All the Pretty Things

by Emily Arsenault

  Looking good, Brent Ballard had written. But he writes stuff like that to everyone.

  You look a lot happier when you’re not slinging meat lovers’ deluxe slices, Zach Crenshaw had commented. Now, that was interesting. Morgan had mentioned to me a couple of days before I left that she thought Zach was flirting with her. Neither of us knew quite how to feel about it. A couple of years older than us, he was the sort of guy who sometimes wore vintage leather vests with nothing underneath—and you could see that he waxed. The sort of guy who took his cool status so seriously you just wanted to burst out laughing at the sight of him. Morgan and Zach worked together at the Pizza to the Rescue booth regularly. He made the pizzas, while Morgan took orders and served sodas. Sometimes they’d talk about books during the downtime. Apparently they both liked apocalyptic fiction. It was kind of remarkable, though, that Zach was on social media at all. He always acted like he had better things to do.

  Sexyyy, Winnie Malloy had added to the thread. Tall, stone-faced, and usually heavily made-up Winnie. Like Morgan, she lived in the neighborhood close to Fabuland with the small ranch houses and the trailer park. She’d graduated from our high school two years ago with my brother, except she stayed local. I’d never talked to Winnie much, but Morgan knew her from the neighborhood, and from riding the same school bus. I was pretty sure Winnie didn’t like me. She’d worked at Fabuland for a few summers and was always giving me an angry stare. Or maybe it was just all the eyeliner she wore that made her look that way. Maybe it was that a lot of people don’t know how they’re supposed to feel about the boss’s daughter. I don’t blame them. Even I don’t know how I feel about it most of the time.

  I would continue to let it all slide, though. The post was from the day before Ethan, Winnie’s cousin, was found dead. It made me sad to think of her happily typing dumb stuff on her phone, unaware of the tragedy that was about to overwhelm her family in a matter of hours.

  I glanced at Morgan’s picture again. Morgan was an expert at smiling so you could only see a little of the tops of her teeth. She had practiced that smile a lot when we were in middle school. She was self-conscious about the fact that a couple of her front left teeth had grown in wrong. The pointy one was next to her front teeth, rather than two teeth away like it was for most people. My canine tooth is switched with my lateral incisor, she used to explain gravely, as if she had some serious condition.

  I scrolled through the rest of her Facebook feed, but there wasn’t much to see. Morgan wasn’t really into Facebook. Two days after she’d found Ethan, some lady named Trista had written on her wall So sorry to hear about your friend, Morgan. Call if you want to talk.

  I assumed this was Morgan’s Aunt Trista—since not many people are named Trista. In any case, Morgan hadn’t replied. At least not on Facebook.

  I switched over to Twitter. A couple of days before she found Ethan, Morgan had written It might just be a corn dog kind of night.

  Aw, you don’t really mean that, Trevor Baines had replied.

  Isn’t every night, at F-Land? Emma Radlinger quipped.

  F-Land. Not my favorite abbreviation for Dad’s relatively new venture.

  Frustratingly, Morgan’s Twitter feed also had nothing on it after that post. Unlike some of the other people who worked at Fabuland, Morgan had not posted any tributes to Ethan or condolences to his family. Was she still shaken from finding Ethan or was my gut right and there was something more going on? Whatever the something was she had been about to tell me—and whether or not she had confided in someone else—there was no sign of it here. I’d have to start asking questions at Fabuland tomorrow. Even if I couldn’t get answers to my questions, I wanted to get a better sense of what Morgan had been up to in the last few days. And that was best done in person.

  Feeling resolved, I put on my pajamas and crawled into bed. Staring at the white ceiling and hoping to think of anything but Morgan, I found my thoughts drifting to the day I found out Dad was buying Fabuland.

  That was almost two years ago, on the very same day that Dad and I accidentally served a customer a deep-fried rubber glove. I still couldn’t tell what the universe had meant by that.

  To be fair, Dad had owned and run all the Food Zone vendor trucks at Fabuland for a few years by then without any significant issues. He split his summer between the doughnut shops and Fabuland, and that year I helped him mostly at the park.

  David, Dad’s Food Zone manager at the time, had just cooked up a batch of onion rings. We were working the biggest of Dad’s shiny new vendor trucks, the one with the picture of the smiling french fries on one side. David had excused himself for his lunch break, so only Dad and I were there when a gaunt red-haired lady shuffled back to the window and shoved the contents of her paper plate at us, standing hand on hip as we looked at the plate. Nestled among the onion rings was a light-yellow mass with several stubby, shrunken appendages. It was breaded and fried like the onion rings, but sprang back unnaturally when Dad poked at it with the handle end of a spork. I had to hold my breath so I wouldn’t laugh.

  “Whoa,” he said. “That’s something. I wonder why the rubber didn’t break down in the hot oil.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was surprised. Maybe he was really good at hiding it.

  “You must not have cooked it for long,” the lady replied dryly.

  I was glad Dad was doing the talking, for the moment, because I wanted to puke just thinking about it.

  “I didn’t cook it,” Dad pointed out. “The clown I got working for me in the back did. He’s off somewhere on his lunch break or I’d fire him right now.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to fire him. I want—”

  “I’ll get another batch cooked for you. But, you know, it is what it is.”

  I snatched some breaded onions out of the fridge and plunked them in one of the frying baskets.

  “We’ll change the oil in the fourth vat in case rubber got in it,” I said. “For now I’m going to fry everything, including your new rings, in the middle fryer.”

  “Don’t do that, Ivy,” Dad said. “I don’t want you to burn yourself.”

  I knew Dad didn’t want me to do the frying whenever anyone else was around to do it. Your talents are wasted behind the deep fryer, he said. Usually he liked me to just get the Cokes and smile at the customers while I took their money. But David wasn’t here, and Dad wasn’t moving fast enough, in my opinion. He might not even know how to cook onion rings.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and lowered the basket carefully into the hot oil.

  Dad watched me for a moment, scratching absently at the chest hair sprouting out of the top of his black button-down shirt. “Okay.”

  “Dad,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  I curled one finger toward me so he’d step closer and I could whisper. “Are you going to give her her money back?”

  “She doesn’t need her money back. She’s getting fresh onion rings.”

  “If someone served me a deep-fried rubber glove, would you want them to say to us, It is what it is?”

  Dad’s lips puckered and he bobbed his head back and forth for a moment. Then he stuck his head out the window and said to the lady, “Fresh batch coming up for you. And it’s on me. Here’s your five bucks back.”

  He opened the register and gave the lady her money, winking at me as I stood over the fryer. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the sleeve of my T-shirt. I could feel sweat dripping down my chest too, but I resisted the urge to mop that up with my shirt. The last time Dad had seen me do that, he’d joked, What do you call the sweat between Dolly Parton’s boobs? Mountain Dew.

  That was last thing I wanted him to say in front of a customer. Particularly in an already awkward moment.

  Dad’s cell phone rang.

  “You got this?” he said, brow furrowed. I nodded.

  He studi
ed me for a second, then took off—probably to find David and scream at him, or worse.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the woman. “We’re so sorry about that. Would you like to have some free ice cream, too? How many in your group?”

  Her eyes were sad for some reason. “Just me and my son,” she said.

  I nodded, but before I could say anything else I heard the ding of the fryer and turned around to dump the rings onto a plate. Bringing the new batch over to the window, I opened the drawer and handed her four free Fabuland cone certificates. I kept them around for such occasions. I was pretty sure ice cream wasn’t going to keep this lady from telling people her rubber-glove story. But free ice cream would at least give it a happy ending. The best I could do beyond that was hope she was from out of town.

  Maybe the story would be funny with a few days’ perspective. That’s kind of how food service is, as long as the Department of Health doesn’t enter in.

  She appeared to be in better spirits when she took the onion rings and certificates, so I was able to relax until Dad returned. His face was red and sweaty, and you never quite knew what was going to come out of his mouth when he looked like that. When he said he had big news, my heart thumped hard, because I thought he might be about to say he’d chased David down and slugged him.

  “I didn’t want to tell you until it was final,” he said, when he caught his breath.

  He said he was buying Fabuland, the biggest amusement park in our area. This was quite the step up from our doughnuts-and-assorted-fried-goodies operation that had just served a rubber glove. Dad went into explaining how Mr. Moyer had been thinking of selling it for a couple of years, and now it was a done deal. Moyer was washing his hands of the whole thing and moving to Florida with his wife. Dad wouldn’t be in charge of only the Food Zone and his doughnut shops but also a whole theme park. I shouldn’t have been shocked, because Dad had been toying with the idea since Grandma died and left him a chunk of money. But I’d thought it was only talk, a pipe dream, because really, who buys a theme park?

  I wasn’t sure if I was excited about this, so I texted Morgan, asking her to meet me at the gates that night. We walked along the edge of the park after the Food Zone closed at seven. The park had two hours left before closing, so the lights were still on and people were still squealing on the swings and at the Pirates’ Pendulum.

  “I’m not sure that’s the kind of thing Grandma had in mind when she left Dad money,” I said a little sadly. Grandma and Grandpa had opened Cork’s Doughnut Dynasty when Dad was just a kid, and Dad had helped them open the second and third shops when he was in his twenties. Grandpa died shortly after I turned five, and since then Grandma and Dad had disagreed about a lot of things.

  “It seems weird that she didn’t leave you and Jason anything for college or whatever,” Morgan said, a little gingerly. We were both comfortable talking about almost anything. Except money.

  I turned red and was grateful that the darkness hid my blush. In fact, Grandma had set up a college fund for me and one for Jason. Mom had squirreled away some money, too. But I hadn’t told Morgan any of this. It would feel like bragging, telling her about a college fund. I was pretty sure her mother couldn’t afford to save anything for her.

  “Well, the doughnut shops have been doing well,” I said. “The extra money from my grandma just put him over the top to make the deal with Mr. Moyer less of a risk.”

  “Huh,” Morgan said, staring up at the lights glittering along the spokes of the Ferris wheel.

  “It’s kind of a shame,” she said after a while.

  “What?”

  “You can ride that thing as many times as you want to now. But you aren’t interested in doing that.”

  “Maybe I can learn to like that kind of stuff.”

  We both knew it wouldn’t happen, but Morgan humored me.

  “Maybe,” she said. “You do seem more…adjustable than some people.”

  I decided not to take that as an insult or a compliment. It was simply true, and we both knew it. We walked back to the front of the park, where Dad was waiting to drive us home. All the way to Morgan’s house, he wanted to talk about whether we would change the name of Fabuland to something else.

  “Shouldn’t ‘fun’ be in the name of the park?” he said. “I’ve always thought that.”

  “Like, Funland?” I said.

  “No. Funland sounds like it’s for little kids. Like, maybe, Fun Realm.”

  Morgan stayed silent the whole drive, braiding and unbraiding the long pieces of blond hair framing her face. But by the time Dad and I got home, she’d texted me.

  I’m not sure people feel comfortable in a “realm” was all her message said. She’d been too polite to say it out loud to my dad. She was like that around adults.

  * * *

  • • •

  I couldn’t sleep. Every time I started to drift off, I got the sensation I was still way up high, in the Ferris wheel, and would jolt awake. After it happened three times, I got up and went out to our back deck to call our cat.

  I always feel stupid calling “Emoji! Emoji!” and want to explain to neighbors that she’s a rescue cat and came with that name. Thankfully, after about three calls, Emoji flitted up the steps and sat on the back deck, unwilling to make the commitment of going inside.

  She’s a funny cat—basically outdoor in the summer and indoor in the winter. At the pound, they said they thought she was originally from somewhere in the South and somehow ended up in New Hampshire. She tested positive for heartworm exposure, which is apparently very rare up here for cats, but common in the South. Jason calls Emoji our secret Southern belle, and thinks that’s why she hates going out in the cold—she’s not used to it, and never will be. I sometimes wonder, though, if she kind of hates us in the summer, and stays out to avoid us.

  She opts instead to prowl the neighborhood all night long and only comes inside to eat or drag in a dead bird. She probably senses that I’m a little crazy in summer, always with my foot out the door, heading to Fabuland, scheming with my dad, talking about roller-coaster ribbon cuttings and corn dog prices and all kinds of things that would surely be offensive to cats if they understood them. In the winter, Emoji is a different animal, and I guess I am too. In the winter, she snuggles with me on my down comforter while I study chem or read fantasy novels. She sleeps on my head and tries to lick my hands while she watches me type on my laptop.

  I sat on the deck next to Emoji, petting her calico fur and thinking of winter. About how I never used to spend my summers counting the days till Labor Day. Emoji purred for a minute or two, as if she understood. I wanted to pull her to my chest and carry her back to bed with me. She must have intuited my impulse, because she got to her feet, stretched, and then pranced back into the trees behind the lawn.

  There was a fairly strong breeze blowing through those trees. I wondered if it had just started, or if I hadn’t noticed it while I was petting Emoji. It seemed like a storm might be coming. Usually I liked the noise and the drama of a good thunderstorm. But tonight the hiss of the wind and the rustling of the leaves made me feel anxious. At first I thought I was nervous for Emoji—wishing she’d come inside where it was safe. I hugged my knees, feeling the breeze begin to lift my hair.

  Ask Ethan.

  I felt the words shudder through me, finally demanding my attention after all the distractions of the evening. I wasn’t sure what they meant. Even if they didn’t make sense, they reminded me of what Morgan had been through. Finding someone dead. Seeing his face. The dead face of someone she’d known all her life. Someone I’d known all my life, too. We weren’t friends with Ethan exactly, but he and Morgan were from the same neighborhood. They’d known each other for a long time.

  Want to talk to you about something I saw the day I found Ethan.

  What was this something? Something specific? Or was
I overthinking it? Maybe it was about how horrible it had been, seeing that up close. Maybe I’d just failed to recognize the significance of dealing with it. This dark thing that would forever be in Morgan’s head, and that I would forever—probably—fail to relate to in any real way.

  “Emoji,” I said softly, wishing she’d come back to me.

  While I waited and hoped Emoji would reappear, I thought about the last time I’d seen Ethan. It was about a week before I left for North Carolina. As usual, he’d wanted me to let him spin his own cotton candy. And as usual, I’d let him.

  “You ever going to get purple cotton candy?” he’d asked as we waited for the first threads of blue candy to appear in the barrel of the machine.

  “We’ve always just done pink and blue,” I said. “Probably Chris gets a good deal on the standard colors.”

  Ethan pushed up his sleeves and gripped his cone. “It’s good to try new things.”

  “Yeah. Maybe I should suggest other colors.”

  “You’re so lucky.” He sighed, peering into the machine. “You’ve got the best job at Fabuland. Look. Here they come!”

  “Go for it!” I exclaimed as he started to swirl his cone.

  “It’s like cobwebs,” Ethan said, not for the first time. “You get to be a witch, taming the cobwebs.”

  “Is that what witches do?” I asked, laughing.

  “Why not?” Ethan said, shrugging, focusing his attention on wrapping his cone.

  I wished now that I had prolonged that conversation. There was so much possibility in that why not, but I hadn’t bothered to ask about it. I’d probably been eager to send him on his way with his cotton candy. To get back to playing with my phone. And why hadn’t it occurred to me to ask if maybe Ethan could be on cotton candy duty occasionally?