Page 43 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“Go ahead,” I tell him. “I’ll catch up.”

He looks where I’m looking. He grins in a way I don’t love. “Uh huh. Sure you will.”

I don’t wait to hear the rest. I’m already moving, cutting sideways through the crowd, apologizing to approximately nine people whose feet I step on, because there is a woman thirty feet away wearing an invitation on her chest and I have questions.

By the time I get close enough to actually see her face, she’s already turned half away, laughing at something her friend said, Bomb Pop halfway to her mouth again.

“It’s your birthday?” I call out, because apparently that’s the sentence my brain landed on.

She hears me. I know she hears me because she gives me one look. One. Just a glance over one shoulder, quick and wicked. And then, because apparently she enjoys watching me suffer, she licks the Bomb Pop again, slow, deliberate, eyes locked on mine the entire time, and disappears into the crowd like she was never there.

“Wait.” I say it to no one, because she’s gone, folded into a family of six and a stroller the size of a golf cart.

I look down at my hands. I have no gift. Granted, I didn’t know it was her birthday, but if only I hadn’t given away all my special edition sticks. Then again, who’s to say she’d want a hockey stick? Maybe she’d rather have a watch. I chuckle thinking about it, and go back to join my teammates.

The second the parade officially ends, I’m out of formation before Coach Badaszek finishes the closing remarks, jersey untucked, moving through the crowd like a man with somewhere urgent to be. Because I do. I have somewhere urgent to be. I just don’t know where that is yet.

“Hey, Zesty. Zesty! Where’s the fire?”

Kingston jogs to catch up, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, grinning like he’s already got the whole story and just wants to hear me say it out loud.

“I’ll see you guys later,” I say, and I’m already moving, already cutting sideways through a crowd that’s thickening by the minute as everyone drains off Constitution Avenue toward the National Mall, where the festival’s cranking up. The Mall in the noon heat is chaos… a Ferris wheel turning slow against a vivid blue sky, a country band tuning up somewhere near the Ellipse, the smell of funnel cake and fry oil in the air. And closer, a kid is screaming with either delight or genuine terror at a ring toss booth, hard to say which.

I move through it fast, scanning the festival grounds, past the smell of jerk chicken and duck fat fries. I push through the crowd past a ring toss booth, past a guy dramatically failing to win his girlfriend a stuffed bear at the strength test hammer game, past a line of people waiting for the dunking game and a water gun setup where kids blast streams at bobbing rubber ducks, half-missing, spraying strangers, nobody caring because it’s ninety-eight degrees and everyone’s already sweating through their shirt anyway.

But she’s nowhere to be found. No cutoff shorts, no birthday shirt, no Bomb Pop.

I’m starting to think I imagined the whole thing, some kind of heatstroke hallucination brought on by… well, let’s face it. That horse smell is still lingering in my nostrils.

Then, there. A flash of denim. That ponytail. Gone again around the side of a striped tent before I can even be sure it’s her.

“No,” I say out loud, to nobody, startling a woman holding two churros. “Not again.”

I move faster. Sweat runs down my spine. My jersey is sticking to my back now. My eyes lock on the spot where she disappeared. I round the tent and there’s nothing, just a family arguing about whether to get the fried Oreos or the chocolate covered bananas, and I have to physically restrain myself from asking them if they’ve seen a woman in a birthday shirt run past, because that is, objectively, an insane question to ask strangers.

I scan the crowd like I’m reading ice, looking for the gap nobody else sees, picking up my pace. I pass a milk bottle throw where the carny tries to wave me over, tells me I’ve got the arm for it, and I don’t stop long enough to find out if that’s true.

Then I see her again, thirty feet ahead, and this time she’s looking right at me. She smiles, slow and knowing, backs up two steps, and slips sideways into a boxy plywood trailer with a crooked sign that reads HALL OF MIRRORS in chipped red carnival lettering over a doorway shaped like a clown’s mouth, which is deeply unsettling in a way I don’t have time to unpack.

She looks over her shoulder one more time before she vanishes inside. It is, without question, the single most dangerous look a human being has ever given me.

I go in after her.

A teenage attendant waves me through without even asking for a ticket, possibly because I’m still wearing an Olympic medal and a national team jersey, possibly because he simply doesn’t care. Either way, I duck through the flap and the outside noise cuts off like someone hit mute, replaced by the low hum of a box fan somewhere and my own breathing.

It’s dark in here, and hot in a different way than outside, a trapped, airless heat that makes the jersey feel even worse.

And there’s mirrors. Everywhere. Floor to ceiling, angled every direction, so that I turn my head and there are forty versions of me turning my head back, each one looking slightly more unhinged than the last.

“Hello?”

My voice comes back at me from six directions. No answer.

I take a step forward, and my reflection splits into three, then five, walls of glass leading off at angles that don’t seem to obey any layout logic. Somewhere to my left, fabric moves. I turn. Nothing but my own face, distorted long and thin in a warped panel, looking like I’ve been stretched on a rack.

“This is ridiculous,” I say, to nobody, to forty of myself.

I catch a shape, ahead and to the right, the outline of a woman, dark hair, and I move toward it fast enough that I nearly walk face-first into a mirror, my own reflection rushing up at me at full speed before I throw a hand out and catch the glass instead of my nose.