The Trouble Is

Chapter 32: Freeze Frame

East pulls up to the house as Katie drives away. She gives him a little wave and speeds off with a tire screech. We're heading to the local fair grounds for a carnival. Yeah, I know it's cheesy. Love is cheesy. I read a great list once in a magazine called "15 Cheesy Relationship Things Every Twenty-Something Secretly Wants." The great thing about being a teenager is that you don't have to keep those things secret. Also, FYI, magazines writers are great list makers.

I manage to pull together a carnival-friendly outfit of denim jeans, a plain gray V-neck t-shirt, and basic white tennis shoes. East is wearing another old sports team t-shirt. (This time it's the Devil Rays.) It has some kind of fish on it. The fairgrounds are always dusty, and the addition of all those trucks and tents magnifies it. I'm already pulling my hair up into a topknot as we walk up to the entrance. We pool our money and buy a ton of tickets, then head straight to the cotton candy. We pass by booths for guessing games, roaming jugglers, and women yelling for us to come take a chance on throwing a ball or a dart or a ring. They promise easy wins, and we tell them we'll be back.

East stands beside me as I sit on a confident-looking horse on the carousel. His arms are tight around my waist. I can feel his breath on my neck as he leans in to me. His face is warm against mine, and when he takes a bite of the cotton candy I'm holding, I can smell the sugar eruption.

"Give me the list, baby" he says softly in my ear. "I know you've got one building inside that beautiful mind of yours. I really want this night to be special, A. So if there's something on your mind, maybe I can help. So come on, give me the top 3 or 5 or 10 or 100 things that are occupying that beautiful mind of yours, Anne."

It's so incredibly weird-slash-wonderful-slash-a-little-scary to be so known. It's not as if I've been dragging my feet around the fairway here, pouting or distracted. It's just that he knows me so well now. I mean, I'm here. I'm present. But there's always a list going through my head. It doesn't always mean that I'm sad or upset. Sometimes it's a list of the best of things so that I will remember them later. Tonight it's a short list of worries.

I feel myself relax a bit at East's proposal and lean further against him. It would be so much easier to just list them and be done with it, to set these thoughts free. Right now they are just humming around in my subconscious like a swarm of bees. They won't annoy me unless I poke at them, but I can't really focus with them back there buzzing. Asking me to name my top three things is like offering those bees a stick coated in honey in order to lure them out.

As we walk back to the boardwalk full of games, I tell him the smallest worry, which is Katie. I explain the whole crazy-slash-mean-sounding pirating thing. He had never heard of it either. He stands there throwing little plastic rings at the blue, green, and red bottles as he thinks about this. You get a different level of prize depending on the color of the bottle that you manage to snare. The plastic rings make a little chinksound as they bounce off each bottle. The booth guy gives him a little braided string bracelet as a consolation prize. He nods his thank you to the guy working the booth and turns to me.

"I think it's gotta be some kind of power thing," he says. "I'm glad you're not going along.

"Give me another," he says. I like this about East. Well, it's one of the many things I like about East. He doesn't try to solve everything. He understands that sometimes things can't be fixed, but you need to express them anyway. He leans down and kisses my forehead ever so softly while he waits for me to give him another item from the list.

"Doug has now moved into Buddhism, I think," I say. "I mean, it's not like he hands out press releases or anything, but he's changed a bit. So, I'm guessing he's a little Buddha. He must have gotten some help on that one. I don't think he knows any Buddhists, and he seems to get the basic ideas."

While I'm talking, East lifts my hand up to rest on his raised knee. He's tying the little braided bracelet to my wrist. My heart flutters like the girly cliché that it has become whenever I'm near him.

"Like what ideas?" he asks.

"Well, he knows the word 'mindfulness,' which is so weird," I say. "Skip loves all that mindfulness talk. And I know meditation is not necessarily a Buddhist thing, but he appears to be meditating. And I can't think of another religion that does that. He's got a couple of his friends sitting outside with him under that sheet he hung up. They look like shrunken old men out there with their eyes closed, legs crossed, and all that."

"OK," he says. He sounds even, like there's no opinion or judgment. It's just OK. He knows there's nothing to fix or solve here. It is what it is.

"Last one for the night," he says. "Make it count, baby."

I do—make it count, that is. I don't even have to think about which thing makes it into the top three—it's a fear thing. It's like when you know you are going to throw up and then finally give in. Fear doesn't enter the world with a dribble; fear vomits its way out of you when it's confessed.

"Remember that kid game of freeze?" I ask. "You know, where you run around like idiots until the 'it' person tags you and you are frozen?"

"Yeah," he says. He takes my hand in his, and we start to walk toward the Ferris Wheel.

"It kinda feels like we are all in that stage where we are running around like idiots," I say. "I just want to tag everyone for a while so I can breathe. I want a freeze frame, I guess.

"I don't have a clue what's next," I say. "Mom seems to be getting better, but it might not last. I think Skip actually went to the office yesterday. And Katie, well, Katie is managing her life in her own way, and she's here for me. Every step of the way she is here for me. And you. You are here. You just parachuted into my life and turned this summer into something magical. I know how that sounds—so corny. But still, it fits. When I am with you, all my insecurities and all my worries just wash away."

East nods like he gets it and doesn't push any more.

We are the only people in line for the Ferris Wheel, so East asks the guy running it to stop us at the top for a few minutes. We start to move slowly in a circle, and as we move up to the treetop level, the sounds of the carnival and the nearby traffic ease away into the night around us. We stop toward the top, and the basket swings a bit. There's a bit of a breeze up here, and it feels like we are suddenly removed from everything—from the carnival, our town, our lives.

East picks up the wrist with the bracelet, turns it over, and kisses it right where I am pretty sure he can feel my pulse pounding out Morse code for "I love you." Then he pulls me in close and we sit there, swinging in the sky, just breathing and feeling my heart pound as I try figure out how to hold onto this moment, this freeze-frame, forever.