Joyland (2 page)

“No!”

“’Kay, okay.” Chris picked them off without even seeming to look. “Next challenging stage then. There’s nothing to it, see? They don’t drop any bullets at this juncture. All you do is shoot.”

Tammy nodded.
Juncture
was a conceited-Chris word.

The music chimed when CHALLENGING STAGE appeared in the centre of the starry screen a few minutes later.

“Ready?” As Chris said it, aphid crafts were already appearing, zooming in from either side of Tammy. She hit a bunch at the bottom and fired random shots up to the top of the screen.

At the end of the action, her results were displayed: 24 hits. From watching Chris she knew there were 40. He’d gotten all 40 and the word PERFECT! with an exclamation mark. Tammy knew about percentages. She’d hit 60%. If it had been a test, barely a C.

“That’s respectable,” Chris tried to reassure her. Her expression had given her away. “Keep playing.” She got killed in all of two seconds. Jumping out of the way, she let him take over again.

J.P. was still there. Tammy’s face grew hot. She shook her hair back, feigning confidence, Pam Dawber to the intended Brooke Shields.

“Should’ve played third round ’steada seventh.” J.P. readjusted his ball cap again. “Prob’ly did as well as I would’ve.” He peered over Chris’s shoulder at the game for a couple seconds. “I got your back,” he said to Chris, then headed off.

“You can’t compare yourself to him,” J.P. said over his shoulder as if he expected Tammy to follow him. They wandered toward the far wall, where J.P. stood in front of the air conditioner, flapping his shirt up and down off his belly. “If we all did that, we’d feel so bad we’d never play.”

The black mesh shirt swung back down over the pucker of J.P.’s belly button, the white circle of skin confessing the fact he never went shirtless. Three years older, he was nearly as skinny as she was.

“What’s your favourite?”

“Aw, whatever,” he said. “It don’t matter. I don’t play to compete. You know, it’s all a game.”

Across the room, a bell shrieked and something went
splat!
A sputter of boy-laughter scrambled its way across the surface of the noise. The microwave rang. Pengo plinked out its theme.

At the opposite end of the arcade, through spaces between machines, Tammy noticed the yellow jukebox light and the stray parts of the people collected in front of it. Jean pocket details stretched so tight, the corner rivets resembled tacks stuck directly into the wearer’s behind, as if to restrain the skin from pushing right through the material. A plastic purse the size of a gym bag was being swung about. Blush brushes and compacts tumbled over a pack of Players Light. Several blue-line notebook pages had been folded into exact two-by-two squares. A full-size can of hairspray clunked against the jukebox. The debris of combs and picks and hairclips shone, proud possessions encased behind the plastic. Two of the other purse straps were thin denim, decorated with clunky Twisted Sister buttons and feather clips. Behind the plethora of purses and makeup bags, beaded crop tops exposed brown skin. An orange tube top suctioned to triangular breasts. They jutted unapologetically from the chest of a girl wearing hot pink lipstick. These five or six girls circulated, passed in and out of Tammy’s line of vision, just parts of them, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, their odd shapes somehow fitting together. If they saw Tammy standing there with J.P., would they mistake her for his sister instead of Chris’s? Would they mistake her for his girlfriend?

Laughter. A pair of snapping fingers as one of the girls began to dance. She wriggled behind the black frame of a game and then all Tammy could see were the bruised legs of a skinny girl in a pair of pink and white pinstriped shorts. Her bum rested against the starburst of the jukebox panel, one knee thrust out, her entire kneecap the size of a silver dollar, and on it a black mark the size of a quarter. Tammy couldn’t see her face. A crop-top girl was moving in front now, a freshly lit cigarette held at waist level. Expert fingers dangled, short square nails with chipped pink polish. The cold that the air conditioner hissed out hit Tammy’s back with a wave of pleasure.

She wanted to argue with J.P. It wasn’t a game: it was a world.

The Frigidaire swirled up her neck as she gathered her hair into a ponytail and held it for a second before shaking it out over her shoulders. When she glanced up at J.P. she saw he wasn’t paying attention to her, but to the same thing she had been distracted by: the girls weaving and dancing between the cracks.

“You like Pat Benatar?”

Tammy nodded.

“Good.” J.P. launched his body away from the wall toward the jukebox. White strings straggled from his jean cut-offs and trailed his thighs, catching in the thin puffs of his leg hair. He took long steps and Tammy had to skip to keep up. He sauntered past Chris, who was still pounding out space bugs. Just before they reached the end of the aisle, J.P. turned around.

He hunched down slightly. “So when I give you the quarter, you think it over like it’s your idea. Then pick ‘Love Is a Battlefield.’ They totally love that song but I don’t want them to think I would play it.” J.P. looked at her earnestly, his breath hitting her face. Sweet, like Grape Crush.

She swallowed and nodded.

The jukebox girls had a smell about them; it hovered there like a nimbus. Tammy had noticed it before, at school, whenever gangs of Grade Eight girls passed by her, trailing fragrance like a ribboned kite-tail of colours. Soap and smoke and confidence — she’d wondered if she would ever carry that scent, if, when she reached a certain age, it would roll from her skin the way it did from theirs. She didn’t know if it was natural or chemical — some combination of hairspray, perfume, and powder — or less contrived, seeping out of pores as easily as sweat, something undefinable. Femininity. Its essence. Their laughter washed over Tammy as she approached. She looked at her feet. She looked at J.P. She didn’t know how to look at them. They were all protrusions and nubs and tucks and foreign flesh betraying the confines of their clothes. Even their eyelids were alien: swollen purple and white, ringed with blue mascara. They were like extraterrestrial angels.

“Tammy,” J.P. was saying. “What’dya wanna hear?”

She looked up at them all then. Just looked.

“Tammy?” J.P. repeated.

The girl with the orange halter began to laugh. She poked the one with the bruised skinny legs and skinnier arms. “Fuck,” said the tube top, her pointy boobs jiggling with giggles. “She’s just like her brother!”

“Yeah, she don’t know how to talk!” hooted the chunky blonde with the plastic purse.

A chorus of laughter.

“Kitty cat got your tongue?” asked Cindy Hambly, who Tammy knew from Chris’s grade at school. Nice-ish, but not really.

“She is Chris Lane’s sister, isn’t she?” the tube-top girl asked.

“Oh puh-leeze. Look at her, of course she is!” Cindy leaned toward her, fingers straying to Tammy’s head. She pulled the hair back into a ponytail, as if there were no boundaries. “Just imagine if Chris had longer hair.”

“He’d look like Boy George.”

“Trans . . . vesta-tite!”

“You idiot — trans-ves-tite.”

“What’s . . . ?” Tammy didn’t get to finish the question before they all exploded. Their bright faces turned brighter beneath their blush. Their bodies swerved, knocking into one another as they giggled and snorted.

“Oh geez,” said the brunette with the drinking-straw arms. “It means your brother looks . . .” she wrinkled her nose, “. . . a little too much like us.”

“Yeah, but maybe he’ll grow out of it,” said Cindy, a note of sympathy in her voice as she looked down at Tammy. “You know . . . when he grows another foot or so!”

“Short Fry!” they all chorused, like it was the most hilarious thing.

Tammy peeked over her shoulder at the Galaga game. Chris’s head turned, just for a second, in response to the outburst. His mouth clamped into a tight line and he looked back into the game. Between Tammy and her brother, two other guys — maybe Grade Nines or Tens — swayed against the machines, knocking things dead with their index fingers. Their massive thighs were covered in squiggly dark hair. Tammy looked up at J.P., who stood taller than her dad. At the far end of the arcade, Chris leaned further and further into the screen, as if he could escape into it, become a wheeling, firing, two-dimensional object in a graphed-out universe, trying to jam things up and override the system like Tron.

J.P. was still extending the quarter. One hand came to rest on Tammy’s shoulder. “’Kay, don’t spaz. C’mon, chill. What do you want to hear, Tammy?”

She only had one line, and she’d forgotten it.

The girls stopped and looked at her, waiting. Tammy held power over the whole arcade, could subject all of them to her choice.

“Maybe Pat Benatar?” J.P. prompted.

The girl in the orange tube started to smile, shook her hair back from her shoulders joyfully. Her lips were greasy with colour, wet all over, like she’d been sucking on a cherry popsicle. She looked positively thrilled with J.P.’s offer.

Tammy shook her head. “Scorpions.”

The girl’s lips fell flat, her face emptied. The rest of the group exploded. The skinny girl leaned over, clutching her ribs. The plastic-purse girl and the beaded-crop-top girl banged into one another as they laughed, the can of hairspray in the bag smashing once again across the glass of the jukebox.

J.P. crisscrossed hands over Tammy’s shoulders, around her throat like he would strangle her — then pulled her back against him in a half-hug. She felt his warm chest ridged with ribs against her back.

“Tammy Lane, you little fucker.” She’d never heard the F-word spoken with such affection. “I shoulda known you’d do your own thing just to piss me off. You don’t even like the Scorpions, ya spaz.”

“She is just like her brother,” the girls were saying, in self-congratulatory tones. “Just like her brother.”

“I just want you to know,” J.P. said, clutching one hand to his heart, his head bowing toward the face of the orange tube-top girl. “I was fully preparing to sacrifice my quarter for Pat Benatar. But now . . .” He spread his hands wide “. . . due to no fault of my own, I am forced —
forced
, I tell you — to play ‘Rock You Like a Hurricane.’”

The quarter went in and the buttons were pressed. The song blasted out over the whole arcade. Guys looked up from pinball and foozeball, nodding their heads in appreciation.

Tammy wandered off. She hated the Scorpions. They were Chris’s favourite.

“D’you meet the girls?” Chris asked.

He’d been growing his hair all spring, eyes barely visible under brown bangs that parted in the centre and trailed thick off his cheekbones. Beneath them his eyes flicked nervously back and forth, checking that none of the beautiful creatures were about to walk by at that particular moment.

Tammy nodded.

“They’re asswipe dumb,” Chris said, though he never cursed at home. He closed the conversation by flipping a quarter heads/tails from his thumb to his palm, as if it were of infinite interest, as if he could distract either of them from what they both knew Chris felt. “Burnouts,” he said. The coin flew up. He made a swipe and caught it in his fist. “Druggies.” His voice dropped lower. “Don’t ever be like them.”

He paused.

“You wanna see something?”

Tammy nodded. Anything.

“On Galaga, they can bring out your own dead ships and turn them against you. But it also means you can win them back.” The quarter sailed up again, spinning.

“Call it.”

“Heads.”

Chris lay the quarter on his wrist without looking. He pulled his hand away, exposed the silver antlers of a Canadian caribou.

“Tails,” he said.

“But it’s the
head
of the deer,” Tammy pointed out.

“It’s a caribou. And don’t be a brat. The queen’s always the head and the animal’s always the tail.” He feathered his hair back through his fingers, swaggered toward the machine, Chris the champion again, leaning to the left with that air of impatience as he stood before it, continuing to pontificate.

“Even if it were an American coin — a bald eagle — it’d still be the tail. Doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s coming or going. You can be player number two. Besides,” he said, “that way I can show you.”

“How are South Wakefield girls like bowling balls?”

J.P. leaned back against the machine, self-righteous and satisfied after a half-hour by the jukebox with the tube top. Chris had been showing Tammy the nuances of the Galaga game. Namely, that if she shot the bugs before they dive-bombed, they were only worth half as much, so if she was playing for points, it was better not to attack until they went on the offensive. Sometimes, Chris had explained, he played for points, and sometimes, he just played to survive.

“How are South Wakefield girls like bowling balls?” Tammy repeated. Even as she parroted J.P., her head felt huge on her shoulders. She stared at her running shoes. Blue and white suede. “How are South Wakefield girls . . .”

“You can fit three fingers in them.”

J.P. leaned back, grinning. Chris erupted into the machine, shaking his head and losing their last player.