“Oh Johnny, I do like you.”

“I like you even more than that,” he said seriously.

“Take me on the Ferris wheel,” she demanded suddenly, smiling. No more talk like this until she had a chance to consider it, to think where it might be leading. “I want to go up high where we can see everything.”

“Can I kiss you at the top?”

“Twice, if you're quick.”

He allowed her to lead him to the ticket booth, where he surrendered another dollar bill. As he paid he told her, “When I was in high school, I know this kid who 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…”

“Co to hell,” she said merrily, “nobody lives forever.”

“But 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.

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 she had gotten on the carousel with her boyfriend and…

“Someday 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-oldlady 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 nonEuclidian 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 Tolkein dwarf. Another created the apotheoeis of teenage gangliness with shins a quarter of a mile long.