Chasing Forever Down

by Nikki Godwin

  Chapter Fifteen

  The morning sun glints off of Linzi’s rhinestone-studded flip flops and blinds me for half a second. She rocks back and forth, heel to toe, studying the whiteboard hanging outside of the turquoise snowcone stand. Summer Snow stretches across the lime green roof in bright pink letters, the letter O a snowcone. Luckily the guy ahead of us is as indecisive as Linzi.

  “Brad, dude, c’mon. Make up your mind. I’ve got real customers behind you,” the blonde behind the stand says. His lopsided smile is childlike, and his hair is as wild as A.J.’s.

   His name tag reads Alex, and Linzi instantly begins talking about her Enchanter named Alex and how she wonders if Enchanted Emily named it after snowcone guy. This Brad guy settles on blue raspberry and moves along so Linzi can study the selection list more closely.

   “Just get the usual,” Vin says from behind me.

   Reed laughs. “You’re so boring. It’s always something simple. Watermelon. Grape. Apple. You need to live a little.”

   “Fine,” Vin spits back. He leans over my shoulder and scans the flavors while Linzi orders Mango Mandarin.

  Despite Reed’s jab at Vin for being boring, I play it safe myself and order pineapple, not so much because I’m scared to live a little but more so because I don’t want my mouth to be blistering red or deep ocean blue while I attempt to sell the rest of these tickets. I need my smile today. I don’t have Miles to help me out or show me who I need to target.

  “Tiger’s blood,” Vin says. “It sounds badass.”

  But three seconds after he bites into the snowcone, tiger’s blood splatters across the sidewalk and Vin curses, something about strawberries and damn-it-fucking-coconuts. I grab his arm before he tosses it into a nearby garbage can.

  “Wait,” I say. “I like coconut. We can trade.”

  I pull the spoon from my clear pineapple ice and offer it to him, although every fiber of my confidence is mocking me and laughing at my attempt to be nice to Vin, like he’d even accept such a gesture.

  So when he hands me that bleeding red ice and says ‘thank you’, I’m too dumbfounded to respond. I stand on the sidewalk, watching the back of Reed’s T-shirt blend into the crowd as he and Vin disappear into the mass of tourists and locals near Strickland’s Boating. I attempt to drop the red ice down my throat without it hitting my tongue or teeth, but Linzi sticks her orange tongue out at me, and I realize it’s pointless. I hope her orange tongue is up for selling tickets because my mouth will look like that of a well-fed vampire soon.

   

  After an hour of listening to Linzi’s attempt to sell tickets, I see my salvation down the sidewalk. A.J. flexes his arm back, showing off the dragon across his forearm to the girl working at one of the T-shirt stands. She leans forward on her elbows in that flirty way Linzi does, and I assume she asked if he has more because he turns and shows her the crescent moon skull on his other shoulder. Neither Linzi nor I approach until Alston pulls his shirt over his head to show off the tribal art between his shoulder blades.

  I swap glances with Linzi, whose eyes are flaring with some sort of emotion that I can’t exactly decipher, and we trek forward to the T-shirt stand. The guys are already past it though, A.J. with his arms flailing and his turquoise dragon flying crazily with his motions. For him to be so thin, I really think he could take Alston right now. His eyes are flaring, just like Linzi’s, and I suddenly feel like I should be mad too.

  “Every fucking time! Every. Fucking. Time. You just have to get in the way. You can’t give me a single fucking moment!” A.J. shouts the words too loudly, and it won’t be long before some Crescent Cove cop gets word that his favorite troublemaker is at it again. God, I hope it’s not that Pittman guy.

  Alston shakes his head and just laughs. “Dude, don’t trip. All I did was show her my tat. You’re not the only one with them, you know.” He drapes his arm around Linzi, but she shrugs him away.

  “No!” A.J. shouts. “That’s not all you did, and you fucking know it! You have Blondie. Is that not enough for you?” He motions to Linzi, who obviously isn’t enough to feed Alston’s need for attention.

  A.J. doesn’t wait for an answer. He tells Alston to go to hell and cuts between two vendor booths before he disappears. The three of us stand in awkward silence while life carries on around us – volleyball, shopping, swimming – until Dexter circles Alston’s legs and drops that hot pink UFO onto the sidewalk.

  My heart erupts into a mass of burning flames. Dexter. Colby’s dog. His pet. One of the few aspects of normalcy in his abnormal life. I wonder if he takes him out on the beach for morning runs or if he plays Frisbee with him in the sand. Dexter doesn’t even know that his owner is the ultimate west coast surf star.

  But I can’t dwell on Dexter or wonder if there really is any normalcy in Colby’s life when he has to live in the shadows to hide who he used to be. Right now, I have to find A.J.

  “Where is he going?” I demand answers from Alston, but he just laughs.

  “To join the freak show,” he says.

  I wait just a second longer for a real answer, but he isn’t going to give it to me. He’s more concerned with sucking up to Linzi and convincing her that she’s the only girl he has eyes for. I leave them on The Strip, cut between the two vendor booths, and hurry back to my car. I hope Alston’s smartass remark is legit because my instincts tell me that I already know where A.J. went.

  A.J. is perched on that same orange octopus on the sea creature carousel that he sat on the night Reed and I hid in the House of Mirrors. He doesn’t acknowledge me even when I straddle the tentacle next to him. I don’t know what to say. We sit in silence for so long that I finally stand up and make a circle around the carousel. My heart silently breaks to see this beautiful piece of machinery go to waste.

  “I wish I could take this thing apart,” A.J. finally says from the octopus. “I can’t stand it, watching it rust like this.”

  He flicks a piece of orange paint from the tentacle. It floats like a leaf on a windswept morning and lands on the carousel’s metal floor. He pushes off of the octopus and jumps off the carousel. He doesn’t speak on his walk toward the giant pirate ship. I trail behind, watching the giant dragon grow larger as we draw closer.

  “I used to damn near live out here,” he says. “This was my second home...until it shut down. I didn’t have anywhere else to go when Reed and Alston were out doing their speed junkie stuff. Vin was always working, so I came here. Now it’s decaying and everyone’s moved off and Lickety doesn’t remember me and–”

   “Whoa,” I say. I grab his dragoned arm and force him to face me. “The schizo ghost?”

   He nods his head. “C’mon up,” he says, climbing into the pirate ship. “He’s not dead. He’s in a nursing home about four miles from here.”

   We settle onto the last bench seat toward the dragon’s head. I wish we could turn this thing on, let it send us higher than the rest of the carnival rides. We could see the far side of the ocean, away from Alston and Linzi, away from surfers, away from all the things that don’t feel right anymore.

  “Haley, what the hell happened to your mouth?” A.J. asks, staring directly at my tiger’s blood-stained lips, teeth, and tongue. Damn.

  “Vin,” I say. “He got a tiger’s blood snowcone, and it had coconut mixed with it, so I traded him, and now I look like a vampire.”

  “It’s kind of hot,” he says.

  From swamp creatures to vampires. God help him.

  “Tell me about Lickety,” I say, changing the subject before it ventures into whatever paranormal creature A.J. may be fantasizing about next.

  “He was a war vet,” A.J. says. He stares off into the distance while he talks. “He didn’t have anywhere else to go, and he joined this traveling carnival. They finally stayed here, but he was pretty fucked up from the war.”

  This place isn’t nearly as creepy in the daytime. The ocean splashes behind us, quietly and cal
mly, with no disruptions from undead surfers, wild storms, or territorial surf gangs. And the fact that Lickety isn’t lurking around waiting to attack me with shards of mirrors helps too.

  “He used to tell me stories, not that they all made sense, but he liked to tell them,” he says. “After the surf scene blew up and Drenaline opened, this place went to hell pretty quick. Most of them moved off, but Lickety was too far gone. The war, the carnival closing, no family – he just couldn’t take it.”

  A.J. stretches his arm out again, showing off the dragon on his forearm. I pull his arm closer to me and trace the ink with my index finger.

  “He went with me when I got this. I was underage and he signed for me,” he says. “I used to visit him in the nursing home every week, but his dementia got to a point that he didn’t remember me. He thought I was some ghetto Mexican thug coming to kill him.”

  He pulls his arm back and runs his hand back and forth over the dragon.

  I inhale and stare at the House of Mirrors. “Why the ghost story?” I ask.

  “No one around here really knew what happened to him,” A.J. says. “And it keeps stupid kids off of my carnival grounds. Sometimes Vin sends funnel cakes over there to him. They were his favorite.”

  A.J. leans forward against the railing and squeezes his eyes shut. I want to cry too, just like the last time I was here and couldn’t fight the salty tears as Reed told me about Shark’s death. I wrap my arms around A.J., and for once, someone here doesn’t push me away. He buries his face into my shoulder, and I can’t really make out everything he’s saying through the tears. Something about hating how Alston is now, how he doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and he doesn’t want me to go back to North Carolina.

  At sunset, we’re still here, sitting in the spinning teacups. A.J. has told me all about the legend behind them, about the two feuding kingdoms who were merged together after the princess fell in love with an assassin, went insane, and then murdered anyone who didn’t follow her. The maroon and gold cups belonged to her kingdom, the blue and black to her cousin’s.

  A.J. prefers the blue and black, unlike me. I’m all for the princess who went after what she wanted. She chased her forever down before the two kingdoms’ teacups were stolen in a pirate raid, cursed by a gypsy named Cornelia, and washed ashore to become part of a traveling carnival. At least that’s what the legend says.

  A.J. climbs into the maroon cup with me. He has his serious face on again.

  “You really need to listen to Vin,” he says. “He’s looking out for you, for real, even if you think he’s just being a jackass.”

  I wondered how long it’d take before someone brought up the morning of the storm, the whole “get out while you can” remark that was so clearly aimed at me. I guess this is that moment.

  “What’s his deal?” I ask, hoping A.J. will spill something to change my mind about Vin. I feel like there’s so much more that I don’t know, so much about Shark and Colby and how Vin is twisted into the middle of it.

  “He cares,” A.J. says.

  I try not to laugh at him the way the tourists laughed at me and Linzi the first time we hit The Strip.

  “Cares? He has a damn good way of showing it,” I say.

  I push off of the golden rim at the top of the cup and start walking toward my car. I can’t deal with A.J. feeding me this craziness. Vin doesn’t care. He never has, and I don’t foresee him having any major change of heart before I leave California.

  A.J. runs behind me. “Haley!” He grabs on to me and won’t let go until I face him and listen. He looks so incredibly desperate, and damn it, I care about A.J. too much not to listen.

  He exhales like it’s his last breath, exhausted and emotionally drained.

  “Look, you’re one of my favorite people in this world,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s only been this short time. You’re for real, and you have been the best friend I could’ve ever asked for. Hell, I don’t want you to leave. But the truth is, Vin knows what he’s talking about. He knows things that you don’t, and he knows you’re going to get fucked over just like the rest of us. He doesn’t want to see that happen to you.”

  “Why do you listen to him?” I ask.

  I get it – Vin took A.J. in when the world kicked him out. But still. He puts way too much faith in a con artist with a million secrets.

  A.J. shrugs. “Vin’s one of my favorite people in this world too.”

  I feel like I’m standing under a slew of blue and black flags, waiting to surrender to the maroon and gold, just like the princess’s cousin’s kingdom did so many centuries ago.

  “Forget it,” A.J. says. “Just be careful. I don’t want to see you get trapped like we did. C’mon, we have to get ready for tonight.”

  He wraps his arm around my shoulder and leads me toward my car. I question what’s happening tonight.

  “Pre-competition party?” A.J. says, seemingly surprised that I’d forgotten.

  “On a Tuesday night?”

  “Um, yeah,” he says. “You’re in California, babe. It doesn’t matter what day it is.”

  Of course. The party to celebrate Colby Taylor, Drenaline Surf, Shark’s legacy, and the upcoming sponsorship. God, I don’t even know what to wear, and Linzi will look cuter than me anyway because she’s totally doing up this whole beach babe thing to perfection. But I’m not leaving that guest house until I’ve brushed every bit of tiger’s blood out of my mouth.