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worked at the fair, and he said most of the guys who put these rides together are dead drunk and they leave off all sorts of . . .”
    â€œGo to hell,” she said merrily, “nobody lives forever.”
    â€œBut everybody tries, you ever notice that?” he said, following her into one of the swaying gondolas.
    As a matter of fact he got to kiss her several times at the top, with the October wind ruffling their hair and the midway spread out below them like a glowing clockface in the dark.
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    After the Ferris wheel they did the carousel, even though he told her quite honestly that he felt like a horse’s ass. His legs were so long that he could have stood astride one of the plaster horses. She told him maliciously that she had known a girl in high school who had had a weak heart, except nobody knew she had a weak heart and she had gotten on the carousel with her boyfriend and . . .
    â€œSomeday you’ll be sorry,” he told her with quiet sincerity. “A relationship based on lies is no good, Sarah.”
    She gave him a very moist raspberry.
    After the carousel came the mirror maze, a very good mirror maze as a matter of fact, it made her think of the one in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, where the little-old-lady schoolteacher almost got lost forever. She could see Johnny in another part of it, fumbling around, waving to her. Dozens of Johnnies, dozens of Sarahs. They bypassed each other, flickered around non-Euclidian angles, and seemed to disappear. She made left turns, right turns, bumped her nose on panes of clear glass, and got giggling helplessly, partly in a nervous claustrophobic reaction. One of the mirrors turned her into a squat Tolkien dwarf. Another created the apotheosis of teenage gangliness with shins a quarter of a mile long.
    At last they escaped and he got them a couple of fried hot dogs and a Dixie cup filled with greasy french fries that tasted the way french fries hardly ever do once you’ve gotten past your fifteenth year.
    They passed a kooch joint. Three girls stood out front in sequined skirts and bras. They were shimmying to an old Jerry Lee Lewis tune while the barker hawked them through a microphone.“Come on over baby,” Jerry Lee blared, his piano boogying frankly across the sawdust-sprinkled arcades. “Come on over baby, baby got the bull by the horns . . . we ain’t fakin . . . whole lotta shakin goin on . . .”
    â€œClub Playboy,” Johnny marveled, and laughed. “There used to be a place like this down at Harrison Beach. The barker used to swear the girls could take the glasses right off your nose with their hands tied behind their backs.”
    â€œIt sounds like an interesting way to get a social disease,” Sarah said, and Johnny roared with laughter.
    Behind them the barker’s amplified voice grew hollow with distance, counterpointed by Jerry Lee’s pumping piano, music like some mad, dented hot rod that was too tough to die, rumbling out of the dead and silent fifties like an omen. “Come on, men, come on over, don’t be shy because these girls sure aren’t, not in the least little bit! It’s all on the inside . . . your education isn’t complete until you’ve seen the Club Playboy show . . .”
    â€œDon’t you want to go on back and finish your education?” she asked.
    He smiled. “I finished my basic course work on that subject some time ago. I guess I can wait a while to get my Ph.D.”
    She glanced at her watch. “Hey, it’s getting late, Johnny. And tomorrow’s a school day.”
    â€œYeah. But at least it’s Friday.”
    She sighed, thinking of her fifth-period study hall and her seventh-period New Fiction class, both of them impossibly rowdy.
    They had worked their way back to the main part of the midway. The crowd was thinning. The Tilt-A-Whirl