Free Wicked Games by Sean Olin Page A

atmosphere carry them along.
    Jules pointed at a stand surrounded by children. “The goldfish game!” she yelped, and she raced ahead of Carter toward it. They put all their energy into getting the Ping-Pong ball into the goldfish bowl, taking turns, lobbing the balls at various arcs and angles, laughing and cursing each of the balls as it ricocheted off the lip of another bowl.
    And when they gave up on that they moved on to throwing darts at balloons, dropping basketballs into the undersized hoop, shooting the cutout ducks with the air rifle. Jules pretended that she wasn’t as touched as she was by Carter’s careful, protective way of navigating her through the throngs clogging the alleyways, that she took less joy than she actually did at watching Carter flare with competitive spirit as he tried to get the beanbags into the fifty-point hole.
    “You don’t understand,” he said. “I really, really, really want that AC/DC mirror.”
    “These games are all rigged,” Jules said with a laugh.“Let’s go do the Tilt-A-Whirl and see if we can make ourselves throw up.”
    And off they went.
    An hour and a half later, having exhausted the rides, they ended up in the food court, standing at a high, round table near an ivy-covered wall of the Harpoon Haven food court, a cardboard box of popcorn between them.
    “So, if you could be anywhere in the entire world, doing anything you wanted right this minute, where would you be and what would you be doing?” asked Carter.
    Jules tapped her lip with one finger and thought about this. She plucked a few kernels of popcorn from the container and dropped one of them onto her tongue.
    “Eventually?” she said. “I’d want to be on Broadway, starring in
Wicked
. Or the next
Wicked
, whatever that might be. You know? Working with the writer and the director to develop and put on a new amazing show.”
    “You don’t want to be a movie star?”
    Jules shook her head. “No.” She dropped another piece of popcorn onto her tongue. “I mean, I wouldn’t turn it down, obviously. But I don’t know. There’s something so narcissistic about Hollywood. I’m not so interested in being famous.” She studied his face for a reaction. “I know, you think it’s stupid. Everybody does. They say, ‘Why do you want to be an actress if you don’t care about being famous?’”
    Carter bobbed his head slightly as he contemplated what she was saying. The seriousness with which he listened to her was disarming. She wasn’t used to guys taking the time to try to understand the nuances of her hopes and dreams. “I don’t think it’s stupid,” he said. “But what do you like so much about acting?”
    “The craft, maybe? Like, the work. Just being in the room. Exploring the play or musical and working through the hundreds of decisions that have to be made to turn it into a great work of art. It’s hard to explain.”
    “I think I get it,” said Carter. “It’s like what happens when I’m deep in an experiment. I see this goal out there ahead of me, like, this possibility that I can’t quite reach. And it’s like time disappears. It’s like
I
disappear. I can spend hours standing over the microscope, taking notes on every little change going on in the petri dish and putting together all the ways these changes do and don’t prove my hypothesis. The only way I know that time’s passing at all is that I have to choose a new album on my iPhone.”
    “Exactly. That’s what happens to me when I’m onstage. There’s a presentness. Like I’m right there at that moment and nothing else exists.”
    She looked up at the white lights strung in loops above the food court and realized that right now she was feeling the same presentness she’d just described. She took in this moment, with Carter across from her,amazed at how easy, how natural it felt. She would have been happy if it never ended, and she wondered if Carter was feeling the same thing.
    “I’m so glad you get it,”