The Nobody People by Bob Proehl (manga ereader TXT) 📕

“Nothing’s happening!” Ruby shouts.

The Ferris wheel blazes to life, and the final-years lose their collective shit. The fliers hit the air, dancing through the spinning, shifting light. Lynnette Helms blasts a Beyoncé song into their heads. Carrie wants to tell her it’s perfect. Before she can, Lynette is somewhere else, dancing. The final-years couple off, group into tiny cliques. In the choices they make, the people they join up with, they reify their whole history at Bishop. Friendships that will survive their departure must be cemented here, and this is the last available burial ground for grudges. Anything they don’t leave behind now will be carried. Anything they don’t carry will be forgotten.

Waylon grinds against Bryce’s trunk. Bryce grabs the sides of Waylon’s head and kisses him, and Waylon kisses him back desperately. This had to happen tonight, Carrie thinks. They were about to miss each other. These things come so close to not happening. She watches the two of them and smiles. None of the other final-years, even Miquel, sees. They are absorbed in themselves. They are caught up in the lights and the air and the end of everything they know looming over them. They’re caught up in freedom and terror.

“This is amazing!” Miquel shouts. There’s no way to tell if he’s drunk or high on everyone else’s euphoria or genuinely ecstatic. Carrie needs to know which it is. Miquel and Waylon and Hayden have made plans to move to Chicago after graduation. Hayden says there’s a neighborhood in Wicker Park filling up with Resonant kids their age. Hayden says it’s like St. Mark’s Place in the seventies, which Carrie knows is intended to lure her along, although no one’s invited her. She’s waiting to hear about jobs in Boston and here in New York. She didn’t apply anwhere in Chicago. It felt too close to home. But if Miquel asks, she’ll follow.

Miquel grips her by the shoulders of her heavy coat. His wide grin is lit in rainbow colors by the Ferris wheel behind her. “It’s like a Lou Reed song,” he says.

Carrie played Lou Reed for Miquel when they were sixteen to cure him of Pink Floyd and the Dead and all the other lazy things he listened to stoned. She started him out in the deep end of the pool with “Heroin,” Reed wheezing and sputtering, guitars screeching over his vocals.

“Hear that?” she’d said. “That’s dissonance. Can’t you feel it in your teeth?”

Miquel smiled. His teeth were perfect. He wanted more, wanted every song Reed had recorded. Carrie gave them to him, and now he’s offering them back to her as something changed, new.

“Which song?” she asks, yelling over the music Lynette is playing in their heads.

“What?”

“Which Lou Reed song is it like?” Before Miquel can answer, blue and red lights cycle across the boardwalk. Cops, attracted by the Ferris wheel lights. The final-years scatter. They run for the streets and take to the air. Miquel is ready to bolt, but she holds him.

“Stay still,” she says. She pulls him in tight, pushes them both down, invisible. A cop sprints by, close enough to touch them. Two more, three.

“I can see you,” Miquel says. His arms are around her waist, hers around his shoulders. Carrie lifts her face to his, her lips to his.

Down the beach, the other final-years laugh. They fly and shoot fireworks into the dark from their fingertips.

The cook raps a greasy knuckle on the flyer Owen Curry has been staring at for five minutes. “You been?” he asks.

Owen is startled. He jostles his coffee, his fifth cup. It spills on the picture, a still from an old movie. FREAKS! the flyer declares. Welled on the surface, the drops look like pale blood. They soak into the paper dull tan.

“Not yet,” Owen says. The cook is sweaty, unshaven. He smells like hamburger and that body odor cattle have. Bread soaked in soured milk. Owen feels nauseous being around so many of them. Couldn’t I—

No, says the friend in his head.

Owen crams cold pancake into his mouth and looks at the cook as he chews. “You?”

The cook holds up three fingers, then leans in so close Owen gets a whiff of his stale breath. “Seriously fucked up,” he whispers. “They got this girl with tentacle arms. Normal except for that, but her arms are tentacles with suckers and everything. Imagine you saw her on the street. You’d check out her ass, because it’s like an easy eight. Maybe whistle or say something. And then, bang, tentacles.”

“That’s fucked up,” says Owen. He knows this is how guys talk to one another. Girls’ asses rated like movies, thumbs up or down. His manager at the Planet gave three letter grades to every girl who worked at the mall, one for tits, one for ass, and one for face.

“Worst thing is I can’t stop thinking about her,” says the cook, wiping his hands on a dirty towel tucked in his belt. “I get these nightmares of those tentacles touching me, but it’s like I’ve got to know what they feel like. If they’re warm or cold.” His eyes go out of focus. Someone’s fucked with his mind, Owen thinks. Someone like me has laid their mark on him. He wonders how long and how badly this hapless cow will be haunted. “Anyway,” the cook says, “you got to go. Bring a sick bag in case you get queasy. But you got to go.”

Owen looks at the flyer. He points to the address, some county road. “How far is it?” he asks.

“Twenty-minute drive.”

“I don’t have a car,” Owen says.

The cook stares at him. “How’d you get here without a car?”

“I’m on a sort of walking tour,” says Owen. “Like a pilgrimage.”

“Like Moses.”

“Yeah,” says Owen. “Like Moses.”

“Me and Jake are going to drive out there after work,” says the cook, cocking his thumb at the dishwasher in the back. “It’d be tight, but