Full Tilt (5 page)

“Fat chance. It wouldn’t even have hit the target.”

Quinn shrugged and turned his attention to a flight simulation game on his computer. It was typical Quinn: playing darts while playing computer games while blasting music loud enough to shake the house from its foundation. I turned down the music a few hundred decibels so I could hear myself think, as Quinn ditched his plane in a cornfield.

“Isn’t the object to actually
land
the plane?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Quinn quit the game and flopped bonelessly onto his bed. I sat on his desk chair, handing him one of the bags of food. “Here, stuff your face. Mom and Carl had Chinese.”

“Great! They’re engaged five minutes, and we’re already eating his table scraps.” He riffled around his desk until he found a fork with dried ketchup on it and started eating.

I studied the diamond stud in Quinn’s earlobe. “I like it better than sputnik,” I told him.

Quinn looked at me as if I’d insulted him.
“You
gave me sputnik.”

“Yeah, but when I gave it to you, it was a key chain.”

He returned to his food. Lo mein noodles dangled from his chin like worms as he sucked them in. “You
watch,” Quinn said. “This guy’s going to bail, and we’ll never hear from him again. Just like the other ones . . .”

I looked away. He didn’t have to say it—I knew what he was thinking:
Just like Dad.

I wanted to reach out to Quinn somehow, but I couldn’t. It made me think of this thing I once read. Scientists now think there are actually nine dimensions instead of three, but the other ones are so folded in upon themselves, we can’t experience them. Maybe that explains why I could never reach out to Quinn, because although he was only a few feet away, he somehow felt much farther than the space between us. When Dad left us all those years ago, it tore open a wound that led to a whole lot of unexpected dimensions.

“Hey, maybe this guy’ll hang around,” I said. “And maybe it won’t be so bad.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ll be off at Columbia.”

I felt the skin on the back of my neck tighten. “I never said I was going.”

Quinn laughed, his mouth full of noodles. “Yeah, right. You’re gonna turn down an Ivy League scholarship.”

When I didn’t answer him, his expression changed.

“Wait a second. You’re not kidding!”

I began to pace, kicking the debris on the floor out of the way. “That scholarship doesn’t cover everything. And do you know how expensive New York is?”

“One month to go, and you’re gonna talk yourself out of it?”

“I’m being practical. I know
that
particular word never made it into your vocabulary.”

Quinn put down his fork. “You’re chicken, aren’t you?”

“It’s better for everyone if I get a part-time job and take some classes at a junior college.”

But Quinn wasn’t buying it. “You’re scared! I can’t believe you. I mean, you paste your room full of places you’ll never go, and when you actually get the chance to have a life, you’re too scared to take it!”

He had a point. But so did I. “If I go to junior college, I can live at home,” I reminded him, “and maybe keep some balance around here. Besides, you never know when someone might need their ass saved from a roller coaster again.”

“Oh, right. So it’s my fault?”

“Do you really want to face life with the newlyweds alone? What if they do crash and burn?”

“You mean like you’re doing now?” Quinn crushed a fortune cookie in his fist and let the flakes fall away. “Fine! See if I care. Go turn your life into a car accident. Or should I say a
bus
accident?”

I spun to face him, feeling his words like a slap. So he did know! But to use his knowledge against me like that—it was unforgivable.

“Accident?” I said. “No, Quinn.
You’re
the only ‘accident’ in this family!”

I regretted it the moment I said it, but it was too late. I couldn’t take it back. Quinn’s expression hardened into hate, and I braced myself for a serious verbal beating. But instead, he broke eye contact, looking down at the mess on the ground. He brushed the cookie flakes from his hand, pulling out the fortune.

“Hey, don’t worry about me, bro,” he said, waving his fortune. “It says here
YOU ARE EMPEROR OF ALL YOU SURVEY
.” He crumpled the paper into a ball and flicked it away.

I wanted to say something to him. An apology, maybe, but it was like I’d just thrown a stone at a glass house and the shards were still falling all around me. I just had to get out, so I went to my room and lay down on the taut blanket of my perfectly made bed, looking up at the Parthenon and the Eiffel Tower and the Kremlin and the Great Wall of China—things that existed somewhere out there in one of the many dimensions I knew I’d never have access to. Things that were all so frighteningly far away.

Screaming. Spinning out of control. Gripping tightly on to the seat. So dizzy . . .

I am there again. I am seven, on a school bus, spinning. Crashing through the guardrail, caught on the edge of the canyon now, balanced like a teeter-totter, tilting, tilting. Me, crawling down the aisle, toward the emergency exit at the back. The floor rising like a black wave before me as the front end of the bus tilts forward, and I’m climbing the rising floor toward the back of the bus. Pounding, pounding, pounding the emergency exit door. A teacher screaming, “Open it, Blake.” What’s her name? I can’t remember. I’m hitting the door, banging, kicking. I’m not strong enough to open it. I’m not strong enough to open the emergency exit door.

The floor of the bus is a rising wave. The wave hits. It swallows me.

My eyes shot open, and I shivered uncontrollably until the warmth of my room brought my mind and body back from the nightmare. It was two o’clock in the morning—definitely not my favorite time to be awake. The dream was fading, but something wasn’t right. Strange light flashed through the blinds, casting shifting slits of light on my travel posters. I sat up and looked out of the window.

An ambulance was parked on our driveway.

“He was just lying there on the living room floor,” Mom was telling the paramedics as I came out of my room. “I couldn’t wake him up.”

It was Quinn.

They had him on the couch now, but he wasn’t moving. One of the two guys shone a light into Quinn’s eyes and checked his pulse.

“Accelerated pulse. Eyes fixed and dilated,” he said. “Do you know what he was on?”

What he was “on”?
The question infuriated me. “He wasn’t ‘on’ anything,” I said. They turned to see me there for the first time. “Quinn doesn’t do drugs.”

But he does other things,
I thought.
Things that can get into his bloodstream as quickly as drugs. Things that are just as addictive. He does acceleration instead of speed.

But I didn’t tell them that, and they just looked at me, not believing me. Not even Mom. She ran off to check his drawers for whatever stash he might have.

The paramedics lifted Quinn onto a gurney, and as
they did, something fell off the couch: a stuffed bear with a lopsided head wearing a yellow shirt with a pocket. I picked up the bear. The pocket was empty. The invitation was gone.

There was a logical, sensible explanation for that—there had to be—but I wasn’t feeling sensible at that moment. I hurried over to Quinn. His eyes were half open as if he were dead, but he was still breathing. It was as if Quinn weren’t really there. His body was, but Quinn himself was gone.

I go places sometimes.

“Where did you go, Quinn?” I said aloud. “Where did you go?” And as I peered into his eyes I got something of an answer.

Because reflected from the shine of his wide pupils I could see lights—spinning carnival lights, and I could swear I heard the faint echoes of calliope music and screams.

The paramedics shouldered me out of the way and rolled Quinn out the door.

I’m not the kind of guy to make huge leaps into the impossible. I don’t believe in aliens, I have no faith in psychics, and tales of the Loch Ness monster leave me cold. So I can’t begin to explain what made me believe that Quinn had stolen my invitation and taken some sort of spiritual road trip to God-knows-where. Call it unwanted intuition, but whatever it was, I simply knew.

“It’s not that we don’t believe you, Blake,” Maggie said. “It’s just that you need to see this from our side.”

By twenty past two I was in the Volvo with Russ and Maggie, because I knew I couldn’t face this trip alone. I had driven to their houses and woken them up with long blasts of my horn—woken up half the neighborhood, I imagine—and practically dragged them out of bed.

“You wanted to go,” I’d told them. “Now you’ve got your chance.”

I slammed my brakes at a stop sign. Russ and Maggie jolted forward from the backseat, their seat belts digging into their shoulders.

“Thanks. That woke me up,” said Russ.

“This is crazy,” Maggie said. “I mean, you’ve put two and two together and come up with pi.”

I floored the accelerator and pulled through the intersection. “You didn’t see Quinn’s eyes. I’m telling you, he wasn’t
there.
Maybe his body was, but
he
wasn’t. Don’t ask me how to explain it, but somehow he’s at that freaking amusement park.”

“You mean like an out-of-body experience?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t know! I just know he’s there.” I screeched to a halt at the next stop sign, then hurled forward again.

“I think
I
just had an out-of-body experience,” Russ said.

“But . . . if he went there in his
head,”
Maggie asked, “how are we supposed to get there in a
Volvo?”

“All I know is that we had an invitation to an address on Hawking Road. It’s the only clue we have, so I’m following it.”

I turned onto the deserted stretch of Hawking Road. It wound through a forest, leading nowhere anyone would ever want to go.

Maggie put her hand on my shoulder. Russ was too tired to even notice. “Listen,” she said, “we’ll get there, and you’ll see it’s just a carnival. Then we can all drive to the hospital and wait to find out what’s up with Quinn.” She spoke to me like someone talking to a leaper on a ledge. Well, maybe she was right. The best thing that could happen to me was to prove that I was a deranged idiot. It was better than the alternative.

We passed a sign that said
SPEED LIMIT
45. From
habit, I looked down at the speedometer. The pin wavered at 45. That wouldn’t do. I extended my foot and watched as our speed passed 50.

“Blake,” said Russ. “You’re speeding.”

“I know.”

“All right.
Now
I’m scared.”

Up ahead a wooden sign nailed to a tree bore a red symbol—a wave intersecting a spiral—just like the one on the invitation. An arrow pointed to the left, down a dirt road, and I took a sharp turn, feeling the car almost lose its grip on the asphalt. The smoothness of the paved road gave way to bone-jarring, uneven bumps. Deep down, I knew this place we were headed wasn’t really an amusement park.

Am I nuts? Am I nuts to think what I’m thinking?

“Watch out!” screamed Maggie.

Suddenly the road took a sharp turn, and a huge oak tree loomed in my headlights. I spun the wheel and stomped on the brake. The wheels lost traction, and the car narrowly missed the tree. We careened through the underbrush until finally the car skidded to a halt.

I shut my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to pull myself together. Somehow everything around me felt different in some fundamental way that’s still hard to describe. You know how when there’s a noise that’s so constant, you forget there’s any noise at all? Like the hum of an air conditioner? You don’t notice the sound until it’s gone, and then, for a moment, the
deeper
silence is so eerily empty, your brain kind of gets thrown off balance. That’s the best way I
can describe what I felt as I sat there behind the wheel—only it wasn’t just sound, it was every other sense as well. It was like ripping through the normal fabric of life’s noise into a true void.

I stepped out of the car. We’d come to a stop just short of a canyon rim. There before us was the old quarry, which had been shut down for years. Only now it didn’t look much like a quarry. The crevasse below was a fog-filled rift, glowing with colored lights. I could smell cotton candy and popcorn. I could hear the sound of grinding gears, punctuated by the ghostly echoes of screaming riders. In the center of the breach I could see the very top of a Ferris wheel rising above the fog, churning the moonlit mist like a riverboat paddle.

“I think we’ve all gone schizo,” Russ said, holding Maggie tightly, as if she were the one who was unnerved.

I turned at the sound of nearby laughter. Other kids. Where had they come from? They sifted through the woods, invitations in hand, descending a path down into the canyon.
Was this how Quinn came here?
I wondered.
Was this ridge some interface between mind and matter, and were all these kids actually lying unconscious somewhere?
I hadn’t seen any other cars, and this place was too far out of the way to walk. But that would mean . . . No. I didn’t want to think about it.

With my friends close behind, I joined the other kids in the procession toward the park.

Russ looked at the narrow, winding path down into the crevasse. “How do you suppose they got all those rides down there? You think there’s a back road?”

Neither Maggie nor I answered him.

“I mean, it was a quarry, right? There has to be a road. .. .”

We came through the layer of fog. There before us was the entrance to the park. Ticket booths and turnstiles. Pretty ordinary, except for the fact that every theme park I’ve ever been to has its name written on all available surfaces, from benches to soda cups, just in case you might forget where you are. This park didn’t seem to have a name.