I have, actually—I shoved a soggy fistful of them into my mouth last night when I got home from Spencer’s party—but I’m still not totally following. “How do we factor into this, exactly?”
Dad explains that this first outing—“The Original Cream Cart,” he calls it—is a trial but that he hopes if it’s successful enough, next summer he can have two or three of them dotted along the beachfront. “And since the two of you are leaving in the fall and I figured you might not want to spend your last summer cooped up in the restaurant…”
“You want us to run it?” I ask.
“Together?” Miles chimes in.
“Exactly,” Dad says, pleased that we’ve finally caught on. “Rachel can be the customer service person and, Miles, you can prepare the orders—since, no offense, your people skills occasionally leave something to be desired.”
“He’s working on it,” I say, glancing at Miles sidelong. He grins at me, quick and gone again, in reply.
“All right,” Dad says, clapping his hands like a little kid at—well, at the sight of an ice cream truck. “Let’s get this baby ready to go!”
* * *
Miles and I spend the next hour stocking the cooler and the compartment where napkins, the Square reader, and extra tools go, making sure the Cream Cart is ready for its maiden voyage tomorrow afternoon. “He must have spent a ton of money on this contraption,” I note, eyeing it with no small amount of trepidation. “We’re going to have to sell a lot of ice cream sandwiches just to break even.”
“Ice cream Gondolas,” Miles corrects absently, straightening the stack of paper napkins. “Better work on your sales pitch.” I wait for him to suggest some perverted thing involving bikinis and whipped cream, but instead he just straightens up, brushing his hands off on the seat of his pants and looking at me. “Hey, can I ask you something?” he says, looking weirdly serious. “Do you have plans ton—”
“Rachel?”
The sound of my name is accompanied by a knock-knock-knock on the side of the moving truck. When I poke my head out the back, I’m surprised to see Carrie standing on the concrete in shorts and a T-shirt from last year’s Ann Arbor Pride, her braids pulled back with a vintagey-looking scarf. “Hey,” she says, waving at Miles before looking back at me. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to creep on you. Nonna—I mean, your grandma—said you were out here.”
“Oh.” I frown, totally flabbergasted by the sight of her. Sure, we talked about maybe hanging out again when we exchanged numbers last night, but honestly I figured it was the same kind of popular-person non-vitation as Clayton asking me to Spencer’s party. I definitely wasn’t expecting her to actively seek me out not twenty-four hours later. “I mean, hi!” I smile, remembering myself. “Sorry. What’s up?”
“A bunch of us are headed to the fair in Douglas,” she reports, nodding in the general direction of the parking lot on the side of the building. “I was going to text, but then the restaurant was on the way, so I figured I’d just stop by and see if maybe you wanted to come.”
“Oh!” I say again, truly taking advantage of the opportunity to showcase my enviable conversational chops. The Douglas Fair marks the official kickoff to summer in this part of Michigan, though I haven’t been since I was probably twelve because it always conflicts with busy season for the restaurant. At least, that’s what I told myself. “Like, right now?”
“Yeah, Rachel,” Carrie says, with that same tolerant smile from last night—like she thinks I’m a piece of work, maybe, but also like she missed me. “Right now.”
I grin back at her; I can’t help it. Ruoxi notwithstanding, I can literally count on zero hands how many times I’ve been invited anywhere over the course of my high school career. And now it’s happened twice in as many days.
Still, I find myself glancing at Miles, who’s busying himself wiping a scuff off the side of the Cream Cart. It definitely seemed like he was about to ask if I wanted to hang out tonight, didn’t it? I don’t owe him anything, obviously. But it’s also possible that, in the split second before Carrie knocked on the side of the truck, I was the tiniest bit intrigued.
“You’re more than welcome too, Miles,” Carrie says, misinterpreting the look I’ve shot in his direction, but Miles holds a hand up.
“Can’t do carnivals,” he says, shaking his head gravely. “Heart condition.”
I roll my eyes. “He’s deflecting,” I report.
“Um, okay.” Carrie tilts her head, a little uncertain. “So what do you say?”
This time, I don’t even have to wonder what Paula Prescott would want me to do. “Yes,” I tell her, hopping out of the truck and down onto the concrete. “Just give me five minutes.”
I dig a pair of cutoffs and a wrinkly T-shirt out of my locker, trying with little success to smooth the worst of the creases out before giving up and shaking my hair out of its braid. I kiss Nonna goodbye—“Look at you, Patatina!” she crows, like possibly I’m a toddler learning to use the toilet—and wave to my dad before darting back outside.
“Ready to go?” I ask Carrie, who holds up her car keys in response.
“See ya,” Miles calls, still messing around inside the moving truck. I glance back at him one last time before we go.
The fair is pretty much exactly the same as I remember it from when I was little: a midway packed with water gun races and win-a-goldfish Ping-Pong ball tosses, the kind of rickety-looking rides that fold out of trucks. The grounds are crowded with locals and a few early season tourists eating corn dogs and funnel cake, the scent of drugstore perfume and cotton candy heavy in the muggy air. A band is set up on a low stage near one end of the field, and Carrie and I stop to listen for a while—two fratty white guys in cowboy hats who advertise themselves as a country ensemble, though their repertoire seems to skew mostly toward Hootie & the Blowfish songs from 1994.
“So who are we waiting for?” I ask finally, scratching a mosquito bite on one calf with the toe of my Converse.
Carrie frowns. “Huh?” she asks distractedly, offering me half of her Sanders hot fudge cream puff.
Welp, I don’t need Dr. Paula’s book to convince me to say yes to that one. “You said ‘a bunch of us’ were coming,” I remind her, popping it into my mouth and swallowing. “Who’s a bunch?”
“Oh.” Carrie bites her lip, looking a little bit embarrassed. “All right, I may have overstated. I mean, Ethan and Trevor said maybe they’d stop by, but…” She sighs. “I’m kind of talking to this guy and he said he might be here tonight, so I sort of wanted to like, stake the place out.” She makes a face. “I know, it’s pathetic.”
“It’s not pathetic,” I say immediately. God knows I’m the last person on planet Earth who’s in a position to criticize what anyone else does in the name of romantic infatuation. On top of which it’s kind of nice, the idea that Carrie trusted me to be her wingwoman. Even if she probably only did it because none of her other friends were around.
“It’s…whatever.” Carrie wipes her hands on the seat of her shorts. “So, hey,” she says, nodding at something behind me as the band clangs away at “Only Wanna Be with You” for what I’m pretty sure is the second time in the last twenty minutes, “how do you feel about that?”
I turn around. “The bungee thing?” It’s a ride, sort of, this ridiculous reverse-catapult contraption with what looks like a foam hamster ball attached to two giant bungee cords. Two people sit in the ball and then it launches them up and snaps back and forth at a velocity that looks guaranteed to cause traumatic brain injury.
She grins. “It could be fun.”
“Yeah,” I shoot back, “or it could be awful and we could die.”
Carrie cackles. “Nice to see you’ve held on to your flair for the dramatic after all these years.”
“Yeah, well—”
“Carrie!” a guy calls from behind us. “Walls!”
Carrie looks over my shoulder and breaks out into a smile before I can turn to see who’s she spotted. Or rather, who spotted us. “What’s up?” she calls, lifting her chin in greeting as Ethan ambles over in our direction.
With Clayton trailing directly along behind him.
“Man, Walls,” Ethan says before I can properly rearrange my face into anything resembling indifference. “Two days in a row?” He grins. “You stalking me or what?”
“In your dreams maybe,” Carrie answers for me. “What’s up, Clay?”
“Not much,” he says, shaking his head and jamming his hands into his pockets. His gaze flicks in my direction for one achingly brief moment. “Hey, Rachel.”
“Hi,” I manage. Suddenly all the sadness and disappointment from last night comes rushing back, sucking at my limbs like an undertow. I swallow it down and do my best to put on a smile. He’s dating someone, that’s all. It’s a thing people do.
“So what are you ladies up to?” Ethan asks, taking a sip of his slushie—cherry, judging by the faint red stain on his full lips. He’s wearing his Michigan hoodie again, a baseball cap tilted rakishly on his head.
“Just discussing the Ejector, actually,” Carrie tells him, tilting her head toward the bungee ride of death. “I’m too scared to do it, but Rachel’s freaking obsessed.”
“Wait, what?” I gape at her for a second, then look back at the guys. “There’s no way. She’s delusional, truly.”
“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Carrie teases, twisting one of her braids between two fingers. “You’re an insatiable thrill seeker, we know.”
“Uh-oh,” Ethan says, picking up on the bit. “We’ve got a secret adrenaline junkie on our hands?”
I roll my eyes. “I assure you, that is…emphatically not the case.”
“Aw, I always kind of loved the Ejector,” Clayton chimes in, the neon lights studding the ride casting his face in pinks and blues. Up close he’s not actually entirely symmetrical, I noticed yesterday in the restaurant, with a small constellation of pale freckles clustered just under his right eye. He looks back at me, raises his eyebrows. “You’ve really never been?”
“Uh, nope,” I say, feeling oddly defiant. Probably I’ve never done a lot of things he’s done. “And I never intend to.”
“Aw, come on, Walls!” Ethan takes a final noisy slurp of his slushie before dumping the cup into a nearby trash can. “Now you’ve gotta do it.”
“He’s right,” Carrie says, slinging her fringey suede purse across her body and taking a couple of big steps backward in the direction of the Ejector. “It’s time.”
I shake my head. “Hard pass.”
Carrie is unmoved. “Summer of new experiences!” she crows, and I wince, not exactly dying to let the guys in on my little self-improvement project. “I’m going, you’re going, we’re all going.”
“Carrie—”
“You sure?” Clayton asks—and there’s that dimple again, like punctuation at the end of a particularly artful sentence. “I’ll ride with you, how about. That way if something goes wrong, we’ll both be maimed.”
“I—” That stops me. On one hand, I fully believe I’m inviting grievous bodily injury—or worse—by climbing into that broken-down hunk of junk. On the other, smashed into a confined space with Clayton Carville would be the very definition of a good death. Without entirely meaning to, I imagine Dr. Paula Prescott dressed in ’80s-style play clothes—a Day-Glo tank top and high tops, maybe—strolling the grounds of the Douglas Fair.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “Let’s go.”
“Really?” Carrie looks flabbergasted.
“Yep.” I offer a tight-lipped smile and a single nod. “Quick,” I tell them, leading the way through the crowd in the direction of my own impending doom, “before I change my mind.”
The line is short, so I don’t have time to reconsider or chicken out before all at once the zitty, frowning ride operator straps me and Clayton into our seats. It’s a small car, the sides of our thighs pressing together; his bare knee just barely brushes mine as he wraps his hands around the safety bar and glances in my direction. “You okay?” he asks, smirking a little.
“Um, yup,” I manage. In truth I’m barely breathing, though I’d be hard pressed to say whether it’s because we’re about to be launched into the air like a spitball and then free fall back toward the pavement or because the side of Clayton’s pinky is brushing the side of mine.
He nods, then takes a deep breath. “Listen,” he says. “About the party last night—”
That’s when the latch goes loose, and suddenly there’s nothing above us except sky.
At first all the noises in the world—the joyful squeals of little kids on the Tilt-A-Whirl, the bratwurst hawker shouting about his deals, the rhythmic ding of the ring toss game—all of it fades away to silence. There’s just me sitting here next to Clayton, hardly even registering our high-speed ascent as I wonder desperately what he was about to say.
I can hear my heart thumping as we reach the apex, the sound of blood swishing wildly through my body; then we start to fall, and it’s drowned out by something much, much louder. It’s only a second before I realize it’s also coming from me: I’m screaming, wild and ragged, from an inside deeper than I knew I had. The gravitational pull pushes me against the seat so I can’t turn my head, but from the corner of my eye I can tell Clayton is laughing; after a moment I’m laughing too as we launch back up again.
This ricochet pattern, screaming then laughing, flying then falling, continues a few more times before we slow and then come to a suspended stop. I’m still clutching the bar when the attendant comes to unlatch us. It’s only when I look down that I notice Clayton and my fingers are overlapping now, his hand on top of mine.
He pulls his back, wiping his palms on the front of his khaki shorts before reaching out again, his grip warm and steadying as I climb out of the Ejector car. My legs feel like water. My brain is full of gauze. “So?” he asks, waving at Carrie and Ethan as the attendant straps them in for their turn. “Want to go again?”
“No way,” I say, and I mean it. But the truth is I’m glad I tried it once.
* * *
Carrie’s mystery man shows up just as we’re finishing with the Ejector—this guy Adam Meyers I remember from elementary school, when he used to try to convince everyone to play Pokémon at recess every day and carried a backpack in the shape of a monkey’s face until we were way too old for that kind of thing to be socially acceptable. He transferred to Hartwick Prep in ninth grade—his family made a billion dollars on a chain of local department stores and presumably wanted him to learn to speak dead languages and, like, be rude to service people, or whatever it is they teach you at private school—but I have to admit the years have not exactly been unkind to him. “Adam Meyers got extremely cute,” I whisper to Carrie as we amble along the midway.
“Ugh, I know,” she says, wrinkling her nose like “got extremely cute” is synonymous with “still wets the bed” or “was never vaccinated for any childhood diseases because his parents don’t trust the government.” “It’s the worst.”
I laugh, the two of us hanging back as the guys stop off at the free-throw booth, all of them loudly impugning one another’s basketball skills. “Why is it the worst?” Adam keeps glancing back at Carrie like he thinks he’s being slick, and I think of a recent crossword clue: Trash talk from the peacock with the best courtship display. Twelve letters.
Tailgloating.
Carrie sighs. “I mean, we all know you love yourself a preppy white boy,” she says, shooting a meaningful look in Clayton’s direction as he hands a couple of dollars over to the carnie running the game, “but some of us have reputations to maintain.”
She’s teasing me again, familiar, but this time I don’t smile. “Wait, what?” I look from her
to the boys, back again. Does everybody know how I feel about Clayton? Does Clayton know how I feel about Clayton? Ugh, this right here is exactly why I never leave my house. “I don’t—”
“Suck it, Carville!” Ethan crows, doing a corny victory dance on the dusty midway as the barker hands over a giant stuffed giraffe.
We hang out at the fair for a while longer, eating deep-fried Snickers bars and riding the Scrambler—in that order, actually, which is probably ill-advised—but the truth is I’m not having that much fun anymore. I feel out of sorts and exposed, an animal showing its raw pink belly. There’s a part of me that wishes I’d just hung out with Miles tonight instead, watching The Last Jedi in his basement and eating cheese balls out of the tub. By the time Adam asks if we want to go meet up with a bunch of his friends at a party in town, all I want to do is go home.
“I’ve actually got to head out,” I tell Carrie, who’s looking at me hopefully. She feels bad about what she said about me and Clayton, I can tell. “You should go, though.”
“What? No way,” she protests, looking from me to Adam and back again. “I’m not going to just ditch you here. How are you even going to get home?”
“I’ll call somebody,” I promise. Maybe it’s not too late for Mom and I to swing by Moxie’s after all, though the idea of any more sugar makes me feel a little sick. “It’s totally fine.”
“I can take her,” Clayton interjects from right behind me—and crap, how long has he been standing there? He hasn’t had two words for me since we got off the Ejector, like possibly the jolting of the ride reconnected some circuit in his brain and he remembered he didn’t have anything to say after all.
Carrie’s dark eyes light up. “Are you sure?” she asks him, then frowns a little. “Like, do you even know where she lives?”
Say Yes Summer Page 6