Summer Days and Summer Nights (22 page)

Maybe I've just been reading too much Charles Dickens recently, but today doesn't seem dreary enough for a breakup, you know?

Yeah, about the Dickens thing: Not my choice. It's on our AP summer reading list, and I want to get into a good college, and summer's almost over. That said, the breakup thing wasn't exactly my choice either. But today's the day—breakup day—that Kieth and I agreed to, that we've been circling all summer like two gay buzzards. Unless, wait, maybe I mean vultures? Are those the same thing? Which one is the bird that waits until something's dead before it swoops down?

If that sounds dramatic, blame Kieth. He's kind of rubbed off on me this summer. He's an actor. For God's sake, he spells his name
Kieth
, even though he was born regular old Keith. Not that my Kieth is any kind of regular.

It was his idea, for example, to pick out our breakup day in the first place, the way some couples might look forward to an anniversary or a camping trip. I don't really know. It's all new to me. He's my first boyfriend. (I'm his third, which he likes to remind me.)

Customers!

A mom in a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball hat approaches my booth, followed by two girls in identical teal tank tops. They're local—but then, they're all locals here. Nobody drives more than forty miles to come to Wish-a-World. We are as regional and rickety as it comes, one degree removed from a traveling carnival.

“Good afternoon,” I say, doing my best to act casual. “Can I help you?” I've been back here thumbing my copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
, pondering how a book so heavy could be considered so classic.

“We were just wondering,” this lady says to me (she's about to ask where the bathroom is), “if you knew where the bathr—”

“Head past the log flume,” I say, “and duck under the sign for snow cones, and then make a hard right past the gazebo where everyone smokes, even though they're not allowed to. Can't miss it!”

Already,
poof
, they're gone. At the beginning of the summer, I would've tried to upsell them on a key chain, a hat, an anything. That's my job, and I like to do a good job. But one thing you learn when you man a souvenir stand at a regional amusement park is that mostly what people want is bathroom directions. What they rarely want is a twenty-dollar T-shirt, let alone a thirty-dollar
sweat
shirt, and who can blame them? The average temperature around here is hell with a chance of thunder.

I scan the sky for that cloudy, Dickensian day that doesn't seem to be showing up. “The good news,” I mumble at a seagull, “is that I've gotten over love before.”

Yep, I love Kieth. Or I think I do. But, hey, I loved pizza once, too, before I became lactose intolerant—and now I barely even miss it. I barely even think about pizza, I mean.

A cluster of tweens screams past my booth without stopping, one of them holding a Mylar Wish-a-World balloon that flits behind her like a metallic kite. I crack open
A Tale of Two Cities
and attempt to read the same paragraph I've been attempting to read for about three days now. Maybe four.

But then: “Excuse me—
sir
?”

And against all odds, I'm smiling.

It's Kieth, sneaking up on my booth. Who else would call me sir? Sirs don't have zits. Sirs can grow respectable sideburns.

“Could you,” he continues, “direct me to the Tunnel of Love?”

I shut the book. My eyes are already watering. Basically, my eyes are Pavlov's dogs, and Kieth's voice is the bell.

“We don't have a Tunnel of Love,” I say, just like I did on the day we met. He's recreating the whole scene—the way he tiptoed up to my booth “looking for the Tunnel of Love” after a full week of us stealing quiet glances at each other in the moldy employee locker room. Even under those harsh fluorescents, he was adorable. And unlike guys in my PE class at school, Kieth actually looked
back
. I was smitten.

“What kind of an amusement park
is
this if you don't have a Tunnel of Love?” he says, putting on a show here. Always putting on a show
any
where. “I'd like to speak to management.” Kieth places his hand on my book, but I jerk it away from him, for secret reasons.

“Ha-ha,” I say, “you can stop now.” He's in his show costume. Against park regulations. This is my in. “You're not allowed out here wearing that!” I only say it to change the subject, to get mad at him about something. When I'm mad at Kieth, I love him less.

I glance at the time on my phone. His next show starts in ten minutes. “You don't even have your makeup on!”

Three times a day, Kieth performs in a spirited theme park revue. It's a really cheesy show. Wish-a-World couldn't get the rights to any good songs, so it's this oddly generic mash-up of different knockoff styles. The fifties medley contains no hits from the fifties. The seventies medley sounds just like the eighties medley. Only the wigs offer a vague clue to the era.

“Eh.”
Kieth rubs his chin like he's checking for bruises on a peach. “It's the last day. I'm gonna skip the makeup and give my skin a break.”

He already has perfect skin.

I cross my arms. A small line has formed behind Kieth.

“People need to know where the bathroom is,” I say, gesturing at the antsy park patrons fanning themselves with our famously outdated park maps. “And
you
have a show!” I look at my phone again. “In seven minutes!”

But he doesn't budge. He touches my hands and makes them stop playing this made-up song that I've been thumping into my glass stand. Every time Kieth touches me, I feel the same jolt I felt in the second grade when I plugged in my mom's hair dryer and got my finger caught between the prongs and the outlet.

“Actually, Matty,” he says, “I wanted to invite you to this little wrap party the cast is having. Backstage.”

Ugh. I've avoided going backstage all summer. All those theater people in one room, all those loud voices, all that
hugging
—it's a lot. Kieth is enough. Kieth is, I remind myself, almost too much.

“Why didn't you just text me?” I ask. Because, really, it's a big deal to be in costume outside of his amphitheater. Kieth could get written up. I'm no goody two-shoes, but I hate breaking rules for no reason.

“I had a feeling you'd put up a fight, is why,” Kieth says. “You know, all those theater people … So I thought I'd ask you to the party face-to-face. Plus, I like your face.”

I hate that he knows me so well. No—I
love
that he knows me so well, and I hate that today it's over.

To catch you up: Tomorrow, Kieth's off to freshman year in college and I'm off to senior year in high school, both of us traveling in opposite directions on a map. You couldn't mastermind a more geographically literal breakup.

Ba-da-boom, ba-da-boom, ba-da-boom.

This canned music starts pumping from inside the half-tented amphitheater, twenty feet away across our faux-cobblestone Maine Street. It used to be called
Main
Street, but Disney apparently sued us in the nineties, so the owners painted an
e
onto the word
Main
—even though nothing about Maine Street is evocative of Maine. There are no lobster shacks. There are no fishermen. We are in Pennsylvania. There's just my souvenir stand and the amphitheater and a dozen “shoppes” with faded striped awnings, all of them selling the same Wish-a-World candy.

“Can we move it along, guys?” this dad type calls out from my line.

“I gotta work the booth,” I say to Kieth.

He releases my hand. “So? The wrap party, at lunch? Be my plus-one?”

Please note that he can't even say “Be my
date,
” after five weeks and two days of, you know, dating.

“I thought we were having lunch
together,
” I say. “Just us. For the
last
time.” This all comes out more emphatic than I mean it to,
LIKE WHEN YOUR BEST FRIEND TEXTS YOU IN ALL CAPS
.

Buh-du-beeeep, buh-du-beeeep, bu-duh-beeeep.

The music has switched to this annoying bleep, which signals the three-minute countdown to the top of Kieth's show. Several potential patrons leave my line altogether, openly scowling at me as they hightail it to find bathrooms unknown. There goes my commission.

Kieth glances at the amphitheater entrance—an unwelcoming wall of concrete speckled with wadded-up gum, a Wish-a-World rite of passage—and then back at me. “See you after the show …
please
?”

Man, you should see the way he twinkles. Kieth can turn on the charm like it's, I don't know, a faucet. A faucet that's powered by a geyser.

“
Pretty
please?”

I take
A Tale of Two Cities
and use it to gently bop his forehead. “Okay.”

He leans forward and kisses me, something we don't do in public. It's against park policy for employees to date each other—but I let him. I have to stand on my tippytoes because he's taller than me. What if I never meet another guy who is the perfect kissing height, a four-and-a-half-inch difference if I'm in my favorite pair of white Converse (which don't technically fit me anymore but are the ideal level of smudged)?

Our first kiss happened beneath a murky moon, with mosquitoes buzzing around me like a halo. Every one of my senses went
boing
. I could smell Kieth's sweat-concealing cologne, I could taste his gum, I could see his eyelids flutter. I didn't close my own eyes, because what if
this
—the hottest, happiest moment of my life—was a dream? When he came up for air and said, “Holy crap, Matty, you're a really good kisser,” I still wasn't sure if I was awake.

But today, “No crying!” is all Kieth says, after he pulls away from our public kiss and sees my face. He's always teasing me (in a sweet way, I think?) for being emotional. By now, he's learned that once I start crying you'd better back away or find a snorkel. “At least save it for the parking lot!”

That's where we always say good night. Every night. A tradition.

“Fine,” I say. “Look—presto—I'm not crying.” But he's not really listening. He's getting in his performance zone, which I have to respect. I love a job well done.

“I'm outtie, cutie,” he shouts back at me, scurrying away with only one minute left till he's due on stage.

And as I look at his ridiculously cute butt in those polyester black pants, the thing that dawns on me, weirdly, is that maybe I do miss pizza. Very badly. That maybe, if I'm being honest with myself, I haven't stopped thinking about pizza since the day I had to stop eating it, when the allergist said I have an oversensitive disposition.

*   *   *

Something is off about Wish-a-World today. No theme park is exactly an epicenter of civic responsibility, but even by our lax standards there is a lawless vibe in the air.

Adults are hiding behind our overgrown topiary bushes (is that a hippo? a …
dragon
?) before springing out to soak their friends with water guns. Skateboarders are blazing down the Maine Street sidewalk in coordinated, flock-like V's. Twice already today I've watched the manager of the Candy Shoppe chase after kids who were dashing out of his store with shoplifted sweets, their pockets bulging like chipmunk cheeks.

Last month, Kieth bought me these humongous candy lips from the Candy Shoppe and wrote “But your kisses are sweeter” on the price tag in purple Magic Marker.

Across the courtyard in the amphitheater, they're midway into their thirty-five-minute show, at the top of the all-girl doo-wop section. Kieth's not on again for another forty-five seconds, so I leisurely open my book again, and—

Really, who am I kidding? I'm not going to digest a word of this. Not today anyway.

So I take off my sunglasses and pull out my bookmark, which isn't a bookmark at all but a handwritten, top secret list that I've slowly been compiling. A list of everything about Kieth that drives me crazy. I figure it'll be easier to put him in the past if I can remember how annoying he makes my present.

Thing number one:
He always looks like he's waiting for me to stop talking
. Like, his eyes kind of fade out when I'm sharing something. Kieth's like a kid in Kiddie Land, waiting his turn to hop on a ride. But the thing about the kids at Kiddie Land—and I know this because I was a ride operator last summer, and made three dollars less per hour—is that they are terrible about waiting their turn. And so is Kieth.

I squint against the sun, toward Kieth's stage. The girls are taking all sorts of bizarre vocal liberties in the medley today, making it sound totally contemporary. They're acting up, since it's the last day at the park. “Prank day,” Kieth called it, preparing me for it last night, “because what are they going to do, fire us? None of us want to work at this deadbeat park again, anyway.”

He said all this, by the way, forgetting that yours truly is back for his second summer in a row. Because Kieth forgets everything.

I accidentally bite my tongue and take the hot frustration as a cue to continue reviewing my list.

Thing number two:
Kieth isn't always sensitive about my feelings.
He's got that actor thing where his eyebrows are permanently lifted, judging every last everything that passes by. It can be intoxicatingly fun to hang with Kieth—nobody is funnier, nobody is faster. But as my mom always says, “There's a fine line between charming and manipulative.”

Oh, my mom: a nurse, a real bleeding heart. Like, she had a
COEXIST
bumper sticker on her car before it was trendy, et cetera. The only nicer person is my dad, who my friends have anointed “the strangely buff vegetarian.” My parents are so nice that when I brought Kieth home for dinner a couple weeks ago my dad tried three different neutral topics—the weather, the wonky mass transportation system in Pittsburgh, and “What about your folks, Kieth? What do they do?”—before giving up, since Kieth likes to be in total control of conversation topics. (Kieth wanted to talk about religion, since he's proud to have recently left the Catholic church. My mom got up three times during dinner—to get the salt, to get the pepper, and then to get a different kind of salt.)