Tristan hands cider around and I drink it while watching the lantern clear the tree line. I find Ryan in my peripheral vision. He’s watching me. Not the lantern.Me.
“It’s so pretty,” I say.
“It sure is,” he agrees.
After the ceremony the crowd disperses into thecarnival proper. The closing weekend energy is different from the opening, it’s more settled, familiar, the ease of something at its ending after an intense couple of weeks.
Jack takes me to the game alley. Or, he gestures toward it and I go, which is the same thing at this point. We do the full round, ring toss where I beat my own record, axe throw, the ball game at the end that I’ve never tried and which Jack is extraordinarily bad at despite claiming expertise.
“You said you were good at this,” I say.
“I said I had experience. I didn’t specify talent.”
I throw. It lands.
“You’re insufferable,” he says.
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m an excellent liar, I just didn’t apply the skill here.” He retrieves the balls with the dignity of someone who has made a choice to lose and owns it. “Do you want to try the maze again?”
“The maze where we made out?”
“The maze where you found the gap in the canvas that none of us knew about.” He looks at me. “But if you want to keep your mind in the gutter, I won’t complain.”
I go into the maze.
We spend forty minutes within the winding canvas walls, which are lit for the final weekend with different lighting. The disorienting effect has been softened into something more like atmosphere. Jack knows the layout now, or he says he does, and he gets it wrong twice, which I gleefully point out.
“Left,” I say.
“I know.”
“You went right.”
“I course-corrected.”
“After the dead end.”
“The dead end is part of the experience.”
We come out through my gap and emerge into the exterior corridor in the warm night air. Unfortunately, there are too many people around to make out this time.
Ryan is outside. He’s always where I’m going before I get there, not in a way that feels like surveillance but in a way that feels like he’s coincidentally moved in the same direction I’m moving. Oriented the same way.
“Lost?” he asks Jack.
“Never,” Jack says. “We used the gap.”
Ryan looks at me.
“It’s a secret,” I state.
“A secret?” He asks, then shakes his head like he doesn’t want to know anything more. “Feel like a walk?”
We walk. All of us, eventually. Jack peels away to the game alley but returns, Tristan finds us at the river path, Archer materializes from the perimeter like he does. The five of us along the river in the closing-weekend carnival light, the water dark beside us, the music from the stage reaching us in fragments.
I am walking in the center of them. The warmth ofthem on every side is wonderful. It’s the thing I couldn’t tolerate on Saturday night. The thing that overwhelmed me.
