Missing Pieces

by Carly Anne West

  There used to be more—lots more. A directory obscured in oily burn residue tells me at least that much. But whatever this place was, it’s dead and buried now.

  Across the concession stand—in faded white letters over red paint—reads GOLDEN APPLE AMUSEMENT PARK.

  “They made a park, too?” I ask, incredulous that Aaron didn’t show me this just as eagerly as the factory. Sure, there were no locks or machines, but there is plenty to mess with between the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster. I mean, the cars have to be around somewhere.

  “I bet I could get the carousel going again,” I say, stacking my factory treasures against a tree and racing across the overgrown park.

  I emerge from the brush to find him looking at the ground, his hands crossed over his chest. He’s acting like he’s mad at me.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, I just don’t like it here,” he says evasively.

  “Are you joking? What’s not to like? Seriously, why is this place, like, completely hidden?”

  “It’s not hidden,” Aaron says, but he almost spits it out, like he’s disgusted with me.

  “Ooookay,” I say, clearly terrible at sidestepping whatever land mine is buried under all this ash.

  Ash. Like maybe it burned down.

  “Did something … what happened here?” I ask, and Aaron looks up. His eyes look like they’re ready to shoot lasers, and I’m close enough that I think he actually might throw a punch at me, but I still have no idea why.

  Then he seems to catch himself and his shoulders relax a little. “I shouldn’t have come this way. I forgot this was here.”

  But I don’t think that’s true. I think maybe he wanted me to see it.

  “So did it, like, burn down or something?” I prod.

  Aaron just stares at me.

  “I lived down the street from a house that burned down once,” I say, starting to ramble. “It was a space heater or something, and everyone got out okay, but the house was completely torched, just like this … place … looks …”

  I keep waiting for Aaron to say something—to save me from my babbling—but he keeps staring. The sudden silence is a stark contrast from the factory only moments ago. Just when I think we’re going to suffocate under all that awkwardness, Aaron shakes his head.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says, and even though I’m relieved to go, I know I’ve let Aaron down somehow. He doesn’t say a word the rest of the way home, just a casual “See ya around” before he steps onto his unlit porch and disappears into his house.

  I replay the night in my head. The house with all its twists and turns. His dad’s … unique sense of humor. The factory. The amusement park. I try to figure out when things turned weird. Aaron was squirmy after we left his house, but that seemed to wear off once he showed me the factory. It was only after we got to the burnt remains of the amusement park that Aaron’s entire demeanor changed. The guy who shared his trove of abandoned electronics had disappeared, and the angry, scared kid he’d left in his place needed me to know something.

  “What were you trying to tell me, you weirdo?” I ask Aaron’s dark porch, because I know what it’s like to want someone to guess how you’re feeling. It’s way easier than saying it.

  I set my electronics haul beside the door and decide I’ll leave it there until the morning. Maybe by then I’ll have a plausible explanation for where they came from. I barely have time to close the front door before Mom and Dad pounce on me.

  “Did you have fun?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Are you in the same grade?”

  “Have you had dinner yet?”

  “Yeah, he’s okay. Same grade,” I say. Then I shrug. “Not hungry.”

  Mom’s palm cups my forehead. “You coming down with something?”

  “I just don’t feel like eating, okay?”

  Mom and Dad exchange a look.

  “He looks like our son,” Dad says, “but …”

  He reaches for my face, tilting my chin to see up my nose, pinching my cheeks to open my mouth.

  “I don’t know, Lu. He could be a changeling.”

  “Hardy har har,” I say, swatting Dad’s hand away.

  “Well, you have two choices,” Mom says. “You can stay here and eat like a normal twelve-year-old or you can run a boring errand with your boring mother.”

  I hadn’t noticed before that she’s wearing her rain jacket and shoes.

  “I need a book from my office,” she says.

  A book. From her office at the university.

  “Your office is near the campus library, right?”

  Mom cocks her head to the side. “Just the science library.”

  “But does it have newspapers? Like, old records?”

  Mom looks like she wants to ask another question, then loses interest. “Probably,” she says, grabbing her car keys.

  * * *

  Our shoes squeak against the orange-and-white linoleum of the Life Sciences building on the east end of campus. The university is old, and some of the original buildings are really pretty, all brick and dark wood and pillars. The east end of the grounds, though, was built sometime in the sixties, and I’m pretty sure that was the last time anyone’s touched it. That’s one of the reasons the school is so excited about having Mom on the faculty. She’s a chemist, and not just any chemist. She’s written a couple of papers on some experiment she did that got published in some hoity-toity journals, and now people know that Luanne Roth is super smart. Smart scientists mean more student enrollment, which means maybe the school will finally be able to buy some new equipment and remodel the bathrooms. Or so Dad says.

  “Which way is the library?” I ask Mom.

  “Downstairs, to the left, but, Narf, I’m only going to be a min—”

  “Meet me down there!” I call over my shoulder, disappearing down the stairs and around the dark hallway before she can tell me no.

  The science library is smaller than most elementary school libraries, which makes it easy to find the periodical section. Most of the tables are piled with neatly stacked science journals, well worn with sticky covers and dog-eared pages. Those aren’t going to help me, though.

  I keep scanning the periodical shelf until finally, in the very bottom corner, I spy a pile of old newspapers, the masthead on one I recognize from the sign on the building where Dad works: The Raven Brooks Banner.

  I sit on the ground and pull the stack onto my lap, skimming through the headlines as quickly as I can for anything with the words “Golden” and “Apple.” I’m a third of the way through the stack when I hear footsteps echoing through the hall above. I recognize my mom’s urgent stride. Even when she’s not in a hurry, she moves fast.

  “Come on,” I mutter, flipping faster through the pile, but nothing is jumping out at me. I skip to the bottom of the stack, but in my hurry, I fumble the papers and send the collection scattering.

  “Narf, are you making a mess down there?”

  I hear my mom’s footsteps begin to descend the stairs. Ready to admit defeat, I start scooping the stack back together when I spy a paper with bold letters spelling out the headline.

  I grab the paper and try to skim what I can, but Mom is almost at the bottom of the stairs. So I commit a mortal sin.

  “Aliens, forgive me.”

  Tearing the newsprint, I pull the page from the paper and shove it into my pocket before my mom pokes her head around the corner.

  “What were you trying to do, build a nest?” Mom asks, her hand massaging the back of her neck.

  “I didn’t tear anything!”

  I am, without a doubt, the world’s worst criminal.

  Mom knows it, too. She shakes her head at me, then helps me clean my mess before we leave the library mostly the way we found it.

  At home, I wait until I can hear my parents snoring before pulling the article from my pocket.

  On this day exactly one year ago, life for the Yi family changed
forever, and the town of Raven Brooks lost a piece of its heart. What should have been a day of family fun at the newly opened Golden Apple Amusement Park turned to unimaginable tragedy when a mechanical flaw in the park’s much-buzzed-about “Rotten Core” roller coaster caused the death of seven-year-old Lucy Yi.

  A close-up picture of a smiling girl stares back at me from the page, her eyes sparkling under a fringe of dark bangs. I read the caption reluctantly:

  Lucy Yi was a first grader at Raven Brooks Elementary School.

  She was a first grader, I think to myself. Was, because she’s dead now. Is that the something Aaron wanted me to guess? How could I ever have guessed something that horrific had happened right there in the same park where we were standing earlier tonight?

  I keep reading.

  “It was just so shocking. I mean, an amusement park is supposed to be a carefree place,” says Trina Bell, a former Golden Apple assembly line worker at the factory a mile from the park.

  “I’ll tell you this—no kid of mine is going to set foot on one of those contraptions ever again. This just goes to show you never really know what’s safe,” says Bill Markson as he sweeps the sidewalk in front of the Pup ’N’ Puss Pet Supply. “You know what I think? I think they rushed to open before they’d done all those safety tests they should have done.”

  Yet not all of Raven Brooks blames the Golden Apple Corporation or the builders responsible for its construction. Gladys Ewing tries to hold on to the happy memories despite the long shadow cast by the confection maker’s meteoric fall from popularity.

  “I will never forget riding the Ferris wheel with my youngest son on opening day. I’ve never seen him smile that big. People ought to be ashamed of burning that place down like they did.”

  I read Gladys Ewing’s quote three more times to make sure I’ve read it right.

  “They burned it down?” I breathe.

  In a week dominated by suffering for a family and reflection on the further tragedy that could have struck, angry parents and townspeople gathered at the shuttered Golden Apple Amusement Park to grieve together. But what was meant to be a candlelight vigil turned riotous when several disgruntled citizens turned their anger toward the park. By then, blame for young Lucy Yi’s death had fallen to the Golden Apple Corporation and the amusement park’s lead—

  I flip the page over, but all I find are stories of the neighboring town’s zoo and a sale on organic chickens at the natural grocer (when they were still selling meat, I suppose). I turn back to the article and see that the story continues on page B3.

  I lay the crumpled newsprint at my feet and lean against the bed, my head all the way back as I stare up at the ceiling. So that’s what Aaron couldn’t find a way to tell me, not that I can blame him. How do you bring up something that awful in casual conversation?

  As awful as the history of that place is, that isn’t what’s eating at me, either. What I can’t figure out is why Aaron brought me there in the first place. He obviously wanted me to know what had happened there.

  But why?

  I fall asleep with thoughts of Aaron and his family whirling through my brain.

  Mrs. Peterson’s trembling hands as she puffed away on a cigarette by the window. The look she exchanged with Aaron when his dad talked about removing bones. The way Mya’s face lost all its color just before her dad picked her up and tickled her ribs.

  That night, I dream of small, fragile skeletons crouched low to the ashy ground, bounding around a darkened Ferris wheel that’s being slowly choked to death by vines.

  I don’t exactly need another reminder that Raven Brooks is weird. Between the llama farm and the not-quite-a-grocery-store—not to mention the whole Golden Apple tragedy hidden in the woods—this town is bonkers.

  “It’s eclectic,” Dad says as we pass a woman “walking” her dog in a baby sling.

  “There’s not a mall within thirty miles!” I complain.

  “The Square has at least five stores that sell clothes.”

  “It’s gonna be all organic cotton and canvas stuff.” There’s a display in the natural grocer with straw fedoras and scratchy hemp sandals.

  “You don’t know what it’s going to be like until you see it,” Dad says about the Square, but even he doesn’t sound convinced.

  “I’m going to look like freaking Davy Crockett on the first day of school. Why don’t you just tie a piece of twine around my waist for a belt? It’s bad enough Mom swapped my pudding packs for homemade granola. I’m not bringing that in my lunch, Dad. Seriously, it’s not happening.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Dad says, looking both wounded and tickled. He pulls into a parking space in the Square and turns to me before I can escape the car.

  “Where’s all this coming from, Narf?”

  I think about bolting, but I see Dad’s finger on the power lock.

  “I mean, I’ve barely met anyone yet,” I say. “What if—” This is always the hard part: finding a way to tell my dad that I understand why we have to start over again, that I know it’s not his fault that his job is hard to keep. It’s just that every time we move, it gets harder to be invisible.

  “Remember when we moved to Redding?” I ask Dad.

  He nods, listening intently.

  “Remember how I wore that Redding Rocks shirt on the first day?”

  “The one with the granite?” Dad smiles. A good pun is never wasted on him.

  But at school, a kid asked me if I shop for my clothes at the airport. I never told Dad about that.

  “It’s nothing,” is what I say to him now. “But I draw the line at puns. No clever shirts.”

  Dad cocks his head to the side, but I get out of the car before he can prolong this conversation.

  The Square really is a square. There’s a giant copper fountain in the middle of it: Three enormous dancing apples with long, spindly arms and legs are supposed to look like they’re playing, but the way their faces are carved makes them look almost vicious. It’s super unsettling, but no one else seems to be as bothered as I am. Little kids fling pennies into the water and balance along the low brick wall that surrounds the sculpture.

  Along the perimeter of the square, shops line up side by side facing the fountain. Restaurants ranging from casual to fancy make up the corners of each side, and the shops seem to be separated by theme: a side for really little kids, then kids my age, then adults, then the sort of catchall knickknack stores my mom would say are full of “more stuff I’ll have to dust on a shelf.”

  “Oooh, they have a Wellington Hammel!” Dad’s eyes sparkle against the reflection of the fountain as he gazes upon the expensive desk ornaments and massage chairs and rushes inside to join every other dad in Raven Brooks.

  After twenty minutes, he’s nearly convinced himself that he needs a stress-reducing foam figurine called The Gnome, when a guy I don’t know comes up behind him.

  “We’ve already got you stressed out enough for The Gnome?” he asks.

  Dad turns and laughs, clapping the guy on the shoulder.

  “Even if you did, it’s not like you’re paying me enough to afford anything in this place!”

  Now they’re both laughing, and I see an equally uncomfortable kid lingering behind the guy who apparently knows how much money my dad isn’t making at the Raven Brooks Banner.

  He and my dad seem to suddenly remember us.

  “And hey! This must be Enzo,” my dad says, extending his hand to the kid, who takes it politely.

  “Nice to meet you,” the kid says. Then Dad pulls me forward and presents me.

  “This is Nicky.”

  “Dad!” I cringe.

  “Sorry, Nick. This is Nick. Narf, this is Miguel Esposito, the college roommate I told you and Mom about—the one who told me about the job.”

  “We were lucky your dad was available,” says Miguel, and I can tell he’s a nice guy because he finds an easy way around my dad’s unemployment.

  “Hey, Narf, I think you and Enzo are the same a
ge. Eighth grade, right?” he asks Enzo, who nods.

  “Maybe you two will share some classes,” Mr. Esposito says, and Enzo and I look at each other and shrug. Parents always say stuff like that, then look at kids like we’ll have the answers.

  “If you like The Gnome, you should check out The Gremlin,” Mr. Esposito says to Dad. “Twice the price, but it’s a pen, too!”

  They run off to play with their old people novelties and leave Enzo and me with exactly two things in common.

  “I don’t get it,” says Enzo. “This is the same kind of garbage they sell in airplane catalogs, but Dad says those are a waste of money.”

  I chuckle like I’ve ever been on an airplane before. Anywhere we’ve ever gone has been a few days’ drive away, and Dad and Mom never met a motel they didn’t think was “charming.” They’re road-trippers, through and through.

  “We’re supposed to be buying me clothes,” I say, and Enzo’s nice like his dad because he doesn’t ever flick his eyes down to see how worn my shirt is.

  “C’mon,” he says, walking ahead of me. “My friend’s brother works at Gear, across the Square. He’s always scoring us stuff for really cheap.”

  Gear doesn’t look like the kind of place I should be shopping, but after Enzo has an exchange with the guy behind the counter who lifts his chin at me, Enzo tells me to grab a few shirts and pairs of shorts.

  “Are you sure?” I ask, my embarrassment fighting it out with my ego because these clothes look normal, and they smell new, and at least I won’t be wearing a blinking neon sign saying I’M NEW! on the first day of school.