I used to read your palm on the jungle gym. On the last day we saw each other, I jabbed a spot on your hand. This line, I said, means you’ll get a puppy for Christmas. Side by side on the swings, we oohed and clucked, bare feet dangling inches above the ground. Mima watched TV inside, but the stuff she liked was boring. The evangelist on the screen repeated the phrase eternal damnation, and it slid into our minds like a mantra. Every ten seconds, with a cadence I can still remember—eternal damnation—the words buzzed from the TV. We squished ants against our thumbs and chanted “eternaldamnation eternaldamnation.”
Always at six o’clock, Mima clicked off the TV and waited with us on the porch for our parents. Ivan, Mima’s grandson, usually stayed inside while we waited. On that particular evening, he was in the backyard, likely crying from what we’d done to him. My mother pulled up to the curb and beeped. I galloped down the front steps and climbed into the backseat of my mother’s sedan.
I was withdrawn from Mima’s daytime care that same night. I thought I’d never see you again.
• •
I was shaking a Crystal Light packet into my Mountain Dew at the front desk of Family FunZone—mostly as an experiment—when the door jingled. You walked down the long path to my desk, rested your elbows on the countertop, and told me you were here to see the manager. The thick hair on your arms reached the backs of your hands.
I had seen your name on the office whiteboard calendar a week earlier, in the box for January 15: Interview, 3 pm, Luis Morales. The sight of it set something abuzz in me, a tickle of familiarity. Like mine, yours was a name so common around here it was nearly meaningless. There was nothing about you that would have confirmed my suspicion. No birthmark I could remember, no visible scars. You could have been anyone.
“Are you Luis?” I asked, knowing my question could be taken two ways. You said yes. I called Jen’s extension and pointed you to her office. A kid with a mushroom haircut ran past you, grazing your pants, but you didn’t seem to notice. I watched the denim strain against your butt as you disappeared through the break room door. You weren’t the spindly, knob-jointed boy I’d met in 1993. While I’d grown into the wiry kind of woman whose family calls her “breadstick,” you’d become the kind of guy who goes to the gym. I sometimes think our disparate shapes would have made us a killer duo, not unlike Penn and Teller.
A week later, we sat in Jen’s cramped office for your first day of training. “Alrighty-roo, Luis,” Jen said, “Diana’s gonna be supervising you today. We got ticketing, concessions, and party hosting on the docket. Sound good?”
I nodded. Jen smacked my shoulder and said I’d make a great manager one day. Sometimes, in the break room, she’d make me watch seven-minute videos of DIY creative uses for beer bottles or old flip-flops. I’d mutter “Wow” at the final product because I couldn’t believe anyone would spend three hours making something you could get at the Dollar Tree next door. “I know, right?” Jen would say, through a mouthful of quinoa salad she’d brought in a mason jar. Jen is a nice person.
“Your training has officially begun,” Jen said, shaking her jazz hands before ushering us onto the FunZone floor.
You squinted at me like I was a stain on a dark carpet. “Diana Castillo?” you asked.
While Jen was monologuing, I’d been working up the nerve to ask if you were the Luis, the one I’d known when I was five. I was brainstorming dozens of ways to phrase my question, but you beat me to it. I was knocked off balance.
“How’d you know?” I managed, though you probably noticed the pause before my words, the way they caught in my throat like sauce stuck at the lip of a bottle.
“Your face is exactly the same,” you said. I took it as a compliment.
We stamped lavender pandas onto wrists, placed pizza on pedestals, checked military IDs for family discounts. I wondered if you even remembered Ivan Marcus.
We celebrated a seven-year-old’s birthday in the Family FunZone party room. Eric danced in the panda suit and we clapped along. A kid with a mushroom haircut was there, shoving huge bites of pepperoni into his mouth at an unsustainable pace. I watched him, worried he might choke, but he never even gagged. When the kids lined up for photos with Eric, mushroom-haired kid slipped away. Through the room’s glass pane, I saw him jog toward the arcade, wielding a pizza crust in his fist. It occurred to me that he may not have been an invitee, that the punk had probably snuck in for the food.
I told you I’d be right back and walked up to the birthday girl. I tapped her shoulder. She turned to me, congealed cheese caught in her curls. I said, “That boy with the mushroom haircut, in the blue shirt, is that your friend? Was he invited?”
She looked at me like I had lost it. “I didn’t see anyone like that,” she said. I stared into the arcade machine thicket. He was gone. On one of the screens, an 8 bit aircraft exploded. The dozens of pinprick lights that blinked at me seemed to say nanny nanny boo boo.
• •
In the break room that day, I wanted to make a good impression. I resisted the urge to bite into the rim of my Styrofoam cup and let the soft squeak soothe my nerves. Instead, I peeled off the crust of my sandwich in one long ribbon.
“So, what have you been up to since Mima’s?” you asked.
I gave you the highlights: I’d slipped through school unnoticed and graduated from Barbara Goleman High; worked briefly at the Palacio de los Jugos rip-off restaurant, Patio de los Jugos, where I quit after making my billionth smoothie; purchased How to Write a Selling Screenplay in 30 Days and read almost half of it before abandoning an eight-page script midscene. I asked you what you did for fun these days, if you still showed everyone you met what you could do with a yo-yo. When you laughed, your lips didn’t disappear like mine did. Even stretched into a smile, they were full and curved. My ham sandwich suddenly seemed like a bad choice. White bread clung like spackle to the roof of my mouth.
“I wish,” you said. You told me you’d dropped out of FSU your sophomore year and tried to continue living in Tallahassee because you found sweater weather exotic. The party culture in Tally—that’s what you called it—exhilarating at first, became exhausting. “I live with my parents now. Not ideal, but if I save up enough I can move up to a place in Fort Lauderdale. Or, who knows, maybe somewhere real far. New York.”
“I don’t think I could go back to living with family,” I said. A strip of ham slid out of my sandwich when I bit into it and dangled against my chin. You were surprised to find out I rented my own place.
“The rent’s not bad in Pines,” I said.
“You probably think I’m a scrub, huh? Living in my childhood bedroom in Hialeah.”
I shook my head. “Everyone knows the Cuban eighteen is closer to thirty.” I was considered the prodigal daughter for moving out at twenty-two. Though I was only a thirty-minute drive away, my mother called me “dramatic” for getting my own place. Every time we spoke, on the phone or in person, she mentioned my old bedroom. She’d kept everything intact, she said, and hadn’t touched my dresser drawers in case I ever wanted to move back in. The money I could save was tempting, but I was worried I’d revert to my younger self: a bad person, a bully, a bitch.
“You should come over sometime,” I tried.
“I’d like that,” you said. It was hard to tell whether your sleepy eyes were flirtatious.
Our thirty minutes were over too quickly. My phone, which I hadn’t checked the entire time, chimed to let me know it was 1:45. Our conversation brought on an ease I rarely felt. Before your first day, I’d worried that being around you would be something like sitting in my old bedroom, that I’d become bored and angry. But we sat there five days a week, in matching purple polos that became neither of us, and laughed between bites of bland sandwiches and rejected pizzas from the FunZone kitchen.
• •
It was a game at first. In Mima’s backyard, I traced your palm lines and shook my head. “I can’t believe it,” I said.
“What? Is it bad?” you asked.
“You’re gonna get a puppy, and not just any old puppy. It says right here you’re getting the eternal Dalmatian.”
You freestyled a happy dance.
“What’s that?” Ivan asked. He was sitting on the ground, peeling blades of grass into thinner and thinner strips. Chichi, Mima’s Maltese, whined from her perch on one of the many cinder blocks Mima used to fill in the holes Chichi dug under the fence.
“You don’t know, Mucus?” I knelt by him and forced his hand open. I often reminded him that his fingernails were disgusting. They were unnaturally thick and yellow-green like split pea soup. I dusted dirt and grass from his palm and divined: “Not good.” I smacked my lips. “Not good at all. Says here you’ll always be a weird little elf. Yeah. Till the day you die, a weird little elf.”
“Legolas is an elf,” Ivan said.
“You’re not that kind. You’re the bad kind.” I stood with my hands on my hips and shrugged.
When Ivan lifted his free hand from the unkempt grass, red ants had come along for the ride. They scuttled and stopped and scuttled again. I remember thinking that each fat segment of their bodies seemed discrete, that they must have been held together by magnets. Ivan’s arms shivered. He scraped his hand against the grass and ran inside. The sky burned above us, blue and empty.
• •
The first time you texted me, I was on my knees. It was Monday, and I was emptying the Skee-Ball machines of tokens. There were few enough children swarming that I could discern slivers of conversation. A teenager urged his little brother to play pinball instead of Guitar Hero. Someone wanted mushrooms on their pizza. I scanned the room for Jen, then read your text: The spot right by FunZone, the pub, is it any good?
I responded: Oh yes. I was, and still am, a big fan of Falcon’s Cuban sandwich.
Whens your shift over?
A familiar surge filled my chest, something akin to nausea. I told you I’d be done around six thirty. You’d meet me then.
I stood at the customer service desk for hours, getting the occasional whiff of the particular musk of a room habitually filled with children: pee and mouth-moistened Cheerios. A little girl ran up to me and asked if I had any tokens. I pointed her to the dispenser by concessions. “But I don’t have money,” she wept. Beyond her, some kid was climbing the Skee-Ball machine, shoving balls into the 150-point target.
“Hey!” I speed walked over.
The kid’s face snapped in my direction. It was mushroom-haircut kid, mortified. He dropped the balls and bolted. They rolled off the slope in different directions, and by the time I’d picked them all up, he was gone. I didn’t go looking for him. In my experience, the ones that look at you like that aren’t repeat offenders. The worrisome ones are those who smirk or stick out their tongues like little sociopaths. If a kid can be such a thing.
Near the end of my shift, I shed my work polo in the bathroom and dabbed my neck and armpits with a wet paper towel. I combed through the bigger knots in my hair with my fingers. The whites of my eyes were more like pinks, but there was nothing I could do about that. The sun was just setting and glared against the black glass of Falcon’s windows. People smoked cigars and played giant Jenga on the patio. They looked beautiful there, in the golden light, with their chicken fingers and frosty beers. Inside, you gave me a real hug. I was glad I’d given myself that cursory wipe down.
Melissa, my favorite waitress, dropped a hot basket of fried pickles on our table.
“Great leggings,” I said. She thanked me and struck a pose, stretching one leg out so I could admire the details. They were black tights with bones printed on them; she was half skeleton. I wondered if I’d ever be funny or beautiful enough to work at Falcon.
“So, Diana,” you said, rubbing your hands together. I briefly worried you were about to ask for Melissa’s number. Instead, you wiped your greasy fingers on your jeans and asked about my workday. I was charmed.
I told you about the Skee-Ball incident. “It was the same kid from the birthday party. The boy who ran away with the pizza crusts?”
You shook your head. You didn’t remember. I told you about the birthday girl, that she hadn’t noticed him either.
“Maybe he’s a ghost,” you said.
“He eats pizza and plays Skee-Ball. Ghosts don’t do that.”
“How would you know?” You thumbed something into your phone and shoved the oversized screen in my face. A Reddit page of paranormal anecdotes. I scrolled with my nongreasy hand. One woman had seen her husband walk into the bathroom and slam the door behind him on a day he was out of town. A different man heard sobbing coming from his garage. He opened the door to what looked like his son crying, slumped against the car. When he reentered his house, he heard the telltale tapping of foot and pencil. His son was upstairs, drumming absentmindedly. He checked the garage again; no one was in there.
You had this look on your face, this transparent, goggle-eyed hope that I’d shortly come to think of as your trademark. “This is stupid,” I said. I meant it playfully, but you bit your bottom lip and I felt shame slink into my chest. I handed your phone back. To make up for my prickliness, I laughed a little too hard at your jokes, and let my hand fall onto yours more than once.
Ivan Marcus bumped around in my mind, barely there, like a student smacking gum in the back of a classroom. Every time his face surfaced behind my eyes, I’d push him down, down. If I seemed mean when you brought up the ghost stuff, I’m sorry. I was trying to convince myself that real hauntings are impossible.
A loud guy slapped the bar and yelled “fuck” at the TV. He was angry about football, maybe. He was squeezed between two friends and was the shortest of the three.
“With how much they fucking pay these guys? And he’s not gonna catch it?”
“Ew,” I said.
He had blond, soft-looking hair that glowed blue under the Bud Light sign. His T-shirt was a sun-bleached beige and about eight sizes too big. He was as scrawny as he was loud. His face was familiar enough that it made me uneasy. I imagined he called himself something like Ace or Chico. I hated him instantly.
Something angsty fuzzed out of the speakers. We exchanged a ten for quarters and picked a game from the arcade machine emulator tucked into a corner of the bar: Mappy: Mouse Police. We alternated turns recovering the Mona Lisa from the cats who had burgled it. On my turns, you stood behind me, grabbed my upper arms, and rested your chin on my shoulder. The noises of the bar—the Mappy theme, Melissa and the customers’ banter—were sucked away to a far-off point. I heard only the clicks of the joystick and your breath hitting my skin.
• •
When I got home that night, I couldn’t adjust to my smell: a chemical sharpness layered over something sour, like potpourri in a public bathroom. I paced my apartment, restless, thinking of you. I wiped scum from around the sink. I boiled water for tea I forgot to make. In an attempt to relax, I filled the tub with hot water and improvised a bubble bath by squirting shampoo into the stream. The bubbles barely reached my nipples. I slumped so my shoulders were submerged, but then my knees stuck out. I pushed my knees to one side, but they hit the porcelain. It would take acrobatics, flexibility I didn’t have, to properly tuck myself beneath that scrim of soapy water. The tub was a shade of caramel that had long gone out of fashion. I wondered how old my apartment was. I wondered whether anyone had died in it.
Eventually, I gave up on relaxation. I stood in the tub, more stressed than I’d been when I entered, and ran the shower. Though I’d been thinking of you all night, mushroom-haircut kid flashed in my mind each time I closed my eyes. When I was done showering, I ran into my living room, half worried I’d find him on my couch, his waxy skin glowing in a square of moonlight.
My phone buzzed. A text from you. What are you doing after our shift tomorrow? I lay back and thought about how nice it felt to be wanted. I fell asleep without responding, still in my towel.
I dozed off and had a dream that my doorbell rang. My Abuela Maria was there on my doorstep, though she’d been dead for ten years. I let her in. She had been a cat lady in real life, and in the dream, I had two cats of my own. She met them and told me she was proud of me, though I wasn’t sure why she would be. When I offered her a cafecito, it fell through her hands and crashed on the floor. Soaked my socks. I reached for her bicep, the chill of her skin, but only gripped air. She asked to use my bathroom, and I pointed her toward it. I waited on my bed for what felt like hours. The cats gathered around the bathroom door. I knocked and yelled, then let myself in. No one was there.
When I woke in the middle of the night, there was a huge wet splotch on the sheets, a second self I’d left behind. I responded to you on the toilet. No plans yet. It was three in the morning but you wrote back. Falcon again. It was a plan.
• •
From noon to two, I managed the prize booth. One girl exchanged two hundred tickets for a rubber snake. As she walked away, she used it to whip her mother. I watched people’s feet through the glass case behind the midlevel prizes while I guzzled Mountain Dew from concessions. I’ve found it works better than coffee. Its supernatural green glow reminds me of video game elixirs and bioluminescent microbes.
A dusting of flies were silhouetted against the overhead light. I cleaned it twice a year, maybe. The small spot must have contained hundreds of flies. How did they get in there? There were no cracks in it that I could see. I imagined they phased their tiny selves through the frosted glass. Absurdly, I spent the rest of the day flinching at every sudden movement, sure that mushroom-haired kid was waiting for me in some corner, and when I finally saw him up close, his pallid face would go translucent and he’d follow me forever after, speaking only with his eyes: I know what you did. I know what you are.
Sometime after one, you rested your hairy hands on the glass display and asked me what you could buy with thirty tickets. I pulled a rainbow pencil from the bottom shelf. “This isn’t bad,” I said. “Or you can get six Airheads.”
“Quantity, not quality,” you said, pointing at the Airheads.
“I would’ve done the same.”
You asked if we were still on for Falcon, and I nodded too enthusiastically. You left your fingerprints behind on the glass. There was no sign of mushroom kid that day. Later, I semijoked that he might be a ghost after all.
Falcon was quieter than usual that night. One of the bartenders had queued up a heap of mumbly, lo-fi songs. I waited for Ace or Chico to show up and pierce the serene atmosphere with his jagged, bony presence, but he never showed. It meant nothing to me at the time.
You ordered me a Mountain Dew with bourbon as a joke, and thought I was kidding when I said it was delicious. This became our postshift ritual: the booth, the Cuban, Mappy. On some nights you’d come home with me, but I’d never go to yours.
• •
I remind myself that we were Ivan’s best friends. The three of us would race around Mima’s yard. Ivan won every time. We praised his elf powers and gave him our candy at lunch. Sometimes, when it was too hot out, he would blow cold air onto our sweaty necks. I’d return the favor, the downy fuzz on his back rippling in the manufactured breeze.
One day, we Frankensteined a doll out of Little Debbie snack cakes. A giant oatmeal cream pie head, two Swiss roll arms, donut bar torso. For the shoes, it was Ivan’s idea to cut the ends off of the Swiss rolls with Mima’s house key. When I saw the key in his hands, his thick green fingernails approaching my food, something ugly overcame me. I wrenched it from him.
“Gimme that, Mucus. Your dirty nails might poison it. We’ll all get fungus.”
His fingers curled into fists he then sat on. I fake-barfed and you joined me. When Ivan tucked his reddened face into his chest, I smiled knowing my words could be salt on a snail. He was semi-opaque, so white that green and red capillaries webbed his cheeks. His paper-thin skin reminded me of the membranes of fruit. I often looked at him and thought: you are a grape. In my dreams, Ivan is sometimes purple and dead still, as though he’s afraid a too-deep breath or the brush of a twig could tear him open.
• •
The fourth or fifth time we huddled in our booth, I finally brought up Ivan Marcus. By then, we had learned to split the Cuban. It was monstrous and contained what could only be described as an irresponsible amount of pickles. Even half of it left little room for drinks. I peeled the crispy edges from my share to shave off empty calories.
“Any sightings of mushroom kid today?” you asked.
I nodded. “Caught him at the drink machine trying to fill a baseball cap with orange soda. It was working, actually. He was sipping from the brim.” When I saw him at the drinks, I embraced my role as a FunZone authority and strode toward the kid, clenching a terrycloth washrag. I told him to cut that crap out—I really said those words—and shook my fist. The rag waggled limply. He dropped the hat and ducked away. I wrung the hat out and took it to the lost and found behind the customer service desk. By the end of the day it had shrunk and crystallized, the dried sugar giving it a frosted orange shell.
You munched on my bread scraps and told me your belief in the FunZone ghost was waning. “If we do have a ghost, mushroom kid isn’t it.”
“Too goofy,” I agreed. But something still didn’t feel right. There was an eeriness about the kid that I couldn’t pin down.
Melissa swirled some whipped cream atop two shots of something dark. She slid them across the narrow bar to Ace or Chico and the friend. Ace cocked his head. He raised an eyebrow at the shot glass and turned to his friend. “You ordered us some kind of fruity ass drink?” His friend chuckled and said, “It tastes good, bro.” Ace’s eyes flipped over to Melissa to see if his nonjoke had landed, but she’d tactfully turned away to cut limes.
I thought of Ivan then, the way he made my whole body cringe. Ace or Chico’s manner—at once awful and confident—made him easy to spurn. But Ivan, when he combed the grass for ladybugs, or watched The Magic School Bus with his mouth pulled into a tight frown as though it required all of his concentration, had made me feel a similar way. My stomach twisted sympathetically, and it made me want to squash him.
You made me remember things I’d rather not. Ivan Marcus, so earnest and strange. He was probably hard to look at when they found him in Mima’s yard that day. His nose was probably crusty, his mouth opened a crack, his shocked eyes big and round as golf balls.
“Hey,” I said, before I changed my mind, “do you ever think about Ivan?”
“Mucus?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“What about him?”
“Do you ever think about what we did to him?” In the space before your answer, my heart hammered in my fingertips. I wanted to hover in that moment, when it was still possible for you to tell me I’d imagined it all. For a second, alternate possibilities spread before me. In some of them, I wasn’t a bad person.
“We? Not really,” you said. “Do you?”
My mind snagged on the way you said we. “You don’t think it was ‘we’? Like both of us?”
“I just did what you asked. The whole plan was your idea.”
“The cinder blocks were your idea,” I said.
“Definitely not. You just needed me to help you lift them.” You bit a french fry. My appetite was gone. “Wow,” you said. “I can’t remember the last time I thought about that.”
I stabbed my Bourbon Dew with a skinny little straw.
• •
I’d just finished a cup noodle in the break room and had retied my hair into a low bun as I walked back to the customer service desk. Something rustled near the computer. I panicked and considered the possibilities: we were being robbed, we had rats, our ghost had returned. Small Velcro shoes poked out from under the FunZone T-shirts that hung on the wall: an armless, headless person. I sideswiped the shirts like a curtain and there was mushroom kid, clutching his soda-soaked hat to his heart.
“You want your hat back?”
He nodded.
“Take it.”
The arcade swallowed him back up. I doodled on the mousepad, resting my chin in my fist. Black lines fell smoothly from my pen onto the soft blue pad: three little ants in a line. The pen tip sank into the rubber as I gave them antennae and pincers. Precision was impossible on a surface like that. The details I’d added were short flecks floating above and around the ants like confetti for a tiny party. I wrote your name, all caps, then crosshatched over it.
I was closing that day, covering for Jen, so I said I’d meet you at eight. At Falcon, I didn’t try very hard to listen to you.
“Earth to Diana,” you said, waving a fry. “You listening?”
“Yes,” I lied.
It was hard to look at you without thinking of Ivan, of your younger self, the way you helped me press a piece of plywood against the doghouse door, then drag the cinderblocks to lock it in place. Here’s how I remember it: we wrangled him. We dragged Ivan across the lawn and called him a slut, though we had no idea what it meant. Mima must have heard his sobs from inside, but, tired and accustomed to the hyperbole of children at play, she ignored us for another speech about the myriad ways in which one could land themselves in Hell. We sat there until we got bored, then we left Ivan to scream while we played.
Maybe we’re all monsters. Maybe the slideshow in my mind that queues up horrors and what-ifs unbidden rattles inside everyone. Maybe children, being fresh in the world, are amoral until they learn better.
But we were too old, Luis. I knew my alphabet. I knew how to double knot my laces. And, though it took years to face this part of me, I knew what I was doing in Mima’s yard that day. As Ivan screamed in the doghouse behind me, plywood scratched my shoulders and I thought about a lizard I’d once caught in my bedroom. It was a baby, the length of my pinky, tail and all, and didn’t fuss when I plucked it from the carpet. I could have cracked a window and set the lizard outside where it belonged, but its soft belly bulged so easily between my fingers, and I needed to see it pop. I squeezed. The chewed gum of its innards curled into a pile on my thumb. I thought: Lizard, you are a grape.
As we sat there shielding our eyes from the sun, I wondered what would happen if no one ever came looking for Ivan. With the same itch I felt while holding that little lizard, I wondered how long it would take for Ivan to die in there. I wanted to break that boy. It was scientific, my desire to see him scream until his face glowed red and popped.
You made me feel wanted, sure, but you also reminded me that some dial on my switchboard was twisted all wrong. I chewed my Cuban, joyless, gnashing the flavors into a sour mud. I spit a mouthful into my napkin.
“You OK?” you asked. I shrugged.
“The fuck did you do to my hat, kid?” Ace or Chico was yelling in his usual spot. Mushroom kid cowered by the man, his face level with the stool’s seat. “Get the fuck out of here,” he said, whacking mushroom kid with the floppy half of the cap. “Go play games or something.”
By the time I reached Ace or Chico, mushroom kid had disappeared.
“Is that your kid?” I asked.
“Is that any of your business?”
“I work at the FunZone.”
“Good for you.” He laughed and turned back to the bar.
“You can’t drop him off like that every day. It’s not a daycare.”
“Oh yeah? And what can you do about it, lady?”
My neck was heating up. What I can do, man, I thought, is tie your wrists to your laces and let you sit in a doghouse for hours. Icy pinpricks will spread through your legs as they fall asleep. In that darkness, when the ants bite, pain will become visible, like fireworks on your calves and arms. When you’re pulled out and cut loose, your sores will be so dense and bright, someone might think you’ve grown new skin. You won’t speak for days, your throat hoarse from screaming.
“Alright,” I said. I headed back to our booth and stewed.
“What was that about?” you asked.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” I walked over to the arcade machine, where mushroom kid was playing Frogger. He wasn’t very good and often couldn’t even cross the road. I crouched next to him.
“You know what’s funner than this?” I said.
He stared at me, his right hand still on the joystick. He shook his head.
I led him through the pub’s emergency exit. In the alley, we hopped over puddles in the asphalt until we reached the FunZone employee entrance. I filled a large soda cup with tokens and handed it to mushroom kid at the foot of the Skee-Ball machines. On the first few rounds, he got no air on his throws, and the balls all clunked, at best, into the ten-point slot.
The first words he spoke to me were, “Can I?” He pointed up at the targets.
“Let’s get your shoes off first,” I said.
He sat on the machine and lifted his feet. I ripped open the Velcro straps and wriggled his shoes off. I’m not sure why I assumed children’s feet couldn’t stink. I thought that, like armpits, they became toxic at a certain age. I held my breath and put the shoes on the far end of the row of Skee-Ball machines. “So they don’t get in the way,” I said.
Mushroom kid climbed the slope, carrying the balls in his T-shirt again. He methodically plopped each ball into the 150-point target, sometimes interrupting his flow to drop one into a lower-scoring zone. Maybe he thought a perfect score would seem suspicious. I never asked. An endless ream of tickets streamed out of the machine and collected on the floor, folding over itself in zigzags.
While this was happening, you told me later, you were knocking on the women’s bathroom at Falcon, asking is Diana in there, and is she feeling sick or something. You hung out with the guys who smoked cigars outside while I exchanged mushroom kid’s tickets for a knockoff SpongeBob plush. I’d give my two weeks’ notice in the morning. On my last day, Jen would clamp a hand on my shoulder, wish me well, and insist that we hang out. When you asked if I’d still meet you at Falcon and I said yes, I didn’t know that I was lying.
I often think of the FunZone at night, how the crack and roll of my Skee-Ball game sounded in the empty arcade when all the machines were sleeping. In the absence of clamor, I still heard a ghost of the workday’s soundscape; blips and bings from the arcade and children’s shrieks filled the silent room. There was no one there with me and mushroom kid, of course, but I noticed a pattern. I have an inclination to fill a space with something: a spirit, an abuela, a lover I don’t know if I need. I should learn to let things rest.