“Allegedly,” I enunciate each rolling syllable. “We don’t know that for sure.”
“Does anybody? Ever?”
“Maybe not. But doesn’t it feel boring to you? Unromantic? Where’s the exploration? The possibility? The tension? The hunt?” I enthuse.
“The closest I ever want to get to hunting is biting the end off this hot dog,” Lish proclaims dramatically, tearing the hot dog wildly with her teeth for effect.
“Don’t quit your day job,” I say.
Lish chuckles, then looks at me with her big brown eyes and requests, “Can you save your judgment for Travis until after you meet him? No, wait. Like after you hang out with him a few times just in case he doesn’t make a good first impression?”
“Fine. But only for you. Not because I believe Empties are real.”
“You have three days to prepare your most sincere fake smile. I suggest you practice in a mirror.”
We watch Sanford and Son for a while, and I try my best to live in this moment. Just me, my best friend, some hot dogs, and classic TV. Fred shouts to his dead wife, “This is the big one, Elizabeth!” always a favorite gag on the show, but I lose to my brain, stuck on Travis.
“What kind of name is Travis anyway?” I turn to ask Lish.
“What kind of name is Hendrix?” she blows back.
“I don’t know. Nor do I care.”
“Mmmhmmm.” She side-glances at me. “Just keep telling yourself that, Agatha.” Lish uses my full name when she thinks she’s being wise. “You know you want to meet your MTB. Even if you don’t want to spend your life with him, you’ve at least got to be intrigued. I bet you search for his name on the Internet tonight. How many Hendrix Cutters can there be in the world?” Lish is such a sensible pain in my stubborn ass. How am I going to resist the lure of an Internet search? Not a full-on Signature Scan, but just a basic Google search of his name? It couldn’t possibly bring up very many hits. And what about my name? Agatha isn’t weird, but I’ve never met another person named Agatha who isn’t over seventy-five.
God. There is a person out there with my horribly illegible signature scribbled onto his body. Is he looking for me? What if he finds me? What if he wants to get married right away and settle down and have babies and, God forbid, wants to be a stockbroker? Or worse: a dentist?
I refuse to look him up. I will use all my willpower and only touch the interwebs for important things like movie times and Kylo Ren fan fiction.
Good thing I start work tomorrow. That should keep my mind off Empties. Because no one I work with is over eighteen and thinking about their Empty, too.
CHAPTER 6
I wake up the next day with the gross remnants of an early-morning dream about a man named Hendrix Cutter who was bordering on ninety years old. And we still made out. The spray of the shower does little to cleanse my mind, and I keep reliving the feel of his wrinkly, soft lips. How do Hugh Hefner’s wives handle this?
Only one case of Empties with a massive age gap has made front-page news—most Empties’ ages fall within ten years of each other. What’s kind of cool, or could be construed as cool if I cared about this MTB nonsense, is that the Name seems to always correspond with a person’s signature at eighteen years old. I’m not quite sure how that fact was discovered. Were scientists digging through boxes of old math tests? Drivers’ licenses make some sense, although that’s sixteen in Illinois. I think it’s different in every state. Every country? Maybe an assumption was made because the Name presents itself upon your eighteenth birthday. In the same vein, if you are eighteen and a person’s signature appears on your chest, it may be possible that the person whose signature you see is not yet, in fact, eighteen. Maybe not even born yet. Much of this is speculation, since the disease (phenomenon, whatever) has only been around for six years. Time will tell, I suppose. Out of curiosity, I grab a piece of scrap paper from the kitchen junk drawer and sign my name as though signing a letter to a relative. I sign again, this time as I would sign the late sheet in my high school office. Still legible, although less so. Finally, I sign my name the way I had on multiple college applications: scattered, angry, willy-nilly. Which one does Hendrix Cutter see? What Hendrix Cutter am I seeing?
I sure as hell hope Hendrix Cutter isn’t ninety. Or four.
Not that it matters.
Time to shift gears into work mode. This marks the third summer I’ve worked at a semilocal (i.e., far enough away that people from my school don’t work there, but close enough that I only have a half-hour drive) kiddie amusement park called Haunted Hollow. The park opens in June and closes Labor Day, when all the high school and college kids can dedicate ten hours a day, six days a week to shilling Halloween-themed snacks, like Hag’s Hot Dogs and Freaky Fries, and escorting children onto rides with clever titles like Voodoo Vehicles, Spook Spinner, and the Carousel of Decline. Ironically, the park shuts its doors before its holiday inspiration, although I suppose it’s no different from the year-round Christmas shop, Jingles, or Fireworks, the Fourth of July–themed restaurant that never made it to its first Fourth of July celebration. Who doesn’t want to be scared shitless every fifteen minutes by a mock fireworks display while they’re eating their sliders?
Haunted Hollow is run by a man named Sam Hain (always hoping, but pretty sure it’s not his real name), a beefy, tattooed man with sideburns that are so close to touching that some may consider them a poorly manscaped beard. He is both terrifying and divine, and, really, who else could own a Halloween-themed amusement park for kids?
And I must emphasize the for kids part. No ride would accommodate a person of adult size (although I can squeeze my compact frame into some of the rides, and often do, after hours).
I tug on my glaring orange, ahem, pumpkin-orange Haunted Hollow t-shirt, one of about sixteen I’ve snagged for myself during my two-year tenure. I made it a habit to grab discarded t-shirts from any employee who (a) was fired for insubordination, slacking off on the job, eating all the rainbow-flavored Dippin’ Dots, or pilfering funds from concessions, or (b) left for college and wanted no tangible proof that they ever worked at such a subpar amusement establishment.
I, on the other hand, fucking love the place. Halloween is incontestably the best holiday of the year, and it’s two trillion times better when you’re a kid. Add to that the gluttonous paradise of snacks, the blatantly rigged game stalls, and the questionable safety of the rides, and Haunted Hollow is essentially paradise.
Plus, Luke Jacobs works there.
Luke runs the park’s only roller coaster, the Ghoster Coaster with the Moster, usually referred to as the Ghoster by kids and carnies alike. The ride resides directly next to the ride I helm, the Devil’s Dinghies. Some people consider the Devil’s Dinghies a shitty ride to work on; it’s slow-loading, kids are always dropping things into the water, and the tracks are so rusty that half the time the maintenance crew is grumbling their way through knee-high water to save the whimpering kids who are trapped in the tunnel.
I don’t mind it. I like to find the tiny toys that have slipped out of kids’ hands and sunk to their watery graves in the nuclear-blue water. I enjoy lifting toddlers under their innocent armpits when their parents are too busy on their phones to notice they need help. And I know it drives everyone batshit crazy, but damn if I don’t love the Devil’s Dinghies song that reverberates through the tunnel from dawn until dusk. The tune is ridiculously peppy, but the lyrics are pretty wicked if you actually listen to them.
Oh, the devil knows where you are.
You’re not on a train or a bus or a car.
You’re not on a bike or a plane.
Beware of the rattling chain.
The devil’s dinghies,
The devil’s dinghies,
The evilest boats around.
The devil’s dinghies,
The devil’s dinghies,
Next stop: be-low ground!
Written and recorded by Mr. Sam Hain himself.
Luke and I spent many a n
ight together over the summers amassing lost toys and belting out the Devil’s Dinghies song like a couple of drunk pirates. The fun invariably ended when his girlfriend of four years, Jenny Butor, picked him up from work, and our potentially romantic moment would disappear until the next night.
At the end of each summer, Luke and I hugged good-bye, painfully platonically, promised to keep in touch, and promptly forgot once our respective school years started. At least, he would forget. My itchy texting finger frequently hovered over the desperate send button, but I never pulled the trigger. For all I knew, he turned into a werewolf once he left the park. And there was the whole girlfriend thing.
Like me, Luke turned eighteen this year. Which means Luke has an Empty, too. I wonder what that implies for ol’ Jenny Butor. Maybe he won’t even work at Haunted Hollow this summer. Which would suck.
Uncle Jim scuffs into the kitchen in decaying moccasins and his Mr. Bubble uniform. The shirt is one of his older editions, shrunken down by too much time in the dryer. A lot of his shirts are too small for his lanky frame, as though he didn’t realize he was going to grow to be six feet and stopped clothes shopping when he turned sixteen. I am enamored with the entire concept of my uncle Jim: a tall man with red hair and beard, his bubbly clothing ensembles and his coffee addiction, and his chosen career as a shiller of romantic fantasy reads for women. The man himself is pretty badass, too. He’s a rock-star chef, built me a friggin’ bathroom, and is damn funny.
But I can’t help feeling sorry that he won’t leave the house. Like, ever. Sure, he goes into the backyard and sometimes even stargazes from the roof. He’ll get the mail after surveying the area to ensure no one is around to attempt small talk. But the only face-to-face human interaction he gets is with me and my mom, plus Lish, due to their shared love of Degrassi.
Other than hanging out with us, he writes in his attic studio and keeps to himself. Unless he has some secret online existence I don’t know about, Uncle Jim is pretty much crushed by his anxiety. Which is a damn shame. I think he’d love the Devil’s Dinghies theme song live and in person.
“My eyes!” Uncle Jim shrieks, shielding his face with his bathrobed forearm. “You can’t wear that color at six in the morning,” he scolds.
“This is what all the cool kids are wearing. You’d know this if you left the house.” Even though I know his agoraphobia is essentially debilitating, I can’t help but want more for him. Sunshine streaming through an attic window is hardly a viable source of vitamin D.
Plus, he refuses any sort of help. He won’t talk to a therapist or go on medication, no yoga or exercise of any real kind (I don’t think climbing up and down the attic ladder to use the bathroom counts). He could be way decent-looking if he shaved his lumberjack beard, fixed his hair, and changed his clothes once in a while, and he is wasting his life living inside our house.
The only piece of his lifestyle that I support is that he is choosing to live it his way. He is not abiding by any preset notion of what a man in this freakishly new age should be doing. Empties be damned, my uncle doesn’t give a shit that he could be out there finding his supposed true love. He’d rather be holed up, sipping his black coffee from a Reading Rainbow mug, and writing cheesy fiction to get off unsatisfied housewives.
This is not to say I don’t die of curiosity every time the mention of Jim’s MTB comes up and he instantly shuts it down. Uncle Jim would sooner go to the grocery store than walk around without a shirt on.
Maybe that’s the real reason he built me my own bathroom.
CHAPTER 7
Luke Jacobs is back, and has grown since the last time I saw him. A lot. I stopped growing the year after I got my period, seventh grade, with my breasts stalling out somewhere around freshman year. I didn’t even realize they were as large as they were compared to my smaller stature until a woman in the Kohl’s lingerie department (mind you, just some random woman and not an actual Kohl’s employee) blatantly guffawed when I held up a flimsy bandeau bra and asked my mom if I had the correct size. “Honey, maybe for a headband,” the guffawer said. It’s a wonder I order my bras online.
Luke Jacobs’s growth was just as unanticipated as that of my breasts, but a whole lot more exciting (to me, at least. I’m pretty sure my breasts are rather exciting to quite a number of people). His height over the past couple of summers had hovered somewhere in the average range. It wouldn’t have been something I’d mention when describing him to someone, like, for instance, my best friend. “He’s got shortish brown hair that gets shaggy toward the end of the summer. Eyes that are sometimes brownish, sometimes greenish, sometimes bluish—”
“That’s called hazel,” Lish would interject.
“Really? I thought maybe his eyes have some magical changeling quality that only happens when I’m around. Like mood eyeballs. Can we pretend he has mood eyeballs?”
Ever the romantic, Lish would inevitably agree.
“He has really fit calves that aren’t overly hairy but just enough so that I might have fantasized about running my fingers through them.”
“Through the calf hairs?”
“Don’t pretend like you’ve never had that daydream. And the dimples…”
“On his calves?” Lish loves to interrupt me when I’m overanalyzing a potential beau’s body parts.
“On his cheeks, duh. The ones on his face. I knew what you were thinking. One on each side. They appear only when I’m around,” I assure her.
“How do you know?” She barely holds in her snicker.
“Because I can’t see them when I’m not around, can I?”
“I could analyze them myself, if you ever let me meet the guy,” Lish says.
Lish has never met any of my friends and coworkers from Haunted Hollow. The drive is far enough that she couldn’t randomly drop by while she was busy with summer school last year nor will she be able to this year because of her internship at a local pharmaceutical company. The rides at Haunted Hollow are only suitable for ages ten and under (that’s a prepuberty ten for sure), but anyone over the age of eight is too busy season-passing it at Six Flags to care about a rinky-dink operation like Haunted Hollow. All the reasons keeping Lish away are precisely why I like it. Not that I don’t love hanging out with Lish, but sometimes I like to feel that I’m nowhere near my actual life (see also: my desire to move to Australia). Working at Haunted Hollow is akin to going away to summer camp (I would imagine, if my mom ever let me go). You see the same people year after year, eat cotton candy for breakfast, watch little kids have the time of their lives, then go home to your family with a pocketful of tales no one will understand except your fellow campers. Each summer is filled with sunburn, churros, and broken hearts. Why would anyone not want to work here? (*cough* Shitty pay, indigestion after every meal, backwoods locals who put cigarettes out on children’s ride seats. *cough*)
I’d be lying a smidge if I said Luke Jacobs wasn’t one of my main considerations when coming back to a job that pays significantly less than Lish’s internship (not that I have any interest in the world of pharmaceuticals, unless they can do something about turning me into a half human/half unicorn). It’s not as though Luke and I ever really had a relationship. Or a date. Or any actual romance, since he’s been dating the same person since the two Frankenstein-slow-danced together in eighth grade. Except …
… none of this stopped us from making out. Once. It probably wasn’t even technically making out, since it lasted less than five minutes and there was only minimal tongue involved. His hand did cup one breast, although that might have been due to its colossal size and his hand having nowhere else to go once in its proximity. I am now wondering if it’s technically possible to cup something accidentally. The act occurred behind the Wheel of Torture, where most seedy things do, on our last night of work before the park closed for fall. Sam Hain threw a bash for seasonal workers before the park was dismantled by the full-time employees, women and men who work year-round on technical and aesthetic upkeep and who mos
tly look upon us seasonals with polite disdain. I don’t blame them. We are the ones who push the incorrect buttons and hold levers too long, which makes rides malfunction and their jobs more complicated. But without us, what would they do all summer? Eat funnel cakes and drive around in their miniature trucks blasting AC/DC out of the open windows due to lack of air conditioning? They need us, and we need them, and most importantly the kids need all of us.
And that night I really needed to kiss Luke Jacobs.
We were all sugared up on too much Witch’s Brew, the park’s signature drink of strawberry lemonade mixed with 7Up. I ordered mine with extra maraschino cherries because I knew the kid working concessions, Jerry B., had a crush on me. It was good for some extra cherries anyway.
Luke and I had a pretty fun summer together, using a system of lewd hand gestures we’d devised to communicate across the chasm between our rides. We also wrote out a few paper signs for important occasions, such as LUNCH?, SNACK?, and PEE? for those times we needed someone to cover our ride between break times. Lunchtime was spent with a group of seasonals, the majority of whom attended the same high school, and therefore knew each other in an “I saw you when you had your awkward bowl cut” kind of way. The few of us seasonals not from the immediate area brought with us a bit of intrigue, albeit not as much as the foreign exchangers. The buzz at most lunches varied from pop-culture chat to college applications to advice for the lovelorn, and almost always inevitably turned to Empties. Every summer a crop of seasonals had recently turned eighteen, and like the first kid who figured out Santa was a sham, they loved acting like the ultimate MTB authority.
“Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: It hurts like a bitch.”
“He’s full of shit. It tickles. Like, in a really good way.”
“I didn’t even notice when I got mine.”
“You were probably too stoned to remember it was your birthday.”
And that was just the conversation about the materialization of the Name. When it came to discussing what people believed the Name meant, that polarized the seasonals hardcore.