Clarity and I are panting as we get off the ride. Because we’ve been screaming. Because we’ve been shouting. At every curve. At every little drop.
Her eyes say: Can we go on it one more time?
My eyes say: We have to get Purity.
“You know what it’s like?” Clarity says out loud.
“What’s it like?” I say.
“Hot air ballooning,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I knew someone who died hot air ballooning.”
“Yeah?”
“Some people from our church. They tried to land in a field. There were power lines around the edge of the field. Their basket got caught in the power lines. They were electrocuted.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah,” Clarity says. “I wasn’t close to them or anything. But I knew them. This is when I was little. But I can see the scene of them getting wrapped up in those power lines, even though I wasn’t there.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Get it out,” she says.
“What?”
“I know you’ve got more. Get it out. Tell me. It’s ok.”
My hands are on my knees. I’m breathing heavy. I look up at Clarity.
“My computer programming teacher died on TWA flight 800.”
“Yeah. Ok. Wow. How old were you,” she says.
“In high school. There was no programming class for my grade so he and I came to school an hour early for an entire year and he taught me Pascal. Just to teach one student. He came in an hour early every day for a year!”
“What was his name?”
“Art. Arthur. Arthur Benjamin.”
“Damn.”
Clarity puts her hand on my shoulder.
“That sucks. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry about your hot air ballooning friends.”
“Thanks.”
I right myself.
“You know what else?” I say.
“Tell me.”
And I tell her. And the world goes by us as I do, people eating cotton candy and zooming to their rides and them having no idea what these two people are doing, standing face to face, not going anywhere, telling each other their life stories at Six Flags.
“Tell me,” she says.
“Ok, I am. I’m going to tell you. This is it. I hate it when they say She went peacefully in her sleep or He died instantly—there was no pain. How do they know? Maybe when you die in your sleep you actually wake up and your heart is stopped, and you breathe and breathe, but your heart won’t start, and you actually die in mortal panic—literally, mortal. Or like Porsche girl. They say she died instantly but what if when she hit that toll booth and her brain split in two, she was actually two consciousnesses for a split second before she died? I mean how do they know she died instantly? How do they know?”
“They don’t.”
“And my friend Art, my teacher, Mr. Benjamin. I mean when a missile strikes a plane, yeah, there are the lucky ones who get blown up without ever knowing what happened. But don’t you think that some of those people end up alive, shot out of a plane, and they live the last seconds of their life falling into the ocean..just..in the middle of the blue fucking sky like Wow, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, this is the last moment of my life. What do I want to think about while I fall to my death. Wow. My plane just blew up. My plane just blew up!!”
“You want to sit down?”
“No.”
“Ok. You know what that reminds me of? Do you remember the space shuttle Challenger?”
“Yeah, it was one of the first times I saw a disaster on TV. I was eight.”
“I was six,” Clarity says. “But I knew what it meant. That those teachers and scientists had died.”
“Right. You know what?”
“What?”
“I heard they didn’t die in the explosion,” I tell her.
“No?”
“No. The compartment the astronauts were in survived the blast and it hit the ocean going 900 miles an hour.”
“Fuck,” Clarity says.
And I say, “Yeah.”
“You know what we’re gonna do?” Clarity says.
“What.”
“We’re gonna ride that.”
And she points to it: the orange steel, the Mt. Everest first drop, curling in on itself just a little so it’s not a straight-down path.
“You said that’s the one ride you wouldn’t go on.”
“I’d advise you to take me up on it before I change my mind.”
“You’re going to go on the Goliath.”
“If you shut up and get me in line. Once we get in line there’s no turning back.”
“Ok. Let’s go. Let’s go right now, we’ll get Purity, and we’ll get the fuck out of this place.”
Clarity is nodding like someone in shock.
“Ok,” she says.
Then life goes into slow motion. We walk to the entrance of the Goliath line—and it’s long. This is where all the people are. Not at Thrill Seekers in Training, where we’ve been. Everyone’s at Maximum Six Flags Thrills, number 23, Goliath. Purity and I get in line and then it’s minutes that seem like hours, and all conversation between us stops. We are not the scary ones anymore, pissing off dads with our Googled stories of amusement park deaths; we are the scared, looking up every five seconds at the ride we’re about to go on, standing in the dark, an odd couple, thrown together in what might be that Six Flags’ last summer, and Clarity stands closer than she has all day, and I pretend she’s my girlfriend. And just for that day, she is.