Chapter 17
Nighttime altered the fair’s composition.
Adults and animals went home. Young people crushed into the fistful of aisles that remained open past eight, their giddy shrieks and shouts of recognition punctuating the steady mechanical aching of the metal rides.
Vendors flooded the air with the smell of cooked sugar.
Floodlights beamed blue-gray over the grounds, their faces like electric flowers blooming against the night.
The sky faded to pale purple without anyone noticing.
A thousand people our own age moved up and down the aisles, looking at each other.
We found this mutual appraisal intoxicating.
“Bea fully hasn’t texted me back,” Margaret said. “She knows we’re here.”
I rolled my eyes. “Whatever! Stop waiting for someone else to make this fun. It’s already fun.”
Margaret nodded. “You’re right,” she said, and we tossed our hair a little.
The most efficient route from the fair’s entrance to its point of apex nighttime activity cut through a narrow aisle of square white tents.
Each of them belonged to a local business attempting to attract attention from the passing crowds.
Beyond the alley of tents on either side, carnival rides loomed like massive neon insects.
The two of us both were and weren’t potential customers.
We didn’t own houses. We couldn’t commission custom closets or backyard pizza ovens.
We had no money, but we were associated with money that belonged to people who loved us.
This tenuous connection still sufficed for businesses to produce trash merchandise that might theoretically be appreciated by our demographic, like small foam footballs and elastic wristbands.
As though our parents might see a branded key chain and decide to build a pool in their backyard.
I hated situations like this, scenarios that made half a claim on me as a party to a potential commercial exchange.
You have to behave in a certain way once you’re someone who could buy something.
Margaret might have walked up to any of these booths, given them a fake name, and pretended to be in the market for a new orthodontist for the sake of laughing at being treated as a customer.
But I couldn’t play games like that, and Margaret knew I didn’t like to, so instead she held my hand and walked right through the narrow passageway without allowing for even the possibility of eye contact so that I didn’t have to either.
I felt the part of my personality that existed uniquely in the expression of my friendship with Margaret unfurling, and I felt her experience the same.
An additional layer of confidence threaded her step, the way she held her neck, my belief in her eliciting and propelling her shiniest self.
I’d missed so badly the people we got to be when we were together like this, the feeling of our tiny federation and the resulting conviction that almost every single thing about being alive was ridiculous and we had merely to point it out to each other to laugh.
Energy pinged through me. Still holding her hand, I bounded a few steps farther in the direction of the fair’s central landmark.
“Come on,” I said.
On the Ferris wheel, we rose and fell. Margaret swung her legs hard back and forth, screaming in gleeful horror as the car rocked.
I gripped the handlebar giddily and shouted at her to hold still, please God.
We sat pressed into each other at the center of the bench and took pictures of our faces in the dark, cheek to cheek, the state of our appearance conveniently obscured by the brilliant and illuminated background.
Below us, we saw people we knew but no one worth risking the perfection of our shared mood, so when we disembarked, we sped through the fair, hugging, saying hello and exchanging sartorial compliments, but then acting as though we had a place to be next and therefore had to take off after only a few minutes of talking.
The two of us were like a pair of thieves, a little breathless, knowing the mood we’d entered could only be sustained by an unbroken sequence of action.
We had to keep consuming the world if we wanted to keep living in it.
—
Margaret and I saw Bea and Olivia at the same time.
They were standing in the very long line for the Big Loop, a rickety roller coaster that perfectly exemplified my mother’s concerns; when its twelve-passenger car reached peak looping speed, the entire metal donut vibrated.
Bea stood with one arm wound around Olivia’s waist and Olivia with her head on Bea’s shoulder.
Neither of them was wearing a whole shirt, Olivia in a shrunken tank top and Bea in a long-sleeved men’s shirt she’d scissored off at the rib cage with a visible bralette underneath.
Olivia had Bea’s same impeccable stomach muscles.
The two of them liked to go work out together in full hair and makeup and then buy smoothies.
I didn’t want to give up being alone with Margaret, but I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with the night unless it meaningfully involved people other than me.
She sped over in their direction, calling out her greeting.
I followed. A girl three or four back loudly complained about some people who thought they could cut lines.
I flinched. I didn’t even like roller coasters.
Eleanor didn’t either. She didn’t like being shot through space by another person.
However, she would have ridden any ride if she could have been the one to press the button.
“Mina! Oh my God, hi!” Bea exclaimed as she hugged me. We all immediately took a picture together, though only in one pose. “My phone has like no service here,” Bea said. But the different versions of the picture, which she soon after sent me, all went through right away.
I stopped feeling bad about cutting the line when I realized the line was constantly being cut.
Every five minutes new people were showing up next to their friends or leaving the line altogether because they saw someone they knew.
Part of the reason to ride the roller coaster was to hang out in line, since the line was in the most populous part of the fair, and the event didn’t otherwise allow for stagnation.
None of us complained when, after twenty minutes, we noticed that we’d hardly gotten any closer to the contraption itself.
Bea only spent one sentence complimenting Margaret’s new hair, which I considered insufficient.
Her balayage managed to be both a genuine manifestation of her personal style and in complete alignment with what was just right then becoming cool.
It deserved to be celebrated as an accomplishment.
Bea was probably annoyed that Margaret had gotten balayage first because now that she had, Bea couldn’t also get it.
Margaret, being younger, could sometimes copy Bea, but Bea could never copy Margaret.
Olivia, while actively talking to us, was also extremely on her phone, engaged in what seemed to be a full-on texting conversation, though the intervals between messages were obviously longer than she would have liked.
She kept her phone in her hand, and I saw her check the lock screen and then lower the device to her side more than once.
I briefly speculated about the identity of the person keeping her waiting.
I thought with great pleasure about how Margaret and I were going to go home, get into bed, and talk about every single thing that every single person had said and done. I stored up details in preparation.
“So where are all these boys I’ve never met?” I asked because I knew Margaret wanted to know.
Apparently, they’d all gotten too drunk ahead of time and decided to remain in their basement and hang out only with each other instead of coming to the fair, a real misalignment of priorities.
“I swear I don’t even know what they do when they’re alone. It’s not like they ever talk about anything,” Bea said.
“Maybe they’re all watching porn together,” Margaret suggested.
But Bea and Olivia weren’t in the mood to be titillated.
They were annoyed, indignant that the boys hadn’t cared enough about their public efforts of hotness to show up in person, and they were bound to each other by the specific circumstances of their disappointment.
They didn’t really want to hang out with us or anyone else.
They kept looking at each other and blinking.
“Well, where’s El?” Olivia said. Margaret rolled her eyes, and Bea looked at me because I was usually the one willing to explain the behavior of my friends.
“Are Mar and El still being weird because they kissed?” Bea asked.
That was what she asked me: if Margaret and Eleanor were still being weird because they kissed. I felt my blood stamping through the veins of my face.
“You’re so dramatic,” Margaret said to Bea.
My expression must have visibly demanded explanation because, after several seconds in which Bea looked at Margaret and Margaret said nothing further, Olivia explained.
Apparently, they’d all played Truth or Dare on the night Eleanor left early.
Truth or Dare was merely a means of forcing specific events to transpire.
One of the boys dared Olivia to kiss her neighbor, the boy Margaret was pretending she didn’t like.
Then he dared Margaret to kiss Eleanor, which she did.
Then Margaret dared Bea to kiss Olivia. Then Olivia dared Bea to kiss another of the boys and so on.
None of the boys kissed each other. I knew without having to ask that none of the boys had kissed each other.
Only girls kissed each other for the benefit of other people.
“Basically, everybody made out with everybody,” Margaret capped the explanation, raising a million more terrible questions I couldn’t ask.