Vanishing Girls(11)

John Parker makes him sound like a stranger.

“Since John Parker what?” I prompt.

She doesn’t answer, and doesn’t have to, because at that moment I see him: shirtless, straddling an open toolbox and fiddling with something beneath the undercarriage of the Banana Boat, a ride that, true to its name, looks like a giant airborne banana with multicolored sides.

Maybe he hears his name or senses it or maybe it’s just coincidence, but at that moment he looks up and sees me. I lift a hand to wave but freeze when I see his expression—horrified, practically, as if I’m a ghost or a monster.

Then I realize: he probably blames me too.

Alice is still talking. “. . . put you on crew with Parker this morning. I have a shit ton of work to do for the anniversary party. He can show you the ropes, no problem, and I’m around if you need anything.”

Now Parker and I are separated by no more than ten feet. Finally he ducks under the steel support beams, sweeping up his T-shirt at the same time and using it to quickly wipe his face. He seems to have grown another two inches since I last saw him in March, so he towers over me.

“What are you doing here?” he says. With his shirt off I can see the half-moon shape on his shoulder blade, a smooth white scar, where he and Dara burned themselves with lighters freshman year while they were drunk on Southern Comfort. I was supposed to do it, too, but chickened out at the last second.

Stupidly I tug at my T-shirt. “Working,” I say. “My mom forced me into it.”

“Wilcox got to your mom, too, huh?” he says. He’s still not smiling. “And I’m supposed to play tour guide?”

“I guess so.” My whole body feels itchy. Sweat moves between my breasts, down to my waistband. For years, Parker was my best friend. We spent hours watching bad B horror movies on his couch, experimenting with ways to mix chocolate and popcorn together, or rented foreign films and disabled the subtitles so we could make up the plots ourselves. We texted in pre-calc when we were bored, until Parker got busted and had his phone taken away for a week. We hopped his older brother’s scooter and piled on: me, Parker, and Dara, and had to abandon it and run for the woods when a cop spotted us.

Then, last December, something changed. Dara had just broken up with her latest boyfriend, Josh or Jake or Mark or Mike—I could never keep them straight, they cycled in and out of her life so fast. And suddenly she would crash movie night with Parker, wearing short-shorts and a tissue-thin shirt that showed the black lacy cups of her bra. Or I would see them riding the scooter together in the freezing cold, her arms wrapped around his chest, her head tilted back, laughing. Or I would walk into the room and he would jerk quickly backward, flashing me a guilty look, while she kept a long, tan leg draped across his lap.

Suddenly I was the third wheel.

“Look.” My throat feels like it’s coated in sand. “I know you might be mad at me—”

“Mad at you?” he interjects, before I can say more. “I figured you were mad at me.”

I feel very exposed in the high glare, as if the sun is a big telescope and I’m the bug on the slide. “Why would I be?”


His eyes shift away from mine. “After what happened with Dara . . .” Her name sounds different in his mouth, special and strange, like something made of glass. I’m half tempted to ask whether he and Dara are still hooking up, but then he would know we aren’t speaking. Besides, it’s none of my business.

“Let’s just start over,” I say. “How about that?”

Finally he smiles: a slow process, beginning in his eyes, lightening them. Parker’s eyes are gray, but the warmest gray in the world. Like the gray of a flannel blanket washed a hundred times. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“So are you going to play tour guide or what?” I reach out to punch his arm, and he laughs, pretending I’ve hurt him.

“After you,” he says, with a flourish.

Parker takes me on a tour of the park, pointing out all the places, both official and unofficial, I’ll need to know: Wading Lake, informally known as the Piss Pool, where all the toddlers splash around in their diapers; the DeathTrap, a roller coaster that might, Parker tells me, someday live up to its name, since he’s pretty sure it hasn’t been inspected since the early nineties; the small, fenced-in area behind one of the snack bars (which for some reason at FanLand have been renamed “pavilions”), which contains the maintenance hut, where the employees go to smoke or hook up in between shifts. He shows me how to measure the chlorine in the Piss Pool—“always add a little extra; if it starts burning off your eyelashes, you’ll know you’ve gone too far”—and how to operate the hand crank on the bumper boats.

By eleven o’clock, the park is crowded with families and camp groups, and the “regulars”: usually old people, wearing sun visors and fanny packs, who totter between the rides announcing to no one in particular every way in which the park has changed. Parker knows a bunch of them by name and greets everyone with a smile.

At lunchtime, he introduces me to Princess—actual name Shirley, though Parker cautions me never to call her that—an ancient blond woman who runs one of the four snack bars—excuse me, pavilions—and clearly has a major crush on Parker. She gives him a free bag of chips and me a long scowl.