Adrenaline (In Secret We Sin #1) Page 2

  The latch released on the queue gates, opening at a tortoise’s pace. I scurried to the first car, my heart thumping wildly in my chest as I settled in my seat, the cracks on the bench padding snagging against the skin not covered by my shorts. I pulled the lap bar down in place, hearing that reassuring buzz of the lock click. There was still room between my thighs that allowed me to lean back—I hated how snug it could feel and it always crushed my junk.

  Not that I was supposed to pull down the lap bar myself.

  On cue, Dad’s sun-soaked hands came down on the lap bar, his veins compressing as he pushed down further until it compressed my thighs.

  Jeez! “Dad,” I groaned.

  “Safety first, Adam.” He gave me his dad voice, but his face was all humor. “Can’t have you slipping out.”

  I rolled my eyes. I was only twelve, but I’d heard a story about a kid who lost a nut because of an injury, so if he wanted grandkids someday…

  “You know what to do when you get up there, yeah?” he quizzed, quirking a smile.

  Of course. This had practically been our family mantra since Saoirse and I could speak. “Arms raised, chin up, and keep your eyes wide open.”

  He tapped the space under his eye. “Always look your fear in the eye…” he added.

  “And give it hell,” I finished.

  He shucked my chin, a glint of pride touching his gaze that made me wanna puff out my chest. Nothing made me happier than making him happy. No one deserved to be happier than my parents.

  “That’s my boy.” He pressed down on the lap bar one last time, stepping away from the ride. In my peripheral, I watched him head back to the ride operator station, his voice filtering through the distorted speakers. “All clear.”

  Back in the day, he would have signaled to another attendant with a fist. Now, he signaled to himself, purely out of habit.

  It bummed me out that I had at least two more years until I could work here, and at least four until I was old enough to operate the rides. With the thought resounding in my head, my hands wrapped around the old and age-beaten safety bar, my clammy grip tight, the chips of paint on the bar scraping my skin. Nerves flipped in my stomach as I pulled in air through my nose, letting it back out through my mouth.

  This roller coaster didn’t scare me—when you had a dad like mine who lived for the thrill, not much did anymore—it was the anticipation. How your senses heightened when you were out of control and you had no choice but to lean into your lack of power. Every hair on my body stood at attention, my blood pumping hard in my veins while awareness pushed my sweat glands into overdrive. At least I’d remembered to put on deodorant today. My ma was always on my ass about that.

  The hydraulics on the track engaged, the train pulling away from the station, carrying me into the darkness. The clicking of the tires against the wood planks drowned out the voices behind me, and the air thickened as the chain lift rumbled beneath us, pulling us higher and higher until I could see the American and Massachusetts state flag flanking the awning of the ride’s peak, blowing proudly in the summer breeze.

  I peeled my sweating palms away from the lap bar, raising my hands above my head and lifting my chin, staring directly at the drop ahead of me.

  Always look your fear in the eye, no matter what it was.

  Past due notices, the threat of starvation, or death’s invisible, bony fingers digging into my ma’s narrow shoulders.

  Up here, I was invincible. Nothing could touch me, nothing could hurt me, as long as I faced it dead on and gave it hell.

  But what happened when hell came to find you first?

  The lock on the lap bar disengaged with a click and a shudder, shooting upright unexpectedly, making my blood run cold.

  No, no, no.

  That wasn’t supposed to happen. My throat filled with grit, fear making tears prick at my eyes like stinging insects as death knocked on my front door.

  “My lap bar,” I called out loud to the duo, a few cars behind me. “It lifted.”

  “What the fuck?” someone complained behind me. “That kid’s lap bar!”

  “Holy shit!”

  I wrapped my hands around the lap bar, pulling with all my might, a pathetic cry slipping from me. My struggling muscles quaked, but the mechanism remained jammed—it wouldn’t drop back into place, no matter how hard I pulled.

  My tongue thickened in my mouth, eyes flaring as I rose a little to grapple with the lap bar at another angle. I tugged hard enough that I thought I was going to tear something in my arms, my molars grinding together in a sickening crunch and my face flushed red with sweat.

  It just wouldn’t budge.

  “Help!” I cried out. “Please!” Panic dulled the rush of blood filling my ears, my head as heavy as a brick as the dizziness set in.

  A kid I knew died a few years ago.

  Avery, she was in Saoirse’s kindergarten class. Big, dolly blue eyes with pale pigtails always weaved in thick braids and dresses that reminded me of the curtains in our kitchen—floral with lace trim. She’d run across the street two blocks from our house to greet her brother, who was getting off the school bus. The school bus driver hadn’t been paying attention and didn’t realize she hadn’t cleared the curb when he pulled away. He crushed her under his tires, right in front of her brother and a dozen petrified kids on the bus who’d felt the tire go right over her.

  The bus driver shot himself two weeks later—couldn’t handle what he’d done. Avery became a story parents used to warn their kids not to run across the street like that, Ma and Dad included.

  Not that I listened.

  I was always doing reckless things like that. I thought I was invincible.

  Death happened to other kids, to grown-ups.

  Not me.

  Until now.

  Behind me, the other patrons wrestled with their own lap bar. “Hang on, kid,” a man’s booming voice called. “Help me push up on this thing.” The car a few lengths back rattled.

  “Craig, are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Do you want that kid going over the fucking edge?” Craig asked, dizziness entering my head as the genuine threat came to fruition. “Can you live with that on your conscience, Derek? ’Cause I can’t.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  I could go over the edge.

  I could fly right out of this thing.

  I could die.

  “Push. Up. On. The. Bar. Now!” he roared.

  Behind me, the male grunts mingled with the clicking of the lift chain.

  “It’s not lifting.”

  “Fuck!” the hard voice I now knew belonged to Craig bellowed. “Don’t let go, kid!”

  No shit!

  On wobbling legs, I forced myself to summon bravery from who the hell knew where, and stood up completely, curving my entire body around the bar. I knew my roller coasters and Comet was an out-and-back coaster, focusing more on drops and airtime rather than inversions or helixes.

  Dad told me that most out-and-back coasters relied on physics. It was gravity fighting against centripetal forces—the energy that keeps you seated.

  That alone might keep me in my seat when we cleared the first drop, but if it didn’t… I panted, glancing to the sixty-foot drop below where people milled around like shadowed ants, completely unaware of what was going on above.

  Up here, it was even more apparent that this park was dead despite the brightly colored lights below, like pinpricks against the darkness in flashes of red, blue, yellow, and white.

  Deadsville.

  Just like I was going to be in a minute.

  The ninety-degree incline inched closer, and I squeezed my eyes shut, my knees knocking together as I clung onto the lap bar with everything I had in me. Warmth soiled the crotch of my shorts, dribbled down my leg, hitting the ankle of my sock, and seeped into my sneaker. The tears skimmed over my cheeks. I didn’t even have it in me to feel any shame. Fear drowned out every other emotion I had.

  Who cared if I pissed all over myself? I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to be like Avery, a story for parents to tell their kids.

  The brakes shrieked, the train shuddering to a stop.

  It stopped.

  Holy shit, it stopped.

  I almost didn’t want to believe it. I was too afraid to open my eyes, even when I heard the steady pounding of footsteps driving against the wood.

  “Adam!”

  Dad? I opened one eye, tilting my profile a little with my cheek pressed against the bar. “D-dad?” I stammered.

  “I’m coming,” he hollered, his Irish lilt thick despite trying for calm. His anxiety echoed in my bones. “I’m coming!”

  “Thank God,” Derek remarked anxiously. “Get us the fuck off this thing. I’m getting claustrophobic.”

  Dad’s features were blurry in the dark as he charged up the lift hill, but his breathlessness hit my ears. The wood rattled with his footfalls, the railing to the right of us shaking and whining. It took everything in me not to throw myself at him when he reached me.

  He framed my cheeks with both hands, the pads of his fingers digging into my skin as his wide eyes ran over me, looking for signs of injury. “Are you okay?”

  “I…” I swallowed hard, my cheeks burning red as I looked up at him with shame. “I wet myself.”

  If this ever got back to my friends, I’d be the butt of everyone’s jokes at school until I graduated.

  “That’s okay,” he said in a whisper, swiping his thumb under my eye where a tear I hadn’t even felt slipped free. “I would have, too.”

  That made me feel a little better.

  Dad let my face go, placing his hand gently on my bicep. His palms were shaking, warm and slick with sweat. He was nervous, too. “Can I help you out, son?” H
is voice calmed me, creating a clearing in the anxious fog.

  I reached for his hand nervously. The sticky skin on my arms hurt when I peeled myself away from the lap bar, accepting Dad’s hand as he helped me out.

  “You okay, kid?” the man I identified as Craig asked. His dark eyes flickered down, noticing the unmistakable wet spot on my shorts, before he brought his gaze back on me, his face not even twitching with disgust.

  I nodded, but my eyes flashed to the guy behind him, Derek. Even in the darkness, I could make out that he was as white as a sheet, terror gripping him.

  “C’mon,” Dad urged. “Hold on to the railing tightly and start walking down the lift.”

  I just wanted to go home. I wanted this to be a bad dream.

  “What about you?” I asked, my heart in my throat. I knew I was too old to want to hold his hand on the way down and the track was too narrow to allow us to walk side by side, but…

  “I’ll be right behind you. Need to help the rest of our riders out,” he assured. He squared his shoulders, tacking on an animated smile as bright as the lights below us. “Sorry about that, folks. Slight hiccup.” Dad forced himself to chuckle, clapping his hands together. “Now, I need you to accompany me on a ride of another kind.” He kept his tone light and cheery, but I could sense his worry as I clutched to the wooden railing, taking the steps timidly.

  Why had that happened? Dad had never told me about anything like that occurring before. He’d always stressed how safe rides were. I knew how hard he worked at maintaining them.

  The mechanism on the lifts released with a grating click, shuffling hitting my ears.

  “One at a time!” Dad called. “Don’t shove. There’s not enough room.”

  The wood boards rattled under my feet, the cars to my left rocking. “Get me off of this thing!” Derek shrieked.

  “Just hang on, man,” Craig barked. “Don’t panic. You’re gonna knock me over.”

  “Move!” Derek shouted.

  My stomach twisted, bile crawling up my throat as I passed a car full of two teenage girls. Their mouths slackened as they stared behind me.

  Dad’s voice cut through again. “Sir—”

  The haunted gasps ripped all around me, stopping me in place, my soiled shoes squelching. The railing shook under my grip as though something had collided against it. I turned my head, watching in what felt like slow motion as the wind left Dad’s lungs, his arms windmilling as he fought to keep himself upright.

  But just like the coaster, you couldn’t fight the force of gravity, could you?

  The crack of weak wood robbed the park and night sky of all sound, stuttering my heartbeat.

  It dulled the hum of an airplane flying overhead, drowned out the dinging of games below and the cheering in the distance.

  Instead, it etched itself in my memory forever, like the grooves on Ma and Dad’s favorite record they always danced to in the living room, the needle in my mind, promising to replay it repeatedly.

  Terror rooted me despite my screaming mind, telling me to run to him as I watched Dad flail, grasping at an invisible lifeline, something to keep him upright when the railing broke away from him.

  Fear—so much fear—took over his face as the splintered wood went airborne, his balance rocking on his heels as he slipped back.

  “Grab him!” Craig roared, jerking his terrified friend out of the way.

  The one who’d shoved my dad.

  But it was too late.

  Dad met my eyes as he went over the edge. My name was on his lips as he disappeared from my line of sight.

  A series of screams rang out all around me.

  But none of them were as loud as mine.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Present

  “I don’t think you should go in there,” my older sister, Olivia, warned from my cellphone.

  I slouched in the driver’s seat, my chair reclined back far enough that only my eyes could see over the lip of my older red Jeep Cherokee’s window. I scanned the stretch of wooded area, squinting. Was security still there, or would they have left by now? It was inconclusive on the urban exploration forum I was part of if security was there consistently.

  I’d have to roll the dice.

  “You’re paranoid,” I replied nonchalantly. I’d done shit like this a million times before.

  “That place is creepy.”

  I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn’t see me. “That’s what you said when I spent the night at the Lizzie Borden house.”

  And anything else I did that she decided wasn’t “normal”—mosh pits included.

  “Because that was creepy, Trina,” she complained, blowing on her fingernails I knew she just finished painting. “Who wants to sleep in the house of a murderer?” I could practically envision Livy throwing her hands up in the air to drive her point home, risking the wet polish. “She’s got her own nursery rhyme, for fuck’s sakes.”

  It was one of the best sleeps of my life even if the old blood still stained the grooves of the floorboards, and you could see it from the basement. For what it was worth, I didn’t think Lizzie did it—like me; she was too short to have landed some of those blows—but that was a debate for another time. Never one to miss an opportunity to pester my siblings, I crooned out the aforementioned rhyme. “‘Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks—’”

  “Stop,” she interrupted with a whine. “You’re so weird.”

  I always had been, at least according to my siblings, though I felt perfectly normal to me. At twenty-four-years-old, I was the youngest of four. I had two older sisters and an older brother. There were two years between Livy and me, ten years between my brother, Sean, and eleven years between me and my oldest sister, Maria. And as all older siblings do, they’d always had something to say about my personality, my interests, or my hobbies.

  My music was too scary and loud. “What are they even saying through all that growling? It’s hideous,” Maria would admonish in her bored and pretentious lilt she’d taken on to mask her natural accent, her full ox-blood-red lips pursing with disdain. I didn’t expect her to appreciate the creative endeavors or guttural growls of Whitechapel’s Phil Bozeman. Then again, Maria didn’t like music—period. Who was the weird one now?

  Sean routinely scrunched up his nose at my curiosity for urban exploration and clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You’re gonna get arrested.” My brother wasn’t the risk taker in the family. He was the goody two-shoes, and our ma’s golden boy. He had his own little family now to take care of, so his sense of adventure, if he ever had one, was shot to shit.

  None of my siblings cared for my style or aesthetic, either, with Livy being the most vocal about my tendency to change my hair color every couple of months. “You’re going to fry your hair.” So? I’d just give myself a cool under cut, or hell, shave it all off and start again. It was just hair.

  Livy was too obsessed with trying to copy and paste the aesthetic of one of Hollywood’s many manufactured faces, anyway. I’d take my chameleon hair tendencies—which was currently a frosty lilac shade—over her duplicated vanity any day.

  All of this was to say, despite the close relationship I shared with my siblings, they all thought I was a little fucking odd. Which was fair, I supposed. My interest in pursuing that spine-tingling sensation of fear was a bit of an unexplainable thing for me to chase—and it was just as hard to explain why I needed it, too.

  “I gotta go,” I said.

  “Go home?” She brightened. “Yeah, you do.”

  I laughed, reaching for the handle of my seat, pulling myself upright. “I’m just gonna take a few pictures, and then I’ll be out of here.” Take pictures and examine them more in depth in the comfort of my apartment.

  “How are you even going to get in there?” she questioned, sighing loudly. “Walk through the front entrance?”

  She thought so little of me. I wasn’t that stupid. “Of course not.” Dry November leaves danced across the grass, creating a cleared path for me through the woods. The temperatures had plummeted fast, and the meteorologists forecasted there would be snow early this year. “I’m going to cut through the woods and hop a fence.” It was a perfectly sound plan.

  “Katrina!” Livy shrieked.

  “It’s not that high,” I assured, ignoring her flair for drama as I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder, zipping up my faux fleece-lined corduroy chore coat that was two sizes too big for me. I’d stolen it from Sean, who had well over a foot over my petite stature. What was the point of being the baby in the family if you couldn’t help yourself to your siblings’ stuff? And for the record, Maria was still looking for her black-laced La Perla bustier I’d helped myself to and altered to accommodate my much smaller chest because my older sister had gotten all the cleavage Livy and I hadn’t and it wasn’t fair. “Six feet tops. I can clear it.” With a fence that short, they hadn’t tried very hard to keep people like me out. I glanced at my laced-up Doc Martin boots, admiring the tiny platform. These were more practical than people realized—traction, style and functionality. They’d absorb the brunt of the fall, although I certainly didn’t want to have to run in them.