The Girl in Acid Park Read Free

said Sheriff Archibald. All eyes turned to me.
    I was useless without Hiroki. I couldn't talk to the ghost, or even see him. I reached up to my temple, touching the spot Hiroki had kicked two months ago when I boosted him through a nun's office window. The concussion had given me a brief taste of Spectral Sight. I hadn't wanted it then, but now?
    I looked at the streak of red lipstick on my thumb, the scars hiding beneath the cuff of my white school blouse. I was sick of hiding. Sick of letting my mistakes haunt me more than any ghost ever could. I could let my classmates force me back into invisibility, or I could go out there and demand their respect, whether Hiroki backed me up or not.
    "I'll do it," I said.

CHAPTER TWO
    There's an App for That

    Let it never be said that I don't do my research, even if it is on a cell phone in the passenger's seat of a patrol car.
    A fifteen minute drive from Millroad Catholic Academy, between pines growing close as the bristles on a hairbrush, is a sharp bend in the road. On the outside curve is a repair shop, which flanks the fantastical memorials locals call Acid Park.
    Back in the sixties, a girl on her way back from prom missed her driveway and wrapped her VW Van around the tree beside her dad's roadside repair shop. She made it out of the wreck, but died in the undergrowth ten feet away, her dress a bloody cobweb of tulle between the rhododendrons.
    Her father left the van as a warning, but it wasn't enough. In his grief, he erected an eerie memorial among the trees where she died. He suspended sheets of aluminum or tin to throw back headlights and warn drivers of the bend in the road, then used his mountain of accumulated scrap to build enormous, pinwheel-like structures he called whirligigs.
    The first piece was a weather-vane, studded with bicycle reflectors and mounted on an old basketball hoop, sunk into the ground between the rhododendrons where he'd found his girl that terrible morning.
    He stopped repairing cars, turned away customers with their tractors and backhoes, and hurled himself into work on his whirligigs. Within a few years, he was creating moving masterpieces larger than a state fair ride. Brightly painted whirligigs creaked and flashed in the night, propellers spinning on giant axles that swung like booms.
    During the day, it looks almost like a junk-yard with the way the metal stands among the trees, getting rusty under its shawl of wisteria. But at night, it turns into acid park--a post-apocalyptic carnival of shimmering reflections to blow the chemically-altered mind. Though the father's work gathered artistic praise across the nation, the story's creepiness and the easy roadside access made the memorial site something of an acid-dropping destination for the local purveyors of fringe and free-love. Apparently, he was bitter about the unintended result.
    Until pulling up the article online, I hadn't heard the father died. I had heard the Arts Council was disassembling Acid Park--meticulously moving and restoring each crazy whirligig for reassembly in a lot downtown, where they could be appreciated by more than urban legend-chasers and druggies.
    Sheriff Archibald had left me in the care of Deputy Reid, who turned out to be both less formal and less fake than the Sheriff himself. She was a narrow-framed black woman in her twenties, and her short hair was cropped close and worn natural. The no-fuss set to her mouth convinced me to lay off the questions, so we drove in silence until the road took us around a sharp curve, and straight into Acid Park.
    From the roadside, it looked like a scene from a post-apocalyptic movie. Dirt and gravel lapped at the the asphalt highway in a wide shoulder that funneled into a narrow side-road. Tall pines and deciduous brush grew in tangles along the edges, not quite obscuring the rusting structures turning in the breeze. A giant yellow windmill stood as tall as any pines on its kindergarten-blue stilts. Its sails had rusted