The Tragic Age by Stephen Metcalfe

Author:Stephen Metcalfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466857353
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

37

Only this year at Halloween it rains.

38

“This is crazy!” screams Gretchen.

The smile on her face says it’s not crazy at all.

With no possibility of trick-or-treaters, Gretchen has come over to the house and we have, of all things, done homework together. Which means, of course, we’ve accomplished absolutely nothing. The fascinating discussion of what’s your favorite flavor of frozen yogurt has taken us a good hour and a half alone. The only conclusion we come to is that yogurt would not be a bad idea. We take the Jaguar and Gretchen drives. We go to Bogart Yogurt and I get something orange and Gretchen gets something pink. We trade licks.

This, of course, gives me a hard-on.

“Where to now, James?” Gretchen says, when we get back in the car. She’s looking down her nose at me as if she’s totally in charge. It kills me, it really does, and so I make a sort of spontaneous decision. Playing it close to the vest, I only tell her the general directions. An hour later we’re only halfway there and it begins to rain harder. I ask Gretchen if she wants to turn back.

“Uh-uh,” she says. I can tell she’s busting with curiosity about where we’re going but I keep my mouth shut. I want it to be a surprise. And it is.

“A Ferris wheel!?”

The Pacific Wheel sits at the end of Santa Monica Pier. It’s the world’s only solar-powered Ferris wheel, is ninety feet tall, can move eight hundred people an hour, and contains 160,000 lights.

“If you’d gone a little faster than fifty miles an hour, we might have got here yesterday,” I say. I’ve become quite the comedian. Along with hard-ons, it seems to have come with the territory.

As I lead Gretchen by the hand down the deserted pier, it’s like looking at color trails in the falling rain. Gretchen’s hair and clothes are soaked. I’ve given her my hoodie but she’s left it unzipped. She’s wearing no bra and I can see her nipples poking out beneath her thin, wet top.

It is crazy.

I pay for the tickets. There’s no line. We move up the ramp toward the spinning baskets. The attendant, wearing a rain-slick green poncho, shakes his head.

“Getting ready to shut it down,” he says.

“Twenty bucks for five more minutes?” I say, and I hold out the bill. The operator takes the money. He brings the slowly spinning wheel to a halt. He opens the side door to the basket.

“Oh, I don’t like heights,” says Gretchen. You can tell she’s thrilled.

The attendant pulls the bar down, locking us in. He releases the gear. In a stomach-dropping surge, we move back and then up, the pier dropping away, the lights of Santa Monica coming to eye level, then dropping away as we move up toward the peak of the enormous wheel. Gretchen shrieks and buries her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her hair is wet against my cheek and I put my arm around her shoulders. I’m laughing so hard.

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