Suddenly I was the third wheel.

“Look.” My throat feels like it’s coated in sand. “I know you might be mad at me—”

“Mad at you?” he interjects, before I can say more. “I figured you were mad at me.”

I feel very exposed in the high glare, as if the sun is a big telescope and I’m the bug on the slide. “Why would I be?”

His eyes shift away from mine. “After what happened with Dara . . .” Her name sounds different in his mouth, special and strange, like something made of glass. I’m half tempted to ask whether he and Dara are still hooking up, but then he would know we aren’t speaking. Besides, it’s none of my business.

“Let’s just start over,” I say. “How about that?”

Finally he smiles: a slow process, beginning in his eyes, lightening them. Parker’s eyes are gray, but the warmest gray in the world. Like the gray of a flannel blanket washed a hundred times. “Sure,” he says. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

“So are you going to play tour guide or what?” I reach out to punch his arm, and he laughs, pretending I’ve hurt him.

“After you,” he says, with a flourish.

Parker takes me on a tour of the park, pointing out all the places, both official and unofficial, I’ll need to know: Wading Lake, informally known as the Piss Pool, where all the toddlers splash around in their diapers; the DeathTrap, a roller coaster that might, Parker tells me, someday live up to its name, since he’s pretty sure it hasn’t been inspected since the early nineties; the small, fenced-in area behind one of the snack bars (which for some reason at FanLand have been renamed “pavilions”), which contains the maintenance hut, where the employees go to smoke or hook up in between shifts. He shows me how to measure the chlorine in the Piss Pool—“always add a little extra; if it starts burning off your eyelashes, you’ll know you’ve gone too far”—and how to operate the hand crank on the bumper boats.

By eleven o’clock, the park is crowded with families and camp groups, and the “regulars”: usually old people, wearing sun visors and fanny packs, who totter between the rides announcing to no one in particular every way in which the park has changed. Parker knows a bunch of them by name and greets everyone with a smile.

At lunchtime, he introduces me to Princess—actual name Shirley, though Parker cautions me never to call her that—an ancient blond woman who runs one of the four snack bars—excuse me, pavilions—and clearly has a major crush on Parker. She gives him a free bag of chips and me a long scowl.

“Is she that nice to everyone?” I say, when Parker and I take our hot dogs and sodas outside, to eat under the shadow of the Ferris wheel.

“You don’t get a name like Princess without working for it,” he says, and then smiles. Every time Parker smiles, his nose wrinkles. He used to say it didn’t like to be left out of the fun. “She’ll warm up eventually. She’s been here almost since the beginning, you know.”

“The very beginning?”

He turns his attention to a miniature relish pack, trying to work the green goop out of the plastic with a thumbnail. “July 29, 1940. Opening day. Shirley joined up in the fifties.”

July 29. Dara’s birthday. This year, FanLand will turn seventy-five on the day she turns seventeen. If Parker makes the connection, he doesn’t say so. And I’m not about to point it out.

“Still eating alien slime, I see?” I say instead, jerking my chin toward the relish.

He pretends to be offended. “Le slime. It’s not alien. It’s French.”

The afternoon is a blur of rounds: scooping up litter, changing trash bags, dealing with a five-year-old kid who has somehow gotten separated from his camp group and stands, bawling, underneath a crooked sign pointing the way to the Haunted Ship. Someone throws up on the Tornado, and Parker informs me it’s my job, as the new girl, to clean it—but then does all the work himself.

There’s fun stuff, too: riding the Albatross to see whether the gears feel sticky; washing down the carousel with an industrial hose so powerful I can barely keep it in my hands; downtime between jobs when I talk with Parker about the other kids who work at FanLand and who hates who and who’s hooking up or breaking up or getting back together.

I finally find out why FanLand is so short-staffed this summer.

“So there’s this guy Donovan.” Parker starts into the story while we’re taking a break between shifts, sitting in the shade of an enormous potted palm. He keeps swatting at the flies. Parker’s hands are constantly in motion. He’s like a catcher telegraphing mysterious signs to an invisible teammate: hand to nose, tug on ear, tuck the hair. Except the signs aren’t mysterious to me. I know what all of them mean, whether he’s happy or sad or stressed or anxious. Whether he’s hungry, or had too much sugar, or too little sleep.

“First name or last?” I interrupt.

“Interesting question. Not sure. Everyone just calls him Donovan. Anyway, he’d been working at FanLand forever. Way longer than Mr. Wilcox. Knows the whole place inside and out, everyone loves him, really great with the kids—”

“Wait—was he here longer than Princess?”

“Nobody’s been here longer than Princess. Now stop interrupting. So he was a good guy, okay? At least, that’s what everyone thought.” Parker pauses dramatically, deliberately making me wait.

“So what happened?” I say.

“The cops busted down his door a few weeks ago.” He raises one eyebrow. His eyebrows are very thick and practically black, like he has vampire blood somewhere far back in his ancestry. “Turns out he’s some kind of pedo. He had, like, a hundred pictures of high school girls on his computer. It was some crazy sting operation. They’d been tracking him for months.”