Full Tilt by Neal Shusterman

mirror, stretching and distending my image, but the reflection of the skull didn’t quite look that way. In fact, the twisted skull, when reflected by the twisted mirror, was the perfect reflection of a human skull! I looked at the lopsided skull again and back at its perfect reflection. Then I reached out with my free hand and touched the surface of the mirror.
    My hand passed through the glass as if there were no glass at all.
    I could see my fingers on the other side of the mirror, and I almost screamed. They were short, stubby claws. I moved my fingers, feeling how my flesh had changed once they’d passed through the looking glass. I pulled my hand back quickly, and my fingers returned to normal, tingling from the change they had undergone when they had passed through.
    Then I heard a sound behind me and turned to see the creature once more. It was breathing heavily, tears rolling down its stretched face, splashing onto its huge, bulging belly. It didn’t chase me, but loped toward me cautiously, and I grimaced. Does your face hurt? the old joke goes. Because it’s killing me.
    The creature got closer and looked at me for a long time. Then it looked down at its bloated belly and said in a wet, slippery voice, “Do I look fat to you?”
    My knees buckled. I almost fell through one of the distorting mirrors but kept enough of my balance to stay on the right side of the glass.
    “Maggie? Is that you?”
    And she sadly nodded her lopsided head.
    “Crashed our bumper car,” Maggie said as we crouched at the dead end, listening to the distant wails and explosions echoing in the maze. At first I couldn’t understand her speech, filtered through that mess of a mouth. But after a while it was kind of like listening to Shakespeare: The more I listened, the more I could understand.
    “Crashed our bumper car but couldn’t stop. Had to get another car. Had to ride. Don’t know why. Couldn’t stop.”
    “It’s all right,” I told her. “I know what this place does to you. Tell me what happened next.”
    She drew a deep breath and rested for a moment. It was a real chore for her to speak with her tongue so thick and her jaw so misaligned. “Found a manhole cover. Ride symbol on it. Knew it was the next ride. Pried it open. Jumped in. Wound up here.” Maggie reached up a distorted hand and wiped away a tear from her smaller eye.
    “Where’s Russ?” I asked her. “What happened to him?”
    She shuddered. I could see that this was the hardest part for her, and I braced myself for the worst.
    “Running through the mirrors. Both of us. I fell. I fell again, through the mirrors. One mirror, then another, then another. Couldn’t find the first one. Kept trying, couldn’t find it.” Her voice got higher and harder to understand. Now her large, swollen eye began to drip heavy tears. “Russ saw me. He saw me, and he didn’t help me. He saw me like this, and he ran. Couldn’t look at me. He ran!”
    After that her words dissolved into sobs, I reached out and took her in my arms as best I could.
    “I won’t run from you,” I told her.
    “You did!” she accused. “You did, you did, you did!”
    “I didn’t know it was you!”
    But that didn’t stop her tears. “Russ knew!” she wailed. “Russ knew, and he ran anyway.”
    “I’m not Russ!”
    Slowly she began to calm down. Far off I heard another blast, and booted footsteps resounding through the maze, but I didn’t care about all that right now. I know this is a strange thing to say, but I’d never felt closer to Maggie than I did at that moment.
    I found myself leaning forward and kissing those swollen, sagging lips. It was the most repulsive thing I had ever done, yet it was the most wonderful. When I looked at her again, she’d stopped crying. She was still the same mess she’d been a moment before. I mean, it wasn’t like the kiss had changed her from a frog into a princess, but something had changed in both of us in that weird little