Side Effects May Vary

“You said you two weren’t anything,” said Eric from behind me. “That’s not how people act when they’re not anything.” He sounded a little let down, which surprised me. It hadn’t occurred to me that Eric might feel something more than hormones for me.

“He’s been in love with me forever.” I forced myself to keep my voice steady as I swallowed back tears. “But I don’t feel the same way,” I lied, still facing the door. It was probably the most I had said to him since he’d gotten here earlier this afternoon.

I heard Eric moving behind me, and a minute later he appeared in front of me with his hat on and my sweatshirt in his hand. Without having to be asked, I shrugged out of his jacket and slipped on my sweatshirt.

He opened the door and said, “I’ll see you Monday.”

As soon as the door closed, I locked the dead bolt behind him and crumpled to the floor.

Harvey. Then.

A week after the Luke incident, Alice told me I needed to get off work one Saturday night and tell my mom I was staying at Dennis’s. At first I told her I couldn’t do it. I didn’t like lying to my mom, and I still felt pretty uneasy about this whole list thing, but when Alice told me where we were going, I couldn’t say no to her—even if it was 100 percent trespassing. Which, I guess, was no surprise.

Alice sat in the passenger seat. “Lake Quasipi should be two exits down.”

“This is going to be awesome!” screamed Dennis from where he sat behind me.

I glanced to the rearview mirror to see Debora sitting next to her brother, biting her lip. She looked concerned. Our eyes met and she smiled for a second, raising her eyebrows. Debora was never very comfortable with breaking rules, so I couldn’t really figure out why she’d made us bring her along.

We drove with the windows down, the heat blasting, and music crackling through my crappy speakers. I hadn’t planned on inviting Dennis or Debora. But when I told Dennis about our plan to go to Lake Quasipi in the middle of December during the off season when the whole park would be closed to the public, he begged me to let him come with. Which was okay, except that Debora caught us leaving and said she’d tell if we didn’t bring her with us.

We all had our perfect excuses. I told my mom I was spending the night at Dennis’s, and Dennis told his mom he was spending the night with me. Debora told her mom she was staying with her friend Lucy to get ready for the Spring Academic Bowl. And Alice told her parents she was going to a basketball game and a slumber party with some girls from Miss P’s—which was less believable, but cancer had bought her a few Get Out of Jail Free cards. Plus she’d been pretty okay the last two weeks. If it weren’t for the lack of hair, I might have forgotten she was sick. Still, I was scared, and I think everyone else was too. But no one talked about it.

Dennis leaned forward with his upper body wedged between my and Alice’s seats. “Where should we park?”

I turned my blinker on for the exit. “Uh, in the parking lot?” I looked to Alice.

She nodded.

We followed the signs for Lake Quasipi Family Amusement Park. Alice turned the music down, like we were going through some residential neighborhood and not a weaving two-lane road in the middle of the woods. The road led to the parking lot outside of the park gates. I expected us to have to climb over some sort of gate or maybe even sneak past a rent-a-cop, but there were no obvious security measures. Lake Quasipi was the oldest theme park in the state. None of the rides had ever been replaced, only maintained. There were roller coasters, but nothing huge. Some of the rides were even manual.

It actually made me feel better that Dennis and Debora had tagged along, because they never got in trouble, and if they were here, it felt physically impossible for us to get caught.

The four of us got out of the car, all bundled up in winter coats, hats, and scarves.

“What if there are cameras?” asked Debora, tugging down on her purple knit hat, which matched her gloves and scarf.

“We just have to be stealthy,” I said, “right, Alice?”

“Sure,” she said.

We walked up to the front gate, which was chained shut.

“I think we can all squeeze through that,” said Dennis.

“A camera!” screamed Debora, jumping back enough so she was out of its line of sight.

Okay, so there was a camera, but it was covered in cobwebs and probably hadn’t worked since 1983.

Alice picked up a stone too small to be a rock but too big to be a pebble and threw it directly at the camera, knocking it down so that it only clung to the wall by its wires. “Not anymore.”

“Are you crazy?” hissed Debora. “That’s vandalism!”

Dennis laughed, and I tried not to.

Alice turned back to Debora. “What? You thought you were going to come here and relive my childhood memories with me in the parking lot?” She squeezed through the fence and from the other side called, “Let’s go!”

Debora huffed, but followed as we all filed in.