Vanishing Girls(12)

“Is she that nice to everyone?” I say, when Parker and I take our hot dogs and sodas outside, to eat under the shadow of the Ferris wheel.

“You don’t get a name like Princess without working for it,” he says, and then smiles. Every time Parker smiles, his nose wrinkles. He used to say it didn’t like to be left out of the fun. “She’ll warm up eventually. She’s been here almost since the beginning, you know.”

“The very beginning?”

He turns his attention to a miniature relish pack, trying to work the green goop out of the plastic with a thumbnail. “July 29, 1940. Opening day. Shirley joined up in the fifties.”

July 29. Dara’s birthday. This year, FanLand will turn seventy-five on the day she turns seventeen. If Parker makes the connection, he doesn’t say so. And I’m not about to point it out.

“Still eating alien slime, I see?” I say instead, jerking my chin toward the relish.

He pretends to be offended. “Le slime. It’s not alien. It’s French.”

The afternoon is a blur of rounds: scooping up litter, changing trash bags, dealing with a five-year-old kid who has somehow gotten separated from his camp group and stands, bawling, underneath a crooked sign pointing the way to the Haunted Ship. Someone throws up on the Tornado, and Parker informs me it’s my job, as the new girl, to clean it—but then does all the work himself.

There’s fun stuff, too: riding the Albatross to see whether the gears feel sticky; washing down the carousel with an industrial hose so powerful I can barely keep it in my hands; downtime between jobs when I talk with Parker about the other kids who work at FanLand and who hates who and who’s hooking up or breaking up or getting back together.

I finally find out why FanLand is so short-staffed this summer.

“So there’s this guy Donovan.” Parker starts into the story while we’re taking a break between shifts, sitting in the shade of an enormous potted palm. He keeps swatting at the flies. Parker’s hands are constantly in motion. He’s like a catcher telegraphing mysterious signs to an invisible teammate: hand to nose, tug on ear, tuck the hair. Except the signs aren’t mysterious to me. I know what all of them mean, whether he’s happy or sad or stressed or anxious. Whether he’s hungry, or had too much sugar, or too little sleep.

“First name or last?” I interrupt.

“Interesting question. Not sure. Everyone just calls him Donovan. Anyway, he’d been working at FanLand forever. Way longer than Mr. Wilcox. Knows the whole place inside and out, everyone loves him, really great with the kids—”

“Wait—was he here longer than Princess?”

“Nobody’s been here longer than Princess. Now stop interrupting. So he was a good guy, okay? At least, that’s what everyone thought.” Parker pauses dramatically, deliberately making me wait.

“So what happened?” I say.

“The cops busted down his door a few weeks ago.” He raises one eyebrow. His eyebrows are very thick and practically black, like he has vampire blood somewhere far back in his ancestry. “Turns out he’s some kind of pedo. He had, like, a hundred pictures of high school girls on his computer. It was some crazy sting operation. They’d been tracking him for months.”

“No way. And no one had any idea?”

Parker shook his head. “Not a clue. I only met him once or twice, but he seemed normal. Like someone who should be busy coaching soccer and complaining about mortgage rates.”

“Creepy,” I say. Years ago, I remember learning about the mark of Cain in Sunday school and thinking that it wasn’t such a bad idea. How convenient if you could see what was wrong with people right away, if they wore their sicknesses and crimes on their skin like tattoos.

“Very creepy,” he agrees.

We don’t talk about the accident, or Dara, or about the past at all. And suddenly it’s three o’clock and the first shift of my new job is over, and it didn’t totally suck.

Parker walks me back to the office, where Mr. Wilcox and a pretty, dark-skinned woman I assume is Donna, the woman who hoards all the Cokes, are arguing about additional security for the anniversary party, in the good-natured, easy tones of people who have spent years arguing without ever essentially disagreeing. Mr. Wilcox breaks off long enough to give me another hearty slap on the back.

“Nick? You enjoy your first day? Of course you did! Best place in the world. See you tomorrow, bright and early!”

I retrieve my backpack. When I reemerge into the sunshine, Parker is waiting for me. He has changed shirts, and his red uniform is balled up under one arm. He smells like soap and new leather.

“I’m glad we get to work together,” I blurt as we walk into the parking lot, still crowded with cars and coach buses. FanLand is open until 10:00 p.m., and Parker has told me that the night crowd is totally different: younger, rowdier, more unpredictable. Once, he told me, he caught two people having sex on the Ferris wheel; another time he found a girl snorting coke off a sink in one of the men’s toilets. “I’m not sure I could handle Wilcox all by myself,” I add quickly, because Parker is looking at me strangely.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m glad, too.” He tosses his keys a few inches and catches them in his palm. “So you want a ride home? I think the Chariot’s missed you.”