Vanishing Girls

And it gives me an idea.

JULY 28

Nick

It turns out that my failed turn as the mermaid wasn’t so failed after all—apparently the kids thought it was so uproariously funny that Mr. Wilcox decides to make physical comedy, and specifically my face-plant, a permanent part of the act. Since we can’t count on a real dog to reliably chomp down on Heather’s tail feathers, Wilcox invests in a big, floppy-eared dog puppet, and Heather works both identities at the same time—strutting in her costume while wearing the puppet on her right hand and miming a contest of wills until the culminating moment, when the dog gets hold of her butt.

Unfortunately I’m stuck in the role of the mermaid for the foreseeable future. No one else can fit into the tail, and Crystal never comes back to work. Rumor is that she got busted for something really bad—Maude even claims the police are involved.

“Her parents caught her posing for some porn website,” Maude says, gesturing with a french fry for emphasis. “She was getting paid to send naked pics.”

“No way.” Douglas, who is thin and sharp-beaked, like a bird of prey, shakes his head. “She doesn’t even have boobs.”

“So? Some guys like that.”

“I heard she was dating some old guy,” a girl named Ida says. “Her parents flipped when they found out. Now she’s on lockdown.”

“She was always bragging about money,” Alice says thoughtfully. “And she always had really nice stuff. Remember that watch? The one with all the little diamonds?”

“It was a website,” Maude insists. “My cousin’s girlfriend’s brother’s a cop. There are, like, hundreds of girls on there. High school girls.”

“Didn’t Donovan get busted for the same thing?” says Douglas.

“For posing?” Ida squeaks.

“For having access.” Douglas rolls his eyes. “A perv’s dream.”

“Exactly.” At last Maude pops the fry in her mouth. Then she drags her finger through a thick glob of ketchup on her plate. That’s how she eats fries, in stages: potato, then ketchup.

“I don’t believe it,” Alice says.

Maude looks at her pityingly. “You don’t have to,” she says. “It’ll all come out soon enough. You’ll see.”

The worst part about being the mermaid is the costume itself, which requires special cleaning and so can’t be washed more than once a week. After three days, the tail reeks, and whenever I’m suited up, I make it a point to stay as far away from Parker as possible.

But after a few performances, I find I don’t mind being onstage so much. Rogers even shows me how to cushion my fall safely—he was a thespian in college, he tells me, with no hint of irony and embarrassment—and after one show, a little cluster of kids even crowds me behind the potted palms and asks for my autograph. I sign: Stay cool! Love, Melinda the Mermaid. No idea where Melinda comes from, but it feels right. And suiting up as Melinda keeps me from having to skim the Piss Pool, or scrub puke out of the Whirling Dervish.

Slowly I’m getting the hang of FanLand. I no longer get lost on my way around the park. I know the shortcuts—cutting behind the Haunted Ship brings me straight to the wave pool. Walking through the darkness of the Tunnel lops a full five minutes from the walk between the Lagoon and the dry lands. I know the secrets, too: that Rogers drinks on the job, that Shirley never locks up her pavilion properly because she can’t be bothered with the faulty lock on the back door, and that some of the older employees swipe the occasional beer from the cooler as a result, that Harlan and Eva have been screwing around for three summers running and use the pump house as their own personal sex den.

Every day we do more and more prep for the anniversary party: blowing up mountains of balloons and tying them in thick clusters to every available surface; scrubbing and re-varnishing the game stalls; stringing up banners advertising special promotions and events; performing vigilant, military-style maneuvers to keep bands of marauding raccoons (the source of Mr. Wilcox’s greatest anxiety) from decimating the frozen corn dogs and sugar cones we’ve stored in all the pavilions.

Mr. Wilcox grows increasingly excited, as if he’s popping larger and larger rations of caffeine pills. Finally, the day before the party, he’s practically vibrating with enthusiasm. He doesn’t even speak in full sentences anymore, just walks around repeating random sentence fragments like: “Twenty thousand people! Seventy-five years! Oldest independent park in the state! Cotton candy free for the under-sevens!”

But his enthusiasm is infectious. The whole park is buzzing with it; a sound perceived but not exactly heard, a sense of anticipation like the moment just before all the crickets start singing at night. Even Maude’s permanent scowl has flattened out into something close to a normal expression.

Four of us are assigned to the graveyard shift the night before the party: Gary, a sour-faced man who runs one of the stalls and who has worked at FanLand through three changes of admin—a fact he repeats loudly whenever Mr. Wilcox is around; Caroline, a grad student who has spent four summers working at the park and who’s struggling through a thesis paper about the role of spectacle in American carnival entertainment; me; and Parker.

Things have become easy between us again; we eat lunch together most days, and time our breaks together, too. In only six weeks, Parker has become a never-ending source of FanLand trivia, much of it related to the park’s design and engineering.

“Do you study this stuff at night when you go home?” I ask him one day, after he’s been going on and on about the difference between potential and kinetic energy and its application to roller coasters.