Raze

by Roan Parrish

  “Holy shit,” Felix said, grabbing my hand as we drew within view of the rides. “It’s got for-real roller coasters!”

  He grinned, and I could tell that I wouldn’t be spending the day sitting on a bench or on the beach people-watching like I usually did when I came by myself.

  “I’ve never been on a roller coaster,” he added.

  “Cyclone is a wooden coaster built in 1927,” I said, pointing to it.

  Felix was wide-eyed at everything and kept grabbing my hand in his enthusiasm. After getting the lay of the land, we went down to the beach so he could look at the water. Then we walked hand-in-hand for a while, weaving through arcades and back to the boardwalk, avoiding the streets.

  “Jeez, it’s huge,” Felix said. “I guess I thought it would be more contained.”

  “Yeah. Back when this was a resort spot the amusement parks were individual, but now it’s all connected.”

  As we approached the Cyclone again, he asked if I wanted to ride it.

  “I’ve never gone.”

  “But I thought you came here all the time.”

  “I do. Don’t ride the rides, though.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged.

  “I’d feel kinda creepy doing it by myself,” I said. “Big old dude lurking.”

  Felix looked up at me and wrinkled his nose.

  “You’re not old and it’s not creepy. You’re a person, Dane. You’re allowed to ride a roller coaster if you want to. You don’t need someone else to do it with you.”

  He sounded fierce as he lectured me. It made me want to kiss him senseless.

  You’re a person.

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  The attendant told Felix to sit on the right side since he was smaller, and as the lap bar came down, my heart began to race. Felix held tight to my hand as we climbed the first hill on the coaster. The air was cool and fresh in the way city air near the water can be.

  We crested the hill, hanging there for just an instant until the weight of the car pulled us over, then we shot down so fast my stomach was in my throat. When we raced around the next loop without pause, I couldn’t even turn my head to look at Felix, but I heard him shout.

  The coaster was rickety and as we were thrown from side to side, it was clear why they’d placed me on the left. Felix ended up slamming into me over and over. If our positions had been reversed, I would’ve crushed him into the side of the car.

  After a few turns, the terror died away and a strange calm came over me. Charging forward, flung up and down and side to side, confined to one looping path, unable to control anything, felt like freedom.

  When the car jerked to a halt Felix and I turned to each other at the same time, blinking dry eyes, and grinned. His hair was a complete mess and his smile so bright it took my breath away. He surged forward and kissed the smile right off my face, laughing when some kids behind us whistled.

  We exited on shaky legs, clutching each other like dizzy children. Felix was giggling and staring up at the track we’d just come from like he couldn’t believe he had survived it.

  “How was your first roller coaster?” I asked him.

  He pulled my arm around his shoulder and winked. “Wicked. What’s next?”

  Warmth glowed behind my ribs. I led him back to the boardwalk.

  “This is my tradition,” I told him. “Hot dog–off. Nathan’s versus Paul’s Daughter. You in?”

  “Um, no,” he said, looking mildly green. At first I thought he was sick from the coaster, but then I remembered what he’d said about cooking hot dogs in spaghetti. I ordered my food and we walked down to sit on the beach.

  “Nathan’s is historically considered the best in Coney Island, but I like Paul’s Daughter better,” I said.

  “Then why do you get both? Why not just get two at Paul’s Daughter?”

  “Tradition,” I tried. It sounded hollow even to me.

  Felix looked at me, expression serious, and slid a hand to my thigh.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Please. You’re always so…I can never tell if you don’t want to tell me stuff because you’re private, or because you don’t trust me, or…”

  I could hear the unspoken end to his sentence. Because this isn’t real.

  I looked out over the sand and the sea. How many times had I sat here, watching the families and friends and couples, alone?

  “I came here on the first anniversary of getting sober. I went to a meeting, got my one-year chip, and didn’t want to go home. Stayed on the subway and ended up here. I got a dog at Nathan’s and came down here to eat it. The beach, the ocean…It was July. Hot as hell. Kids running around. It all seemed so…” Hopeful.

  I shrugged.

  “It was…good here. In the sun. So I decided to get another hot dog and saw Paul’s Daughter over there. Got one, ate it, liked it. Then I just…kept doing it every year.”

  “It’s a ritual,” Felix said slowly. “You did it then and you’ve stayed sober, so you keep doing it.”

  I nodded. My routines, my habits—they were a system that had concretized into something that felt like the armature of my life.

  “I know it’s not really magic or anything,” I clarified. “It’s not what keeps me sober. I know that.”

  “Rituals are kinda their own magic, aren’t they?” Felix said. “Maybe they don’t do anything, but they remind you of what you want. Every time you get these hot dogs, you remember that first time and you decide all over again that you want to stay sober. Right?”

  I nodded and felt my muscles loosen.

  “Well, go on, then.” He pointed to the hot dogs I hadn’t touched yet. “One at a time, or alternating bites, or what?”

  “One at a time.”

  “Want me to hold one?”

  I handed him the Paul’s Daughter. I always saved it for last.

  The snap of the hot dog, the brininess of the sauerkraut, the burn of the mustard. I closed my eyes to taste it better. It was so good and so familiar that for a moment it could have been any day I was here. Any year. Except that if I let myself lean just slightly to my right, I could feel Felix’s shoulder press against my upper arm. For the first time, I wasn’t alone.

  “Oh, shit,” Felix said. I looked over to find a large bite of my hot dog gone and a guilty look on Felix’s face. “Okay, so hot dogs maybe taste a lot better when they’re not microwaved and in spaghetti…”

  He gave me a flirty look and a sly smile that clearly asked permission to eat my hot dog. I waved him on but stopped him when he’d eaten half and traded half of the Nathan’s dog I’d been eating.

  “Here, you can decide for yourself.”

  He took a bite of the Nathan’s and closed his eyes in pleasure.

  “Mmmm, damn.”

  “Verdict?”

  “Verdict is you have the right idea getting both. Why choose?”

  I leaned in and kissed him, then, because he was beautiful and alive and today I was a person.

  After we ate, we wandered around some more, and ended up in front of B&B Carousell.

  “Okay,” Felix said when he saw it. “We have to go on that. It’s like the most…what’s the word? Iconic fair thing ever.”

  He reached for my hand as if he was confident that I’d be there, that I’d go with him. It felt like a responsibility and a reward all in one.

  “They spell carousel wrong,” I muttered as we chose our horses.

  He picked one that was rearing, mouth open and mane streaming. I took the one next to him that sat sedately on its pole. I had a momentary fear that I’d be too heavy for the horse to move, and then the music began and the carousel cranked into motion. It was beautiful and reminded me of something out of an old movie, like the kind m
y mother used to watch, with its muted pinks and blues, and its gilt.

  I probably looked ridiculous, perched on a fake horse, going around in circles but getting nowhere as people took pictures of their children, but Felix looked so happy that it didn’t matter. I fished my phone out and took a picture of him, hair as wild as the horse’s streaming mane, mouth open in a grin, the painted scrollwork of the carousel’s center the perfect backdrop for his beauty.

  “C’mere,” he said after he saw me taking it. He took my phone, leaned toward me, and took a selfie of us, horses rearing in the background. He looked bright and happy, eyes half closed, jaunty green shirt buttoned up to his throat. I looked huge and hulking in comparison, but my eyes were clear and my brow was smooth where usually, pictures informed me, it was furrowed.

  After the carousel, Felix became determined to win me a stuffed animal in one of the games. It was a fluffy purple monster creature with glued-on black felt eyes, and he took one look at it and decided it had to be mine. Within three minutes, though, he was outraged at the game, ranting to the teenage girl who ran the booth that it was rigged.

  “Duh,” she said. “That’s kind of the point.”

  Felix pouted at her and said, “But how can I impress my boyfriend by winning him that monster if the game’s rigged?”

  The girl raised one meticulously painted-on eyebrow in a jaded teenage expression, looked at me, and said, “Does your boyfriend like cheap stuffed monsters? ’Cuz I don’t know it’s that impressive.”

  Felix turned to me, clearly enjoying the interplay.

  “I will win you this monster if it’s the last thing I do!” he pledged, hand to heart. Then, shoving his hand into his pocket, he added, “And if I can do it in six dollars.”

  The girl laughed.

  He could not do it in six dollars.

  The girl watched him fail and pout with amusement. When he sighed dramatically, she cast a glance around, then yanked the monster down and thrust it at Felix.

  “Tell no one,” she hissed. Then she looked away as if we weren’t there.

  “Omigod, thank you, you’re an angel,” he said to her profile. The corner of her mouth curled up and she snorted and waved him away.

  Giddy with victory, Felix pressed the purple monster to my chest and kissed it. “For you.”

  He was giggly about it, but it made a strange warmth bloom in my chest.

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t actually have to keep it if you don’t want,” he said. “It just…I dunno, seemed like you needed to have it.”

  I’d had a stuffed dog, as a child. I remembered sleeping with it, dragging it around with me in the yard. One night I’d pretended it was a wolf that wanted to rejoin its pack, so I’d put it under a bush. It rained that night and I found it the next day, bedraggled and dirty. My mom put it in the wash and it came out clean, but with all the stuffing in its belly and none in its legs.

  I carried the monster around for the rest of the day as we poked in shops, rode a few more rides, and sampled more boardwalk food.

  As the sun began to set, I steered Felix to the Wonder Wheel, which rose 150 feet into the sky. Its lights twinkled in the growing dark.

  “Will you go on this with me?” I asked. “I’ve always wanted to.”

  One year, I saw a couple get engaged at the top of the Wonder Wheel at sunset. The woman had asked the person running it to stop it when she was at the top. Then she sang a song to her girlfriend and proposed. The whole wheel burst into applause as they came down. The two of them clung to each other, silhouetted against the glowing sunset.

  We chose a stationary car and had it to ourselves. Felix sat right next to me and pulled my arm around his shoulders as our cage rose into the darkening sky. Coney Island was alive with lights, flashing in arrows and sunbursts. The ugly apartment buildings of Trump Village were a sinister block in the background to one side of the wheel, and the setting sun gleamed off the Atlantic to the other.

  The sounds of laughing, yelling, screams from the roller coasters, music from the arcades—it all became distant white noise as Felix rested his head on my shoulder and we gazed at the sea. At the very top, Felix sighed and turned to kiss me. It felt like there should be fireworks exploding for us in the night sky.

  I hadn’t gotten a call or text from a sponsee all day, and I hoped the trip had made my cancellation of a few days before up to Felix. The scent of his shampoo mingled with the ocean salt, fry oil, and sugar smells in the air. I matched my breathing to his and memorized every detail.

  Too soon, the wheel completed its second rotation and we were forced out into the real world again. I bought us a funnel cake, but Felix was too tired to eat any, so we walked back toward the subway.

  On the train, Felix slid onto the seat next to me and immediately rested his head on my shoulder.

  “Thank you for today,” he murmured as the train pulled out. “It was magic. It was perfect.”

  He was asleep in seconds.

  It was. It was a perfect day.

  Chapter 8

  Felix

  Two nights after our perfect day at Coney Island, I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where Dane didn’t know I existed. In the dream, I showed up at his apartment like I often did, but he acted like I wasn’t there. He cooked and ate dinner and did the dishes, and the whole time I was talking to him, tugging at him, trying to get him to notice me, but he acted like I was invisible. When I finally went to leave, he looked up and said, “Oh, hey,” then turned away.

  Even though it was just a dream, it left me with a gnawing panic in my stomach because the Dane in the dream had seemed so real. Sofia wasn’t home. I tried to go back to sleep, but all I could think about was what if the next time I went to Dane’s, that really happened. Finally, I worked myself into such a lather of panic that I picked up the phone in the pitch black and called Dane.

  After a number of rings, he answered, “ ’Lo?” Clearly he’d been asleep.

  “I—I—I don’t wanna be invisible to you,” I blurted out.

  “What? Felix? What?”

  “I had a bad dream and you ignored me and it just—sorry, sorry—it really freaked me out, and you’re…you never call me and I’m always the one to invite you to hang out and if I didn’t do that, would you let me go? Would you never call me? Would I never see you again?”

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness a bit and the familiar shapes of the living room emerged. Suddenly, with a little grounding, I felt very foolish.

  “I…shit, sorry, I…” Still no response. “Dane? I—sorry I woke you,” I finished miserably. “You can just hang up. I’m…yeah, shit, I’m sorry.”

  There was a sigh from the other end of the line, so I knew he hadn’t hung up. I was an idiot. I’d called and woken my boyfriend up in the middle of the night because of something he’d done in a dream.

  “Dane?” I ventured, very softly. “Do you hate me now?” I bit my lip, heart pounding.

  Another sigh and then I could hear a creak, like he was getting out of bed. I imagined him prowling his apartment, pacing from the bedroom to the living room in his underwear, powerful muscles soft from sleep.

  “Felix.” He said my name low and gruff. “Will you come to dinner with me at Caleb and Theo’s?”

  “Will I…what? Yeah! Well, wait. Are you just inviting me ’cuz I called you in the middle of the night all freaked and made you feel obligated?”

  “No.”

  “Um. Okay? Then, yes.”

  There was a sound on Dane’s end I couldn’t place, then he said, “I’m sorry. No, I wouldn’t have let you go without getting in touch if you stopped calling me. I didn’t…I didn’t think of it that way. I—shit. It made me feel good. When you’d ask me. So I kept letting you. Sorry you thought I didn’t wa
nt to ask you.”

  I let that sink in: it made Dane feel wanted when I asked to see him. I hadn’t even considered that he might need that.

  “Oh. Okay. I thought…I thought I might be bugging you and you didn’t know how to tell me to buzz off.”

  “No.” He said it fast and certain. “I…Fuck, Felix, you’re so young. I worry that I’m not…not good for you. I’m not good at this. Not like someone else could be.”

  It was the first time he’d ever really acknowledged that he thought about our relationship when we weren’t together. That he thought about me when I wasn’t around. But also for the first time, I was able to hear his fear.

  Maybe it was the effect of not seeing him as he spoke. Of not letting his size and his age and his strength suggest things to me about how he felt. I was ashamed to think I had let them.

  “I don’t want someone else,” I said.

  He made a choked sound.

  “I just don’t think of it like that,” I told him. “I mean, I know you’re older than me. I know we don’t have the same, like, high-school-prom final dance song or whatever. Not that I went to my prom. But anyway, I don’t care about that. I—” Adore you, can’t get enough of you. “I love spending time with you, and I don’t care about our ages. Unless…unless it’s that you think I’m too…that you don’t take me seriously ’cuz you think of me as a kid.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I just don’t know why you’d want me when you could have someone with less…less shit.”

  “I like your shit.” He snorted. “You know what I mean,” I grumbled.

  He sighed again, but this sigh sounded like capitulation, not hesitation.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll, uh, I’ll call you more.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “I know.”

  * * *

  —

  Dane picked me up from work in a borrowed car, and we drove out of the city to Stormville, where Theo Decker and his partner and Dane’s best friend, Caleb Blake Whitman, lived. I was hella nervous but it felt momentous, to be going out of town with Dane, to be meeting his friends. I knew Caleb in particular was really important to him. Dane grumbled about how it was a pain in the ass to get to Stormville, but I could tell he didn’t mean it.