Full Tilt (3 page)

Suddenly I had no reasonable argument not to ride.

My panic built as people ran to the empty line like passengers leaping from the
Titanic.
“Guys, what’s the big deal, anyway?”

Maggie took a dangerously deep look at me. “Are you scared, Blake? Don’t be—you’ll have fun.”

“Scared? Don’t be ridiculous,” I told them. “I love roller coasters.”

“Yeah, sure,” Quinn said with a sneer.

I threw Quinn a warning glare. He swore he wouldn’t tell anyone—but then what did Quinn’s word ever mean?

“Blake’s terrified of roller coasters,” Quinn said.

I tugged on the sputnik hanging in his ear, and his head tilted to one side. “Ow!”

Russ looked at me like I was someone he didn’t know. “He’s kidding, right?”

I stammered a bit. Lying is not one of my better skills.

“Blake hates airplanes and roller coasters and fast cars,” Quinn said.

“That’s not true!”

“It is and you know it!” Quinn turned back to my friends. “He’s a grade-A chicken. Yellow as a school bus!”

That’s what did it. I don’t know if Quinn realized what he had said. I didn’t even think he knew about the School Bus Incident. But whether it was intentional or not, it got my feet moving.

“Sure, I’ll ride. Can’t wait.” I tried to sound casual about it, and that’s hard to do through clenched teeth. I forced myself forward, keeping my pace steady as I wove through the empty line. I didn’t slow down until I saw the big warning sign in bright red letters. You know the one: Y
OU MAY NOT RIDE THIS ATTRACTION IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, HAVE BACK TROUBLE, A HEART CONDITION, HEMORRHOIDS, WATER ON THE KNEE, BLAH-BLAH-BLAH
. I slowed down, glanced at the emergency exit, and got an unwanted blast of déjà vu. I knew I hadn’t been here before, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.

“What’s the matter?” Russ asked. “Feeling a pregnancy coming on?”

I laughed, but I had a hard time tearing my eyes away from the emergency exit sign. Quinn, on the other hand, never even looked. Like everything else in his life, he crashed forward, caution the first casualty.

It took only a few minutes to reach the ride. Quinn, of course, grabbed the front car, smiling back at me. “Next stop, Willoughby,” he said, quoting the old
Twilight Zone
episode. “Room for one more.”

Russ and Maggie took the seat behind him. I stood there, frozen.

“C’mon, Blake,” Russ said. “One last thrill before the ivy.”

Ivy, I recalled, is what they generally put on a grave.

“Very funny,” I said a moment before I realized that he really meant Columbia University, which is an Ivy League school. Duh. I took my place next to Quinn, my feet uncomfortably crossed in front of me. I pulled down the lap bar, double-checked it, then triple-checked it. Quinn snickered at the expression that must have filled my face.

“Are we having fun yet?”

“Just shut up, okay?”

The little train jerked forward and began to ratchet up a steep climb toward the first drop. “You gotta live for this, bro,” Quinn said. “Live for it, like I do.”

The Kamikaze dragged us heavenward and reached the peak of its first drop. We lingered for a moment at the peak, then hurled into a suicide plunge. My stomach tried to escape though my eyeballs. My brain became a pancake pressed to the dome of my skull. Quinn
whooped and wailed, loving the feeling.
You gotta live for it,
he had said, but right now I just wanted to live
through
it.

The safety bar offered no safety at all, and all at once I was back there again.. ..

Seven years old, spinning out of control. My first ride . . .

No!
I told myself. No, I would not go there. I wouldn’t think about it. I pushed the memory down so deep, not even the Kamikaze could shake it loose.

The roller coaster bottomed out and turned sharply to the left, spinning into a double corkscrew. Quinn’s hands were in the air as he screamed with the thrill of the ride. I gripped the safety bar, gritting my rattling teeth.

The Kamikaze doubled back, and the force of the turn cut into my side as we shot toward an insane loop. My head was pressed forward by g-forces. The earth and sky switched places, and back again. Then, as we came out of the loop, I caught sight of a wooden support strut tearing away from the weblike scaffolding of the Kamikaze. The thick pole plunged like a felled tree.

“No!” I screamed.
“No!”

It wasn’t my imagination. It was real! Crossbeams fell away next to me. The rattle of the ride intensified. When I turned my head, I caught sight of the damaged part of the ride, but we were speeding away from it, hitting a trough and rising again. Then the ride took a wide U-turn and headed back toward the damaged section.

Another support beam broke away. Big heavy white timbers tumbled down, bouncing off the track, taking
more of the ride with it. Others saw the danger now.

“Do you see that?” yelled Quinn.
“Do you see it!”
The screams of fear were the same as the screams of joy. I tugged at my lap bar, but what did I think I could do? Jump?

The damage was right in front of us now. The last falling crossbeam pulled away all the support beneath the track, leaving us to face a rickety trestle. Just the track and nothing beneath. For a moment I thought we’d make it across, but the left rail fell away and then the right, leaving a twenty-foot gap and a hundred-foot fall.

I could do nothing but scream as the Kamikaze left the track, the rumbling and rattling giving way to a deadly silence as smooth as wet ice, then a vertical drop, spiraling at the full force of gravity. My face was an open wail. The wind, the light of the park, the whole world disappeared into my screaming mouth as the bottom dropped out of the world, turning into a black misty pit.

Darkness.

More darkness ...

And then the lights of the Kamikaze station blazed around me as the little train came to a jarring stop and the lap bars all popped up in unison. The ride was over, and I was left with the mind-frying memory of something that could not have happened, but did.

“Cool!” screamed Quinn. “Did you see how the track fell away?”

“Yeah,” said Maggie. “It looked so real.”

“I wonder how they do that,” Russ said.

I looked up. The support struts and dangling crossbeams rose against gravity, reassembling themselves like the collapsing bridge at Universal Studios. Only then did I see the single hidden track that brought us into the vertical dive and back into the station once the false track fell away.

The ride attendant turned to me. “Hey, you have to get out. If you want another ride, you’ll have to get back in line.”

I gladly vacated my spot.

On the way out we were all given pins that said I
DIED ON THE
K
AMIKAZE
.

My hand shook as I tried to drink a Coke. I wished my friends weren’t watching me.

“Didn’t mean to scare you, dude,” Russ said. “I thought everyone knew what was going to happen. Jeez, they’ve been showing the commercial for months, before the ride even opened.”

Maggie put her hand on mine. “It’s okay. To be honest, I was pretty shaken up myself.”

I went a little red at Maggie’s touch. Russ noticed how Maggie held my hand, and he put her in his lover’s choke-hold. “He’ll get over it,” Russ said.

We were on the midway now. Quinn was hurling baseballs at a stack of resistant silver bottles that just wouldn’t fall from the pedestal. He wore his Kamikaze pin like a Congressional Medal of Honor.

“Why don’t you stick it through your belly button?” I suggested.

He pointed at his hat and threw another ball. “That ride was a life-altering experience,” he said, although his life didn’t seem altered much at all. Even now, he hurled those balls at the bottles with a certain fury—the same fury that followed all of his dealings. His high from the ride was already fading, and I knew he’d be impossible to live with once it was entirely gone.

Up above, a new batch of victims plunged from the fracturing beams of the Kamikaze. I forced myself to watch, this time seeing the single dark track beneath the falling train. It crashed out of sight, the ground rumbled with the force of an aftershock, and a voice I didn’t know spoke to me.

“You like the fast rides?”

I turned to see a girl watching me as I watched the ride. She was the one running the ball-toss booth.
A life-altering experience.
Quinn’s words came back to me, but I couldn’t say why.

“I . . . uh . . . what?” This girl was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that even now is hard to explain. Like an impressionist painting in a soft gallery spotlight.

“I asked if you like the fast rides.”

“I . . . can’t get them out of my mind,” I told her, which wasn’t entirely untrue. She smiled as if she knew exactly what I meant. Her hair was long and red—the kind that must have been brushed a thousand times to make it flow in a perfect fall of copper silk. And there was something about her eyes—blue as glacier ice, yet hot as a gas flame—reflecting the chasing lights of the midway. They seemed like windows to
some other place. They also seemed familiar.

“There are better rides than these,” she said, in as close to a whisper as the loud park would allow. She was older than me. Eighteen at least.

Like all the girls will be,
I thought.
They’ll all be older than you when you get to college next month.
Looking at her was like looking into my future.

“I’m Cassandra,” she said with a smile.

Is she flirting with me?
It was a heady feeling. I got a knot in my gut, like I was still on the Kamikaze, turning a tight loop. No hidden safety track here.

“I’m Blake.” I held out my hand to shake, and she put a ball into it instead.

“Try your luck,” she said. “This one’s on the house.”

By now Russ and Maggie had taken notice of the way Cassandra was looking at me and the way I looked back. Russ smirked knowingly. Maggie’s mood took a turn toward sour. “Why are we wasting our time here? Let’s ride something,” she said.

Quinn was getting angrier with each ball he threw and each dollar he lost. “These stupid games are all rigged.” He stepped away, and I took his place.

A life-altering experience.

I shook off the strange feeling that I would have recognized as a premonition if I had had any sense whatsoever. Then I took aim and hurled the ball at the little pyramid of bottles, hitting them squarely in the center. Those bottles flew like they were hit by a freight train, not a baseball. Looking back, I think those bottles would still have fallen even if I had hurled the ball at the moon.

Quinn jolted in disgust. “Oh, man!”

“We have a winner,” said Cassandra. She reached above her to a menagerie of stuffed animals and pulled one down. She didn’t give me a choice—
she
decided which one I got. The roller coaster rumbled again, and the air filled with the screams of its riders.

“Enjoy,” she said as she handed me my prize.

It was a bear, but this bear was one sorry specimen. Its head was lopsided, its bright red eyes were too small and too far apart, making it appear both angry and congenitally stupid at the same time. Its fur was an uneasy shade of greenish brown, like what you get when you mix all of your paints together.

“That bear is as inbred as they come,” said Russ.

The bear wore a bright yellow jersey bearing the number 7.
School bus yellow,
I thought, but I shook the thought away. On the jersey was a large pocket in the center of the bear’s chest. The edge of something stuck out of the pocket.

I reached in and pulled it out. It was a white card about the size of an index card. On it was a strange symbol in bright red:

“What’s that supposed to be?” Quinn asked.

I flipped the card over to see what was written on the back.

An invitation to ride
10 Hawking Road
Midnight to Dawn

“I don’t get it.” I looked at the bear as if it could give me an explanation, but all it gave me was a beady, red-eyed stare.

“Hey, Cassandra—” I turned to ask her what it was all about, but she was gone. Instead, the booth was now manned by some bearded, bald guy who looked like he’d rather be on a Harley than behind a counter.

“Three balls for a buck,” he said. “Wanna play?”

“Wait a second. Where’s Cassandra?”

“Cassandra who?”

I scanned the crowd around us, but there was no sign of her. Somewhere up above, the roller coaster plunged and the ground shook like an aftershock.

Last month, on my sixteenth birthday, I bought a car with the money I had made working summer jobs for four years. Mom couldn’t contribute, but that was okay, I never expected her to.