Carla’s face was stunned. She stared at Dad, then glanced over at Chris.
“I think there must be some kind of misunderstanding here,” she said slowly.
“Did you or did you not put Morgan Froggett on lifeguard duty at the waterslides?” Chris asked.
He sounded exhausted.
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t want to hear any buts, Carla,” Dad interrupted. “You ask for the certification. You make sure you get that paperwork before you put someone in that chair. You check the references. And isn’t there a basic skills test you’re supposed to do, even when you have all that stuff?”
“Not when you—”
“Not good, Carla. It doesn’t look good at all.”
“But you told me—”
“Yours is one of the most important jobs in the park. Because if safety at Fabuland goes out the window, Fabuland goes out the window. You know what I’m saying? Do you know how many Fabuland jobs this town relies on? How hard it would be if we went down the tubes for a summer because some dumbshit didn’t ask for certification from a new lifeguard?”
Dad stopped to take a breath. I glanced at Carla, whose posture seemed to crumble at dumbshit.
I think Carla was trying to say something, I wanted Chris to say. Because I couldn’t manage to say it myself.
“And you know why I gave the job to you?” Dad continued. “Because I thought you were a smart cookie. But you know what, Carla? No smart cookie would do this. Only a dumbass would do this.”
I watched Carla standing there. I felt bad that on top of everything else she had to endure this while wearing only a bathing suit.
“I mean, am I wrong?” Dad demanded. “Tell me I’m wrong, Carla.”
Carla opened her mouth, but Dad didn’t let her say anything.
“Now, I know that Morgan was partly in the wrong. Who the hell knows what that kid was thinking? Maybe it was a dare. Maybe she wanted to impress someone. Maybe it was a money issue. I don’t know. But you’re the grown-up in this situation, and you were supposed to be the one to check that shit. That’s your job.”
“Ed,” Chris said softly, and then cleared his throat. “Ed. I think you’ve made your point.”
“It’s a point that needed to be made. It’s about kids’ safety. A lot of people don’t know that about me, that that’s the thing I care the most about.”
“Of course,” Chris said.
Dad sighed. “Carla, I think you need to pack your things and go.”
Carla looked confused for a second, and then looked at me. She seemed to be studying me—looking me up and down. Was there something she wanted to say to me?
I think Carla was trying to say something shot through my head again. But the air was so thick with my dad’s anger, I could barely breathe, much less speak.
I felt very small and pathetically girlish. I might as well have been saying, Mommeee! Let’s have a sprinkle partyyy! I wondered what Carla thought of me. And why, in this particular moment, it was me she was choosing to look at.
I always knew that about you. That you wanted to stay small.
Mercifully, Carla stopped looking at me. She turned and headed for the dressing room, presumably to gather her things. Chris disappeared quickly, his phone up to his ear as he went.
“Ivy, why are you here?” Dad demanded. “Get back to work, honey.”
I nodded. I was stunned silent and motionless, my head and limbs still prickling with the sting of what Carla probably thought of me. She probably thought I’d told on her. Among other terrible things.
Dad wanted Oompa Loompas, and he wanted me to be his Charlie, like Jason had been. I tried so hard, but somehow I always ended up as Veruca Salt.
FIFTEEN
Spinning cotton candy is actually therapeutic.
That’s why I asked my dad for the job at the beginning of last summer, when he first became the boss of everything.
The buzz of the machine helps me drown out the noise of the rest of the park. And I love that moment when you start to see the first few wisps begin to fly up the metal cylinder of the machine. It really is like magic, how they appear out of nowhere. And I love corralling the gossamer threads onto a little paper cone, twisting them into a cloud.
Kids love to watch the spinning. Stay behind the bubble, kids, I say as I put on my latex gloves. I think it all looks like something quite expert to them. It’s a cheap thrill for everyone involved.
I spun, looped, and bagged a couple of blue batches to have on hand, letting the noise of the machine calm my nerves from Dad’s shouting at Carla earlier. Then I waited, perched on my stool, for customers. After a few minutes, a wave of parkgoers came off the Ferris wheel, a handful of them wanting fresh-spun candy. But after they’d gone, I was alone with my grim thoughts again.
I’d screwed up royally. I’d thought I’d been talking very casually to Drea, but she’d turned around and told Maura, and then big trouble ensued. For Carla, for my dad, probably now for Morgan. Because even if my dad was willing to overlook Morgan’s role in the whole thing, people would certainly be talking about it. At the hospital, Morgan had said she wasn’t comfortable in Danville anymore. Whatever that meant, I’d just made it worse.
“Shit,” I muttered. And of course, two little girls—about kindergarten age—chose that very moment to walk right by, probably within hearing distance. Then I saw Anna Henry following close behind them. Her perfect black bobbed hair always stood out in a crowd. People at school used to call her Helmet. I resisted the urge to yell that.
“Anna!” I called instead. “Your friends want some cotton candy? It’s on me.”
The girls came running to my stand, Anna chasing after them.
“I guess that’d be okay,” Anna said. “You giving it out for free today, or what?”
“No…just…free for you guys. I’d been hoping to run into you or Lucas.”
“Ava and Portia!” Anna exclaimed rather suddenly, almost as if she hadn’t heard me. “Do you recognize Queen Elsa here?”
The two girls stared at me. One of them—the one with curly blond pigtails—put a thoughtful finger up her nose.
“You were at the parade?” I asked. “I guess I didn’t see you.”
“Yeah,” Anna said. “This is my summer babysitting job. Ava and Portia aren’t sisters, but their parents both pay me for the two of them so the girls can hang out and the parents can get a cheaper sitter. They send us here, like, once a week.”
“Sounds like a good deal,” I said, nodding at the machine. “Pink or blue, girls?”
The girls whispered to each other for a moment, and then the finger-up-the-nose one chirped, “Pink.”
I poured the pink floss sugar into the machine. Anna rummaged around in her large tote bag and extracted a wallet and round hairbrush.
“One for you?” I asked Anna.
“Oh! No thanks.” Anna grimaced. “I don’t eat that stuff.”
Probably she didn’t want anything that sticky anywhere near her hair.
“How are you holding up?” I asked, hesitating before starting the machine.
Anna shrugged, tidying her hair and twisting a couple of strands to curl playfully along her chin line, then tossed the brush back into her bag.
“Well…how do you mean?” she asked.
“It’s been a hard time for everyone, I know. It’s been hard on you…hard on Morgan. Listen, after the girls get their cotton candy, do you have a sec to talk?”
“I guess,” Anna said slowly.
After I spun each girl a giant cone, Anna told them to sit on a nearby bench.
“So…” Anna glanced back at the girls for a moment. “What is it? Briony mentioned you were trying to piece some things together from when you weren’t here.”
Of course Briony had. But I caught
myself before letting an exasperated sigh escape me. There was no such thing as a private conversation in this town, apparently.
“Yes.” I played with an empty paper cone, tapping it along the edge of the machine. “Do you mind? I mean, I know it’s still a hard subject.”
“I don’t mind.” Anna glanced back at the kids. “As long as the girls don’t hear. They don’t know about Ethan. They don’t need to.”
I put down the paper cone. I needed to try not to look fiddly and nervous. Maybe that was how I’d seemed to Drea yesterday.
“I think I got the basic picture from Briony, about how it was when you last saw Ethan,” I said. “But I just wanted to make sure I understood something else about him. Did he tell you why he’d never ridden the Laser Coaster before?”
“No.” Anna shrugged. “Maybe he was too scared.”
“But then why was he magically brave enough that day?”
“Well…who knows? Why are we ever brave enough to try something new? I guess it was just the right day.”
I didn’t reply. It hadn’t been the right day for anything for Ethan at all. But it would be cruel to point that out.
“You know…” Anna hesitated, looking thoughtful. “I’m not absolutely sure it was the first time he’d ridden the Laser Coaster. I think he might have just been saying that to get us to go on it with him.”
A wild yodel came from the top of the Ferris wheel. We both glanced over as the gondola of the noisy rider moved down closer to us. It was a young dad in a baseball cap, apparently trying to entertain the little boy sitting next to him who was very much on the low end of the legal height permitted on that ride, from my estimation.
“What makes you say that?” I said, turning back to Anna.
“Well…right after we got off, he was saying something kinda weird. He kept saying, I feel like I’ve actually done that before. It feels like this is something I’ve done before. Isn’t that weird? It feels so weird.”
“Wooo-hoooo!” The dad screamed again as his gondola swept near us and then upward.
“He said that?” I asked.
“Yes.” Anna looked slightly impatient.
Behind her back, one of the girls had yanked most of her cotton candy from its cone and was positioning it over her chin to resemble a beard. I decided not to say anything, because I wanted to continue the conversation.
Had it really been the first time Ethan had ridden the ride, then? Or was that just the story everyone told now? Because it dramatized and saddened the narrative of the night he died? I could feel my theory about him not being allowed to ride the Laser Coaster slipping away.
“Did he say it in a joking way?” I asked.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Anna admitted. “Maybe he was remembering that he’d gone on some other roller coaster somewhere else or something.”
“And was he okay on the roller coaster?” I asked. “Not seeming sick? Not too terrified? Like, not begging to get off or whatever?”
“Absolutely,” Anna said quickly. The word made me feel a little funny. Except for my dad, I hardly ever heard anyone use that word outside of television. “He was fine. I mean, he was screaming and stuff, like all of us were. But he was having a great time.”
The other girl pulled half her cotton candy off its stick and put it on her head, bobbing it up and down like a big bouffant.
“But after you guys said no to riding the Laser Coaster a second time, you didn’t see him actually go to the front gate and leave?” I asked. I cocked my head as if that might somehow soften the question. I knew I was getting into more sensitive territory here.
“No.” Anna shook her head sadly. “I think we’d have offered him a ride in that case. It’s just…the way it all happened, we didn’t see him. I think he may have gone to the bathroom right after we said goodbye. Lucas says he’s sure Ethan went into the bathroom after we said goodbye to him. He told the police that. My guess is that Ethan spent some time at his locker after that. I mean, I know he didn’t take his backpack from his locker. But maybe he was struggling to get the locker open for a while before he actually left.”
I nodded, taking this in. I had a feeling that Anna, like Briony, had gone over all this many, many times. But it was interesting that Lucas said he saw Ethan go into the bathroom as they parted ways after the Laser Coaster. I hadn’t heard that before.
“We should’ve gone on the ride with him again,” Anna added, looking at the ground. “It would’ve meant a lot to him, probably.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to make anyone feel bad. I’m just trying to understand what happened.”
“Yeah, I know,” Anna mumbled. “You talked to Reggie at all?”
“Reggie? No, not yet. I haven’t seen him, actually.”
“He’s not working today,” Anna said. “I’ve been wondering how he’s doing. I was going to check in on him too, but someone else is running the Laser Coaster today.”
Now that she mentioned it, I realized I hadn’t seen Reggie since returning from North Carolina. Reggie was hard to miss. Short with slightly spiky hair and a silly little mustache, he was always playing way-too-loud Celtic punk music on his phone to accompany his every move. He’d been a friend of Jason’s last summer, and maybe before that too.
Anna finally turned around and looked at the girls on the bench. Both were sporting fluffy hair and beards.
“Cute,” she said, putting one hand on her hip. “But Ivy gave you those to eat, my lovelies.”
I handed her a plastic bag and a few napkins.
“They can put whatever they’re not going to eat now in this,” I said. “Just try to leave some air in the bag before you tie it. It’ll last longer.”
Anna thanked me again and walked toward the carousel with the girls. After she wasn’t visible anymore, I turned the cotton candy machine back on and kept busy for the next twenty minutes bagging a few pink batches. As I worked, I couldn’t shake one thing Anna had just told me about Ethan.
That thing he’d said after going on the Laser Coaster.
I feel like I’ve actually done that before. It feels like this is something I’ve done before.
And the term he hadn’t used for that sensation—at least not according to Anna’s account—kept whirling around in my head to the rhythm of the spinning cotton candy machine, feeling more significant with each turn.
Déjà vu. Déjà vu. Déjà vu.
SIXTEEN
On my way home from work, I thought about a conversation my parents always used to have. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but Anna’s words had called up the memory.
When we were kids, Jason used to try to get away with riding his bike without his helmet. And then our mom would lecture him, usually over dinner, about why he needed to wear it. She would tell this long story about how when she was a kid nobody wore helmets and how once she wiped out on her bike and hit her head. She was unconscious for a couple of minutes and then she and her sister walked home and didn’t even tell their parents. That evening my mom got a really weird feeling, like everything that she and her family were doing—the shows they were watching, the things they were saying, even the way she picked out her nightgown and put it on—had all happened before. And then by bedtime she had started puking. She confessed the fall to her parents, who rushed her to the hospital to have a CT scan. Turns out she had a concussion, and she didn’t recover for several weeks. She had headaches and couldn’t really do her math homework for a while—her brain was too foggy.
And I got off easy, our mom would conclude. I don’t want you to go through that—that or much, much worse.
Our dad would always match our mom’s concussion story with his own.
In high school, when I was catcher, a kid from the other team made a clumsy swing and knocked me clear out. But I was back up and hit a home run next in
ning. I insisted on batting even though I felt like crap. Doctor told me later what a bad idea that was. But I went for it, and our team won by that point.
And then our mom would inevitably say something like:
Well, we don’t want Jason to miss the point, Ed. I’ve heard this story about a hundred times and I still don’t understand why the hell your coach let you do that.
I’m fairly certain Jason finally started wearing his helmet so that we could all stop having to experience this conversation. As I parked in Dad’s driveway, I observed a brief moment of gratitude that my parents were no longer married.
My dad was in the living room when I stepped inside. The TV was on, but he wasn’t watching it. He’d positioned several shovels around the room, leaning them on the couch and the armchairs. Two were snow shovels, one looked like a heavy garden shovel, and one looked more like a giant spatula than a shovel.
“What’re you doing, Dad?”
“Mostly just killing time till my vats arrive. I can’t wait. I’m taking a dinner break and then I might go in later to check things out, make sure the vats fit where we plan to do the frying. I want to get started on a practice-run doughnut right away. But I’m glad you’re here; I was wanting to ask you what you thought of them. You’ve got a flair for this sort of thing.”
“For…shovels?” I said slowly.
“Don’t think of them as shovels,” Dad said, picking up one of the snow shovels and waving it gracefully back and forth, two-handed. “Think of them as frosting spatulas. I’m not sure this one would work that well for the gentle contours of a giant doughnut.”
“Okay,” I murmured, wondering if the Carla incident occupied even a tiny fraction of his brain anymore. I wondered how someone could ever get used to firing people, let alone doing so publicly.
“Whichever type I think is best, I’ll be buying a few so we can have several people frosting at once. Not for efficiency’s sake so much, but I think it’ll give it a fun, frenetic kind of look.”
All the Pretty Things Page 14