Jeremiah #2
I look down at my hands. I have no gift. Granted, I didn’t know it was her birthday, but if only I hadn’t given away all my special edition sticks. Then again, who’s to say she’d want a hockey stick? Maybe she’d rather have a watch. I chuckle thinking about it, and go back to join my teammates.
The second the parade officially ends, I’m out of formation before Coach Badaszek finishes the closing remarks, jersey untucked, moving through the crowd like a man with somewhere urgent to be. Because I do. I have somewhere urgent to be. I just don’t know where that is yet.
“Hey, Zesty. Zesty! Where’s the fire?”
Kingston jogs to catch up, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, grinning like he’s already got the whole story and just wants to hear me say it out loud.
“I’ll see you guys later,” I say, and I’m already moving, already cutting sideways through a crowd that’s thickening by the minute as everyone drains off Constitution Avenue toward the National Mall, where the festival’s cranking up.
The Mall in the noon heat is chaos… a Ferris wheel turning slow against a vivid blue sky, a country band tuning up somewhere near the Ellipse, the smell of funnel cake and fry oil in the air.
And closer, a kid is screaming with either delight or genuine terror at a ring toss booth, hard to say which.
I move through it fast, scanning the festival grounds, past the smell of jerk chicken and duck fat fries.
I push through the crowd past a ring toss booth, past a guy dramatically failing to win his girlfriend a stuffed bear at the strength test hammer game, past a line of people waiting for the dunking game and a water gun setup where kids blast streams at bobbing rubber ducks, half-missing, spraying strangers, nobody caring because it’s ninety-eight degrees and everyone’s already sweating through their shirt anyway.
But she’s nowhere to be found. No cutoff shorts, no birthday shirt, no Bomb Pop.
I’m starting to think I imagined the whole thing, some kind of heatstroke hallucination brought on by… well, let’s face it. That horse smell is still lingering in my nostrils.
Then, there. A flash of denim. That ponytail. Gone again around the side of a striped tent before I can even be sure it’s her.
“No,” I say out loud, to nobody, startling a woman holding two churros. “Not again.”
I move faster. Sweat runs down my spine.
My jersey is sticking to my back now. My eyes lock on the spot where she disappeared.
I round the tent and there’s nothing, just a family arguing about whether to get the fried Oreos or the chocolate covered bananas, and I have to physically restrain myself from asking them if they’ve seen a woman in a birthday shirt run past, because that is, objectively, an insane question to ask strangers.
I scan the crowd like I’m reading ice, looking for the gap nobody else sees, picking up my pace. I pass a milk bottle throw where the carny tries to wave me over, tells me I’ve got the arm for it, and I don’t stop long enough to find out if that’s true.
Then I see her again, thirty feet ahead, and this time she’s looking right at me.
She smiles, slow and knowing, backs up two steps, and slips sideways into a boxy plywood trailer with a crooked sign that reads HALL OF MIRRORS in chipped red carnival lettering over a doorway shaped like a clown’s mouth, which is deeply unsettling in a way I don’t have time to unpack.
She looks over her shoulder one more time before she vanishes inside. It is, without question, the single most dangerous look a human being has ever given me.
I go in after her.
A teenage attendant waves me through without even asking for a ticket, possibly because I’m still wearing an Olympic medal and a national team jersey, possibly because he simply doesn’t care.
Either way, I duck through the flap and the outside noise cuts off like someone hit mute, replaced by the low hum of a box fan somewhere and my own breathing.
It’s dark in here, and hot in a different way than outside, a trapped, airless heat that makes the jersey feel even worse.
And there’s mirrors. Everywhere. Floor to ceiling, angled every direction, so that I turn my head and there are forty versions of me turning my head back, each one looking slightly more unhinged than the last.
“Hello?”
My voice comes back at me from six directions. No answer.
I take a step forward, and my reflection splits into three, then five, walls of glass leading off at angles that don’t seem to obey any layout logic.
Somewhere to my left, fabric moves. I turn.
Nothing but my own face, distorted long and thin in a warped panel, looking like I’ve been stretched on a rack.
“This is ridiculous,” I say, to nobody, to forty of myself.
I catch a shape, ahead and to the right, the outline of a woman, dark hair, and I move toward it fast enough that I nearly walk face-first into a mirror, my own reflection rushing up at me at full speed before I throw a hand out and catch the glass instead of my nose.
Somewhere further in, I hear that laugh, the quick surprised bark, echoing in a way that makes it impossible to tell which direction it came from.
It is stiflingly hot in here. The heat genuinely unbearable now, the kind that makes your shirt stick and your brain go slightly stupid.
Body heat trapped in glass and no airflow whatsoever, and within a minute sweat is a waterfall down the back of my neck.
I pull the jersey over my head in one motion, momentarily blind inside the fabric, and when I emerge I catch a flash of her, real this time, I’d bet everything on it, disappearing around a mirrored corner with one look thrown back over her shoulder that is pure, deliberate invitation.
I tuck the jersey into the waistband of my pants without thinking about it and go after her.
The corridor narrows. My reflections multiply and warp, tall, short, sideways.
I hear her laugh again, closer now, and I follow it around a bend where the mirrors angle inward like a funnel. Another turn. Another wrong mirror, this one making me look about four feet tall, which, no thank you.
And then she’s just there.
I don’t slow down enough to think about it, I just close the last few feet, and she’s got nowhere left to go.
I catch her before she can slip away again, her back meeting the warm surface of a mirror with a small, surprised exhale and she’s laughing, breathless, chest rising fast, and I’m breathing just as hard, and I genuinely cannot tell anymore how much of that is the chase and how much of it is her, close enough now that I can see the last blue tint of Bomb Pop still on her bottom lip.