DOWNWARD SPIRAL

“I mean, I think I’m remembering why I shouldn’t be dating right now.” Her fork had run out of bucatini to coil around itself. “I think Suzie was right, though, we should talk about these things. And your story about the ball pit, well. It rhymes with what I remember about the slide.” 

“I'd love to hear it, if you're willing to tell me.”

“Well.” Dara froze for a moment before continuing. “There was this waterpark in my hometown, they just called it ‘Waterworld.’ A truly disgusting place. It had that reek of rotting chlorine, filthy locker rooms with bent tiles, the constant wet sound of slapping feet. And one waterslide, a two-hundred foot worm that was deeply unsafe. While you were on it, you always felt like you were about to go over the edge, and it eventually closed down because someone did.”

She set her fork down. “I was twelve at the time. You had to climb this loud white stairwell to the top, and there was this group of three older boys when I got up there. They told me and this other girl in line named Thea to slide down after them, and they'd teach us how to live forever. When we hit the bottom, there was this terrifying sensation, like your ears and eyes had just turned off and on again. It was like when you flicker a light switch as fast as you can. And Thea and the boys were there, and told me to look at the clock. It was exactly 3:33 PM, over an hour before we'd even arrived at Waterworld.

“The boys told me they had no idea how long they’d been doing this, but it had been at least year. Their names were Blake, Leslie, and Donovan. They’d been going back in time to that exact minute every time they’d gone down the slide, and had worked out how to live in that cycle. Sometimes they’d steal money and cigarettes from someone’s purse, or food and beer from the gas station nearby. Most of the time was spent drinking and smoking in the nearby treeline, though we occasionally walked to the trailer park a block over to meet up with this girl named Henna. Donovan would give her cigarettes and talk to her like they hadn’t already done this countless times. They tried to explain the waterslide to her, to get her to come with us, and she called bullshit, every time.

“We hung out with those boys for what felt like a whole day. Probably was. But eventually, Thea quit. She asked them, ‘Why keep doing this? Why not just go home sometimes? I’m getting bored.’

“And Blake responded, ‘Because we don’t have one anymore. Where we started, there’s not even such thing as Pepsi. It keeps changing bit by bit, and we just keep going down. Once you find something like this, you just have to keep moving, and we're not going to leave each other behind.’

“Thea heard that, and was going last, and didn’t follow us down the next slide. After that, she was just gone. There was no sign of her or her foggy goggles for two more rounds downward. I checked the lockers for her stuff, even. The boys told me they were going to go visit Henna again. That’s when it clicked for me. Donovan was worried that if they kept sliding, eventually, she’d be gone, and he wouldn’t be able to see her ever again unless she came with. I was losing my people, too.

"I told the boys I was having ‘womanly problems’ and needed to be in the restroom for a while and would catch up in thirty. They fell for it. After they left, I ran to the slide, and I went down, and down, and down, so many times, as far away from them in space and time as I could get. Then, I ran home and I cried and I cried. Mom asked me where my stuff was and I told her some boys had stolen it, which was half true, and I got grounded from going back for a month because she could smell the smoke in my hair. Not that I even wanted to go back. I never did.

“I never saw those boys again either. In high school, there was a Thea in choir. She looked similar, but older, and her hair was dyed red, so I couldn't be sure. I asked her if she knew me and she gave me a very frank ’no.’ I had to wonder if it was the same one I'd known back then, but I never asked again. It was up to her if it was.

"I still have nightmares about it, though. Like I’m going down the waterslide, and it turns into the digestive tract of some kind of snake, and I start dissolving in acid. I get nauseous around chlorine. I can scare myself by blinking. I feel like I've already lost the world I was born in, and now I’m just slipping further from it.”

“Well, your Mom still recognized you when you got back, right? That's got to count for something.”

“She did, but she was worried about me because, of all things, I apparently stopped drinking pink lemonade. There was nothing wrong with it. Just. I had never seen anything like it before in my life, and she asked me why I didn’t like it anymore.”