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need to know where the bathroom is,” I say, gesturing at the antsy park patrons fanning themselves with our famously outdated park maps.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.”