Knott’s Berry Farm was a Wild West themed amusement park, complete with ghost town, kiddie camp, a working locomotive frequented by bandits, and a fiesta village where we spun in giant sombreros. Us girls, they dropped off by the front gates, with ticket money and a coupon printed on the back of a Coke can. Wait here at nine o’clock, our parents said. Ingat.
Althea and I peeled away our jackets and tied the sleeves around our waists, revealing white tank tops that accentuated our brown shoulders and small breasts. We freed our ponytails and shook our hair between our knees. For makeup, we ate funnel cake, allowing powdered sugar to settle on our eyelashes and boysenberry to stain our lips. We roamed the park in fresh bodies, keen to enjoy our adolescent autonomy. So atypical of the restrictions we endured most days, within Knott’s turnstiles, we could do as we pleased—so long as we met minimum height requirements.
We tumbled in red pods, gyrating end over end like bicycle pedals. Metal arms scrambled and whirled us in time to music, strobe lights twitching, illuminating the pink insides of our mouths. Conveyor belts aimed our raft into rapids. We squealed when we drifted beneath waterfalls, eager to emerge wet and glistening. Ride after ride, we sought controlled highs, each adrenalin rush more intense than the last. Every spin, every drop, fed the trembling our bodies were hungry to appease. And sometimes, when that wasn’t enough, we rode with boys, their shoulders nudging against ours, their spread legs cupping our backs.
Boomerang, a blue steel rollercoaster, launched us forward into loops and corkscrews, then zipped backwards to trace its flight in reverse. The line for Boomerang was easily the longest in the park and on hot days, misters drizzled water over us while we waited. Althea and I had packed a small radio and set it to 92.3 The Beat. We pumped music through the restless line, making us its moving epicenter, the songs coaxing dancing and singing from those nearest. We made what we could of the attention, smiling and nodding at boys.
Posted warning signs merited only cursory glances. Remain seated with hands, arms, feet, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Do not ride if you have a heart condition or abnormal blood pressure. Do not ride if you have back or neck problems. Do not ride if you are pregnant or might be pregnant.
The last, we held like talisman to our chests.
But we were careful, Althea and I. We’d watched couples wander into the ride filled with groaning animatronic dinosaurs, seen the girls blinking and prodding their swollen lips outside the exit. We knew what happened to girls like us who became buntis—cousins sent away to the Philippines, where lolas worried over their expanding bellies, praying for Mary’s intercession. No more flips or falls. No more distractions. What they left—one less cousin around the potluck table, one more name to speak only in shadow.
Your first time is a freebie.
That’s not true. You have to use protection.
I’d use two.
Me too.
Afterwards, if you shake a bottle of Coke and spray it inside, the soda kills all the stuff.
Must be the carbonation. What if that doesn’t work?
Rosemary. Cinnamon. Clove. Grind it up and shove it in there.
And if that still doesn’t work? A hanger—my God.
Get really drunk.
Crash a car into a wall.
Or jump from a bridge.
At thirteen, we were not afraid to speak aloud what we already knew—we would rather die than let them see the secrets of our bodies exposed. They had taught us enough about hiya, that we feared the weight of its shame crushing us.
Adrift in hollowed out artificial logs, we trailed our fingers in the chlorinated river, then stood, arms wide, daring the darkness to strike us. We stared over the precipice.
I could just stand up and jump right out, you know.
I know.
We could just jump right out.
We held each other and braced for the fall, flinching at the spray of water.
We stood in open-topped cages, flimsy parachutes hovering above us. A thin clasp secured the latch and up our cage went, two hundred feet high. Above the southern California smog, we hoped to see the ocean, but a hazy marine layer obscured the horizon. Still, we saw what we had seen from the ground.
I could just unlatch this and jump right out, you know.
I know.
We could just jump right out.
The cable rattled and whistled when we plummeted, fake parachute quivering.
We liked to sit in the back, where the drops felt highest and most perilous. We waited our turn behind metal bars, and when the coaster rushed through the station in a blur, our hair slapped across our faces like black flags.
I could just duck under this bar and jump in front of it, you know.
I know.
We could just jump right in front of it.
The bar swung wide and we climbed aboard, sliding the straps of our backpacks around our ankles, so nothing fell out during the flips.
What if Boomerang malfunctioned? What if after the first loop and into the corkscrew, the ride stopped mid-scream, emergency brakes screeching, shoulder restraints locking us into place upside down? People would gather beneath to catch coins falling from our pockets. Look at those girls, they’d say, pointing at how gravity pulled at our hair. Emergency crews would ascend the blue spiral access steps reaching from the ground to the first loop. They’d crank the coaster back and drag us from our seats. That, or scrape us from the cement.
Not us—we have the Coke.
We already used the can with the coupon on the back.
A hanger?
My God.
A car crash.
Spinning sombreros?
Not enough.
The parachutes.
I’m not sure I have the nerve.
Dysentery then. Ride Montezuma’s Revenge forty times.
A hundred.
Until everything inside comes out.
Would you ride with me?
Yes. I’ll ride with you.
Ride or die was our pact and promise—the only choices we ever allowed ourselves.
Like ghosts, we joined the line of girls entering a haunted wooden shack. When asked for volunteers to climb a chair mounted to the wall, we raised our hands and tried to stand. The floors tilted. We held our arms out for balance. We weren’t afraid, not even when we felt gravity pushing against our legs and saw water flowing uphill.
A yellow steel coaster, shaped like a cursive letter e and consisting of only a loop and two spikes, Montezuma’s Revenge lasted a brief thirty-five seconds. Acceleration into the loop, up the spike, reverse through the same loop, up another spike and down. While Boomerang was a sentence, Montezuma was not even a word—just a gasp, a few shouts.
Once, we rode Montezuma’s Revenge forty-four times. That day, the line was run-through. After the first two dozen euphoric rides, we became relentless in our pursuit to ratchet the count higher and higher still. We clambered from our seats and raced back through the line again and again, but it was just for fun, we said—a world record only Althea and I would ever know about. Or maybe it was practice, preparation for what we would do if needed.
Before each ride, attendants walked the length of the coaster, bending down at every seat, shoving lap bars down hard, so the metal pressed against our waists. That time, Althea, who was thin and small, pulled the bar down only a little, and laid her forearm straight atop her knee, preventing the bar from latching at her lap, leaving a large gap between the bar and her body.
The coaster hurtled us toward the first loop. I prayed to Mary that centrifugal force would hold Althea to her seat, expecting to see her slip free and hit the track. Into the loop. Up. Down. Backwards into the same loop. Upside down again, Althea still beside me. We untangled our legs from the straps of our backpacks.
What happened?
The bar slammed down when we went into the flip.
We scraped our lips along the hems of our shirts, the tender flesh curling up in dark purple shadows, erasing all traces of boysenberry. Jackets zipped closed, we left our hair loose and free in the cool night air. At nine o’clock, we stood where they’d dropped us.
Later, seatbelts taut across our laps, we breathed in the dark quiet, watching the hypnotic wink of orange lamps along the freeway. Like sleep after a day at the beach, phantom waves tugging at our bodies, we remembered the dip and whirl of every ride, the feel of our hair lifting from our necks as we fell. Eyes closed, we sensed the smooth lightness of traffic, this last ride hurrying us home.
