He took several steps, stopped, and then looked back over his shoulder at the merman.Marin was still languidly finger-combing through his hair, expression pensive.Totally normal stuff.Blake nodded to himself for a third time and continued walking towards the castle-shaped arcade at a casual pace.By the time he’d made it halfway through the park, he’d increased his speed to a dead sprint.
He busted in through the doors of the arcade, met by the sound of blaring videogames and the Christian pop that their boss liked to pipe into the establishment twenty-four seven.
“MATT,” he shouted over the din, stalking the nearly-empty rows of shoot-em-ups and crane games.He found his best friend wiping down the counter of the snack bar, mouthing the words to the demo song playing on the DDR cab.
“Thereyou are,” he started.“Look, you need to come out to the pirate ship with me—”
“Ugh, B,” Matt Nghê groaned, flopping over onto the counter in what Blake figured was a health and safety violation.Matt’s overgrown dark bangs flipped over his piercing-laden face like a mourning veil.“Why did you let them drag me in at the crack of dawn?I’mexhausted.”
“It’s almost eleven!”Blake argued.
“Like I said, thecrack of dawn,” Matt complained, dropping his cloth into the sanitation bucket with a despondent groan.He began to scratch at one of his new tattoos in a fit of frustration.“I swear to God if I get called in this early again, I’m quitting.What about the ship?”
“You—stop scratching that—” Blake shook his head.“Come with me, it’s better if I show you.”
In several minutes they were back at the kiddie pool, and the merman had regained his initial position, expression as peaceful as ever.
“Look, it was—” Blake sputtered, pointing at the unmoving figurehead.“Fiveminutes ago, it was—”
“What am I looking for?”Matt frowned, glancing around the play area.“Did one of those little turds wedge rocks into the water cannon again?I swear to God I was picking pebbles out of them all last summer.They like to shove them in to get the water pressure higher.”
“No, the merman!”Blake pointed at it—him?—in desperation.“He… he was moving and talking to me!”
“Your boyfriend…” Matt squinted up at it, still looking half-asleep.“Was talking to you?”
“Yeah, I…” Blake trailed off, only then realizing the extent of how insane he must have sounded.“It was asking to taste my energy drink, and—andfor Christ’s sakeM, don’t call him my boyfriend!”
“Hm, I’m gonna have to ignore that request.”Matt pursed his lips, expression a strange mix of imperious and judgmental.“You’ve spent the last two summers wistfully gazing at him, that’s gotta constitute dating status by this point.”
“Matt, that is not the main issue at hand.”
“You’re the one who pushed it!”Matt pouted, set a hand on Blake’s shoulder, and looked up at him in concern.“And B, this is Water Zone, not Disneyland.The only thing here that talks is that awful Laffing Sal in the arcade.”
Blake shivered, recalling the deeply cursed antique animatronic that howled and trembled behind glass whenever someone was foolish enough to drop a token into the display.
“No, but—it wasn’t like an animatronic.It was moving around like a person,” he insisted.
Matt fixed him with a disbelieving look.“It’s way too early for you to be messing with me like this, B.”He squinted at Blake, eyes teeming with suspicion, “Have you been getting enough sleep?”
“Uh.”
That was a good question and the answer was a resounding “no.”Blake had spent the entirety of the previous night working on synthesizing his thesis notes.He wasn’t even supposed tobeat work, but he had been unable to refuse when his manager Lovepreet had called him up, begging him to take a vacant shift.If Blake was being honest with himself, climbing around the slide tower running on nothing but half a can of Monster was a poor choice.
Not that he was about to admit any of that to Matt.
“Look, I amnotmessing with you,” he contended, jabbing a finger at the merman.“I swear to God that thing—thathe—was just moving and talking.”
Matt frowned at him, unconvinced, before scaling the slide up to the aft of the pirate ship.Once he got to the top, he reached up and tapped the merman’s tail with an open palm.It made a dullthwumpnoise.
“Nope, definitely not alive,” Matt surmised.He turned to Blake, folding his arms over his chest in concern.“B, are you sure you’re okay?I know you’ve been pulling double-shifts on top of working on your thesis…”
“I’m fine,” Blake insisted, shaking his half-empty can at Matt.“What about the upper part?Are yousuresomeone didn’t manage to fit a live actor in there?”Maybe this was all part of an elaborate prank by the other staff or a hidden camera show.
“Do you really thinkWater Zonehas the budget to pull something like that off?”Matt scowled.“Back in high school, Sam quit two weeks into wearing the Walter the Wacky Water Wizard costume ‘cause the kids kept pummeling him so hard he got bruises.I doubt anyone would have the patience to get paid minimum wage to drown in pisswater all day.”
Blake couldn’t argue with that, but still…
He motioned for Matt to step aside and walked up the slide himself.He was able to reach much higher on the merman’s tail than the petite Matt, and when he jumped he managed to smack its stomach.There was nothing more than the spongy feel of fiberglass and the dullthunkof it being struck.
