I've spent a lot of time wondering if I should tell someone my story, our story, wondering if I even want to tell someone, deciding for or against one or both, back and forth, over and over, until finally I guess I decided to go for it so all the internal debating could just... end.

But in all that time, and at least a solid week after that, I haven't been able to figure out where to start. In the car ride to that horrible place, nervous and excited, leaning against slightly cracked windows, staring out into the weird gloom of the high desert's night? When I met Jade, which in a weird way basically started this whole thing? When Jade introduced us to each other?

None of it feels right. None of it captures the context. The love. The misery, individual, shared, then lightning-fast and savage, then blurred and disorienting. The heartbreak I think I don't actually care about as much as I should, even though something deep in me still aches at the thought of of how little good I was able to do even when good is all I ever wanted to do, no matter what I still remember so clearly, mumbled, dreamlike, from bloody lips as they tilted so suddenly across the grand precipice of death.

So I think... I think I'm gonna have to ramble. Try to paint a picture, bit by bit, of what we did and what we felt. All I can do is keep typing and hope the final result is some odd kind of closure, even when some of you might hate me for it, even when I think you probably should. I'll just sink back into the ocean of memory and let instinct take over.

At some point a couple years back, I realized I'd started seeing Friday nights in sort of a complicated way.

When I'd just started college, it was... I mean, you can probably imagine what that's like for extroverts. Or maybe I mean introverts? What do you even call it when an introvert is lost and lonely enough that he forgets what it felt like to act like one?

I mean, it was college, you know? I made some good decisions. I made more bad decisions. Mostly I dissociated through classes and lectures in the daytime, then had a lot of fun, wonderful evenings. You know, the kind of fun, wonderful evenings that end about halfway before everyone else's, with me barfing in someone else's toilet or trash can... or once, under the bed in a guest room. Which, uh... yeah, I still feel bad about that, but I got my wallet stolen a few days later, so I the karma almost evens out.

Except karma never really evens out. Not for me. I've gone too far. Accomplished too much while changing so little. Removed myself as far as I have from... no, come on, it's too soon to get into that. Focus, James. You're not doing anybody a favor by lacing the preamble with even more storm clouds. If you really want to write part of this, then do it already.

...On rare occasions when some incident does feel like I've squared away the math, morally speaking, I try to just roll with it and not obsess over the bigger picture.

But about a year in, I had to admit my routine's returns diminished painfully. I fucked a girl, didn't like it much, wondered if I was gay, fucked a guy, didn't like it much, wondered if I was ace, but no, people were hot and I did want to fuck them, I just never ended up happy afterward. And every crush that was about more than "person hot, let me get it in there" went even worse. Turns out it's a lot easier to be disappointed by casual sex than it is to be disappointed in a person, and before long I was almost as disillusioned about love as I am about myself.

Fridays bled away their upsides, and it took way too long for me to notice. I drank more and faster, had less actual fun, spent less time "partying" and more time puking or just going home to cry on the bathroom floor... then puke anyway, except it'd be my furniture caught in the splash zone. I was legit jealous of introverts. I mean, extroverts, or... God, which one am I? No, that's just another distraction. It's fine. I'll type and the truth will follow, whether I understand it all or not.

I think that for myself, practically speaking, there wasn't much difference between extroversion and some twisted introversion that had shattered like bones on a breaking wheel. The idea of just staying home and reading a book or watching a movie or playing a game alone, then feeling even halfway fulfilled... it sounded so good by the time I was sick of parties that when I did give it a shot, I was honestly surprised when I didn't fucking like it any more or less than what I'd already been doing.

I was starting to figure out that the problem most likely wasn't college, sex, parties, drinking, or anything like that. The problem was me. I just... couldn't pin down exactly what the problem with myself was.

Well, that's not quite true. I at least had the general idea.

Eventually it had been months since I went to a party. So when my best friend Jade texted me about a party at her place that was going to be "like 600% off the fucking hook", my first thought was "Goddammit, Jade, I'm not gonna fuck you again even if we're both drunk, because you're the only person I can actually stand being around and if I actually remembered most of fucking you, something might break". But she kept going on and on, and...

And hey, maybe it'd be cool to puke in someone else's trash can again for once, regardless of the amount of awkward, apologetic Jade-fucking that may have taken place once upon a time.

It wasn't a great party or a shitty one. It was just a party. It was everything I was sick of and everything I wanted. It was nothing. It was a bunch of people getting smashed in someone else's home and acting like that meant something. On the bright side, I wasn't trying to fuck Jade again, or no, I mean Jade wasn't trying to fuck me again. I mean, it hadn't been fun for her either.

Except it had, hadn't it? Or am I just... I dunno. Maybe the first time fucking somebody you care about is always weird, and having only done that once hadn't given me much data. Although one half-forgotten round of shitty sex wasn't exactly the primary issue that kept romance from igniting there.

What actually matters is that this specific party is where I met Devin. No, it's less like I met Devin, and more like by the end of our first conversation, a version of myself I hated was half-dead, and a version of me who could almost be happy took his place.

I was expecting that to stop when I got sick of her, but then I just... didn't get sick of her. I was expecting it to stop weeks later when she said I was the kind of guy her parents would've hated if they were still alive. Hell, I'd expected it to stop that first night when she awkwardly seduced me. Instead, I found out there were people I liked having sex with after all.

Is it weird to not even remember who said "I love you" first? I remember Jade admitting later, guiltily, that she'd wanted me at that party because Devin would be there. I remember it word for word: "I guess I was hoping that if the two most broken people I knew met each other, they'd hit it off and be just a little bit happier." I remember that, but I don't remember if my girlfriend said she loved me before I said I loved her. The mind's weird like that. If anything, I almost feel like we both said it first, somehow.

So what's next? Maybe... yeah, that works. Nothing wrong with at least trying for a comprehensible chronology.

I remember our first date. Or should I call it our second date? I think even if you didn't go to a party expecting to meet somebody, if you've fucked them by the end of the night and they're still there in the morning, you can probably safely count it as a date, even if they leave half an hour later. So yeah, I remember our second first date. I don't think anything could make me forget. If I got a brain injury and forgot my whole life, that memory would be one of two or three exceptions. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't remarkable except for how after it ended, I realized I wanted to do it again. Well, no, I wouldn't want... the exact same experience. Because it was definitely remarkable. Why did I just tell you that it wasn't? I'm not even drunk.

Whose idea was it to go to an amusement park? It had to be Devon's. Devin's, I mean. Not that she was more ambitious or fun-loving, although those things are both very true about her, especially compared to me, but I would've been... more cautious, maybe? I think that's it. Yeah, it was Devin's idea. I remember texting Jade something like "help i was born stupid is she the kind of girl you take to a restaurant or to olive garden" and then, after a few minutes of irritably lying on my bedroom floor staring at the little check mark that meant she was leaving me on read, the buzz of my phone, so strong that I'd long since turned off its weird default... notification blorp, shook me out of some odd thought, and I read, re-read, and re-re-read "she says she likes indecisive guys and she'll be in the parking lot for FunFun Land at 530 thursday night".

...Man, who the fuck names a theme park FunFun Land? That's so desperate that I find it relatable. And just like me, it was a stumbling derelict, stubbornly extant, ragged and disappointing. Something that might once have been golden, if gold rusted like the soul does.

I went, though. Give anything a shot once, right? That worked out with Jade. Well, it... I mean, listen, if you fuck somebody and end up upgrading from friend to best friend, I'd say it was probably a good deal even if you both woke up the next morning and simultaneously realized you finally understood what it must've felt to write the lyrics to The Birthday Massacre's Nevermind.

The drive felt weirdly long, but there was Devin, waving fast enough that Jade must've described my car to her, although it took me a literal minute to recognize her. She'd been wearing a weirdly nice black evening dress at Jade's otherwise-boring party, but she came to FunFun Land in beat-to-shit jeans and a patch-speckled bomber jacket that definitely didn't come from any aisle someone would shop in if they cared whether or not other people could even tell they had tits.

Honestly, I damn near drove right by. There was a solid moment when I thought she was a punk-adjacent guy waving at the wrong car until I heard her voice and realized that her almost hypnotically flowing red-brown hair wasn't gone, just lazily braided behind her back instead of spilling across pale, bare shoulders. The only thing missing from the look was a cigarette, which I guess means the look could never have been complete, considering...

"Uh... hey! Sorry, I was... looking for a... for a parking spot," I think I mumbled, trying not to say 'I literally thought you were a dude' even as I realized about ninety percent of the lot was empty. I guess it must've bled out into my voice, though.

"A parking spot," she said. There was that rueful little smile on her face again. That smile was half of what had charmed me a week earlier. A smile that says 'yeah, my life is dog shit too, wanna roll around in it together?'

Did I really forget to mention the smile before? Christ. I must be as tired as I feel.

"...Yeah." It was such a bad lie that I didn't really even feel like I was lying when I said it.

"Is that the new slang for 'holy shit, I didn't even recognize you?' I must be losing track of the zeitgeist again."

I at least tried not to wince.

"Ah yeah, there it is. That's the one." She shrugged and cracked her neck. Maybe that was her equivalent to whatever nervous thing I would've been doing with my hands if they weren't already on the steering wheel. "That's the face that says 'who are you and what did you do with that lovely, ephemeral little shade who was for sure going to the bathroom every half hour to fix her makeup, and definitely not because she picked a bad afternoon for chili dogs?"

"It, it's more like the face that says 'I forgot I was bi enough that this is actually a hotter look than the nice dress.' I mean, not that I'm implying, like..." I don't even know what I thought I was implying, but the rueful smile suddenly wasn't rueful anymore. I had the weirdest thought right then, that I ought to have resented a smile that was so real, but maybe the outfit had enough rue in it that her face could get away with anything it wanted.

"Yeah," she said after a long pause. "This works. We're not even in the park yet and this is already worth the bus ride."

"You took a bus to get here?" I think maybe there were other things I should've said. Not that I could tell you what those things were.

"It's fine," Devin said, rolling her eyes in a way I really hoped I was correctly interpreting as 'fondly.' "If there's a third time, you'll probably connect some puzzle pieces from the backstory all on your own."

"...What if it turns out i'm a little bit stupid?" Spoilers: I was. I still am.

"Then I guess I'll crack Pandora's old jar open just a bit if everything else is going well," she said. "I'll do my best to kill a mood with it, too. In fact, I'm an expert at killing moods. And you should be parking your fucking car."

She wasn't wrong. So I did.

Thinking back on this, it's almost shocking how quickly things went sideways. And it... I don't know. Maybe it wasn't my fault, and that's the wrong way to think. Or maybe I'm the kind of bastard who's self-aware but always finds a way to play victim anyway.

Fuck, this isn't even the story. This is the preamble to the real story. And I wanna emphasize, yeah, okay, some of why it was unforgettable wasn't fun. But it did lead to basically everything else, and even if I have my regrets about everything else, I wouldn't take any of it back.

In the end, everyone got what they wanted, or at least they got closer than they ever could've if I wasn't there. Assuming I believe them. I don't know if I do. I want to. I allow myself to be convinced, on hard nights when I just can't fucking stop crying.

Even karma falls for my bullshit, and I prove that by continuing to be alive. That's the kind of bastard I am, the sheer, absurd caliber of it all. The hubris I have so meticulously hammered into a shape that, from a distance, must resemble a beacon of hope for the hopeless.

We left my car to bake in what remained of the afternoon's light, walking slowly toward the deeply unfun-looking entrance to FunFun Land. It was a long walk, but I don't think I parked my car too far away. What would the point have been? We must've just walked slowly. It's hard to get hyped about walking into places like FunFun Land. I wasn't here for that, I was here for her, and apparently, for some reason I couldn't fathom, she was here for me.

"So, why this place? I'm not saying it doesn't look inviting, even though I'm definitely saying that, but..." That was probably not the ideal slow-walking icebreaker, but I led with it anyway.

Devin was so... small. I'm not sure why I thought that. She wasn't even short, I'm just a bit on the tall side for a guy, and she wasn't on the tall side of anything, but I kept thinking that she was so much smaller than me somehow. And that felt... incorrect. Yeah, that's the closest word I can find. It felt incorrect for her to be that height. And that might also have been part of why it took so long to get to the park entrance. She wasn't fast-walking, the opposite if anything, and between that and the height gap, she got to set the pace.

Devon's very good at that. At setting the pace, I mean. That probably should have been obvious just from how we set up the date, by which I mean how Devin set up the date, but... I did just get done admitting I'm a little bit stupid, didn't I?

"...Well." Devin chewed on the inside of her lip a bit. On most people I think it would've looked like awkwardness, or maybe even guilt, but on Devin, I'd call it mischievous. "Alright, so... stop me if you've heard this one before."

"Uh, sure?" Whatever this would be, I really doubted I'd heard it before.

"So there's this old amusement park, yeah? The kind that so few people go to anymore that it barely makes sense that it's still open? Even has a stupid name. And also there's... let's call it lore, about this amusement park. Yeah. Lore's the right word."

"FunFun Land has lore," I said flatly. More of a challenge than a question.

"It does," she said, "And I'm kinda big on lore. Yeah. Still the right word. So the lore here is pretty simple. They say... I mean, who the fuck knows who 'they' even means, but they say, on the street or the internet or whatever, they say that FunFun Land..."

"Isn't actually very much fun?"

"Oh no," Devin said. She was smirking now. "The lore is that it's a fucking blast. Just not for normal people."

"So we're heading into urban legend territory here? I'm gonna be real, this isn't exactly how most dates work."

"Well, I'm not exactly how most people work. So yeah. If you come to FunFun Land, and you approach a certain ride at a certain time and say a certain thing to a certain ride operator - it'll be a very specific guy. Uniform's all the wrong colors, no blue at all. He won't always be there, either. But sometimes he will. And if you say the right thing, the ride you get on turns out to have two tracks."

"I'm not doing this," I said. "I mean you can talk about it, but I'm not..."

"I might," Devin said. "Okay, no, I won't, but only because if it was true, I'd still hate it. But it's interesting. To think about that."

"About a ride having two tracks?"

"Well, it's interesting if the second track takes you underground to a place where missing children are kept in cages. Fed just enough to keep them... motivated. And people who want to have a special kind of fun at good old FunFun Land, the ones who said the right thing to the right guy at the right time, they get to place their bets."

"On what? Fucking... abducted child gladiator battles? Where is this even going?"

"Not exactly. There are more rides down there. They're just a little less safe than they maybe should be. So you bet. You bet on which kids'll die and which kids won't. Not money, though. That part changes depending on who tells the story. If anybody says it's money, they're fuckin' boring and you should stop talking to them immediately and seek actual friendship. Or romance. Or anything." She sounded almost serious about that last part. Not the betting on dying children stuff, but the part about paying with money being boring somehow.

"This is not exactly how I thought this date would start," I mumbled. Though the truth is that I didn't really mind. She had been a bit, uh, macabre at the party. And during sex. I think it's safe to say someone's a bit macabre if you meet them, fuck them a few hours later, and they mention their knife collection and ask if you want to roleplay killing them very, very, uh... let's pretend the word she used was "romantically".

Was I that kind of person too? I hadn't thought so, even though the third time Jade and I got just drunk enough to fuck and halfway through doing it she asked if I'd choke her out just a little bit, I was fine with that, even though it wasn't my thing? Was I fucked in the head in a way I wasn't aware of, and that's what Devin found interesting? Or was it just that I didn't mind that Devin was that way? Is it that right after she asked about the "romantic" thing she apologized, started pulling the half-wilted black dress back up, said she should go, but I grabbed her arm - lightly, not in a weird way - and said it was fine, she'd just caught me off-guard?

"Yeah, I get that from time to time. Entrance coming up, by the way. Probably shouldn't talk about secret child death games right in front of the guy we pay to get in."

"Oh yeah, that... wait, forty bucks? For this dump?" The sign was so faded I couldn't even read it, but some grimly underpaid employee must've scribbled the number onto the sign with what I assume was a permanent marker, just below traces of old paint.

I mean, I could swing forty bucks for me, and technically I could for her too, but... fuck, would it be sexist to try to pay to get her in too even though I didn't want to? Or would this be one of those weird situations where somebody who seemed like she'd hate me offering to pay for her would unexpectedly get weird if I didn't?

"Yeah, it's dumb. Don't sweat it, I've got us covered." She fished around in her jacket pocket, plucked out a weirdly nice leather wallet, and Jesus that was a lot of bills. I mean, most of them were probably tens or less, but it wasn't a small wallet, and it was stuffed to capacity.

"You sure? That's a lot of cash to drop on..."

Something prickled at the back of my neck. I had a half-thought to reach back and smack it a little in case it was a mosquito or something, but no, that was just... my hair standing on end.

The afternoon would cool off soon, but the sun wasn't sinking yet. So what was that feeling? It reminded me of something. Some old thing I hadn't felt since I was a kid. Okay, maybe not literally since I was a kid, but something I sure felt a lot more back then.

I felt, very suddenly, like I was being watched.

"Not to brag... I mean, really, please don't think I'm bragging, I only brag about things I've actually worked for, but eighty bucks is not exactly an amount of money I'll notice is gone." That sounded a lot like bragging, but I was preoccupied with that feeling.

It hadn't gone away. Someone was watching me, I just felt it. And, as I glanced around furtively, I noticed Devin was doing the same thing.

So she felt it too. She must have. That ancient, primal urging. The voiceless voice that speaks in stiff hair and goosebumps, whispering that something was... I didn't want to even think the words 'hunting us', but that's how it felt. A gentle, almost distant sense of danger, like an odd scent caught in the warm summer wind.

"Let's... let's pay and get in there," I said, and I'm sure I failed at pretending to be totally calm.

"Yep." Devin cracked her neck again, then her knuckles. "Not gonna be crowded today, or any day, but I don't exactly hate the idea of more people being around right now."

"For fucking real," I muttered. Maybe there were only a few dozen cars scattered around, but between those and employees... I guess the idea of being watched worried me more in a parking lot that was totally devoid of human life than it would in FunFun Land.

"Hey," Devin said. I think her tone was meant to sound reassuring. "Don't worry too much. Just stick close to me, keep your eyes open, and you'll be fine."

I didn't even know how to respond to that. I think I would've rather she hadn't instantly validated that sense of not-quite-sourceless danger.

Except... whatever. I probably would be fine. Even if something real and dangerous was somehow about to happen... against all logic, she had succeeded at making me feel reassured.

Devin threw eighty bucks at a very tired looking guy who I swear I could almost tell at a glance had ended up here because he had a degree he couldn't make money with, and we passed through the creaky, rusty metal turnstile leading into FunFun Land.

Do you think it's interesting that crossing that threshold changed nothing? Entering the park hadn't triggered that anxious, haunted feeling, and it hadn't banished the feeling either. I don't know. I'm sidetracking myself, I guess, but I definitely think it's interesting. I have no doubt that Devon thought it was interesting, too.

We wandered around the park. Devin bought us both corn dogs. They were even shittier and greasier than you'd expect, although that's probably what people want from amusement park "food". We ate them wandering around, just mapping the place out, looking over our shoulders, ignoring that the urgency was getting worse, not better. Ignoring the occasional glimpse of something vanishing just around a corner, flitting away at the edge of our peripheral vision.

There was nowhere near enough of a crowd to get lost in, which actually might not have been safer for all I know, but it sure as hell would've felt safer. Really, there were just enough people that it was oddly easy to observe how they'd cluster together. It was the groups of three or more that kept putting me on edge, especially the... I don't know, the basic ones? Like, a mom and dad, or maybe adult siblings or whatever, and then a kid or two. Or sometimes just a random small group of teens or young adults. Over half of those groups, passing us by, made that sense of being prey spike upward.

And I thought I noticed something about those people, something I doubted at first, but the more groups I observed, the more I realized that no matter how little sense it made, either I was very suddenly developing schizophrenia somehow, or something was deeply, deeply fucking wrong, because I just kept seeing...

Well, at least I'm not that inclined to feeling sick to my stomach when I'm anxious, so we picked up funnel cakes when the corn dogs were gone, ate those on a bench. But we were both doing the same thing, and I'm sure we both knew it. We talked, but really we were people-watching, questioning shadows, and in my case, keeping my eyes on little clusters of people.

"I... feel like I keep... seeing the same guy," I said, in-between bites.

"That'll happen at a theme park with less than a hundred customers, yeah."

"No, I mean..." What the hell did I mean? "I mean like..."

But I took another bite instead of finishing a sentence I couldn't quite figure out how to phrase.

"You mean that every so often when a group of people gets close, you keep seeing the same guy with them."

"I mean, yeah, but it's different people he's with every time. And that doesn't make any sense."

"What about it doesn't make sense?" She genuinely sounded as if she had no idea why anyone would question it.

"Okay, fine, well... how about this, then: I can't think of anything that makes sense but isn't terrifying."

"Do you want an explanation that isn't terrifying?" This, too, felt weirdly genuine.

"Of course I do!" I snapped that one off a bit too loudly for comfort. A few people glanced our way. Great job, me, now I was the thing that other people were nervous about.

"If you really want me to, I could try to make one up."

"I want the truth," I said, only realizing once I'd said it that the truth was probably the last thing I actually wanted. What I wanted was for the truth to not be my problem, no matter what it actually was.

"No you don't," she said. "Hey, it's fair. I don't want the truth either. I just want to be on a fucking date at a shitty amusement park."

"Me too, but I also want to not feel like I'm in danger somehow," I hissed, not quite as under my breath as I'd intended.

"Then do what I said to do. Stick close to me and keep your eyes open, and you'll be fine. Just... do it without overthinking it too much. Otherwise it'll ruin the whole evening." She said it so casually, like doing that would be easy.

I guess it was easy for Devon. Or at the very least, it somehow must have been necessary often enough that doing it was second-nature. I'm not actually sure if there's a difference. I think there is, but it's hard to pin down.

But she was basically right, wasn't she? If we weren't just going to drop the date over whatever was happening, wasn't this the only logical way to move forward? To keep an eye open just in case, but mostly focus on eating terrible theme park food and arguing over which so-bad-it's-good movie was the worst/best? (I was in favor of Troll 2 or The Room. Devin correctly divined that I had never heard of Neil Breen.)

We did our best to lose ourselves in each other, and it turned out that we were pretty fucking good at that.

I mean, it had been that way at the party, but we'd been drunk at the party. It was almost surreal, for me at least, realizing that booze had apparently been responsible for none of the sense of connection I'd felt with her that night, that strange sense of finally coming home somehow to a world that made sense, like sinking into an old bed you're fond of, or maybe into warm water. The sense that even if I drowned, I wouldn't mind it at all.

My head insisted the feeling should've disappeared with the alcohol, or shattered like some ancient spell eroded by time the next morning when she had to go to work just half an hour after we'd woken up and I couldn't tell for the life of me if she'd meant it when she said she hoped we'd see each other again.

Actually, I'd gotten a bit caught up on that phrasing. Hoped. As if whether we talked again was something being left up to destiny somehow, and not, y'know, left up to whether or not the phone numbers we gave each other were real.

We were so lost in each other in that surreal semi-paranoid conversation that hearing someone else speak was like a bucket of ice water being thrown in my face.

"Nadia, right? Isn't that you?"

Devin and I both flinched like we'd been struck by something. Or maybe it was only me who did, and I just wanted to think she was a loser too.

"Definitely not," Devin said, slowly. One of her hands was in her jacket pocket, and somehow I knew that inside that little hollow, she was holding onto a knife. No, wait, now I'm not sure if I knew. I might just be letting information I didn't have at the time color my memories of past events. I bet there's a term for that.

"No, it's definitely you," the guy talking to her said. It wasn't the guy we might or might not have been seeing in the 'crowd'. If anything this dude looked... so normal that it's actually hard to describe him. I'm not the best at faces, but all I can remember about this guy is that he was presumably, uh, a guy. But I got that same feeling, that 'you are in danger you fucking idiot' sense that must've existed in human beings long before we invented language.

"You've got the wrong person, dude," I said. "I think if you say somebody's name and they tell you 'no, that's not me', they're probably right." Devin glanced at me for just a split second, a ghost of a smile. Then she turned back to whoever-the-fuck.

"What he said." Her tone was polite but decisive.

"I'm serious. Nadia Brozek, right? We're like... two seats apart in Egyptology. We've shared notes."

"My name is Devon, actually," she said, and if the last thing she said had been decisive, then this was glacier-cold. When she said it, I almost thought the temperature dropped, like we'd come here in the fall and not the summer, uncomfortably underdressed. "And I've never seen you before in my life, and you should get the fuck out of my face while you still have one."

"C'mon, Nadia, don't be that way," the guy said. He was grinning now. A big, shit-eating grin. And I don't think teeth aren't supposed to look like that. There aren't supposed to be... so many of them. "You know what I want, right? This doesn't have to get ugly. Just..."

"...Give you my... notes," Devon finished, "but they're mine, I'd never share them with anyone, I've never met you, and if you try to take what's mine I will fight back until one of us is dead, and the dead one won't be me. The dead one is never me."

"Holy fuck, Devin", I whispered without actually meaning to, because suddenly I was... let's say 'thinking with two heads at once', except, y'know, in the way that makes me a dumbass.

"Huh... what a shame. That's a real shame, Brozek." The shit-eating grin was still there, but it didn't match his words or his creepy tone even slightly anymore. "Guess I'll see you in class."

"I don't think you'll be seeing her anywhere, dude," I said.

"Hmm." The man scratched at his chin. Or maybe at his beard? I can't remember if he had one. "Well, we'll 'see' about that, won't we?"

And then he just left. He walked away. I took a few glances around us in case something else was wrong, but everything seemed normal, and by the time I looked back again the guy was nowhere to be found.

"Leaving with a shitty pun," she muttered. "Can't say I don't I respect that kind of exit, even from a fucking liar."

"...Egyptology, though? That's so specific. That's such a weird way to fuck up a cold read." If this was a cold read, but it had to be, didn't it?

"No... I am taking a course on that, although it hasn't covered anything I didn't already know. But he sure as fuck isn't in there."

"Really? Wait, what are you majoring in?" I hadn't necessarily assumed that being at Jade's party meant she went to the same college, or to any college, but maybe this was confirmation.

"I'm majoring in being a fucking problem. Nothing more and nothing less. And my name is not Nadia."

The way she said it was weird. Curt and angry at first, but the part about 'Nadia' came out... wistful.

"Should we... I think we should leave," I said. "I mean, I don't... this is only getting more worrying, right?"

"You can leave if you want," Devon said. "But I'd rather be dead than have my day fucked up by that organism."

"Would you be pissed if I did leave?"

"No," Devon said slowly. "No, not even a little bit. It's honestly the right choice. But if you do leave, I won't be calling you again, you won't be able to contact me, and Jade won't be wing-manning us any further. So... what are your priorities, James?"

Devin versus danger. The dream of happiness versus withering, loneliness, hollowness. There really wasn't even a choice to make.

"Let's at least ride some shit," I said. "But after that, we get the hell out of here."

"Yeah, that works," Devin said. "Look, as long as you don't leave before I do, we won't have a problem."

I nodded, thinking I could handle it. And unfortunately I was right.

The log flume we had to skip, since it was undergoing repairs. The basic bitch coasters weren't, though, and none of them were great, but they were fun. Even the park's crappy tea cup ride was worth a whole three minutes of "waiting in line".

The Ferris wheel was battered, so much that the ride operator, her uniform the same blue as all the others, didn't seem to want us onboard. Every time the old metal groaned, my nerves yanked me out of the moment, but Devin only seemed more excited. My anxiety did not get in her way.

Maybe replacing a weird fear with a more grounded one helped, though. I was almost ignoring that my sense of danger still rose, higher and sharper, like a spear pushed slowly through a living body, the skin that would soon be an exit wound straining visibly as the dull point pressed relentlessly forward.

"So what now?" We'd had a chance to ride everything that was even a little bit interesting.

"I guess we wander toward the exit and then use it," Devin said. "Thanks for sticking it out with me."

I was about to say something, probably 'of course' or 'no problem'... but we were passing by the log flume again, and my words died in my mouth before I could open it.

The little, easy-to-miss 'OUT OF ORDER: UNDERGOING MAINTENANCE' sign was still there, but this time, there was a ride operator sitting there anyway... in a uniform that was black with red accents.

"No fuckin' way," Devin said, staring. "That's... not supposed to actually be..."

And that's when I realized the sun was behind us now, ready to sleep in the west, and though I didn't hear anyone nearby, there were three long shadows spilling forward across the concrete.

I shoved Devin aside out of pure reflex, but I wasn't fast enough. She stumbled away, bright blood dripping from the rusted-red slice in her sleeve.

Time felt frozen for a moment, just then, as I realized the hand holding the knife that must've been aimed right at Devin's back belonged to the same man I'd been seeing in those groups, the man who could hide in a crowd without needing a proper crowd to do it.

He looked almost as shocked that he'd missed as I was shocked that this was fucking happening. We shared that, almost, me and that rat bastard son of a bitch, our disbelief at what had just happened.

And then he took a wild swing at her, missed, she grabbed me by the arm, and we ran like hell. She was yelling something, at him, me, both, I don't know, I wasn't really processing anything but the way he gave chase, the crimson tinge on his combat knife glittering eerily in the sunset.

I had been right when I first interpreted that sense of dread. We weren't just being watched. We were being hunted.

We ran. He followed. And no one else reacted. Devin was yelling, I might have been yelling, this guy was obviously trying to kill us, no, to kill her, no no no no to kill us, but we might as well have been silent or invisible. The staff and guests we sprinted by didn't seem aware of us at all.

There hadn't been much ambient noise here, but I suddenly realized it was absent, that it had been absent since the moment of the attack. An eerie silence smothered everything. I couldn't even hear the low murmur of cars in the distance. In that oppressive, suffocating silence, we just kept running.

...Then a panicked left turn took us into a dead-end, pinned between the bathrooms and some other building.

The man with the knife laughed, high and wild, and the fact that I could hear him startled me into freezing up. He lunged, again, at Devon...

...But it was Devon's pocketknife, flickering clear of her jacket pocket, that cut deep into the side of his ribcage as she darted forward and around his thrust. Something else came out of that pocket, too, thumping gently to the ground.

The silence shattered, the sounds of the park and the city rushing back in. Devon slashed at him again, but the man stumbled back just beyond her reach.

Then he turned and ran.

"GET BACK HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!" Devon screamed. Even from six feet away, the sheer volume made my head throb. She dropped low, snatched up a rock I hadn't noticed, and hurled it at the guy. Her aim was solid. The rock cracked against the side of the back of his head and bounced away, tearing loose a bloody patch of skin and hair. "I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL RIP YOUR GUTS OUT AND SHOVE 'EM DOWN YOUR FUCKING THROAT!"

He still ran, the head injury hardly slowing him down. And then he was gone, and so was that sharp sense of being hunted.

"Holy fucking shit, Devin, you..." But I trailed off. She'd slumped against the wall next to a trash can, coughing hard.

"S-sorry," she squeezed out before another, worse coughing fit wracked her whole body. "Just... j-just..."

The coughing got worse. I was frozen all over again as she collapsed to her knees, hacking wetly down into the garbage.

"I'm, I'm calling 911," I said, fumbling for my phone.

"No," Devin said, then coughed until she was all but retching. "No hospitals. This happens. D-drive me home." A lull in the fit. "Sew myself up. No h-hospitals or cops."

"Al, alright, sure. Can you walk?"

"Lean on you s-some." Her breathing was improving, but...

"Sure. Yeah, of course." Then something caught my eye. Her wallet, dislodged when she'd pulled the knife. I snagged it as she latched onto my arm. There was that thick wad of bills again, and a single card tucked into a narrow plastic slot. Her ID. I only got a glimpse before she took the wallet back.

We stumbled back to my car together, and I know I should've been freaking out about our near-death experience, but instead, I just couldn't stop thinking about the ID.

About the card with a photo of a younger Devin in a sundress, smiling bright, next to the name Nadia Brozek.