her hands. She pulled me over to the side of the pier, by one of the circular stands that are dotted all over—some of them with games, shooting galleries, some of them selling ice cream and hot dogs and whatever. “Go,” she said.

“I’m rusty,” I said. “Wait.”

I took a breath.

“Hey,” I said, “don’t walk on by,

Come on in and give it a try,

It’s a simple game

If you’ve got aim,

Split a buck

To double your luck,

A quarter won’t break you

But it might just make you.”

I gave a little bow.

“Wow,” said Paris. “My little carny.”

“They’re not called—”

“I know. I’m ****** with you. That was amazing. Thank you.”

“Uh, yeah. Okay.”

“Gracious as an Austen heroine.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“As Elizabeth Bennet herself declared.”

“Paris. Let’s ride the Elevator now.”

“Oh, yes. Let’s.”

We skirted around the stand—it was a rings-on-the-jars game—and worked our way to the end of the pier. Then we passed Hook-the-Duck in its circular island. The water was bright green under neon lights; the sky above almost entirely black now. Katy Perry was blasting from the speakers hung above. Also hanging were all the toys you could win—the plush and the cheap stereos and stuff. Every color in the spectrum, just pulsing at you, and the music too.

“—this,” said Paris, and I realized I’d missed the start of whatever she had said.

“What?”

“I want to play.”

“You want to hook a duck?” I was kind of shouting over the music.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like hooking a duck.”

I did a not-real sigh and handed her one of the ten-spots. I don’t know why I just wrote “ten-spots.” That’s not how I speak. I think it’s writing about Paris. I mean, she was just so cool, you know? And she didn’t even mean to be. She was just a hundred-watt bulb in a world of forty-watt bulbs. She shone. When she walked by, you saw people following her with their eyes, like it would hurt them to look away.

Anyway.

She got a fishing rod and she was terrible. Pretty soon I was laughing as she knocked the ducks together, sent them spinning, flipped their backs under the water. Eventually she hooked one sad little blue duck and yelled with triumph and the girl on the stand said, bored,

“You can have anything from the outer ring.”

Paris looked up. “I’ll take that red monkey thing.”

“That’s Elmo.”

“Yeah, him.”

The girl pulled down the little Elmo stuffed toy and handed it to Paris. Paris clutched it to her chest. “It’s mi-i-i-ine,” she said dramatically. “It’s finally mi-i-i-ine.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Come on.”

She pretended to be a chastised kid, kind of moping along behind me, pulling a moue of exaggerated sadness, lips pushed out.

“Stop that.”

“Spoilsport.”

Then I saw something from the corner of my eye. We were near the side of the pier. It was a white F-150 truck, driving across the sand of the beach, toward us. I could see a stack of clear plastic bags in back, full of toys. You? It had to be you. “Follow me,” I said, and I started walking, keeping an eye on the truck to see where it was headed.

“Where are we going?” asked Paris.

I didn’t answer. I swerved past a group of women on a bachelorette thing, pink furry mouse ears on their heads, angel wings fluttering out behind them. Between two of the round stalls, along the side of the Sidewinder. Beyond its steel struts and riveted crosspieces, there was a little gate, waist high. A wood-sided office was next to it. A sign said STAFF ONLY AFTER THIS POINT. It wasn’t locked—I pushed it open and walked through, and then there was the side of the pier—a sheer drop to the beach below.

“Cass, what the—”

I held up a hand to cut her off. I walked right up to the edge and looked down.

“Jump,” said the voice. It was only the fourth time I had heard it that day, I realized. The schedule thing was really working.

“Jump,” it repeated. “Break your legs.”

“Shush,” I said.

“You little *****. Don’t you d—”

“Not now,” I said.

“Uh, Cass?” asked Paris from behind me. “Cass, are you all right? What are you doing?”

“Wait,” I said. I looked down.

“Wait for what?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Is this, like, some kind of bravery thing? Like Chicken? How close will you go? Okay, I’ll play.”

“What?” I said, turning to her. But she was already coming up beside me, shuffling her feet till her toes were over the edge of the wooden planks. Then she leaned forward, right over the edge, almost ready to topple.

I looked down. The hard gray sand was easily fifteen feet below us.

“Jesus,” I said. “Don’t do that.”

“Just because I’m winning,” she said. She leaned right out now, ten degrees or something. I don’t know degrees. I don’t even know why I’m making that analogy. Let’s say instead: she leaned out till she looked like the woman on the prow of an old ship, her hair stirring in the breeze.

“It’s not a game,” I said.

“Not if you’re losing,” she said. Leaned more.

I backed away from the edge. “Seriously, I’m not competing with you.”

She turned, looked quizzically at me. And that’s when she lost balance, her arms wheeling as she began to fall. Her eyes went comic-book wide, and I lunged without thinking and caught her wrists. I then did a beautiful move where I just kind of sat down, all my weight at once, to pull her back onto the pier.

She collapsed on top of me. “Thanks,” she said, with a grin, the fear already gone from her eyes, as if it had never been there.

“You’re welcome.”

We stood up.

“So what were you doing at the edge?” she said.

I pointed down. “Waiting for him,” I said. You had just pulled up in your truck and were climbing out of it; you hadn’t looked up yet, and consequently had not noticed us standing there.

“Oh,” said Paris. “That makes much more sense.”

 

Below us, you closed the door of the truck and walked around to the back. Then you leaped up onto the tailgate.

“Hey,” I said.

You looked up. You raised your eyebrows and smiled. “Hey, yourself,” you said. “What are you doing there? Where’s Pedro?”

“I don’t know who Pedro is.”

You sighed. “Always late.”

“It’s him!” said Paris, moving to stand next to me. “Hello, cute boy who lives at Cass’s place.”

You blinked at her. “Uh, hello, um …”

“Paris.”

“Hello, Paris.”

I looked down at the bags of toys. “So you just throw them up on the pier?”

“Yeah,” you said. “Then Pedro carries them to the stalls that need them. When he’s around anyway.” You saw the toy in Paris’s hand. “You won that?”

“Hook-the-Duck,” said Paris. “I sucked ****.”

“Hang on,” you said. You moved a couple of the bags. Then you made a little rip in one of them and pulled out a big Elmo, like half the size of me. “Catch,” you said, and tossed it up to Paris.

Paris held out her hands but missed—the Elmo fell to the wooden floor of the pier.

“See?” she said. “I suck.”

Was she flirting with you?

And if she was, why would I care?

“Do me a favor,” you said, interrupting my thoughts.

“What?” I said.

“I need to roll. I have another delivery. So I’m going to toss these bags up. You make sure they don’t fall off the side, okay? Pedro will know what to do with them.”

“Just don’t throw them to her,” I said, pointing to Paris.

You laughed. “Seriously, though, don’t try to catch them. They’re heavy.”

“Okay.”

You picked up the first bag and kind of pitched it up onto the pier. It landed with a dull thud and a flat flopping motion that made me think queasily of a body.

Blood.

A tiled floor.

No.

I pushed it under again.

You grabbed another bag, threw it up. Then another and another. No wonder your arms had gotten ripped. Then you jumped back down and opened the cab door. “Me and Shane are going to Pirate Golf on Pier One after work, if you want to come,” you said. “Both of you.”

“That would be wonderful,” said Paris, before I could say anything. “We most humbly accept your gracious invitation. We shall see you upon the Pirate Golf course. At what hour should we convene?”

You looked at me. “Your friend is weird.”

“I know,” I said.

“He’s talking about you,” said Paris.

“No, he’s not.”

“No, I’m not,” you said.

“Now you’re just ganging up,” said Paris. “What time?”

“Nine thirty?” you said.

“See you there,” I said. It was like a small creature with unknown motivations had taken over my brain and my mouth.

“It’s a date,” said Paris, with a mischievous smile.

“Paris!”

“Laters, cute boy,” said Paris. She turned, and I gave you a what can you do? gesture with my hands; I could feel the heat of the blood in my cheeks. You smiled and slid behind the wheel of the truck; then I heard the engine roar as I caught up with Paris.

Huh. Was it a date? Did it count as a date? We were meeting you later anyway. That creature in my stomach spread its wings, took flight.

“And when will you tell him about me?” said the voice. “I mean, this is all very romantic and all but have you forgotten you’re crazy?”

“Quiet,” I said.

We walked back onto the pier proper. As we approached the gate, a guy opened it from the other side—Hispanic, with wire-rimmed glasses. Young looking, skinny, more like a chess-club kid than a fairground worker.

“You’re … ,” he said. “You shouldn’t be back here.”

“Oh, sorry, Pedro,” said Paris. She flashed her VIP pass at him.

His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. “How did you …”

Paris blew him a kiss. “The bags are there,” said Paris. “Elmos and … some other ****. Bunnies and ****. I suggest you hurry up, Pedro.”

“Who are you? How do you know my—”

“Laters, Pedro,” said Paris. Then she put a hand on the fence and tried to vault it, but her foot caught and she tumbled to the ground on the other side, did an ungainly roll and came to her feet again. She walked off without a backward glance.

I gave Pedro an apologetic look and ran to catch up to her.

“You’re beautiful,” I said to Paris, “but you are not graceful, are you? I mean, what were you even thinking, putting your feet over the edge of the pier like that? A clumsy person like you.”

She shrugged. “I thought it was a game.”

“And if you’d fallen?”

Another shrug. “Then I guess I would have gotten hurt.”

That was Paris: she was fun, but she didn’t really know where the line between fun and danger was. That was Paris’s whole entire problem.

 

We were walking toward the Elevator—the Ferris wheel at the piers—when Paris’s cell rang. She fished it out of her pocket and answered it.

“Hey! You win? (Pause.) Aw. Sucks. Where are you? (Pause.) We’re at the piers. Well, yes, on the piers. A pier, actually. (Pause.) We’re going to ride the Ferris wheel. (Pause.) Seriously, yeah. (Pause.) Yeah, with Cassie. Look, come down. Get a ticket. Ride it with us. Oh, come on. It’ll be fun! (Pause.) Great, cool. See you there.”

She flicked it off and put it away. “Julie,” she said.

“She’s coming?”

“Yep. They lost their roller derby game. She’s in a bad mood. Figure the Ferris wheel will help.”

Weirdly, I felt a little jealous. I just … I was enjoying spending this time with her, just her. It was awesome, and I felt like Julie coming along was going to ruin it.

Although when we got to the base of the wheel and the queue, and Julie waved and then walked over, I felt kind of stupid because Julie was smiling and holding out three sticks of cotton candy and being super nice.

I held up my hands when she proffered mine. “Sorry. I—”

“Cass here is allergic to basically everything,” said Paris. “Including heights. Chances are she’s going to barf on you.”

“Just peanuts,” I said hurriedly when Julie frowned at me. “It’s really boring. I just have to be really careful.”

Julie shrugged. “More for me,” she said, and kept hold of two of the cotton candies, giving the other to Paris. Paris plunged her face into hers, started making gross noises like a T. rex eating another dinosaur’s stomach. She lifted her eyes to us, pink shreds hanging from her chin.

“Roar,” she said.

“T. rex?” said Julie.

“Yeah.”

“I got the same thing,” I said.

“Psychic connection,” said Paris. “Look at us! BFFs.”

“No one says BFFs,” said Julie. “Except in stupid TV shows.”

“Nuh-huh,” said Paris. “I just said it. Anyway. What was I eating?”

“Diplodocus?” I said.

Paris sighed. “Stegosaurus. I thought that would have been perfectly obvious.”

“Is she always like this?” I asked Julie.

“Always,” said Julie, with a strange little smile.

Then there was a buzz from Paris’s phone and she checked the screen. “Bachelor party,” she said. “Tomorrow night. You drive me, Julie?”

Julie gave an awkward glance at me. “You know I don’t think you should—”

“Oh, I know, Mom,” said Paris.

Julie sighed. “Where is it?”

“Goose Heights.” This was a nice part of town.

“If I can come in with you,” said Julie.

“Julie, do we have to have this conversation every time? If you want to watch me strip you’re welcome to subscribe to my cam site. No. You can wait in the car. I have my phone. I have you on speed dial. I’ll call if I need you.”

Julie pursed her lips.

“And I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” said Paris. “You’re the best, Julie, for doing this, for helping me to earn my own money, get out from under my dad and—”

“Okay, okay, fine,” said Julie. “Fine.”

“Right,” said Paris, putting away her phone. She flashed a grin at me; a shark’s grin, full of joy and danger. “Let’s get high.”

We looked at her blankly.

“On the Ferris wheel.”

We flashed our passes and skipped the line. Well, Paris and I did, but Julie didn’t have a VIP pass. Not that it held us up for long—Paris did this eyelash-batting thing at the kid managing the line and he let all three of us through.

It was nine, full dark, a slight chill in the air. Purple clouds covered the moon, over the black ocean. The Elevator was almost as old as the roller coaster. A lot of its supports were still wooden. Each of the cars was done up like an elevator, and the joke was that there was a single button inside, which said,

UP AND DOWN AND ALL AROUND.

“The last time I went on this I was eight,” I said.

“All the more reason to ride it now,” said Paris.

“Is it a bad time to say that I’m a little afraid of heights?” said Julie.

“Please,” said Paris. “You do roller derby. Your biceps are bigger than my personal trainer’s.”

“You have a personal trainer?” I asked.

“No,” said Paris. “But that’s beside the point.”

We climbed into our elevator car; it rocked slightly. There were seats, which kind of ruined the illusion, and the whole side was open, secured by a thin metal bar that the kid running the ride dropped into place. Paris and Julie sat on one side, me on the other.

“You get two go-arounds,” he said, in a bored drawl. He was my age, with the broken nose and big shoulders of a football player. “Then we fill the cars again.” He stepped out, leaned on a lever.

We shuddered up into the air, then stopped while people got into the next car—a family with one laughing kid and one crying kid.

We jerked into the sky in increments as the ride filled.

Finally we reached the top.

“Oh, wow,” said Paris.

“Yeah.”

“Huh,” said Julie. She had her hand on Paris’s arm. She’d obviously been only half-joking—she looked a little white. “Suddenly it’s so beautiful.”

I knew what she meant; I was feeling the same surprise, even though I’d been up here when I was a kid. It still struck me.

I mean.

Oakwood was a dump—the old-people’s homes, the slot machines, the white trash on vacation. The used-car lots, the Early Bird Specials, the motels, the broken-down lots where go-kart rides used to be, the demolished blocks like pulled teeth, the wire fences. But from up here, at night, it was as if a witch had put an enchantment on the town, a prince/frog kind of deal, and only when you rode up on the Elevator would you see the true beauty. The boardwalk curved below us like a broad sickle. Pale sand extended from it to the ocean, which glittered like a vast black jewel.

And everywhere was light.

Streetlights, running in ribbons, connecting houses that, too, spilled yellow light into the darkness. A giant phosphorescent creature, throwing out tendrils in every direction. And below us, the constant glow of the theme park, flashing bulbs, floodlights, flickering neon lights. The rides coiling over and around themselves like silver snakes.

It’s stupid, I mean, it’s not the Taj Mahal—it’s Oakwood. But it was so beautiful I can’t describe it.

“I never knew,” Paris said.

“Yeah,” said Julie. “Me neither.”

“Jump,” said the voice.

I must have flinched. “What’s wrong?” said Paris.

“Nothing.”

“Jump. It would be so easy.”

I shook my head.

“Heights?” said Paris. “You too?”

I nodded.

“Suit yourself,” said the voice. “Coward.” But it sounded flat, uninterested. Like if it had the opportunity, it was going to say something, but it wasn’t as committed as it used to be.

It’s nice to hear from you, I said inside my head. It’s beautiful up here, isn’t it?

Nothing. The voice had withdrawn.

“… totally with you,” Julie was saying.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m with you. It’s beautiful, but those houses are just too small down there. It’s not natural.” She smiled at me, and I wondered what I had done to deserve these new people in my life.

“Jump,” said the voice.

Oh Jesus. When were we getting off this thing? A cool breeze moved over my skin, bringing up goose bumps on my arms. The ocean was a long way down, so far I couldn’t hear it, and the beach too, the dark silhouettes of the lifeguard stands. I noticed that our car hadn’t moved for a while. I looked down—the guy had walked a few steps away from the wheel and leaned against the small shack where people handed in their tickets. He reached into it and pressed something, I guess.

Loud music started. That song, “Got to turn aro-o-o-o-ound,” I don’t know what it’s called. Paris would have known. The wheel began to revolve smoothly, and oh thank God, I thought, taking us down into the lights, the glow and the colors rushing up to meet us, so it seemed like we would become light ourselves, dissolve into a million points of brightness.

“This is lame,” said the crying kid in the car behind us.

Paris shook her head, sadly.

We reached the bottom. Oh good, I thought. Finally. But then the wheel started to rise again.

You get two goes, I remembered.

Outstanding.

Julie looked a little queasy too. When we got close to the top, Paris pointed down. “Look how tiny everyone is,” she said.

“I’m trying to ignore that,” said Julie.

I looked, though. I had been focusing on the lights, but now I saw the tiny figures, the thousands of people walking around the piers.

“Have you seen The Third Man?” asked Paris.

“No. What’s that?”

“It’s a movie,” said Julie. “Old. Graham Greene wrote the script.”

“Our Man in Havana?”

“Yeah,” said Julie. “Same guy.”

“Look at Miss Film Studies here,” said Paris, amiably elbowing Julie. “Anyway, the point is, in the movie there’s a spy who’s gone bad or something. The guy who has been sent to bring him back in from the cold meets him in Vienna, and they ride the Ferris wheel. The rogue agent, Harry I think his name is, basically won’t acknowledge that he’s done anything wrong, even though he has gotten people killed. He points down. He says—and I’m paraphrasing—he says, ‘Would you feel guilty if any of those dots stopped moving? What if I gave you twenty thousand for every dot that stopped?’ ”

“Um. Okay,” I said.

Paris leaned forward, took my hand, and pointed to the little people below. “His point being, when you zoom out your perspective, when you look at people from a distance, they’re small and insignificant. It doesn’t matter if they die. What do you think?”

I looked at the people. The wheel was turning slowly; we were just reaching the peak of the arc. “I think they matter,” I said.

“Me too,” said Julie. I noticed that her eyes were closed.

“And me,” said Paris. “That’s what I’m saying. For me, it’s the opposite of the guy in the film. I look down, and I see those tiny people, and I want to wrap my arms around them all, around the whole town, keep them safe, you know?” She put her arms out wide, and we were so high they encircled the town, she was big enough to hold it, the whole place, all the people, all the lights.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

Julie’s eyes opened momentarily, and she looked around her with a hooded, half-attentive gaze. “You know what I think when I see those little people?” she said. Red light flashed off the piercing in her nose. “I think I want to get off this ******ing ride.”

 

A conversation that signifies a lot, and also means nothing at all:

We were walking down the pier, Julie and me. Paris was up ahead, basically skipping instead of walking, like we were in a musical.

Julie was going more slowly, her gait a little unsteady. I realized she hadn’t been joking at all about the fear of heights. But she’d gone on the ride anyway. That registered somewhere, resonated on some taut string in my mind. What she was willing to do for Paris.

I glanced over at Julie. There was a tattoo of the Little Prince on her arm, standing on his little planet, with his rose at his feet.

“ ‘That which is essential is invisible to the eye,’ ” I said.

“What?”

“The fox says it, in The Little Prince,” I said.

Julie smiled. “Oh, yeah. My tattoo. Yep, I love that book. It’s sad, but it’s amazing too. I have the snake on my other arm.”

“Yeah?”

She turned and showed me—the snake swallowing the elephant, making it look like a hat from the side. Saint-Exupéry’s example of how children see things differently than adults, see the magic that adults can no longer see.

“You think it’s true?” I said. “That when we grow up, we see things differently?”

Julie thought about this for a moment. “Maybe for some people. Not for Paris. Look at her.”

I looked. Paris was doing cartwheels down the middle of the pier, people scattering to either side of her, waves.

“Ha,” I said. “Yeah. When we were on the wheel … I felt it. The magic.”

“That’s what she does,” said Julie. “I mean … she has bad times too. She calls them the Black Days. When she can’t leave her room. But living with her … you almost start to believe in magic, you know?”

“I do,” I said. I remembered the crane, how it had seemed to tremble in my hand. “She said you didn’t believe in magic though.”

“What? Really?”

“Yeah, she was talking about her cranes and the wish you get when you’ve made a thousand and she said that you would laugh at her.”

“Oh. Well, she’s probably right. Wishes don’t come true. Everyone knows that.”

I remembered all the times I had wished for my mom not to be dead. “Hmm,” I said. “I guess.”

“Abso-*******-lutely right,” said the voice.

“The thing about Paris … ,” said Julie. “She trusts people too much. She gets hurt. All the time.”

Had she glanced at me there? Shot me a warning?

“Uh, okay,” I said.

“Sorry,” said Julie, with a cough. “I just …”

She trailed off.

I thought:

—    Riding the Ferris wheel when you’re afraid of heights.

—    That strange smile when she said that Paris was “always like this.”

—    That weird line about wishes not coming true.

“You love her,” I said, without thinking.

Julie nodded. “She’s my best friend.”

“No. I mean, you love her. I just figured it out.”

Side note: I said this proudly. Like, I was proud that I had guessed. Can you imagine? The arrogance? The stupidity?

Julie turned to look at me. She was walking quicker now; we were passing the Walk the Plank game. “What?”

“It’s cool. I’m not judging …”

Julie narrowed her eyes.

“And I mean … ,” I said, less confident now. “I’m not … You don’t have to worry about me, with Paris. I’m not … I mean …”

Julie laughed, a hollow laugh. “I’m not worried about you,” she said. “Not in that way anyway. You’re pretty obviously straight. As is Paris, incidentally.”

“Then what—”

“You heard her,” said Julie. “She’d hug the whole town if she could. Fold it in her arms. The thing about Paris: she loves everyone. She even loves her dad. And she hates her dad.”

“Right … ,” I said.

“She loves everyone. So, like I said, she gets hurt.”

“By?”

“By people leaving. Coming into her life, and then going.”

“And you think I’m going to do that?” I said.

Julie sighed. “I don’t think anything. You brought this up.”

Oh. That was right. I did.

“Sorry,” I said. “I speak before I think. But anyway, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to just come into her life and then leave.”

“Good,” said Julie. “Paris … she sometimes makes bad choices, you know?”

“Like what?”

She looked at me, puzzled—that duh face that we all used to do as kids. “You know. What she does?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“It’s like the stupidest thing ever,” said Julie. “And all because she doesn’t want her dad’s money. I told her she could get a job in a bar, but that’s not Paris—not enough money, not quick enough, not exciting enough. I don’t mind the cam stuff but the parties … she has no idea who’s going to be there. What’s she going to do if a bunch of frat guys decide they want more than she’s offering?”

I hadn’t really thought about it till now—had just thought it seemed edgy and dangerous and exciting and cool, which gave me a flush of shame at Julie using basically those words, in a sarcastic way. Now I actually imagined it: going into a room with strange men, taking their money. Doing … stuff. “It sounds pretty dangerous,” I said.

“It’s very dangerous.”

“So why don’t you tell her how worried you are?” It had crossed my mind to bring it up myself, but I didn’t know Paris that well, and I didn’t want to upset her.

“I do, constantly,” said Julie. “It doesn’t make any difference. Now I just try to minimize the risk.”

Silence.

“Anyway,” said Julie, faux-bright. “Where are we going?”

“Pirate Golf,” I said. “We’re meeting some boys.”

“Oh good,” said Julie, with an ironic wink. “Boys.”

 

To get to Pirate Golf, we had to leave the pier we were on and go around to Pier One.

Which meant passing the restaurant.

Paris bought a beer and sucked on it like a thirsty builder as we walked the boardwalk. It takes—what, five minutes?—to walk from one pier to the other.

I went ahead, through the crowds of people, and turned onto Pier One, ignoring what was behind me.

“Hey,” said Paris.

I pretended not to hear her.

“Hey, Cass.”

I turned. Paris was poking her beer bottle at the businesses lined up on the street side of the boardwalk. And there was Donato’s, the red-and-white-striped awning, the little tables on the sidewalk that had gotten popular since the smoking ban—but not popular enough to reverse the damage of the crash; people sitting out there and eating pizzas, chatting.

Inside, I knew, was a mural covering one whole wall, the bay of Naples, a sunny day, boats drifting on the blue waves. A donkey in the foreground, pulling a cart, its legs anatomically incorrect. The land of my ancestors.

Also white tiles.

Also blood.

Also the pizza oven, decorated with broken pottery, red and white, the—

Also blood.

My stomach contracted like a fist.

“You want to go see your dad?” said Paris. “I mean, we’re here, right?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Where’s her dad?” said Julie.

“He owns that pizza restaurant,” said Paris. She turned to me and frowned. “He doesn’t know you’re out?”

“Uh, no, he doesn’t,” I said, grateful for the excuse. My insides were still tight, still clenched.

“You were ******* weak then and you are ******* weak now,” said the voice.

I didn’t have the energy to reply, didn’t have the strength to follow my welcome script. And it was past six, so it was a free-for-all on the voice front anyway.

Paris shrugged. She looked at her watch. “Time to go meet your hot crush anyway,” she said.

“He’s not my—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

We walked away from the restaurant, people moving all around us, molecules in a test tube, walking in all directions, somehow not crashing into one another. As we did, the tightness in my stomach eased, like the restaurant was exerting some kind of gravitational force.

“At some point, you ******* *****, you’re going to have to face up to what you did,” said the voice.

“Please, leave me alone,” I whispered.

“No.”

We made our way down the pier. Pirate Golf where we were meeting you was past all the rides and concessions, right at the end. The voice cursed at me the whole way, kept up a barrage of insults, like:

********* *********** you ********* ******** yourself ******* ****** ********* ******* die ******* ******* ******** such a ******* ******** ***** ******** ********* *********

I tried to concentrate on what I was passing:

The basketball stand where I had worked.

The Haunted Hovel.

A Dippin’ Dots concession.

A mom and dad swinging their toddler between them.

The Twister.

A guy smoking a cigarette and talking loudly into a cell phone.

The Hurricane.

You, playing a little old-fashioned electric organ, while a mechanical monkey on top of it danced.

A knock-down-the-tin-cans game.

The entrance to the—

Wait.

I stopped, grabbed Paris’s arm and turned around. People had gathered around you, watching attentively. You were playing that Adele song, I think, the one about finding someone new. A guy in a football jersey called out, “ ‘Hey Jude,’ ” and you nodded, then segued into the Beatles song. Laughing and clapping from the audience.

Someone else, a girl, shouted, “ ‘Roar.’ ”

“What, the Katy Perry song?” you asked.

“Yes!”

You smiled, and your fingers tripped from “Hey Jude” to the opening verse of “Roar” before building up to the big chorus, the song sounding weird in the piped tones of the organ.

I took a step forward. You hadn’t seen me; you were looking down at the keys. Your playing was amazing—you were riffing on the tune, improvising, every note perfect. My mom made me take piano lessons twice a week till I was eleven, and I knew how hard it was to play like that.

“ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ ” I said.

You looked up and grinned. Then you crashed into the opening chords, deliberately abrupt, breaking off the Katy Perry song. You played the whole thing, people swaying and linking arms, then raised your hands. The clockwork monkey stopped dancing instantly. He was dressed in a red suit, a hat on his head, like the one in our hall at home.

“I’m out,” you said. An old guy stepped up behind you. He was dressed in coattails and a bow tie, with a neat vest, a gold watch hanging from his pocket. He looked like a carny from a hundred years ago, totally out of place among the roller coasters and concessions stands. You nodded to him, leaving the organ.

The old guy sat down carefully on the little stool. I could sense the disappointment in the crowd. A couple of people started to shift away.

“Sorry, y’all,” said the old man in a Deep South accent. “Back to the classics now.”

He flexed his fingers above the keyboard. Then he brought them slamming down, the ancient organ blasting out the intro to “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen. Laughter rippled through the crowd, and those who had been leaving turned around to watch again.

“Hey,” you said, joining us.

“Hey,” said Paris. “This is Julie.”

“Hi, Julie,” you said.

“Hi,” said Julie.

“Hi,” I said, IN SCINTILLATING DIALOGUE REMINISCENT OF THE CLASSIC MOVIE CASABLANCA.

“This is surreal,” said Paris. Behind us, the old guy was playing Kanye West.

“That’s Cletus,” you said. “I don’t know if that’s his real name. He lets me play when he’s on break. He’s like eighty years old, and he smokes forty a day.” You glanced at our passes, mine and Paris’s. “VIPs, huh?” you said.

“On account of her dad,” said Paris.

“ ’Cause of the restaurant?”

“Yeah. They treat Cass like she’s royalty.”

You looked at me with a faint smile. “Really?” you said. I couldn’t tell if you were teasing or not. Like, implying that it was strange anyone would do such a thing.

“Seriously. Roll with Cass in this place, and you’re money.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“I don’t know,” said Paris. “I literally don’t know what I’m saying half the time.”

I was feeling left out; but then you turned to me and smiled. “Your friend is not getting any less weird.”

“No.”

“Will she?”

“No,” said Julie. “Never.”

“Oh well.”

“I’m right here, guys,” said Paris. “Jeez.”

“That’s not going to stop us,” said Julie.

Paris made a face. “Come. Follow me to the golf course. I can see it over yonder.” She put a hand to her forehead like an old-time ship captain. “ ’Tis either a long way off or uncommon small. Perhaps both.”

She strode off toward the miniature golf course, humming Nirvana, Julie at her side. Paris said something to Julie and they both laughed, loud. I felt a pang of left-outness.

But then, I was walking with you. And that gave me a good, fizzy feeling in my stomach. Which was nice.

“You’re good,” I said, and then immediately felt like an ass. “At the piano, I mean. The organ. Whatever.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you in a band?” I asked.

Something crossed your face, a shadow, or a flock of birds, and then it was gone. “No,” you said.

“You should be.”

You smiled, but I thought there was something fake about it. “It’s just a party trick,” you said. “Anyway, let’s go. Shane’s waiting at the mini golf. I mean, he’s supposed to be. For all I know he’s drunk a six-pack already and passed out at home again. The lifeguards get off earlier. In both senses of the term.”

“Ha,” I said. It came out too sarcastic, and you frowned.

Dammit, Cass.

That was me. The voice was silent as ever when you were around.

As we walked, you nudged me with your elbow. “You on Facebook?” you said. “I looked you up, but I couldn’t find you.”

He looked me up on Facebook?

“No,” I said. There is no point in social media when you don’t socialize.

“Twitter? Instagram?”

“No.” Twitter? Too much like voices in your head. So many people’s voices, never shutting up.

That’s what I was thinking, but all I said was no. It probably came out too abrupt. You went silent.

Pirate Golf was close. We caught up with Paris and walked over there, and Shane waved from the entrance. “Hey!” he said. “Cassandra. How’s it going?”

“Okay, thanks,” I said.

“I’m Shane,” said Shane, to Paris.

“I’m Paris,” said Paris, to Shane.

“Ah,” said Shane. “The City of Romance.” He pronounced it like that, with the capital C and the capital R. He was looking at Paris with a slightly stunned expression, at her long legs and her wide eyes.

“Nope,” said Paris. “Wrong name. Easy mistake. I’m Paris as in Texas. The City of SUVs. And fat people.”

“Huh,” said Shane. He struggled for a riposte. “Bummer,” he said eventually.

Paris winked at me and laughed.

“I’m Julie, by the way,” said Julie, in a sarcastic tone.

“Oh, hey, Julie,” said Shane, but you could tell he wasn’t really interested.

“Hey, Shane,” said Julie, flatly.

Paris clapped her hands. “Let’s play,” she said.

“I get the feeling she’s always playing,” you whispered to me.

“Yep,” I said. “Me too.”

 

Paris and I showed our VIP passes, and you and Shane showed your employee IDs, which was kind of unnecessary given you were in your denim-shirt uniform with the radio clipped to the V where your chest— And I looked at your chest and you saw and oh the embarrassment of it—and Shane was in his red lifeguard shorts and a white T-shirt with the Piers logo on it, and Julie just kind of said, “I’m with them,” and the kid behind the counter gave us sticks and a ball, a different color for each of us. “There’s a family on hole one,” he said. “Just wait two minutes and you can go.”

Is it sticks? I’m hopeless with sports, even mini golf.

I’m going to look it up. I’m on my dad’s computer, by the way. I never said that. I’m in the study, surrounded by bugs, the tanks glowing. It’s kind of peaceful. The keyboard is old though and heavy and the keys make an annoyingly loud clicking sound. Then that sometimes gets the bugs going, and they click back at me. I don’t know which ones click—the beetles, maybe.

This room used to be where my mom would sew. I haven’t told you that either. She was a dressmaker—she had mannequins in here, measuring tapes, an old Singer sewing machine. Patterns and scissors; fabrics on rolls; it was like a treasure shop. Mostly she didn’t make stuff outright—women would bring her expensive dresses though, which they’d bought from Bergdorf Goodman in New York or whatever, and she would alter them so they fitted perfectly. Those women loved her for that: I could see it in their eyes, the joy when they saw themselves in the long mirror Mom had hung on the wall.

Dad kept it all for two years, after she died. The mannequins, everything. Then one day I came downstairs and it was all gone, and his bugs, which had been in the basement, were all along the walls. He also put in a safe, and bought a handgun—for protection, he said. After Mom died, he was obsessed with protection. With keeping us safe. Only I never felt very protected; I felt mostly the opposite, like his anger was the biggest threat. It was like living with a black bear.

Anyway.

I didn’t like his redecorating the room and filling it with insects and a gun, but I never said anything. It was like she was finally gone, even from the house. Like, before that, if the house had a mouth, the house would have said it missed her too, because it was still filled with objects that belonged to her, like memories in a mind. You know?

Anyway.

I did look it up. It’s not a stick, it’s a club. A golf club.

Okay, so we got the clubs and went around the course, but of course you were there, you know all this already. We laughed; we had fun. We chipped our balls up into a pirate ship, along the rigging, off a plank and into shark-infested waters. We tapped them up spiral slides and over ramps to clear rivers. We made clocks chime and windmills turn.

Shane tried desperately to hook up with Paris, and she gave weird answers to his questions until he gave up and just started acting normal instead, which was much less annoying. After a while he even tried to hit on Julie for a bit, but he dropped that pretty fast when it was obvious it was going nowhere.

You spoke to me. You spoke to me about the town you grew up in, twenty miles away, and how there was nothing to do there, no way to make money in the summer—just a general store and a gas station and a bunch of farmland that no one could earn a living from.

You spoke to me about how you wanted to go to college; the books you loved. Which were mostly the books I loved, and that was cool. I had noticed you, the very first time I saw you. But the more I spoke to you, the more I realized why I had noticed you. Does that make any sense?

“I’m on an old-texts kick,” you said. “Now that I’ve finished the Ovid. I’m on the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s Babylonian, the oldest written work in—”

“It’s Sumerian, actually,” I said.

You rolled your eyes. “Geek,” you said.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re reading it. I’m just correcting your elementary errors. There are Babylonian versions, but the Sumerian came first.”

You made a face. “Speaking of which,” you said, “I don’t think the ball is supposed to go in the actual water. You aim for that painted ocean there; see the track up the octopus’s tentacle?” My ball had gone flying over the fence ringing the course, and presumably had landed on the beach below.

“Bite me,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” you said. “It’s a complex game.”

I stuck out my tongue at you.

We talked for hours, it felt like. The voice said nothing at all; the voice couldn’t get past the force field that was you.

It was nice.

I know, I know, that’s the lamest thing I could possibly say, but you have to understand, for me it was major. I mean, hanging with Paris was weird, and fun, but the voice was always there, somewhere—hanging on the edge of things like a dark bat—and it took a lot of energy, being with her, even when the voice was silent.

Being with you though … being with you was nice. And not just because the voice wasn’t there. I want you to know that.

As we walked back down the boardwalk, we passed another basketball stall—the racks of plush toys, the little hoops and child-sized balls. People think the whole thing is gamed, that the hoops are too small for the ball, or that the stallman bends them or something to make the angle impossible. But they don’t. It’s just hard.

Paris stopped. “Competition,” she said.

“What?” said Shane.

The stall was being run by a pimply kid in the same blue shirt that you wore to work, with a leather jacket over it two sizes too big. “You playing?” he said. “Five dollars, three shots.”

“Yes,” said Paris. She reached into her purse.

“We are?” you said.

“Yep,” said Paris. “All of us. Best shot wins … I don’t know. Pride, or something.”

“You get a toy,” said the kid behind the counter. He held out a ball to Paris.

“What size?” said Paris.

“Make one shot, get a small one. Two shots, medium; three shots—”

“Large?” said Paris.

“Yeah.”

“Shocker,” said Paris.

The kid rolled his eyes.

“I work in the plush warehouse,” you said. “I can get a stuffed toy whenever I want.”

“Winning one is different,” said Paris.

“Tell me about it,” said Julie. “I’ve never won anything in my life.”

“Don’t be defeatist,” said Paris.

“Well, I’m up for it,” said Shane. He was kind of bouncing on his toes. He wanted to impress Paris. She wasn’t even looking at him. She lined up her ball and threw it; it bounced off the rim and the kid caught it. Smoothly, I have to say. He didn’t look sporty, but he’d been behind that counter for a month maybe. I knew the feeling.

Paris missed her next two shots too, and then Shane stepped forward and sank his first ball beautifully, straight down through the hoop. He missed the next two though and chose a bunny rabbit Beanie Baby. He handed it to Paris, and she clutched it to her chest, with her two Elmos. “My hero,” she said.

“Uh, okay,” said Shane, like he didn’t know if she was insulting him or not. It was sometimes hard to tell with Paris.

You took your first ball. “I suck at ball games,” you said.

“Excuses,” said Paris.

“Sucking is not an excuse. It’s just sucking. I’m not trying to hide anything.”

Paris frowned. “Yeah, acknowledged. I take it back.”

“Good,” you said, and Paris laughed, and I laughed, because I was glad, I was glad you and her were clicking, even if somewhere deep down I had a worry that went, What if he likes her more than he likes you?

You shot: missed.

Missed again.

Missed again.

“Said I sucked,” you said.

“You were not lying,” said Paris. “Cass. You’re up.”

 

Maybe it was the kid who made me do it. I don’t know. The way he patronized me. I mean, he handed me the ball and he said, “You might want to come a bit closer. The hoops are higher than they look.”

I raised my eyebrows. He had a month on that stall; I had two whole summers. I got the ball up on my palm, rolled it off my fingers as I laid it up, and it back-spun in an arc that just happened to send it sailing over the kid’s head, and it fell through the hoop with a hush.

Nothing but net.

“You done this before?” said the kid.

“Yep.”

I spun the next ball on my finger and then let it settle in my hand.

Hush.

Two.

Hush.

Three.

“So … ah … you get to choose a big one,” said the kid.

Paris started to say something, behind me, some innuendo, but Julie got in quick, said, “Nuh-uh. Don’t even think about it.”

“Spoilsport,” said Paris.

“What do you want?” asked the kid. He gestured at the big toys on the top shelf.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

“What do I recommend? Out of the plush kiddies’ toys?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “Cookie Monster, I guess.”

“I like cookies,” you said.

“Perfect,” I said. I reached out, took the Cookie Monster the kid handed me. It was surprisingly heavy, and furry. It’s funny how holding a toy like that gives you a momentary feeling of warmth, of comfort, even though you’re not small anymore. I handed it to you.

“For me?” you said.

“You like cookies. There you go.”

“Oh wow,” said Paris. “Now it’s Jersey Official.”

“What?” said Julie.

“She’s from out of town,” said Paris.

“So are you,” I said.

Paris waved this away like it was an unimportant detail; small print.

“What?” said Julie.

“When a guy wins a toy for a girl on the boardwalk, that’s like the sign that they’re, you know, together,” said Shane.

“Shut up, it’s not,” I said, feeling myself going red. Even though I knew it totally was.

Awkward.

“Anyway, she’s not a guy,” you said. “She’s … a girl.” But you had hesitated too long—Paris caught it. Hell, even I caught it, and I’m not exactly experienced with this stuff. The pause. The inflection on “girl.”

“She certainly is,” said Paris. “You’ve noticed that, huh?”

Double awkward.

“Shut up,” I said again. I was waiting for the voice to chime in, to tell me that I was imagining this vibe anyway, this idea that you might be interested in me, but then I remembered that you were there, so the voice wouldn’t speak.

You lifted the Cookie Monster, pushed it between me and Paris. “Excuse me,” you said, in the Cookie Monster’s voice. “I’m hungry. I want cookies.”

Paris smiled. “No cookies. This is Jersey, land of the funnel cake.”

You nodded. “Funnel cake it is, oh courageous leader.”

“I should think so,” said Paris. “But first, Julie’s turn.”

“No, no,” said Julie. “I told you, I never—”

“—win anything, I know,” said Paris. “Still.” Julie sighed and stepped up. She took the balls and she barely tried, she just threw them kind of randomly. She didn’t win anything. I have to say, she didn’t look at home there, competing for a plush toy at a concession stand in an amusement park. I felt a flash of irritation at Paris for humiliating her like this. I mean, Julie had tattoos all down her arms and was wearing a pleated fifties skirt with a Replacements T-shirt. This was not her scene.

“See?” said Julie, as the last ball pinged off the board and went flying. “It’s like a curse.”

“What is?” you said. You’d been chasing Shane with the Cookie Monster a moment before, growling; you’d missed the part before.

“I never win anything,” said Julie. “Like, not even scratch cards. Never.”

“That sucks,” you said.

Julie did an eye-shrug. “Whatever.” She started walking, and we followed.

Your cell rang and you looked at it, then at us. “My dad,” you said. “Save some funnel cake for me.” You answered the phone. “Hi, Dad. Yeah, I’m at work. Yeah, I’ve been practicing. Yeah, listen …”

You walked off a little distance, head down, talking low and intently into the phone.

“Funnel cake, yes?” Julie said. There was a funnel stall a bit farther down—we could see it.

“Yep,” said Paris.

You put your hand over the bottom of your phone. “Save some for—”

“You, I know,” I shouted back.

You nodded, pleased, and turned away again. “Yeah, Dad, I know, I’m—”

I stopped eavesdropping, and walked on.

Fell into step beside Julie.

“Not even a spelling bee?” I asked, as we walked.

“Huh?”

“You said you didn’t ever win anything.”

Julie shook her head. “I am a born loser,” she said.

“What about you, Shane?” Paris asked. “Won anything?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “Like, football trophies.”

“And him?” she gestured back to you, still on your phone.

“Oh yeah,” said Shane. “He has a shelf of the things.”

“My brother’s the same,” said Julie. We were in line for funnel cakes now. The smell was amazing. “Growing up, he was always winning that stuff. You know, those little pedestal things with statues of guys on them, swinging a baseball bat or diving or whatever. His room was full of them. I always …”

“Yeah?” said Shane. I felt like I had underestimated him. He looked genuinely interested, I mean, interested in the story.

“I don’t know. I just wanted one, you know? Just one.” She rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why. They were stupid, those little statues.”

“Give us all of your funnel cake,” said Paris, reaching the front of the line.

“I’ve got like a ton,” said the redheaded girl in the stall.

“Give us five of your funnel cakes.”

“Five dollars,” said the girl, handing over a bag.

For a long moment we just ate funnel cake. When I say “we” ate it, I mean the others, not me, because of my allergy. I miss out on all the fun. Major understatement!

Paris said it was good. I mean, you know that anyway. I don’t know why I’m telling you. Funnel cake is good. Alert the President and the Joint Chiefs.

Anyway.

“But you might still win a trophy,” said Paris, to Julie.

“What?” said Julie.

“Roller derby,” said Paris. “You guys are in the final, no?”

“Oh. Yeah. But you get, like, a certificate.”

“No trophy?” said Shane.

“No.”

“Dude. That sucks,” said Shane. He was serious. I kind of fell in love with him a bit in that moment. I mean, in a platonic way. I knew now why the two of you were friends, even though you were so different. He would never be reading Ovid, that was for sure.

Julie brushed some powdered sugar from her T-shirt. “If we win a certificate, I’ll be happy,” she said. “At least that’s something.”

“So, roller derby?” said Shane. “What are you, a jammer or a blocker?”

“You know it?”

“Yeah, my sister …”

The two of them strolled on, chatting about roller derby. The two unlikeliest people to be talking to each other. The jock and the punk. It was like a Benetton ad or something.

And you were still talking on the phone, like twenty feet behind, pretty intensely. Now I’ve met your dad, of course, and I know a bit more about you, so I get why, but at the time it seemed strange.

Which left me and Paris.

“What was that?” I said.

“What?”

“That whole deal with the basketball. You know I worked one of those stalls. You knew I’d be good.”

“No. But I figured you might be.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“So what was the deal?”

“With what?” she asked. She seemed truly bemused.

“With me and … him. Now he’ll be feeling, I don’t know, emasculated. He lost. I won.”

Paris smiled so wide it was like her face splitting. Only nice. Okay, ignore that simile. Let’s leave it at: she smiled wide. “Please,” she said. “If he was feeling that, then he wouldn’t be the guy for you. And now the tone has been set, you know, for your relationship. You won him a Cookie Monster. Now he’s your bitch. Not the other way around. I think St. Thomas of Aquinas said that.”

“Our relationship?”

“Come on. You’re seriously crushing. Even after an hour I can see that. And the whole deal with rushing to the side of the pier when you saw his truck?”

“I’m not—” I started to say.

“Whatever,” said Paris, waving a hand. “Anyway, he’s cute. Not the other one, Shane. The troglodyte.”

“He’s actually quite—”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure he’s an angel. But anyway, your guy? I approve.”

“Oh good,” I said. “What would I have done otherwise?”

“Not gone out with him, obviously,” said Paris.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” said Paris. “What, you’ve never had anyone look out for you before? Someone has to watch out for a person. For you, that’s me. Okay. That was inelegantly phrased. I am not on fire today. If I am a fire, I am officially out. I am, what would you say? I am damp.”

“Damp?”

“Like wood that won’t catch, you know? That’s how not on fire I am.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Well, thanks,” I said. “For watching out for me.”

“Of course. And now he has passed my stringent tests.”

“By acting cool when I won him a Cookie Monster?”

“Indeed.”

We sped up, to catch you and the others. You were off the phone now and eating your funnel cake. It left a white sugar smile around your real smile.

“Seriously, has anyone been looking after you?” asked Paris as we approached. “Your dad …”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“He hurts you?”

“No! God, no. No, he just … it’s complicated.”

“You said.”

“Yeah.”

She linked her arm through mine. “Well, I’m here now. And I will keep you safe. I’ll be, like, your tooth fairy, watching over you.”

“I think you mean fairy godmother,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Paris, shaking her head. “I felt it even as I was saying it. Not my A game.”

I smiled.

“Hey,” said Paris. “You look nice when you smile.”

“I don’t usually smile?”

“No,” said Paris.

An uncomfortable silence.

“Oh,” I said.

“Well,” said Paris, after a while. “We’ve only just met. I mean, relatively recently. We have our whole lives ahead of us. Whole lives of smiling and fun.”

False statement.

 

I paid for the fun, it goes without saying.

We got home about eleven, and Dad wasn’t home yet. There were no lights on. You and Shane said good night, then went up to your apartment. Shane was nudging you with his elbow, whispering to you, and you whispered fiercely back at him. I thought … I thought maybe he was telling you to make a move.

I hoped.

But you didn’t make a move. You followed him up, and disappeared through the door.

I put my hand to my pocket where I usually kept my keys—

No keys.

Oh yeah.

“You’re locked out,” said the voice.

“Uh, yes,” I said. “Because I wasn’t allowed to take keys.”

“You’ll have to wait for your dad.”

“He’ll ground me. I have a curfew.”

“Yes. That was the point of the exercise.”

“You wanted to get me grounded?”

“I wanted to get you.”

I sat down on the porch step and closed my eyes. “I thought …” I hesitated, amazed at the weirdness that had become normal in my life. “I thought we were getting along well,” I said. It sounded crazy even to me.

“You’re having too much fun,” said the voice. “It’s time you realized that I am the ****** boss around here and what I say goes. And you forgot the date.”

“The date?”

“Think about it.”

I did. Oh, Jesus. August 7. It was the day … the day …

“You ****** forgot, Cass. You forgot.”

“I didn’t mean … I just …”

“You disgust me. You are a ****** disgrace. I am going to ruin your life. I am going to break you. You are nothing.”

There was wetness on my cheeks; I touched them with my fingers, felt the tears. I didn’t mean to, I wanted to say, I didn’t even think, I didn’t say anything to Dad, didn’t mention it this morning at breakfast, and no wonder he was acting so weird and quiet when he was making pancakes.

I put my head in my hands, then I saw movement in the window of your apartment, and a moment later the door opened.

“Cass?” you called.

“Yeah.”

“You locked out?”

“Yeah.”

“Come up. We’re watching a movie. Some trash about a shark fighting an octopus. It’s awesome.”

I thought for a second. At least the voice would go, if I was with you.

I climbed the steps, and you opened the door wide for me.

“You okay?” you asked.

I nodded. “I got locked out.”

“But you’ve been crying.”

“I was upset about being locked out.”

You gave me a sympathetic look mingled with doubt. “Well, I’m sure your dad will be back soon,” you said.

That’s the problem, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. You ushered me in. You’d turned it into a dump, the two of you. Pizza boxes everywhere, stacked like Jenga. Beer cans, take-out menus. Clothes hanging from furniture to dry, or maybe just to hang there, I don’t know.

“It’s a mess,” you said. “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “Not my apartment. But don’t let Dad see it.”

“He doesn’t come up here.”

“He might.”

Shane, who was standing in the door to the living room, made an exaggerated scared face. “We’d better clean tomorrow,” he said.

“I can do it,” I said.

You frowned at me. “You want to clean our apartment?”

“I like cleaning,” I said. Also I didn’t like my bedroom, I mean the voice was always so loud there, and it had been better in the apartment. There were less memories there. Fewer memories. Damn autocorrect, underlining my words in green. “I can do it when you’re at work, the two of you.”

“Seriously, Cass, it’s gross, you can’t—”

“I don’t mind.”

“I say let her,” said Shane. “We can pay you in beer.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Pizza.”

“My dad owns a pizza restaurant.”

“Money.”

I thought for a second. “No. Books. Bring me books from the library. I’ll keep this place clean. Okay?”

You looked at me. “You can’t get books from the library?”

“No.”

You seemed confused by this. Of course now you understand why. “Uh, deal,” you said.

We went into the living room and watched the movie. It was stupid and also, as you’d said, awesome. I was sitting next to you on the couch. I could feel you, feel your leg next to mine, even though there was four inches of air between our skin, and clothes. It was still like we were touching, like our bodies were magnets, held close to each other—something in our molecules vibrating; buzzing.

There was a crunch of tires on gravel.

“Oh no,” I said. “Dad.”

I jumped up; ran to the door and pulled it open, started down the steps. I was on the bottom one when Dad looked up, his hand on the door of the Dodge as he closed it. He looked at me silently. Then he walked toward the door of the house. I thought: Maybe he’s going to go easy on me. Maybe he’s going to give me a break.

I followed him, and he stayed silent as he held the door for me, just like you had done an hour before with the door to the apartment, but also so very differently.

“Dad—”

“No, Cass. Don’t ******* even. What were you doing?”

“I forgot my key and—”

“You went out? At night? When you have a ****** mental illness and there’s a ****** guy killing ****** women in this town?”

“I—”

“I don’t care. And you went up there? When we’ve had a RULE, Cass, a goddamn RULE, since you were twelve ******* years old, that you don’t go in the apartment when it’s boys renting. What were you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He put his hand out and clasped it around my arm, tight enough to make me gasp. “On THIS ******* day of all days? THIS day? Did you even remember it was the anniversary? You have to be ****** kidding me. You don’t leave this ****** house again after sunset, do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Upstairs,” he said.

I started up the stairs. “Are you having fun now?” said the voice.

 

That night, I lay on my bed and imagined that I was a bird, flying above Oakwood. Same view as on the Ferris wheel. Looking down on the sudden small beauty of the town, embracing it with the outstretch of my wings, untethered from the ground.

Floating.

Inhuman trajectory and lift: carried higher by updraft of warm air, no effort at all, wings arched above me. The houses and streets dwindling, forming into fractal patterns, dissolving into distant abstractions of light; the dark mass of the ocean.

Floating on the air. Freed from all movement and decay, freed from the voice, blessed with a new perspective. The place where birds live: the same world but different, in the mirror of the sky, inverse to us as death is to life, hovering in the spaces where our roofs and cars and towers aren’t; in the gaps; in the blue brightness; a kind of heaven.

 

DR. LEWIS:	So things have regressed.
ME:	(nods)
DR. LEWIS:	But you deployed the strategies we talked about. The welcoming. Scheduling.
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	And things improved?
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	But now they’re worse again.
ME:	(nods)
DR. LEWIS:	Has anything happened? Anything that might have triggered a return of the trauma?
ME:	(Thinks about the restaurant. Blood. Dad getting home and finding me in the apartment. Tiles. Me forgetting Mom’s day.) No.
DR. LEWIS:	What does the seventh of August mean to you?
ME:	(looks up sharply, breathes hard) What?
DR. LEWIS:	The seventh of August. It’s a date. What does it mean to you?
ME:	Are you … What the … I …
DR. LEWIS:	It’s the day your mother died, I think?
ME:	How do you …
DR. LEWIS:	The Internet.
ME:	Oh.
DR. LEWIS:	It’s also two days ago.
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	Do you think that might have something to do with your regression?
ME:	(cries)
DR. LEWIS:	Here. (He hands over a box of tissues.)
THE VOICE:	Are you crying again, you ******* pathetic piece of ****? All of this is your fault. You did it. I died, and you did nothing to—
DR. LEWIS:	You said the voice was a woman’s. An adult woman’s?
ME:	(nods)
DR. LEWIS:	You have any theories about that?
ME:	(shrugs) It might be the voice of one of the … one of the prostitutes that was killed. Wanting me to, you know, solve the murder.
ME:	(Watches, carefully. Having said this fake-casually. Wanting to see what he makes of it.)
DR. LEWIS:	Right.
ME:	It adds up, huh? A woman. Speaking after I find the foot … wanting revenge. Wanting justice. Maybe that’s where I come in. To … to get him. To make him pay.
DR. LEWIS:	Maybe.
ME:	You think I’m crazy, don’t you?
DR. LEWIS:	I certainly don’t think that.
ME:	But you think I’m deluded.
DR. LEWIS:	No, I think you’re … hiding from certain things.
ME:	Hiding from what?
DR. LEWIS:	You say your role is to find the killer. What have you done to further that goal?
ME:	Um.
DR. LEWIS:	Anything? Any progress at all?
ME:	I read some books. About him. About other serial killers.
DR. LEWIS:	(significant pause)
ME:	Okay, so I have been busy with other things.
DR. LEWIS:	Busy? Did you get a job?
ME:	(pause) No.
DR. LEWIS:	I have a theory. Do you want to know what it is?
ME:	No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.
DR. LEWIS:	My theory is that this notion of yours, about the voice being one of the murdered women … it’s a distraction. Pure and simple. That’s why you’ve done nothing about it. So let’s think about other adult women. Other women the voice could represent.
ME:	Like who?
DR. LEWIS:	Your mother was an adult woman.
THE VOICE:	TEAR OUT YOUR ******** EYES, YOU ******.

ME: (head reeling, roiling, a receptacle for liquid, set spinning, detached from my body and sliding around on a smooth

tiled

floor—my mind revolving, finding no purchase on the slippery

tiles,

and that’s really what it feels like; like my body is gone and I’m just a head, with eyes that for some reason are seeing a static image of the Doc sitting on his chair, the blank walls, the coffee dispenser and the cookies on the table, while my head itself is rolling uncontrollably, unstoppably, on that

tiled

floor)

THE VOICE: (SCREAMING INCOHERENTLY, A KLAXON OF ANGER AND CURSING AND JUST, JUST, JUST AWFULNESS)

I put my hands over my eyes and my head between my knees. I took deep, long breaths. There is an expression—my mind was spinning. Usually it’s just an expression. But that was what was actually happening. My mind was a whirligig; I felt sick.

DR. LEWIS: Cass?

I looked up. I wanted this feeling to stop, I wanted to never feel like this again. “What are you … I mean … ,” I said.

Dr. Lewis was looking scared, and at the same time—not pleased, but like something he had been suspecting had been confirmed. “The voice is very angry with you, is that right?” he said.

“Tear out your throat,” said the voice. “Tear it out, right now.”

“Oh God,” I said. “Help me.”

“I’m trying to, Cassie,” said the Doc. “It may not feel like it, but I’m trying.”

“It’s not my mother!” I said. “The voice is not my mother!”

“Okay, okay. Take a deep breath.” He paused while I panted, trying to get my heartbeat under control. “We often find that people, especially younger people, respond to trauma with anger. Perhaps they feel angry with a person who abused them. Perhaps they feel angry with someone for dying. But they are taught to hold that anger in, that it is inappropriate to express it. So they turn it on themselves. The voice begins to punish them.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying maybe you are angry with your mother for dying. Maybe the voice is an expression of that.”

“I’m not angry with my mother.”

“Not consciously, no, but it’s possible that—”

THE VOICE: It’s you. It’s your fault. It’s all you.

I stood up, quickly. My plastic chair fell, landed on its side, the thin metal legs sticking out like it was a wounded animal.

“It’s ME,” I shouted. “It’s ME, okay? I’m not angry with my mom for dying. I’m angry with me. It was MY FAULT, okay? Don’t you understand? I KILLED HER.”

 

I killed her.

 

Me.

 

Stupid, disgusting me.

 

In my memory there’s a jump cut.

One moment I’m standing there screaming, and then, without seeming to cross the intervening space, without seeming to operate as a body in a physical universe, requiring time to move from one point to another, the next moment the doctor has his arms around me and is holding me.

Holding me.

Do you know something?

It was the first time someone had held me for three years. Dad had never, Dad had never, Dad had never—

My thoughts were a storm. A maelstrom. A whirlpool. Charybdis.

My dad never—

It was me—

I KILLED HER.

My breath was hitching in my chest; I was not a body but just lungs and a mind, a pounding heart. I was broken into pieces, like Echo, like Orpheus, torn into my constituent organs and pieces.

Sparagmos.

I was all over the floor, scattered.

“It’s going to be okay,” said Dr. Lewis, over and over again. “This is a breakthrough. This is a breakthrough.”

 

But it didn’t feel like a breakthrough.

It felt like a break.

Like I was broken.

 

“I have to go,” I said. My whole being felt like a slept-on hand; tingling, filled with pain.

“I don’t think that’s wise. I think you need—”

“I have to go.”

“You shouldn’t be alone at this point,” he said. “This is a very sensitive time. Perhaps your dad could pick you up?” He was standing back from me now, one pace, his hands on my arms. The parts of me that had fallen all over the floor had started to knit back together again.

“Are you ******* kidding me?” I asked.

“He’s at work?”

“No! He knows I killed her! Don’t you see? He knows. That’s why he hates me.”

“You think your father hates you?”

“No.”

“Good, because—”

“I know he hates me.”

“Cass …”

“It was my fault. Why are you not understanding that? He knows it, the same as me.”

He shook his head. His gray hair rippled. “I know you feel like that, but—”

“But it’s true. Now let me go.”

He withdrew his hands, quickly, like I was burning. “At least call Paris,” he said. “Have her come be with you.”

I opened my mouth to say something angry, then stopped. “Yeah, okay,” I said. I took out my cell and dialed. It rang for a long time, and I was about to hang up when Paris answered.

“Hey,” she said flatly. Distantly. At any other time I would have wondered what was wrong.

“It’s Cass.”

“I know.” Her voice still not quite there. Absent, somehow coming from someone or somewhere else. A ventriloquist’s dummy, talking to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just had a bad time doing a party, that’s all.”

I realized I hadn’t even asked her what was wrong; but she’d answered anyway; she’d assumed I’d asked. That was how much of a selfish asshole I was.

“Sorry,” I said.

A sound like a shrug made of air. “It happens,” she said.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No, Cass. No. Not … physically.”

“Good. I know Julie worries that—”

“I’m fine, Cass.”

“Good. That’s good. But I mean, are you sure? Because you sound kind of—”

“Look just ****** leave it, okay, Cass?” Her voice had a sudden coldness in it I had never heard before, like the coldness of stone; sharp-edged, mineral, angry but distant at the same time. Somehow … not human. It’s hard for me to describe. All the time I’d known her I’d never seen her as someone with … issues, you know? Despite what she said about her drugs and her therapy and whatever, she seemed so together.

That was the first time I saw another shape underneath her, the contours of a troubled mind.

A pause.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have called but … but, Paris, I need you,” I said, all in a rush. “Please, I really—”

I heard her snap into the real world. Like a penknife closing. “Where are you, Cass?”

“At the bowling—”

“Ten minutes. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She hung up.

I turned to Dr. Lewis. “She’s coming. I’ll wait for her outside.”

Dwight the cop opened the door as I walked unsteadily toward it—he was always the first to arrive. Dr. Lewis looked torn for a moment, but then finally he nodded. I guess he had heard Paris’s side of the conversation, so he knew I wasn’t lying.

“Hey, Cass,” said Dwight. “You joining group today?”

“Not today, Dwight,” said the Doc.

“Hey, ****, you okay, Cass?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I think I … realized something. About myself.”

Dwight nodded slowly. His big, kind eyes were full of sympathy. “That’s good, Cass,” he said. He always used your name when he was talking to you. I think it was a trick he learned from the cops. “I mean, it doesn’t feel good now. But it’s good.”

I nodded at him. I couldn’t talk.

“I’ll see you next week,” he said. He was wearing a T-shirt that said NJPD SOFTBALL on it, under a crest.

I nodded again. Then I walked out of the hall and through the bowling alley, past the glowing lanes, the iridescent balls. And out onto the dusk-lit street. It was raining, softly, the droplets hanging in the air, almost seeming to rise up from the concrete; a cold steam, everywhere.

 

I started by leaning against the outside wall of the bowling alley, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up.

I slumped down until I was sitting on the damp ground. It soaked through my pants, numbed my butt. I wished the mist would numb me all over.

Around me, the street shimmered. The mattress store on the other side, the 7-Eleven. The cheap hotel with the flashing sign: VACANCIES.

That was how I felt.

Like a vacancy.

At the same time, there was another scene superimposed on the street, bleeding into it. It was the restaurant, Donato’s. The bar counter was over the bowling alley, the pizza oven was behind me; the tables with their red-and-white-checkered cloths were covering the street, the

tiles

were gleaming where concrete and asphalt should be. Ghost figures came and went; waiters, customers. Dad wasn’t there—Dad was in New York, talking to a new tomato supplier, one who flew the tomatoes over from Tuscany. Mom and I were holding the fort, as he put it, running the Sunday night shift—I was taking orders and she was hosting, greeting people as they came in.

Dad didn’t like leaving us alone. That was one of the worst things, one of the ways his fear and his foreboding ended up getting confirmed, ended up bricking him into the personality he started out with already.

He’d bought Mom a gun. A small pistol, two shots—a Derringer. I don’t think it was legal, but he got it from some gun fair somewhere. The idea of it was that you hid it in a sock or something. Only she didn’t like it, didn’t like carrying it, and she didn’t have it on her that day.

She left it in the restaurant safe, where she always left it.

Anyway. She was so beautiful. Dark hair pinned up, spilling out in wavy strands, a gray dress, no makeup. Everyone who came in was captivated by her; you could see it. I wanted to look like her one day. To move like her. To smile like her.

Then I was shaking Parmesan over a woman’s amatriciana and I heard my mother gasp—you know how you recognize your parents’ voices even when they don’t say anything?

I turned around, and there were two guys standing just inside the door. They both wore ski masks. They were both big. One of them was holding a shotgun and the other a baseball bat. It happened so fast. Faster than your reading this. Faster than my typing it, and I type fast. I took an online course.

“Empty the register,” said shotgun guy to Mom. She moved over to it, moved strangely, jerkily. She pressed the key to make it open but nothing happened; she must have gotten it wrong; her hands were shaking. She banged it with the side of her hand and the tray shot out. She started pulling out money. The guy closest to her, the one with the baseball bat, held out a bag—an ordinary plastic bag from a supermarket—and she stuffed the cash into it.

The other guy handed another bag to the diner closest to him. “Pass it around. Watches. Wallets,” he said.

Everyone in the restaurant took off their watches, took out their wallets.

“And jewelry,” said the guy.

Women started removing their earrings. Mom too. They were emeralds surrounded by diamonds, the only nice jewelry she owned; Dad bought them from Tiffany’s for their ten-year anniversary. She nearly ripped them out of her ears and handed them over to the guy who had taken the cash.

Pretty soon the bag came back to the guys.

They turned, began to leave, took their eyes off Mom for a second.

Mom hit the button under the cash register, the panic button that Dad had insisted on installing, an alarm with a link to the local PD. I don’t know why she did it.

Correction: I do know why she did it. Because times were tough, that’s why. And the restaurant was barely breaking even. We couldn’t afford to lose that money.

The alarm started blaring. The two men stopped, and their heads twisted to look at Mom. They didn’t even say anything; they didn’t shout or curse or anything like that—the one with the baseball bat just took a step toward her, and swung.

The bat struck the rear side of her head with a sound like an ax burying itself in a wooden log. She dropped instantly, as if a magician had removed her legs. She sprawled on the tiles. I started screaming then; I don’t remember this, but it was in a lot of witness statements. I screamed and screamed and screamed. One of the cops we spoke to afterward said a diner had described it as the worst sound he had ever heard. Said he hadn’t known a human being could make that noise.

The two guys left, running.

I moved, suddenly able to move.

Mom was lying on the white tiles. There was a halo of dark red blood around her head; her hair was matted. I knelt beside her—her eyes were open and staring, the eyeballs twitching, saccadic, as if she were reading something I couldn’t see, something hanging in the air above her. I could see blood trickling from her nose. I couldn’t see what had happened to the back of her head.

Apparently at this point I was screaming “Mom” over and over. I remember hearing someone dial 911 and ask for an ambulance.

And that’s when I did it. I didn’t realize. I swear I didn’t realize. I just wanted to hold her, I just wanted to make her okay. I lifted her up into a hug, and I held her tight, calling in her ear, calling for her to come back to me.

I lifted her head off the ground.

Do you see?

I lifted her head off the ground.

Because I wanted to hold her.

 

She died of a massive subdural hematoma. That means her brain bled all over itself, drowned itself.

I know this because I looked up brain injuries, afterward.

That was where I learned that the last thing, the last thing you do, if someone suffers a head trauma, is to move them. It can disturb the bleed. Make it worse. Hell, I may even have started the bleed.

I never said anything to Dad. I mean, he knew already. He was a goddamn Navy SEAL. He knows all about injuries.

So we both knew I killed her. We just never said anything about it.

They never caught the two guys either. Dad searched for a while. He used his contacts—his cop buddies from the restaurant. But nothing ever came up.

Probably a good thing. If he’d found them, I’d have lost both my parents. He’d have ended up in prison.

 

There was a voice, and the street by the bowling alley began to reform itself around me, patchily. A scrap of concrete, a parking meter, the 7-Eleven, slowly reappearing out of the fog. A Polaroid, developing.

“—ambulance?” said the voice.

I looked up. There was a middle-aged woman standing over me, kind looking, with a fake Louis Vuitton purse and a long red coat. She looked like a housewife out to meet her lover. That may even have been what she was doing.

“Excuse me?” I said. I was coming to the realization that I was lying on the damp ground. It had stopped raining. But no more than a few minutes could possibly have elapsed—it was no darker than it had been when I left the bowling alley. The sky was still ablaze with the setting sun.

“Do you need an ambulance? Are you epileptic? Diabetic?”

I seized on this excuse for my weird behavior; anything is better than saying you hear a voice and someone has just pointed out that it is probably you internalizing your own mother, because you feel guilty about making her die.

“Just … need some sugar,” I said.

I must not have looked like a meth head or a bum, because the woman nodded and ran across the road to the 7-Eleven. She came back with a candy bar, which she handed to me. “Here,” she said.

At that moment I didn’t think about my allergy at all; it was like it had been rinsed from my mind, washed away by the storm of memories. I just tore open the bar and ate it. Chocolate. With some kind of crunchy filling.

“Thanks,” I said. I sat up, to show that I had more energy now. “Thank you so much. I’ll be fine.” I smiled, as best as I could.

“If you’re sure …”

“I’m sure. Thank you though. Please, let me …” I started to take out my wallet. I kept it in my back pocket, with a chain to my belt loops.

“No, no,” she said. “On me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

I saw the crucifix around her neck now—a true Good Samaritan. “Thanks again,” I said.

She nodded and walked off. I took a long breath. Paris, where are you? I thought.

Then my long breath caught in my chest, like my body had closed around it, vice-hard. I coughed. I coughed some more. I pursed my lips. My mouth was fizzing, tingling, electricity running through it. I felt my lips swelling. My tongue. My bronchioles were going to swell too, till I would no longer be able to take in any oxygen.

Till I would die.

Yep.

Just my luck.

Peanuts.

 

Paris parked and opened the door of her surprisingly ordinary sedan—a Prius I think—just as I was injecting myself with my EpiPen, counting down the elephants.

“What the—”

“Shh,” I said. I finished counting. “—six elephants, seven elephants, eight elephants, nine elephants, ten elephants.”

“Elephants?” said Paris, in a hysterical tone. Like she was freaking out but hard. She was fully human now, the stony tone gone from her voice, and I almost forgot about how she had been on the phone earlier; I had other stuff on my mind.

I was a terrible friend.

Anyway.

I took another deep breath. Better. No hitching in the chest. I took another.

Okay.

My airways were clearing. The epinephrine was doing its job. My mouth was still sore though.

“You count to ten,” I said, as I massaged my thigh. “Because the spring keeps squeezing the drug through the needle. If you don’t wait, you lose some of the injection. They teach you to count elephants, because it makes sure.”

“What the **** happened?”

“A good Samaritan,” I said.

“Huh?”

I shook my head. “Long story.” I picked up my bag from the sidewalk—the shoulder bag I carried everywhere. It was green and had red writing embroidered onto it:

ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS!

CASSANDRA DI MATTEO

76 OCEAN DRIVE OAKWOOD

Mom had sewn it herself, and it was the lamest and least cool thing in the world, but I still carried it with me at all times and would have fought anyone who tried to take it from me, bare fists. I opened the bag and handed Paris my spare EpiPen. “Here: if I start struggling to breathe, give me that. Meanwhile, call an ambulance.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Make sure it’s a paramedic ambulance. Tell them I’m having an anaphylaxis and have injected myself with 0.3 of epinephrine. At …”—I checked my watch—“at about twenty past seven.”

Paris made the call, then she sat down beside me. “This is why you called?”

“What? Oh. No. I called because … You know what, I can’t … I can’t.”

“Sure,” said Paris. “Sure. Let’s just get you better.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “But they’ll want to keep me overnight.”

We waited in silence for a moment.

“Want me to come with you?” asked Paris.

“Please.”

“And your dad. You want me to call him?”

“Um … yes. Please. Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“We need a story. I need a story.” I thought for a moment. “Okay, so I was at your place. You made cookies. I ate one. Then we left to get sodas, and I had a delayed reaction. It can take two hours.”

“I don’t live very near here.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“And won’t he be pissed with me for making you the cookies?”

“No. He’ll be pissed with me for not checking. I’ll say they were chocolate; that I wanted to be polite. Or something. He’ll probably never let me leave the house again; he’ll think I’m totally irresponsible. But hey.”

“You can’t tell him the truth? Whatever that is?”

“No.”

Paris frowned at me. “He doesn’t know about Dr. Lewis, does he?”

“No.”

“Jeez, Cass. Way to set yourself up for a fall. Wait. Does your psych know?”

Silence from me.

“Jeez, Cass.”

Paris dialed the number I gave her. It was a short conversation. What I could hear of it sounded like this:

PARIS:	Hi, Mr… . Oh. Actually, I don’t know Cass’s last name. Hi, Mr. Cass’s Dad.
DAD:	Kccccchhhhhhh.
PARIS:	No, no! No, she’s okay. I mean, she’s not okay. I mean … ****. She’s had a reaction. To nuts, you know? She stabbed herself with the thing …
DAD:	Kccccchhhhhhh
PARIS:	(nodding) The EpiPen, yeah. Yes, she’s breathing fine. No, it’s totally my fault. I insisted she eat a cookie. I didn’t realize.
DAD:	Kccccchhhhhhh Kccccchhhhhhh Kccccchhhhhhh
PARIS:	Oh, no, yeah, no, she did tell me. But I didn’t know how serious it was. (Raising her hands and eyebrows at me, like, I’m trying!)
DAD:	Kccccchhhhhhh
PARIS:	Anyway, I’ve called an ambulance. We’re going to City.
DAD:	Kccccchhhhhhh Kccccchhhhhhh
PARIS:	I will.

She hung up.

“Wow,” she said to me. “That guy’s tense. Anyone would think I was telling him that his daughter had suffered a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction.”

I rolled my eyes at her, and she laughed.

“Seriously,” I said, “is he pissed?”

“Hard to tell. He’s jacked up though.”

“Super,” I said.

Paris started laughing again. I loved her for it.

Remember that:

I loved her.

Not like you, not romantically, but I loved her.

The ambulance came, and Paris rode in it with me all the way to the hospital. She was having the best time, now that I was clearly going to be all right. She flirted with Ben, the younger paramedic, and thought the banks of instruments were the coolest; she had never been in an ambulance before, she said.

Ben stuck tabs to the top of my chest and a clip to the end of my index finger. Then he watched my heartbeat on the screen. “107,” he said. “Saturation 100.”

“Good,” said the guy I think was called Peter. He was older, with a mustache. “Looks like you won’t need to be intubated,” he said to me.

“Hooray,” I said.

“I’m watching your heart on TV,” said Paris, eyeing the jagged peaks and troughs of my pulse. “It’s awesome.”

“Your friend is a little strange,” said Ben, smiling.

“People have commented,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you say that was a beautiful heartbeat?” said Paris. “Wouldn’t you say Cass has a beautiful heartbeat?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Ben.

Paris nodded, sagely. “She does,” she said, as if it had been his idea, as if she was agreeing with him.

Ben started filling in a chart. “You on any medications?” he asked.

I glanced at Paris. “Yes,” I lied. I knew my dad might see the chart, or someone might say something.

“Which ones?”

“Risperidone. Paroxetine.”

I saw his face change. Or maybe I imagined that I did. But I think it did. I mean: I had just shifted in front of his eyes into a different person, like a movie morphing trick. I had gone from:

Reasonably cute but maybe a bit plump teenage girl → mental patient.

He wrote something down on his chart.

He didn’t say anything after that. Nor did Paris. I think she sensed how he had swerved too, how his opinion of me had changed, and she was angry with him. Angry on my behalf.

And I loved her even more for that.

When we got to the hospital Dad was waiting outside and he spoke briefly to Paris, but he wasn’t even looking at her, so she waved to me and kind of subtracted herself from the scene, backed away, until she was gone. And Dad and I went into the building with the paramedics.

 

DAD:	Are you trying to get yourself killed?
ME:	No!
DAD:	You know about food someone else has prepared. You know this stuff, Cass.
ME:	I do.
DAD:	Clearly you don’t!
ME:	(silent)
DAD:	I have to work, Cass. I have to ******* work. I have to know you’re going to be okay when I’m at the restaurant.
ME:	You do know that. You can know that.
THE VOICE:	You will never be okay. You will always be worthless.
ME:	Not now.
DAD:	Not now? Are you serious? Evidently I can’t leave you on your own! If you’re not with boys, you’re having a ******* anaphylaxis, Cass! I can’t ****** worry about you like this, it’s ******* kill me.
PEDIATRICIAN:	Sir? This is a public ward. Could you lower your voice, sir?

 

So now you know.

Now you know about my mom, about how she died.

I don’t …

I mean …

I guess I don’t need to tell you much about how it made me feel. You know all about parents dying. You get it. I mean, I didn’t know that night that your mom died, but I knew something had happened to her. And you told me later of course.

For a long time after the restaurant—this is even before I looked it up and found that I shouldn’t have moved her head—I felt a whole range of different things, different emotions, no single feeling that could be identified as “grief.”

I laughed at inappropriate ****. I laughed at the funeral, because we walked into the chapel and there was this little old lady at the back at this, like, raised mixing-desk thing, all knobs and lights and sliders to control the sound on the mikes at the front of the church, and I just started giggling hysterically because she looked like an octogenarian DJ, in a DJ booth.

My dad glared at me, then.

I felt okay for long periods, I forgot my mom was dead, and then it would hit me like a tidal wave, literally nearly knock me off my feet, the realization, the stupid simple realization, that she was gone and would never come back and we’d never make brownies again with peanut-free chocolate and lick the spoon.

I did that thing; I’m sure you did it too. That thing where I would go into my room and I’d see an album and I’d think, the last time I played that album my mom was still alive; I’d wear a T-shirt and I’d think, the last time I wore this T-shirt my mom was still alive; I’d pick up a book and—

You get the picture.

It sucked. I mean, you know all about it, right? One night I dreamed she was still alive and it was all a big mistake and she bent down low to fold me in her arms and then I woke up and—

Well. You know. I thought I might never stop crying that morning, like an ocean would come flooding out of me and I would disappear, just turn into a puddle on the floor, like some mutant in one of those comic book movies.

I dreamed about the robbers too. Daydreamed also. Fantasized about finding them and torturing them, choking the lives out of them. Making them feel a fraction of the pain I was feeling.

Every day, for like a month, I thought, This is the day the cops will find them.

But they didn’t, and they didn’t, and then … it was a year later, and the robbers were just gone. Like Keyser Söze, you know? Into the sea mist. Evaporated. Like they were never there.

The police kept saying they had leads, that it was only a matter of time, but I didn’t believe them anymore. And time slipped by. Breakfasts, TV, books, school, assignments. All the stuff that just keeps chipping away, keeps happening to you, and that you have to engage with.

“Life goes on” would be the simpler way to say this. But I don’t like those kinds of expressions; they’re so old that they’ve gotten worn and faded, and they don’t really convey what they’re supposed to mean anymore. And it doesn’t tell you anything. Life is always going on, for the living anyway.

Instead, what happens is that things accrete, tiny things, tiny experiences, going to the bathroom, doing makeup, getting dressed, walking places, and they end up covering the shape of the dead person, filling it in, like little bricks, tiny, until the hole is almost filled up and you realize that you’re forgetting, and that makes you feel even worse.

I didn’t want to feel bad anymore though.

And so …

Slowly …

Surely …

I just stopped myself from feeling stuff. From thinking about the killers, about justice, about revenge. I edited my memory. Deleted the part where I lifted her head, where I killed her.

Well.

I thought I had anyway.

It turns out that all I did was push this stuff way inside, tamp it down, squash it, until just like old shrimps and stuff got slicked into oil, far underground, the pain got transmuted into something black and liquid, running through the crevices of my mind.

The voice.

 

Four things happened after my unfortunate hospitalization with anaphylaxis:

1.    Dad banned me from ever seeing Paris again.

2.    Dad banned me from eating any food outside the house.

3.    Dad tried to ban me from leaving the house at all, and I screamed so much he ended up backing down.

4.    I remembered, when I got home, why I had taken my eye off the ball in the first place, why I had eaten the candy bar.

5.    I knew why the voice had come. Because I had killed my mother and the voice was angry with me. Dr. Lewis was right. The voice was my mother. Or it was the part of me that hated myself, the part that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I was punishing myself.

6.    This insight did not help. The voice came back but hard.

7.    I know I said four things.

8.    Yeah, yeah.

9.    Whatever.

10.    It’s my list.

 

5.    FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.

Round two.

It was weird.

I knew now what my trauma was: I knew, I mean consciously knew, that I had killed my mother. That it was my fault that my mother was dead.

But here’s the thing: you would think that would be terrible … only knowing that somehow made it easier, not harder. Because now that it was out in the open—I mean, the open inside my head, if that’s a thing—I could at least talk to myself about it.

I could say to myself,

“But, Cass, she would have died anyway.”

I could say to myself,

“But, Cass, you saw her eyes. She was gone. The doctors said there was nothing anyone could have done.”

And I didn’t really believe it, but at least I could talk to myself about it.

Not out loud of course. That would have been crazy.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

So … mentally, I was doing a bit better. I hated being basically grounded and I wanted to see Paris, and wanted more than I could even admit to myself to see you … but in my head, in the echo chamber of my mind, I was improving.

I realized, too, that I had been wrong—I mean, I had known there was something in Ovid, but I was looking for the wrong thing. I had been looking for Echo in the voice that I heard, when I should have been looking at myself. Ever since Mom died I had been Pygmalion’s statue—a girl who had been a solid object, an ivory girl—and now I had come to life, like Venus made Pygmalion’s statue come to life, and it was painful and amazing at the same time.

Dr. Rezwari was pleased with my progress. I went to see her in her strange empty room, with its shelves of books, and she said I was responding very well to the drugs. This was funny because I was NOT TAKING ANY. But I was lucky: I think I looked so dopey from the anaphylaxis and being generally tired and emotional that I looked like someone who was taking powerful antipsychotics.

“And do you ever hear the voice these days?” she asked.

“No,” I lied.

“That’s excellent,” said Dr. Rezwari. “Excellent.” Then she sent me home. Whether I heard the voice: that was the only thing she cared about. Not what might have caused it.

The day after that I was in my room. Dad was outside, on a ladder leaning against the wall, painting the window frames. He liked to do it in summer, when it was sunny. But not too hot, because then the paint would dry too quickly and crack. He wasn’t painting my window, he was doing his one, the next one along.

“Walk into the wall, *****,” said the voice.

“Hello,” I said. “How nice to hear—”

“Walk into the wall or your dad falls off the ladder.”

Deep breath.

“It’s two p.m. I’d really rather you spoke to me only after—”

“He’ll break both his legs. Walk into the wall. Right now.”

I don’t know why I did it. I really don’t. Maybe because the voice told me to eat the candy bar, and it really could have killed me? Anyway. I said,

“No.”

“What?” said the voice.

“No. I won’t walk into the wall.”

“Are you ****** serious? Both legs, Cass. You want to hurt him like you hurt your mother?”

Rage filled me suddenly. I pictured it like redness rising up my eyes, flooding them. “Fuck you,” I said.

“Last chance,” said the voice.

Fear was fingers clasped tight on my body, shaking it. “No,” I said.

I waited.

The clock on the wall—Peter Rabbit, from when I was small—ticked and ticked, chopping up time into seconds.

I could hear Dad whistling as he painted. The Beach Boys. “God Only Knows.” He and Mom had it at their wedding. I smiled a little. I listened for the sound of his ladder slipping, him falling, the scream when he hit the ground.

Nothing.

“Are you there?” I asked the voice.

Silence.

The voice was gone.

AND SUPER UNSURPRISING CAPS-LOCK SPOILER ALERT: Dad did not fall off the ladder.

DR. LEWIS:	(eating a cookie) Of course, the voice didn’t threaten you.
ME:	Huh?
DR. LEWIS:	It threatened your father.
ME:	Yes.
DR. LEWIS:	The next test, I think, is to resist the voice when it is you it’s threatening.
ME:	I … I …
DR. LEWIS:	You’re still afraid of it, yes?
ME:	(silence)
DR. LEWIS:	You still believe it could hurt you.
ME:	I guess.
DR. LEWIS:	So what happened when your father didn’t fall off the ladder?
ME:	Maybe the voice decided not to do it.
DR. LEWIS:	No. It couldn’t do it. Because it’s part of you. It has no supernatural powers.
ME:	(thinking of the compasses, of the moment when Shane rolled over and scratched himself and I saw his junk, all wrinkly and gross) Hmm.
DR. LEWIS:	What I want you to do is, next time the voice threatens you, suggests some specific punishment … I want you to call it. Like in a poker game. Call it, and see if it can really do it. If it can’t, you start to get your life back.
ME:	You make it sound so easy.
DR. LEWIS:	Oh, no. No, it won’t be easy. But what is?

It wasn’t all bad though.

I didn’t see you apart from a couple of glimpses out of the window, and that sucked. And I didn’t hear much from Paris, and that sucked too.

But then one day she texted me like five times.

Hey hun come to the roller derby tonite it’s the final & Julie is skating. It’ll be fun! I promise.

I know your dad’s working tonite b/c I asked in the restaurant. I pretended that I wanted a job as a server. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Once I worked in a burger joint & I got fired b/c I kept eating the burgers and I accidentally kissed the short-order cook.

Hello? OK it wasn’t an accident it was totally deliberate but he was hot.

Hun? OK OK OK also I sprayed MEAT IS MURDER on the front window. I was confused, I was going through some stuff, OK?

And, okay, that made me laugh. Then the last one dropped the joke:

Roller derby. Tonite. Be there. I want you there. Please?

I wanted to reply. I wanted so badly to reply. But there was my dad, and my work with the voice and … and I didn’t.

But Paris wasn’t going to take no for an answer that easily, and maybe half an hour after my dad went out that evening, there was a ring at the door. I went to it thinking it would be Paris but it wasn’t, it was you.

“Hey,” you said. You looked super awkward.

“Hey,” I said.

(I have just had a call from Spielberg saying he wants to option this conversation for a tentpole movie next year. I have said yes. Hope that’s okay.)

“Um, Paris sent me,” you said. “Is your dad here?”

“No.”

“Oh good. Um …”

“She sent you to take me to the roller derby, right?” I asked.

“Yeah.” You shuffled a bit. You looked good. You were wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and your hair looked like you’d slept on it but still … you looked good. Hot, actually. God, I am curling up inside writing this. “She’s totally amped up about it,” you said. “She really wants you there. I’m supposed to drive you in the pickup.”

I looked over at the road, where your white Ford was parked under a streetlight. I sighed, but only inside, so you wouldn’t hear. “Well, I do love that pickup,” I said. “But my dad …”

“Is out till late, right? He told me earlier.”

“I’m supposed to be grounded.”

“Why?” you asked. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Mysterious,” you said.

“Yeah.”

Then one of our classic awkward silences.

“Come on,” you said. “How can you resist a trip in that sweet ride of mine?” You gestured at the pickup.

“It’s tough, I’ll give you that,” I said. “It’s the big Piers logo that really makes it.”

You smiled. The world got a bit brighter. “Please?”

I sighed. “Well if you say please … Fine. Let me get my Vans.”

“Awesome,” you said, a bit too enthusiastically. Then you paused. “Um, I mean, for Paris …”

I saw the embarrassment on your face, and inside I smiled. I grabbed my shoes and slipped them on and then you let me into the passenger seat of the F-150. It was still clean in there; I was kind of surprised. I figured, you know, seventeen-year-old boy in a pickup. I thought there would be McDonald’s bags and whatever. Eighteen-year-old? I’ve just realized I don’t know how old you are. But you’ve finished high school—so you have to be eighteen or nineteen, right?

I digress.

You drove us in your spookily clean pickup to what I thought was going to be some cool velodrome-type place but was actually a high school gym on the outer edge of town.

“It’s a gym,” I said, as we parked the truck and got out.

“Yeah.”

“Disappointing.”

“Hmm,” you said. “I was picturing an arena with, like, sloping sides.”

“Me too. Same exact thing.”

“Oh well,” you said. “It’s—”

But I never knew what it was because …

“CASS! CASS, YOU ******** ****! CASS, I ********* LOVE YOU, YOU SPECTACULAR ******* PERSON! ****.”

Paris ran over. She had been standing in the shadows outside the gym, invisible, and I guessed we were late because there was no one else out there in the parking lot but light was coming from the windows of the gym. She picked me up and spun me around.

“You came!” she said.

“Evidently,” I said. But I couldn’t help smiling.

“I knew you couldn’t resist him.”

“Actually,” I said. “It was his sweet ride.”

Paris looked over at the pickup, nodded sagely. “The iconography of the Piers has ever been potent. Once I hooked up with a guy just because he was wearing one of those mascot costumes. You know, the Piers dolphins?”

“Ha-ha,” you said.

“No,” said Paris. “That’s actually true.”

“When he was in the costume?” I asked.

“Well,” said Paris, “he took the head off.”

“Wow,” you said.

“Follow,” said Paris, gesturing to the gym. “The game is already afoot and we squander precious time.” She led the way through double doors and then down a corridor with lockers running down it. She was carrying a really big purse. Prada, I think? Black leather with a gold clasp thing.

When we stepped into the hall the roar took me by surprise—the hall was flat, there was no sloping track, but there was a running track around the outside of the hall; it was big, I guess that was why it was chosen, and the bleachers were packed with people.

The skaters were already racing around the running track, some of them in yellow and black, like wasps, the others in bright red.

“Which is her team?” I asked.

“Places first,” said Paris. She pushed past people, alternately charming and elbowing them, until we came to a good spot roughly in the middle, one bench back from the front. A rigged-up fence was between the audience and the skaters, those metal barriers that kind of slot together?

You know this already. I keep forgetting.

Anyway, so we sat down and started to watch the … match? Game? I don’t know. I would look it up, but I’m conscious of not wasting your time. Ironic, I know. There were lots of people in the center of the gym, inside the track the skaters were skating around. More skaters, in the same uniforms but not skating. Plus coaches, I think? And also people in black-and-white-checkered tops who I took to be referees.

“See Julie?” said Paris. She pointed and, yes, I saw her. Yellow-and-black uniform, a helmet with a bright yellow stripe on it, her name emblazoned across her back: ONE THOUSAND MEGA JOULES. “They’re the Oakwood Miss-Spelling Bees,” she said. “Other team is the Wildwood Wild Kittens.”

“She’s fast,” I said. Julie was behind a pack of the red skaters and closing on them quick.

“She’s a jammer,” said Paris. “Well, right now, she’s a pivot, but—”

“Excuse me, what?”

“It means the jammer can designate her to take over as jammer, if she gets injured or whatever,” you said.

I raised my eyebrows at you.

“What? I read up on it.”

“Suck-up.”

“Scr—”

“Children,” said Paris. “No bickering.”

We watched some more of the play. I couldn’t really follow what was going on. After a minute or so they stopped skating and milled around, and then some of the players swapped with the ones waiting in the center space. It seemed like there were about fifteen girls on the team, but only about five of them were skating at any one time. Julie was one of the ones who stopped … playing? Competing? Skating? Anyway, she stopped. She looked around at the bleachers, finally saw us, and waved. We waved back.

Meanwhile the skaters were skating.

“Yeah!” you shouted at one point.

“Um,” I said. “What happened?”

“They scored.”

“Really? How?”

Paris turned to me. “You really don’t know anything?”

“Uh, no.”

“The jammer scores by lapping the pack,” you said. “The blockers from the opposing team try to stop them.”

I looked at you blankly.

“The one with the stars on her helmet has to pass the other ones,” said Paris. “Then she scores.”

“Why didn’t you just say that?” I asked you.

You rolled your eyes.

 

I watched them play. Now that I had a vague idea of the rules it was easier to understand and I was less bored. There was one more two-minute jam (see, I am all over this stuff now) where Julie sat out, and then she joined the team again. Almost straightaway the jammer shot past the pack and I jumped up and whooped. Okay, I got into it for a bit. I don’t like sports usually, but it was exciting.

Paris and you stared at me.

“What?” I said. “They scored. Right? Right?”

“Yeah,” you said.

“But you whooped,” said Paris. “You, whooping.”

“What? I whoop.”

“You’re not a whooper.”

“Hey!” I said. “I can whoop.”

“You don’t strike me as a natural whooper,” you said.

“Stop saying whooper, both of you!” I said.

“Maybe you could ask Julie if you could be a cheerleader,” said Paris. “You could follow the team around and—”

“Shut up.”

She smiled. It’s a picture I have pinned on the inside of my mind, to look at.

Then the jammer seemed to lock skates with one of the blocker girls from the Wild Kittens, and went spinning on her back. The play stopped and she hobbled off, and various people talked to one another, and then Julie took off the helmet with the stripe on it and put on one with stars all over it instead.

“Julie’s the jammer now,” you said.

“Yeah, I got that, thanks,” I said.

The previous jammer seemed to be okay. She sat on the ground cross-legged, rubbing her ankle, but didn’t appear to be badly injured. There was a scoreboard up on the wall of the gym, an electronic one. It said:

BEES 42    KITTENS 50

So I could see that the other team was winning. But as we watched, even in the first two-minute jam, it was clear that Julie was making a difference. She flew past the Kittens’ blockers a couple of times, and there was a big cheer when she did and Paris cheered too, so I joined in; I mean, I wasn’t going to be the first to whoop. Not after the last time.

Soon after that it was 50–52 to the Kittens. Really close. There was like one more jam and then it all stopped for some reason; the skaters all went into the middle and huddled, the two teams standing far apart so as not to hear each other. Paris turned to me. “Seriously,” she said, under her breath. “Are you okay? With …” She gave a meaningful look, knowing that you were sitting there too.

I nodded. “Surviving. Just about.”

“Good,” she said. “That’s really good. Let’s talk. Not here though.”

“Okay,” I said.

(We didn’t. We didn’t get a chance.)

Anyway, then the announcer, who was standing in the middle of the gym with a corded microphone, the track running in an oval around him, said it was time for the second period.

The skaters set off, the blockers first, Julie and the Kittens’ jammer behind. Some stuff happened. It’s not like I was registering every detail for later transcription. The score stayed pretty even. Julie scored some. The other blocker too. She was called Patricia Pornwell, I remember that because it was kind of a book name, and I liked that.

Even a sports illiterate like me could see that the time was running down. There were eight minutes of play left, and that’s when stuff got kind of exciting.

74–75 to the Kittens.

Julie was trying desperately to get past the pack. The Kittens’ blockers were all mixed up with the Bees, and then one of her team reached behind her and caught Julie’s hand, linked up with another girl, and kind of pivoted and slingshotted Julie past them all.

Slingshot?

Slingshooted?

Who knows.

Instantly, I was on my feet, screaming.

“She scores!” shouted the announcer. “75–75!”

Julie looked right over at us as she cruised past, and she fired a salute off the side of her forehead at us. It was like the coolest thing ever.

“**** YEAH!” screamed Paris. “**** YEAH!”

Now it got kind of rough. The blockers were jostling one another, pushing. Not violent but close. It was messy. The red jammer got past the pack and scored for the other team.

“No,” said Paris. “No no no.”

Then Julie came flying up behind, putting on speed. She closed on the pack. Her hair was in two ponytails sticking out from her helmet, and they were flying behind her like pennants.

It happened suddenly—one of the Kittens went down. I think she caught her skate on another girl’s, and she wiped out on the hard floor of the gym. She spun for what was probably a fraction of a second but felt like forever, all of us in slow motion now.

Julie was maybe four feet away when the girl fell. She couldn’t turn. She couldn’t stop.

Julie—

 

—jumped, right up in the air, and she kind of hugged her knees to her chest, literally five feet off the ground, and then she touched down on the other side and just kept skating.

The girl on the floor did a thumbs-up to show she was okay, and the skaters slowed so that she could get up. A medic-type guy went over, but she shook her head and went back onto the track.

“Holy cow!” said the guy on the loudspeaker, when they were all skating again. “We see stride jumps in this competition but a full jump—wow! Mega Joules back in play here, and she’s gaining and—”

I don’t even know what he said after that, because there were Bees supporters around us and they were going pretty much crazy. The noise was getting louder and louder. Actually the other team’s supporters were going wild too. It was hard not to get swept up in it, even if at the back of my mind I was counting down time for another reason, glancing over at you again and again, thinking about later. About how we would be alone together when you drove me home.

I wondered what might happen when we got out of the pickup. When we stood in the warm night air, outside the house.

Then you caught me looking, and I turned away embarrassed.

I looked up at the board.

Two minutes to go. Still 75–75.

“What happens if they tie?” I asked.

“I don’t know actually,” you said.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said the announcer. “We haven’t had a tie in the Eastern league before, but it might just happen tonight. If so, we’ll go into extra time. Oh, oh! Patricia Pornwell almost past there, but edged out by a human chain of Bees. Still a tie, everyone!”

“There you go,” you said. “Extra time.”

“Sport sucks,” I said. It was too tense for me. “Couldn’t they just have a tie and everyone be friends?”

“Shut up,” said Paris.

It may have been two minutes, but it felt like more. It was intense. Both of the jammers were pushing and pushing, trying to get past the group. But they couldn’t. The Bees did this thing where four of them linked arms and made like a diamond, trapping the Kittens’ jammer inside. It didn’t seem fair to me, but you said it was legal.

It didn’t help though. Julie couldn’t get past the Kittens either—she was trying, but every time there’d be a girl in a red uniform there, blocking her with a hip, or dropping onto the track just in front of her, preventing her from overtaking.

On the scoreboard, the time was ticking down.

Sixty seconds.

Thirty seconds.

The diamond was still in place, and the Kittens’ jammer was powerless. But it was no good because their blockers were in a chain and there was no way for Julie to dodge past them.

Fifteen seconds.

The pack was skating down the hall on the far side from us, toward the turn after the straight, and there was still no way past, and there was still no way past, and—

Eight seconds.

And—

Five seconds.

And then they came to the turn, the pack right on the inside of it, and Julie was there, suddenly, going faster than I had seen before, really powering up behind the blockers and then she leaned into the corner, leaned much too far into the corner and she kind of dived and I thought she was going to fall—

No.

She jumped, again, only this time with one leg and then the other, so that she kind of leaped past the blockers by cutting across the sharpest part of the turn in the air—without her skates ever touching down outside the track—and came down again just past them, just past the most acute angle of the turn, and we were on our feet before I even really knew what was happening.

“The Bees WIN!” the announcer screamed. “Mega Joules jumps the apex and wins the final for the Bees! 76–75! Unbelievable!”

 

After the end of play it was actually kind of anticlimactic. The crowd—at least the Bees’ supporters anyway—kept cheering for a while, and that was fun, being caught up in that.

In the middle of the gym the announcer got both teams together. He had the mike in one hand and a framed certificate in the other. “The Oakwood Miss-Spelling Bees!” he said. “Winners of the New Jersey Eastern League!”

Applause.

He handed over the certificate to Julie. She smiled.

And that’s when Paris slung her bag over her shoulder and vaulted over the bench in front of us, her bag knocking the head of a girl with red hair who turned and said, “Hey!”

Paris turned at the safety barrier. “Come on,” she said. “Boost me.”

“Wh—” I started, but you were already on your feet and jumping down beside her. I guess boys are just better at obeying commands without thinking about them at all.

You cupped your hands and crouched; Paris got one foot on them and you powered her up. Everything was happening very fast, and I wasn’t really processing any of it because I had two conflicting thoughts in my mind:

—    He’s helping, that’s so sweet, he doesn’t know what she’s doing or why she’s doing it, I don’t even know, but he jumped right up to help her over the fence, like a knight in shining armor.

And:

—    He’s helping, that’s so awful, he doesn’t know what she’s doing or why she’s doing it, but he jumped right down and he put his hands out, and they’re touching oh God I’m so jealous her foot was in his hand and her hand was on his shoulder, just for a moment, and THIS MEANS HE LIKES HER DOESN’T IT? He’s only here for her, he’s a knight in shining armor, but he’s a knight in shining armor for her.

It made me feel sick, that feeling, that envy, seeing your bodies touch, just for that moment.

And, yes, I know this is repetitive, I know it’s just like when I thought you were into Jane from the library, and I apologize for that. But the thing is that minds are repetitive. They tend to get into fixed patterns.

This is something I know better than most.

Anyway. Those two thoughts were warring in my mind, but it was so much faster than I am conveying it here. It all happened in an instant.

Paris pivoted over the top of the fence, using the momentum you had provided with surprising grace, at first anyway. Then … then it kind of went wrong, her leading foot was over but her back one caught, and she flipped suddenly, scary-fast, like someone being hit by a bull, and for a frozen instant she was upside down on the other side of the fence.

Then she hit the ground, sprawling, her head and shoulders taking the impact, and rolled.

“****,” you shouted. “Are you okay?”

Paris stood, awkwardly. She shook herself like a dog. Then she put her arms up in a V, like an Olympic gymnast, like, “TA DA!”

She turned and hurried over to where the two teams were gathered, though it was obvious she was limping.

“What’s she doing?” you asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

You frowned. I must have sounded angry. Because of the touching. Because of you giving her that boost, and how obviously you would be more into her than me.

And then Paris was pushing a big silver trophy into Julie’s hands and there was a flurry of movement and suddenly the Bees lifted Julie up into the air and the crowd went wild.

Click. Kodak moment.

“Um,” you said, over the noise of celebration. “What was that?”

“I’ll explain later,” I said.

 

But I didn’t.

I mean, I didn’t explain later. I really wanted to, I really wanted some time alone with you, I had been looking forward to that all evening, thinking about the ride home and how we would stand in the yard together, under the night sky …

But sometimes life thwarts our plans. Often, in fact.

First off, we were hanging out with Paris and Julie and the team in the parking lot and then you offered them a ride and the whole way to their apartment the pickup was just filled with them, with their excitement and happiness, and Paris was so loud.

“My girl got her trophy!” she was shouting. “My girl is a champion!”

“It was a team effort,” said Julie, but I could hear the bright joy in her voice, and it made me twist inside.

“She is the champion, my friends … ,” Paris started singing. You glanced over at me and raised your eyebrows. Paris did not have a beautiful singing voice. I just wanted her to be quiet, but she was Paris. She was never quiet. I mean, what are you going to do? You can’t ask the sun to stop shining.

So she sang the whole song, only she didn’t know most of the words, not that it stopped her.

Then we dropped them off, and Paris and Julie went up, Paris still shouting stuff, mostly impossible to make out now, and Julie was holding the trophy aloft that Paris had given her, and finally they went into the apartment building and you turned to me. And then I found out that sometimes your own feelings can thwart stuff for you; you don’t even need life to do it.

“Wow,” you said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I must have sounded cold.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Absolutely not.”

“But you’re pissed with me. Is it because I offered them a ride?”

“No.”

You sighed. “O … kay … So nothing is wrong?”

“No.”

But of course I was speaking in monosyllables and it was pretty obvious I was not happy, and in the end you just raised your hands and said, “Fine. Let’s just go home.”

That made it sound like our home was together, like we were a couple or something, which just made me feel even worse, thinking of you rushing to help Paris, of how stupid I had been, thinking that any of this had anything to do with me. I knew that was a thing boys did—get to the beautiful one through her plain friend.

I figured that was what you were doing.

I know better now. I know you were helping Paris because you liked me, and I liked Paris, and so automatically you liked Paris. At least I assume so; just as likely you just saw that she needed help and you didn’t even think about it. I’m the one who thinks about stuff too much, I’m aware of that.

Anyway, that’s why I was frosty to you in the pickup, okay?

Eventually you gave up on me and a little part inside me died, and you started the engine and drove back toward the house. After a while, watching the streetlights go past, I started to think maybe I had been an idiot. Maybe I had read something into nothing. I opened my mouth to say sorry—

—and we passed Dad’s car, a few blocks from the house, driving home.

****.

“Hit the gas,” I said. That was another opportunity wasted to spend time with you, to talk to you alone, because you sped up to beat him and we got home like two minutes before him so I didn’t even say good night to you, just ran into the house while you lay down in the pickup so he wouldn’t see you. And we made it. We got away with it.

So that’s why I’ve told you the story of the game, which you know anyway, what with being there and all.

One: because I was mean to you afterward and you didn’t deserve it and I’m sorry. Two: because you saw what happened at the game, with Paris and Julie, but you didn’t understand.

You see, you were on the phone at the pier when Julie was talking about never winning anything. You probably just thought it was Paris being crazy, as usual.

But you get it now, right? You get what I’m telling you about her?

You could call her crazy. If that was the way you saw the world. Or you could call her someone who would go to the trouble of having a trophy made, specially, and then crash a sporting event just to give it to her friend.

That’s the Paris I want the world to remember. That’s the Paris I want you to remember.

 

“Can you wash up?” said Dad. We had just finished eating—pizza from the restaurant for the third night in a row.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll be in the study.”

“Sure.” I was not varying my vocabulary much. I was thinking about you, and how even if you did like me, which I wasn’t at all sure about, but still, even if you did, I had messed it all up now.

He left his plate and went to the bug room. He was still pissed with me, even though he didn’t see me get back from the roller derby, luckily. I didn’t blame him, really. At least he hadn’t shouted for a while. Of course that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Dad’s anger, it surfaces unexpectedly, I’ve told you already. Like spray from a whale’s blowhole. Stillness …

then …

whoosh.

So I was just waiting for him to blow over some tiny inconsequential thing. Like the dishes not being cleaned properly—so as a result I scrubbed them for ages before putting them in the rack to dry, trying to give him no excuses.

I stopped at the door to the study, on the way up to my room. Dad was hunched over the computer, typing. On the forum, I guessed. Dad was always on the forum, when he wasn’t actually feeding the bugs or breeding them or whatever he did with them.

On the forum he was BEETLEJUICE3. It was like a lame superhero identity. I mean, in real life, he was an ex-soldier with a failing restaurant and a sick daughter. But there on the forum he was a PRO-LEVEL BUGGER. He had seventeen hundred posts or something and two thousand comments. People would ask him questions, post comments with lots of animated emojis about how awesome he was—I’d seen him answering them lots of times. He was like a legend on that site.

No wonder he didn’t want to deal with real things. Like me.

“’Night, Dad,” I said.

He turned. “’Night.”

“Watcha doing?”

“Posting some pics of my new giant pills.”

“Pills?”

“Millis. They roll into balls. Like a pill bug, you know?” He went back to the screen, typing with one finger, slowly.

“Okay, well, see you tomorrow.”

He grunted and I went up the stairs. I lay on my bed, all my clothes still on. I stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then I grabbed my phone and texted Paris.

U there? xxx

I waited for, like, half an hour, but she didn’t text back. I turned on the radio, and Katy Perry blasted out into the room.

“Turn that ******* **** down!”

That was Dad, shouting up from the study.

I sighed and turned it down. I got up onto my knees on the bed and looked out the window—but I couldn’t see you and Shane on your deck chairs, and there was no light spilling from your apartment.

My phone buzzed. I picked it up.

Going out. Client. C U tmw?

I thought of Dad, banning me from seeing her. But he’d be at work from eleven in the morning …

Yeah. Wld have to be daytime tho.

The answer popped right up.

That’s cool. Maston Theater? Matinee of Toy Story.

Toy Story? I replied.

Hey don’t diss Pixar.

OK. What time?

1.

OK. Night, Paris.

Night, Cass.

I put the phone down. I lay down again and reached for the Haruki Murakami book on my nightstand.

“No,” said the voice.

“Oh hi,” I said. “Nice to hear from you. And thank you for waiting till after six p.m. to—”

“No reading.”

I thought of Dr. Lewis. I thought: I have nothing to lose here. “Or what?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“If I read my book, what are you going to do about it?”

The voice thought for a moment—this sounded different from when it went away. I can’t explain it. I mean, I could still feel it there. “I will make you cut off one of your toes.”

My toes curled. “How?”

“What?”

“How will you make me do that?”

“I will force you to.”

“No.”

Then the voice screamed at me. That was new. I mean, it was always saying horrible things. But the screaming was different. “Don’t push me! ” it screamed.

“I’m not pushing you. I’m just saying no.”

“Go to the kitchen this instant. Tell your dad you’re getting a glass of water. Take a bread knife, and come back up here. Then cut off your pinky toe on your left foot. Do it right now.”

“Or what?”

“What do you mean, or what?”

“I mean, if I don’t cut off my toe, what are you going to do about it?”

The voice thought. “I’m going to kill your father. No more injuries. No more minor ****. You don’t cut off your toe, your dad dies. Okay?”

You can’t imagine how scared I was. My eyes were filling with tears. It was dark out; my room was gloomy with shadows. I flicked on my bedside lamp. But that only made it worse. Now my clothes hanging on the door handle, my posters, my shelves, cast weird shapes on the walls and floor.

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“Then you will wake up in the morning and your father will be dead.”

I said nothing.

“He will die. Do you understand? I will kill him in his sleep. I will smother him until he stops breathing and his body is cold and dead.”

I said nothing.

“Get the bread knife. Now.”

“No.”

“Last chance, Cass.”

“No.”

The voice sighed. “He dies, then,” it said.

And then it did go. I felt it withdraw from the room.

From my head.

 

The voice didn’t speak then, but my mind was unquiet. You get that word in old gothic novels, don’t you? Unquiet ghosts and so on.

That was my mind that night. My thoughts just raced around, like ghosts in a haunted house, unstoppable.

What if your dad dies because of you?

How selfish are you?

You really want to kill another parent?

Sometimes they were words, like that, and sometimes they were images. Scenes, flashing in and out of my consciousness.

Tiles.

Blood.

The house was mostly wood and I could hear it expanding or contracting or whatever houses do at night when they cool down. Outside, there was a strong wind coming from the ocean. I could smell it through the cracks of my windows, salty and holding the promise of distance and forgetting—a promise I wished it would make good on. I wished that wind would sweep into my head and rinse it clean, whistle through the cavities of my skull until there was nothing there but emptiness, and silence.

But the wind didn’t do that, and the voice was still in my head. “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die like a dog on the ground, like your mother. It’s going to be your fault.”

The voice was everywhere. It was speaking, in my ears, as a voice, but it was merging with everything else too. The creaking and clicking and ticking of the house were all consonants, the wind outside was all vowels, and together the house and the wind were saying,

Your dad is going to die.

In the end I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I got some old headphones out of my nightstand—I had to dig under the piles of medication that I hadn’t been taking; archaeology. I plugged them into my radio and tuned it to a dead channel again, the way I used to block out the voice.

I filled my head with white noise.

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I must have fallen asleep at some point because when I opened my eyes there was sunlight flooding the room and the white noise was still blasting in my ears,

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I pulled off the headphones and vaulted off the bed. I ran out my door and just down the hallway to Dad’s.

I banged on it, hard.

No answer.

I hammered again on the door with my fist.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Oh please oh please oh—

“Cass? What the hell?”

Relief snapped open and expanded inside me, like a parachute. “Dad?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s five thirty ********* a.m., Cass. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad. Nothing’s wrong.”

I heard him roll over in bed. “Then go back to ******* bed.”

But I didn’t. I bounced down the hall, elastic with happiness. I had challenged the voice and I had won. I had taken on step five for the second time, and I had come out victorious.

“You there?” I asked the voice.

No answer.

“Figures,” I said.

I didn’t know how I was going to wait till one o’clock for the Toy Story matinee with Paris. I was buzzing. I had 220 volts of electricity running through me, fizzing in my veins and nerves. I was wired. I went to my room and tried to read some of the Murakami—the voice said not one thing about it—but I couldn’t concentrate on the words.

A little later I heard Dad go downstairs and have his breakfast; then he left. He didn’t make me anything to eat, or call up, or anything. I went downstairs and tried to watch some TV for an hour or so, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I went back upstairs, still in my pajamas.

I pulled on my swimsuit and then faded jeans and a T-shirt with my old Converses and went outside. My phone went into my back pocket. I was going to walk to the beach, do some drawing, maybe swim in the ocean. If the voice wanted to say anything about it, well, what was it going to do? I grabbed my sketch pad and my pencil.

Thin mist hung over the town. I followed our street to where the asphalt began to break up, sand pushing through the cracks. The road just became the shore at a certain point. Then I stepped from the sidewalk down onto the scrub and dunes of the beach.

I walked the beach until I found something I wanted to draw—an old Coke can, it looked like it might have been seventies even; the font was weird, and it had washed up, faded out, on the sand. Trash. I loved to draw trash—that was my thing, remember? Neglected things. Ugly things.

I took my pencil and pressed it to the paper and—

Nothing. I couldn’t draw it. I couldn’t draw the ugly old squashed Coke can. It held no interest at all for me, its folds, its little holes, its faded lettering. It was just a dead, broken object, and the pencil wouldn’t move.

It was like … like it was something I used to like to do, but now it was just gone. Like a switch had been turned off. It wasn’t even the voice saying no, it was just me. Losing interest.

I shrugged and put the sketch pad and pencil in my back pocket. Then I went to the spot where Dad taught me to swim, south of Pier One. I slid off my jeans and took off my T-shirt. The late morning air was cold on my legs and arms.

For a second I thought, Really?

But then I smiled to myself. Yes, really.

I ran straight at the ocean, my legs crashing through the low waves, the salt water freezing, and then I dived down; my face and hands scraped the bottom and I surged up, grabbed the water in my hands and pulled myself out, stroke after stroke. I swam the crawl, only occasionally lifting my head to breathe.

Silky water embraced me, held me up, the feeling like a promise. A promise of buoyancy, of not letting me fall. A promise you never get from the air. If you lose your balance in the air, you always fall.

The taste of the ocean was in my mouth: salt, sand, small creatures. Water was all around me, containing me, shaping itself to my contours.

What I mean to say is:

It was amazing.

I swam all the way up to the first pier, then turned and swam back to the little pile my clothes made on the sand. My movements were stiff at first, forced, but got smoother as I swam, the feeling coming back to me. I felt free and I thought about nothing except the waves and timing my breathing and my strokes.

As I neared my clothes, I saw your truck. You were driving onto the sand where the road merged with the beach. The way you took me, that time. You drove a little way down the long, wide stretch of beach, toward the shore, and then you turned in the direction of Pier One.

I swung my legs down, planted my feet in the hard wet sand; it compacted around my toes. I stood and waved with both arms.

The white pickup slowed, then turned and drove toward me. You parked up by my jeans and T-shirt.

I walked slowly out of the water as you stood by the pickup, your arm on the open door. You raised a hand as I got close.

“Venus exiting the sea,” you said with a smile. You were wearing Ray-Bans.

“You’re letting him see your body,” said the voice, because you were too far away to mute it. “You’re letting him see your disgusting—”

“Yeah?” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Kidding,” you said, thinking I was speaking to you, raising your hands in mock defense as I neared you. “I’m not looking.”

The voice disappeared. I was too close to you now; I was in your force field.

“What do you mean, you’re not looking?” I asked.

You raised your sunglasses. Your eyes were closed. “See?”

I laughed. “Okay, keep them closed. I’m going to get dressed.”

“You didn’t bring a towel.”

I looked around. “Oh.”

“I have one in the truck. Hang on.” You turned, put up a hand to shield your eyes, and felt around in the cab of the truck. Then you were facing me again, eyes closed, holding out a towel.

I hesitated.

“It’s clean. I always have one. So I can swim after work.”

“Thanks.” I reached out and took it. “You swim?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” You paused. “You looked good out there.” You flushed. “I mean, your stroke. ****. I keep doing that. Your stroke looked good.”

He thinks I look good? So maybe he does like me.

But how am I supposed to know?

“Dad taught me,” I said, trying to ignore the thoughts racing in my head. This was true. When I was a kid, I was always in the ocean with my dad. I mean always. Every evening, every weekend. I loved it, sharing his passion with him, learning from him. My mom called me her water baby—she would come too, swim with us, though she was never as fast, would get left behind, joke-cursing us.

So many of my memories of my dad have the texture of water. And they evaporated, too, like water. Dried out, leaving the ocean behind, and him washed up in front of his bugs, and me left stranded in my room, alone.

“Oh yeah,” you said. “He was a SEAL, right? That’s hard-core.”

“Was,” I said. “He’s not so hard-core these days.”

You smiled, your eyes still closed. “Yeah, he showed me his bugs. Creepy. Like, literally.”

I had finished drying myself now and quickly pulled on my clothes. “You can open your eyes now,” I said.

You did. “Truth is, I’ve had them open a crack the whole time.”

“You—”

“Kidding! Kidding.”

He is. He’s totally flirting.

“You swim a lot?” I asked, to change the subject.

You shrugged. “I was on the school team.”

“Oh! You told me. Sorry. You must be good.”

You shrugged again.

“But you left the team?”

“Huh?”

“You said you were on the school team.”

“Oh. No. I’m going to college. In the fall. On a swim scholarship actually.” You looked a little embarrassed.

“Then you must be really good.”

“Hmm,” you said. “Anyway, I’d better get going. These Angry Birds are not going to deliver themselves.”

“Okay. Thanks for the towel.”

“You’re welcome,” you said. Then, “Oh!” you added, as you put the towel away. “Hey, I forgot.” You pulled a pile of books from the footwell of the truck. “I got these for you. From the library.”

“But I never cleaned the apartment.”

“Well, no, but still. I got them. Vonnegut, Carver, Austen. Kind of a random selection. I didn’t know what you liked.”

I looked at the pile. He brought you books. Still think he likes Paris? Idiot. That wasn’t the voice, that was just me. “Thanks,” I said. “Really.”

“You don’t have to take them now. If you don’t want to carry them. I can bring them to your—”

“No,” I said. “Better not. That’s kind of why I never cleaned the apartment. My dad doesn’t want me … um, hanging out with you.” I reached out and took the books.

Looked away.

A long moment.

Looked back and you were watching me. A small smile on your face. Like: intrigued, and amused. “Star-crossed!” you said. “A dramatic turn.” In my defense it was not always obvious that you liked me. You had a habit of making everything into a joke, if it turned too serious. I know it’s hypocritical of me to say that.

“It’s not funny,” I said, and it came out harder than I meant.

Your face sank. “Oh. Yeah, of course. Your dad’s strict?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

Silence.

“Um, well, then. I guess, ’bye,” you said.

“Um, yeah, ’bye.”

→ OUR ROMANCE, STILL SCRIPTED BY SHAKESPEARE ←

You pulled yourself easily into the cab, kind of swung yourself. I …

Okay, I’ve been sitting here at Dad’s PC in the study trying to think of how to describe you, the way you moved then, the way you always move. And I think I have it, finally. It’s …

So, you have to start by thinking of the word “fitness.” I mean, thinking of what it really means. We use it all the time—that person is fit, that person isn’t fit, he’s doing fitness training, whatever. But think about the root word. Fit. To fit. To be fit or apt for a purpose.

That’s you. You’re fit, yeah, in the obvious sense that you’re healthy and have a slow resting heart rate, and all that stuff. From all the swimming. But you also fit, your movements fit with the world, you interlock elegantly with it.

You fit into the world like a key in a lock.

Anyway.

So you swung yourself into the cab like your body was meant to fit into that sweep of air, that motion, at precisely that moment, and then you started the engine and drove off, waving.

I thought: I wonder if life gets any better than this. The voice has no power over me and he moves like that and …

I don’t know. I was happy. I reached into my pocket and took out my phone to check the time; I had left my watch at home. That was when I saw that I had a missed call, and a message. I hadn’t looked at my phone in the morning. I mean, I know people do that, but I’m not people; I’m someone used to having no friends. All of which is to say that I had not looked at the thing until I saw on the screen:

Paris. MISSED. 1:24 a.m.

I dialed the number for my messages, and put the phone to my ear. There was a beep, then a click, then a hiss.

“Kccccchhhhhhh … Kccccchhhhhhh …—” And then a scream.

And then:

Click.

I held out the phone, held it far from my body, like it was contaminated.

Fear flooded through me; freezing water. I had been in the ocean and now the ocean was in me; rushing, merciless.

Cold.