All the Pretty Things

by Emily Arsenault

  Now I dreaded going back to the machine tomorrow. I’d probably sit there alone all day with this painful memory amid the blue and pink plastic-wrapped candy puffs.

  “Emoji,” I called weakly.

  She didn’t emerge from the trees, or even make a sound. I knew she was out for the night, come what may. I went inside.

  FOUR

  BUY TWO HOT DOG’S, GET A POPSICLE OR COTTON CANDY FREE!

  I sighed as I drove past Dad’s big red LED sign before the main entrance. He changes the sign nearly every day—if not with some surprise deal, then some saying about memorable summer days or the value of hard work. He probably came up with the cotton candy promotion early this morning. Probably someone at the Food Zone had alerted him to a pile of hot dogs about to expire, and this was his brilliant plan to get rid of them. Enterprising, sure. But now I needed to chase him down and tell him to fix his apostrophe.

  I parked quickly and went in the front gate, but decided correcting Dad on his punctuation could come later. I had about a half hour to ask around about Morgan before I had to start slinging popcorn and cotton candy.

  I headed first to the Rotor—the spinning ride where the floor drops out. I used to ride the Rotor all the time. I had all my friends convinced that I loved it. Except Morgan, who knew better. Truthfully, riding the Rotor was a way to look brave without having to go on many of the high rides. The Rotor is just spinning and no heights, and I can handle spinning.

  As usual, Ben Yardley—whom everyone calls the Rotor Lord—was there early. He was doing a couple of test runs of the ride, like they do with all the rides in the morning.

  “Hey, my friend,” Ben said when he saw me. “Here to take a few spins to wake you up? It’ll probably work better than coffee.”

  Ben calls almost everyone “my friend.” I’m not sure why, but my best guess is that he smokes pot more days than not, which maybe isn’t great for name retention.

  “I don’t drink coffee,” I said.

  Ben glanced self-consciously at his Dunkin’ Donuts cup. Maybe he wondered if it bothered me that the coffee wasn’t from Cork’s Doughnut Dynasty. It didn’t, but I didn’t feel I could volunteer that.

  “I was trying to remember recently,” he said, raising the cup as if making a toast, “when I started. It must have been sometime in high school. But I don’t remember who told me to start drinking it.”

  As he lifted his arm, a stale kind of smell emanated from his orange Moxie T-shirt. He wore that thing almost every day.

  “Maybe nobody told you,” I said. “Maybe you tried it on your own.”

  “Maybe. So, what’s up?” Ben asked with a bemused smile.

  One of the reasons I chose to go to Ben first was that he was relatively easy to talk to. He generally seemed removed from the Danville gossip mill. He was a year older than Jason, and he hadn’t gone to high school here—he went in Dover, where his mother lived. He spent his summers with his dad in Danville, though, which was how he wound up working at Fabuland for so many years.

  “Um, did you hear about what happened yesterday morning?” I asked. “With Morgan? On the Ferris wheel?”

  “A little bit,” he replied. He shook the hair out of his face. “Is she okay now?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I haven’t seen her since it happened.”

  I decided not to mention that Morgan was in the hospital, because then Ben would ask if she was hurt, and I’d probably say that she wasn’t, and then it would be fairly obvious that it was her mental state they were worried about. Which I didn’t want everyone talking about either, if I could help it.

  “If you see her, give her my best, okay?”

  There was a look of genuine concern on Ben’s sunburned face. He tried again to shake the overgrown blond curls out of his eyes and I remembered fourteen-year-old me who met Ben when he worked in the Food Zone and my dad managed just that and not the whole park—I had a little crush on him then. Maybe I still would now if he took better care of himself.

  “Sure,” I said. “Also, can I ask…how did Morgan seem to you the last couple of days? I don’t mean right after she found Ethan. I know she wasn’t in great shape right after that, for obvious reasons. But I mean…after the initial shock. Yesterday, or the day before that?”

  I watched as Ben thought about my question. He screwed up his mouth and closed his eyes. This was what I’d always liked about him. That you’d always catch him being surprisingly thoughtful. Like the way he’d watch Rotor riders so carefully, and always stop the ride at the mere hint of distress.

  You okay there, my friend? he’d say to younger, winded-looking kids, leading them off the ride with his arm around their shoulders. Maybe take a little break before trying this one again, huh?

  “Well…I saw her crying in the Food Zone the other day,” he said slowly.

  “Crying while she was working at Pizza to the Rescue?” I asked.

  “I think she must’ve been taking a break because she was at one of the tables.” Ben turned off the Rotor and we both watched its inner spinning tube slow down and then come to a stop. “She was with Winnie. It looked like it was getting kind of intense, so…Winnie walked her to the bathroom.”

  “Oh, huh,” I said, wondering when Morgan had gotten close to Winnie.

  “I had to get back to work though, so I didn’t see them after that. I don’t think I saw her after my shift ended either, and I have to admit I didn’t think about it much. I figured she was still upset about Ethan, you know?”

  “Yeah.” I swallowed hard, trying not to be so petty as to wonder why Morgan was willing to cry to Winnie Malloy but not answer my texts. “But…what day was that? Do you remember?”

  “Uh…It had to be Saturday, I guess. Because on Sunday I leave early and don’t eat at the Food Zone.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Huh.”

  That was four days ago, the day she’d stopped texting me. It seemed pretty clear now that something was up that day in particular.

  “You know, you might want to just ask Winnie,” Ben said. “You’re both friends with Morgan, right?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. It had never seemed to me that Morgan and Winnie had much of a connection beyond familiar hellos. But maybe the shared tragedy of Ethan’s death had brought them together while I was gone.

  “I don’t want to bother her right now,” I said uneasily. “You know, when her family is going through so much.”

  I was kind of a liar. Sure, all of this was true. But I also found it difficult to talk to people who seemed to hate me.

  “I don’t think she’d think of it as bothering her.”

  “Well, it’s more that I don’t want to say the wrong thing. You know, I wasn’t here the week Morgan found Ethan.” It felt vaguely shameful to admit. I should’ve been here. For Morgan. For my dad. “I have some questions, but I don’t want to upset anyone unnecessarily.”

  “Well…that’s nice of you.” Ben waved at Emma Radlinger, who was walking by hauling a big clear plastic bag full of cheap stuffed animals for her prize booth. “What kind of questions?”

  “Umm…” I lowered my voice as much as I could—which wasn’t much, since someone was testing the creaky Starship 360 ride a few feet from us. “Maybe you could kind of walk me through some of what happened that day? In a general way?”

  I knew it probably sounded like a sort of morbid request. But neither my dad’s nor Morgan’s accounts had felt complete to me. I’d been careful not to press Morgan and risk upsetting her more, and my dad had been so stressed out about running the park short-staffed that I hadn’t asked him for details either.

  “Well…it was a sad day. When I got here that morning, it was kind of chaos.” Ben took a sip of coffee, frowned at the cup, and then put it down next to the metal control panel. “They’d already found Ethan at t
hat point. The police were roaming around asking everybody questions. People were crying and talking about it the best they could, and we were really short-staffed, too….Tim and Winnie took off as soon as they found out, of course. Reggie Wiggins was so upset he was in the bathroom puking and crying. Anna Henry was hysterical. Chris sent both of them home, I think. Chris and your dad were just trying to hold it together, deciding whether they should close the park for the morning.”

  “They didn’t, though, right?”

  “No. Too many guests had already arrived. Chris had me close down the Rotor and operate the carousel instead of Winnie. They switched around a few other people’s duties too, closed a couple of what your dad called ‘nonessential rides’ for the day.”

  His account pretty much matched what my dad had told me about that morning. Chris, my dad’s manager, had called a few extra people in to cover all the bases. Dad had even covered my cotton candy post. He’d bragged to me that night about how big and fluffy his puffs were.

  “The first couple of days were pretty rough. We tried to keep things upbeat for the guests, but…I think the gray mood still came through. It’s been back to normal the last few days though. With the exception of yesterday morning.”

  Yesterday morning meaning Morgan and the Ferris wheel. I didn’t really want to get into that specifically even though Ben was giving me a look.

  “Were you working till closing the night before?” I asked quickly.

  “Yeah. Well, close to it. I wasn’t the official closer. Usually it’s Winnie on Thursday night. But it wasn’t this time—she wasn’t around to walk Ethan home.”

  I didn’t know there was a set schedule, but that made sense given that every night a supervisor—usually Chris, but occasionally my dad—closed up with one other person. Usually a ride operator—Ben, Winnie, Lucas, Reggie, or Carter.

  “Who was the closer, then?”

  “I’m not sure.” Ben took a crumpled napkin out of his jeans pocket and dusted around the ride control buttons in a perfunctory way. “I think it was Reggie, but I don’t remember for sure.”

  “Why wasn’t it Winnie, if she usually took Thursdays?”

  “I don’t know.” Ben shrugged. “But I’d be kinda…careful about asking her about that. Whatever it was, I’m sure both she and Tim feel really terrible about not being with Ethan that night. I know Tim was working his other job at the grocery store, but I don’t know what Winnie was doing.”

  “I wasn’t planning to ask her about that,” I said, a little defensively. Maybe he thought I sometimes lacked a filter, like my dad. Of course I wouldn’t ask Winnie that kind of question.

  Ben adjusted the ride operator’s microphone, dusted it, then leaned down and said “Check” into it in a low voice. His voice echoed through the cylindrical interior of the ride.

  My phone vibrated and I peeked down at the screen. It was a text from Heidi.

  Just realized I can’t do the parade, sorry! Forgot I’m driving my grandma to the dr. :(

  “Shit,” I muttered, and then looked up. “Princess Parade problems.”

  “Never a dull moment.” Ben raised his cup of coffee again. “Not at Fabuland.”

  “No…never,” I said, and slipped my phone back in my pocket.

  “So.” Ben tried to blow his bangs out of his face. “You seem to be acting more like the boss around here every day. You taking over the place when the old man retires?”

  “What old man?” I said, before thinking about it. Then I felt like an idiot. I never think of my dad as an old man since he has the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old. “I mean…no. I’m not planning on that. Why?”

  Ben studied me. In the long pause, I became self-conscious about some of the grooming choices I’d made this morning. I’d thrown on a pink sundress to try to Band-Aid how I’d been feeling since yesterday. And I’d put a little too much product in my hair. It was probably kind of artificially shiny, like Dad’s.

  “Just wondering,” he said. “I’ll bet he thinks you’d be good at it.”

  This line of conversation was making me a little sick. My worst nightmares have me in charge of Fabuland as a middle-aged lady, toothless from too much cotton candy, hacking and scratchy-throated from too many stress cigarettes. I believe this nightmare began precisely when I heard my brother wouldn’t be coming home this summer.

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’m probably going to end up being a lawyer. Not an amusement park owner.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ben scowled, apparently taking this answer more seriously than I’d intended it.

  “Yeah.”

  I actually have no idea what I’m going to do with my life after Danville. But people seem to respond positively to lawyer. Probably because they think lawyers are a little cold, and think I’m slightly cold as well. I don’t agree with either sentiment, but it shuts people up because it apparently sounds like a good fit.

  “I’m not sure I can see it, Ivy.” Ben squinted at me. “I see you more like a veterinarian…or maybe even a park ranger, if you don’t mind me saying so?”

  “And what about you, Ben?” I said, feeling slightly unsettled at how well he could read me. “What do you see yourself as?”

  Ben looked surprised, and then I felt bad. I’d only meant to shift the focus of the conversation onto him instead of me. I’d forgotten, for a second, that he was older than me and I’d never heard him mention college. That there were probably no fancy career plans for the foreseeable future. I wondered, for the first time, what Ben did for the rest of the year, when he wasn’t Rotor Lord.

  Ben turned on the Rotor.

  “A chiropractor.” He snorted, taking a slug of coffee. “I’d think that would be obvious.”

  He smiled and I guessed—hoped—there were no hard feelings.

  “See you later, Ivy,” he said.

  I waved and headed toward the center of the park.

  Winnie was kind of the jill-of-all-trades at the park, so I wasn’t quite sure where to find her as I walked around. Sometimes she ran the fried dough stand and sometimes she operated the carousel. Occasionally she was the Rotor Lady, when Ben was taking a day off. Clearly my dad must’ve thought she was pretty competent, because those were all relatively important jobs. When Dad thought someone was a bit of a loser, he put them on janitorial duties or had them run the deadly boring balloon dart booth.

  I found Winnie at the carousel. She was running it without riders, checking for mechanical issues, just as Ben was doing with the Rotor. She ignored me for a minute or two, staring at the carousel as it spun. You could practically see her mascaraed lashes flapping in the wind of the passing ponies.

  As I approached, I saw that her super-short shorts were cut so that you could see just a sliver-tease of each ass cheek. She had long, enviably tan legs, which made me think of the Cinderella costume that Morgan and Heidi wouldn’t be using. Why hadn’t I thought of Winnie before? She was even blonder than Morgan and Heidi. Not that Cinderella needed to be blond, in my opinion, but I had a feeling my dad might disagree.

  I stood next to Winnie, smiling faintly at her as I waited for her to turn off the carousel music. The sound of it always rattles me and makes me forget what I’m supposed to be doing or thinking. The low thump thump thump beneath the calliope sound seems to reset my heartbeat to its own rhythm.

  After the test ride was over, Winnie didn’t turn off the music. She just looked up at me and yelled, “Did you want something?”

  “A couple things,” I yelled back. “This would be easier if you turned off the music.”

  She didn’t try to hide her annoyance at the request, but she did what I asked.

  “Yeah?” she said, taking a phone out of her pocket and glancing at it briefly before slipping it back in again.

  She was making a show of how disinterested she was in talking to me. I tried not to take it personal
ly. Understandably, she might still be pretty depressed about her cousin.

  “I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to hear about Ethan. I was away when it happened, so I haven’t had a chance…” I trailed off.

  “Thank you.” She finally made eye contact with me, nodding slightly.

  “Umm…and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Morgan.”

  “Oh. Yeah?” The second word came out unusually high-pitched. Like she was either really surprised or just feigning interest, like you do with a little kid. “Have you guys been…talking?”

  Had Morgan told Winnie she’d stopped texting me? It seemed like maybe she had. My chest started to tighten at the thought.

  “Well…not in the past few days, no,” I admitted reluctantly. “Except for on the Ferris wheel.”

  “I heard about that. I heard you’re like the big hero for getting her down.”

  I caught the briefest hint of an eye roll as she said this. Probably my dad had been spreading around an exaggerated account of my “heroics.”

  “Oh, um, anyway, someone told me Morgan was crying on Wednesday in the Food Zone,” I said. “While you were with her, talking to her.”

  Winnie’s grip on her hip tightened, her fingernails appearing to dig into the flesh above her hip-hugging shorts. She glanced away from me and looked at the carousel horses as if one of them might help her out with a response.

  “What was wrong?” I pressed. Winnie cleared her throat but still wouldn’t look at me. “C’mon, Winnie, what was wrong with Morgan?”

  “She was upset.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, unsure if that was a deliberate nonanswer. “Okay. I figured that.”

  “You know…” Winnie drew in a breath and leveled her gaze at me. “Since you weren’t here, you might not realize what it’s been like the past week or so. There’s been a lot to cry about.”

  “I get that,” I said. As soon as the words left my mouth, I cringed at how unconvincing they sounded.

  “You do?” Winnie demanded.