The Carnival at Bray by Jessie Ann Foley Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t
know.
Some fella that works here.”
    Maggie looked at Aíne’s flushed, hopeful face. In her ear, PJ Harvey panted,
did you ever wish me dead? Oh lover boy, oh fever head?
    â€œBut what do they want to
do
with us?”
    Aíne took out her pink lip gloss and began smearing on a fresh layer.
    â€œWhat do you mean,
do with us?
He was
decent.
He goes to Saint Brendan’s. It can’t hurt, can it?”
    Maggie was unconvinced, but the alternative was going home to help supervise a mob of sugar-crazed eleven-year-old girls, so an hour later she stood with Aíne under the dark metal hulk of the Ferris wheel, squinting through the darkness at the approaching boys.
    The carnival, which had been depressing enough at the end of the summer, was now flat-out ghostly. Most of the larger rides were covered in heavy white tarp that flapped in the salty wind like some frightening art installation. Walking through it felt like walking through a collapsible city of billowing white buildings. Corrugated doors covered the gaming booths, some of which were scrawled with orange graffiti. To the east, the sea was calm and abiding, rippling, watching.
    Aíne’s boy was named Paddy. He was stork-like and jittery, pulling at his pockets and walking in quick, jerky steps. He had a plated, ceratopsian nose, which, along with the thick glasses, made him look like he was wearing a Groucho Marx mask. The light wash of his jeans was outdated and his shoelaces were untied.
    â€œEver seen the view from Bray Head?” he asked, the long, wispy hairs on his upper lip stirring in the wind.
    â€œWould you believe I’ve lived my whole life looking at that thing but never actually climbed it?” Aíne said. “I hear it’s lovely, though.” Her voice was giggly and effusive; she was nearly unrecognizable from the serious girl who wore her uniform skirt unfashionably long and always did the extra practice sentences in the back of their French textbook. Maggie had witnessed this strange occurrence in her mother many times over the years: the transformative power of attraction.
    While the two new lovebirds walked ahead toward the hill, Paul, who had been recruited as Maggie’s date, sidled up alongside her. He was short and wiry, with jutting brows that overhung his dark eyes like invasive ivy. He reeked of Lynx Dark Temptation cologne.
    â€œSo, how do you like Saint Brigid’s?” he began. “I heard the nuns there are bitches.”
    â€œIt’s okay,” Maggie shrugged. “Pretty much the same as back home, I guess.” He looked over at her, his thick eyebrows hitching up as he tried to place her accent.
    â€œBoston?” “No, Chicago.”
    â€œOh, right. The windy city.”
    â€œYeah.”
    Although he seemed perfectly polite, his hooded eyes and ropy neck muscles hinted at a future of bar brawls and cardgame fistfights. Maggie wouldn’t go so far as to describe him as attractive, but he wasn’t heinously ugly, either, and as they walked through the hulking tarp figures that flapped in the sea wind, she wondered if maybe, when the night ended, she should kiss him. She felt none of the jittery happiness that trembled from Aíne ten feet ahead of her like a heat mirage on an asphalt road, but she was halfway through sixteen, and wasn’t there something to be said, at this point, for just getting it over with?
    â€œYou always remember your first kiss,” her mom had advised before the freshman year homecoming dance as Maggie sat on the toilet waiting for her curlers to set and Nanny Ei painted her eyelids a frosty silver.
    â€œYeah, you do always remember it,” Nanny Ei acknowledged, “but it usually doesn’t mean anything.”
    Now, Paul walked close enough to her that Maggie could smell his cherry gum, a cloying smell that told her he’d been promised a girl who would make out with him. Was this the kind of night