Joyland (21 page)

Chris had a feeling that if they kept playing, and if he kept talking, she wouldn’t kiss him, which was strange, because Chris had been waiting to be alone in the same room with Laurel Richards since spring. He’d thought she didn’t even know his name, yet no one had bothered to introduce them when the girls had arrived. Panic broke inside Chris as the hall monster began to form outside the Two-Headed Room. What if it was so obvious he liked her that Cindy or someone had told her? Inside his T-shirt, a droplet of sweat made its way down the centre of his chest to his belly. Chris dodged around a dead dungeon monster and made his exit. If it bothered her, he reasoned, she wouldn’t have come here in the first place, and certainly not up here — to Marc’s room — with him.

“Do you play at home?” he asked.

“Nah, my mom won’t get me one. Says I’ll get addicted like that guy, Mickey what’s his name, and never go outside again.”

“Mickey Newton.”

“Yeah, him.”

Mickey Newton’s greatest accomplishment was shop-lifting an Atari 2600 from Zellers back in 1980 when it was still a coveted gaming system. Mickey was twelve then, two years older than Chris, but Chris had heard the rumours ever since. By wearing Mr. Newton’s big vinyl parka with the hood up, instant hoodlum-hero status had been achieved.

Chris had learned many things at Joyland by watching Mickey. Firstly, Chris ascertained that anonymity begat fame. He’d never gotten an introduction to guys like Mickey Newton and Johnny Davis. He didn’t need one. He knew who they were. He observed their ways, and one day, he too became good enough for them to know who he was. In the same manner, one day Laurel had appeared in Joyland from the other side of South Wakefield, and Chris made a point of finding out her name.

Like Johnny Davis, Mickey Newton was above entering his initials on the machines. A simple row of Xs became his high-score signature. ZZ blazed from Johnny’s vacated games (short for ZZ Top). Younger, ambitious video-game guys took note, struggled to find witty ways to represent themselves. Occasionally, they resorted to the most unoriginal: abbreviated obscenities typed in the space provided for winner’s initials. Meatheaded Pinky Goodlowe was the exception, tapping the control stick over the onscreen alphabet until PKY filled the dark space. David White became Black — BLK — for Black Sabbath. Kenny’s signature was YES. With misplaced loyalty, he continued to use it through the spring of ’84, even after the band of the same name had sold out its art-rock roots and “Owner of a Lonely Heart” clung like a wart to the pop charts for a solid twenty-one weeks. Chris had flirted with DEF, but by early ’83 he’d decided the best signature was none at all. A row of dashes. A blank line stood out from the screen at a glance, even from across the arcade, like the dangerous flat line of a heart monitor. It had become Chris’s legacy as he moved up in rank, rounding the corner and climbing up the metaphorical staircase with an involuntary ease.

Mickey vowed he would have victory over Johnny Davis one day as the South Wakefield champion of Galaxian. The declaration was Mickey’s first mistake. His actual downfall was his mother’s removal of the Atari, not because it was hot, but because Mickey had stopped doing anything else, including eating. Rumours circulated that the good woman continued to bring him bowls of Kraft Dinner that went untouched. J.P. and Chris visualized a platoon of plates, ketchup gradually hardening as Mickey played on, cracking infinite numbers of game patterns without witness to his genius, until one day she pulled the plug and sent him to his aunt’s, or some other never-before-seen relative, who happened to live remarkably close to St. Beckett.

St. Beckett: the closest city with an institution. The name of the city alone had come to stand for looney, cuckoo, bananas, the funny farm. To Chris (and indeed to nearly all his peers), a person couldn’t go within twenty miles of it without it meaning he was
loco.
All this Mickey-lore had occurred the previous year, before Ray Kassar sold $250,000 of his own company stocks, before Atari had crashed and burned, the entire industry heading into a nosedive. Chris had heard a few whispers that Mickey had returned to town. Apparently, he was really pissed to discover Joyland had been shut down.

Chris recounted these details to Laurel with an authority he did not have, as though he and Mickey had been best friends, Chris the one and only witness to his genius and his madness.

“Since you can’t play at home, you should come to my house some time. I mean, if you want, you know, maybe.”

Chris had located Laurel in the phone book, the name
Richards, K
. in blurred black and white, the stern evidence of her birth. Once Chris had ridden to Cassandra Crescent where she lived, passing quickly on his bike before the mouth of her building.
The Sunset Villa
was stencilled on the side in faded blue looping letters. A four-storey C-shaped structure with stairs and a balcony running the length of each floor, doors opened out onto the balcony instead of an inside hall. California motels in old movies couldn’t salvage its appeal, or its peeling pink paint. In the brown-brick bungalowed lap of South Wakefield, the villa’s misplaced glamour had degenerated before either Laurel or Chris were born. One of two apartment complexes in town, it sat on the south side of South Wakefield, and Chris’s mother said nobody decent lived there. Only Laurel Richards. Chris waited for her to say,
Yeah, sure, I could ride my bike over, it’s not that far, that’d be really cool.

She didn’t reply. With mascara-damp eyelashes, lips slightly ajar, she watched the screen where he moved in and out of danger.

He was spending pointless time shooting things, corpses that would kill him if he touched their dead edges. They left blobs in his path to the treasure. He could hear the hall monster growing outside the Skeleton Room and he felt his heart speed up. A choking-hissing-swooshing sound.

“I hear that sound and I know it means instant death.”

Laurel rocked onto her knees. “Come on,” she said, “You can still outrun him.”

Sometimes, no matter how hard Chris jerked the joystick, he didn’t stand a chance.

Other times, fate seemed to be on his side.

Winky moved slowly. The red ever-smiling head that was Chris progressed in a straight line toward the exit as the hall monster arched diagonally through the wall, a thunderous growl paving its path. Straight for Chris.

He made it out just in time, clearing the third board.

“Woo,” Laurel slapped his shoulder. Her hand settled momentarily in the space beside his neck. “All right!”

Chris arched into her touch instantly. His reflexes took over, moving him toward the thing he meant to move away from. His neck caught her hand between his face and shoulder, held it captive against his cheek. Laurel didn’t try to withdraw it. Her brown irises were indistinguishable from the pupils. An excited blue light shone in them. Chris realized too late that it came from the screen and the new game board. Jerking his head up, her hand was free. Her fingers trembled as she brought them up, hovered over his left ear. The touch, a small white shock. Before he could react, her chin came down, and that was how Chris realized Laurel was taller than him: sitting on their knees on Marc Breton’s bed, her lips steadfastly inching his open. The controller fell from his hand, and he could hear the electric jolt of a hall monster banging into him. All the blood in his body rushed into his blue jeans.

Her tongue circled his mouth. He didn’t know when she gained entrance, or why he hadn’t thought to do it to her first. This was the part he’d never been able to practise. He felt her begin to withdraw. His hands jerked toward her, caught in her feathers, tangled among the short strands of her hair. Chris realized his eyes were wide open. He closed them. He let his lips loosen, felt the alive thing inside her face move into his again. He followed it back, and found the warm thick cavity of her mouth, the wet quivery wall of tongue that had retreated and curled up there behind her teeth. All the while, he could feel the rushing blood.

“Shit, the game! The game!” she yelped. She pulled away, made a grab for the fallen joystick twisting on its cord halfway between the desk and the floor.

She was so frantic for it that Chris grabbed the controller and played the last man directly into the Spider Room, where he died an instant death by means of red, shivering spidery electrocution. The beauty, he thought, was that only with Laurel could the game be as important.

She twitched into a giggle fit. Her shoulders shook. V-shaped breasts quivered beneath her black T-shirt like small private entities all their own.

“You were doing so well!” She fell sideways on the bed, rubbed tears from her eyes.

He didn’t know what possessed him. He flopped beside her, her jacket lying there, a pillow for his head. The saccharine musk of drugstore perfume surrounded Chris, the empty sleeves of the coat beneath his shoulders to hold him. The real Laurel turned to him, leaning close, the same smell on her.

“Chris . . .”

He could almost taste the soda on her breath again, NutraSweet and lip gloss. A surge of joy crested Chris’s ribcage and rushed downward.

Her spontaneity turned serious. “Christopher,” she said. She edged intentionally closer. They both looked down at the space she had closed, an inch of blue bedsheet between them. She propped herself up on one elbow, her face a finger away from his face, as she placed one digit upon his lips.

“Chris, I love . . .” She bit her lip. “I love — the way — you play.”

That was what she said. What Chris heard was, “I love you.”

She put her hands on him then. Though Marc’s smell still clung to the covers, Laurel’s chalky sweetness drew a cloud around Chris’s head. She shoved his T-shirt up, ran the palms of her hands across his scrawny chest.

“Unh . . .” he said, when she hit the nipples, a part he’d never known had so many nerve endings. Then Chris couldn’t say anything else or he would have grunted directly into her mouth. Laurel’s shirt slid up against his stomach, an inch or two of her skin against his. He knew right then he should just shut up, that if he wanted this to continue, it would, but only if he didn’t speak. He lay very still, willing her. His hands were trapped, one beneath her, the other pinned by her arm. Uselessly his hand froze on her back below her bra strap. He kept kissing her, and hoped.

Laurel’s fingers moved to the waistband of his jean cut-offs. A second later she was inside. Fly undone, blue Kmart briefs exposed, she rummaged beneath the material. Her hand wrapped around him clumsily, and Chris groaned. Her tongue effectively silenced him. For a few seconds Laurel fumbled, got her bearings, then began to jerk him somewhat harder than he would himself. Chris still couldn’t move his hands. In another minute, it would be too late.

She stopped abruptly, edged her shorts down her legs. Their sock feet tangled as she lay down, pressing Chris further into the mattress, the white lining of her jacket coming up crackling around his head, a peripheral halo. Laurel paused, a strange look in her eyes as though she was waiting for something. Then she reached down and grabbed Chris half around the balls and half around the shaft, attempting to yank him toward her, Stretch Armstrong–style. Aware of the impossibility, Chris still said nothing. She scooted down his stomach deliciously. Above Chris, her body became a stethoscope, amplifying. All he could hear was his heart pounding.
Dum-dum, dum-dum,
the dull song subsumed his skin as well as his head.

Laurel freed more of him from his jeans, and with further adjustments, Chris was in.

Consciously, he put his mouth against her ear, kept it there. It was the only normal part of her, the only part that felt definite. Below, he savoured nothing but a warm, silent hammering. The room and pressure closing around him.

Don’t jerk into her like an overeager dogboy,
Chris said to himself, wanting to laugh and not able to.

Four seconds, and already she was sliding away from him. Chris tried to go with her, to come out on top. They wound up side by side. The two children lay still for a moment, looking at each other. Her eyes were frightened and determined. Up close, her face seemed less formed. It had the malleability of adolescence, though Chris did not recognize it for what it was. A narrow forehead, ample flaccid cheeks by comparison, and rounded blades of nose and chin that would grow longer and more angular with age. Chris saw only smoothness, a dark freckle here or there, annular eyes, girl.

He reached up her shirt then and felt her. Beyond the elastic of her bra, her breast was smaller and softer than he expected. It wavered in his hand like egg yolk.

Inching his hips forward carefully, Chris felt himself becoming fluid, and thought for the first time about the danger of what they were doing.
Two more seconds,
he told himself.
Just two more seconds.
She pulled his face against her shoulder. The cotton became wet with his breath. She pulled him tighter and tighter against her until Chris couldn’t have left if he’d wanted to. Laurel moved his body, her breathing rising around him like fog.

Chris didn’t hear the door open. He’d never fully closed it. He didn’t see the person in the doorway. The first indication Chris had that they were not alone was when Laurel yelped. The second was a beer bottle flying over his head. It hit the wall behind the bed and shattered. Spray erupted over the two of them. Rivulets of glass poured down the wall, across the pillow in Chris’s hair.