Foreverland Read online

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  For my Girls, believers

  In magic. And for my Boy Wonder, who

  Opened these gates.

  For a while, I’m dropping

  Off the

  Radar.

  Everything’s so

  Very screwed up, I can’t

  Even stand the thought of home.

  Running away is a

  Lousy idea but it’s

  Also my only idea. And

  Nowhere else will

  Do.

  CHAPTER 1

  Fun fact: I am running away. To live in an amusement park.

  Related fact: I am not a runaway kind of person. Unless you’re talking about running away from a fight, or from awkward eye contact or something. Then, yes, totally, I’m your girl.

  But if you made everyone in my sixth-grade class vote for “Least Likely to Run Away to Live in an Amusement Park,” they’d definitely pick me. If they could remember my name.

  So it’s kind of unbelievable that I am here, standing directly in front of the Foreverland gates, in the middle of a Wednesday in the middle of the summer, when everyone thinks I’m at computer camp back in the city.

  Life is full of surprises.

  People say that like it’s a good thing, but honestly, the surprises are usually bad ones. At best, it’s 50/50. Of course, I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person—at least that’s what my mom tells me. So I might be wrong. But, just as an example, the suitcase I found this morning by the door—that was a surprise. And not the party-hat kind, that’s for sure.

  This, here, my running away—I haven’t decided yet if it’s a good surprise or a bad one. Because I haven’t decided yet whether I’m really doing this. Yes, I took the Metro-North from Grand Central for an hour and a half, then the Foreverland shuttle bus to get here, but I haven’t really done anything that wrong yet. I haven’t done anything I can’t undo.

  I crane my neck up to look at the FOREVERLAND sign hanging in the middle of the gate. Underneath, in smaller letters, it says: WHERE MAGIC NEVER ENDS! I look past the gate and see the sweep of coasters curving like mysterious symbols in the sky. I breathe in the tangy, plasticky smell of cotton candy from a nearby stand. If the color pink had a scent, this would be it. I hear the joyful shrieks of people riding high, cutting through clouds. It looks and smells and sounds like freedom and fun and, yes, maybe even magic. And it can all be mine … if I step inside.

  Chances are, I’ll get caught right away. I mean, there are definitely people who could pull this thing off—fast-thinking, slick-talking criminal masterminds—but I am not one of those people. I panic when I order from the “12 and under” menu, even though I am twelve, because it feels like I’m just cutting it a little too close. This will never, never work.

  I could just spin around, retrace my steps, take the train to the city, and be back before my parents get home.

  Home.

  Home.

  I can think of about a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t take another step forward.

  But I do.

  I take another step. I walk through the gates. Right into Foreverland.

  CHAPTER 2

  I head to the ticket booth, weaving around a swarm of little kids in mustard-yellow Camp Barrie T-shirts. The ticket line is really long. I knew the park would be busy, since it’s the middle of the day, but the park is even more packed than I’d expected. Which is great. Perfect, actually.

  The bigger the crowd, the easier it is to get lost in.

  And since getting lost in the crowd is one of my specialties, I’m all set.

  Fun fact: I’m a wallflower.

  Actually, I’m more like wall paint. I’m pretty sure flowered wallpaper gets more attention than I do.

  I guess it’s because I’m quiet or maybe I have one of those faces that looks like a lot of other faces. Either way, lots of people forget they’ve met me. I know this is a thing that happens once in a while to people, but it happens all the time to me. It’s hard not to be insulted. Nobody wants to be invisible.

  Except for superheroes, as my ex-best friend Priya would point out when I complained about this. Spies, too.

  “You’re looking at this all wrong,” she’d say. “Think of the perks of blending in.”

  This, right here, is one of those perks. When you’re running away to live in an amusement park, it comes in handy to have the kind of face people instantly forget.

  I’m happy the park is crowded, but I’m not thrilled that the ticket line is so long. The longer I wait, the more nervous I get. It’s boiling hot out and I’m sweating up a storm, but I’ve got cold feet, all right—feet so cold they’re turning icy. My heart’s racing and my stomach gets that familiar churning feeling.

  I do the one thing that I know will definitely calm me down.

  I write an acrostic poem.

  I take my brand-new notebook out of my backpack, uncap a Flair pen, and scribble:

  A

  C

  R

  O

  S

  T

  I

  C

  Then I fill it in:

  A kind of weird way to

  Calm down, but weird is

  Relative. It’s not nearly as

  Odd as that

  Sixteen-year-old I read about who

  Turns her fingernail clippings

  Into sculptures, as a way to

  Chill.

  Acrostics are my superpower. The only word I can’t immediately turn into an acrostic is my name. It’s my acrostic Kryptonite—it just makes my mind go blank. I tried to write one for my name this morning on the train. On the very first page of my new notebook, I wrote:

  M

  A

  R

  G

  A

  R

  E

  T

  Just the bare skeleton of the acrostic. No meat on it. And it stayed that way. I couldn’t fill it in.

  I inch forward in the line. The closer I get to the ticket window, the more my heart speeds up. I scribble another acrostic:

  Remember that the trick to

  Effective

  Lying is to say as little

  As possible. Nothing

  Xcept for what’s necessary.

  Okay, the last line is cheating a little, but Xs are impossible to work with in an acrostic … I mean, there’s x-ray, xylophone, and … I’m out.

  Then it’s my turn. I slip my notebook into my backpack, take out my money, and walk up to a ticket window. A grandma-type lady with short gray hair is asking me, “How many tickets?”

  “One,” I croak. “Youth. Ummm, ticket?”

  Ticket Lady is wearing these red reading glasses attached to a beaded chain around her neck, and now she’s peering at me over the tops of these glasses.

  “How old are you?” Ticket Lady asks.

  My heart is thundering in my chest and my palms are so clammy, my money’s getting damp. I try to calm down by taking a deep breath, but I just end up making a gasp-y sound, like a person being strangled.

  “Twelve?”

  Here’s the thing: I’m not even lying. But I’m short for my age, so I know Ticket Lady will think I’m lying. And that’s enough to make me short-circuit.

  Some people are calm under pressure. I’m calamitous under pressure.

  Now Ticket Lady has taken her fingers off her keyboard, and she’s leaning over her counter to look at me, which is definitely a bad, bad sign.

  Please don’t ask where my parents are, I think. Please don’t ask—

  “Where are your parents?” Ticket Lady asks.

  Fun fact: I am a terrible liar. The worst. Pinocchio is smoother than I am.

  My heart is pounding so loudly, I worry that she can hear it. She knows; I’m sure of it. She knows I’m here alone, and she probably knows it’s because I’m running away, and in about five seconds she is going to call the police.

  “My parents? They’re, um, coming?” I say. “In a few minutes?” All my answers come out like questions.

  This happens to me all the time, and it drives my mom nuts. She’s always lecturing me: “When you make your voice go up, like this? It doesn’t command respect? You see what I’m saying?”

  I do now. I see exactly what she’s saying because Ticket Lady, who is officially suspicious, is asking me, “So you’re unaccompanied?”

  “No!” I say, way too loudly. “My parents are here, it’s just—I, um, I couldn’t wait to come in, and my toddler—I mean, my sister, who is a toddler—she had an accident … a, uh, urination accident? So they went back to the—to our car? Which is in the lot. The parking lot.”

  It’s like my mouth has been hijacked. I have zero control over the words coming ou
t of it. It’s a cruel twist of fate that when I should talk, I clam up completely, but when I need to be quiet, I’m Little Miss Chatterbox.

  Ticket Lady is looking at me like she’s trying to decide what to do. Now, I think, might be a good time to give her money.

  I put forty-seven dollars in sweaty, crumpled bills on the counter and push them through the slot in the window.

  Ticket Lady frowns, then looks behind me at the long line, which I am holding up. After a few seconds, she pulls my money through the window and stabs at a few keys on her keyboard, and then a tiny printer starts sputtering. My ticket.

  I’m not the beaming type, but I beam.

  “Have a magical day,” she says. Her lips are pursed tight, like she is still really skeptical, so I don’t think she genuinely wants me to have a magical day, but that’s okay. I’ll take it.

  “Thanks!” I say. “You too!”

  I walk over to the turnstiles, where a bored-looking teenager with hair down to his shoulders takes my ticket. He inserts it into the ticket-eating machine, which gobbles it up, and then the light on the turnstile turns green.

  “Have a magical day,” he mumbles in a monotone.

  And just like that, I’m in. I am in Foreverland. And it’s exactly how I remember it.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Souvenir photo?”

  A woman in a Foreverland staff T-shirt with a huge camera hanging off her neck waves me over to a cheesy photo backdrop. It’s a cloudless blue sky with mountains and lagoons and a white castle in the distance. On the top of the backdrop, the words Where magic never ends! are written in curly golden script.

  I shake my head. I don’t want to take a photo. But I stand looking at the backdrop, which I recognize. It’s exactly the same as it was two summers ago, when I last came to Foreverland. Just to be sure, I slide my backpack off, unzip the front compartment, and pull out the photo I stashed there this morning. The picture that jump-started this whole idea.

  In the photo is the same fairy-tale landscape, and in the middle of it is my family. Or the collection of people formerly known as my family. I don’t know what to call us now.

  We’re all standing in a line. Mom’s on the end, wearing a black skirt, a white embroidered shirt with fluttery sleeves, and big black sunglasses. That’s her idea of casual. The woman does not own a single T-shirt or pair of sweatpants.

  Next to her is my sister, Gwen, who’s three years older than me. She looks just like Mom—same shoulder-length blonde hair, same brown eyes. Gwen’s wearing a swim-team T-shirt and a pair of those athletic shorts that are ultra-everything: ultra-fast-dry and ultra-lightweight and ultra-expensive.

  Next to Gwen is Dad, in his wrinkled Roosevelt College T-shirt and a pair of plaid shorts, with a black ink splotch near one pocket. He looks every bit like the head-in-the-clouds professor he is. He’s sort of squinting behind his rectangular eyeglasses, and he’s smiling his trademark toothy grin.

  Next to Dad is me.

  I’m wearing Gwen’s hand-me-downs, like I always do, because they’re in “excellent condition.” They make me feel like I’m in a costume, but whatever. The T-shirt I’m wearing has a cartoon bumblebee on it, surrounded by the words BEE YOURSELF! You just don’t get more ironic than that.

  My hair is brownish, and longish, and straightish. It’s in a low ponytail, the exact same kind of ponytail I have my hair in right now.

  Mom’s got her arm around Gwen, and Gwen’s got her arm around Dad, and Dad’s got his arm around me. We are pressing close together, so close that our bodies make a big block, a unit. If you looked at us from far away, we wouldn’t look like four separate things. We’d look like one thing. We were, back then. We were a family.

  This morning, when I found the photo, forgotten on the floor by the suitcase, all I wanted to do was jump into the picture. I didn’t have a time machine, obviously. But I did have money for a train ticket.

  And now I’m there. Here. Now I’m in Foreverland. I’m staring at the exact spot we stood two years ago.

  All around me, fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters are veering off to Vertigo Vortex and Tsunami Falls and the Catapult and the Shooting Star, rushing to get there first so they won’t have to wait so long. So they can cram more fun into their day. They only have one day, and they have to make the most of it.

  Not me. I have all day and all night, too. When this place closes at ten, I’ll be closed up inside it. Tomorrow when I wake, I can start all over again.

  I grab a park map from the map kiosk. Then I stand under a tree to escape the brutal sun, and unfold it.

  Foreverland has four sections: Sky City, Waterworld, Tot Town, and Magic Mile. Sky City has all the big roller coasters, Waterworld has all the—duh—water rides, Tot Town is the kiddie section, and Magic Mile—well, that has the miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t fit in any of the other sections.

  Foreverland isn’t a theme park like Disneyland or whatever—it’s smaller and a lot less famous. There are a few rides that are pretty well-known, like the Shooting Star, but there are definitely newer, nicer amusement parks closer to the city. The reason my family always came here was that Dad used to come when he was a kid, and he’s got a soft spot for it.

  So Foreverland doesn’t have a theme really, except for the whole magic thing. There’s signature “Magic Burgers” and “Magic Cones” and “Magic Hour.” Magic is printed on basically every surface in the park.

  I’m looking at the map, trying to decide what to ride first. I’ve been here so many times with my family—every summer for practically my whole life—and we have a strict routine developed by my control freak mom. We would come first thing in the morning, when the park opened, and we’d head straight to Sky City to get on the most popular rides before the park got too crowded. I never liked this plan.

  Fun fact: I hate roller coasters.

  Okay, I don’t hate them. I’m not opposed to their existence. I just don’t want to be on one, ever. They terrify me.

  Is it ironic that I’m terrified of roller coasters but have run away to live in an amusement park?

  Why, yes, it is.

  Is it surprising?

  Nope. Not at all.

  I’m terrified of too many things to count. It’d be easier to make a list of the things I’m not terrified of.

  I’m the only one in my family who doesn’t like roller coasters. The rest of them are coaster-crazy. So we’d always beeline to the Shooting Star and the Catapult, where they’d get in line, and I’d wait on a nearby bench with a book.

  “Honey. Honey,” my mom would say, with her perfectly plucked eyebrows all raised, “are you really going to just sit there while we all ride? You’re not even going to try?”

  I’d really wanted to shoot back, “Are you really all going to ride while I sit here? You’re not even going to try to consider what I want?”

  But I’d never say that. I’d just shrug and open my book. And my mom would sigh and look so incredibly disappointed in me.

  One summer, my parents got into a fight about it. They thought they were out of earshot, but they weren’t. I’m lucky that way.

  “Would you just leave her alone, Mary?” my dad said. “She’s happy reading. Don’t you get that?”

  “She’s not happy reading,” my mom said. “She’s comfortable reading. You never push her, which is exactly why she is the way she is.”

  I waited for my dad to ask, “And what way is that exactly?”

  Because I wanted to know myself. But he didn’t ask—either because he knew what she meant already or because he was too fed up to keep talking.

  Instead, Gwen chimed in. “Whatever, Mom, she’s fine. Don’t feel bad. It’s an amusement park. The whole point is to go on the roller coasters, not to, like, ride the merry-go-round ten times.”

  Which made sense.

  But it doesn’t make sense now. Now it’s my Foreverland, my way. And riding the merry-go-round ten times is exactly what I am going to do. Maybe I’ll ride it twenty times. Who’s going to stop me?

  I walk toward the center of the park, to the Grand Carousel.

  It’s hot today. Blistering hot. Fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. After about two minutes in the sun, I can feel my pale skin getting toasted like a marshmallow. So I stop under a tree to re-apply sunscreen. It’s been a few hours since I put some on, while I was on the train.