The car comes to a momentary stop, suspended above the drop, building anticipation. Its passengers are already waving their hands above their heads, eager grins splitting their faces. They’re ready.
Then, just as the generic rock song reaches a particularly dramatic crescendo, the car releases from its perch, plummeting straight down. It’s like watching people get unceremoniously thrown into the abyss.
But they all love it. Their screams signal release. The cacophony of voices is thrilled, a little bit terrified. They want to be scared.
I watch until I can’t anymore, then bury my face in Henry’s shoulder.
“Hey, Rika.” His voice turns concerned. “We don’t have to go on any rides if you don’t want to—I was just kidding. But what is it? Are you scared of heights?”
“No.” I shake my head against his shoulder, still unwilling to look at the roller coaster. “Not heights.”
I take a deep breath and lift my head, meeting his gaze.
“I’m scared of . . . losing control.”
He stares at me, looking perplexed.
“I . . .” I try to put the right words together. What is it about this boy that makes me want to say things? Especially things I’m used to shoving so far down that I forget they exist.
Maybe it’s because I know he doesn’t ask to hear these things because he wants to use them against me or make fun of me or tally them up as weaknesses. He genuinely wants to know.
“When you go on a roller coaster, there’s always that moment when you lose control,” I say. “You’re in this situation where your body’s thrown all over the place—you’re basically being tossed off a cliff.” I gesture to the new car of people reaching the top of the big drop. “And in that moment, you can’t hold anything in—you just can’t. Every feeling you’ve been having, every emotion you’ve been shoving down or holding so tightly comes tumbling out. You can’t stop it. You scream. You have to feel things.”
The rock music builds to its uninteresting crescendo yet again, the car releases, and everyone screams their heads off.
“My temper is always trying to get the better of me,” I say, my eyes glued to this bumpy descent. “It takes everything I have to shove it down. But on a roller coaster . . . all that goes away. You can’t shove anything down.”
Silence falls between us as we watch carload after carload of people get tossed off the punishing drop, yelling all the way and loving every minute.
“Maybe that’s what you need right now,” Henry says.
I give him a look.
“I’m serious!” he presses. “You’re dealing with this whole snarl of feelings over all these things you can’t control—like whether you ever find Grace or not. But you’re holding on to them so tightly, they’re about to eat you alive.”
I can’t help but remember what Joanna said—about all my anger, that tight ball in my chest that gets bigger every day, burning me up inside.
Henry turns so he’s facing me, his hands on my shoulders.
“I’m not going to push you to do anything you don’t want to. If you’d really rather keep it all locked up here”—he gestures to his chest, closing his hand into a tight fist—“we can skip the rides and go straight to the cheese. But I feel like maybe you want to let some of that stuff out? To scream? Maybe it would feel good, even.”
I look at him for a moment, my eyes wandering from his hopeful expression to the coaster and back again. My stew of feelings—all that frustration that bubbled up earlier, all those tears I didn’t want to cry in front of Joanna—is thrumming through my bloodstream, my kaiju-temper pounding eagerly at my breastbone. I imagine ordering them back, shoving them down once again. Letting my armor surround me and turning my back on the coaster. Going to eat fried cheese with Henry, allowing all that carby goodness to settle in my stomach, and casting my tight knot of feelings out to sea.
That thought should comfort me, this idea that I can reset myself so easily.
Instead it makes me twitchy. Like all these feelings rising up inside of me are my own personal onryo, and no matter how much I try to banish them . . . they’ll always rise up again. I feel the same way whenever Craig says something awful to me. Whenever I feel disconnected from my family. Whenever I get called a mistake by the neighborhood gossipmongers or someone refers to me as a fraction or looks at me like I’m a puzzle instead of a person. It doesn’t go away and it doesn’t get better. It just lives inside of me, and it’s like Joanna said—I start to believe it’s true. The onryo that is my shoved-down feelings always comes back to haunt me.
“Let’s do it,” I say impulsively.
I grab Henry’s hand and start towing him toward the roller coaster.
“What, really?” He lets out a surprised laugh. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m not scared of a carnival ride. And this is how you wanted to celebrate, right? And . . . maybe I do want to let some feelings out. We’ll just have to see.”
I drag him over to the booth in front of the coaster, and we buy our tickets and get in line.
“So I told you why I don’t usually do roller coasters,” I say, shifting from one foot to the other. I can’t believe I committed to this. What the hell am I thinking? “Why do you love them so much?”
“Hmm,” he says. “I think it’s actually the same reason you don’t like them—that loss of control. I spend so much of my life worrying about what people think of me—whether it’s my parents or a casting director or someone who posted a
