My face turned red because I felt stupid for wearing that T-shirt, even stupider for thinking it was cool. But it was the only shirt I had to wear, and I hated Wade for buying it for me.
The little train pulled out of the haunted house and the people got out, and I climbed into the first car and pulled the bar across my lap. The tall boy with the frozen lemonade and one of the girls got in the car behind me.
The brakes hissed and the cars started rolling into the haunted house, and as soon as we rolled forward some scratchy Halloween music started playing from little speakers in the walls. A white sheet that was supposed to be a ghost dropped from the ceiling. We rode right under the ghost, and it was hanging so low that I could’ve reached up and touched it. When I looked back at it I saw the boy in the car behind me stand up and smack it. It rocked back and forth like a piñata. The other boy in the car behind him laughed. The whole haunted house was full of cheap stuff that wasn’t scary at all. The only time I jumped during the ride was when I felt something cold hit my neck.
At first I thought it must be water dripping from the ceiling, but when I touched my hair and felt around on the back of my head I knew exactly what it was, but I smelled my fingers anyway: lemonade. The boy behind me laughed and whispered, “Can’t touch this,” to the girl in the car with him. She laughed too. He sucked up more lemonade into his straw and spit it into my hair. I didn’t turn around to look at him. I just ran my fingers through my hair and hoped it wouldn’t look wet when I saw Wade and Ruby after the ride was over.
When the train stopped I wormed myself free from under the lap belt before the operator could release it. I was the first one off the ride, and I ran down the steps past all the people who were waiting in line. Wade and Ruby were sitting on the bench. Wade saw me and waved. He said something, but I was too far away to hear it. The kids who’d been on the ride must’ve seen Wade wave at me, and they must’ve seen that me and Ruby had on the same shirt. They busted out laughing again.
Seeing Ruby and Wade sitting on that bench, both of them in their Myrtle Beach T-shirts with those kids laughing at all three of us, gave me the worst, most lonely feeling I’d had since the morning me and Ruby walked down to Fayles’ to call 911. I started running, and I didn’t stop until I’d crossed the street, run through the arcade, and hit the boardwalk and couldn’t go any farther.
I stood there on the boardwalk and leaned against the railing, the wind coming off the ocean and blowing both my hair and my tears off my face.
Somebody tugged on my shirt. I turned around and found Ruby standing behind me. “You okay?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.” I turned back around and looked out at the beach again, half of me hoping that she’d leave me alone, the other half hoping that she’d tell me that she hated Wade too, that she knew why those kids were laughing at us, that she wanted to go home. She stepped up to the railing and stood beside me.
“Was it scary?” she asked.
“Was what scary?”
“The haunted house,” she said. “Is that why you’re crying?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I said.
“I bet I would,” she said. “I bet I understand a lot more than you think I do.”
“Maybe you do,” I said.
“Daddy thinks you got scared because you went in there by yourself. He’s getting us some quarters to play video games. He thinks you’re mad at him.”
“He’s not our daddy,” I said. “I don’t know why you want to call him that.”
“That’s what he wants us to call him.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “What about what I want, Ruby?”
Ruby folded her arms across the railing and lifted her chin and rested it on her hands. We both looked out at the ocean. “But doesn’t it feel good?” she finally said. “Having a dad like everybody else? I like it; I can’t help it.”
“Just don’t get used to it,” I said. Ruby pushed herself away from the railing and raised her voice, and she might’ve screamed if the wind hadn’t been blowing so hard to push her words away from me.
“Why are you acting like this?” she said. “This morning you said I shouldn’t think about home, that I should get used to being with him. And now you’re telling me I shouldn’t.” She was crying now, and I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away from me and backed toward the Pavilion. We stood there looking at each other, and then she turned and ran toward the arcade. I followed her.
Wade was standing just inside, and I could tell the pockets of his shorts were weighed down with quarters. He saw that Ruby was crying, and he sighed and bent down to her. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said before Ruby could answer. “She got scared because I did.” I reached out my hand and put it on her head. “Right?” Ruby lifted her head off Wade’s shoulder and turned and looked at me. She sniffed and wiped at one of her eyes.
“Well, all right,” Wade said, standing up. He patted the quarters in his pockets. “Who feels like playing some video games?”
Ruby looked up at him. “I do!” she said.
Wade put both hands in his pockets, and when he brought them out he had fistfuls of quarters. He bent down and divided one handful of quarters between the pockets of Ruby’s shorts, and then he held out his other hand to me. I cupped my hands and he let the quarters spill into my palms. I tried to dump them into my pockets without dropping any, but a few slipped through my fingers and rolled out toward the boardwalk. Ruby ran after them and brought them back to me.
“What do y’all want to play first?” Wade asked. He kneeled again and cinched the drawstring on Ruby’s shorts to keep the quarters in her pockets from tugging them down.
“Pac-Man!” Ruby screamed, jumping up and down.
I looked around the arcade and saw what I’d been looking for. “Can I go to the bathroom?” I asked. Wade looked around until he saw the sign for the bathrooms on the far wall beside the gift shop.
“Okay,” he said. “But come back here when you’re done.”
As soon as I turned down the hallway to the restrooms I saw what I’d been hoping to find: a pay phone sat on the wall right in between the men’s and women’s restrooms. I used my shoulder to hold the phone against my cheek, and I took out a fistful of quarters and put them all in the coin slot. As soon as I heard the dial tone I called his number and closed my eyes and waited for it to ring.
“Hello?” Marcus said.
“Marcus?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Easter.” The line was quiet.
“Hey,” he finally said. “I was hoping you’d call me.”
“I hope it’s okay that I did,” I said, putting my hand over my other ear because the arcade was so loud, even though I was all the way at the end of the hall.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m in an arcade,” I said, “in Myrtle Beach, with my dad and Ruby. We came here last night.”
“I saw y’all leave,” he said. “I was trying to come over.”
Something made a noise on the other end, and then I heard a voice in the room with Marcus. “Who’s that?” I asked. “Don’t tell them it’s me.” But it was too late. His mom got on the phone.
“Easter, baby, where are you?”
“Put Marcus back on, please,” I said. My hands had started to sweat, and I could feel my heart beating in my ears.
“Don’t be afraid, honey. The police are going to find you; they’re looking for you and your sister now. You’re somewhere with your daddy?”
“Marcus said they’re in Myrtle Beach,” a man said in the background. It was Marcus’s dad.
“Myrtle Beach?” his mom said. “Okay, okay.”
“Please put Marcus back on,” I said. “Please.” But she wouldn’t, and she wouldn’t stop talking, telling me it was going to be okay.
“What’s she saying?” asked Marcus’s dad in the background. His mom didn’t say anything to him; she just kept talking to me. But then the line went quiet.