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“This feels like the beginning of a horror movie. Am I the stupid girl the audience is yelling ‘run’ at?” I ask Will, hoping to elicit a smile from him.
It doesn’t.
Through the rearview mirror, we both watch a flock of birds rise from distant treetops. The sun disappears behind the massive shapeless swarm, and a chill replaces the golden warmth.
“Maybe you were right. We should go home.”
He faces me, and the dusting of amber around his dark-brown eyes glints with mischief. “You should know better. Horror is ghosts. If I’ve lured you here for nefarious reasons, we’re in a thriller.”
The sun reemerges with new intensity, lighting up every inch of the dashboard. The last bits of the knot in my stomach melt away.
“Well, thank you for clearing that up. I’ll make sure Tessa gets the genre right when she brings your photo to the police.”
He grins, and I follow him across the cracked asphalt to a rusted ticket booth. Will produces two smooth stones from his pocket. He hands one to me and gingerly places the other one on top of a precarious pile of similar stones.
“Do you always carry rocks in your pocket?” The smooth stone is the baby-blue color of a robin’s egg.
“Long story.”
“We seem to tiptoe around a lot of those,” I say, and his smile confirms he’s thinking of the first night we met as strangers on the roof-deck. The way fate has woven us into each other’s lives makes that night feel like a memory of a dream.
“It took ... what ... about twelve hours for both of our long stories to come out?”
I scrunch my nose. “Ten. Max.”
The sound of his laughter echoes through hollow spaces in my chest. I miss this—talking to someone, joking with someone, without subtext or worrying that if I say the wrong thing, I’ll get a lecture about moving on with my life.
“In that case ... you might as well hear it from me. I saw Darren yesterday. At the cemetery. He’s ...” Will shakes his head, and his silence fills in the blanks.
“He gave you rocks?”
“Jewish tradition. Flowers wither. Rocks are forever.”
I glance at the rock pyramid. “And this?”
“Our father used to take us here when we were little. Darren and I started coming here on his birthday as a kind of memorial a year after it closed.” Will looks out at the amusement park, which has been so thoroughly reclaimed by nature it looks dystopian. “This place gave me my first taste of adventure. Which isn’t a surprise, considering it’s called Adventure Land.”
“I’m not sure there’s much adventure left.”
“You’d be surprised. Follow me.”
We walk past gutted food stands and a rickety barn that once housed a petting zoo. Someone spray-painted the wordsFix Meacross the barn’s doors. We pass a rusted teacup ride, a playground with a broken swing, and an old go-kart track outlined by well-preserved tires. Tree roots encircle a merry-go-round like tentacles.
Too quickly, my hair is stuck to the back of my sweaty neck, and I miss my ponytail. “Honestly, if you were going to murder me, I’d think there were easier ways.”
He chuckles. “Just trust me, okay?”
“The last time someone asked me to trust them, I ended up at a wedding for Brandon’s cousin. Let’s just say it didn’t end as well as it did the night you and I met.”
“Because you didn’t meet a dashingly handsome former writer?”
I roll my eyes at Will’s back. “Dashingly handsome, huh? Good to know you have a healthy ego.”
“Nah,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “Just a healthy ability to cover up insecurity with humor.”
“Maybe you could teach me how to do that. Probably would save me a few spins across the rumor mill.” The brittleness in my voice shifts the lightness between us into something somber and quiet. “I mean, there are worse things than being at the center of the rumor—”
“Why do you let them get to you?” he asks, his voice low.
