Full Tilt Part 1

Full Tilt.

Shusterman, Neal.

1.

"I Go Places Sometimes"

It began the night we died on the Kamikaze.

I should have known the night was jinxed when Quinn lost his hat on the Raptor. I wasn't sure where on the roller coaster he lost it because I didn't ride with him; my friends, Russ and Maggie, did. I had volunteered to wait in line for Icewater Rapids.

"What a nice guy," Maggie had said, giving me a peck on the cheek. Well, nice guy or not, I had my own reasons.

The loss of Quinn's hat was the first trauma of the evening, but not the first of Quinn's life. Whole galaxies of traumas revolved around my brother. I knew he wouldn't part with his hat easily; it was one of his prized possessions-a black baseball cap with a very distinctive design on its face. Not the insignia of a sports team or a designer logo-that wouldn't do for Quinn. No, his hat featured a rude cartoon of a hand with its middle finger up. He loved that hat because he could flip everyone off on a continual basis.

He was still grumbling about his loss as he, Maggie, and Russ joined me in the line for Icewater Rapids.

"There should be catch-nets beneath the ride," Quinn complained. "They're gonna pay. Russ should have caught it-he was behind me!" As if the whole world were to blame.

"Ignore him and maybe he'll go away," Russ said, waving his beefy arm dismissively. Russ is what you might call a disenfranchised jock. He muscles up regularly, lifting weights, but never lasts more than a month in any of the sports he's tried, because he loses interest too quickly. Maybe that's because so many of the other guys on teams just try to impress the girls, while Russ had no need: He and Maggie had been dating since the beginning of recorded time, with no end in sight.

As for Maggie, she couldn't have cared less about Quinn's ravings. She checked herself out in a tall mirror-one of several distractions placed in the long line to break up the monotony. "Tell me the truth, do I look fat to you?" she asked me.

"You're kidding, right?"

"No, seriously."

Russ just laughed.

"Maggie, it's a fun-house mirror. Of course you look fat. That's the point."

She sighed. "I know that, but fun-house mirrors never usually make me look this fat."

"Scootch down a bit," Russ said, "and you'll be fat in all the right places."

She poked him in the stomach for that one. Warped mirrors aside, Maggie was slim and nice looking. Smart, too. But to hear her talk, you'd think she was dumb and ugly, always comparing herself to the other girls in school.

"Congratulations," I told her, glancing once more at the mirror. "I always said you've got a distorted view of yourself. Now you really do."

She threw me a twisted grin, and Russ, thinking the grin was meant for him, clamped his muscular arm around Maggie's waist. I sometimes wondered if Maggie got bruises from the way Russ held her-like, if he let go, she might get away.

You're probably wondering how I fit into this little high school equation. Well, I suppose if the others are variables, I'm the constant. Constantly studying, constantly busy, constantly shuttling from swim team to debate team to home with the regularity of a celestial clock.

"That's what I like about you," Russ once told me. "You've got a level head-and I don't mean just the haircut."

As far as the equation went, I'd be out of it soon, on account of the way I tested out of high school. Not that I'm a genius or anything. I'm just a mix of a little bit of brains, a whole lot of studying, and a knack for multiple-choice tests. Blend that with a single parent earning minimum wage, and you get a scholarship to New York's Columbia University at sixteen. I was scheduled to leave next month, right after summer vacation, skipping my senior year of high school entirely.

"Columbia?" Russ had said. "Wow, I didn't even know you spoke Spanish!"

Maggie had told me he was kidding, but we both knew he wasn't. Let's face it, if my bulb was halogen, Russ had an energy saver. But that's okay. He had other things going for him. Like his easygoing personality. Like Maggie.

Me, I was between girlfriends. So when we took our little road trip to Six Flags, instead of a date, I ended up with Quinn.

I turned around, noticing that Quinn had stopped grumbling about his hat. That's because he was gone.

"Forget about him," Russ said. "He'll turn up eventually, and even if he doesn't, no great loss."

I shook my head. "If he gets into trouble, we'll all get ejected from the park." Which happened once before, when Quinn took an M-80 and blew up an animatronic mime.

"You know that's what he wants," Maggie said, "to make us all look for him."

"He's a waste of life," said Russ, and it annoyed me. I was the only one allowed to call Quinn a waste of life.

"Next time bring a metal detector," Maggie suggested. "Easiest way to find him."

I laughed at that. She was, of course, referring to Quinn's many facial accessories. Studs, rings, and dangling things. They weren't just in his ears, but in his eyebrows and nose. He had one in his lip, too. Call me old-fashioned, but I figure a thirteen-year-old like Quinn could get away with one, maybe two rings before maxing out the face-to-metal ratio.

I asked Russ and Maggie to wait for me when they were done with the raft ride. Then I wound my way out of the line until I came to a wide pathway that was almost as crowded as the line. In an amus.e.m.e.nt park this big, I knew if I let him get too far away, I'd never find him. And Maggie was right; he'd like that just fine. He'd ruin my night by making me worry where he was and what kind of crazy thing he was doing, then he'd show up at the car an hour after closing, with a smug grin stretched across his ring-filled face.

Fine, let him get lost, I told myself. I don't care. But the problem was, I did care, and that annoyed me even more.

For a long time everyone thought Quinn was autistic. Hard to believe that, looking at him now. Now he was just a self-centered royal pain. But when he was a baby, he would turn all his attention inward, never making eye contact with anyone. He was almost three and a half before he even spoke. It happened right before our parents split up. We went to one of those cheesy carnivals that came to town every year. Dad took us on a kiddie coaster. Quinn smiled-and back then Quinn never smiled. Then, when the little ride grinded to a halt, Quinn spoke.

"Daddy, more."

We were speechless. Until then Quinn had never put a coherent thought together. It was as if the ride had stimulated something in my brother that had always been dormant. Dad moved out a few weeks later. It was on the night of our annual viewing of The Wizard of Oz, just about the time that Almira Gulch turns into the Wicked Witch of the West. I still can't watch that movie without getting a sick feeling in my stomach, like it's my own house spinning inside of a tornado.

Our father probably would have left a few years earlier had Quinn not been born. Quinn wasn't planned. He was an "accident." Enough of an accident to keep Dad around until Quinn was three. Since he left, our lives have been a roller coaster of Mom's raging romances with men who weren't good to her, or to us.

As for Quinn, that first ride opened the door to bigger things. Stimulation and saturation. His life was a festival of excess that could not be contained. Deafening music, eye-popping bright colors, sugar added to almost everything he ate. Quinn's life was a bullet in a barrel ready to explode.

I searched the amus.e.m.e.nt park for fifteen minutes before I found him. I would have found him sooner had I been thinking like a lunatic, to whom breaking laws is a lifestyle choice.

About a dozen people stood in the middle of a wide pathway, looking up at something. I followed their gaze to some imbecile climbing the support scaffolding of a roller coaster. He was at least fifty feet high and leaned dangerously toward a piece of cloth wedged between two crossbeams. It was a hat. That's when I realized that the imbecile and I came from the same gene pool. And the law my brother was trying to break now was the law of gravity.

"Is that part of the Spider-Man show, Mommy?" I heard a little kid next to me ask. I hurried toward the roller coaster, ready to kill my brother, if he didn't do the job himself.

"Have I ever told you what a psycho you are?"

I stood on the exit stairs of the Raptor, looking out at Quinn, who clung to the support beam about six feet away from me. I looked around to see if any guards had noticed him out there, but for the moment Quinn's antics had found a security blind spot.

"Hey, defib, okay? I had to get my hat." He stretched his hand out toward it, but it was still just out of his reach.

"Did you ever consider engaging your brain?" I easily grabbed the hat from where I stood on the exit stairs.

He sneered at me, but he did seem a bit red in the face. "Oh, sure, do things the easy way." There was something else about him too. Not now, but when I'd first arrived. I'd seen the way he'd reached for his hat, as if he weren't hanging fifty feet above the asphalt. As if he didn't notice where he was until I'd brought it to his attention. There were times that he sort of slipped out of phase with reality-a holdover, I guess, from those early years when he was so locked in his own private universe. It wasn't just that he didn't see the big picture. Sometimes he saw a different picture entirely.

Now Quinn looked down, taking stock of his situation, and shrugged, swinging to another girder closer to the stairs, still using the ride's infrastructure as his own personal jungle gym.

"Isn't it enough that you drive Mom crazy?" I asked him. "Is it such a stretch for you to be normal just this once?"

He tossed his head, flinging a lock of his uneven hair out of his face. "If that's what you are, I'd rather be deviant."

Unable to reach the railing of the stairs from where he hung, he grabbed a bar above his head and let his legs swing free, as if the fifty-foot drop beneath him were nothing. A sizable crowd had gathered below, gawking and pointing.

That's when I noticed the vibration. I felt it in the staircase railing before I heard or saw it: a shuddering of metal crashing downhill. It came to me in an instant what I already knew but had forgotten until that moment.

The Raptor was a hanging roller coaster. The bars Quinn dangled from were part of the track.

Quinn realized it too, and he tried to swing himself closer to the railing but didn't have enough momentum.

All at once the train swung around an outside curve, its riders screaming with joy, completely unaware of my idiot brother directly in their path.

I leaned out as far as I could, grabbed Quinn by the waist, and wrenched him from the hanging track. I almost lost him, but I got enough of him over the rail to flip him onto the stairs. We tumbled on the steps, while just past the railing, the Raptor sliced past, a blur of green and black, gone in an instant.

I should have been relieved, but saving Quinn was such a regular pastime for me, all I could feel was anger. "I'm tired of saving your friggin' b.u.t.t," I told him, although friggin' and b.u.t.t weren't exactly the words I used.

Then his eyes glazed over for a second.

"I go places sometimes," he told me, his voice as thready and distant as his eyes. "Don't know why I go places . . . I just do."

It caught me off guard. He was around six the last time he said that. It was a whisper at bedtime, like a confession. A secret, too fragile for the light of day. I go places sometimes.

But right then I wasn't feeling too sensitive. "Next time you go, bring me back a shirt." He snapped out of whatever state he was in, and something inside him closed up like a camera shutter. He glanced defiantly at the ride that had almost turned him into roadkill, then looked back to me.

"Nice save, bro." Then he put on his hat, effectively flipping me off without lifting a finger.

2.

An Invitation to Ride.

We found Russ and Maggie standing dangerously close to the entrance of another roller coaster-the new one, hyped up to be the mother of all thrill rides. Flaming fragments of j.a.panese Zero planes decorated the entrance. The ride was called, of course, the Kamikaze. The thing was a mutated hybrid, offering the bone-jarring rattles of an old-fashioned wooden coaster along with the loops and corkscrews of a hightech steel one.

I refused to look up at the dizzying monster above me, but I did see the twisting nightmare of a line in front of us, which ended at the sign saying SIXTY MINUTE WAIT FROM THIS POINT.

"Icewater Rapids was totally geriatric," Russ said. "Blue hair and denture cream all the way."

"I doubt we'll get to ride the Kamikaze if we don't get in line now," Maggie said.

Russ levered his arm around her in his usual rib-crunching style. "It's now or never."

I gave him a look of casual annoyance. "Look at that line. What a waste of time. Let's find something else to do."

Quinn rolled his eyes, adjusted his hat, but said nothing.

"Are you kidding?" said Russ. "Miss the main attraction?"

"Do you really want to wait for an hour in that line?"

"The ride's only been open a week, and I hear they already have three lawsuits," Russ said. "You expect me to miss a ride like that?"

It was a good point, and I knew the three of them would end up riding. I also knew if I kept debating, one of them would suggest that I go do something else. I wanted that suggestion to come from them, not from me.

Just then some pimple-faced, buzzard-necked employee removed the chain that blocked the ride's second line-a line that was completely empty.

"No way!" said Quinn, so excited that he almost drooled.

Suddenly I had no reasonable argument not to ride.

My panic built as people ran to the empty line like pa.s.sengers leaping from the t.i.tanic. "Guys, what's the big deal, anyway?"

Maggie took a dangerously deep look at me. "Are you scared, Blake? Don't be-you'll have fun."

"Scared? Don't be ridiculous," I told them. "I love roller coasters."

"Yeah, sure," Quinn said with a sneer.

I threw Quinn a warning glare. He swore he wouldn't tell anyone-but then what did Quinn's word ever mean?

"Blake's terrified of roller coasters," Quinn said.

I tugged on the sputnik hanging in his ear, and his head tilted to one side. "Ow!"

Russ looked at me like I was someone he didn't know. "He's kidding, right?"

I stammered a bit. Lying is not one of my better skills.

"Blake hates airplanes and roller coasters and fast cars," Quinn said.

"That's not true!"

"It is and you know it!" Quinn turned back to my friends. "He's a grade-A chicken. Yellow as a school bus!"

That's what did it. I don't know if Quinn realized what he had said. I didn't even think he knew about the School Bus Incident. But whether it was intentional or not, it got my feet moving.

"Sure, I'll ride. Can't wait." I tried to sound casual about it, and that's hard to do through clenched teeth. I forced myself forward, keeping my pace steady as I wove through the empty line. I didn't slow down until I saw the big warning sign in bright red letters. You know the one: YOU MAY NOT RIDE THIS ATTRACTION IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, HAVE BACK TROUBLE, A HEART CONDITION, HEMORRHOIDS, WATER ON THE KNEE, BLAH-BLAH-BLAH. I slowed down, glanced at the emergency exit, and got an unwanted blast of deja vu. I knew I hadn't been here before, but the feeling wouldn't go away.