The day of the fair arrived and, to my distress, the whole family was going. I should have expected such a possibility, but thoughts of the high Ferris wheel and rollercoasters and haunted houses and finding Tara somewhere there, radiant in the lights of the place, pushed out all other considerations. I hadn’t even entertained the notion that my parents and sister would want to go also. So when Dad made his announcement and started herding us to the door, I moved with exaggerated sloth-like shuffling strides impossible to ignore.
“What’s wrong?” he asked when we were all in the foyer, each jockeying for one last look in the standing mirror.
“I wanted to go with my friends,” I said, unable to keep a certain tone from my voice that I knew wouldn’t go over well with my dad.
“Well, you’re going with us.”
This last brooked no argument, stated with a not so subtle, unspoken warning that I would go with them or not at all. In protest, I made sure my feet plodded through the door and onto the porch with a little extra emphasis.
Bustled into the car, dressed warmly for the night in coats and sweaters, we rolled away onto the highway. I scowled in the backseat, staring daggers at my family. Sarah didn’t seem perturbed by this at all, and with some new guy she’d met I thought she would have put up a bigger fight than I had with Dad. But she seemed smug and happy as can be, and I thought I knew why. She was probably meeting the guy at the fair, and was thinking that she’d slink away from the rest of us when we were actually there, batting her lashes and mooning over Dad to win him over.
Figuring I could probably do the same thing, except for the batting the lashes part, I tried to keep my spirits up. Truth be told, it wasn’t all that hard to do. As the highway made its final slow descent into town, the great lights of the fairground rose outlined against the early evening sky. With its rollercoaster loops and arches stretching high, it seemed like an alien city, some strange metropolis landed upon our world.
The noise of the fair drifted to us before we even arrived. Traffic slowed to a crawl as we approached, and the laughter and screams of those lifted above carried on the night wind, through the streets, and into the windows of the cars turning into the parking lot.
The long snake-train of vehicles moved forward inch by anxious inch, until we pulled up alongside a booth, and an attendant leaned out of a window. Dad took some bills out of his wallet and handed them over to the attendant, saying: “Two adults and two children.” The attendant disappeared and then popped back into view like a jack-in-the-box, handing over four tickets to my dad and then waving us through.
We found a parking space far enough away so that when we climbed out I could look up and there were the humps of the rollercoaster, like the arched spine of a fierce dragon. Over there a ways the Ferris wheel stood like a portal and the lights of the cabs all around it twinkled in a vast “O”. The screams of the people high upon it wafted down, shrieks of joyful fear like a primal, cultic chanting. I wanted to be up there with them, and it was all I could do to refrain from tugging at my parents’ sleeves like the child I was but no longer wanted to be.
Dad passed out the tickets and we pocketed them, heading across the parking lot and to the arches that admitted us.
Just as we walked in a young man approached, in nice pressed pants and a collared shirt and a denim jacket. He said hi to Sarah, and then turned and shook my parents’ hands and “sir”-ed and “ma’am”-ed them and I knew then without a doubt that Sarah had planned this.
She indeed batted her lashes at Dad and did this pouty thing with her lips and pulled on his arm and said: “Please, Daddy, oh please.” Mom leaned over towards Dad and whispered in his ear. With an exasperated sigh he waved Sarah away. She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek and then she was prancing away like a doe with this nice looking guy not at all like the grease ball from California, and that surprised me. But not so much as the fact that Dad had let her go in the first place when he made such a fuss about it being a family night. I was angry at Sarah for getting away so easily, but angrier with myself that I hadn’t planned ahead like her.
So I gave it a try and asked Dad if I could go looking for my friends. For a second I even considered trying the batting the lashes thing and pulling cutely on his arm. But at the last moment I decided to hang onto a bit of self-respect and just stick to the begging.
“No,” he said.
I thought about making a scene, but then Mom leaned towards him again. She had one hand on his chest and one finger was kind of stroking him gently, prodding him.
“Come on, John,” she said, and she did this persuasive lilting, soothing thing with her voice a thousand times better than my sister’s blatant mooning. Sarah, take some lessons from the master, I thought, holding back a smile. “Let them have fun.”
“This was supposed to be a family night, Linda,” Dad said.
Mom snuggled even closer to him.
“We can have fun too,” she said, and I thought, Oh, barf!
But I thought of finding Tara out there somewhere, among the crowd and the booths and games, and her pressing close to me like Mom was to Dad. The Puke Factor immediately went down a few levels. Dad smiled at Mom. You could see he was trying not to but losing the battle. Finally, he handed me a twenty from his pocket, ruffled my hair, which I hated, and waved me off. I ran before he could change his mind.
Under the lights and the shadows of the towering wheel and coaster, the people of Payne, shoulder to shoulder, moved almost as one mass, one creature. An ocean of people, and I ran and was drowned in the magic of it.
I looked for my friends for a bit, trying mightily to avoid the game booths and rides until I found them. Until I saw this booth with water guns where you had to shoot into the mouths of these clowns that looked to me like portraits of John Wayne Gacy, not cheerful funny clowns at all. The water in the mouths filled up these balloons, and if the balloon on your target popped, you won a prize. It was the prize wall that caught my attention. Lined up rank and file on little shelves were these big plush superhero toys of Spiderman, Batman, Superman, and others, and I thought: Wow, that’s pretty dorky, but really what that meant was I thought they were cool and wanted one.
Fishing the twenty from my pocket I walked over to the game booth. Only two of the six seats were taken, so I sat and gave the attendant my twenty, and it was a dollar a game so I got nineteen back. On my first try I found that the water stream from the gun arced high and I missed the maniacal clown’s mouth for a couple seconds and sprayed his eyes, forehead, and chin while trying to adjust my aim. I thought to myself if this was John Wayne Gacy he would have raped me and chopped me up for the mess I was making of his face.
When the water gun was empty I passed another dollar across the counter to the attendant. He flipped a switch, and when the gun was full again, he said: “Ready!” I pulled the trigger and the water started to fly. This time I aimed low, adjusting for the arc, and though I was closer to the clown’s blood-red open mouth, I still splashed around a bit and the balloon only got half full.
“Shit,” I muttered and passed over another dollar. As my water gun was filling up again I saw this body sitting down on the stool next to me. I turned and there was this face like the moon, and a smile that made my heart skip a beat.
“Hey cowboy,” Tara said, as she passed a dollar over to the attendant and he began to fill the gun in front of her. She wore jeans and a jacket, and she straddled the stool like a cowgirl. “Bet I can beat you.”
Her voice was like a spring breeze through grass and tumbling leaves, and I thought I could smell her breath on the air. It was dew after the rain, flowers, and a clear blue sky.
I smiled, took hold of my gun.
“What are the stakes?” I asked, taking careful aim at Gacy’s mouth.
“Whatever the winner wants,” she said.
Smiling, she gave me this squinty look.
“That’s kind of broad and vague. I don’t have much to give.”
Somehow I found the courage to meet her gaze.
She laughed, a brief sound like raindrops on a rooftop or feet tapping a dance.
“Then you better hope you win,” she said. The attendant told her the gun was ready. She looked at me. I looked back at her, smiling so broadly it ached, telling myself I must look like an idiot, and not caring. “On the count of three.”
I turned to stare down the killer clown.
You’re going to choke on it, I told that painted face staring back at me.
“One,” she said.
You’re going down, clown boy, I taunted telepathically at Mr. Gacy.
“Two.”
I tried thinking of what I’d ask for if I won. I wondered if she really meant what she said: Whatever the winner wants. I thought of a lot of things I wanted at that moment, and they made this shivery feeling go up and down my body.
From the corner of my eye I saw the arc of water shoot out of her gun, and I was still waiting for the Three! It took me a moment to figure out what was happening. I looked over at her and laughed, and then back at my target and pulled the trigger.
My aim was true this time around, but she had a head start and her aim was nearly as good. I watched as our balloons filled with water, mine always a bit smaller than hers, and then her balloon was stretching, growing, expanding until parts of it seemed almost translucent. When it burst she dropped the gun and lifted her arms to the sky and shouted: “I won! I won!”
I laughed and so did she, and she pointed across to the prize wall and chose the Spiderman plush toy.
“Two out of three,” I said when she was seated again. Spiderman resting on her lap seemed to look up at me with a smug satisfaction. “You cheated.”
Her crooked smile aimed my way and she laughed and reached over and gave me a little shove on the shoulder. My skin tingled there even after her hand was gone, like a phantom presence.
“Can’t stand losing to a girl?”
This seemed a taunt in more ways than one.
“No,” I said. “Losing to a girl’s just fine by me. It’s losing to a cheater I can’t stand.”
She gave another one of her tinkling laughs, and I wished I could record that sound and play it back whenever I wanted.
“Okay,” she said, her head kind of rising a bit and doing this cute bob like one of those springy bobble heads on the dashboards of cars, “Mr. Macho has to beat a little girl. Two out of three.”
She passed over another dollar to the attendant.
“No cheating this time,” I said, passing over another dollar also.
“No cheating,” she agreed.
We waited for the guns to fill and the attendant to give us the ready. I looked over at Tara and she was looking at me, and those eyes were like crystal balls and in them I saw what I wanted my future to be.
“On three,” I said, and she nodded. “This time I count.”
She laughed, and my heart raced.
“One,” I said, taking aim then looking back at her. She was all concentration, looking down the sight of her water gun at the clown in front of her. The tip of her tongue poked out of a corner of her mouth, and it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. I needed to make a list of the cutest things I’d ever seen when it came to her.
“Two.”
I turned back to my own devil clown. Put the painted bastard in the crosshairs.
I waited for the count of three, letting the silence hang between us. I counted the seconds away in my head, one, two, three … still not saying the last aloud. I waited, ticking the moments by in my mind … four, five, six, seven … and finally, in my periphery, I saw Tara lower her gun and turn to me.
“Something wrong?” she asked, and then I pulled the trigger, my grin impossibly stretching wider.
“You booger!” she shouted, turned back to face front, took aim, and fired.
This time my balloon filled faster, though she gave it a good run. My balloon burst, splashing the ground beneath it. We both laughed, and she gave me another of those shoves on the shoulder.
“You cheater!” she said.
Laughing, she wiped at her eyes, tears of laughter rolling down.
“I learn from the best.”
I ran a forearm over my own eyes.
I pointed at the Batman plush toy on the prize wall, and the attendant brought it to me. I propped the Dark Knight in my lap, like Spiderman was in Tara’s.
We took a few moments to regain our composure. We each slid another dollar across the counter to the attendant, dancing back and forth between us and his other customers. We waited for the guns to fill.
“Now the tiebreaker,” she said. “Winner takes all.”
“And this time,” I said, “really, no cheating.”
“No cheating.” She crossed her chest with a finger. I watched where her finger trailed, making the X between the swell of her breasts, and my mouth went dry. I turned my gaze back to her face. “Cross my heart.”
She faced front again.
I did the same, taking aim, looking down the scope of the gun at the evil clown in front of me.
“We’ll both count this time,” she said. “To make it fair.”
“Okay,” I said, not looking away from my target.
The attendant gave us the ready.
“One,” Tara said, and I heard her shuffle in her seat, probably to take better aim.
“Two,” I said, finger tightening on the trigger.
I waited for the three count, tensing in my seat. I heard her shuffling again and thought to myself: Good, she’s nervous. My mind drifted and I thought again of what I could ask of her if I won. The possibilities were almost too much for my brain.
“Three,” came the final count, and it was right next to my ear, a puff of breath like an ocean breeze. Startled, I dropped the gun and turned. Tara was moving back into her seat, lifting her gun, aiming, and pulling the trigger, smiling and laughing like the night was hers. The evening air carried that laughter like it belonged to it.
Her balloon was filling fast.
My gun sat on the counter in front of me.
The tingle of her breath against my ear lingered, that feeling of a phantom touch like when she’d shoved me on the shoulder, now intensified a thousandfold. I picked up the water gun and pulled the trigger, trying to aim and splashing nothing but the wall, missing the psycho clown completely.
Tara’s balloon burst and she jumped from her seat and did a little dance. She came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders and shook me, leaning over and laughing in my ear.
“I won! I won! I won!” she said. She pointed at the Superman toy, and when the attendant got it down for her, she put it under one arm and Spiderman under the other.
I smiled, but inside I felt cheated. I’d lost, and now all those things I had thought about wouldn’t ever happen. Still, she was here beside me, and that wasn’t bad at all.
“Come on,” she said and took me by the arm and pulled me along beside her. “I saw Jim and Bobby near the Haunted House earlier. I told them to wait for us.”
“Wait,” I said, as she tugged me along. “What about what the winner gets?” I asked, surprised that I’d had the guts to say it, even as I wondered how she knew Jim, how all these people—Fat Bobby, Jim, Tara—knew each other, and feeling a bit like an outsider.
“I’ll collect later,” she said mysteriously. She gave another cute bob of her head, and then she was pulling me again, away from the water gun booth and into the lights and the people. I saw none of it, only her hand on my arm, and I hoped the night would never end.
Jim and Fat Bobby were in front of the Haunted House just as Tara had said they’d be. Eager and anxious, they jogged towards us and herded us back towards the line. Jim saw the Batman doll under my arm and gave me this wry grin like he wanted to call me a sissy, wanted me to know he wanted to call me a sissy, but was doing me a favor, and wanted me to know he was doing me a favor. It was all pretty complicated, and I threw him a look that I hoped let him know I got the message and appreciated it. About twenty or so people were ahead of us, and I took the time to look at the Haunted House.
The place seemed constructed of clapboard and leftover wood too termite infested and splintered to be used for proper construction. The walls were adorned by murals of wailing ghosts and bloody-mouthed vampires and zombies with ropes of brains dangling from their maws. I thought to myself that a retard with crayons and markers could paint better than those murals, even if said retard also had Parkinson’s and periodically went into spastic fits and banged his head against hard surfaces. The line of patrons waiting to get in went down the center of a rubber foam stone graveyard, each tombstone with a stupid name like ‘Boo Gravely’ and ‘B.L. Zebub’ etched on it.
I would have complained and asked that we go do something else, but everyone else seemed eager to get in, and so I kept my mouth shut. Besides, Tara was beside me and so I figured the night was still a winner.
Finally at the front of the line, each of us handed over a dollar, accepted our ticket, and went up the steps and through the door. The door shut behind us and my opinion of the place soon changed.
The first room was dark and in the sudden dark it was sort of frightening. A woman’s voice ahead of us gave a shrill little gasp, and someone with her laughed nervously, like he was saying: I’m not scared at all little lady, but my, it sure is cute that you are. In the dimness, red and blue lights started to flash, and a fog machine somewhere pumped in whirls of the stuff from vents in the floor and walls, so that soon you looked down and your feet and ankles were gone in the mist. As we stood about, sections of the walls began to flip open and behind them were women done up like Anne Rice vampires, in long and flowing immaculate gowns of reds and purples and black. They writhed their bodies in a slow and deliberate way, and offered passersby lascivious looks. They hissed at us and bared fake fangs. Trickles of fake blood ran down the corners of their dark red lips, running down the slopes of their chins and necks. A sign above them in glowing neon green lettering read “THE DEVIL’S BRIDES.”
“Oh, brother,” Tara muttered from behind me and prodded me forward with a hand to my back.
“Why does Satan get all the bitches?” someone called out behind us. Even distorted, bouncing off the walls with a tinny echo, the voice for some reason sounded familiar.
Hoarse laughter answered it from somewhere ahead of us, past Jim and Bobby.
The next room was lit by yellow lights and candles set into the walls and covered by protective glass. Tables, counters and shelves crowded the room, and it was obvious it was supposed to be some sort of library or laboratory or a combination of the two. Glass cases covered the surfaces of the furniture, and inside many of the cases were glass jars filled with what was supposed to be formaldehyde but looked suspiciously like Mountain Dew. Floating in the viscous fluid were fetuses vaguely human, grotesque and disturbing because of that similarity. All of them were deformed in some manner, staring out at us with glazed, plastic eyes.
Here was one with an oversized head. There one with two heads sprouting out from each other like potato spuds. Another here with no head at all. One counter had floating and bobbing fetuses with too many hands; over this way one with three legs; right over here just a torso, bobbing like a buoy in a yellow ocean. Others had limbs fused together; too many fingers on each hand; noses and ears and eyes misplaced. Some had flesh like lizards, scaly and thick; others with spiny tails growing at the ends of their backs. In other cases were skeletal remains, and here were skulls misshapen with bony protrusions like jagged boulders; skulls with too many eyeholes; skulls with jagged shark-like teeth. A sign hung in this room as well, glowing bright in the dimness, and it read “THE DEVIL’S CHILDREN.”
“At least Lucifer doesn’t shoot blanks!”
The familiar voice from behind us.
The laughter ahead of us answering it.
Moving forward again and we came into a hall of mirrors. Lit only so that you saw the mirrors just before you ran headfirst into them, the mirror room was a maze of shadow and reflected shadow. Here too a fog machine poured in a mist from vents in the floor, so that it seemed like you were floating in the darkness, the darkness reflected and the mist below. The mirrors distorted things in disturbing proportions. First there was a big fat Joey in front of me, and then after a turn a skinny Joey almost ten feet tall, his head nearly touching the ceiling. I saw a squat and dwarfish Joey, and a Joey with a squished in face like he was sucking on the world’s sourest lemon. Lost in my many reflections, it was a moment before I noticed Jim and Bobby had disappeared out of sight ahead of us. I turned to make sure Tara was still with me, and seeing her vague form there I continued forward.
A squeal issued from behind me a moment later. Tara ran into me from behind and I was pushed forward, bringing my hands up against the mirror looming before me. It didn’t shatter as I feared it would, imagining the tiny shards raining down on me and carving me up.
I turned and faced Tara. Her face was pale and seemed to float before me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, grabbing hold of her hands without thinking about it.
“Someone … grabbed me,” she said.
She cast an anxious glance behind her. I looked that way too. Saw nothing but the darkness.
“What do you mean?”
“Someone … pinched me,” she said. “You know … on the butt.”
I looked behind her again, balling a fist, but then she was pushing me forward once more. Alone there in the mirrors and dark and mist I lost my moment of bravery as quick as it had come, and let myself be propelled forward. We turned corners quickly but cautiously, our other selves imitating us in their distorted bodies, mocking us, and then there ahead of us, I saw Jim and Bobby, and ahead of them an exit sign glowing red, and an arrow pointing the way.
“Come on,” I said as we moved up alongside them, wondering why they hadn’t moved towards the door. Then I saw the others, two silhouettes on either side of the door, one thin and one fat, both taller than any of us.
Footsteps came up from behind me, moving fast.
A metallic snik and something cool and sharp pressed against my throat. I froze, refusing even to swallow, afraid that one movement, that small ripple of flesh, would split my skin against the blade and a hot crimson wave cascading forth would be the last thing I felt.
“Where’s the dog, fag boy?” Dillon’s familiar voice issued from behind me. I could hear the smirk in his words, even though I couldn’t see his face. A puff of breath, stale and heavy, whispered in my ear. “I see you and fatty have yourselves a slut and a pet nigger now.”
Giggles from the shadow people guarding the exit door.
“Quite a gang of fucking losers you have going,” he said, and I said nothing. “You know I’m going to fucking kill you, don’t you?”
Here it was, then, I thought to myself. He’d promised me that night on the highway, in his black car like a slick rolling shadow. He’d said he would, and now he was going to.
“But first let me demonstrate on your dolly,” he said, and I felt the plush Batman torn free from under my arm. I’d forgotten all about it with the knife at my throat, and now with it gone I felt the wetness of sweat under my arm. I sent out a silent apology to the Caped Crusader for bathing him in that most unfavorable of ways.
The blade moved away from my throat, yet still I didn’t move. My limbs felt weighted by cement, my feet rooted to the ground. I wondered where all the other people were in the Haunted House. What had happened to all the people behind and in front of us? Then I thought of Dillon trailing us, maybe slinking along like an oily eel, and his buds, Stu and Max, in front of us. Could they have maneuvered in such a way as to make sure no new people came in, and waited for the rest to leave?
I thought maybe they could do just that. They were just the sort of kids—not really kids anymore being in high school, definitely not the size of kids—that even most adults wouldn’t challenge. Just in the short time I’d known him, I could easily imagine Dillon lingering at the entrance to the Haunted House, directing patrons to come back later, his wicked smirk all the average person needed to take a hint and walk away.
There was a harsh ripping and tearing, and I vaguely saw in the darkness Batman’s white cotton guts spilling out. More laughter from the shadow guards.
Still I didn’t move.
But Tara did.
A passing of air and I felt more than saw her twirl. In my periphery I saw her kick out low and fast, the glint of a burnished sandal. A smack echoed loud in the small corridor and I thought of my sister throwing her sandals at me just a few days ago, and one of them sailing past me and hitting the refrigerator with a solid thump.
This was louder.
Sensation returned to my body, blood rushing to the extremities, and though it was gone I felt the haunting touch of the blade at my throat. That cool touch wasn’t something I’d ever forget.
Turning in the weak light and the murk, I saw Dillon’s dark form hopping up and down, holding a leg at the shin. I thought of the things my dad had taught me, the punches and the kicks. How if you had to fight, if there was no option but to fight, then fight hard and fast, bring your opponent down quick.
I moved forward, building momentum in the small space between us. As I darted forward I reached out with my hands, felt the leather of his jacket, snagged it and pulled him forward. My head shot forth like a piston, my forehead met his nose, and there was a sharp crack like a twig broken underfoot. A spray of warm blood sprinkled my head. Something gleamed in the darkness there, like ripples of water in the moonlight, and I saw it was the knife—he’d dropped the knife—and it hit the floor with a clatter. I pulled him closer and brought a knee up and into the softness of his belly, and felt the air go out of him in a whoosh like a vacuum sealed container being opened. I let go of his jacket and Dillon crumpled to the ground in a dark heap.
Just two or three seconds for this all to happen, and yet it felt like an eternity.
Remembering the shadow guards, I turned to meet them even as they were just moving themselves, hearing their leader and realizing that something was wrong. The not-quite-as-fat-as-Bobby, yet still pudgy Stu moved first, and I saw Jim’s dark form, a shadow in deeper shadow, dart forward, bent low, charging like a bull. He collided with the bigger kid, drove him back and hard against a wall. The room shook with the impact like a quake had passed.
Seeing his friend go down, tall, lanky, and complexion-challenged Max moved next.
I pushed Fat Bobby with all my strength and his greater weight overtook that of the taller guy, like a child’s wagon disappearing under a freight train, and now, moving, stepping over and on the figure under him, Bobby ran to the door, opened it. Colliding with each other, bumping and shoving, Tara and Jim joining us at the threshold, the four of us spilled out the door and into the night beyond.
We ran until the Haunted House, its foam rubber graveyard now too realistic for my taste, was far behind us, lost amidst the people and the lights and the sounds.
“Was that Dillon Glover?” Tara said. Fat Bobby and Jim both nodded. “What the hell does he have against you?” This last was directed at me.
I explained to her about the day at the stream and coming upon Bobby. How the three guys had been throwing rocks and sticks at him, though I left out the part about Fat Bobby being almost naked. I glanced at him and saw the look of gratitude on his face and gave him an almost imperceptible nod.
“Wow,” she said. “We should tell our parents.”
Reluctantly I agreed, and I saw Jim nod too, though Fat Bobby remained silent. We walked the midway and kept close to other people and stayed in the lights. Remembering the sound of his nose crunching, I didn’t think Dillon would be feeling up to coming after us anytime soon, but it didn’t hurt to play it safe.
Jim’s father was the first we came upon, him sitting at a table taking hunks out of a large hotdog and great gulps out of a big soda, so big it almost looked like a pail. He saw us approaching and rose to greet us and ushered us to the table. He asked if we would like anything to eat. Then he saw the looks on our faces, and his dark face took on this scrunchy scowl that made me think of a black hole in space, eager to swallow planets and devour them. Jim explained to his dad what had happened, and Mr. Connolly’s scowl deepened.
“Those fucks,” he said, and followed with: “He really pulled a knife on you?” I nodded, and he repeated his initial words. “Well, let’s go find everyone’s parents, and then I think we’ll be calling the police.”
Fat Bobby spoke up, and we all looked at him.
“My dad’s not here.”
“Well, then,” Mr. Connolly said, “you stick with me and I’ll give you a ride home. Come on, let’s get moving.”
We walked around for awhile and came to my parents next, coming out of the exit area from the Ferris wheel. They were still holding hands and my mom was pressed close to my dad. Dad saw us, apparently read something in Mr. Connolly’s demeanor, maybe like the looks me and Jim gave each other and seemed to understand without words, and he came jogging up to meet us halfway.
Dad and Mr. Connolly shook hands, and their eyes met and something passed between them. Mr. Connolly repeated what Jim had told him, and at the end of it my dad had given more than his fair share of “fucks” and “bastards” and “shits,” more in those few minutes than I’d ever heard from his mouth before. Quite a little gathering now, we all walked the midway until a few minutes later we found Tara’s father, whom I didn’t know from anyone else in the throngs milling about, but she pointed out for our benefit.
The man was tall, taller than Jim’s dad, and slightly gawky, but not strangely so. His height and angular features made him seem like a bird of prey, and when he heard the story Dad and Mr. Connolly told him, he seemed only more so. His face settled into this passively hungry-like expression, his fingers curled like talons wanting to grip and tear something.
The adults moved a distance away, Jim hung by his dad, Fat Bobby with them, so for a moment it was just me and Tara under the awning of one of the areas set aside for tables and the diners using them. Our parents were exchanging numbers, pens and scratch paper pulled out, scribbling and babbling, talking about the police and what would happen and all three men talking about kicking asses and busting heads. No one paid us any mind under the awning. The moon up above like a pearl seemed to shine its light directly upon Tara and I.
Tara was holding my hand, I looked at her, and there was that crooked little smile that set my heart to beating like a drum. She said something, but my heart and my blood pumping drowned it out.
“What?” I asked.
She smiled and gave one of her little shoves.
“I’m ready to collect,” she said, and I heard the words but they didn’t make sense for a moment. It was like I was hearing her through water. All I could think was: I’m here in the moonlight with a beautiful girl.
She leaned forward and her lips met mine. I think I tasted the stars.