It took like an hour to get to Coney Island from Rockaway, so Kayla and Heiley never went much before, but that was the summer Heiley wanted to ride rides next to screaming boys she didn’t know who pretended to their friends that they weren’t scared afterwards. They had to take the Q35 across the bay all the way into Flatbush, and then the train back down.  

They wore their bikini tops even though the wind came off the ocean thick and cold, and kept their uniforms in their backpacks so they could change back before they got home. They took off their door knockers to get tossed through the Aviator’s colored light while “Six Foot Seven Foot” blared at them from huge cheap speakers. They rode the swings, which spun the world beneath them. They rode the Viking ship, which went back and forth for way too long, the safety bar pressing bruises into their thighs. Kayla wanted to ride the Cyclone but Heiley didn’t. It had given her dad sciatica. Heiley’s dad was a cop. He was going to sue. In Rockaway, Kayla might have gone for a swim despite the cold but Heiley said that no one goes in the water at Coney except for single moms wearing t-shirts over their bathing suits who don’t care that they’re wading through diaper soup.  

Heiley was hungry so they split a paper boat of cheese fries and watched a white man with a combover lining up the paintball rifle mounted to the boardwalk’s back rail at the Shoot the Freak booth. “Gonna shoot that freak,” the man mumbled to himself. “Gonna shoot that fucking freak in his fucking eye.” Heiley laughed and the man turned to look at her and Kayla hit her on the arm. A plywood sign hung from the fence in the lot’s back with spray-painted letters reading “NO HEAD SHOTS.” 

The freak wore a V for Vendetta mask anchored to his head with a red baseball cap and a white t-shirt, unsplotched and immaculate except for the creases marking where it had been folded in its package, and so large that it hung off him like a nightgown. He loped through the plastic piña colada tubes and mustard-smeared deli paper littering his pit. The mask’s nose poked out obscenely when the freak took shelter behind a makeshift lean-to, the boards marked with a dull rainbow of old missed shots.  

“You like that,” Kayla said, elbowing Heiley. “You like the freak.” 

“Ew,” Heiley said. “You know he’s all Quasimodo under that thing.” 

“You mean Phantom of the Opera.” 

“Same shit.” 

The man swiveled the rifle, tracking the freak’s movements. Kayla imagined another gun mounted to their plastic table at Nathan’s and the look on the man’s face when he felt them there, when he realized that he wasn’t the hunter after all. 

“Yo, fuck you,” the freak shouted.  

There was a violent puff and then the plywood board below thunked and shook with the new pink dripping down its surface. “Straight busta,” shouted the freak. He was tall but just a kid like them, twiggy limbs and a whiny, nasal voice. His eyes were light through the holes in the cheap mask, which didn’t look like it would offer much protection if it were hit.  

“Always you let freak talk like that to you?” the attendant said, his accent milky, his voice loud enough that the man knew Kayla and Heiley could hear. The man looked back at them. Kayla knew he would have swiveled the plastic rifle on her and Heiley if it was able to turn that far. Heiley adjusted her bikini top. The man cursed and handed more bills to the attendant.  

• 

That summer, sometimes after work, Kayla began riding out to Coney Island by herself. It cost three dollars for five shots or ten for twenty to try to shoot the freak. She never told Heiley when she went but did ask her to show her how to use a gun. Kayla knew Heiley wouldn’t ask why. Heiley didn’t really think too much about other people, which was why it was easy to be friends with her. But Heiley said her dad only taught her brothers to shoot, so they looked it up online instead. Heiley’s house had DSL. Sometimes they used the internet to chat with other girls, claiming that Galadriel718’s A/S/L was 32/M/Manhattan. “Just keep them talking,” Heiley would say. It was so easy. The other girls were from towns with unpronounceable names in states Kayla had barely heard of, and the ones who called them a pervert or a sexual predator were always also the ones most desperate for anyone, even a pervert or a sexual predator, to listen to them. Sometimes the girls sent photos. If ur ever here lets meet up, I can give u everything, Kayla would type, and Heiley would laugh and sometimes spit Town House cracker crumbs on the screen.  

They found a hunting and firearms message board, which was mostly arguments about licensing and lock boxes, but some of it was good, like the guy who wrote that you should exhale before you pulled the trigger and when you did, to let the future flow like water to fill the present, so when you saw the target being struck you couldn’t be sure if you were imagining it or if it was real life. Another guy said to always aim for the center of your target’s body so if you missed you might still graze a leg, a neck.  

On the train, Kayla tried to let the future flow like water to fill the present. She imagined the freak in the V for Vendetta mask—his head snapping back, his shoes flying off, his body dissolving into neon mist—like scenes from a movie she’d already watched. She never talked to Heiley about going back to Coney Island and never told her mom about any of it. Her mom worked doubles and only cared about Kayla getting the grades to keep her scholarship to St. Joseph’s. It felt good to have a secret, and Kayla wondered if that’s how the girls online felt when she told them New York was made of glass and leather.  

It was hard to hit the freaks because the paintball rifle was uncalibrated and you could fire consecutive rounds without moving the barrel an inch and one would strike the middle of the board and the other would piff in a wisp of neon dust at the back of the lot. The only maintenance Serge did on the gun was to trick out the pressure tank so the paintballs shot out harder, which made the freaks shout louder when they got hit. At first Kayla thought Serge was just the attendant, but it turned out he owned the booth. Kayla couldn’t tell how old he was. The sun-carved lines in his face were like cracks in the desert and he liked to talk about the moral superiority of the Soviet system, though Kayla suspected he’d never been much further from Brighton Beach than the folding chair he sat in. She wasn’t even sure his accent was real.  

“Is problem of accountability,” Serge said once, watching an oiled and shirtless man with a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck strut through the boardwalk’s weekend crowd. Coney Island had started to fill up now that school was out and the weather was getting hot, the sea air lingering close with sweat and coconut sunscreen. “This one, he shows off his snake because he only is accountable to himself. He has no community so he makes choice to scare babies instead.” 

“I’m not scared,” Kayla said, wiping sweat from her face to line up a shot. 

“You are not baby,” Serge said. “You have gun.” 

Dexter was the first freak Kayla hit. He was older than the other freaks, and wore a torn rubber mask of a grotesque old man’s face. He didn’t run so much as ooze, and his insults were mumbled and incoherent. Kayla knew there was something different about that shot while she lined it up. It was like she was in her body but also somewhere else, herself but also the paintball and also its future trajectory, and when she pulled the trigger she felt the pressurized air eject her out of the chamber and down the crooked barrel, the crags throwing her out of true and into an evening warm and pliant with weed smoke and shadows. It was like she had read about on the message boards but also not like that at all. Kayla hadn’t even been aiming at Dexter but held him somewhere just behind her eyes, seeing him and not seeing him at the same time.  

The pellet grazed Dexter’s shoulder and splatted a bright starburst across it, spinning him around like he’d reached the end of a leash. Then he tripped over his own shoes and fell into the lot’s dust and trash. It looked exaggerated, like a slapstick pratfall. The weekend crowd had gathered behind Kayla and everyone went quiet for a second and then exploded into a weird mix of violent sympathy and scared laughter. When Dexter stood up, his mask was askew, one eyehole over his ear, bright red old man lips flapping loose over the side of his jaw. 

“Good,” Serge said, and he gripped the barrel of the paintball rifle and lowered it, like he was shaking her hand. “Soon you can maybe shoot freaks who do not want to get shot.” 

The name of the freak in the V for Vendetta mask was Alan. Kayla learned Alan’s schedule—Wednesday afternoons, Thursday and Saturday nights. Alan didn’t want to get shot, and no one ever shot Alan. It was like he was made of wind as he glided across the filthy lot in long, lightfooted strides, shouting that Kayla was a mark-ass bitch as he tiptoed strewn Burger King bags like stones dotting the surface of a lake. He seemed alive in the pit in a way the other freaks didn’t. She knew the stains from her closest near-misses—a purple smear on the plywood lean-to that had almost nicked the brim of Alan’s cap, a green one burst on the concrete at the rear of the pit from where he’d stopped abruptly and his jeans shifted with the passing pellet. Not even rain washed them away. They were going to be there for a long, long time. 

Except that it turned out that the Shoot the Freak booth was going to close. New developers were coming to revitalize the boardwalk. Serge had refused their buyout check, so far. “They say Shoot The Freak attraction interferes with plans to make park more friendly for family,” he said. “I say, look.” He waved vaguely towards crowd that had gathered around the booth. They wanted to see the shooter humiliated or the freak shot and didn’t care which. It was Saturday night.  

“I say, do you see family here? Children, they scream for toy bear, for video game, for treat, always for treat? Family, like men who stare at round breast and ass like dog at butcher shop window? With fat wife like old car that runs on daquiri but gauge is on ‘E?’” 

Alan shambled out, his arms through the holes of his spotless t-shirt flowing like streamers behind him. She traced his movements back and forth in the lot through the crooked sight. Kayla’s first shot sailed over his head, breaking against the cinder blocks at the back of the pit.  

“Who is better gunman?” Serge called to the crowd. “Who here can shoot the immaculate freak?” 

From the crowd there were words not about her aim, but her ass, about the things she could do or have done to her. Threats that begged. They were the night air and what flew through it. 

“You see. These families, they do not want friendly, they want violence,” Serge said, turning back to Kayla. “So I give them it. I provide for them violence, and then they do not unleash this part of themselves on people they love.” 

“Serge,” Kayla said. She couldn’t concentrate. Her next shot kicked up a puff of colored dust in front of Alan and way to the right. 

“Ay yo, fuck you,” Alan yelled. 

“He is freak nobody can touch,” Serge called to the crowd.  

Alan stopped moving entirely, as if daring her. His eyes flashed contempt at her through the holes in the mask. 

“How does it feel to you,” Serge said, quietly now, just to her. “How does it feel to have private moment with everyone watching, moment when you can be yourself, willing to do irredeemable things, things you would not do without permission?”  

She lined Alan’s chest up, exhaled, let the trigger slip back under her finger and it was like Alan disappeared as she did. It felt good but it felt bad, too, and she didn’t want to think about which was which. The shot skipped past him and then some scrubby weeds in the back of the lot dripped electric orange. 

“Straight garbage,” Alan yelled. 

• 

Heiley lived in Breezy Point, which is the part of Rockaway where cops live. Some firemen live there too, for diversity. You should see their lawns. Sometimes Kayla and Heiley joined the other kids who oozed through Breezy Point’s nights in amorphous blobs like primitive organisms, absorbing and shedding each other, periodically excreting empty Coors Light cans into the gutter, converging on the Jacob Riis parking lot, which was once the biggest parking lot in the world. It was hard to believe that somewhere there was one that was bigger. Some nights they stayed in the parking lot and sometimes they went down to the sand and started a bonfire with driftwood and cardboard that boys collected from the dunes. Kayla and Heiley shared handles of vodka from someone’s parents’ jimmied liquor cabinet with girls in Pocahontas headbands and boys wearing XXL hockey jerseys. They went to St. Joseph’s with some of them and some of them Heiley knew because they were other cops’ kids, and they weren’t really friends but Heiley liked getting drunk and Kayla liked when everyone got quiet for a moment, when all you could hear were crickets, or the waves rolling in, or the creaking chain from someone on the swingset, alone.  

One night it was Vanessa, Richie, Soraya, Kessler, Julio, Cia, maybe some others. Vanessa told them they were going for a night swim but they all knew the dudes just wanted the girls to strip down and would never go in past their ankles. At Riis a sandbar builds all day and collapses at twilight, after the lifeguards go home. Two or three boys die a year, kidnapped by riptides.  

The wind came cool and wet off the ocean and made the bonfire leap, its light spattering the flat sky. Vanessa giggled theatrically when Julio told her she didn’t need her bra either. Kessler and sat down next to Heiley and his friend beside Kayla. Kessler had been in their class since kindergarten and looked pretty much the same as he did then except his arms had grown ropy with muscle. He hadn’t learned to read until like sixth grade. He asked Heiley if she was cold. “I’m fine,” she said and he draped his hoody over her shoulders anyway. His mouth was close to Heiley’s ear but Kayla could hear everything, his tongue fat from light beer. He was taking surfing lessons. He had a new board. They could come out here sometime and he could show her.  

Kayla looked at Kessler’s friend. He was watching the fire like he expected something from it. He silently passed Kayla his Bud and put his hand on her leg. His oversized white t-shirt still had the folds in it from the package. Maybe Kessler bought weed from him sometimes or something, but she knew that wasn’t why he was here. It was for her, only her. The world had expanded and contracted to this one point, the future flowing like water to fill the present, just like on the message board, except now she was on wrong end of the barrel. Everything was turning inside out. She didn’t know if she should drink from the bottle but she did anyway. It was mostly backwash. 

Now Heiley stood up with Kessler and said, “Yo, catch up with you in a few,” to Kayla, and Kayla wanted to tell Heiley not to go but she wasn’t sure if Heiley would stay even if she did. And then Heiley and Kessler had gone into the dunes, where the firelight didn’t reach.  

Alan’s hand was a limp weight on her leg, like a glove filled with sand. His face was a boy’s face, all cheeks, when it wasn’t behind the V for Vendetta mask. She thought of the contempt she saw when she was aiming the paintball rifle at him and decided she had to let him know she knew. “How much do you get paid,” she asked. 

He sucked his teeth. “Eight an hour,” he said, after a while. Another place limned his voice, somewhere further away than Coney Island. He didn’t look at her but he didn’t take his hand off her leg either. “You get a bonus if you get shot exactly five times during a shift.” 

“Five times,” she said. “But you never get shot.” 

He shook his head. “Never.” 

The trash in the bonfire crackled as it burned. Alan’s voice sounded different when he wasn’t cursing at her. She still wasn’t sure why he was there, if it was from desire or hatred or maybe some combination of the two, and when he asked if she wanted to go into the dunes too she still didn’t know but found that the threat she had felt earlier had evaporated into the night. The words were gentle but he rolled them around in his mouth before spitting them out like watermelon seeds. He didn’t think she’d say yes, she could tell. Heiley had told her that hooking up with boys was whatever, but she liked the part before, when they got quiet and scared. They were sweet, then, she said. You could make them do anything if they thought you’d let them do what they wanted.  

She stood and maybe the stars spun a little bit and she started walking, not towards the dunes but the other way, down the sand to the tideline. Alan stood and followed her. The hat brim, the loping walk. Kayla thought about shooting him in his soft face.  

The tide flowed over her feet and then receded. She hadn’t even let a boy see her in her underwear yet, but wasn’t that the same as a bathing suit, really? She took her clothes off fast with her back to him and then splashed waist-deep into the waves while Alan was still dropping his flaglike shirt and jean shorts next to hers at the edge of the tide line. “It’s cold as shit,” he yelled. He was in only up to his ankles. He’d put his hat back on when he was down to his boxers. His voice had pitched up and now he sounded goofy, helpless. She liked it better when he was shouting insults. The water wasn’t even that cold. Kayla ducked under a rolling breaker. “I ain’t trying to drown in my unmentionables,” he yelled as she surfaced on the other side.  

“It feels good once you’re all the way in,” Kayla yelled back. Waves swelled in the dark, rolling through her body beneath the surface, bearing her up before they crashed on shore. When the current took her away from him, Alan followed her, parallel to the shoreline.  

He skimmed the water with his toe. “No, for real. I know two kids who drowned here. My boy Dmitri and another one, the next year. Chester or something. Chester was last year and Dmitri was a couple years ago.” 

Kayla flipped onto her back, letting the salt water bear her up, the dry world bobbing its head at her in rhythm with the drifting swells. The dark sea was bigger than the sky, covering all its light at the horizon. She realized that Alan was scared. The boys who drowned were usually from Hamels or one of the other projects, boys trying to prove something. Sometimes the Coast Guard found their bodies, but not always.  

 “You won’t die,” she called. “I’m here.” But the soft waves lapped at his shins, the bonfire burning itself out behind him and he wouldn’t go in any further. He looked as alone as if he’d lost his mom at the supermarket. Her toes could still touch bottom, but the undertow was trying to convince her to come away with it. 

Alan didn’t move. 

“I’m going to find them,” she called.  

“Who?” 

“Dmitri. Or Chester. Whoever.” 

She could only see him as a silhouette haloed by the night sky, bright with the reflections of everything sheltered beneath. If ur ever here lets meet up, I can give u everything, Kayla thought. She dove under the surface, and her pulse slowed to beat in time with the undercurrent as it folded back in on itself. Below, she was blind, but it didn’t matter. She knew the ocean like the corner store. She could swim across a rip and come out on the other side closer to shore than when she started. The pressure around her was always the shape of her body, their bodies, her and all the others down here. She kicked until her fingertips pressed into the bottom, the sand smoothing itself back as she pulled her hand away. This other world parted for her, just like it must have once for all those dead boys.