by Megan Walker
“Nothing. Just thinking.” The ride ends, and I help Allison out of the dildo. We’re both walking a little crooked, but we manage to stay upright. JT leaps off of the car and bounds after us, whooping about how this time was his record. And it was, by a long shot.
He comes up behind Allison and presses himself all up her back. “Daaaaamn,” JT says. “You have got to get some of this.”
He starts humping her from behind, and I’ve finally had enough. “I’ll get us tickets for the bounce house,” I say, and I give JT a flick of my head to indicate that he follow me, which he does.
I stalk over to the ticket booth by the bounce house, muttering under my breath at JT. “Back. Off.”
“What?” JT says. “Come on, dude. You need to chill out.”
“Do not disrespect her,” I tell him. “Do you understand me? Or I swear to god I will start playing the Spice Girls night and day just to shut you up.”
JT holds up his hands. “That’s cold.”
Maybe it is, but if JT wasn’t dead, I would punch him in the face right now like I did to Mikey when he tried to get with Anna-Marie just because we happened to be broken up. “Back off,” I say again, and manage to keep from looking like I’m talking to myself while I buy the tickets.
Allison catches up to me at the bounce house. “Are you sure about this?”
“Definitely,” I tell her, and we both take off our shoes and climb up the inflatable ramp and into the enormous structure. The roar of the air pumps makes it so we have to shout to be heard, and we bounce across the entrance and into a room filled with large inflatable bubbles that pop out of the floor. I jump on top of one of the bubbles, which deflates slowly underneath me until I’m lying on my back on the mat. Allison bounces experimentally up and down next to me.
“I can do this carnival thing,” she says. “I can eat at a food truck. Look at me, being carefree.”
I laugh. “Your feet aren’t leaving the mat.”
Allison gives me an offended look and then launches herself at me, messing up my hair again. I flip off the deflated bubble and pin her to the mat. Her fingers leave little electric pulses behind, and not just because all this bouncing has charged us both with static that makes our hair float on end. “You really like touching my hair.”
She looks up at me, breathless. “Yes, I do.”
My full body rush comes with an added dose of terror that I’m going to do something to ruin everything. I shift off of her to let her up, but she grabs me by the shoulders, shoving me down again and landing on top of me. I can hear the shrieks of other bouncers off in other parts of the structure, but none of them are right here. My whole body aches for want of her, and I can’t take it anymore.
I reach my hand into her hair and pull her mouth down to mine. I kiss her and kiss her, and she responds in kind, our bodies communicating this perfect storm of longing and desire. The static crackles around us, and I groan against her lips, pulling her tighter against me—
“Hey!” someone shouts from outside. “Knock it off, you two. This is a family establishment.”
We break apart, staring at each other wide-eyed. She’s breathing as fast as I am, and I can’t help but grin at her.
“Damn,” I say, and she smiles back and nods.
“Yeah,” she says. “Damn.”
I laugh and scoop her onto her feet, then lead her out of the bounce house before we get into any more trouble. JT has disappeared somewhere—probably creeping on some girl who can’t see him look up her skirt or else sulking that I won’t let him dry hump this girl that I’m somehow on a date with. JT tried a lot of stupid things when he was alive, but that one is new.
“All right,” I tell her. “I know there aren’t any giraffes, but you still need to pick which animal I’m going to try to buy for you.”
Allison looks at me uncertainly. “Are you really going to pay two hundred dollars for one of those animals?”
“It’s a point of pride now. Let’s make a bet out of it. I say I’m going to have to pay three hundred and fifty before they’ll decide it’s worth getting fired over and give it to me. You pick a different number, and whoever’s closer to the actual amount wins.”
“And what do we win?” Allison asks.
I hesitate. “I don’t know. What do you want to win?”
“I’m not going to bet going home with you tonight, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
It seems obvious, but it wasn’t what I was thinking. I can barely stand to spend the night with myself, much less drag anyone else into it. “Noted. So what do you want to play for?”
“Winner picks where we eat dinner,” Allison says. “Anywhere. Food truck or otherwise.”
“Done,” I tell her. “Pick a number.”
“Four hundred.”
“You’re on.”
We circle the games again, and Allison chooses a stuffed bulldog wearing a spiky plush cactus costume. There’s a teenage girl working the game, which is one of those ball tosses where the balls are clearly too large to fit inside the pipes that win you prizes beyond wristbands and lollipops. Allison hangs back while I step up and lean on the counter between me and the girl. She doesn’t appear to recognize me. I think most people at this carnival are outside our target demographic. “Hey,” I say. “See that gorgeous girl in the red dress behind me?”
The girl nods.
“I need a favor.” I pull out my wallet and a couple of big bills. “I’ll pay you two hundred dollars for that stuffed animal right there.”
She turns around and looks at the cactus-clad dog, then at me. “I’m not supposed to do that.”
I drop another bill. “Two fifty.” I’m prepared to go up to seven hundred dollars for this thing. I may be generally fiscally responsible, but part of being financially healthy is knowing what’s worth spending money on.
This is it.
The girl looks around at the other booths uneasily. “You have to play,” she says. “But I can make sure you win.”
I smile. “Done.” I hand her the cash, which she pockets in her carnival apron. She hands me three balls and goes to stand behind the bunch of pipes.
I make one toss, and she catches the ball on the rebound and drops it in a hole toward the center. “Winner!” she says, and grabs the bulldog and hands it to me.
“So he really won that, huh?” Allison asks, walking up to the booth. She’s fighting a smile.
“Oh, yeah,” the girl says. “Definitely. And you should totally date him.”
Allison raises her eyebrows. “Why exactly is that?”
“Ummmm,” the girl says, and I surreptitiously push another fifty dollar bill across the counter to her. I’m sure Allison notices, but I don’t care.
“Because . . . he’s cool,” the girl says. “And like, old, but not, like, a creeper.”
Allison grins at me. “Oh, yes. Not being a creeper is one of his finer qualities.”
I link my arm through hers and hand her the improbablydressed dog. “Come on. I paid two fifty, which means I won. And the Sushi Taquito place is clearly the sketchiest of all food trucks, so that’s what we’re eating. My treat.”
Allison winces at the thought of food truck sushi, but as she trots along to keep up with me, she squeezes the dog tight.
That two-hundred-and-fifty dollar carnival animal was worth every penny.
Seven
Shane
We sit on a bench across from the carousel and eat our questionable sushi. I got the spicy tuna, and Allison picked the California roll, possibly because it doesn’t contain raw fish, but hey. I respect a good vegetable.
“You don’t have to eat that,” I say as she unwraps her taquito. “We can go somewhere else if you think it’s gross.”
“No way,” Allison says. “I’m being adventurous today.”
I
look down at my own sushi. I wonder if that’s all this is for her—some adventure she’s having before she goes back to her serious, well-ordered, and psycho-free life. I don’t know what else she would be doing. I’m clearly not fit to be dating anyone, let alone someone like her. But she scoots close to me, her stuffed dog still tucked under her arm, and the last thing I want is to walk away.
“Tell me about your family,” she says. “Are they still back in Wyoming?”
“JT and Kevin are my family.”
Allison nods. “They’re like your brothers.”
I appreciate that she doesn’t talk about JT in the past tense. He’s sitting on the bench across from us, eating cotton candy that he got from who knows where. Given that no one is looking askance at the cotton candy floating in mid-air, I assume that it, like him, is visible only to me. “Closer than brothers.”
“I have twin brothers who would argue that’s impossible,” Allison says.
“Younger brothers, right?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Much younger. Joel and Julian are still in high school.”
“And one more sibling, right?”
“My sister Nicole. We call her Nix. She’s also younger than me, but we’re still close.”
“You call her Nix,” I say, “but no one calls you Ally?”
Allison chews a bite of her sushi. “They did when I was younger. But when I got to be a teenager, I wanted to be taken seriously, so I made everyone start calling me Allison.”
“Oh,” I say, “hey, if you don’t like it—”
“No, I do. I like it when you say it.”
I like being the guy she likes saying it. More than I probably should. “Ally.”
She grins back at me, and I realize I’ve surpassed my day’s goal of making her smile by the dozens. Even if I don’t have anything else in my life together, I’m proud of that.
“So why the gap?” I ask. “Between you and your siblings.”
“They’re technically my half siblings,” she says. “My mom was a single mother. She married my dad, and he adopted me. They had Nix pretty much immediately and the boys several years later.”
“Were you ever jealous of them? For being your dad’s biological kids?”
She shakes her head. “Nah. My parents treated us all the same. If anything, I got away with more, because I was the oldest, so I was left in charge a lot.”
“I bet you liked that,” I say.
She laughs. “I did!”
“Are your parents Mexican?” I’m guessing by the last name of Mendez, mostly.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m half, though. My biological father was white, I think, but my mom is Chicana.”
“You think. So he’s not in the picture.”
She shakes her head, but she doesn’t seem upset about it. “My biological father was out of the picture before I was born. I’m not a hundred percent sure he even knew he had a kid. But it’s fine. My dad is my father, and I wouldn’t ever want him to doubt that.” She lowers her sushi taquito. “What about your parents?”
I take a deep breath. This is more stuff I don’t talk about, especially publicly. “My dad is back in Everett. I don’t know where my mom is. She travels around a lot. Last I heard she was up near San Francisco, but that was a while ago.”
“You haven’t talked to her since the accident?”
“I have,” I say. “For a minute. She just wanted to make sure I was okay. She read about it in the news.”
Allison’s starting to look sorry for me again, which I hate. “So, not a big part of your life, then?”
“Nah,” I say. “She left when I was four. She’s been in and out of my life since. Mostly out, but since I left Everett she’ll show up every once in a while. Sometimes needing a place to stay, sometimes wanting tickets to one of my concerts or something.”
Allison nods. “Are you and your dad close?”
I shake my head. “No. He’s an alcoholic and a first-class asshole. We don’t get along.” I pick at my sushi. “He came out for the funeral, though. Complained we weren’t having it in Everett, but at least he was there.”
“Nice,” Allison says. She’s being sarcastic, and that reaction I do appreciate. She pauses then, turning serious. “That must have been really hard. Losing a friend you were that close to.”
I can feel tears burning behind my eyes, and I nod quickly. Too quickly. “It was. Are you close to your family?”
“Yeah, I am.” I’m pretty sure she notices the change of subject, but she doesn’t call me on it. “Though not as close as my mom would like me to be. They’re always bugging me to come home more. I should, because they don’t live far, but I just get so busy.”
“How often do you see them?”
She looks embarrassed. “I go home for dinner about once a month.”
I shrug. “That’s not so bad.”
“No,” Allison says. “But Nix still lives there, and the boys obviously. My mom would rather I was there for dinner every night, or at least once a week. Do you ever go home and see your dad?”
“Yeah,” I say. “About every six months. His health’s not great, and he doesn’t have anyone else, so if I don’t go check in on him, nobody’s going to.”
Allison doesn’t ask me why I do that when my dad is such a dick to me, and I’m grateful. I don’t know how to explain it.
“Dude,” JT yells through a mouthful of cotton candy, “it’s because you’re messed up.”
That, above all other things, is true.
“So what other poetry do you like?” Allison asks. “Besides Sylvia Plath.”
I smile. “I like a lot of stuff. Hopkins, especially. And Robert Frost, even though that’s a cliché. It’s with good reason. Billy Collins, of course.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know who that is.”
“No way,” I say. “Hang on.” I balance my taquitos on my knee and dig out my phone. I look up “Litany,” which is my favorite of his. It’s basically a sarcastic deconstruction of love poems, but in this concise, hilarious way. All of Collins is like that, which is what I love about it.
I read the poem to her and put my phone away. Allison is staring at me, and I feel my face get hot. “I swear this isn’t a thing I do to impress girls. If it were, I’d have read you the one by Adrienne Rich about having sex with a doorknob.”
Allison laughs. “You totally have layers.”
“No!” I say, further unwrapping my sushi. “I don’t, I swear. I’m a musician. People used to read poetry, you know? Like, for fun. And then T. S. Elliot killed fun, but people still like poetry. It’s just all the poets now are song writers. The ones people actually pay attention to, anyway.”
“I’d never thought of it that way,” Allison says. “Elliot is the Prufrock guy, right?”
“Yep. Tied for most overrated poet with Walt Whitman. He celebrates himself and he sings himself and he’s definitely way too impressed with himself.”
“I don’t know anyone like that,” Allison says.
I smile. “Guilty.”
She looks at me like she’s considering something.
“What?” I ask.
“What I’m trying to reconcile,” she says, “is this guy I’m talking to being the same person as the guy who told all those lies about Anna-Marie.”
My mouth goes dry. “I am the same person. I told you I’m an asshole.”
“But you also told me you died, and you’re not the same person anymore.”
“That part hasn’t changed.” I don’t like the look of doubt in her eyes. It’s only going to make it hurt all the more when she figures out what I am.
“Why’d you do it? Why did you camp on to Ryan Lansing’s story and lie to the press about her?”
“First,” I say, “I didn’t know about Ryan’s story until after I’d a
lready done the interview. They came out hours apart, and I was up all night writing that song.”
“Okay.” Her voice is even, like she’s suspending judgment until she’s heard the whole story, but she shouldn’t. What she thought of me originally . . . it was all true.
“And second, I didn’t so much lie to the press. I more implied.”
“Really,” Allison says. “When you said that you guys had been doing the long distance thing and you had no idea she was seeing other people and you’d been in love with her since you were kids and would never love anyone but her, that was an implication.”
I elbow her. “You’ve been Googling me.”
She holds up a finger. “Not the point.”
Maybe not, but I like it. “And third, Anna-Marie didn’t care what I did. Sure, I hurt her pride, but it’s not like she gave a shit about me, and she hadn’t for a long time.” She made it very clear how little she cared when Josh Rios showed up in town. I’ve always found it special that she can be so pissed at me for hurting her, but she didn’t care enough to give me the time of day before that, and hadn’t for five years. It’s bullshit. She’s just worried about her image.
“You’d just had sex with her, hadn’t you?” she says.
Ah, yes. The footage where Anna-Marie and I got caught naked in the hot springs by a group of horny boy scouts. “You’ve seen the video?”
Allison shrugs. “Everyone with internet access has seen that video.”
Something about the too-casual way she says it makes me think it’s not just that.
“You watched it again,” I say. “Recently.”
Her cheeks turn pink and I smile. It’s never bothered me much that everyone in the world has seen me naked, and it definitely doesn’t bother me with her.
“So, yes,” I say. “We’d just had sex. Not great sex, mind you, because we were interrupted by a creepy old man and a troop of Boy Scouts and then later a fateful bat.”
“A bat? Seriously?”
“Yes. But regardless, the sex didn’t mean anything to me, and it definitely didn’t mean anything to Anna-Marie.”
