All the Pretty Things

by Emily Arsenault

  Ben went through the usual announcements: “Heads and backs flat against the wall, please. Feet apart. If you feel sick during the ride or for any other reason you need the ride to be stopped, please yell ‘Stop.’ Enjoy the ride, folks.”

  I pulled my shorts down as far as they would go on my hips, glad I hadn’t worn a dress today. As the ride started spinning, I stared at my knees. When I felt ready, I lifted my gaze over the top of the ride, where people could stand and look down. You don’t realize how fast you’re going until you look up. I watched the heads of the spectators swirl. I was surprised to find the ride easier to stomach than I remembered.

  Like Ben had pointed out a few days ago, spinning is easy. You just go around and around. You don’t have to see anything upside down or sideways. You don’t have to see the sky trade places with the earth. I felt silly as the ride slowed to a stop. Of course I wasn’t going to learn or think anything new spinning around like that. But I hadn’t wanted to go back to the cotton candy machine just yet. Where there’d be, admittedly, just more spinning. And staring into a slightly smaller tin can. It occurred to me that Ben and I spent our days in a similar way. I wondered if he was as sick of it as I was.

  When I got off the ride, my feet felt a little funny on solid ground. But only for a moment. I turned to wave at Ben, but he didn’t see me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I sat behind the cotton candy machine and watched people stroll by. It was almost noon, when cotton candy appetites are usually at a lull. They tend to pick up at one-thirty or two.

  I tried calling Jason back but didn’t get an answer. A few minutes later, he texted me:

  In class now. We can talk more tonight if you want.

  I drummed my hands nervously on the side of the machine. I was going stir-crazy waiting for customers—waiting for distraction from all my issues and inadequacies. It felt like I should’ve known how badly Reggie had been struggling and that Chris’s wife was sick. These things my father had told me made me feel incredibly naive and childish.

  What’s your problem? my brain kept saying. Do you want to stay small?

  I grabbed a carton of floss sugar and studied it. Every word. Super Floss Sugar! Makes 70–75 Cones. Beneath the words was a picture of a clown with a bubble coming out of his big, happy red mouth, saying Yummy yum! There was a Shakespearean sort of ruff around his neck, a yellow daisy springing from his tiny hat. I wondered when the packaging was designed. In the ’50s?

  Clowns are often all about having something comically large or small. Giant feet. A teensy car. Big round nose. Tiny bike. I’d never understood why any of it was supposed to be funny. Was there something wrong with me? I suspected the answer was yes.

  And I also suspected someone was standing behind me. I could feel it. I whirled around.

  There was Lucas Andries, staring at me through his overgrown black swoop of bangs. The last of the riders who’d been with Ethan “that night.” The one I hadn’t talked to yet. Possibly intentionally, because my brother had implied he was shady.

  “Hey,” he said flatly. “I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

  I couldn’t tell if there was a bit of a threat in that statement. I felt tiny seated in the shadow of his six-foot-plus frame. Even if his limbs were lanky, his joints knobby. When he smiled, Lucas kind of reminded me of Woody in the Toy Story movies.

  But he wasn’t smiling now.

  “Who said that?” I asked.

  “Anna,” he replied. “Of course.”

  “Oh,” I said noncommittally.

  “So?” He sounded impatient.

  “Well…I did want to ask you a couple of things, but…” I trailed off with a shrug.

  Asking questions had gotten me into trouble. I didn’t want to make things worse.

  As seriously as I took my promise to Morgan, I was beginning to wonder if it was time to give it up. Someone else had broken down and gone to the hospital, and we were none the wiser about the sparkle scorpion. Maybe we both needed to face some sad realities: Morgan, that there was no knowable explanation for her finding Ethan’s paperweight where she did, and me, that I was never really going to crack the secret of Ethan’s fall. Or get my best friend back.

  “She said you were surprised to hear that I saw Ethan go into the bathroom,” Lucas pressed.

  “Uh…no, I wasn’t surprised. I just…She’s the first one who ever mentioned that.”

  “Well, it’s true. And you know what? If I had known he was gonna walk home, I’d have offered to drive him.” Lucas pushed his hair out of his eyes and sighed. “Really, I would’ve.”

  “I know…,” I said carefully. “I’m sure all of us would have.”

  “You want to know one of the last things he said to me?” Lucas demanded, leaning in closer.

  I hesitated. Judging from his pained expression, he wanted to tell me.

  “Yes,” I murmured. “I do.”

  “He said, I’m pretty sure you farted. Because I know it wasn’t me.” Lucas made a sputtering noise, shaking his head.

  I stood there speechless, because it seemed like Lucas was laughing.

  “He and I sat next to each other on the ride.” Lucas talked so fast and was so close a tiny drop of his spit hit me in the eyebrow. “And when it was over, when we were unbuckling our seat belts, he was like, Did you poop your pants ’cause you were so scared up there? And I was like, No, dude…did you? He was all like, Well, then you farted, at least, ’cause I could smell it up there.”

  Lucas’s face was red. And I could see he was actually crying a little bit too. I glanced down at the clown carton because it was painful to watch. And because I didn’t want Lucas to feel like he was being stared at.

  “And that’s what we were talking about when we got off the ride. Whether or not I farted. Which I hadn’t, by the way.”

  “Okay,” I said. I felt my hands pull themselves into fists, resisting the urge to reach up and wipe my eyebrow.

  “And then he tried to get us all to go on again. And then he said, I’m pretty sure you farted. Because I know it wasn’t me. And he went into the bathroom. And I guess Anna and Briony were too busy talking to see him. But I did.

  “And my theory is that he was in there a while, till almost everyone was gone. And maybe that means he was kinda sick. Maybe he was throwing up, who knows? And then he tried his locker, and by then it was dark and he took off by himself. But that’s what gets me. Maybe he was sick from the ride, or something. And that’s maybe why he fell.”

  Lucas sighed, grabbed a napkin from my cart, and wiped his eyes.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Lucas was silent, and I considered what else he might need me to say.

  “I believe you,” I offered.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Do you want any cotton candy?” I asked. “It’s on me.”

  “Sure.” He sniffled. And I wondered if he had heard about Reggie. It seemed like maybe he hadn’t.

  As I twisted the cone for him, I told him what Ethan had said about me being a witch playing with cobwebs.

  “That was very astute of him,” Lucas said, taking the cone from me and staring at it.

  I had a feeling he wasn’t going to eat much of the candy. Which was fine. It was all air and empty calories anyway.

  But he thanked me. And as he walked away, I decided not to read too much into the astute comment. I’m a lot of weird things to a lot of different people. And at least Lucas had been willing to come up and talk to me.

  After he’d gone, I contemplated the Yummy yum clown for a few minutes more—and then slowly, uneasily took out my phone and Googled déjà vu strong smell cold feeling.

  The first handful of hits came up:

  Déjà vu weird smell—Epilepsy Foundation

  Déjà vu—Epil
epsy Foundation

  Temporal lobe seizure—symptoms and causes—Mayo Clinic

  People with epilepsy describe how they feel just before seizure

  Symptoms of temporal lobe seizures—WebMD

  Epilepsy? Now, that was an avenue I hadn’t expected to open up. Ethan had worked for Doughnut Dynasty for years before he switched to Fabuland. My dad and his Dynasty manager would’ve known if Ethan was epileptic.

  Still, maybe if I narrowed the search, something else would come up that applied to Ethan. Concussion, maybe, like I’d thought before?

  I held my breath. Maybe you need to stop asking questions. Hadn’t I just been telling myself that a half hour ago? Maybe you stop here.

  But at the same time, I thought about how unusually protective Katy said Ethan’s family had been lately. I curled my finger and started to click on the first site that had come up.

  “Hey there!”

  I gasped and dropped my phone, then looked up to see Ben standing beside me.

  “Aw…,” Ben said, picking up my phone from the ground. The screen was cracked. “That was my fault.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Don’t.” I hurried to grab the phone from him. “Um, did you want cotton candy?”

  “I was actually gonna ask you if you were having lunch soon?”

  “Uh…what?”

  “Can you break for lunch? You seemed like you wanted to talk more.”

  I wasn’t sure if I should be touched by this offer or worried that he’d seen what I’d been searching for on my phone.

  “Oh. Uh…sure. I guess.”

  “Well, I don’t want to twist your arm.”

  “I’ve never liked that expression,” I said absently. “But sure. Yeah. I’d like to.”

  We made our way to the Food Zone, and Ben ordered a pizza slice while I unpacked my yogurt and veggies from home.

  “What do you do when it’s not Fabuland season?” I asked him before any awkward silence had a chance to settle in.

  He seemed to brighten at the question.

  “I teach skiing in the winter. And work as a waiter at the same ski lodge where I teach. And I ski, of course. Sometimes I take classes at the community college.”

  This was a surprise. He’d never mentioned school before. Not to me, anyway.

  “Are you trying to get a degree?”

  “Not necessarily. We’ll see. I only take one class at a time. They’re expensive, and I have a short attention span. What do you do when it’s not Fabuland season?” he asked.

  I finished crunching on a red pepper stick, and hoped chewed-up bits of it weren’t stuck on my tongue.

  “I go to Danville High School.”

  “Well, I figured that. What else?”

  I couldn’t think of anything I did that could compete with hanging out in the mountains skiing for most of the year, in terms of casual coolness. I’d played the violin for a while but wasn’t very good at it.

  “I hang out with Morgan,” I said. “At least, I used to.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “She needs some time to herself, I guess.” I tried not to mumble as I said this. And I chose not to mention the whole thing about her possibly switching schools—because saying it out loud might make it closer to reality.

  Ben stretched, considering this.

  “Everybody needs that sometimes,” he offered.

  “Yeah, sure. I don’t know.”

  I didn’t want him to ask again what I did outside of Fabuland. Homework and JV field hockey just didn’t seem like good enough answers.

  I hesitated. “Why don’t you work up in the mountains in the summer, too?”

  “I used to come here and work for Mr. Moyer and stay with my uncle, who knew him. Summers, starting when I was sixteen. It’s a bad habit at this point.” He paused. “I mean…”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’m not offended.

  “How old are you?” I blurted, since I’d been wondering for a long time.

  Ben took a moment to finish his pizza crust before answering.

  “I’m twenty.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Ben wiped his face with a napkin but missed a gob of cheese on his chin.

  “You sound surprised to hear that,” he said.

  “You seem…older.”

  “I do?”

  I tried not to look at the cheese. “Yeah.”

  But then I felt like I’d said the wrong thing. I wasn’t sure if seeming older was a compliment. I wasn’t sure if my question about his age might be interpreted as my assessing his viability as a romantic interest. Which was kind of mortifying. Especially since my question kind of was.

  “Did you know Ethan Lavoie at all?” I asked, since at least that was a topic I was getting used to discussing these days.

  “Not that much. I mean, he was a nice kid, of course.”

  I noticed the of course. It seemed like a weird thing to add, if you were giving a genuine answer.

  “Someone told me recently they thought he was kind of philosophical,” I said, deliberately avoiding using Reggie’s name.

  “Huh. I would never have used that word, but maybe I didn’t know him well enough. What I remember about him was how much he seemed to know about music.” Ben pointed an index finger upward. “You hear this stuff they pipe into the Food Zone? I’m sure you know it’s on a loop—the same songs over and over again.”

  “It’s a playlist Chris created. He worked on it for a couple of weeks to make sure only the cleanest and happiest possible songs get played.” At that moment, an old ’90s song called “Steal My Sunshine” was playing. Chris had been partial to songs with the word sunshine in them.

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Well, whatever it is, Ethan knew lots of the songs really well. He’d be like, ‘Wait for it…wait for it…they’re about to get to the crescendo.’ He was into crescendos.”

  As Ben was saying this, I noticed that Zach Crenshaw was staring at us from behind the Pizza to the Rescue counter.

  “That’s funny.” I tried to refocus my attention on Ben. “I don’t remember that.”

  “Or maybe he thought I was into crescendos. Hard to know. The first time he said it, I guess I was kind of encouraging him, like, Yeah, yeah, that crescendo is really good. And then after that we were, like, crescendo buddies. I hope I was interacting with him as sincerely as I could. Sometimes, thinking about it after the fact…I don’t know.”

  Ben drummed his paper plate with the two burned remaining pieces of his pizza crust. “Did he ever ask you when your birthday was?”

  “Yeah, that was interesting, his memory for that,” I admitted. “Kind of amazing, actually.”

  Ben sighed. “It’s rough. I really feel for the family. I don’t know his mom. I’ve never met her. But it’s a lot for Tim and Winnie to deal with, I’m sure.”

  I was quiet. The topic of Winnie seemed to paralyze me more and more each time her name came up.

  “They were dealing with a lot before Ethan even died,” Ben continued.

  “Yeah?” I squeaked, unsure how eager I should be to hear more.

  “They were both juggling a lot. Different jobs and stuff. Keeping an eye on Ethan was just an extra thing, but they were trying to make it work.”

  “Does Winnie have two jobs, too?” I asked. I hadn’t heard that before.

  “Well, no. I guess she lost her waitressing job a while back when that restaurant on Main Street closed, so she wound up back here for the summer. But Tim basically works two full-time jobs. And they juggle that one car. And I know sometimes Winnie would do some of Tim’s jobs here for him, to help him make it to his deli shift.”

  “She’d do some of his jobs?” I perked up at this. “You mean her
e? At Fabuland?”

  “Yeah. Like one day I saw her mopping the men’s room floor in the restrooms by the waterslides. That’s not, like, in her job description. That’s Tim’s. But she’d sometimes do that kind of thing if he got behind.”

  “Oh,” I breathed. “So were they walking and driving Ethan home for a particular reason, you think? Do you think there was some special reason why they were doing that?”

  “Well, why wouldn’t they do that?”

  “I was starting to wonder recently if Ethan had some kind of health problem that nobody knew about?”

  “Like what kind of a health problem?” Ben asked.

  “Hey!” someone barked behind me.

  I craned my neck around. I’d been so focused on Ben that I hadn’t seen Zach Crenshaw come up from behind. There was tomato sauce splattered across the front of his apron and an indignant expression on his face. He yanked his hairnet off.

  “Can you give it a rest, hey?” he said. I wasn’t sure who he was looking at—Ben or me. Bewildered, I smiled reflexively.

  “What’re you smiling at?” Zach demanded. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?”

  “Hey…,” Ben said soothingly. “Is something wrong, Zach?”

  “Yes. I heard Ethan’s name again. And Winnie’s.”

  “We were only saying nice things,” Ben said slowly.

  “It’s not up to you to be judge and jury about what happened to Ethan, Ivy. I heard you were asking Tim about it, making him feel bad. And everyone’s heard what you did to Reggie.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered, staring at my sad carrot sticks, my little-girl lunch.

  “And now you’re…well, I don’t care who your father is.” I could feel Zach’s stare boring into the top of my head, and I was too chicken to look at him. “He can fire me if he wants to for saying this, but you need to cut it out, what you’re doing.”

  I was stunned silent for a second, then glanced up. Zach wasn’t the only one staring at me. So were a few people dining near us.

  “She’s not doing anything,” Ben said, standing up.

  “He’s not going to fire you,” I murmured. It was the first thing I could think of to say. It was probably better than It looks like you burned your last crust. But not by much.