The Funhouse

legs in the backseat of a boy's car nearly every night of the week? Did a good girl get knocked up while she was still in high school?
        The dark minutes of the night unwound like black thread from a spinning spool, and Amy's thoughts unwound, too-tangled and confusing thoughts. She couldn't make up her mind about herself, she couldn't decide whether she was basically a good person or a bad one.
        In her mind Amy could hear her mother's voice again: There's a darkness in you. Something bad is in you, and you have to fight it every minute.
        Suddenly, Amy wondered if her sluttish behavior was just an attempt to spite her mother. That was an unsettling thought.
        Speaking softly to the blackness around her, she said, “Did I let Jerry knock me up just because I knew the news would shatter Mama? Am I destroying my own future just to hurt that bitch?”
        She was the only one who knew the answer to her own question, she would have to look for it within herself.
        She lay very still beneath the covers, thinking.
        Outside, the wind stirred the nearby maple trees.
        In the distance a train whistle sounded.
        
        * * *
        
        The door scraped open, and floorboards creaked beneath the carpet as someone walked into the room.
        The noise woke Joey Harper. He opened his eyes and looked at the alarm clock, which was visible in the pale glow of the night-light. 12:36.
        He had been asleep an hour and a half, but he wasn't groggy. He was instantly awake and alert, for he was anticipating Amy's reaction to the tarantula in her bed. He had set his alarm for one o'clock because that was when she was supposed to come home, apparently she had returned early.
        Footsteps. Soft. Sneaky. Coming closer.
        Joey tensed under the sheets, but he continued to feign sleep.
        The footsteps stopped at the side of his bed.
        Joey felt a giggle building in him. He bit his tongue and struggled to hold back his laughter.
        He sensed her leaning toward him. She was inches away.
        He was going to wait a few seconds longer, and then, when she was on the verge of tickling him, he was going to yell in her face and scare the dickens out of her.
        He kept his eyes closed, breathed shallowly and evenly, and counted off the seconds: One… two… three…
        He was just about to shout in her face when he realized that the person bending over him wasn't Amy. He smelled sour, alcohol-tainted breath, and his heart began to pound.
        Unaware that Joey was awake, his mother said, “Sweet, sweet, little Joey. Little baby-boy angel. Sweet, precious little angel face.” Her voice was eerie. She spoke in an odd, half-whispered, half-crooned, throaty, silky stream of slurred words.
        He wished desperately that she would go away. She was very drunk, worse than usual. She had come into his room several other nights when she'd been in this condition. She had talked to him, thinking he was asleep. Maybe she came in a lot more nights than he knew, maybe some nights he was asleep. Anyway, he knew what was coming. He knew what she was going to say and do, and he dreaded it.
        “Little angel. You look like a little snoozing angel, a baby angel, lying there so innocent, so tender, sweet.” She leaned even closer, bathing his face with her pungent breath. “But what're you like inside, little angel? Are you sweet and good and pure all the way through?”
         Stop it, stop it, stop it! Joey thought. Please, don't do this again, Mama. Go away. Get out of here. Please .
        But he didn't speak to her, and he didn't move. He didn't let her know he was awake because when she was like this he was afraid of her.
        “You look so pure,” she said, her alcohol-thickened voice growing even softer, even more blurry. “But maybe that angel face is just the surface… the mask. Maybe you're just putting on an act for me. Huh? Are you? Maybe… underneath… maybe you're just like the other one. Are you, little angel? Under that sweet face, are you like the other one, the monster, the thing he called Victor?”
        Joey never had been able to figure out what she was talking about when she sneaked in here at night and mumbled drunkenly at him. Who was Victor?
        “If I produced one like you, why not another?” she asked herself aloud, and Joey thought she sounded a little bit afraid now. “This time… maybe