Six Earlier Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

get dressed. He comes racing through, running late. He says he’ll meet me by the car.
    This gives me ten minutes of empty time. I never know what to do with it. There’s no one for me to text, no book for me to read ten minutes of. I could make conversation with the other guys leaving the locker room, but I don’t know who they are, and I won’t remember them tomorrow. The empty time remains empty. I try to remember the name of the girl I was two days ago, and the one I was two days before that. The name Alicia comes back to me, but that’s not right. I’ve already forgotten.
    Sam doesn’t say much to me as we head to the car. Complaints about the coach, worries about the game coming up, resentment that Alex (whoever he is) is not a team player. I don’t have to do much more than faintly agree, and then faintly disagree when Sam says he’s complaining too much.
    “But what about you?” he asks. “What’s on your mind?”
    There have been moments in the past when I’ve been tempted to answer this last question truthfully, to let myself be part of the conversation. But the temptation fades under the cover of reality. I cannot share myself because, as far as Sam is concerned, I have no self. I don’t exist. Only Mark exists.
    “I guess I’m just tired,” I say.
    “Me too. I’m tired of so many things, you know?”
    “So many things,” I echo.
    We drive on for a few more minutes. The trip seems longer than the trip to school was.
    I access to see if Sam and Mark had specific plans for tonight. I can’t find any. So I ask, “Where are we going?”
    Sam smiles. “I’m kidnapping you. I was waiting for you to notice.”
    “And where is the destination of this kidnapping?”
    “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
    He sounds happy. Awake.
    He makes me play Twenty Questions to figure out where we’re going. Not knowing what the options are, I’m not particularly good at the game. I find out that where we’re going is bigger than a trailer but shorter than the Washington Monument. It’s not in a city, but it’s not in a field. It is neither yellow nor purple. It is not a place where you’d find horses or falafel or the Amish. It is somewhere Sam’s been before, but not (to his knowledge) somewhere Mark’s been before. It doesn’t smell like sewage or Tater Tots or strawberries. It has never appeared on reality TV. There have been no songs written about it. It doesn’t require a change of clothing, or an admission fee, or a note from my doctor. It is not a church.
    He makes me close my eyes as we pull up. I have seen no signs along the way, no telltale markers. All I can see is how proud he is of himself.
    “All right. We’re here.”
    I open my eyes and see an old, battered sign that says FUNLAND.
    “I used to come here all the time as a kid, because my uncle was one of the owners. I don’t know if you remember, but I told you about it when we first became friends, and you drew a complete blank. So you could say the plan to come here was hatched out of that blank.”
    The gates look locked to me.
    “We’re going to break in?” I ask.
    He pulls something out of his pocket and dangles it in front of me.
    “No need to break in when you have a key!”
    It’s a small amusement park—the kind that seems like a universe to a little kid but completely manageable to a parent. It’s closed for the season—the booths shuttered, the refreshment stands unrefreshed. But the rides can’t be hidden. They are idle versions of themselves, waiting for the summer to come.
    “We’re going to have to play pretend,” Sam says.
    He has no idea how good I am at playing pretend. But I guess that’s a different kind of pretend, a pretend that can’t be obvious. Here we revel in the pretend, laugh at it, become children within it. We walk rings around the carousel horses, trying to find our perfect steeds. We dangle at the bottom of the Ferris wheel and pretend that it is taking us up, up, up. I