Sweet Sixteen, Chapter 10 ~ Gut Spinner, part 2

An hour later they were strolling along the boardwalk beside the beach, looking out on the ocean as the waves lapped gently over the sand.  The sun was halfway below the horizon, casting everything in a warm, beautiful orange light.  Elly sighed, biting into a hunk of barbecued alligator meat skewered on a stick.  It tasted like pork, mostly.  Under one arm she had a blue teddy bear wearing a wreath of pink and yellow roses, and a Siamese cat plushie.  She wore a string of iridescent black, blue, and emerald green Mardi Gras style beads around her neck and a matching Venetian mask over her face, its black feather plume swaying gently in the fading light as they walked along.

Sien sported a pirate’s patch over his left eye, and had proclaimed himself “Leftie,” though he kept tugging at it and saying that it itched and made his face hot.  He had a plastic sword that probably wouldn’t cut butter, but it looked cool and had come with a jaunty red sash so he could wear it proudly at his side.  Everything except the alligator on a stick was the spoils of many rounds of shoot the duck, bash the gopher over the head, dunk the ball, pin the toupee on the bald man, ring the bell, and a somewhat dubious new game called slaughter the village.

“That was fun,” Elly said with another contented sigh.

“Yeah,” Sien said around a mouthful of alligator.  “Slaughtering a village works up an appetite.”

“Indeed.”

“Look, there’s the Flaming Banshee’s Torture Chamber In Hell up ahead,” Elly gestured with her stick.  “Wanna do that next?”

“Mm.  Maybe we should wait a little while after we’ve eaten,” suggested Sien.  “Let it settle.”

“Maybe.  I don’t remember that the chamber involves a lot of movement so much as . . . well, Torture,” Elly said with a shrug.  “I think you go in and you get sucked up against the wall so you can’t move, and then you’re assaulted with heavy metal music and flashing lights while the room tilts you upside down.  And then you get the sensation that a million little centipedes are crawling over you.  At least that’s how my parents described it the one time they went in.”

“Sounds fun.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

They stopped in front of the entrance and contemplated the dark, circular building.  From inside came the sound of blood curdling screams.  “That’s probably recorded,” Elly remarked.  “You know, as part of the experience.”

“Yeah.”

“So.”

“Oh, the Arcade Palace—” Sien’s face lit up as he caught sight of another building a few yards away.  Inside they could see kids huddled around monitors displaying digital reality, wielding joysticks, guns, and the like.

“Has your strangely deprived childhood included video games?” Elly asked curiously.

“One time when we were living in Arizona there was an arcade only a couple blocks away from our . . . em . . . house,” Sien said.  “I went there every day and played at least one game.  I’d go around digging up change that people had left in pay phones.”

Elly laughed.  “Why on earth would you do that?”  Mentally she added, And where on earth did you live that was right next to an arcade?

“Well, you know my dad.  Always stingy with the allowance,” Sien laughed back.  “I couldn’t exactly ask for money to blow on video games.  Not character building enough.”

Elly glanced at the torture chamber one more time and said, “Let’s go play.”

Another hour or so went by, passing quickly with game after game of racing, fighting, and many variations on slaughtering villages.  Elly giggled as they went around to pay phones, fishing around inside the change slots for coins.  Elly had plenty of money in her purse to insert into the change machines, but somehow it seemed more fun to go scavenging with Sien.

When they were bored of the arcade, they ventured out to get ice cream.  Elly loved the way the brightly lit rides and stands blazed out in the darkness, in a myriad of colors.  People moved about, coming and going in and out of patches of light before becoming shadows milling about in the dark.  The atmosphere made regular people like themselves seem suddenly mysterious and alien, the sounds of talk and laughter surrounding them like in a dream.  Elly loved it — she felt alone with Sien in the crowd, alone with him in an exotic night world of flashing light and disembodied sounds.

She smiled at him a she watched him finish off a double chocolate fudge mint brownie cone.  She had gotten a strawberry and vanilla cream swirl.  It made the corners of her mouth sticky and left a trail of coldness all down her throat to her stomach.  She shivered in the night air, turning her face to the salty breeze flowing in from the ocean.  “It’s getting chilly.”

“Uh-huh.  Summer’s over.”

She gathered up her stuffed animal prizes in both arms and hugged them for warmth, surreptitiously stepping close to Sien, so that their arms brushed.

He glanced at her.  “Cold?”

“A little.”

“Mm.”  He paused, then awkwardly slid an arm around her shoulders.  They walked on, heading no place in particular, like sight-seers in a most bizarre town.

“Should we go on the Brain Blaster?”

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.  It’s right over there.”

“So it is.”

Elly stopped walking, and Sien dropped his arm from her shoulders.  He turned to face her.  “You’re fun, Eleanor.  To be around.”

She smiled.  “You don’t actually have much fun, do you, Sien?”

He shrugged.  “What makes you say—”

“Just this feeling I get.”  She tilted her head to the side.  “Is it your dad?  I’ve been going back and forth, wondering if it’s ’cause he’s strict . . . or ’cause he’s sick . . . or ’cause it seems like he’s all you’ve got.”

“All I’ve got?”

“Well, he’s the only family you’ve ever mentioned.”

Sien nodded.  “You’re right.  Very astute surmising.”

“Why are you smiling at me like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like my astute surmising is so cute.”

“Well . . . it’s the mask.”

“Oh.”  Elly had almost forgotten that she was still wearing her iridescent mask.  She pushed it up onto the top of her head.  “Well, Leftie, you don’t look so astute yourself.”

“I like to think my eyepatch is rakish.”

“It is.  I feel like I’m with a regular scoundrel.”

“I was hoping for extraordinary scoundrel.”

She laughed.  “Well, actually, an extraordinary scoundrel would have shown the girl where the best places to get air on his motorcycle is.  Also he would have gotten into a fight with some dudes from rival gangs, and won, of course.  Then they would have gone on the Brain Blaster and Gut Spinner twice, and laughed inside the Flaming Banshee’s Torture Chamber.”

“I guess I’ll have to settle for regular,” he said with mock sadness.

“Also, the extraordinary scoundrel would have definitely found an excuse to kiss his date by now,” Elly added saucily.

Sien just smiled, something earnestly sad clouding his eyes.  He reached out and tugged her mask back down over her eyes.  “You look beautiful,” he said.  “It makes you exotic and mysterious.  Like a queen.”

“A princess.  Princesses are hidden behind masks.  Makes the young men want to go slay dragons just to find out what’s under the mask.”

“Like a queen,” he repeated.

“Is that why regular scoundrels don’t kiss queens?  Afraid of the king?”  She smirked.  “An extraordinary scoundrel, now . . . .”

“No . . . this queen doesn’t have a king.  She doesn’t need one.”

“Really.  Well, in that case . . . .”  Elly leaned forward and kissed Sien, slowly, tasting chocolate fudge mint brownie on his lips.  He didn’t move.  “There,” she said, her face still close to his.  “Don’t need a king, don’t need to wait around for the scoundrel, now do I?”

“I guess not,” his whisper was voiceless and barely audible.

“Or isn’t that what a Queen of Seven would do?”

He drew back, clearly surprised.  “What?”

She smirked again.  “The note you put on your locker.  I didn’t exactly forget, you know.”

“Oh.  Yeah.  That.”  He smiled.  “I had . . . actually.”

“Family joke.  You were going to tell me all about it ‘someday.’  Remember?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, looking down at the ground.  “It’s . . . not important.  It can wait till . . . .”

“Someday?”

“Yeah.”  He hesitated, then put his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him.  The blue bear and the Siamese cat were wedged between them, keeping their embrace somehow distant.  But his kiss was very warm, and a few moments passed with only that thought in her head, the sounds of carnival music and delighted, terrified screams fading away into the night.

Sien drew away and looked away, for some reason embarrassed.  She thought.  Elly shifted her stuffed animals to one arm, and Sien took her free hand.  His hand was cold.  “Time to go home,” he said.

“But . . . it’s not my curfew yet,” replied Elly, surprised.

“It’s mine.”

“Your father.  Strict.”

“Yes.”

They walked together back to his motorcycle, saying nothing.  Elly got the feeling that Sien was unsettled by their kiss in some way she didn’t understand, and she couldn’t ask.  He was not the first boy she had kissed.  He was the first boy whose kiss made her feel like she was doing more than just smooshing her lips against another persons’ mouth.  Only, she wasn’t sure now if this was a good thing.

They climbed onto the bike, after stuffing the stuffed animals into the saddle bags, and Elly wrapped her arms around his waist.  She had to, that was how you rode on the back of a bike.  But holding him did strange things to her and it was all she could think about on the ride home.

“Good night,” he said quietly as she climbed off the bike outside her house.

“Night, Sien.”  She started up the walk.

“Eleanor?”

She stopped and turned around.

“That Gut Spinner of Death?  Worst experience of my life.”

She smiled.  “It was pretty bad wasn’t it?”

“Let’s never do it again.”

“Okay.”

He took a breath.  “You’re beautiful.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a scoundrel.”  She waved and resumed her trek up the walk.  He revved away, and she stood at the door listening to the sound of his motor getting fainter.  Then she went inside, and saw her father loitering around, trying to look as if he was doing something and hadn’t just scampered away from the window.

“Hey Daddy,” she said, smiling wryly at the silliness of men, no matter if they were your date or your strange young-old father.

“Have a good time, Elly Ann?”  He smiled, very forced.

“Uh-huh.”

“Back kind of early.  I mean, not that that’s bad.”

“Yeah.  Well, Sien’s dad is . . . gouty.  Must make him really cranky.  Very early curfew.”

“Good.  I mean . . . oh.”

She took off her mask and tossed it onto the couch.  “You wanna watch TV with me?  Let’s watch an action movie.  Lots of guns and explosions and blood.  And people dying horribly.”

“Er . . . .”

“Ah, c’mon, Daddy, what could be more fun?”  She went up to him and gave him a quick hug around the neck, which was always a little hard since he was six foot and a little extra, but she had gotten to be a tall girl.  Tall enough for the Brain Blaster, Gut Spinner, and Torture Chamber.

“I’m gonna put my stuff away, you pick out a DVD.”  She smiled fetchingly as she headed for the stairs, and of course he went to do what she said.  No doubt he’d been pouting around the house all evening, her silly Daddy, driving her mother crazy.  She knew him well enough.  She owed him a little movie time, for caring so much.

Why sit and watch a movie when you can go out and do stuff?  Well, curfew, and kisses that killed the evening, for starters.  Upstairs in her room she stared at herself in the mirror for a moment.  You’re beautiful.  Mysterious.  Exotic.  Like a queen.  The Queen of Seven.