You Were Here

by Cori McCarthy

  I stared at the floor.

  “You guys making out?” she asked hopefully.

  “Like I’d know how to do that,” I growled as I walked by her. Mik had at least one ex-girlfriend. He had three college years on me. And tattoos. Maybe I was scratching around for excuses, but Mik—Ryan—was an enigma. And kissing? There’s no way I wouldn’t embarrass myself. And all this came secondary to the life-altering confusion that I’d finally found a person to blame for Jake’s death, and I no longer wanted to.

  Chapter 52

  Zach

  Bishop was sitting outside the hospital when Zach pulled up.

  “Is Mik all right?” Zach asked, rolling the window down.

  Bishop climbed into the passenger seat. “They’re releasing him now. How are you?”

  “Better.”

  Bishop stretched. “We need to get out of here. Too many parades of senior citizens in wheelchairs, trailing IV bags. I’m having flashes of my own mortality. Can’t believe something worse didn’t happen. Can you?”

  Zach stared ahead, his knuckles drawn tight on the wheel. A few minutes clicked by.

  “So, Zach, where’d you go?” Bishop’s question hung in the stiff air of the Oldsmobile. “You don’t look so great. Should we put on the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack or something? I mean everything is cool now.”

  “Cool?” Zach stared at Bishop. Was it possible that this guy really didn’t know how uncool his life was? “What’s your first memory?”

  “What?”

  “Tell me.”

  Bishop closed his eyes and exhaled. “Something about a funeral. My great-grandpa’s funeral. People were telling stories and laughing, and I thought that was weird because my dad said we had to be serious.”

  “My first memory is my fifth birthday. I ran into the kitchen with my new toy bow and fired one of the suction cup–tipped arrows at my mom. Shot her in the butt. Surprised her. She dropped my cake on the floor. It had Darth Vader on it, and I always picture the way his helmet kind of slid off the icing and onto her shoe. She cried really hard, and I was in the middle of thinking, ‘Wow, Mom, it’s just a cake!’” Zach paused. “How many five-year-olds have that sort of perspective, do you think?”

  Bishop’s brow was bent down in a v. Good, he knew this story was going to get worse.

  “My dad came in and caught her scooping up the cake. He started screaming about how stupid she was. He said she had one job for my birthday, and she’d ruined the party.” Zach put on his best dad voice. “‘You ruined his birthday, Carrie. Look how he’s crying!’”

  He glanced at Bishop again and was pleased by his horrified expression.

  “Of course he felt bad about it later. So much so that mom woke me up that night and said, ‘Guess what? You’re going to get another present. How about a little baby brother or sister?’ She was totally beaming. I think she’d wanted another kid for years, but my dad had said no. So that’s how we got Alianna. Because I shot my mom in the butt, and my dad felt guilty about ripping her down to the fibers over floor cake.” Zach felt his body grow cold. He pictured himself looking just like Tyler, squinting maliciously at the shards of his life. Searching for the sharpest piece. Something to cut his steak with.

  “Damn, Zach. I didn’t know there was verbal abuse in your house.”

  “You think Tyler’s cruelty just sprang from the earth? That shit is passed down, baby. Like heart disease and the ability to roll your goddamn tongue.” Zach reached into his pocket and pulled out the pieces of Tyler’s phone. He dropped them on Bishop’s lap. “I’ve talked to him about what was on there. He doesn’t have a real excuse, but he’s not what you think he is.”

  “You talked to him?”

  “I had to hold him down, but yeah.”

  Bishop rubbed his face. “Zach, you drove to Athens and back today?”

  “I did.”

  They were silent for a long time. Zach eyed the entrance, waiting for the girls and Mik to come save them from this conversation. He didn’t want to think about that video ever again…or about Tyler’s I-have-to-cry-so-fuck-off face. Bishop was staring at him strangely. “What?”

  “Nothing. I just…man, I feel like I don’t know who you are right now.”

  “Of course you don’t. You think I’m a kid who’s wandered into a movie, asking what’s going on. You think I’m simple.” Zach’s hand tightened around the steering wheel. “What did you call me exactly? Narrow? Shallow?”

  “Zach, think about it from my perspective. All you’ve ever showed interest in is getting boozed, playing video games, and making out with Natalie in your basement. I’m sorry if it seems like I don’t respect you.”

  “Don’t apologize. It’s what I like about you.” Zach thought about giving him the real truth, and then…he did. “When I started to date Natalie, she was doing a project for a class. Something about the end of childhood. Coming-of-age bullshit. I think it was a request from her therapist to help deal with Jake’s death. But anyway, she started telling me about how kids who see horrible things stop being kids. And I immediately thought about my parents. About how they’d stolen all the best times of my life from me. So I went backward. On purpose. It’s like you said. All I want is to escape to my basement to make out with my girl and play Tetris with my best friend and pretend that everything can fit together like those falling bricks.”

  “Christ, Zach.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You can head off to Michigan next week and never look back.” Zach smiled sadly. “To think that at the beginning of this summer, all I cared about was finding a way to make you stay around. Thinking about life without you and Natalie? Now that’s terrifying. Well, when you come home on the holidays, you can check in on me. I’ll be in the basement.”

  “You’ve got to move out, Zach. Live in the dorms while you go to OU.”

  “And leave Alianna? Are you stupid?” He couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. He hit himself in the chest until his mouth opened and let in air. Those words were his father’s favorite insult, and they were always right on the edge. Ready to pop out. He had to be more careful. No, he had to be carefree Zach. That was the only true defense. “I’m sorry, Bishop. But think about it: How long before my dad marries his girlfriend? How long before everything is not heaven, and he starts tearing her down? Or what if it isn’t his new wife who pisses him off but Alianna?”

  Bishop looked as shocked as Zach wanted him to look. “Can she live with your mom?”

  “Maybe. Mom only has a one-bedroom apartment. My dad took the house in the divorce. I actually think that’s the cruelest thing he ever did to her. Ali and Mom don’t have the best relationship either. I’ve been trying to get them to talk more.”

  “And Tyler?”

  Zach shrugged. “Lost cause.” They were quiet for a long moment. “We should go inside and get them. We need to head back to Athens before our families send out a search party.”

  Bishop touched the pieces of Tyler’s phone in his hands. “I’ve been thinking, Zach. About Jake. About Jaycee’s map and how she’s been trying to find her brother.”

  “You think we need to go to that last place.” Zach had been thinking it too. “That abandoned amusement park?”

  Bishop nodded. “For all of us. Not just for her. This feels like something we have to see through, you know?”

  Zach felt the same way, but there was an immediate problem. “Natalie is going to freak. That cop made us promise we wouldn’t trespass again.”

  “This is more important.” Bishop opened the car door and let the pieces of Tyler’s phone spill out onto the parking lot. Zach agreed, but he still felt old and cold inside. “Maybe you can talk Natalie into it,” Bishop added. “Use your charm.”

  Zach smiled genuinely. “Holy shit. I actually forgot she was my girlfriend again.”

  Bishop lifted an eyebrow.
“She’ll kill you if you tell her that.”

  Mik came out with one girl on either side of him. He looked pretty good, considering the last time Zach had seen him. Bishop and Zach jumped out of the car to greet him.

  Zach was stiff, exhausted from driving all morning. And yet, there was a new lightness in his mind. Whatever he’d unloaded on Bishop had needed to be let out of his mind’s basement. He only hoped that the feeling lasted.

  “You all right?” Bishop asked Mik.

  Mik nodded. Natalie kept trying to walk him like an invalid, and he gave her a bug off look. Jaycee stood apart, seeming lost.

  “You okay?” Zach asked her.

  “She’s okay,” Natalie said. “We should get going. That is, if Mik’s up for the drive.”

  “Well, we”—Bishop looked to Zach for confirmation—“want to go to the amusement park.” He looked to Jaycee, and her face lit up. “What’s it called?”

  “Geauga Lake,” Jaycee said. “At least that’s what it was called once upon a time.”

  Natalie started listing all of her reasons why they shouldn’t, but Zach was distracted. He leaned against the passenger door, staring at the rectangular light of his phone’s screen. He had two missed texts from Tyler.

  Told you. Was his photographer.

  The second one was a video attachment. Zach’s finger hovered over the play arrow. This could be a trap. Tyler could have sent him something horrible to watch as a repayment for the beating.

  He pressed play but then paused it two seconds later, his heart storming.

  “Guys.” He pushed in to the center of the group, holding out his phone. “You have to see this.”

  Chapter 53

  Mikivikious

  Chapter 54

  Natalie

  No one said anything while the video went to black, but Natalie knew that she no longer had a case against going to the abandoned amusement park. They had to go.

  They had to go now.

  Natalie’s brain clicked into action. “We need supplies. I left my bag somewhere in the mall.” She shook Zach gently by the shoulder. He looked like he was seeing ghosts.

  “I forgot that he used to go by Ty,” he murmured. “Did you hear him laughing in the background? Like really laughing?”

  Natalie didn’t know what to do with that, so she turned to Mik and Jaycee. Jaycee was holding Mik’s hand and grinning excitedly, while Mik seemed determined.

  Natalie ushered them into her car. She jumped in the driver’s seat and looked up directions. Anything to keep Jake’s smiling, happily crazed face out of her thoughts. In the end, all she could say was this: he would have made a fantastic TV show host.

  Geauga Lake—or what was left of it—was surprisingly close. She actually had to drive farther to find a Walmart. Natalie left all the quiet, disconnected humans in her car and bought a hundred small things. When she got back in the driver’s seat, they were all still silent. “I’ve got food, water, an emergency kit, and this is for Bishop.” She handed him a plastic bag.

  He opened it and looked at the spray paint cans and a book of letter stencils. He grinned at her. “Aw, you remembered.”

  “I remember everything. And all of you should be aware of that and take it into consideration.”

  Mik chuckled from the passenger seat, along with Jaycee in the back.

  “Now everybody say, ‘Thank you, Natalie. You make all of this possible and fun.’”

  They laughed some more, but she waited, and finally the three of them said it in unison. Mik kept a quirky little smile like he knew something she didn’t. He probably did; no doubt all that quiet was hiding a warehouse of life experience.

  Their first view of the amusement park was of a green courtesy fence that blocked all eyes from what lay behind it—all except the mounding peak of an old, wooden roller coaster.

  The Bonemobile had to pull a wide turn and half go into a ditch to get around the cement blocks that cut off the driveway from the parking lot, but after that, it was easy to find a spot in the jungle of weeds growing up through the pavement to hide the car.

  The front entrance had been partially dismantled. The pictures Natalie had found online bragged a looming redbrick gate with a large clock tower. But that was when the park was active. All that was left was a series of brick pillars connected by a platform roof. Anchored to the pillars, a metal mesh gate securely blocked their entrance.

  Natalie looked through it. The first thing that made her pause was the saplings. No—small trees. Trees were growing inside the park, up through the broken concrete and straight through some of the remaining structures.

  “How long has this place been abandoned?” Bishop asked.

  “Almost ten years,” Natalie said. “It’s a sad story, actually. This park was built in 1887. It survived more than a hundred years. Then Six Flags kinda ran it into the ground. And then another company bought it and closed it so that it wouldn’t compete with their park in Toledo.”

  “Where are all the roller coasters?” Jaycee asked.

  “They sold them,” Natalie said. “Piece by piece. They’re as far and wide as Germany and France. I read a listing of the sales on Wikipedia.”

  “But not that one.” Jaycee pointed to the high crisscross of wooden tracks and rusted rails. The last remaining roller coaster. Natalie knew that Jaycee was thinking of the marker on Jake’s map—or maybe the final image on Jake’s demo tape of him standing with his arms out, the wind throwing up his messy hair while his grin showed off that infectiously unabashed nature that seemed to run in the genes of the Strangeloves.

  Natalie shook the secure metal fence. “What do you think? How do we get in?”

  “Up and over,” Zach said. Bishop offered his linked hands, and one by one, they boosted each other to the top of the redbrick pillars and then jumped down on the other side. Mik was the last one, and he scaled the pillars without needing a boost. Natalie marveled at his skills, flashing back to all the times she’d watched Mik and Jake repel from trees or climb the two-story-high fences around the baseball diamond with fake rubber daggers in their teeth, Rambo style. Jaycee always wanted to try it; Natalie never let her.

  Once inside the park, Natalie didn’t feel the ghostly pinch like she had at The Ridges, Moonville, and in the rotting collapse of the mall. And the park was, thankfully, nothing like the cement incline of the Gates of Hell that swept toward that iron wedge…

  Geauga Lake had been stripped.

  The buildings, bathrooms, and shops were mostly missing. Leveled. The pathways showed where someone might have walked without revealing where they might have gone. They followed one route toward the shore of the mud-green lake that the park had been named for. Bishop and Jaycee climbed onto a huge cement block, one of many that rose out of the water all the way down the shore, dotting a mysterious path.

  “What was this?” Zach asked.

  “A roller coaster,” Jaycee and Natalie said together.

  “The platforms for it at least.” Natalie closed her eyes, briefly imagining the whoosh of what standing here might have been like when the passengers screamed by. A roar of metal and sound and air. Of excitement and heat and the full-body sticky sensation of ice cream, candy, and sweat. She opened her eyes, and birds flew overhead, landing in the water with a slight splash. The sun was beginning a pink-blue sunset, sending its last warmth across her back.

  Bishop pointed across the lake at the multicolor swirl of water slides. “What’s over there?”

  “A water park,” Natalie said. “It used to be a SeaWorld.”

  “SeaWorld in Ohio?” Zach gave a short laugh but then immediately shivered. “You guys ever see Blackfish? I still get nightmares about being eaten by a killer whale.”

  Natalie held her hand up to her eyes to take in the small outline of the rides across the water. “The SeaWorld was sold to this park.
Conjoined, Six Flags turned them into the largest amusement park in the world in 2002.”

  “SeaWorld…” Bishop shook his head like he couldn’t believe something. “Guys. I’ve been here. Right here. Back when we first moved to Cleveland, my dad brought me here. I was eight, so 2007.”

  “That was the last summer it was open,” Natalie said.

  “And this is all that’s left of the world’s largest amusement park?” Jaycee asked.

  They looked around, letting the quiet sink deep.

  “Do you guys know what a Gordian knot is?” Bishop asked. “Some people think that it represents time. A tangle of sorts, but basically, it implies that anything that happened is still happening. That the past is never gone. The future already exists. Spirals upon spirals.” He cleared his throat. “So really, everyone who was ever here is still here. In a sense.”

  The wind picked up, pushing into them. Natalie thought she smelled the fall.

  Zach broke the silence first. “Well. I officially have the willies.”

  Mik laughed, Bishop shook his head, and all three boys started back to the center of the park. Jaycee and Natalie left the lakeshore together, turning their backs on the cement headstones that now remembered the path of some monumental roller coaster. Everywhere they stepped, nature was trying to come back, to crumble the walkways, to make trees.

  Natalie watched Zach walk next to Bishop. The two of them were different. Zach hadn’t been trying to get Bishop’s attention, to drill him for his opinion. They were just walking a few feet apart. Two boys, one broad shouldered and one tall and thin, and yet they both had the same silhouette when the setting sun threw their shadows askance. Zach had also been distant with Natalie since the mall. She remembered with a start that they were supposedly dating again.

  Oops.

  Jaycee ducked away from the group when they passed one of the only remaining buildings, a faded-yellow, old west–styled structure with a porch that looked like it was a sneeze from collapsing. Natalie followed her, watching the three boys head off toward the front gate. Jaycee was drawn to a deep winding chute that must have been some sort of log ride. She looked over the edge. The water had pooled and drained inside with each heavy rain, leaving muddy stains in the bottom and the evidence of animal prints and tail swishes.