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The wheels of Mr. Blackwood’s hand-me-down SUV scrunch to a stop over dust and dirt, and just over the hill, there it is.
Constance shoves the stick into park, clicks off her seatbelt, and shuffles around. “Okay.” She slaps two hands on her knees. “Game plan.”
Ocean, from her perpetual station in the passenger’s side, twists to face her girlfriend, whose shoes are now safely off the gas and face hard with something like determination. “One more time,” she agrees. “Step One: Communicate.”
Connie springs up a finger with each pivotal Step. “Two: Don’t get separated,” she recites, dutifully.
“Step Three: Have the best time ever. Except,” tacks on Ocean, “addendum Step Three-B…”
“If we don’t have the best time ever, that’s okay,” they say in unison.
Constance giggles, faint, and Ocean could never help but follow suit. The bricks in her gut get a couple pounds lighter.
“Oh,” Connie suddenly says, snapping her fingers. “Can I make an impromptu addition? Step Four, if you will?”
“Motion carried.”
Constance twiddles a thumb. “Well, hopefully we won’t need it, but, I was thinking, let’s have a, like, an ‘eject switch’ word. An ‘I’m-freaking-out-and-so-it’s-time-to-get-out-of-here-like-right-this-second’ word. No questions asked.” It’s at this moment that her hands reach across the console, to give Ocean’s the customary squeeze, as they have done about a thousand times since this morning. It’s nice. It’s calm. “That sound cool?”
Ocean considers it, for half a second. “Yeah,” she says. It does, actually. “That’s, a great idea. But, what kind of word?”
Constance’s eyes are stuffed to the brim with her heart. “Anything. You pick. Just so long as we don’t accidentally say it while we’re, like…not freaking out.”
Looking back at her, feeling faintly like some organ or other might malfunction if she keeps on staring into those eyes a second longer, Ocean can think of nothing but, sweetness, almost.
“Cupcake,” it tumbles out of her own mouth, tripping on the syllables once or twice. Okay, great, stupid.
But a grin splits Connie’s face all the same and it’s too late to backpedal that particular stupid selection. “Cool. Then, in the unlikely event the world happens to be ending for either of us, we’ll let the other know with ‘cupcake.’” Ocean hopes—no, will make sure that’s not the case. “Capisce?” checks Constance.
She gives a series of squeezes—one, two, three.
Ocean gives them back—four, five, six. Still. “Capisce.”
Connie leans across the console for one chaste, solitary peck on the lips, and Ocean, of course, obliges. When her girlfriend, her BFF, pulls away, her eyes are twinkling gently.
“Then, let’s get this show on the road.”
The car doors swing open, and they do.
With Connie’s hand perpetually in hers as they amble up the easy graveled incline, this might just be okay. Systematic desensitization; exposure therapy; facing your fears; all that stuff the Internet said was supposed to help with the nightmares and the memories and those bricks that still have a home in her digestive tract, as of late.
Even a year later, everything keeps feeling a couple kilograms heavier than it should.
But what better way to spend a date with your BFF-turned-GF? Two hands engaging in self-guided clinical psychology together were better than one, she’d agreed when Ocean had pitched this very idea. And she wasn’t going to push anymore, like she so used to—anything, but definitely not this. Accordingly, it was a tentative tiptoe, those few weeks ago.
But a tenacious look had crossed Constance’s face the instant the suggestion had left Ocean’s mouth. She’d nodded, sure. “Yeah,” Connie said, “you know what, yeah. Let’s do it.”
And so a barrage of color assaults the eyes.
At the apex of the hill, Ocean’s trainers stutter to a stop.
Lights, shapes, sounds. Children with faces stained pink and blue from great heaping wads of cotton candy, skittering around with glee as they escape the flailing arms of their chaperones; greasy whiffs of oil from a frankly unreasonable amount of stands selling every fried food under the sun at equally unreasonable prices; cranks and clicks and bams and tick-a-tick-as of all kinds of contraptions, games and gimmicks and rides that beckon for your loonies even in their gross rusted disarray.
The Fall Fair’s come to town.
Connie’s clocked this, too. Her breath’s held, shoulders set, like she’s taking in all the children and the grease and the contraptions and saying, Bring it on, buddy.
Ocean gives her clammy palm a squeeze. Maybe half for her and half for Ocean.
Like that was the pin to her party balloon, all the air caught in her chest whizzes out through her rounded lips. Connie turns, to look at her.
As she always does, she gives a squeeze back; Thanks.
Ocean blinks; You’re welcome.
And into the fray it is.
They half-walk, half-trip down the hill, and it’s like someone cranks the dial on all the sensations from a six to a solid twelve. Kids swarm underfoot, tired zombies of ride attendants ushering families “right this way.” It’s almost like, a predecessor; an omen.
Like something’s about to happen, even though it’s not.
Probably.
“Fun,” Ocean mutters beneath a breath, like that might help speak it into existence. A stray toddler functioning suspiciously like a chimpanzee on Adderall nearly collides with her, and she suppresses a yelp. “Fun, fun, fun. Where’s fun? Let’s go enjoy ourselves!” she just throws that concept out there, toes bouncing within each sneaker.
“Oh, totally,” chuckles Constance, sounding only mildly queasy. She seems to swallow down whatever frog lodged itself down her throat. “You hungry?”
“No,” answers Ocean, too fast.
Constance chews her lip, grim. “Right. Me neither.”
It gets quiet again, save for laughter that sounds like screams.
Then: “Carousel!” Ocean blurts, at an excessive volume. “Let’s go to the carousel.”
“Carousel!” agrees Constance, matching the decibel level with gracious enthusiasm. “Great idea. So fun!”
With only a marginal amount of wobbling, they go to the carousel.
It’s something of a maze, the Fall Fair, though notably less stuffed with attractions than it was—last time. Ocean’s head twists to take a gander at it all, and from the corner of her vision Constance is following suit, possibly also boarded on this train of thought.
The Cyclone is gone. Of course it is; that was the bolded, highlighted, and underlined clause of the various suits thrown Wonderville’s merry way. So frightened were their lawyers, it seems, that any other even remotely perilous attraction has also been axed: the bumper cars, Gravitron, ferris wheel, all of it’s banished from the grounds, nowhere to be seen. The carousel appears to have been deemed life-altering injury-proof enough to stick around, but peering up and down the line at nothing but rubber duck ponds and hot-dog carts, not much else has.
There’s a weird sense of relief that comes with the knowledge, that this place won’t unfairly change any more lives. That nobody will strap in for the highlight of an evening and get the nightmare of a lifetime.
That there are no more tracks to derail fragile futures.
Tick-a, tick-a.
Ocean startles.
A sick, brick-ish sort of feeling chucks itself down her insides. On instinct, her fingers curl, taut. Connie’s do, too.
There’s no talking necessary; just the look Ocean exchanges with her.
And they speed-walk hand-in-hand for it.
Towards the rusted tick-clacking; the thrilled screams; the snap of the handlebar rattling bones as you’re strapped in with no exit, no eject, no way out but tumbling down, down, down. It’s some twisted will of fate that’s pushing forward, pulling by a crimson cord tethered to the bones of her ribs, down, down, down the dust path and closer, closer, closer still. A train wreck you can’t look away from, a poison apple you really shouldn’t eat, a scene from a horror movie you wouldn’t stop watching even if you could, a—
Unicorn-shaped shopping cart glitter-glued to a Hot Wheels track.
Constance putters to a stop beside her, and Ocean blinks.
At least, that’s what it looks like. Three rows of toddlers are sandwiched into the seats, fashioned to look like a saddle on a horned white horse with a multicolored mane and rosy cheeks. The “Secret Path” through the “Forest of Dreams” is, in fact, a track in one short, breezy oval, and the main event is not a “hill,” but maybe more accurately a “mild elevation” of a plastic rainbow whose paint is chipping at the edges. Everything culminates in, as the lopsided bubble lettering cheerfully proclaims: The Kiddie Koaster.
It is, pathetically and unjustifiably, awful. She’s not even sure she wants to say anything to that effect; the whole, I-almost-just-gave-myself-a-stroke-over-a-glorified-My-Little-Pony-reenactment thing. It’s senseless. It’s dumb.
Isn’t it?
Her eyes glance sideways, and there’s Constance. Frowning, worried. She must’ve been quiet for too long. A reflexive I’m fine nearly slips from her lips, but then she pauses, puts the brakes on that.
Step One, Ocean remembers. Communicate.
Right.
“That’s a roller coaster,” she communicates, unhelpfully. If anyone can legally call it that.
“It is.” Constance grimaces. “And I feel…weird about it,” she concludes.
As always, Connie’s deductions are right: Now that she’s said it like that, Ocean does, indeed, also feel weird about it.
“Maybe…we should get to that carousel,” she tries. “Um. Away.”
An errant toddler shrieks with glee over the rainbow as his mother snaps a portrait on her Canon.
“Yeah. Cool idea,” murmurs Constance.
They do.
The carousel turns out to be not in much better shape than pretty much everything else in Uranium City, Saskatchewan is: It’s old, it’s rusty, and it may or may not be radioactive. At least, by the abhorrent shade of green paint one of the chariots is sporting.
It’s also infinitely less lethal than a roller coaster, and yet.
Ocean’s fingers grip the hand she hasn’t let go of since setting foot here in an attempt to steel her. Systematic desensitization. Exposure therapy. Facing your fears. Except, this totally isn’t a fear. She is not scared. Because that would be dumb.
That just wouldn’t make sense.
“Shall we?” Ocean makes herself say, and her voice doesn’t crack or anything whilst another tinny, cheerful little rendition of what must be “Old MacDonald” starts up again, a herd of children a quarter her age clambering onto those irradiated plastic horses.
Connie’s face squares. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
But the very edges of her expression crease with anxiety only a BFF could see; tips of her filed fingernails press little white crescents into Ocean’s palm. The tiniest trickle of doubt seeps into her psyche.
Is it dumb?
Too late. The line was short—of course it was—and her brain too slow, too thick and full, and so before she knows it her legs are schlepping her up the stairs to the little round platform and there’s no turning back and everywhere is crawling with children.
Nobody said carousels were such a dog-eat-dog endeavor. Suddenly, every unicorn and pegasus and reasonably-sized chariot of clouds is sufficiently full, and no six-year-old seems particularly inclined to give up their seat on “Prancing Penelope.” The only horses left are “Clip-Clopping Carl” whose painted smile has melted clean off and “Galloping Gladys” with some less-than tasteful graffiti splattered on the flank.
On opposite sides of the platform. Away from each other.
The palm in hers suddenly feels a lot heavier. Step Two, Ocean recalls with not a little bit of feverishness. Don’t get separated.
The whole place seems to be closing in. Her non-Connie hand gets a fistful of skirt, pulls it taut. “You know, on second thought, maybe we should just—”
Click.
They whirl around.
The gate’s locked.
Ocean pales.
“Okay,” says Constance, fast, “it’s okay! This is okay!” A guy in uniform is yelling—something—not looking too pleased, pointing emphatically to the control panel in front of him. Kids are getting antsy.
“Okay!” shrieks Ocean back at her, somewhere between nodding and shaking her head.
The connection with her fingers is severed. As Connie’s sucked towards Galloping Gladys, she shoots a sweaty thumbs-up. “I’ll meet up with you after the ride! Just, right out front!” she hollers. “It’ll be all good! No sweat!”
Ocean tries for a solid OK back. Though, she’s pretty sure she touches her thumb to her pinkie in some weird, mangled gang symbol instead. “N–no, no sweat!” she trills back.
At this opportune moment, the platform jerks. Ocean yelps, scrambles into the plastic saddle, and then it’s just her, a family of four, and Clip-Clopping Carl.
“Old MacDonald” starts with gusto.
I am not scared, repeats Ocean, like a mantra, I am not scared, I am not scared, completely fearless as she clings to Carl and the pole protruding through his skull for all he’s worth. If death doesn’t come from nosediving off the plastic and breaking her neck, it might from the tetanus living on the handlebar, rusted and crawling with who-knows-what-else. On top of that, the motor’s got to be faulty, because everything jitters and lurches and shakes every couple of seconds—or, maybe that’s just her—but either way, this thing is not structurally sound, clearly put together with hot glue, Breyer horses, and a dream.
The speakers crackle directly above, simultaneously deafening her ears and unhinging her mind with every sunny little E-I-E-I-O, and the children everywhere, demanding that their inanimate objects giddy up doesn’t help. It’s an assault on the senses, and Ocean is losing.
But maybe worst of all: It’s a battle she’s fighting alone.
Behind the big pillar on which the equine death machine is spinning, Constance’s purple coils, squarish frames, jingling BFF bracelet are nowhere to be found. It’s a cold, sharp, pressing feeling, not going through this alongside her; not having her hand in hers, like the ghostly sensation of missing a limb.
Is she battling, too? Is she okay?
When the blasted thing starts to creak to a halt, it’s deliverance. Ocean nearly heaves with relief—or maybe anxiety. Or motion sickness. Either way, it’s nothing good. The Fall Fair is awful, the stupid exhausting lawsuits did nothing to Wonderville, and she now has tetanus.
Constance. She needs Constance.
Fighting sickness, Ocean stumbles herself off the Merry-Go-Round from Hell and straight for right out front.
Constance is nowhere.
“Con?” Ocean hollers, springs up to the tips of her toes for some sign of purple among this throng of heads, cups her hands over her mouth to reach her, anything. “Connie? Constance!”
All at once, a mob of chaperones descends. The entire Fair seems to decide now is the perfectly convenient time to all simultaneously make a beeline for the hot-dog cart, and Ocean is buffeted every which way. She shrills out some pardon mes, thrashes legs and arms, but nobody listens, nobody sees. Nobody knows.
And then it’s distant. So distant, in fact, it’s meaningless to every other parkgoer, but never to her. Never to one of the Six Saints.
Tick-a, tick-a.
Something’s happening.
Every limb she owns goes dead still. People part like the sea to swerve around, but it doesn’t matter. Her muscles refuse. Her ears strain.
Crack.
She snaps around. There. Frozen in time, chocked with passengers.
The Kiddie Koaster.
Ocean runs. Flies across dust and dirt, pleasant politeness, social decency, all shot to hell as her shoulders ram past bodies large and small with reckless abandon.
No, no, no.
She might scream, a weak warbling thing ripped from her larynx that’ll have her soprano out for a week. It doesn’t matter. Get them off! she might be saying, chest heaving, lungs burning as she stabs past more limbs, more uncaring onlookers—why isn’t anyone moving? They have to get off the ride, Ocean thinks she’s begging, the apex of the incline just jeering at her from over the tops of heads. You have to stop it.
She breaks free, gasps in great swallows of open air, right before the track. It can’t break.
One splayed hand lunges desperately over the fence, like if she just tries hard enough, it’ll hit the eject switch.
It doesn’t.
They’re just kids.
“Stop!”
Ocean’s head jerks up. She knows that voice. Would pick it out anywhere, in fact, in a crowd of the complete human race.
“Let them off,” cries Constance Blackwood, knuckles white on the railing just to the right. “Please. They’re—”
“Stopped.”
A half-lidded ride operator waltzes to the gate with a less than pleased look on his face. “On the half-meter hill,” he deadpans.
They both turn.
The cart full of kids is bubbling with amused giggles. Puttered to a stop—safely—at the tip of the rainbow—rather, gentle incline—Ocean could step over blindfolded—and half-asleep.
“Oh,” she croaks.
Connie whirls. “Ocean!”
In the same instant she surges to surround her in her arms, Ocean twines the both of hers around her neck, nose entrenching itself in the collar of her shirt, skin on her face itched so comfortably by each coil of her hair, the cool plastic temple of her glasses pressing into her cheek, and she holds and is held by her for a good long while.
When Ocean pulls away, both hands firmly in hers, she opens her mouth at the same time Connie does: “Cupcake.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Constance breathes. Saskatchewan be damned, she tips her forehead to hers, and Ocean obliges.
“Yeah.” Ocean gives her a squeeze, just as Constance thinks to do so, too. “Great plan.”
They do.
Nobody talks again until the doors of Mr. Blackwood’s hand-me-down SUV slam shut, the Fall Fair is on the outside, and Ocean is liquefying beside Constance in the leather of the seats.
“Well, that sucked,” Connie announces, and looks about as well as Ocean feels: tired.
Worry goes blossoming straight through her. “Are you okay?”
“I will be,” is what she tells her, truthfully. Gratitude shines in her eyes, until a frown dims them. “Are you?”
“Ditto,” Ocean mutters.
It’s quiet, for a while. Nobody drives, nobody moves, nobody speaks.
Then something occurs to her.
“Constance, I’m sorry.”
“What? No.” Immediately, Connie spins around in the driver’s seat to face her, and Ocean gets déjà vu from not a handful of hours ago. “Don’t be sorry. Ocean, it didn’t suck because—you made it suck. Or because you suggested going,” she tells her, softly. “It sucked because—I, I don’t think we’re ready.”
A sigh that comes from the bottoms of her toes and the bones of her ribs escapes Ocean. “I,” she tries, and it’s not clear what the next words are going to be until they’re already out, “didn’t know that.”
Connie smiles, a little sadly. “Yeah. Me, neither.”
She squeezes. One, two, three.
Ocean’s fingers stay limp.
The crappiest thing about all of this might be that it makes no sense. Carousels can’t kill them; nor Kiddie Koasters, or even hotdogs smothered in canola oil, and yet, Ocean’s monkey-brain decided that all of these things and more spell extinction.
It’s not logical. Ocean is smart. Ocean knows how stuff works. Fall Fairs and unicorns on rainbows don’t kill you; boarding dysfunctional roller coasters with cricks in their front axles and boozers pulling their levers does.
So why did it not feel like it?
“Hey.”
Ocean looks up, makes an indecipherable noise.
“What’s on your mind?” asks Constance.
She could always tell. It’s both wonderful, and scary, being known so deeply. “I think…” Ocean swallows. It’s humiliating. It’s pathetic. It’s almost impossible to say out loud, and yet, Step One, she’s reminded. “I was scared,” Ocean admits, wholly and candidly.
Constance doesn’t say anything, like that’s not the end of it.
It turns out it’s not.
“I’m frustrated that I was scared,” Ocean goes on, bitten fingernails starting to scrabble over Connie’s palm, faster. She’s dimly aware of a thumb drawing calming hearts and stars over her knuckles. “I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It’s like, my brain wasn’t listening to me, when I told it everything’s fine. The kids were fine, the carousel was fine, but it didn’t, but listening to me is supposed to be its whole thing, and— uuughhhh.”
She sticks her face in her starred hands and produces some more inhuman sounds.
“Like a robot.”
Ocean peers up, through some fingers.
“For me. It was like, I was being controlled,” murmurs Constance. “And someone else had the remote.”
Ocean blinks.
“Everything I thought I knew shut down, almost like, the code-stuff that was rational—that told me we're okay—got deleted. And all that was left running, was”—Constance pulls in a wobbly sort of breath—”fear.”
It feels like Ocean’s insides are ripped up then put back together again. “Oh.”
“It’s not—stupid, Ocean,” says Connie, taking her hands in hers when at some point they’d gone away and it’s always better, being tethered to her like this. “It’s not our fault. It really is like—like a bug in the system, a little chip in your brain saying everything sucks and the world is ending. And I think, all of us caught it that day. So”—she looks at her, deadly serious—”if you’re stupid, I’m stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” blurts Ocean, like a reflex.
“Right.” The look Constance is wearing goes softer. “So, none of us are. It’s just…part of the process.”
Ocean sighs. “What process is that?”
“The healing one.”
She snorts, jokelessly. “Pretty crap part.”
Constance throws a hand to her chest, clutching at an imaginary set of pearls. “Ocean! The language!”
Now she’s laughing for real. “Hey!” shrieks Ocean, through some unfortunate snickers that really aren’t helping her case. “I did not—”
“No-o-o, it’s too late. Your reputation is ruined, Miss Class President. Your title has been formally revoked.”
“Don’t—don’t even joke, stop! I have nightmares!”
It continues on like this until Mr. Blackwood’s dinky little SUV is stuffed full with Connie’s fizzy giggles and Ocean’s shrill snorts and all of a sudden, in the middle of a playful argument regarding the necessity of a Profanity Meter, nothing feels quite so heavy anymore.
Constance spins the car around and drives far, far away from the Fall Fair. After she pulls into the lot and they scurry up the stairs, inside the Blackwood apartment nestled above the Café, a frivolously childish animated movie is slipped into the DVD player, desserts are shoved into mouths, and bodies wedged beneath the same blanket.
When the too-young screams of a set of riders flying off the track of The Kiddie Koaster into the empty nothingness of space jolt them both awake on the living room couch, they’re there to tug each other back down to Earth.
Ocean thinks they both might sail away again, or have their brains grow minds of their own, or errors patched into their code, for a long while.
But what sends her back to sleep is the fact they’ve got a four-step Plan to tackle it all with—together.