Wild Blue Wonder

by Carlie Sorosiak

  I nodded and bit my lip, because yes, and because no. It had been two weeks since you dragged me onstage for “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and as much as I was trying, those feelings weren’t going away.

  Later, sun splattered and dissolved in a quilt of orange and blue. There was just enough light for me to see it, through the Tupelo Cabin screen door.

  You and Fern, on the porch.

  She told you:

  You remind me of sunshine.

  I’m not a little girl anymore.

  And then she kissed you on the lips.

  November

  Fun Never Dies

  “Is it true,” Alexander asks the next Monday, “that we get three months off a year to farm potatoes?”

  I set down my quinoa salad wrap (Mom made lunch today), an image of Fern tilling a dirt field in her peasant blouse popping into my mind. I actually snort. “Where the heck did you hear that?”

  “Uh . . . the very reliable place called ‘the internet.’ I also heard the quite disturbing fact that Maine icicles can kill you.”

  Quite. I like how Alexander says quite.

  “Now, that is true,” Elliot says, turkey sandwich in hand. “My cousin Isaac lived up in Scarborough and—”

  Hana edges in: “Do we really want to know how this story ends, considering that it begins with lived?” She and Elliot are improving at this verbal-communication thing. The awkwardness is still palpable, but on the way to class yesterday, I noticed them drifting closer and closer together, their hands almost brushing. Hana was wearing her New England Renaissance Festival T-shirt, and Elliot was wearing his.

  He appears mortified. “Oh no. No, it’s not like that. I was just going to say that he found a ten-foot-long icicle on his barn, and that’s when he decided he had to move to Florida.”

  “So,” Alexander says after a beat, “what does . . . I was just wondering . . . what do people do for fun around here?”

  Not much. Most people just hang out on the frosty beach or smoke pot in the woods. I say, “Oh, you know. The usual. Catching lobsters with our bare hands. Canadian maple syrup baths. Moose rodeo is on Thursdays—you should tag along.”

  “Right, moose rodeo,” he says, dragging off his glasses and cleaning the lenses with the bottom of his white cotton shirt. “You see . . . uh . . . that wasn’t on TripAdvisor. I must be getting the secret local experience.” Not a lot of people get my humor, but it seems like Alexander does, which is nice.

  Hana gasps and slaps the table with both hands, like she’s Newton and the apple just fell on her head. “We should take him to Winship Dinosaur Park.”

  On reflex, I glance over at Elliot—who’s grimacing.

  “Sorry . . . ,” Alexander begins. “A dinosaur park?”

  “Where Fun Never Dies,” Elliot says, wearily reciting the slogan.

  Alexander pinches his eyebrows in a question. “With . . . dinosaurs?”

  “With dinosaurs,” I confirm.

  Like most Mainers, Elliot’s parents have decided to pretend that Maine is geographically diverse. (See on a map: The Desert of Maine, and the cities of China, Poland, Norway, Belfast, Lisbon, Paris, Mexico, and Stockholm, Maine.) That diversity apparently extends to prehistoric landscapes. With its fiberglass dinosaur statues and shitty replicas of pre–Ice Age forests, the park is largely for Canadian tourists—and for children who don’t know better. The last time I set foot in the park was for Reed’s eleventh birthday. We ate Oreo cake in the shade of an iguanodon, and had the privilege of sliding down the T. rex’s tail.

  But I know that Hana loves the monsters—which she’s probably mentioned to Elliot once or twice or a billion times.

  “It’s really awful in the summer,” Elliot admits, “but it’s closed in fall, and it’s actually not terrible.”

  “Never mind the ringing endorsement,” Hana says, dismissing Elliot with a wave of her multibraceleted hand. “How about today after school? Quinn and I don’t have shifts at Leo’s.”

  But I do have to work on the boat. “I actually have plans. . . .”

  Hana eyes me. “What plans?”

  The main sticking point is, I don’t want to give Hana that burden—to show her the exact depth of my pain. One million swimming pools. Enough to spend hours and hours in the dark, scooping dry rot out of wood. “Just . . . stuff.”

  “Quinn, pleeeeeaasee.”

  So we agree (Elliot and I, reluctantly) and meet by Hana’s minivan at three thirty, setting off down the snowy dirt road behind Winship Elementary. I know everyone rags on minivans, but I love Hana’s car. There’s something so satisfying about having twelve cup holders to choose from and seats that fold all the way back.

  On the road, I explain to Alexander that most of the wooden cabins on this street are abandoned in fall. Tourists generally stay for the summer, then scurry away when the leaves start changing. To be honest, it’s a little ghostly in this gray-white light—empty homes creaking with the wind. Part of senior initiation is to spend a night in a tent outside one of the properties and see who makes it to the next morning. Everyone does, obviously, unless they get too cold or bored and ditch their tents for a Locke’s Donuts run. But by morning, there’s always something slightly off. Suddenly, their tents are facing a completely different direction, toward the sea instead of the mountains, or all their fresh fruit is somehow mealy inside.

  There are only four main roads in our town—Cormorant, Shearwater, Sandpiper, and Whippoorwill—and zero stoplights. As we cruise down Cormorant, I point out Millionaires’ Bluff: a row of stupendously large, shingled houses with sprawling gardens, all perched precariously by the sea. Only one family from Winship actually lives there; the rest are summer homes for the überwealthy. Shutters coat most of the windows, but in six months, everything will burst open. Although Winship doesn’t have the same draw as bigger summer resorts like Kennebunkport or Bar Harbor, our town’s population still doubles in size during the summer.

  “That’s fairly awesome,” Alexander muses as we pass Owl’s Island Light, the white-and-red lighthouse on a spot of land right off the coast.

  “You see those boarded-up ice cream shops,” I say, “just before the lighthouse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re in this stupidly intense competition. The owners are these two eighty-year-old men who stare each other down all summer.”

  “I’m Team Jimmy’s,” Hana says. “Better sprinkles.”

  I pretend scoff. “Red’s is obviously better, Hana. I’m not sure I even know you anymore.”

  The four of us hop out of the minivan just before three forty-five, the late-fall air—as Alexander puts it—on the colder side of “absolutely bloody freezing.” And I expect he’s feeling the bitterness a lot more acutely in his thin peacoat and suede shoes. Man, he needs some boots. And a parka. And thicker gloves.

  “Mate,” Alexander says to Elliot, observing all the wonder that is the parking lot. “Your family owns this?”

  “Yep,” he responds. “And I’m an only child, so it’s my entire inheritance. I’m destined to be Dinosaur Man, just like my father.”

  “There are worse things,” Hana chimes in. “Catchy name.”

  Alexander says, “I’d go so far as to say that, quite possibly, ‘The Fantastic Mr. Dinosaur Man’ is better.”

  Elliot extracts a shiny silver key from his coat pocket. “I’ll consider it.”

  We tread over the fake-grass carpet and into the dinosaur’s mouth, then beneath a canopy of artificial leaves and into the main area. What I remember of Winship Dinosaur Park is cheese. Cheesy rides, cheesy creatures, cheesy people with fanny packs. But without all the tourists, and in the bluish light . . .

  “This is brilliant,” Alexander explodes. It’s the first time I’ve seen him fired up about anything. The park still has its fake, plastic veneer, but admittedly it is a bit like stepping into an alternate dimension. “I’m just . . . do you mind me asking if . . . I’m curious about the choice. How did your par
ents decide, This will be our lives’ mission, erecting a park full of plastic beasts?”

  “I’ve been asking that question literally every day of my life,” Elliot says, “and I don’t have an answer. Not a good one, anyway. I think they just thought it was funny?”

  “Brilliant,” Alexander says again.

  “Nothing like this in London?” I ask a moment later, after Elliot and Hana trail ahead of us.

  “Nothing this wilderness-y, which, of course—sorry—that’s not a word.”

  “It should be.”

  “I agree. So do you . . . uh . . . come here a lot?”

  “Nah. Moose rodeo eats up most of my free time.”

  “And repairing old boats?”

  I stop in my tracks, the frost nipping at my cheeks. “How do you know about that?”

  “You . . . Sorry, I thought— I just saw you and your grandmother when I dropped off the meatballs.”

  “Oh, right.” A quiet fear cuts through me. “Could you . . . could you maybe not mention that to anyone?”

  “Uh, sure.” Confusion crosses his face, but he recovers in a blink. “Sure, no worries.”

  “It’s just this thing my grandma and I are doing together,” I say too quickly. “Like, a bonding thing. It’s no big deal, but— Yeah. Thanks.” Ugh. They say that fun never dies, but I think it just did. Okay . . . new topic . . . dinosaurs! “Did you know that in the late Cretaceous period there was an animal called a quetzalcoatlus that was tall as a giraffe but had a wingspan like a small airplane, and it could fly?”

  Smooth transition, Quinn.

  “As a matter of fact, I did not,” Alexander says, breaking out into a grin. “But I’m picturing a dragon.”

  “Minus the fire-breathing.”

  “Well, that’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it? What good is it, then? You can’t . . . you know . . . conquer an empire without the fire-breathing. You can’t even flame grill something in the kitchen.”

  A smile sneaks into my lips. “That seems like a big jump—from empire conquering to the kitchen.”

  Alexander raises a finger. “Ah, you see, that’s where you’re wrong. There are few things that can’t be fixed with a good baklava.”

  “Quinn!” Hana squeals from forty feet away. “Come here, you’ll definitely want to see this!”

  She and Elliot are already at the back of the enclosure, standing on the shores of the “Grand Finale”: a pond with six dinosaurs gathering to quench their plastic thirsts. Even I, with my so-so paleontological knowledge, know that a triceratops, a spinosaurus, and a T. rex wouldn’t drink together in such mythical harmony, but whatever. It’s still cool.

  Elliot’s parents have taken the liberty of sprinkling a few inches of sand around the milky black water, creating a miniature beach, which is exactly where we’ve all gathered when Elliot starts fiddling around in the T. rex’s mouth.

  “Careful,” I say. “He looks hungry.”

  Not gonna lie, I also have a strong, strong desire to climb aboard ol’ Rexy and pretend I’m the Mother of Dragons, raining down on Westeros with my fiery wrath. But it just doesn’t seem like the time.

  “Speaking of hungry,” Elliot says, tossing me the orange container he’s extracted from a secret compartment under the dinosaur’s tongue.

  I examine it—“Fish food?”—and then, taking a cue from Elliot, sprinkle a dime-sized amount of flakes into my palm, tossing them into the glassy blackness.

  We wait.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  And then something.

  Neon colors pulse beneath the water—a constellation of blues and yellows and greens.

  “What—” I say. “What are they?”

  Hana bumps my shoulder with hers. “Fish.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Remember that guy,” Elliot says, “who came to town three years ago and lived outside Hannaford in his van? The guy with the really intense mustache?”

  “Mustache McGee?” I say.

  “I don’t think that was his real name,” Elliot admits, “but yeah. Anyway, he worked here last summer and found this exotic animal dealer online who had all these genetically modified, cold-tolerant fish, so they’d glow colors in the dark when the water temperature drops, and Mustache McGee was obsessed with fish, so he bought like seventy. Then he broke up with his girlfriend, who had the massive aquarium, and he only had his van. . . .”

  “Ah,” I say.

  “What’s cool is you can barely see them in summer, when it’s so warm and bright that you don’t notice them. But in fall, when the sun’s going down . . .”

  I don’t know how long we stand there, watching them swish and phosphoresce and jump for the flakes. What comes to me are two distinct thoughts: (a) these weird, fluorescent fish are completely badass, and (b) Dylan should be seeing this, too. Half of the time, when I visited my dad at work, Dylan would tag along; we’d hang out next to the octopus tanks.

  Now there are so many things that Dylan will never see: Fern’s next production of The Nutcracker or the Grand Canyon or that Garth Brooks concert in Portland that he was supposed to go to with Reed. And of course, once I begin down that road, it’s hard to turn around. Moments untangle like a string of Christmas lights: Candy Land in the tree house, that night at the ropes course . . . In the rising darkness, as I peer down at the water, my skin starts to prickle and my mouth’s suddenly dry and—

  “I’m going to . . . I’m going to go back to the car, okay? I’m getting kind of cold.”

  “Oh,” Hana says worriedly, unpocketing her keys. “Yeah, sure. Blast the heat if you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  I snatch the keys, walk quickly out of the park, and lean over the hedges by Hana’s minivan. I puke until there’s nothing left.

  “I’m going to dinner at Hana’s,” I announce to my parents the next day after school. On the living room couch, Mom’s cuddled up in the crook of Dad’s arm; they both toss me a glance that says my motives are entirely transparent. Fern has her pointe class on Tuesdays at five, which means family dinner afterward, which means fists clenched around forks, and sometimes I genuinely believe that I’d rather puke my guts out like yesterday than endure it.

  “They’re making pot roast,” I say, trying to cover my tracks. “With gravy.”

  There is no pot roast. I think we all know there is no pot roast.

  Mom says, getting up, “Just . . . don’t stay out too late, okay? And call when you’re coming back.” She plants a kiss on my forehead and readjusts my scarf a little more snuggly around my neck so I don’t catch a cold. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Hana charges up in her minivan about a minute later. Inside, the heat’s fully blasting, our hair dancing in the warm gust. “So I haven’t uploaded a character makeup video in forever,” she says once we’re on the road, frost speckling the windshield, “and I could really use a model. I was thinking that maybe . . .”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Sweet. I’ll bribe you with ice cream.” After parking in the garage, Hana makes immediate good on her promise—grabbing two Klondike bars from the kitchen freezer and passing them to me. Then: “Shh. Did you hear that?”

  “I don’t . . . think so?”

  Stepping into the Chang house is how I’d imagine entering the eye of a tornado: everything’s calm at first, but then bam—three little brothers. Little brothers scattering Oreo crumbs on couches. Little brothers jumping on one another’s backs and screaming. And—as we open the door to Hana’s room—little brothers literally rifling through her dirty laundry, yellow ruffled bras covering their eyes, pretending they’re praying mantises.

  Naturally, Hana goes ballistic.

  “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”

  Hwan, Seojun, and Young-soo—ages five, seven, and nine—freeze like they’ve been stun gunned. Dropping the bras, Hwan and Young-soo escape in a zigzag fashion, ducking through Hana’s bathro
om and into the safety of the hall, but poor little Seojun’s still wavering (should he dash left or bob right?), and his indecisiveness costs him. I think he knows exactly what’s coming.

  Darting forward, Hana grabs him by the elbows, spins him around, and stretches his underwear up, up, up—into a spectacularly unforgiving wedgie. He howls as she pushes him into the hall and slams the door. What I love about the Chang siblings is they can act outrageously toward one another—deliver threats like “I swear to God, if you don’t stop, I will literally poop on your pillow”—and the next day they’ll be smiling and exchanging pleasantries over the breakfast table. I’m jealous.

  After taking an extradeep yoga breath, Hana says, “Now, where were we?”

  I hold up one of the Klondike bars. “Ice cream?”

  “Right. Hit me with it.”

  Tossing her a mint chocolate chip, we crash on her dark purple carpeting, no fewer than twenty masks surveying the situation from her walls. When we had regular sleepovers, I’d insist on dragging our sleeping bags to the basement, because Hana’s room is wicked cool—but not a place you’d like to wake up bleary-eyed at four in the morning. Among posters for Doctor Who and Sherlock, all kinds of masks—monster, human, animal, and otherwise—speckle the walls. My favorite is actually one of Hana’s face; I helped her do it, shoving straws up her nose so she could breathe, applying two layers of plaster. The eyes are the most lifelike feature: carefully painted dark brown with gold flecks.

  “I got a new one,” she says, catching me staring and pointing above her dresser. Each one of her fingernails is a different electric color. “Draco Malfoy mask. I know he’s kind of evil, but who cares when he’s that sexy?”

  “We’re going to get married,” I tell her, biting into my Klondike and speaking with my mouth full. “Have beau-ti-ful children.”

  “Just as long as you have a Harry Potter–themed wedding. Lots of butterbeer.”

  “Done and done.”

  She polishes off her ice cream in no more than four bites. “I’ll go get my makeup kit.” I hear her rustling around in the bathroom, and then she wheels it out. Yes, this puppy is so big, it has wheels.