Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
I’m in a meadow.
A meadow with blue poppies and yellow daffodils and dandelions.
“Here they are again,” I say. I reach for one of the blue flowers. It’s soft, slightly wet with the air of spring.
I look around until I find Marcus lying on the grass, hands behind his head, feet crossed at the ankles.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” he says, the definition of casual. Serious Worker Marcus is gone and Dopey Marcus is here, but I’m starting to understand that they are just different sides of the same coin. “How’s the head?”
“Fine. What’s that noise?”
I tip my head to the side at the sound of ice-cream-truck music.
“Let’s find out,” Marcus says, standing and following the sound.
As we get farther and farther down the hill, a full-on fair comes into view. There are merry-go-rounds and clowns on stilts, children holding bags of cotton candy, all behind a massive gate in a tall chain-link fence.
“Where is this?” Marcus asks.
I stare at the lively mayhem behind the gate, trying to figure out why this suddenly feels very, very familiar, but it’s not until we’re close enough to read the orange banner with the words Winfield Carnival on it that I remember exactly what day this is.
And things just got exponentially better.
“Marcus! I love this place. This is where Jason and I snuck off to one weekend last year.” I try to explain it to Marcus as we approach the tail end of a line stretching out from the parking lot.
“Oh my God. We had the best time. Like, one of the best days of our lives.”
We’d been together for months then, and Jason had been pretty proud of himself when he’d planned the date. He wouldn’t give me any details about where we were going or why, but his Cheshire grin told me he thought it was one of his best ideas.
“I’m practically an expert on date organization,” he bragged when I met him at my front door. “Some think it’s a hobby, that maybe he’s born with it, but, friends, it’s a skill. A skill he works very, very hard for.”
I laughed as he spoke. “Oh, yeah. And where did you get all this skill from? All the people you dated?”
“See, it might seem that way,” Jason had said, eyes twinkling as he led me into his car, “but all of those girls, all of those dates, were just practice for you.”
“Aw, I like that you’re a giant cheeseball,” I teased Jason as he started his car.
“What else do you like about me?” He looked over at me like he was genuinely curious. Like he didn’t know. He was clearly fishing for compliments, but I indulged him.
“You’re great at soccer. Everyone likes you—like seriously not one person has a bad thing to say about you. It’s very annoying.”
Jason was biting his lower lip, focusing hard on the road. “What else?”
“What, that’s not enough for you?” I joked.
I didn’t think he was actually insecure, so I didn’t pick out my words carefully like I might have otherwise.
“I like that you’re really going places.
Most high school boys are obsessed with the here and now, but you know what really matters.
We both do. Oh! And you’re a great captain. Leadership skills unmatched.”
“A great captain,” he repeated. “I guess there’s a consensus then. Everyone likes me for the same reason.”
“It’s called universal appeal,” I told him.
I’m practically bouncing on my toes now with anticipation as I try to share the memory with Marcus, but I notice that he isn’t even listening. He has stuck his head between the people in front of us, his face uncomfortably close to both of theirs as he tries to read their tickets.
“Marcus!” I hiss. I tug on the back of his shirt. “Do you know what’s creepy? People who stand too close in line.”
“Relax,” he says, all ease. “I was checking what tickets they need to get in. God, I love being invisible.”
“It feels wrong to go in without paying,” I say. “Or at least waiting in line.”
But Marcus is already weaving his way to the front.
“Spare me the lecture, Cartwright. There’s no rules in dreams.”
I huff. “And you would know because?”
But of course, he’s right. The ticketer doesn’t blink as we push through the line into the carnival. The security guard does nothing as we walk past him.
It feels like with this many people all clumped together, there should be more bumping elbows and stepping on toes and unreciprocated excuse mes, but as always, nobody feels a thing as we walk through them. There are no jolts, no particles clashing. Just me and Marcus, breaking the laws of matter.
It suddenly feels exhilarating, what Marcus said—being totally invisible, immaterial, unseen. I bulldoze right through scores of people, running and skipping and jumping. Euphoric for some reason.
Marcus is grinning when he catches up to me. “Having fun?”
“Have you ever felt like you could do absolutely anything you want and not have a single person judge you? Felt like you don’t have to answer to anyone even if you make a mistake or say or do something stupid?”
“I have,” Marcus says, because he doesn’t care what people think.
“I haven’t,” I admit. “I’m always worried. Worried about doing or saying the wrong thing, seeming stupid, rude, unfriendly, ungrateful. There is always, always something to think about.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way, you know.”
I give him a skeptical look.
“Okay, listen, I’m not going to pretend that you can do whatever you want and not have to pay the consequences.
That’s just unrealistic. And people are going to judge you—that’s a fact of life.
But you can control how much energy you give their judgment.
You can let it affect you, or you can let it roll off you. ”
“You didn’t,” I point out. “The day you played the Buffalos.”
Marcus sighs. “That’s different. A lot of people were counting on me.”
My face tells him I’m not buying it.
“Okay, fine. I did care. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of…everyone,” Marcus says, cheeks turning pink. Everyone sounds suspiciously like you. But why does my opinion of him matter at all?
“Oh, look at this,” Marcus says, breaking our silence and helping himself to some random guy’s fries, dipping a couple in a plate of ketchup.
I make a face. “You’re going to eat a stranger’s food?”
“Pretty much,” he says with zero shame. “That okay with you?”
“I might be judging,” I tease.
Marcus gives a small smile. “Judge away, Zadie Cartwright.”
We walk another few steps and then Marcus is distracted again. “Fuck, why is the food so good in your memories?
“Do you want some fish sticks?” Marcus shouts toward me, closing in on somebody else’s food. “These are some good-looking fish sticks.”
“No, thank you.” I don’t hide my repulsion.
He chews with aggression. “It kind of boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”
“How you can eat so much of other people’s food and not get sick?” I ask.
“I was going to say, I don’t get why some things we can, like, manipulate.
Like say, food. Game machines. We can touch each other,” he says, taking that time to touch my cheek.
I freeze at his nearness. He never takes his eyes off me.
“And other things,” he says quietly, “we just pass through, completely inconsequential.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“How’s your head?” he asks again.
“It’s always fine in the dreams.”
Marcus is frowning. “I really think we should find a way to stop doing this,” he says in a soft voice.
I’ve only just realized how close we’re standing, but I don’t take a step back. “Doing what?”
“These dreams,” he says, gesturing around us. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I need to find out what happened between Jason and me,” I say.
I regret saying his name as soon as I do. It’s like turning on the lights in the middle of a dark theater, a blender in a library; it disrupts everything about the moment.
“Yeah,” Marcus says. “I guess you do.”
We start walking again until I stop at a tent on our right, trying to read the descriptive panel in front of it.
“So what was so great about the last time you were here?” Marcus asks, and there’s a new distance in his voice. A cautiousness.
I can’t hide the smile in my voice. “Well, over spring break, Jay picked me up in the morning and refused to tell me where we were going. He stopped at a gas station, and we loaded up on junk food, and then we rode in his car for like three hours, listening to country music.
“Finally, we pulled up in this parking lot. It’s way in the back outside,” I tell him. “I never told Jay, but I was a little bit disappointed that the whole thing had been about getting to a carnival. I mean, carnivals are fun, but they’re not, you know, romantic.
“But Jason made it romantic. We walked in those gates we just came through, and the first thing we did was buy corn dogs.” I point out the corn dog stand not far from us.
“I could really use a corn dog right around now,” Marcus says. “I should’ve taken that guy’s corn dog.”
I ignore him. “Then, we got our faces painted over there. Jason was…The lady painted this little sunflower on his face.” I look around. “I thought we might have seen them…us by now, but maybe we’re not coming.”
“You and Jay?” Marcus asks, and I nod.
“Want some onion rings?” He raises his voice as I start to walk away from him.
“Gross. Race you to the bumper cars?” I say, then burst into a run as I get deeper into the carnival.
“You sure you’re up for that?” Marcus asks, but he’s already running straight for me. I look over my shoulder at him, pump my arms and legs even faster, but he’s closing in on me. I take a wild right turn and keep sprinting.
I can see the bumper cars up ahead, just a few feet away, when I feel Marcus grab my waist. As I try to wriggle out of his hold, I stumble over my own feet, and we fall in a heap on top of each other.
I’m laughing too hard to breathe and then he’s laughing too, and we are a rowdy messy pile on the ground in the middle of a carnival and our faces are dangerously close, our smiles wavering. Marcus moves in even closer, and I start to shut my eyes.
But right before I do, I see them.
“Oh!”
Marcus sits up, gaze following mine all the way to us.
Me and Jason.
Past Me and Past Jason, walking hand in hand into the carnival. We are the quintessential couple. So happy and so in love that we’re even swinging our hands between us.
“What we’ve been waiting for,” Marcus says, his voice a whisper.
“Yeah,” I say, but my voice is dry, and I have to clench my hands into fists to stop myself from grabbing the front of Marcus’s shirt, making him stay exactly where he is. Pressing my lips to his.
The absence of Marcus’s body weight feels like an insurmountable loss.
His voice is hoarse as he stands then offers me his hand. “What are we doing, then?”
I take his hand so he can pull me up, and we silently hurry after them.