“It was a freak accident. The guy stepped in front of a ball. Took it right to the head. Someone called for help, but he died before the paramedics could get there.”

“You called for help,” my father corrects me. He’s right, I guess, according to the log of outgoing calls on my phone, and the four minutes and eleven seconds I supposedly spent on the line with 911 two days earlier. It’s the only concrete evidence I have to corroborate his statement, given that when I think back on the incident, my memory feels like a fishing net. Captured and writhing between the ropes are mostly sounds—the metallic clink of the aluminum bat striking the ball, the constant hum of the go-kart track in the background, the surprisingly dull thud of the ball colliding with the man’s skull. Everything else sifts through the net like water, dripping back into the sea. 

“I called for help,” I amend, and my father nods encouragingly. “Trina did CPR until the ambulance came.” (A detail he told me later that night, sitting at the kitchen table, three empty beer cans in front of him and a plate of cold mac-n-cheese staring up at me.) “But he was already gone. It was…” I tug my seatbelt away from my neck. We’ve been parked for ten minutes, but I still don’t move to take it off. To take it off means that I am about to get out, and I want to stay in the car; I want my father to shift into reverse and peel away and take me back home. “It was awful. Really sad.”

“A tragic accident,” he offers. “Say that.”

I nod. My father glances down at his watch—a habit, after over a decade of not having a working clock in the old car. This new one doesn’t just have a clock, but a touchscreen display—built-in GPS, a backup camera, the whole nine. It still smells new, even though my father bought it two months ago, signing away the down payment the second his bonus check cleared. His promotion to General Manager had already proved to be worth the time he dedicated to climbing up the ranks of the park.

“Alright, kiddo. Let’s rock and roll.”

There is a lead block in my stomach, pinning me to my seat. “But what if she asks me something I don’t know? Or I say something wrong? I can’t really remember what happened–”

My father pauses halfway through opening his door, one foot already on the pavement, torso twisted to face me. “Good. We can’t trust our memories anyway.” He reaches across the console to take my hand, rolling his thick fingers over my knuckles like he used to do when I was a kid and thought that if he pushed hard enough he’d wiggle my bones loose. “That’s why they toss out so many eyewitness statements in court, you know. People are unreliable by nature. We twist reality to fit the narrative we want to be living in. Don’t worry about what you remember. Just stick to the facts.”

The facts: a man died. A man died on my watch. A man died on my watch on the property managed by my father. A man died and, by default, my father is responsible.

I swallow back the bile that creeps up my throat and manage another weak nod. My father releases my hand and gets out of the car. I trudge along, following in the long stretch of his shadow as we make our way across the parking lot and to Adventure Zone’s main building. 

It’s a stark contrast to the first time I ever crossed the lot, seven years old and kicking up pieces of loose dirt and gravel in my wake (it only got paved last spring) as I raced from the car. My father’s exasperated laugh followed me as he half-heartedly called after me to slow down, to wait for him, and that he needed to get Libby out of her car seat. I didn’t wait—I ran right up to the doors and pressed my face up against the smudged glass, excited about something for the first time in months.

I was a quiet kid, flighty and full of nervous energy. I bounced my legs so much in class that my first-grade teacher taped a block of Styrofoam to the bottom of my desk so that I would stop bruising my knees. We had moved to West Denham three months before that visit to Adventure Zone and I still had yet to make a single friend. 

The advertisements for Adventure Zone played on TV all the time. It looked like a dream: rock climbing, go-karts, and a three-story high padded obstacle course with a ball pit at the bottom. I begged my father every night: PLEASE can we go this weekend pleasepleaseplease. Every time I got the same answer: Soon, kiddo. 

After a few weeks of pleading, soon turned into tomorrow, when I came home from school to find my father wearing a bright red t-shirt with the Adventure Zone logo on the front. There was a word on the back, big black letters across his shoulders, that he helped me sound out. 

“Ma-eye–”

“No, may,”

“May– maint- mainty–”

“Maint-uh–”

“Maint-uh-nance.”

Maintenance, head groundskeeper, assistant manager of the park, and now GM. Ten years of work, all because employees get park tickets at half price and I wanted to play in a filthy ball pit. When I turned sixteen last summer, my father got me a job, too, and the bit of money I’ve managed to put away—plus his new promotional salary—might make the difference between attending West Denham Community or going to a real college next fall. 

That is, as long as I don’t mess everything up. Again.

“Deep breaths,” my father says. We stand outside the employee lounge—when did we get inside?—a room that’s really no bigger than my bedroom at home, with a door that never quite shuts all the way. “Remember: just the facts.”

The facts: a man died on my watch, at a fun park not necessarily known for its strict adherence to safety measures. If his family decides to sue, there will be little to stand in the way of them going after Adventure Zone until there’s not a cent to its name. And, by default, not a cent to ours.

My father knocks hard enough to swing the door open a few inches, and through the crack, I can see two people sitting at the table in the center of the room. One figure, a woman wearing a gray blazer, has her back to me, and the other, Trina, who’s curled in on herself and swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand. They both turn at the creak of the door.

“Come on in,” the woman says, standing and crossing the room to open the door all the way. “We’ve just finished.”

I give Trina what I hope is a comforting smile as she rushes past us, but her red-rimmed eyes don’t look up from her feet. 

The woman in the blazer shakes my father’s hand. “Nice to see you again.”

“If only there were better circumstances,” my father says gamely. I shuffle past them and hover by the table. It still has the blue plastic tablecloth on it from when it was Mark’s birthday last week. Trina made gluten-free cupcakes that gave me a stomachache, but that might have been because I had three. On top of the table now rests a thick black binder, an iPhone without a case, and a box of tissues. 

There were no tissues in our house growing up. Runny noses were wiped on frayed sleeves and tears were blinked away until all that remained was a dewy glistening on our eyelashes. The tissues I got to use at school were flimsy and rough—sandpaper scraping away the blood dripping down my chapped lips after one of my winter nosebleeds.

The tissues in this box are soft. Gentle. I take one as I sit, twisting it between my fingers for something to do. Trina was crying—was I going to cry? It would probably help if I did. Everyone loves a sob story.

The woman—Jeannette, my father told me on the drive over—is sitting down now, looking at me expectantly. Did she speak? I didn’t hear her. I look up to my dad, standing at my side, who looks even more mountainous from this angle. 

“You’ll be fine, kiddo,” he says, squeezing my shoulder and bending at the waist to drop a kiss to my forehead. He smells like the aftershave he started using now that he has to wear a tie to work, a heavy scent with notes of cinnamon. I miss the days when he smelled like sweat and gasoline and peppermint gum. “You know what to do.”

Jeanette waits until my father leaves before speaking again. “Before we begin,” she says, opening her binder, “I want to speak with you off the record.”

“Okay.” Off the record is good. It means nothing counts.

“Are you alright? I can only imagine how it must feel to witness something so… awful.”

“I’m fine.” I start to pluck at the tissue in my hands, making tiny tears in the corners. “It’s not like I knew him.”

It’s not the answer Jeannette is expecting if the way her eyes pinch together is any indication. “Right. Well, as I’m sure your father has told you, I work on behalf of the park in cases like these. They call me and I come in and get all of our ducks in a row.”

“Is his… is the man’s family gonna sue?”

“There has been no contact from the deceased’s family yet.”

“But do you think they will?”

“Speculation does nothing for us. Right now I’m simply here to talk to the witnesses—to get our stories straight. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Fabulous.” Jeannette smiles brusquely, her finger hovering over the screen of her iPhone. “Let’s begin.”

She taps the screen.

“State your name and today’s date please.”

I do.

“Please explain what happened, in your own words, on the date of October 9th, 2019.”

“The guy stepped in front of a ball, took it right to the head. I called 911, but he died before the paramedics could get there.” My words are practiced, robotic. “It was a tragic accident.”

Jeannette taps the screen of her phone and leans toward me. “I’m going to need you to give me a bit more detail, sweetheart.”

“Okay.” I nibble at my lower lip until an explosion of copper spills over my tongue. I search my mind, desperately willing it to conjure up something, anything—anything besides the truth: that I have no solid memory of that day besides clocking into work at three and then, hours later, the metallic rasp of the zipper being pulled over the man’s face.

Jeannette resumes recording.

“You were the one who witnessed the incident, yes?”

The incident. I suck my lower lip into my mouth, slurping up the last bit of blood like it’s the syrup pooled at the plastic bottom of the ice pops we used to get during the summer. A pack of ten for a buck-fifty at the gas station, frozen sugar water that stained our lips and tongues. 

“Me and a few other people.”

“But it happened directly in front of you, correct?”

It did, of course it did. My booth is located directly opposite the cages, so that the balls are hit in my direction but caught by the net that hangs in front of my window. There was nowhere else for it to happen, so why can’t I see it?

The tissue in my hand has been shredded, its remains plucked like chicken feathers and resting in a pile on my lap. “Yeah. Yes, it did.”

Jeannette tilts her head. “I imagine that was quite traumatizing.”

“I guess? But like I said, I’m fi–”

Jeanette pauses the recording again and sits back in her chair. She stares at me for a long moment, then leans in once more, almost all the way across the table, the plastic tablecloth scrunching under her elbows as she moves. When she speaks again, her voice is pitched low.

“Listen, the girl I spoke to just before you started sobbing the second she sat down, and you know what she told me?”

I don’t.

“She told me that you stood there gaping like a dead fish while that man lay dying on the ground, that she had to run over from the go-kart track because she heard other guests screaming for help, that she had to tell you to call 911 three times before it even looked like you heard her.”

I look down at my lap, but Jeanette snaps her fingers to get my attention.

“Now there’s two ways to spin that, sweetheart. Either you froze when a man’s life was on the line and now he’s dead and we’re at fault, or his blatant disregard for safety led to an accident so horrific it emotionally damaged two young girls. Do you know which one you want to go with?”

I cross my legs, trapping the remnants of the fancy tissue between my thighs. The chair squeaks. Finally, a question I know the answer to.

“Yes.”

“Good.” Jeanette sits back again, looking pleased. “Now, witnessing a tragedy can have a variety of effects on a person, whether you know anyone involved or not. Even though death is a natural part of life, the first time that we experience it, especially so violently–”

It’s not the first time.

Jeannette’s patronizing words fade to a dull hum as I try to make sense of my sudden thought. It’s jarring in its wrongness, in the way it echoed so loudly in my head. Why would I think that? Both my grandparents are still alive. I’ve never been to a funeral. Hell, we never even had pets growing up, not even a goldfish to flush down the toilet. 

The words whip through my mind again, a taunting whisper. It’s not the first time. 

As Jeannette keeps talking, a memory filters through my consciousness, hazy like a dream. Suddenly, I feel the crisp slap of wind against my face, cold biting at my ankles. I can see the thick green of trees looming impossibly high and a purple rhinestone barrette in the shape of a butterfly, forgotten in the grass. 

“Do you understand?”

I jolt back to myself. “Yes,” I lie, looking Jeannette in the eye. Her eyes are startlingly green, too light for her darker features. It makes her gaze feel sharper, penetrating. I imagine her pacing in a courtroom, glaring down at a defendant, her gaze predatory and exacting. 

She folds her arms across her chest. “Will you repeat to me what I just said?”

I falter, shame heating my face. “Sorry,” I say with a shake of my head. I fumble for an excuse. “I guess… this is hitting me harder than I thought?”

Jeannette’s eyes brighten like this is what she wants to hear. 

“Okay,” she says excitedly. “Good. Great. Lean into that.”

Her enthusiasm is unnerving. I thought, while rehearsing every possible scenario on the drive over here, that she would just want a blanket statement, enough to be able to brush the whole incident under the rug. It did not occur to me that she might actually want this—my discomfort—or that she might enjoy dredging up other peoples’ twisted thoughts and emotions. 

“Walk me through what happened. If at any point you want me to stop recording, just raise your hand and we can take a break.” Jeannette pauses, her perfectly manicured finger poised over her phone. “But, not for nothing, it’ll help our case if we can hear you crying, too.”

I nod. The recording starts again. The incident was only two days ago, but as I speak, my thoughts drift on their own accord, moving further back in time. The words coming out of my mouth are as true as I can hope for them to be, but the memory of the incident is not the scene playing in my head.

“For the first half of my shift that day I was watching the cages. It’s an easy job; just have to make sure everyone follows the rules.”

I am not in my booth at Adventure Zone. Instead, I am in the backseat of our old car, a rusty ‘87 Toyota Corolla with ripped vinyl seats, finger-smudged windows, and the sickly scent of Newports and drugstore perfume clinging to the upholstery. The radio blares classic rock interspersed with static, barely audible over the rushing of the wind through the open windows as we race down the road. It’s too cold for the windows to be open. There was frost on the windshield that morning, and thick, ominous rain clouds darken the sky. I curl up against the bulk of Libby’s car seat as if the plastic will shield me from the bite of the wind. She’s sleeping already, her sippy cup of fruit punch tilted sideways in her lap. We only get to have juice in the car to keep us quiet so our father can focus on the road. I know I will be joining my sister soon; the long drives always make us sleepy.

“And what are the rules?” Jeannette asks.

“No food, no drink, the basics.”

She gives me a pointed look.

“But the most important rule is that you’re not allowed to leave your cage until your time is up.” I start fiddling with the spare elastic on my wrist, twisting it between my fingers. “There are signs all over the place.”

Jeannette gives me a thumbs up, motioning for me to continue.

“The, uh, the incident occurred in Cage 13. There was a man and his son.”

I’m nearly asleep when the rain starts to fall. The car slows down and eases over to the side of the road. A frigid gust of wind slaps against my face when the passenger side door opens and I scrunch up my nose. The girl who climbs in has red hair. Bright red, almost orange, and so much of it. It spills over her shoulders in wispy curls, damp from the rain, droplets clinging to each strand like little transparent pearls. A purple butterfly-shaped barrette is making a futile attempt to hold back all the curls. She looks back over her shoulder and sees us asleep—Libby for real, slumped over in her car seat, and me just pretending, watching through my eyelashes—and smiles. Her braces are blue. 

Cute kids, she says.

They’re a handful, my father replies. His voice is different than it is when he speaks to us. Slower, deeper. Not as silly. Now let’s get you home before your parents start to worry.

I wrap the elastic around the index finger of my left hand as many times as I can, until the tip of my finger starts to turn blue. 

“The return for their lane got jammed or something, and balls started piling up at the base. I turned on the Out of Order sign and radioed maintenance. It looked like the kid was having some kind of tantrum about it, so I was planning to go move them to another cage or offer them a free round for the trouble. Then the kid threw his hat.”

It’s real nice of you to do this, mister. 

You just make a left up here.

I said make a left.

Mister, where are we going?

The rain pelts the roof of the car, loud enough to drown out their voices, steady enough to lull me to sleep for real. When I wake, it is to Libby’s frustrated whining, her chubby legs kicking out from her car seat, one of them missing a shoe. The rain has stopped. I find her stuffed bunny on the floor and wipe the crumbs off it, then wave it in front of her face until she calms down and sticks it into her gummy mouth. The front seats are both empty, but the doors are unlocked. 

“The wind took the hat, blew it down the lane. The man ran after it. I called out to him, but it’s so loud out there, because of the go-karts—”

“You don’t have to say that,” Jeannette says, stopping the recording. She makes a note in her binder. “Just—you called out to him? What did you say?”

I take a deep breath. My tongue runs along the back of my teeth, faster and faster until it starts to hurt. “I called out to him, told him to stop, but he just waved me off, like give me a second. He bent down to grab the hat and then—”

The grass is high when I step out of the car, cold and damp from the rain. It tickles my ankles, exposed in my too-small pants. The car is parked away from the road, close to a thick line of trees. The blue-gray haze of twilight is settling in the sky. It’s past dinner time, and my stomach grumbles with the realization. We need to get home. Why aren’t we home?

The grass grows even higher as I march toward the trees. Something crunches under my foot and I look down to see a shiny purple barrette, shaped like a butterfly. One of the rhinestones has chipped off and there are strands of bright orange hair stuck in the clip.

“Someone hit a foul from a few cages down. The reason people aren’t allowed down the lanes is not just to protect them from the machine, but from the other batters, too. Not every hit flies straight into the net—people hit fouls all the time. This one girl did, cracked it real good. I don’t- I don’t know why he thought it was okay to run out there. Did he think other people would stop hitting? He was just standing up when the ball came out of nowhere and nailed him in the temple. It swung him all the way around, like a cartoon. Then he fell. Right in front of me.”

The grass turns into mud, and my light-up sneakers slip with each step, the wet earth squelching beneath my tiny feet. My father appears out of nowhere, blocking my path. His face is shining, hair curled up around his temples. His jeans are muddy around the knees and his zipper is down, which makes me laugh.

What are you doing? He grabs my arm and spins me around, and starts to drag me back the way I came. Why would you leave your sister alone in the car?

That girl, she dropped this. I hold up the barrette. My mom always gets mad at me when I lose things; I don’t want that girl’s mom to be mad at her. Then I do a double-take, suddenly realizing where I am. Wait, I thought you were bringing her home.

“He didn’t bleed. Isn’t that weird? It didn’t even break the skin. And then there was all the yelling. I called 911, but it was too late by the time they got there. He was so… stiff. Still holding the barrette.”

“The barrette?”

“Uh, the hat. The kid’s hat.” 

My father swipes a hand down over his face, wiping away the wild look in his eyes and replacing it with a strained smile. I did. I brought her home.

I frown. She lives in the woods?

Well, of course. He crouches down to my level. All fairies live in the woods.

She’s a fairy?! I love fairies. I wear my Tinkerbell pajamas to bed every night.

You can’t tell anyone. My father presses a finger to his lips. She asked me to bring her home because she knew we would keep her secret. That we were special people. And we are, aren’t we?

I nod enthusiastically. He pats my cheek. His hand smells like dirt and something else that I can’t place—a thick, heady smell that I am not old enough to know about yet. Good girl.

But what about her—

She wanted you to keep it. My father clasps the barrette into my hair. A bit of fairy magic to keep with you. And a reminder not to tell anyone her secret. 

When I’m done, Jeannette looks full, satiated. Like my horror is her sustenance. Suddenly I feel cold and distant, as if I just woke up from a nightmare and am struggling to figure out what is real. 

Jeannette turns off the recording with a satisfied smile. “I think we’re done here.”

When I stand to leave, all the tissue shreds fall to the floor.

I wait in the car until it’s time for my father to take his lunch break. I keep the windows down but the music off, listening to the dull murmurs of people coming and going throughout the parking lot and the distant roar of the highway beyond the trees. It’s Saturday, and Libby is at a friend’s house for the day, so when I get home I have the house all to myself. My father leaves me on the couch with a 4 for $4 from Wendy’s on my lap and a rerun of NCIS on the TV. 

The episode finishes, and my cold food still sits untouched. I get up and make my way to my bedroom, where I open the door to my closet and sink to my knees. It’s an astounding mess, shoved to the brim with shoes that don’t fit and old Halloween costumes and winter coats that I have yet to put away for the season. I dig through everything until I find the pale pink jewelry box that I used as a kid, tossed in the corner and scuffed with dirt from one of my boots. I pull it onto my lap and open the lid.

The ballerina still spins, though the music doesn’t work anymore, with a pathetic, distorted warbling left in its place. Amongst the cheap costume jewelry of my childhood are a few things that I don’t recognize, nestled in the velvet like they belong: a gold chain holding a heart-shaped locket, a single diamond stud, a beaded bracelet with a plastic charm shaped like a horse. 

I don’t have pierced ears. Horses terrify me. 

But perhaps these items are forgotten treasures of my sister’s; her life has always overflowed into mine. Unwanted vegetables pushed onto my plate, a tiny, sleep-warmed body wriggled up against mine in the middle of the night, clothes perpetually tossed onto my side of the room until my father finally finished the basement and gave her a space all her own. 

I close the lid of the jewelry box and slide open the thin drawer on the bottom. Or try to, because it jams halfway, and I stick my finger through the crack and shove at whatever is blocking it until it gives way. The culprit is a pair of yellow heart-shaped sunglasses—these I remember; how the tag said $4.99 and eight-year-old me was excited because I had a crisp five to spend all on my own at the beach. I remember the woman at the counter explaining to me how tax worked, how the five wasn’t going to be enough. I remember how she looked at me for a long time before sighing and taking my money anyway, telling me that it was dangerous that I was so cute, that a face like mine could get away with murder.

I pick up the sunglasses, but there’s something else in the drawer behind them. A purple barrette, shaped like a butterfly. Its rhinestones are still shimmering, all there except for one. 

My father was right—we can’t trust our memories. Before, the girl from the car had curly red hair, blue braces. 

I clip the barrette into my hair. Now, as I remember the girl, she looks just like me.