Full Tilt Read Free Page A

the little train came to a jarring stop and the lap bars all popped up in unison. The ride was over, and I was left with the mind-frying memory of something that could not have happened, but did.
    “Cool!” screamed Quinn. “Did you see how the track fell away?”
    “Yeah,” said Maggie. “It looked so real.”
    “I wonder how they do that,” Russ said.
    I looked up. The support struts and dangling crossbeams rose against gravity, reassembling themselves like the collapsing bridge at Universal Studios. Only then did I see the single hidden track that brought us into the vertical dive and back into the station once the false track fell away.
    The ride attendant turned to me. “Hey, you have to get out. If you want another ride, you’ll have to get back in line.”
    I gladly vacated my spot.
    On the way out we were all given pins that said I DIED ON THE K AMIKAZE .
    My hand shook as I tried to drink a Coke. I wished my friends weren’t watching me.
    “Didn’t mean to scare you, dude,” Russ said. “I thought everyone knew what was going to happen. Jeez, they’ve been showing the commercial for months, before the ride even opened.”
    Maggie put her hand on mine. “It’s okay. To be honest, I was pretty shaken up myself.”
    I went a little red at Maggie’s touch. Russ noticed how Maggie held my hand, and he put her in his lover’s choke-hold. “He’ll get over it,” Russ said.
    We were on the midway now. Quinn was hurling baseballs at a stack of resistant silver bottles that just wouldn’t fall from the pedestal. He wore his Kamikaze pin like a Congressional Medal of Honor.
    “Why don’t you stick it through your belly button?” I suggested.
    He pointed at his hat and threw another ball. “That ride was a life-altering experience,” he said, although his life didn’t seem altered much at all. Even now, he hurled those balls at the bottles with a certain fury—the same fury that followed all of his dealings. His high from the ride was already fading, and I knew he’d be impossible to live with once it was entirely gone.
    Up above, a new batch of victims plunged from the fracturing beams of the Kamikaze. I forced myself to watch, this time seeing the single dark track beneath the falling train. It crashed out of sight, the ground rumbled with the force of an aftershock, and a voice I didn’t know spoke to me.
    “You like the fast rides?”
    I turned to see a girl watching me as I watched the ride. She was the one running the ball-toss booth. A life-altering experience. Quinn’s words came back to me, but I couldn’t say why.
    “I . . . uh . . . what?” This girl was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that even now is hard to explain. Like an impressionist painting in a soft gallery spotlight.
    “I asked if you like the fast rides.”
    “I . . . can’t get them out of my mind,” I told her, which wasn’t entirely untrue. She smiled as if she knew exactly what I meant. Her hair was long and red—the kind that must have been brushed a thousand times to make it flow in a perfect fall of copper silk. And there was something about her eyes—blue as glacier ice, yet hot as a gas flame—reflecting the chasing lights of the midway. They seemed like windows tosome other place. They also seemed familiar.
    “There are better rides than these,” she said, in as close to a whisper as the loud park would allow. She was older than me. Eighteen at least.
    Like all the girls will be, I thought. They’ll all be older than you when you get to college next month. Looking at her was like looking into my future.
    “I’m Cassandra,” she said with a smile.
    Is she flirting with me? It was a heady feeling. I got a knot in my gut, like I was still on the Kamikaze, turning a tight loop. No hidden safety track here.
    “I’m Blake.” I held out my hand to shake, and she put a ball into it instead.
    “Try your luck,” she said. “This one’s on the house.”
    By now Russ and Maggie had taken notice of the