by Derek Milman
FYI, I never got my way. Never. So fuck that shit.
In my head, I had this whole stormy weekend planned out—me happily sitting in front of the TV playing this video game, flipping through the fan-art booklet, and eating Cheetos. The fact that my perfectly imagined plans were going to get ruined—that I wouldn’t have the video game, and that I’d be stuck at home during a thunderstorm without it—made me furious. I was a turd about it. I was overdramatic. I was a little kid.
It was my dad who made it into a whole thing when it didn’t need to be. But the fact that Neil was so nice about it made me even more pissed, because I felt like he was trying to one-up me, make me look petty.
Why did Neil always have to be so goddamn perfect?
He wasn’t perfect, though. He was just kind and generous. I knew that. I knew it even then. But I didn’t always appreciate it as much as I should have.
So I took out all my anger on Neil. I got red in the face with rage about how everything is always all about him. And at the end of my little tirade, I said to Neil before I stormed off:
You’re not my goddamn brother.
It’s such a stupid thing to say, too, like what does that even mean? Of course Neil was my brother. But it was the last thing I ever said to Neil, and that sucks—a big kick in the nuts from the universe. And of course he was all like, “Oh, c’mon, Aidy, of course I’m your brother,” and “Dad, just let me get a ride with Jason, don’t make this into such a big deal, let him get his video game, it’s fine, maybe it won’t even rain.”
But I wasn’t hearing it. I ran up the stairs to my room, slammed the door shut, threw myself facedown on the bed and pounded the pillow, drowning in my own stupid selfish sorrowful eleven-year-old tears.
It’s just typical family shit that happens. But, yeah, that was the last thing I ever said to Neil. And obviously that will haunt me forever.
“You’re thinking about him,” says Scotty, pointing his finger at me. “I remember that look on your face.”
Maybe it’s that, Shiloh had told me, looking at me, in the cab.
What?
The way you suddenly get sad like that.
That thing Scotty said about how I think I break people. He was right.
I never got over the idea that maybe I broke Neil’s heart.
Digital Dust wouldn’t have known that. That was all Scotty. Props to him.
I look at him. “There are things I want to do. Things I want to see. He’d want that for me, too. I’m only seventeen years old.”
“There’s Paris and Rome,” says Scotty, “the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China. Castles in Scotland. London. Berlin. Hong Kong. There is so much… so much beauty and so much pain. There is a whole world out there. Ken knew that. Ken knew that better than anyone. The things we wish we could undo.”
He laughs a little to himself, thinking about the world, I guess.
And then we nose-dive.
Scotty and Hardy Boy Joe cheer like little kids as the wind pummels us and my stomach drops, and the coaster, feeding off the momentum of the first plunge, speeds around a bend, and up another climb, down another, steeper drop, and straight into the twinkling gummy-looking brain.
Everything’s all muffled and dizzy and pink and Scotty and Hardy Boy Joe’s cheers echo crazily inside as we zoom around in there. And then we’re spat out, rising again, the sky on all sides of me.
I can see the whole world now: the Ferris wheel spinning to my right, helicopters like huge black insects suspended in the sky, police lights flashing beneath us, the sun sparkling on Long Island Sound. There are sailboats, too, triangular and noble. In an abstract way, they resemble swans.
Scotty grabs me, puts his arm around me, and gives me a big wet kiss on the cheek as the coaster continues to climb to its biggest drop. “I wanted people to think about fate and choice. What if I sit in this car, or another car instead? What if I go on the ride today, or tomorrow? I wanted people to think about the choices we make without knowing what they’ll mean… That’s why I put the explosive charges at random, scattered points along the coaster.”
“Sorry, you did what?”
“Because it’s not about choice. It’s about fate.”
And then it happens.
A string of flashes nearly blind me, followed by several thundering booms, like an explosive necklace was wrapped around the whole coaster. The empty train ahead of Hardy Boy Joe gets torn apart by a blast and blown skyward. I watch, incredulous, as comic book–colored cars shoot like bullets into the gleaming azure sky.
With incredible force, right before we reach the top of the biggest drop, the coaster comes to a screeching stop, and we teeter there at the very top.
“Oh, they stopped us!” Scotty screams, slapping his thigh.
I don’t hesitate.
I stand up and kick forward, driving my foot straight into Hardy Boy Joe’s throat. He falls back with an oof, gripping the sides of the car to steady himself; his gun flies out of his hands. He tumbles, stands up halfway, and apparently that’s exactly what the police were hoping would happen. There’s a sudden crack of a sniper rifle from the distance, and then Hardy Boy Joe is just gone, over the side of the coaster.
I fall back into my seat, breathing heavily as Scotty stares downward at his falling comrade, fascinated by what just happened. Cautiously, he leans forward and peers over the brink of the Mind Melter, where we were just about to drop. He turns around and looks the other way over his shoulder, where we just climbed. And then there’s another crack of a rifle, and Scotty quickly ducks down, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “Well, that’s just rude!”
“JESUS CHRIST!” I shout, trying to wriggle away.
“I can’t believe they stopped the ride. After all that! What the hell do they think is going to happen now?”
In answer to his question, there is a terrible cracking of wood from the damaged, blown-out tracks, and the rail beneath our car comes apart, tipping the train over at a sharp angle.
Scotty slides right out of the car.
Like someone just ripped me out of my body and I’m observing everything from above, I hear myself gasping for breath and making a petrified, voiceless “UGGGHHHHHHHH” sound. A scream from someone too scared to scream.
Scotty’s hanging on to the edge of the car with both hands, his legs dangling in midair.
I clap my hands over my eyes and then slide them down my face like this is all a nightmare that I can wake up from. Then I find my voice, and all I’m saying is, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.…”
I see the public pool, empty and serene, directly below him.
There’s so much terror I can’t even feel it anymore. It just becomes a shudder through my body, a rapid, forceful tingling. Then it’s like a switch gets turned off and I feel almost sedate, my vision narrowed in a primal way, every breath measured out.
“Help me,” says Scotty, trying to hold on, grasping, his face strained.
He reaches out a hand and I grab it. But it’s his injured hand, and the bandage starts to come undone in a way that we both know means the undoing of him.
“I’m scared,” he tells me plainly—the last thing I’d ever expect him to say.
“I am, too.”
“How are we different?” He looks genuinely inquisitive.
Of course the answer to that question is obvious: despite everything, I stuck out my hand for him. But I think he meant why are we different? And that, I guess, I just don’t know.
He wallowed in the darkness, but I saw something else on the horizon.
I mean, Neil died, and I was destroyed. Tom broke up with me, and I was destroyed. Tom killed himself, and I was destroyed yet again. I was this boy who kept getting blown to smithereens and put back together again, like I was made of magnetic fibers and everything just had to recombine because the rules of time and space demanded it. Except there’d be more cracks in me each time. More nicks in the facade.
I guess I knew I’d al
ways be damaged in some ways, but I knew I could try to become better anyway, maybe because of all the pain. I didn’t want to give in. Or give up. Neil wouldn’t have wanted me to. Neither would Tom. That’s what Digital Dust got so wrong; that’s why I could never be a Swan.
The irony is, Scotty is the weak one here.
He chose hatred, and I chose love. They both hurt in different ways. But one is a kind of pain we need to feel, I think. The other is a kind of pain we choose to feel. Hatred and anger lead you nowhere.
I feel sorry for Scotty.
“You’re nothing like him at all,” he says to me.
He’s slipping out of my grasp. “Hold on, Scotty. Who?”
“Preston,” he says. “We all got it wrong, didn’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Yeah… you all did. There is no Preston.”
His eyes sparkle, but it might be just the empty sky reflecting in them. I’m not sure. “Now I know what it was I really saw in you all this time,” he says.
“What?”
“You remind me of him a little.”
My arms feel like they’re going to be ripped off. “Who?”
“You love the world, Aidan.”
“Jesus. Hold on.”
I realize tears are streaming off my face, dripping down into the void, and Scotty does the funniest thing: he catches one of my tears on his tongue.
“See it all,” he tells me. “The whole wide world.”
“I will, I will.”
“Forgive yourself.”
More tears fall onto his face, into his eyes now.
“Stop punishing yourself, Aidan.”
“I will.”
He looks like he just had some kind of revelation. “There won’t be any more tornadoes for you,” he says. “They’ve all blown away, tucked back into the sky.”
And for some reason I believe him. I believe I’ve had my last tornado dream. I don’t remember the last one I had. I can’t remember the last time I even slept. Of course, the tornadoes turned into burning houses, but I don’t feel the need to point that out to him. And I have a feeling I won’t have any more of those, either.
I try with all my might, using both arms, to lift Scotty up, the blood rushing to my head with the effort, thinking: Let me save this one fucking person in my life.
But he’s too heavy and I’m not strong enough and his bandage is rapidly unraveling.
Scotty continues to slip from me as my grip weakens.
Something changes in his eyes, this rabid dissonant light flickers out, and he gives me a wan little smile full of sadness and relief.
“You’re going to fall out if you keep trying,” he says.
“Please hold on!”
Suddenly, he’s Neil.
And then he’s Tom.
And then he’s Scotty again.
“Only one of us can make it out of here alive,” he says, gazing up at the sky. “Oscar Wilde said we’re all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars.”
“I’m trying to—”
“Time to let go,” he says.
But it’s Scotty who lets go.
I watch him fall through the sky, his bandage chasing after him, a mad kite tail in the wind.
And he does get part of his wish, I guess. He does go down in a blaze. Not exactly glory, though, more like infamy—but it is pretty spectacular. When his body hits the electrified pool about a hundred feet below, it’s like the inversion of fireworks, sparks and streamers of smoke spiraling from below instead of above. The redistribution of weight rights the car a little, and the train stabilizes on the broken track, but just barely.
“I’m going to survive this,” I say out loud. And I know I will.
I curl up in the train car, teetering on the edge of the tallest point of the Mind Melter. I laugh a little. I place my hand over my heart and I say thank you to whoever is listening, if anyone is, for my healthy heart and for letting me survive all this. Not that I believe in anything like that—I don’t—but I do it anyway.
I let a couple of Taylor songs play in my head. I even sing some of the lyrics out loud over the sound of the helicopters.
I think I can feel their blades whipping the air.
CHAPTER 19
So How Was Your Spring Break?
In a delicate rescue operation, firefighters from half a dozen departments throughout neighboring towns on Long Island use ladders and the ole’ bucket-brigade technique to get me down from the destroyed Mind Melter.
How very analog, I think, crying and laughing at the same time.
It takes almost an hour, but then I’m down and it’s over.
A foil Mylar rescue blanket thrown across my shoulders, firefighters, police officers, and EMTs lead me out of the Quest Gardens amusement park. The front parking lot is just a gigantic sea of blinking, blaring emergency vehicles now, as far as the eye can see.
I look around for Shiloh. They try to load me into an ambulance right away, but I tell them I’m not injured and need to find my friend.
But I don’t see Shiloh anywhere.
Running through the throng of emergency workers and now the media (reporters with cameras and microphones and vans pulling up, the cops trying to hold them back) come my parents and my sister. “Aidy, honey!” my mom says, running into my arms, nearly knocking me down. She grabs my face. “Are you okay? Baby, are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I hug her back, hard, and accept her many violent kisses. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re all over the news,” says my dad, putting his hand on the back of my head. “They’re calling you a hero.”
“My little brother,” says Nicks, hugging me, “a hero.”
“I thought they said I was a terrorist?”
“Is that what you’d prefer?” says my dad, gruffly.
“No,” I tell him, “I just did what anyone would.”
“That’s what heroes always say,” says Nicks.
I’m confused. “How did you get here?”
“The FBI collected us,” says Nicks. “They gave us the lowdown, kept us at a field office overnight while this whole thing played out. We were terrified.” She wipes at her eyes. “I have never been so scared, Aidy. Never. The whole thing on the roller coaster played out on live news.”
I cover my eyes with my hands. “Oh shit, am I famous?”
“You might be a little bit famous,” says my mom. “I mean I’m sure you’ll get a book deal, at least.” She looks at my dad. “Oh, maybe I can bring it to my book group!”
“Okay, calm down,” says my dad, patting her on the back.
“We never even got to visit Aunt Meredith!” says my mom, shaking her head. “She had already moved on to another casino, in Arizona this time, can you believe it, and your father refused to change our plane tickets again.”
“No more plane tickets,” he confirms, grumbling something else I can’t hear.
Someone hands me a bottle of water. Of course something very particular is gnawing at me, and it isn’t my aunt’s gambling addiction. “So, listen,” I say to my family, clearing my throat, “when you say the FBI explained everything… um… how much did they tell you about… me?”
“They just said you had been randomly selected online or something to trick a terror group,” says my mom. “Something about a photo you once posted. I don’t know. Can you believe this shit?” she tells my dad.
“We’ll let the lawyers work all that out,” he says. “Have a feeling his college will be paid for. Important thing is that he’s okay. I told you the internet is evil. Nothing good comes from the internet. We won two world wars without twatting to anyone.”
I roll my eyes. “Jesus, it’s tweeting. Twatting? Seriously? I mean you know it’s not twatting, Dad—you have to know that.”
A few cops come over with EMTs and ask if I’m doing okay, and if I need to go to the hospital. I tell them I’m okay. A paramedic gives me a cursory examination anyway. I ask the cops if anyone got hurt.
They said there were a few injuries, only one that’s serious (shrapnel, from the Derby blast), but no one was killed. And no children were hurt. Some feds approach, wanting a bit of my time.
I ask for a few more moments with my family and they say that’s fine—the police are keeping the media at bay—but soon they’ll need to clear everyone out so they can begin their work, since this is an active crime scene. Also, they want me to come with them to a field office for a debriefing. I ask them where Shiloh is. They say they’ll try to find him, but he may have been taken to a nearby hospital already.
When my dad and my sister get pulled into a conversation with one of the cops, my mom grabs me again, saying “I love you” and kissing my forehead.
Something’s churning inside me. “I wish you had told me that sooner.”
“What?”
“That you love me. You haven’t said it since Neil died, and you’re just saying it now because of all the drama.”
My mom looks like I slapped her. “Aidan!”
“When Neil died, you and Dad went nuts. I get it. But I was alone—I was grieving him, too, Mom—and realizing I was gay, which isn’t easy, and then you just shipped me away so you wouldn’t have to deal with me—”
“You wanted to go to Witloff! You told us you wanted to leave. We all discussed this with Dr. Boardman, and he thought it would be a good idea—”
“Mom, seriously, I came out to you, and you and Dad had no reaction, except that awful letter he gave me, which was so cruel—”
“What letter? I don’t know about a letter!” she shrieks.
I shake my head. “You need to start seeing me as a real person. I’ve become just a blur to you and Dad. Just some blur of a boy you once knew.”
My mom starts to cry. “Aidy. We just wanted you to be happy.”