Feeling all the way better, she went upstairs and took a long shower. It took her a while to sort through the clothing on her floor to find her favorite pair of jeans, a thin T-shirt, and an oversize cashmere sweater with leather patches at the elbows, which always made her feel like she should be living on a real farm and not just an imitation of one.
Outside, it was cold, clear, and very bright: one of those days that looks like a child’s drawing, the sun shooting daggers at the ground out of a radiant blue sky. She jogged across the road, her breath steaming in the air, pushing aside a sudden memory of Connor’s nightmare—the cold, the snow, the men with no faces.
Connor was shirtless when he opened the door, and wearing only a towel around his waist. She was momentarily too distracted to speak. He smelled like soap, even from a distance of three feet, and his chest was beaded with water. She thought about the lights she’d arranged in the snow of his dream: Kiss me.
“You’re early,” he said. He didn’t look like he’d been kept awake by nightmares. He looked the same as he always did—easy, smiling. Maybe a little more tired than usual, but not much.
She knew she was early, and she knew he would comment on it, and she’d planned a few funny responses in her head: Fried dough is a great motivator and The Ferris wheel waits for no man. The kind of things that the lead girl would say in a romantic comedy.
But confronted with Connor in a towel she just said, “I know,” and tried very hard not to look at him.
“Give me ten minutes.” He stepped back to let her inside.
She’d been over to Connor’s house a few times—because they were friends, she reminded herself, never tiring of the way the words sounded in her head—and every time it was closer to perfect: carpets unrolled, lamps perched prettily on side tables, potpourri poured into wooden bowls, filling the house with a faintly spicy smell. She never got tired of admiring how much Connor’s family owned, how much they’d accumulated together. She thought again of her father—her real father, not the stranger in the red polo shirt—and wondered whether he was somewhere out there, and living in a house like Connor’s, filled with coffee tables and pretty statuettes, candlesticks and porcelain vases. For one delirious second, she imagined tracking him down and showing up on his doorstep, imagining he’d be happy to see her.
Her mom would be so pissed.
Connor went to get dressed and Dea waited in the living room and looked at the family photos, which had been newly set out, partly so she wouldn’t have to think about Connor naked upstairs. There were pictures of Connor at every age—one where he was grinning, practically toothless, in front of an enormous cake with two candles on it; one where he was standing, scrawny and proud, in front of a pool with a medal strung around his neck—and several photos of Connor’s dad and stepmom and various other old people Dea assumed were relatives or friends.
In the very back of the arrangement of photographs, Dea spotted a photo of an infant wrapped in a blue blanket decorated with giraffes. She felt a quick shock of recognition: she’d seen that pattern before. She’d seen it in Connor’s dreams, on the curtains in one of his windows. She picked up the photograph, squinting.
“That’s my brother.” Connor was behind her; she hadn’t heard him approach. He plucked the photograph out of her hands and replaced it on the table.
“What happened to him?” Dea asked.
He looked faintly annoyed. “Dead,” he answered, as if it were obvious.
Dea thought of the screams that had chased her out of Connor’s nightmare, and felt suddenly cold. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” Connor said, and then sighed, looking away from her. “I just don’t really like to talk about it.”
“Okay,” she said. “I understand.”
Then he was easy again, all smiles. Sometimes that annoyed her about him—he was like water jumping over stones, all surface, too quick for her. He slung an arm around her shoulders. “Ready to get your ass kicked at bumper cars?”
“Dream on,” she said.
NINE
Connor and Dea met up with Gollum just outside the festival entrance. Gollum had been at the festival for an hour with her younger brothers, Richie and Mack, and had already won a small stuffed ghoul. Both Richie and Mack had had their faces painted: Richie, who was small and serious and had Gollum’s triangular face, was a cat; Mack, who was older and bigger and a goofball, was a skeleton.
The carnival grounds were packed with people. Mud squelched underneath Dea’s sneakers. The Ferris wheel loomed in the sky like the domed back of a monster. It was loud. The ancient rides creaked and groaned under the weight of their passengers. Periodically, screams erupted, a constant rhythm that took on the quality of waves heard from a distance. The air smelled like smoke and meat and spun sugar. Connor kept a hand on Dea’s lower back whenever the crowds got especially thick.
She wondered if her mom had returned home yet, then pushed the thought out of her mind. Deep down, she knew that if her mom insisted on moving, Dea would have no choice but to go with her. But Miriam wouldn’t insist. Not when she knew how miserable it would make Dea.
Would she?
They ate hot dogs at a paint-splattered picnic table, enjoying the November sun, while Mack and Richie ran circles in the damp grass with kids costumed like vampires and demons, and Gollum explained her theories on the metaphorical significance of the Ferris wheel.
“It’s all about the futility of ambition,” she said, stabbing the air with a plastic straw. “You try as hard as you can to get to the top, but you don’t realize that striving will just topple you and bring you right down to the bottom.”
“So let me get this straight: you don’t want to ride the Ferris wheel?” Connor struggled to keep a straight face.
Gollum sniffed. “I don’t ride metaphors,” she said. “Too unstable.”
They played three rounds of zombie hunter, shooting fine sprays of water into wooden figurines fitted with targets on their stomachs. Connor won the first round. Mack beat him in the second. Dea was on her way to victory in the third, but Connor reached out and started tickling her.
“No fair.” She laughed, breathless, as he raised his arms and declared himself the victor. “You cheated.”
“I strategized,” he corrected her. For a second they were close—so close she could see his individual lashes and streaks of green threaded through the brown of his eyes and the soft planes of his cheekbones. So close she was sure he would kiss her—there, in front of everyone.
“He’s got a point, Donahue,” Gollum said, and the moment passed. Connor reached out and knuckled Dea’s head, like she was his kid sister.
Happy. She was happy. She forgot about Connor’s nightmare-visions, and her mom banging on her door saying pack your stuff, and the lies about her father. She forgot about anything except arcade games and the taste of sugar, the smell of corn dogs in the air, and Gollum chasing after Mack to keep him from rampaging Godzilla-style through the candy stall, and Connor’s hand on her back. She wanted to extend the day, blow it up like a glass bubble that would keep them enclosed forever. Only now did she understand how lonely she’d been for years. It was like washing up on a shore and then realizing how close you’d been to drowning. She wanted to grip her happiness hard, like it was something solid, like if she didn’t it would go away.
But time passed. The sun withered on the ground. It got colder. The crowd changed: parents hustled their children out to the parking lot, and Richie got cranky, and started crying when he didn’t win at a darts game.