Page 181 of Disarm
We ride the Giant Dipper because it should be illegal to come to the Boardwalk and not. The old wooden coaster creaks and rattles and smells like history and faint terror.
“Front or back?” Miguel asks as we get in line.
“Back,” I say. “I wanna feel like my soul is leaving my body.”
“Same,” he says easily.
Mom and Dad opt to sit it out, watching from below like the responsible adults they pretend to be. We climb into the car,Miguel’s thigh pressed against mine, his arm along the back of the seat. The bar drops. The chain clanks.
As we climb, Santa Cruz spreads out around us—ocean silver-blue, houses tiny, Boardwalk suddenly small.
“You okay?” he yells over the clatter.
“Depends,” I yell back. “If we die, I’m haunting you.”
He grins, the wind whipping his hair. “Deal.”
The drop hits a second later, and my stomach flies up into my throat. I scream, laugh, and grab for his hand. He laces our fingers together on instinct, our knuckles white with grip, and for those few seconds, it’s just speed and air and him, solid at my side.
When we roll back into the station, I’m breathless and a little high. He looks the same, eyes bright and cheeks flushed.
“Again,” I say, dizzy.
He laughs. “Later,” he promises. “Let your adrenal glands recover, baby.”
We get funnel cake and sit on the sand, backs to the boardwalk, watching waves roll in. Mom tucks her feet into the warm top layer of sand and sighs like she’s in a commercial. Dad takes off his shoes and murmurs something about sand in his car and then… shuts up. Just sits there, tie-less, toes buried, looking at the horizon.
Miguel leans back on his hands, knee touching mine, squinting at the water. “If you could live anywhere,” he asks suddenly, “no rules, no money problems, nothing… where would you pick?”
“Here,” I say, without thinking.
He glances over, surprised. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe not this exact beach. Maybe… like, a little house a few blocks back. But… yeah. Here. Or somewhere like here.” I shrug. “Ocean, basketball court, you. That’s the math.”
His mouth softens. “Good answer,” he says. “Very correct.”
He doesn’t push further. Doesn’t say “and a ring” or “and a kid.”
But the picture from this morning is still curled in the back of my brain, warm and vicious. I let myself touch it again for half a second, us on a day like this, but older. Rings. Maybe small sticky hands tugging at our sleeves.
My chest does that weird achy thing again.
Then Mom is shouting about seagulls trying to steal the funnel cake and Dad is up, clapping his hands at them like a man in a nature documentary, and the moment stretches into laughter.
By the timewe get home, my skin is sun-warm and my muscles loose in that pleasant, tired way. We pile onto the couch after dinner—some random movie on, Mom half-asleep against Dad’s shoulder, Miguel’s fingers lazily tracing patterns on the back of my hand where it rests on the cushion between us.
It feels… normal.
Like, a new kind we’re building from scratch.
Mom conks out first. Dad turns off the TV and nudges her, and they shuffle off to bed with murmured goodnights.
Miguel and I linger on the couch, staring at the blank TV screen in the dim light. The house creaks softly around us.
“Curfew?” I whisper.
He snorts. “Pretty sure we’re our own curfew now.”
