“I wuv you,” said a seven-foot-tall alligator, hugging a child.
“I wuv you, too, Scaly,” said the child. “Can I touch your scales?”
“Sure, but be careful, little one, because they’re rough!”
The Scrabble kids had until ten P.M., at which point they needed to be back on the buses. Nate’s father wandered over to the water-balloon toss, and Nate’s mother and Dr. Steve and Eloise headed to the frozen custard stand. “Have a great time, Nate,” called Dr. Steve.
Carl Slater’s mother sat at the entrance of a kiddie helicopter ride, secretly lighting a cigarette into her cupped hand. Other parents stood in clusters, knowing that they needed to give their kids freedom tonight. Playing in a tournament took a lot out of you. You needed to unwind, or else you might fall apart.
Duncan felt a little concerned when he thought about his mother lying in the hotel room with a migraine, but April yanked him by the arm and insisted he go with her on the gator coaster, and so he forgot about his mother for a while.
April pulled up the safety bar on the first car, locking them in. “Lucy can’t handle roller coasters,” she said. “She basically turns into a vomit machine. It’s her one weakness. Other than that, she’s pretty perfect.”
“I don’t mind going on this ride,” Duncan said. “It really doesn’t look so bad.”
“You did see the second hill, right?”
“No,” said Duncan. He had only seen the first hill, a gentle rise that wasn’t very high. “What do you mean?”
April didn’t say anything.
“April, tell me what you mean!” Duncan said again, but it was too late; the roller coaster cars were already rumbling slowly up a gentle hill. He wouldn’t be able to get off now. They reached the top, trembled there for a moment, then rushed downward. The wind lifted Duncan’s and April’s hair; neither of them needed to scream, for the hill was low and the ride was brief.
But then, up ahead, Duncan saw what was coming. The track was almost vertical. It seemed to take forever to reach the top, and when they did, the whole snaking chain of cars paused for an agonizing moment, with Duncan and April right in front.
“Oh my God,” Duncan said.
The coaster plunged down so fast that neither of them had a chance to say another word. Their mouths opened into two letter O’s, perfectly round and worth one point apiece, and they both screamed “AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!” all the way to the bottom.
After recovering, they went on the Ferris wheel together, which carried them above the park. “This is unbelievable,” Duncan said, looking down.
“Yeah, it’s an amazing view,” said April.
“No, I mean the whole weekend.”
“Oh, I know,” said April. “I definitely want to come back next year, no matter what happens tomorrow. Whether we make it to the finals or not.” She looked out over the park, her hand shielding her eyes.
“That stuff you were telling everyone,” Duncan suddenly said. “I think you’ll get what you want. Your family will have to see how good you are. And that the game is a sport. At least, it is to you.”
“Thanks, Duncan. I think you’ll get what you want, too,” she said, but he thought she was just being polite.
If the Drilling Falls team didn’t win, then everything in Duncan’s life would be miserable again. Carl would drop him; it would be as if their friendship, their partnership, had never happened. Duncan and his mother would stay in Aunt Djuna’s house for good. He would be Lunch Meat once again, and probably forever.
Tomorrow, during one of the games, when it was no longer possible to win through luck or skill, Duncan would finally have to use the power in the fingertips of his left hand. He wouldn’t be able to put it off any longer.
A moment would arise, and he’d go for it, and afterward he would feel a little ashamed. What had started off as a strange and uncommon skill had become something that made him unhappy. He just wanted to play Scrabble the regular way, like everyone else at the tournament. Was that too much to ask?
Duncan lifted his left hand now and studied it in the nighttime light of the amusement park. It looked like an ordinary hand, like a miniature version of Duncan himself: a little bit chunky and pale.
“I’m not sure I should get what I want,” he said to April.
“Why not?”
“You have to understand what a weird year this has been,” he said, but then he didn’t know what else to say. “At first, they called me Lunch Meat.”
“Who did?”
“Everybody,” he said bitterly.
“But why?”
He told April about the piece of baloney that had been flung onto the back of his ugly yellow shirt.
“What a stupid name,” she said. “Lunch Meat. It isn’t even clever. It’s just . . . nothing.”
“I was a nothing,” he said. “And then things changed.”
“What do you mean?”
He was desperate to tell her all about his power, to confess everything to her and see what she said. But he couldn’t tell her, of course, because she might be furious with him. She might even turn him in. She might lose respect for him, too.
“Maybe it’s not right to get what I want,” he said. “Other people want things, too.” He thought of how April had been practicing Scrabble with Lucy for months and months. And then, of course, there were Nate and Maxie to think about. Nate Saviano needed to free himself from his father’s death grip. It would devastate Larry Saviano if Nate and Maxie lost, and it would make Nate’s life really difficult. “Everything’s so complicated,” Duncan said.
“Everything’s always complicated,” April said. “Welcome to the world, Duncan.”
“We can’t both win,” Duncan said. “One of our teams might win the final round, but of course that would mean the other one loses.”
“Or else neither of us might win,” said April. “Face it, there are lots of other good teams here. Nate and Maxie could win, easily—look at how Nate plays, and how both of them do that amazing mental math. Or the Surfer Dudes; they’re very solid players.”
April squinted out over the park. Though she’d insisted that she’d given up on finding the boy from the motel pool—the boy from the past—she was obviously still looking for him. Maybe he was out there in the night. Probably, though, he wasn’t.
You never really knew for sure what was going to happen next in life, Duncan thought. That was part of the pain, and the fun. You never knew the end of the story until it happened.
“Maxie, watch this!” Nate Saviano called, chucking a small beanbag toward the center hole at the beanbag-toss booth. But the edge of it caught on the wood and instead of going in it slid down the board.
“Nice try,” said Maxie, and she picked up another beanbag and sailed it through the center hole.
A bored teenager with a gigantic Adam’s apple handed her a stuffed animal that was meant to look like Scaly the Gator.
“Thanks. It can be our shared pet,” said Maxie.
“We can have joint custody,” said Nate.
“You can feed it and walk it,” Maxie said. “I’ll just do the easy stuff, like teach it tricks.”
They tossed the alligator back and forth as they walked through the park. It actually did feel a little scaly, Nate thought, yawning. He was tired from the long day, and he wanted to be sure to get a good night’s sleep tonight—though probably his father would try and convince him to stay up late studying ING endings or something.
When the evening was almost over, the life-sized Scaly the Gator approached the group of kids, calling through his snout, “Last chance to go on the Lazy Swamp Ride before the park closes!” He managed to herd several players over to the line for the ride.
Nate and Maxie saw their friends heading there, and they joined the cluster and slipped into the very first two-person boat, which waited in a man-made channel of water.
“Here we go, just us and our pet,” said Maxie, placing the stuffed animal between them.
r /> Duncan and Carl got into the boat right behind them, trailed by the girls from Portland, and the Surfer Dudes, and then a few other teams. The man in the gator costume called out, “Everyone make sure your seat belt is on!” Then he pulled a lever, and the caravan of boats entered the tunnel. Suddenly it was dark, and the whole place smelled of machine oil. Nate heard the sound of water dripping, and kids giggling and talking in other boats.
Up ahead, a light clicked on in a life-sized diorama, revealing two animatronic alligators in rocking chairs, rocking back and forth. One of them was missing an eye; it had probably rolled off into the water months earlier.
“Pleased to meetcha!” said one of the alligators.
“Be sure to keep your hands out of the water!” said the other. “Our son Junior can get pretty frisky!”
All of a sudden, from within the oily dark water around the boats, another animatronic alligator’s head popped up. Duncan Dorfman peered calmly down at it. Its jaws opened so wide he could see the gears inside. He could even make out a Phillips-head screw that had been screwed into a rod that held the teeth in place.
“This is the lamest ride in the world,” Carl muttered beside Duncan.
“Yeah, it really is,” Duncan agreed.
From a couple of cars behind them, one of the Surfer Dudes said in his recognizable voice, “Actually, it’s totally rad. Not.” His partner snickered.
“I’ve had enough already. We should be in the hotel, resting our brains,” said Carl. He turned to Duncan. “You’re definitely going to come through tomorrow, right, Duncan?”
But Duncan said nothing.
“Right, Duncan? No more guilty conscience. It’s getting old.”
Duncan didn’t have time to reply, for they had lurched forward, moving through the dark water toward the next lit-up display. This one was made to look like a scene from Little Red Riding Hood, with an animatronic alligator dressed as a grandmother lying in a bed. A mannequin dressed as Little Red Riding Hood stood beside her.
“Come a little closer, why don’tcha!” said the grandmother.
So Little Red Riding Hood did, and the alligator reached out with its snapping jaws and grabbed Little Red Riding Hood’s head, which neatly popped off. A few kids in the boats appreciatively cried out “Whoa!” and “Nice!”
“I have to urinate!” cried someone else. Duncan realized it was Tim, from the Wranglers.
“The alligator theme doesn’t even make sense,” Maxie said to Nate as they sat in their boat. “I mean, what’s the point of doing Little Red Riding Hood with alligators? What’s the point of this whole creepy place?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Nate.
Without warning, the light in the display—and all the other lights in the tunnel—snapped off, leaving the ride in darkness.
Someone gasped; another kid screamed. Nate and Maxie’s boat pushed through the water with a grinding noise. An ominous KRRRRR sound came from beneath the surface, and Nate felt himself thrust through some damp rubber flaps, and then he and Maxie Roth were out of the dark tunnel and back in the amusement park, where all the lights were blazing, and the music was playing, and everything was normal.
“That was so odd,” Maxie said. “Technical difficulties, I guess.”
“I guess,” said Nate, a little shaken up. They stood up in their boat and disembarked at the same place where they had gotten on. But when Nate turned around, he saw that none of the other boats had come out of the ride. “Where is everyone?” he asked.
They were the only ones to have made it out of the Lazy Swamp Ride. All the others were still stuck inside.
Chapter Fifteen
TRAPPED
What’s going on?” Duncan whispered. It was so dark in the tunnel that he couldn’t even see Carl, who, in the hurry to get on the ride, had ended up beside him.
“No idea,” said Carl Slater, and for once he actually sounded unsure of himself.
“I’ve been in blackouts before,” said a voice with a Southern accent from a few boats back. Duncan recognized it as belonging to Kaylie, one of the Evangelical Scrabblers. “These things happen,” Kaylie said.
“Maybe to you,” said one of the Surfer Dudes. “But not to us. We haven’t been in blackouts. We’ve been in wipeouts.”
Their voices all sounded loud and clear, and they could hear one another perfectly.
“I’m sure it will be fixed ASAP,” said Lucy Woolery.
“Is ASAP any good in Scrabble?” asked Tim from the Wranglers.
“Of course not,” said Carl, snorting.
“Hey, be nice to him, Carl,” said April. “He’s younger than you.”
It was funny, Duncan thought, the way everybody seemed to know exactly who was speaking, even though they were all stuck in a completely dark tunnel. It wasn’t the worst place to be trapped. But just as he thought this, he became aware of a swishing sound in the water.
“What’s that?” asked Josh, the other Evangelical Scrabbler.
“Oh, it’s probably just the mechanical gears down there,” said Lucy. “Nothing to get freaked about.”
“Anyway, the live alligators in the park are in enclosed swamp areas,” April said. “Lucy and I bought little meat snacks for them from a vending machine. A dollar fifty for a piece of gross, fatty meat. I feel sorry for the alligators here.”
“Could be a shark,” said one of the Surfer Dudes.
“Cut it out,” Duncan said. “You’re scaring people.”
“By which you mean,” said the other Surfer Dude, “we’re scaring you.”
“Yeah, right,” said Duncan, but in a way he was a little nervous, and he knew that the Surfer Dudes knew it. Probably everyone did.
They were all silent. Finally Kaylie said, “Maybe this isn’t a regular blackout. Nobody’s made an announcement to tell us what’s happening.”
“Do you think someone’s going to rescue us?” asked Tim, his voice starting to shake.
“Oh, I’m sure they will,” said Lucy. “One of these days.”
Time passed, and the little boats rocked slightly in the water, and still no one came to get them out.
“Hello,” said Kaylie quietly.
“Hello,” said Duncan.
“I wasn’t talking to you, Duncan, sorry.”
“Oh. Who were you talking to?”
“God.”
“Really? Wow,” said Lucy Woolery.
“I like to do that when I’m in a stressful situation,” Kaylie said.
“And does it help?” Lucy asked.
“Definitely,” said Kaylie. “It makes me feel better. You guys can make fun of me if you like. Other kids do.”
“People make fun of me, too,” said Tim. “Because I look like I’m eight. My dad says I’ll probably need human growth hormone injections. You get them every day in your arm or your leg.”
“I know a kid who had those,” said April. “He said they weren’t bad. But anyway, we’re not making fun of any of you.” She paused. “I get made fun of by my sisters and my brother for liking words so much. They’re really annoying about it.”
“I get made fun of,” said one of the Surfer Dudes, whose name was Jonno, “by my partner, Bradley, when we’re surfing and I can’t handle a wave.”
“That’s a total lie,” said Bradley.
“No, it’s not. You’re like, ‘What a baby; that wave was like two inches high.’”
“If someone makes fun of us this weekend when Kaylie and I are praying before a game,” Josh said, “we’re just going to ignore them. We decided this in advance.”
“Do you guys think God’s here right this minute?” Tim asked. “At Funswamp?”
“Oh, sure,” said Kaylie. “Funswamp needs God.”
“And do you think God is here with us on this ride?” asked Tim.
“I personally happen to think so,” Josh said.
There was silence again. No one had any idea how long it would be before they got out of here. They all sat in their boats in
the darkness and waited.
Outside, Nate was anxiously trying to get the attention of the guy dressed as Scaly the Gator, who sat on a stool by the lever of the ride. The alligator seemed distracted. “Excuse me, sir,” Nate said. “I was on the ride in there, and it got stuck, and then there was a loud grinding sound, and my friend and I got out, but no one else did.”
The alligator looked at him. “Is that right?” he said.
“Yes! There are several boats of kids still inside the ride now. They’re trapped in there,” said Nate. “You’ve got to do something!”
“Well, the park is pretty busy right now,” said the alligator. “I can call the manager, but I think he’s handling a fried dough emergency.”
“A fried dough emergency?” said Nate, and he began to shout. “A FRIED DOUGH EMERGENCY? Are you serious? My friends are stuck inside a pitch-black tunnel filled with water, and it’s nighttime, and the park is going to close soon, and we’re all playing in a big tournament tomorrow. Everyone needs a good night’s sleep! They can’t spend the night on the Lazy Swamp Ride!”
“Okay, okay,” said the alligator. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He lumbered off, dragging the heavy load of his tail.
Nate had had enough. “Come on,” he said to Maxie. “We can’t wait for this guy to get his act together. We have to go back in there and help everyone.”
“Nate, we can’t do that,” said Maxie.
“All right, you stay here and I’ll do it.”
“I mean, like, we literally can’t do it,” said Maxie. “All the boats are inside. How are we supposed to get back in? Use our skateboards?”
“No,” said Nate.
“Go in the water?” said Maxie.
No one else was standing on the platform beside the channel of water. Nate rolled up his pant leg and stuck in a foot. The water felt cool, but not cold.
Nate Saviano was a city kid who had skateboarded through the streets and skate parks of New York, the wind in his face. One afternoon, earlier that year, he had been mugged on the street walking home from the grocery store. Two kids who looked about sixteen had come up to him, and one of them said, “Give us your iPod and all your money.” So he’d quickly handed over his new iPod and his wallet, which had exactly three dollars in it, and they had run off laughing while Nate, his heart pounding but somehow his mind staying calm, went up to a newsstand and asked the man inside to call the police.