The colorful brightness of the lights in the distance was a stark contrast to the rest of the area. Not that it was all too bleak, but it's like how grapefruit tastes so much more bitter after eating candy. These things normally don't seem so different apart, but standing directly across from each other, gray concrete buildings and worn street signs completely oppose the features of a carnival.
As a little kid I'd never gone to many amusement parks, mom hadn't had much time or means to bring me, especially with Gabe around. Montauk was farther away from all the commotion, too, more of a calm place to revel in your own thoughts instead of the thrills that this place was designed for. The closest thing in my memory that the sight reminded me of was Waterland, the rundown amusement park that Annabeth and I had stumbled upon in our quest for Zeus' bolt when we were twelve.
Even that was different, though. That place seemed more like a ghost town, the neon bulbs burnt out and cracked, and the paint of the attractions peeling with the ages they'd been neglected. Also, what was probably the biggest difference, was that here there were people—living, breathing people. Not spindly robotic spiders or giant gods looming over us.
We could hear the screams of the people on the rides accompanying the sounds of the waves from beside us. It's so strange, how the only real time that the sounds screaming—the kind that usually mean someone is about to be brutally murdered—aren't considered concerning whatsoever, are at amusement parks.
Peter and I made it to the ticket booth, more of the slightly weather-worn bright paint that covered the park's other attractions decorating the box. The huge "TICKETS" sign on the front drew people to it, wanting to gain admittance to the inside. I stepped up to stand in the cloud of people gathered there as the line moved forward.
It took longer than expected for me and Peter to realize that we didn't have any more cash with us.
"Shoot, I didn't think this through...," he said, and I nodded along. At this point, we would probably need to scrounge the sidewalk for dropped coins or something, if we didn't want this subway trip to go to waste.
We walked out of the vicinity of the loud crowd of people, probably prepared with their own money already. Peter and I, with lack of a better plan, honestly did start to search the streets for some stray change, maybe a lucky $10 bill or something like that.
That was where, while bent over and scanning the ground, another voice spoke. "What are you two dorks doing with your faces in the asphalt?"
I heard Peter stand abruptly at the comment, his feet scrambling to turn to the girl who'd spoken. "MJ!" he said, surprised at her voice, and maybe a little embarrassed, too.
Her eyebrows were raised slightly in a skeptical expression. A book was held at her side, and her finger was still wedged between the pages where she must've been reading.
I stood completely, "Hi?" She turned to face me, and my eyes caught the person next to her. "Rachel?"
She stared at me, her eyes portraying her surprise before her face broke into a grin, "Perce!"
A clattering sound behind them made the two girls turn. I craned my neck to look through the gap between them, to see a third familiar person.
"Great, Ned, the one person I was actually expecting to come..." Peter sounded exasperated.
I looked at him, "Wait, so the other two are a coincidence?" No way do things like that just happen.
"Don't talk to each other like we're not here," Rachel waved her hand at me like she was trying to grab my attention.
Ned finally made it to our little group posted on the side of the sidewalk, a few hundred feet from the blinking lights of the amusement park. He halted to an abrupt stop, leaning over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. "You guys can't just leave me like that!" He scolded in between pants.
The aforementioned MJ looked to him, "It's not my fault that you got distracted by that ad, the sea of the crowd moves no matter if there's someone left behind."
"Wait, so you guys were together at some point?" Peter questioned, pointing to the two of them.
That at least made sense, but Rachel didn't. "Why're you here then?" I looked at the redhead, and she crossed her arms and rolled her eyes.
"Not even a 'hey Rachel, it's nice to see you, we haven't talked in forever!'"
"Hey Rachel, it's nice to see you, we haven't talked in forever—now, why're you here?"
Ned finally stood up, his arm reaching up to wipe the sweat off his forehead as his breathing slowed. "She was with MJ, I found them at the subway station."
"She was reading, I was sketching people," Rachel provided, pulling a pencil out of her red curls and twirling it around. She had a small leather sketchbook tucked under her arm, and it was flipped open to a page half-visible in the space that wasn't covered by her hands.
I twisted my head, trying to gain a better view of the page. It was all in pencil, the one that was being spun in her fingers at the moment, I'd guess. It was a busy scene, the subway car passing by in a swoop of motion, passerbys doing mundane tasks. I could even see MJ, the book in her hand sitting at a bench close to the front of the scene
Even in what seemed to be a quick and on-the-spot sketch, her artwork was incredible. She never failed to amaze me.
"They invited themselves along," Ned said, and Rachel retorted with a, "Well I couldn't let you guys have all the fun without me."
She laughed again, raising an eyebrow at me and Peter, "And anyway, by the looks of it, you guys don't have any money either..."
Rachel turned and started towards the ticket booth again, squeezing her sketchbook against her side with her elbow so that it wouldn't fall as she reached inside the pocket of her paint-stained jeans. The group followed her, and I watched her pull a wallet out of her pocket.
"And I came for the free tickets," MJ commented.
I stood behind Rachel, and stared as she opened the wallet. When I saw that it was filled with a generous stack of $100 bills, I was hardly surprised. A little overwhelmed to be standing within a few inches of so much cash, but not surprised.
Peter seemed to see the wallet, too, and his jaw dropped. "That's a lot of money," he remarked, staring at the bills in her hand, "...how?"
Rachel gave him a wide smile, "What better way to waste my parents' money?"
Peter turned to me, "Where do you find your friends?"
Rachel's eyes flicked to me. "For the record, the first time we met, he tried to kill me, so I don't even know how we became friends in the first place."
"Hey!" I responded, "It was an accident!"
"I don't even want to know...," Peter said.
MJ looked at me seriously, "I do."
Rachel ignored them, and we made it to the front of the line. Rachel spoke to the person managing the tickets, and returned finally with a giant rope of them, bright yellow and probably long enough to stretch from my head to my toes 3 times over.
"What would you guys do without me?"
"I don't know about you, but I'm hungry," I said as we walked into the park.
"You're always hungry," Rachel retorted with a snort. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm losing my appetite with the stuff they have here."
"C'mon Rach, don't tell me you've never wanted to try fried pizza on a stick."
She stuck her tongue out.
"Let's get some real food," Rachel said once I made it within range to hear her. Everyone was already a few more steps ahead, and we walked on to get hotdogs.
Peter nodded to her, "Yeah..."
"You have to admit," I noted after we each had some food in front of us, "this would have been a much more interesting meal if it was deep fried."
Rachel looked at me and smirked a bit, "fine."
She tossed her trash, and walked up to one of the stands lined across from us. Walking back to us carrying a box of weird misshapen lumps, she grinned widely and held it out to me.
I pumped my fist in the air in celebration and took one. I studied it, round and slightly soggy with oil, a golden breading covering the outside. Rachel held her hand out to the others, too, but they were a lot more hesitant to take something than I was. Ned was the first to grab one. He didn't get very far after he grasped one of the fried lumps and let out a hiss, scrambling to get it away from his skin. "It's hot!" he rasped, shaking his hand in an attempt to air it.
"Ooh, sorry," Rachel winced, "they're fresh?" She gave an apologetic smile to Ned.
MJ ripped some of the paper off of the rest of her wrapped hotdog and took one, shaking out her wrist to cool it off.
I risked a bite, less scared of the heat, and more scared that Rachel was just playing a prank on me. I still wasn't entirely sure what this was, after all. It was weird, some type of something that I couldn't place. It was pretty much entirely liquid on the inside, and the breaded exterior was the only thing that was really solid. I liked it. Finishing it off in another two bites, Rachel started to laugh at me.
"What?" I asked, wiping some of the oily substance off the corner of my mouth.
She shook her head, grinning.
"How do you just eat that whole thing like it's nothing? They're like little fireballs," Ned complained, and tried again to pick one up, holding it with the tips of two fingers to keep as little fried-object-to-skin contact as possible. He tried taking a bite, skimming the surface with his teeth and managing to rip some of the breading off.
MJ took a bite of hers, too, using the paper tray of her hotdog to keep whatever was inside the breading from getting on her when it threatened to spill out and onto her shirt. "Interesting," she gave, and looked at Rachel with a shrug.
"What is it?" Ned asked, as he attempted to take another (larger) bite.
"Fried butter balls," Rachel answered, turning around and pointing to a sign somewhere among the food stands.
Peter, intrigued, went for one of his own, and Rachel successfully had all of us hooked.
"See how much of a good idea this was?" I told Rachel, smirking. She just rolled her eyes.
"We should probably start making some headway in that pile of tickets we've got before it gets too late," Peter suggested, pointing to the nest of tickets Rachel was balancing between the array of other things she was holding.
"Ah, yes. What to do first?" Rachel responded, turning around to take in all of the attractions around us.
Ned pointed to a space behind us, covered with a colorful striped tent and a shallow pit below it, "What about bumper cars?"
No one else seemed all that interested.
"How about a roller coaster?" Rachel offered, looking up for the tallest ones.
"Yeah!" I agreed.
Ned seemed to pale a bit. Rachel looked at him, empathetic. "Oh, umm—" she looked around for another option, "how 'bout that?" She jogged forward a bit until she was standing across from another ride, a low one with little spherical seats attached to arms that spun them. It wasn't the most intense, more of a compromise. We had all caught up to her by that point, and everyone seemed to agree, even if some of us were more... hesitant than others.
There wasn't much of a line, and so we quickly made it to the front. Rachel ripped off some of the tickets from her bundle and handed them to the person manning the ride, then tried her best to fold up the rest of them and semi-successfully stuff them into the pocket of the jacket she had tied around her waist. It didn't help that she'd somehow also been able to fit her sketchbook into the same pocket, and it alone took up most of the space. But it would have to do.
Each little sphere sat up to 3 people, so we split up our group a bit to accommodate the restriction. Rachel, Ned, and I all filled one of the units, and we buckled in. Rachel had a wide smile on her face, and I'm sure that I wore the same excited expression, but Ned didn't look the same. He was gripping the seat restraint handles with white knuckles.
"Hey," I told him, "you'll be fine." He nodded, but his hands didn't loosen.
Suddenly, a jolt of movement coarsed through the ride, and we started to move. It was a fairly quick pace, moving around in a circle like a merry-go-round. There was a joystick in between us too, and when Rachel went to test it out, we found that it was another control to spin our little sphere. So along with our slightly slow going ride in a circle, Rachel was pushing the level at full rotation, and we were turning upside-down.
Rachel whooped between the sounds of the ride moving in the air, and I cheered with her. Ned was still holding on tight (in contrast to Rachel, whose arms were up in the air as high as the seat bar would let them go) but he seemed to be having fun too, even if it was a terrifying sort of fun. The spinning blurred the lights of the rest of the park in front of us, until it was all just a fast streak of bright color. I wondered what it would look like for Rachel to paint it.
Too fast, the ride ended. Everyone was smiling, the adrenaline still coursing through us. And everyone seemed glad that Ned had been okay, too.
"What next?" Rachel asked, "I'm trying to reduce how much my pockets have to hold as fast as possible before they burst at the seams."
We took a short stroll around, taking in the options. There were one or two of those obligatory haunted house rides, the dark exteriors decorated with mounds of halloween-decoration-esque ornaments. Peter seemed interested for a second, taking a step forward to gauge the length of the line, but MJ pitched in.
"I heard something about a place like this the other day. A traveling carnival had a haunted house ride, and some movie crew was taking a tour of the inside to see if they wanted to shoot a scene there. They took out a bunch of the decorations that they thought were too tacky and all that, and they found out that one of the mannequins that they were trying to take down was actually a real dead body. Had a huge history apparently, the dead guy was caught up in some shady stuff and got shot, then went through this whole series of people who bought and sold his body until it ended up in this traveling carnival where the movie crew found him. I guess you can never really know what's in these things." She shrugged.
Ned had his mouth wide open, and Peter looked his fair share of terrified. Even Rachel looked a little shaken, and she let out a little nervous chuckle.
Peter turned on his heel, jogging a bit to achieve some distance between himself and the haunted house. "There're plenty of rides, we can do this one later."
I don't think that any of us wanted to 'do it later,' but everyone nodded and we were off again.
"We can do a drop ride," Peter suggested. Second time's a charm.
Everyone seemed to agree, and so we got on. The drop was set in a circle, everyone seated next to someone else. It wasn't the highest ride, but it was up there, and you could see a good amount of the park surrounding it.
Ned didn't look nearly as scared on this ride, maybe he was more confident after the first. We started moving upwards slowly once everyone was strapped in. Our feet left the ground, and soon we were 30 feet in the air. Ned's eyes—at the same pace as our rise—widened farther and farther. Maybe he was regretting his decision... And then it dropped. My stomach flipped, seemingly having been left 10 feet above where we now were. You could hear the shrill screams coming from the other people on the ride, in time with each drop. Rachel was laughing, and MJ seemed to be reacting, too, yelling a bit whenever we dropped—a sound that was mixed with the screams of the rest of the passengers.
When the ride ended, Ned was pretty much done. Maybe bumper cars were the way to go from here on out, I didn't want him to leave holding a full barf bag.
We did a few of the less extreme rides, mostly for Ned's sake, and eventually got back up to some roller coasters, though not with everyone. MJ and Peter seemed to enjoy the thrills more than Ned, but both shied away from the really intense ones.
Rachel's stash of tickets was dwindling, to the point where they were no longer overflowing from her pockets and fit comfortably alongside the rest of her stuff. A few more rides would have to do.
"Hey Perce, let's do that one," Rachel shouted, all of us jittery and excited from all the rides. The coaster she pointed out was definitely the most extreme of all the ones I'd seen that day, the number of loops more than my chaotic brain could manage to process.
I smirked at her, "You're on."
MJ looked up, "I'll pass." Peter was quick to follow, and ran over to Ned who was getting some cotton candy from a stand. Rachel and I didn't even bother to ask him if he wanted to join us.
We entered the line, and she rifled through her pockets for the tickets. The ride had some cool seats, they hung down so that you were below the track instead of being on it, and my feet dangled as I sat.
The acceleration was rapid and unexpected, and then we were off.
It started off pitch black, a tunnel that dimmed all my senses. I couldn't see a single thing. It's the weirdest thing, having your eyes wide open and still not being able to see anything more than you would if they were closed. I usually hated this kind of complete darkness, it leaves you feeling vulnerable in a way that many things don't. But under this circumstance, the incline of us traveling up the tube, and buzzing of anticipation from everyone around me, I was grinning.
We were moving upwards for far longer than any ride I'd ever been on, and the excited waiting started to transform into a feeling that left me much more nervous than I'd been previously. Rachel beside me didn't seem to be having the same problem.
And finally, I could make out the end of the tunnel. In the daytime it probably would've looked like a pinprick of light in the distance, at the end of the giant hill we were climbing, but the daylight had finally given way, the sun dropping so that now the sky was dark. And we made it to the top. The tunnel opened up, and I could see the lights of the rest of the park far below us.
My feet were dangling, and from some perspective, it appeared as if I were suspended in midair. I enjoyed the cool air that whipped around us in contrast from the stuffy tunnel, but the enjoyment of my surroundings only managed to last a millisecond before we were thrust downward.
We were falling, at a degree that was probably farther than even straight down. The ground was so far down, and I couldn't tell how much we had left to go as I squeezed my eyes shut. If anyone asked, it was just because the rushing air was drying them out.
Screams echoed around me, but the loudest sound came from the redhead next to me. She was laughing loudly, shouting "Woohoo!" at the top of her lungs.
At the end of the decline, there wasn't any recovery time before we were thrust onto a loop. The whole world was spinning, my stomach doing backflips, and I didn't really understand how Rachel was still managing to give excited shouts without any sign of her insides being squeezed out.
After what seemed like way too much time of being tossed around on the loops, the ride came to a stop. I was almost inclined to hug the ground for balance, but I settled for leaning against a fencepost.
Rachel came up to me laughing her head off, and punched my arm. "I win!"
"Hey!" I retorted, "It wasn't even a competition."
"Well you sure seemed to be making it one before we got on the ride."
Another voice suddenly seemed to pitch into our conversation. "You guys are insane." We turned around and spotted Peter, Ned, and MJ who'd congregated to meet up with us again.
I smiled, "It was fun."
"Oh please," Rachel retorted, "you didn't even open your eyes once the entire time."
"Just because it may have been a bit vomit-inducing doesn't mean that I can't still have enjoyed it."
Rachel laughed. "Would you do it again?"
"Maybe...," I crossed my arms and raised an eyebrow at her. "Would you?"
She didn't even hesitate. "'Course."
I scowled at her, and she looked at me with an eyebrow raised, "I can't believe that the great Percy Jackson can kill his grandfather, but he can't withstand going on a single roller coaster."
"That's different."
"Please don't tell me that we could get arrested for hearing this conversation," Peter said, eyebrows scrunched together.
MJ looked intrigued. "How do you know each other again?"
Peter butt in before we could dig ourselves deeper. "There any tickets left?" He seemed to shake the conversation off, and the others reluctantly followed suit.
Rachel patted her pocket, digging around to produce a small handful. "Probably enough to get us all into one more ride."
"It's getting late anyway," Peter responded, taking them from her and counting them in the palm of his hand.
"How 'bout the ferris wheel?" I suggested.
"What Percy, no more extreme rides for you?" Rachel asked.
I shook my head, denying the fact that I would probably puke if I did another roller coaster, "This is just for Ned, he doesn't seem to want to do anything else that's super intense."
Rachel gave him a skeptical look, "Sure."
"Ferris wheel it is!" I decided, taking the tickets from Peter, halfway through counting them and setting off on my way across the park, not looking behind me to see if they were following. They were.
We made it pretty lucky, there was a pretty nonexistent line, and we made it through with no hold up. The carts were surprisingly spacious, more so than usual, and I was initially surprised when the person manning the ride let us all onto one unit without any complaint.
Even with its size, the cart was open. Well, mostly. The design held open cutouts like hollow windows where I could stick out my head. It was nice, and the noise of the people below broke up any silence that our group was producing.
I could smell the ocean, hear the ocean. Seeing it was difficult, since the thing was just a giant pool of black ink in the darkness, but the moon's reflection in the water seemed to be floating in midair. It was calm, and I felt content, surrounded by these people and this completely leisurely environment.
And for the first time in a long time, there wasn't a thought in my mind of monsters, or prophecies, or responsibilities.
For once, I just felt normal.
I cannot believe that it's been like 7 months since I last posted. And even then, I feel like this chapter is kinda rushed. I didn't decide I was posting it until last night, I just wanted to before I got to sleep away camp for a week, and then another one immediately after, then on vacation with my family. I'm leaving for camp in literally like 10 minutes, and I wanted to get it out before I go. So keep in mind that the next chapter won't come out in at least like 3-4 weeks. Not that that's the longest waiting time ever when it comes to me... Once again, I know nothing about New York, and I didn't want to attempt something trying to be super genuine since I'd probably make more mistakes, so I made up my own amusement park and all the functions of it and everything. Thanks again to .bee on for helping brainstorm with me, and I hope that you guys enjoyed the chapter. Oh! And also, this story has been up for over a year now, can you believe that? 'Cause I can't...
-Z
P.S. (Part of the reason why I'm posting this right before camp is so that I can avoid seeing people's opinions of this chapter right away... yeah, I'm not super proud of this)
Words: 4106
Published: 07/24/21 (July 24, 2021)