Then his eyes glazed over for a second.
“I go places sometimes,” he told me, his voice as thready and distant as his eyes. “Don’t know why I go places . . . I just do.”
It caught me off guard. He was around six the last time he said that. It was a whisper at bedtime, like a confession. A secret, too fragile for the light of day. I go places sometimes.
But right then I wasn’t feeling too sensitive. “Next time you go, bring me back a shirt.” He snapped out of whatever state he was in, and something inside him closed up like a camera shutter. He glanced defiantly at the ride that had almost turned him into roadkill, then looked back to me.
“Nice save, bro.” Then he put on his hat, effectively flipping me off without lifting a finger.
2
An Invitation to Ride
We found Russ and Maggie standing dangerously close to the entrance of another roller coaster—the new one, hyped up to be the mother of all thrill rides. Flaming fragments of Japanese Zero planes decorated the entrance. The ride was called, of course, the Kamikaze. The thing was a mutated hybrid, offering the bone-jarring rattles of an old-fashioned wooden coaster along with the loops and corkscrews of a hightech steel one.
I refused to look up at the dizzying monster above me, but I did see the twisting nightmare of a line in front of us, which ended at the sign saying SIXTY MINUTE WAIT FROM THIS POINT.
“Icewater Rapids was totally geriatric,” Russ said. “Blue hair and denture cream all the way.”
“I doubt we’ll get to ride the Kamikaze if we don’t get in line now,” Maggie said.
Russ levered his arm around her in his usual rib-crunching style. “It’s now or never.”
I gave him a look of casual annoyance. “Look at that line. What a waste of time. Let’s find something else to do.”
Quinn rolled his eyes, adjusted his hat, but said nothing.
“Are you kidding?” said Russ. “Miss the main attraction?”
“Do you really want to wait for an hour in that line?”
“The ride’s only been open a week, and I hear they already have three lawsuits,” Russ said. “You expect me to miss a ride like that?”
It was a good point, and I knew the three of them would end up riding. I also knew if I kept debating, one of them would suggest that I go do something else. I wanted that suggestion to come from them, not from me.
Just then some pimple-faced, buzzard-necked employee removed the chain that blocked the ride’s second line—a line that was completely empty.
“No way!” said Quinn, so excited that he almost drooled.
Suddenly I had no reasonable argument not to ride.
My panic built as people ran to the empty line like passengers leaping from the Titanic. “Guys, what’s the big deal, anyway?”
Maggie took a dangerously deep look at me. “Are you scared, Blake? Don’t be—you’ll have fun.”
“Scared? Don’t be ridiculous,” I told them. “I love roller coasters.”
“Yeah, sure,” Quinn said with a sneer.
I threw Quinn a warning glare. He swore he wouldn’t tell anyone—but then what did Quinn’s word ever mean?
“Blake’s terrified of roller coasters,” Quinn said.
I tugged on the sputnik hanging in his ear, and his head tilted to one side. “Ow!”
Russ looked at me like I was someone he didn’t know. “He’s kidding, right?”
I stammered a bit. Lying is not one of my better skills.
“Blake hates airplanes and roller coasters and fast cars,” Quinn said.
“That’s not true!”
“It is and you know it!” Quinn turned back to my friends. “He’s a grade-A chicken. Yellow as a school bus!”
That’s what did it. I don’t know if Quinn realized what he had said. I didn’t even think he knew about the School Bus Incident. But whether it was intentional or not, it got my feet moving.
“Sure, I’ll ride. Can’t wait.” I tried to sound casual about it, and that’s hard to do through clenched teeth. I forced myself forward, keeping my pace steady as I wove through the empty line. I didn’t slow down until I saw the big warning sign in bright red letters. You know the one: YOU MAY NOT RIDE THIS ATTRACTION IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, HAVE BACK TROUBLE, A HEART CONDITION, HEMORRHOIDS, WATER ON THE KNEE, BLAH-BLAH-BLAH. I slowed down, glanced at the emergency exit, and got an unwanted blast of déjà vu. I knew I hadn’t been here before, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.
“What’s the matter?” Russ asked. “Feeling a pregnancy coming on?”
I laughed, but I had a hard time tearing my eyes away from the emergency exit sign. Quinn, on the other hand, never even looked. Like everything else in his life, he crashed forward, caution the first casualty.
It took only a few minutes to reach the ride. Quinn, of course, grabbed the front car, smiling back at me. “Next stop, Willoughby,” he said, quoting the old Twilight Zone episode. “Room for one more.”
Russ and Maggie took the seat behind him. I stood there, frozen.
“C’mon, Blake,” Russ said. “One last thrill before the ivy.”
Ivy, I recalled, is what they generally put on a grave.
“Very funny,” I said a moment before I realized that he really meant Columbia University, which is an Ivy League school. Duh. I took my place next to Quinn, my feet uncomfortably crossed in front of me. I pulled down the lap bar, double-checked it, then triple-checked it. Quinn snickered at the expression that must have filled my face.
“Are we having fun yet?”
“Just shut up, okay?”
The little train jerked forward and began to ratchet up a steep climb toward the first drop. “You gotta live for this, bro,” Quinn said. “Live for it, like I do.”
The Kamikaze dragged us heavenward and reached the peak of its first drop. We lingered for a moment at the peak, then hurled into a suicide plunge. My stomach tried to escape though my eyeballs. My brain became a pancake pressed to the dome of my skull. Quinn whooped and wailed, loving the feeling. You gotta live for it, he had said, but right now I just wanted to live through it.
The safety bar offered no safety at all, and all at once I was back there again.. ..
Seven years old, spinning out of control. My first ride . . .
No! I told myself. No, I would not go there. I wouldn’t think about it. I pushed the memory down so deep, not even the Kamikaze could shake it loose.
The roller coaster bottomed out and turned sharply to the left, spinning into a double corkscrew. Quinn’s hands were in the air as he screamed with the thrill of the ride. I gripped the safety bar, gritting my rattling teeth.
The Kamikaze doubled back, and the force of the turn cut into my side as we shot toward an insane loop. My head was pressed forward by g-forces. The earth and sky switched places, and back again. Then, as we came out of the loop, I caught sight of a wooden support strut tearing away from the weblike scaffolding of the Kamikaze. The thick pole plunged like a felled tree.
“No!” I screamed. “No!”
It wasn’t my imagination. It was real! Crossbeams fell away next to me. The rattle of the ride intensified. When I turned my head, I caught sight of the damaged part of the ride, but we were speeding away from it, hitting a trough and rising again. Then the ride took a wide U-turn and headed back toward the damaged section.
Another support beam broke away. Big heavy white timbers tumbled down, bouncing off the track, taking more of the ride with it. Others saw the danger now.
“Do you see that?” yelled Quinn. “Do you see it!” The screams of fear were the same as the screams of joy. I tugged at my lap bar, but what did I think I could do? Jump?
The damage was right in front of us now. The last falling crossbeam pulled away all the support beneath the track, leaving us to face a rickety trestle. Just the track and nothing beneath. For a moment I thought we’d make it across, but the left rail fell away and then the right, leaving a twenty-foot gap and a hundred-foot fall.
I could do nothing but scream as the Kamikaze left the track, the rumbling and rattling giving way to a deadly silence as smooth as wet ice, then a vertical drop, spiraling at the full force of gravity. My face was an open wail. The wind, the light of the park, the whole world disappeared into my screaming mouth as the bottom dropped out of the world, turning into a black misty pit.
Darkness.
More darkness ...
And then the lights of the Kamikaze station blazed around me as the little train came to a jarring stop and the lap bars all popped up in unison. The ride was over, and I was left with the mind-frying memory of something that could not have happened, but did.
“Cool!” screamed Quinn. “Did you see how the track fell away?”
“Yeah,” said Maggie. “It looked so real.”
“I wonder how they do that,” Russ said.
I looked up. The support struts and dangling crossbeams rose against gravity, reassembling themselves like the collapsing bridge at Universal Studios. Only then did I see the single hidden track that brought us into the vertical dive and back into the station once the false track fell away.
The ride attendant turned to me. “Hey, you have to get out. If you want another ride, you’ll have to get back in line.”
I gladly vacated my spot.
On the way out we were all given pins that said I DIED ON THE KAMIKAZE.
My hand shook as I tried to drink a Coke. I wished my friends weren’t watching me.
“Didn’t mean to scare you, dude,” Russ said. “I thought everyone knew what was going to happen. Jeez, they’ve been showing the commercial for months, before the ride even opened.”
Maggie put her hand on mine. “It’s okay. To be honest, I was pretty shaken up myself.”
I went a little red at Maggie’s touch. Russ noticed how Maggie held my hand, and he put her in his lover’s choke-hold. “He’ll get over it,” Russ said.
We were on the midway now. Quinn was hurling baseballs at a stack of resistant silver bottles that just wouldn’t fall from the pedestal. He wore his Kamikaze pin like a Congressional Medal of Honor.
“Why don’t you stick it through your belly button?” I suggested.
He pointed at his hat and threw another ball. “That ride was a life-altering experience,” he said, although his life didn’t seem altered much at all. Even now, he hurled those balls at the bottles with a certain fury—the same fury that followed all of his dealings. His high from the ride was already fading, and I knew he’d be impossible to live with once it was entirely gone.
Up above, a new batch of victims plunged from the fracturing beams of the Kamikaze. I forced myself to watch, this time seeing the single dark track beneath the falling train. It crashed out of sight, the ground rumbled with the force of an aftershock, and a voice I didn’t know spoke to me.
“You like the fast rides?”
I turned to see a girl watching me as I watched the ride. She was the one running the ball-toss booth. A life-altering experience. Quinn’s words came back to me, but I couldn’t say why.