She tugged playfully at my swimsuit’s elastic waistband. Glanced down at my unambiguous bulge. “Funny, your pockets don’t look empty.”

My ears went sunburn red. I so wished I had worn blue jeans to the beach. Maybe an athletic cup.

“Don’t worry, Dave. I’ve got cash.” She broke our clinch and headed toward a clapboard kiosk. “I’ll spring for the tickets.”

We had been cuddling up in front of Dr. Shallowgrave’s Haunted Manor, the rickety, ride-through spook house on the Funtime Pier. It was the closest thing Seaside Heights had to a genuine Tunnel of Love. Brenda bought five tickets for each of us, and we stepped into the waiting twoseater roller-coaster car. It was shaped like a skull.

“Welcome to the frights of Seaside Heights,” said the guy who lowered our safety bar. He was about my age. Had more pimples. He also spent a little too much time eyeballing Brenda, checking out her tight top. When he finally stepped away from our car, he whistled in admiration and gave me a knowing nod: “Looo-king goooood, bro. Looo-king good.”

The car jostled forward. I heard the pull chain clanking underneath our feet. Barn doors swung open, and our slow moving love seat was tugged into a dark tunnel filled with hazy smoke, ultraviolet lights, tolling bells, and hokey pipe organ music.

Brenda snuggled closer. I draped my arm over her shoulder.

She moved my hand to her breast.

“Welcome to my Haunted Home!” boomed a sinister recorded voice. “Ride in peace! Mwa-ha-ha!”

I heard a whoosh-click of compressed air. Hidden doors sprang open. Two skeletons with tattered clothing flailing off their jangling bones flew out of dark cupboards.

Brenda shrieked. I laughed.

And kept my hand locked on second base.

Next came the mannequin strung up in a noose. Then another dummy puking up bright red blood into a witch’s cauldron.

“Gross,” mumbled Brenda.

“Yeah. I told him to stay away from the chili.”

We rounded a bend and entered the Haunted Library. An automaton—a shriveled old woman who resembled Norman Bates’s dearly departed mother after a witch doctor had shrunken her head—was rocking back and forth in a creaky chair in front of a wall of bookcases. A rubber rat popped in and out of a hole in her rib cage. Some of the books shook in the shelves while a gargoyle serving as a bookend flashed its bright red eyes.

That’s when the lights went out.

Our car froze.

All the moaning and groaning and spooky music slid to a stop.

The ride had died.

The tunnel was pitch-black.

“Guess they forgot to pay the electric bill this month,” I quipped.

“Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said Brenda, fumbling through her canvas bag, crinkling open that pack of Dorals I had bought her.

She flicked and flicked her Bic but the gas didn’t catch. The flint just sparked and strobed.

“Damn,” she muttered, the white tube stuck to her upper lip.

“Here,” I said. “Let me.”

I took two cigarettes out of the pack. Stuck them in my lips.

“Use these,” said Brenda, handing me a book of matches.

I gazed into her eyes. Flicked a paper match across the strip of sandpaper at the base of the book. Tried to light the cigarettes as suavely as I’d seen tuxedoed rogues light double smokes in the movies.

I inhaled on mine while I handed Brenda hers.

“I thought you quit,” she said, taking a puff and snuggling closer.

“I changed my mind.”

“Cool,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the menthol.”

We laughed and smoked, the glowing hot tips of our cigarettes casting the only light in the darkened tunnel. When the cigarettes were nearly finished, Brenda held hers elegantly off to the side. “Come here, big boy.”

I did as instructed.

We French kissed like crazy. It tasted a little like two ashtrays licking each other, but I didn’t care. I was alone in the dark with an incredibly sexy woman dressed in a bikini too tiny to fit my two fists. I flicked my cigarette down to the ground, leaned out of the car so I could stomp it out without looking down, then sank my hands into her wild hair to pull her face closer to mine.

Soon, my hands were sliding down across her bare shoulders, down to those barely contained breasts straining to burst free.

“I hope it takes all night for them to fix it,” she moaned.

I was heading for third when he showed up again.

The demon from the dunes.

The emaciated man in the rumpled white cloak, his hooded face more horrifyingly gaunt than I remembered, the jawbone clearly visible beneath the skin, the nose a sharp protrusion of jagged cartilage. He was struggling to breathe through his gaping mouth hole. As he hovered in the darkness behind our car, I realized he was luminous, as if he had been irradiated in a nuclear bomb blast. His body was a floating, yellow-green X-ray; his head a skull wrapped in translucent skin.

“Stop!” he hissed at me, turning the air in the tunnel rank. “Now!”

I tried to ignore the glowing demon because it was obvious from the darting tongue dancing around inside my mouth and the hand guiding mine southward that Brenda Narramore sure as hell didn’t hear her ghostly guardian of sexual abstinence wheezing his words of warning at me!

“Stop!”

I closed my eyes, tried to make the thing disappear.

“Stop!”

I sneaked open an eye and saw the demon once again attempting to raise its rigor-mortised right arm like the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come from the Dickens tale so it could point a bony finger of condemnation at me.

That’s when the lights thumped on. The audiocassette of scary music slurred back to life.

Brenda giggled. Pushed my wandering hand, inches from heaven, aside.

“Just our luck.”

“Yeah.”

The car lurched forward.

The demon had disappeared.

A day later, Brenda did, too.

“VACATION’S almost over,” she said when we kissed good-bye in the parking lot of her motel that Saturday night.

“I’m here for another week.”

“Me, too. But then, I’ll be going back to school.”

“I could come visit you. I could take the bus to Philly.”

“No. You can’t.”

“Why not?” Listening to my own whining, I should have known the answer.

“You’re too young, David.”

“But . . .”

“This is what it is. Fun. A summertime fling. Don’t get all serious on me.”

The transistor radio in my head rolled through every sad song about summer romances ever recorded. “See You in September.” “Sealed with a Kiss.” Chad and Jeremy’s “A Summer Romance.” The Beach Boys wailing about “having fun all summer long.”

“But . . .” I stammered again.

“Don’t worry, Dave, before letting you go, I want to feel some kind of good-bye.” She was paraphrasing Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. “Sad or bad, I need a good-bye.” Her tongue tunneled into my ear again. “We’ll head back to the dunes. Tomorrow night. Say our good-byes there. Finish what we started.”

“Uh-huh.” She was cupping my crotch.

“And David?”

“Huh?”

“It won’t be sad or bad. It’ll be the best good-bye you’ve ever had.”

I nodded. I had already forgotten about my imagined visitor back in the funhouse. Hell, I had forgotten my own name.

THE next night, however, Brenda was gone.

“We thought she was with you,” said her roommates when I showed up at their motel for our hot Sunday night date down in the dunes.

“Did she go back to Philly?” I asked.

“No. Her stuff is still here. Don’t worry, Davey. She’ll show up.”

BUT she never did.

I kept going back to the Bay Breeze Motel.

Her two girlfriends kept telling me they hadn’t seen or heard from her since that day she went to the Boardwalk with me. Her beach bag was draped over the headboard of the bed she had been sleeping in. The sheets were rumpled and cold.