Love in the Time of Serial Killers(76)

Still, I felt obvious as hell when I rolled by the park and turned my car in at the last minute. “I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “I used to love this place when I was a kid, and I just wanted to check it out.”

“Cool,” Shani said. “Conner never mentioned that. He did say that you used to take him to a playground in another neighborhood sometimes, until someone asked you if you lived there.”

I’d completely forgotten that, but now it came flooding back. I did used to take Conner when he was about four or five, and I was eleven or twelve, to this small playground the next neighborhood over. It only had a swing set and the tiniest jungle gym that could still be classified as such. It was in a fairly new neighborhood, and the tree cover wasn’t great, so inevitably by the time we went home Conner would be a little sunburned and probably dehydrated, but he still begged me to take him. Then, one day, some random grown-up had asked me if we lived there. My no was honest but also self-protective—like I’d ever tell some stranger where I lived.

“Then you’re not allowed to play in this park,” the grown-up had said, her tone as serious as if she’d caught us shoplifting. If I could go back in time, I’d be, like, the fuck we can’t, and keep taking Conner there every day until someone forcibly removed us. But at the time, it had spooked me enough to keep us away.

Those memories continuously surprised me, reminding me that there had been a time when Conner and I had been close, or at least I’d taken care of him a lot. But I couldn’t get wrapped up in that right now. I needed to stay focused. There were a bunch of kids playing on the equipment today—more than the number I suspected were involved in the flash mob plan—and my palms were already so sweaty I had to wipe them on my jeans.

“Does it look like how you remember?” Shani asked as we walked up to the park.

There was Sam’s sound equipment, set up next to a covered awning where a bunch of people were hanging out around a few picnic tables. Those must be the parents. I spotted more than one Capri Sun among them.

“Uh,” I said. “Not really . . .”

There was a mark we were supposed to hit, that would signal the music to start and the dance to begin. I’d assumed Sam would want to do that himself, since it was his sound system, but he must’ve deputized a parent to handle it. It made sense that he wouldn’t want to risk Shani spotting him, but I wondered where he was.

“Did you ever read that book on grief I gave you?” Shani asked.

Great. Fewer than ten yards from the mark, and Shani was asking the big questions. What was I supposed to do? Delay somehow and talk this through, while thirty-odd kids anxiously waited for their signal to start dancing? Already I noticed several kids openly staring at us. If we didn’t get this show on the road, it was going to start looking like some Children of the Corn shit real fast.

“I haven’t yet,” I said. “Sorry. I will. What’s your favorite thing to do at the playground? I always liked the swings.”

I sounded like a first-grader trying to make a friend at school. Shani looked a little taken aback, but probably just figured that I really, really didn’t want to talk about the grief book. Which was also fair.

“The swings are cool,” Shani said, then perked up as she seemed to think of a better answer. “Ooh, you know what I liked? When they had a balance beam. I have fantastic balance. Does this—”

But we’d hit the mark, and all of a sudden the opening bars of the song started, the echoey, distant singing, and then right into the chorus. It made even me flinch back a little from the shock of it being piped through the park, and I’d known it was coming. As soon as the chorus started, a couple kids jumped off the jungle gym and started dancing in unison. I could see what Sam had been saying—they were almost more a series of poses than an actual dance, and one kid was half a beat behind, watching his friends do the moves first, but it was ridiculously cute.

“Do you see that?” Shani said, her smile wide with delight. “They must know each other or something. Where is the music coming from?”

She swiveled her head toward the pavilion, but by then it was on to the slower singing, the woman talking about pissing the night away in lyrics I still couldn’t believe an elementary school would sanction. Once she came in, another group of kids started dancing toward us, doing another set of synchronized moves from the first group.

“This is unreal,” Shani shouted over the music. “Have you ever seen this kind of thing?”

“Nope,” I said.

Sam and I had watched several videos together of flash mob proposals, and we’d convinced Conner that shorter could be sweeter in these situations. Sam had pointed out that ours would be made up of kids, which meant we should err on the side of brevity, and I’d pointed out that “Tubthumping” really was the same couple of parts repeated over and over, anyway. The plan was to keep the part until Conner came out under three minutes.

Still, I couldn’t deny that it was a pretty magical couple of minutes. Each time the song shifted from the chorus to the verse, another set of kids added to the bigger group. There was a girl in particular I couldn’t take my eyes off—chubby, with curly red hair and glasses, she was swinging her arms with the wildest abandon and lowest regard for anyone who might be standing near her. I almost saw her take out a skinny boy who kept glancing toward the pavilion, as if asking the adults what he should do.