Top of the World

The boardwalk lights had flickered on, a latticework of soft yellows and pinks that made even the battered stalls look ceremonial, as if the town had dressed up just for them. The evening was rolling out slow and cold, the wind heavy with salt, and the sun had already drowned behind a line of low purple clouds. Andy could see the lights from the last few rides further away, a little constellation of bulbs that blinked and spun, threading the length of the sea-front in a geometry that was more beautiful for having no one there to see it but them.

By the time they reached it, the Ferris wheel was still, waiting for them. Under the deepening blue, it looked less like a ride and more like a moon built out of Christmas bulbs—each car lit from below, the whole structure turning slow and majestic on its axis. It cast a spinning shadow over the empty lot, and Andy was briefly and irrationally afraid it might not be real, that it might vanish into the dusk if he tried to focus too hard.

Chloe slowed as they reached the wheel, looking up with an expression that mixed awe with a kind of sadness. “It always seemed so big,” she said, almost to herself. “I used to think you could see it from a different state.”

Andy looked up too, letting the lights fill his eyes. “Maybe you still can, if you’re looking the right direction.”

Chloe glanced at him, the ghost of a smile on her lips. “Want to try it?”

He nodded without thinking. The rightness of it was so obvious there was nothing else to say.

But standing in front of the ride, Chloe hesitated, visibly rethinking her bravado. “Only if you don’t get sick from heights,” she said, softer now, trying for a joke and not quite landing it.

Andy pretended not to notice her nerves. “You can hold my hand the whole time if you want.”

It had the effect he hoped for. The tension in her shoulders softened, and she squeezed his hand anyway, as if to prove she’d take him at his word.

The operator at the gate was a man in an oversized parka and a woolen hat, his face mostly hidden. He offered a nod, scanned their ride token, and opened the gate. The whole transaction took less than ten seconds; it felt like being let through a checkpoint at the edge of the world. They climbed the shallow steps to the loading platform, and when the man latched the Ferris wheel car behind them, they were suddenly completely alone, suspended in a little glass capsule above a world that wasn’t theirs.

Chloe looked out at the dark, then back at him, the silence stretching. The ride gave a slow lurch, and the car started its upward arc, rocking gently as it picked up height. The higher they went, the more the details of the park below seemed to flatten out—what had been a maze of fences and wires a moment ago became a neat little map of circles and lines, the carousel horses and game booths shrinking to toys.

The wind picked up as they crested the top of the wheel, and Chloe drew her parka tighter around herself, chin tucking almost all the way down to her collar. “I lied,” she admitted, barely above a whisper. “I’ve never actually been on this before.”

Andy blinked. “Seriously?”

She nodded, keeping her eyes fixed on the horizon. “My mom always said the view was better from the ground. She was scared of rides, scared of the idea of being up where you can see the whole world looking up at you.” Chloe made a small, apologetic laugh. “I believed her for a long time. Then, later, I think—” She hesitated, searching for words. “I think I saved it for someone else. Like, if I ever had a kid, or a best friend, or whatever. I decided somewhere in my brain that wanting things for myself was kind of embarrassing.”

Andy let that sit for a minute. The wheel slowed as they reached the top, and for a few seconds they just floated there, the town a glowing scale model of itself, every streetlight a tiny pinprick lined up in rows along the sand. He could see the pier stretching out into the water, the whole town behind them looking as if it had been poured from a single mold.

He squeezed her hand gently, not needing to say anything. Chloe’s hand was cold, but she didn’t pull away.

“I’m trying to remember how to want things,” she said, in the same near-whisper. “Not just for, like, a project or a person. For me.” She cleared her throat, and the next part sounded less like confession and more like a self-dare: “I want to not be scared of it, even if it’s dumb stuff. Like this.”

“You’re allowed to want things,” Andy said, finding himself surprised at how much he meant it.

Chloe looked over at him, and there was something bright and almost hurt in her expression, a mixture of gratitude and disbelief. “You make it look so easy,” she said.

Andy shrugged. “That’s just because I’m faking it.” He said it lightly, but as soon as the words left his mouth he realized he wasn’t joking. The last few months had been an improvisation of wanting and not wanting, of waking up every morning and faking the future until it started to feel like one.

Chloe was quiet for a second, her fingers finding the cuff of her sleeve again, the old nervous loop starting back up. “Can I tell you why I actually picked this place? Not the postcard version.” She didn't wait for him to answer. “What Norah said this morning, in the Archive.” A small, humorless laugh. “She wasn't trying to be cruel, that's just how she talks. She said it doesn't matter what happens with you and the god stuff — doesn't matter if it's tomorrow or never. The bond still wants me close. If you ever settle somewhere and it's not near Chicago, I don't get a vote. I just go where it says.”

She let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh either. “So I've been doing that math all day. Kindergarten. My kids. The apartment with the water heater that never worked right. All of it filed under might already be gone, whether or not you ever turn into something enormous.” She glanced at him, checking his face the way she checked everything, then looked back out at the lights strung along the sand. “That's the real reason I picked this place, I think. Somewhere I already knew how to visit instead of living in it. Easier to hand you a place I'd already lost than one I was still afraid of losing.” She hesitated, then added, “And if you do become... you know... and we do too, is this how we'll see the world, eventually? I wanted to pretend, to see how it felt.”

Andy didn't reach for a fix, and for once he was glad he didn't have one ready. He just held her hand a little tighter and let the wheel keep them up there, suspended, a while longer before either of them said anything else.

The wheel started moving again, the car tilting forward as they descended, and for a few seconds the park below was all motion and color. It felt, for a moment, like falling.

Chloe pressed her forehead to the glass, breath fogging the pane, and watched the lights blur by. “That’s the thing,” she said. “It’s all just pretending, until it’s not.”

They made another circuit, and the car stopped again at the very top, this time swaying a little more in the wind. The sea was completely black now, a flat line painted under the lighter blue of the sky, and the only sound was the quiet, distant music from the carousel still running somewhere below.

Chloe’s voice was smaller. “I used to think about what it would be like, coming back here someday with a kid. I had the whole daydream: holding his hand, letting him pick the rides. Being the mom who wasn’t afraid of any of it.” Her hand drifted to her own stomach, unconsciously at first, then settling there.

Andy watched her profile, the way her hair was backlit by the neon below. He didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what wouldn’t sound like a platitude.

Chloe spoke again, still looking out. “After the last few years, I kind of gave up on that future. It just… shrunk until I stopped thinking about it at all. But now that I’m here, it’s like, I can see it again.” She looked at Andy, then down at his hand on hers. “I don’t want to lose it this time.”

Andy put his other hand over hers, anchoring her there. “You won’t,” he said, and surprised himself with how certain it sounded. “Whatever happens, Chloe, I promise you, we'll bring that kid here, you and I. Perhaps with a group of half-siblings with whom he'd squabble.” He smiled.

Chloe laughed, and it was a real one, bright and slightly cracked. “God, you’re such a dork,” she said, but she laced her fingers through his anyway, and rested her head on his shoulder as the wheel started its slow descent.

They spent the rest of the ride in quiet, letting the world spin around them, the ocean and the lights and the memory of everything they’d talked about pooling together in a strange, warm peace.

At the bottom, the operator let them out with a wave, and they stepped onto the platform together. The boardwalk was empty, only the sound of the tide and the wheel creaking behind them.

Chloe stopped and looked up at it, then turned to Andy. Her cheeks were bright, eyes a little wet with cold. “Thank you,” she said, and this time it was clear she didn’t mean just the date. She meant the afternoon, the last-hour memory, the act of wanting anything at all.

Andy tried to find something worthy to say, but the only words that came were, “You’re welcome.” He meant them, and she seemed to know.

They walked the length of the boardwalk side by side, not speaking, hands together in the pockets of his coat. The lights behind them blinked on and off, and the whole town seemed to exhale as the night took hold.

After the Ferris wheel, they wandered. Not just in the sense of walking, but in the way people working through old, half-buried memories always do: aimless, slow, half in conversation and half pulled forward by the compulsions of nostalgia and possibility. The Palace Playland, running only for them, had shed most of its audience-of-two glamour and now felt a little like an abandoned movie set, the lights still running but the performances over, the skeleton staff gone. It was the perfect place for this kind of drifting.

Chloe moved first; she always did. She pulled Andy along a row of prize stands, the cranes and claw machines and spinning wheels of tickets. Most were dark, but a few still cast their dim halos onto the pavement, enough to make the fiberglass dolphins and tigers in the prize bins look spooked and lonely. Chloe touched the glass of a ball-dispensing gumball machine, lingering for a second. She smiled, soft and private, and Andy realized she was looking at her reflection in the curved plastic, distorting her face into a child’s again. She didn’t say anything, just turned away and kept moving, but Andy watched the shadow of that smile ripple all the way down her body.

At the Skee-Ball machines, Chloe stopped and ran her hand over the faded blue paint of the ramp, the wooden edge worn down by decades of other hands. She looked at Andy sidelong. “You ever cheat at these?”

Andy grinned, still trailing a half-step behind. “Wouldn’t that defeat the entire moral principle of Skee-Ball?”

“Spoken like someone who’s never had to impress their older cousins,” Chloe said, and picked up a ball from the basket, weighed it, and rolled it up the lane with perfect form. It bounced into the 40 ring, then another into 50. “I used to sneak in as a teenager. They had this trick—hold the ball with your palm under instead of on top. Gets it spinning just right. I was a local legend for like, two summers.” She glanced at him, waiting for him to take a turn. He did, and landed a 10, then a 20, then another 10.

“Legendary,” Chloe teased, and rolled again, racking up points until the machine’s analog counter rolled over to four digits. “You know what’s messed up?” she said, pausing to lean on the machine. “I’m realizing I was just trying to get my mom’s attention the whole time. I thought if I won enough tickets, I could buy her something at the prize wall so good she’d feel happy.” She shrugged, the gesture brittle. “Turns out, the only prize she wanted was for me to not cause her trouble.”

Andy didn’t have anything profound to offer, so he just rolled again, on the next lane over, and managed a 30.

Chloe looked at him and said, “You’re not supposed to let me win just because you like me, you know.”

He shrugged. “I’m terrible at Skee-Ball. You’d destroy me either way.”

She considered this, then nodded. “True. I was an only child for a reason. I don’t lose well.”

Andy grinned, not so much at the joke as at the fact that she was still talking. When she got like this—stripped of performance or defense—she was as close to herself as anyone Andy knew could get. He loved her for it.

They kept walking, Chloe’s hand trailing over cold metal and sun-warped plastic, pausing now and then at a silent game booth or shuttered food stand. She pressed her nose to the glass of an old coin pusher, watched the towers of nickels tilt and threaten to slide. “I used to think these were the universe in miniature,” she said. “Balance, fate, persistence. But sometimes you play for hours and nothing ever falls.” She stepped back and let the metaphor hang.

Andy’s memories of arcades weren’t nearly as poetic. He told her about the one place in his childhood town, the “Fun Palace,” which stank of chlorine from the adjacent pool and had a laser tag course that was mostly just a maze of plywood and mildew. “They had this one machine—Crisis Zone, with the plastic rifles. I played until my fingers bled one summer, just to get my name on the high score list. I was so proud, until this twelve-year-old kid with braces wiped my score off the board in one afternoon. I never played again.”

Chloe laughed, delighted. “See, now that is the spirit of New England. If you’re not ready to be humiliated in public by a child, you shouldn’t leave the house.”

They passed a darkened Whac-A-Mole, the rubber mallets hanging limp on their cords, and Chloe reached out and tapped one gently, as if to wake it. “I always felt bad for the moles,” she said. “They never win.”

Andy said, “I think the trick is, they don’t want to win. Their job is just to pop up and take the hit, over and over. It’s what gives them meaning.”

Chloe considered this, then said, “You’re being very philosophical for someone who just lost at Skee-Ball.”

They kept walking, not in a hurry, sometimes not even speaking, just letting the noise of the machines and the wind off the water fill the empty spaces. At one point, Andy reached out and drew a line in the dust on a countertop, and Chloe followed with her own finger, making an infinity symbol next to his. Neither commented on it.

When they reached the far end of the arcade, Chloe lingered by the old photo booth. The sign on the front was half-peeled, but the green “OPEN” light still glowed above the slot. “Do you want to?” she asked.

Andy hesitated, wondering if this was a test or if she just wanted to sit in the booth with him for a minute. But she was looking at him with the same bright, open expectation as she had back at the elevator, so he said, “Let’s do it.”

They crowded into the plastic shell of the booth, knees knocking. Chloe fished in her pocket for her token and tapped it on the coin slot. The timer on the screen began to count down, and for a moment neither of them knew what to do with their faces. The first flash went off with both of them looking serious and straight ahead, and in the second, Chloe stuck out her tongue and made a face, which caught Andy in the act of beginning to laugh. In the third, Chloe leaned over and kissed his cheek, and Andy’s face in that one was pure, unguarded surprise.

The final photo, the one that would print at the bottom, Chloe waited until the very last tenth of a second before turning toward Andy and looking at him, not smiling or performing, just meeting his eyes. In the tight, shadowy light of the booth, it felt as intimate as a confession. The flash popped, and the screen went dark.

They waited for the strip to print. In the silence, they could hear the wind rattling the plastic banners outside. Chloe said, almost out of nowhere, “I want to remember this part. I really, really do.”

Andy nodded, even though she wasn’t looking at him. “Me too.”

The machine spit out the strip. Chloe took it, studied the sequence, and laughed. She ran her thumb over the last frame, then tucked the whole thing into the inside pocket of her parka. “I’m going to put this on the fridge,” she said. “So I don’t forget who I was tonight.”

Andy smiled. “If you don’t, I won’t.”

She looked at him then, and in the blue glow of the arcade, her eyes were so alive it hurt.

Outside, the wind was even colder, biting through layers. Andy offered Chloe his arm, but she just took his hand, lacing her fingers through his and not letting go. They walked toward the carousel, which was still running, the music distant but bright. The painted horses rose and fell, empty but for the ghosts of every kid who’d ever believed in their own invincibility.

They stopped by the carousel fence and watched it for a while. Chloe leaned on Andy’s shoulder. “I always wanted a horse of my own,” she said. “I’d come out here and name each one, give them personalities and backstories.” She pointed to a white stallion with a chipped ear. “That one was Perseus. The one with the blue saddle, I called him Orion. I spent an entire July making up soap operas for them. I think the owner thought I was deranged.”

Andy said, “I always picked the dragons instead.” He pointed out the one in the back, green with gold scales. “They get the best vantage point.”

“Dragons are the Skee-Ball champions of the animal kingdom,” Chloe declared, and the joke was so dumb it made both of them laugh too hard.

A few moments later, Chloe’s laughter faded, and she said, more quietly, “I’m glad you came with me.”

Andy squeezed her hand. “Wouldn’t have missed it.”

Chloe smiled, but there was something else in her face now—a seriousness, maybe, or a kind of sadness that didn’t quite fit the scene. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked.

Andy nodded, not trusting himself to say anything.

Andy nodded, and she went on, “When I was little, I thought magic was real. I mean, not in the obvious way, but I thought if you wanted something badly enough, the world would find a way to give it to you. And then I got older, and I learned that sometimes the world just… takes things. That you can’t want your way around it. And so I just stopped asking for anything.”

She looked up at him, her eyes shining in the neon from the lights. “Obviously we've seen magic on the island, but it's the kind that amuses others. But tonight… tonight felt like my kind of magic is real again. Even if it’s just for a little while.”

Andy hugged her, feeling the heat of her body against the cold air. “It is real,” he said, voice low. “And it's not ending tonight, or any time soon, Chloe.”

Chloe laughed, a single clear note, then wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “You’re too good to me,” she said, then bit her lip and smiled in a way that made her look very young.

They wandered a little more, past the dark arcade and the locked-up bumper cars. Chloe looked at every ride, every vendor stall, every sign. She pointed at the old Zoltar fortune teller and said, “We should do it. For luck.”

Andy dug in his pocket for a coin. The machine lit up, eyes glowing red, and after a moment’s whirring it spat out a little ticket, which Chloe read aloud: “'You will find what you seek, if you let go.'” She folded the ticket and put it in her pocket. “I’ll keep that,” she said. “Just in case.”

They left the Playland hand in hand, the last ride still spinning in the night behind them, and walked down to the sand. The tide was coming in, flattening the beach, and each wave left a shining layer of water that reflected the boardwalk lights in shimmering lines.

Chloe kicked off her boots and ran ahead, laughing as she splashed in the frigid surf. “I dare you,” she called back. “Come on!”

Andy followed, and the water was so cold it felt like electricity. Chloe squealed, the sound echoing off the pier, and ran back to him, catching him around the waist and holding tight, breasts flattening against him.

They stood there, wet and freezing and ridiculous, and Chloe said, “I never thought I’d be here. I never thought I’d get to do this. Not after—” She stopped, shook her head, and started again. “I want to keep wanting things. I think that’s the only way anything matters.”

Andy kissed her, hard and hungry, tasting salt and laughter and the sharp bite of cold. She kissed him back, arms wrapped tight, and for a second he felt the world tip, as if the old rules had fallen away and anything was possible.

When they broke apart, Chloe looked at him, cheeks red and hair wild. “Thank you for being my magic,” she said.

Andy just smiled, embarrassed, because there was nothing else to say.