I had no talent. No special ability, making me essentially a roadie. I did what was needed of me, which usually involved helping set up and take down, and various menial tasks. I cleaned the tiger cages and emptied out latrines when I had to. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it was crucial to our way of life.
Since Roxie worked with the tigers, Mahilā actually tolerated her. Roxie was helping me clean out the tiger cage they traveled in. The cage was open to a fenced-in enclosure Seth had built, so the tigers could roam as they pleased.
Safēda lounged in the grass, the sun shining brightly on her white fur. Whenever we stopped, Safēda seemed content to just lay in the sun, sleeping the entire time, but as the older tiger, it made sense.
Mahilā paced along the fence, occasionally emitting an irritated guttural noise in between casting furtive glances back toward Roxie and me. Her golden fur was mottled with scars from her past life in the abusive circus, including a nasty one that ran across her nose.
“So where did you go last night?” Roxie asked, her voice lilting in a singsong playful way. She was out in the run, using a hose to fill up a blue plastic kiddie pool so the tigers could play in it, while I was on my hands and knees scrubbing dung off the cage floor.
Her bleached blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and the sleeves of her white T-shirt were rolled up, revealing her well-toned arms. The cut-off jean shorts she wore barely covered her bum, and her old cowboy boots went up to her knees—her chosen footwear anytime she was at risk of stepping in tiger poop.
With fair skin, full lips, large blue eyes, and a dainty nose, Roxie was pretty and deceptively tough. Being a beautiful carnie was not an easy job, and dancing in the revue under the stage name “Foxy Roxie” didn’t help that. But she made decent money doing it, and Roxie never put up with anybody’s crap. I’d seen her deck guys much bigger than her and lay them out flat on their backs.
“I was just at a party,” I said as I rinsed the brush off in a bucket of bleach and warm water.
“A party?” Roxie looked over at me with a hand on her hip. “How’d you get invited to a party so fast?”
I shrugged. “I was just exploring town, and I saw some people hanging outside of this big house party, and they invited me in.”
“So what are the people like here? Are they nice?”
Safēda had gotten up and climbed into the pool, and then she flopped down in it, splashing Roxie as she did. Roxie took a step back, but kept looking at me.
“I don’t know. The people I met last night seemed nice, and they were superrich, so that bodes well for the town, I guess.”
“Like how rich?” Roxie asked.
“Like their house is practically a mansion.” I dropped the brush in the water and sat back on my knees, taking a break to talk to her. “It was the nicest house I’ve ever been in, hands down.”
“Is that why you spent the night there?”
Roxie understood my fascination with houses. Well, “understood” wasn’t the right word. It was more like she knew of it, but didn’t understand it all. She’d grown up in an upper-middle-class family, in nice houses with basements, and thought they were about as boring and lame as she could imagine.
“Partly.” I nodded. “It was a really amazing house. There were pillars out front, and the front hall was bigger than my trailer.”
“It’s just a house, Mara.” Roxie shook her head.
“I know but…” I trailed off, trying to think of how to explain it to her. “You know how you felt when you first joined the sideshow two years ago? How everything seemed so exciting and fun, and I was like, ‘We live in cramped trailers. It kinda sucks.’”
Roxie nodded. “Yeah. But I still think this life is a million times better than my old life. I get to see everything. I get to decide things for myself. I can leave whenever I want. There’s nothing to hold me back or tie me down.”
She’d finished filling up the pool, so she twisted the nozzle on the hose to shut it off. Stepping carefully over an old tire and a large branch that the tigers used as toys, she went to the edge of the run and tossed the hose over the fence, before Mahilā decided to play with it and tore it up.
She walked over to the cage and scraped her boots on the edge, to be sure she didn’t track any poop inside, before climbing up inside it.
“So what was the other reason?” Roxie asked.
I kept scrubbing for a moment and didn’t look up at her when I said, “Gabe.”
“Gabe?” Roxie asked. “That sounds like a boy’s name.”
“That’s because it is.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“No.” I shot her a look. “We just made out a little.”
“What what what?” Luka Zajíček happened to be walking by just in time to hear that, and he changed his course to walk over to the tiger cage. “Is that what you were up to last night?”
“That’s what sucks about living in a community so small. Whenever anything happens, everybody knows about it right away,” I muttered.
Luka put his arms through the cage bars and leaned against it, in the area I’d cleaned already. Since he was rather short, the floor came up to his chest, and his black hair fell into his eyes.
His eyes were the same shade of gray as mine, but his olive skin was slightly lighter than mine. We first met him when he joined the carnival four years ago, and the first thing my mom said was that she was certain that we were related somehow.
Unfortunately, Mom knew next to nothing about our family tree to be able to prove it. All she could really tell me was that we were a mixture of Egyptian, Turkish, and Filipino, with a bit of German thrown in for good measure.
Luka had been born in Czechoslovakia, but he’d moved here with his family when he was young, so he’d lost his accent.
He had recently roped me into helping him with a trick. He’d stand with his back against a wall, while I fired a crossbow around him. Originally, Blossom had been the one to help him, but she kept missing and shooting him in the leg or arm, so he’d asked me to do it because I had a steadier hand.
“So you made out with some local guy last night?” Luka asked, smirking at me. “Are you gonna see him again?”
“He’s a local guy. What do you think?” I asked, and gave him a hard look.
Luka shrugged. “Sometimes you bump into them again.”
“And that goes so well when they find out that I work and live with a traveling sideshow,” I said.
The floor was spotless, or at least as spotless as tiger cages can get, and I tossed my brush in the bucket and took off my yellow rubber gloves.
“We can’t all meet our boyfriends in the sideshow,” I reminded Luka as I stood up, and it only made him grin wider. He’d been dating Tim—one of the Flying Phoenixes—for the past three months.
“But you didn’t see Blossom anywhere in town last night?” Roxie asked, and Luka’s smile instantly fell away.
A sour feeling stirred in my stomach, and I looked out around camp through the bars of the cage, as if Blossom would suddenly appear standing beside a trailer. As I’d been doing my chores all morning, I kept scanning the campsite for her, expecting her to return at any moment with a funny story about how she’d gotten lost in town.
But so far, she hadn’t. And the longer she went without coming back, the worse the feeling in my stomach got.
I shook my head. “No. I didn’t see her at all last night.”
“She’s gotta turn up, though, right?” Luka asked. “I mean, it’s not like there are really that many places she could’ve gone considering she has no money or car and she’s in a small town.”
The tigers were still down in the run, so I opened the side gate and hopped down out of the cage. Roxie got out behind me, then we closed the door.
“I should talk to Gideon,” I decided as Roxie locked the cage up behind me. “It’s not like Blossom to do this.”
“It’s not totally unlike her, though,” Roxie pointed out. “Wh
en we were in Toledo six months ago, she disappeared for a few days with that weird commune, and came back just before we were leaving, totally baked out of her mind.”
Blossom had grown up with parents who pretended to be hippies but were really just a couple of drug addicts. That—along with her unexplainable telekinesis—led to her dabbling with drugs and alcohol at a young age, before the state intervened and shipped her off to a group home.
My mom tried to keep her clean of her bad habits, but sometimes Blossom just liked to run off and do her own thing. That wasn’t that unusual for people who lived in the carnival.
“But if you’re worried, you should talk to Gideon,” Roxie suggested. “Luka’s right in that Blossom really couldn’t have gone far. Maybe you can scope out Caudry.”
“Since that sounds like a mission that may take a bit of time, can you help me and Hutch with the museum before you talk to Gideon?” Luka asked. “The exit door is jammed, and we can’t get it open, and Seth is busy helping set up the tents.”
“Sure. Between me and Mara, I’m sure the two of us can get the door unstuck,” Roxie said.
I dropped off the bucket with the other tiger supplies, and then followed Roxie and Luka away from our campsite to the fairgrounds on the other side of a chain-link fence. We always stayed close to the rides, the midway, and the circus tent, but we didn’t actually sleep there. It was much better for everyone if we kept our private lives separate from the crowds.
Many of the games were already set up, and the Ferris wheel was in the process of being erected as we passed. Near the end of the midway was a long black trailer painted with all kinds of frightening images of werewolves and specters, along with happier pictures of mermaids and unicorns, and the sign was written in bloodred:
Beneath that were several smaller signs warning “Enter at your own risk. The creatures inside can be DISTURBING and cause NIGHTMARES.”
The entrance to the left was open, but the exit door at the other end was still shut. Wearing a pair of workman’s gloves, Hutch was pulling at the door with all his might. His neon green tank showed that his muscles were flexed and straining in effort. The bandana kept his dark brown hair off his face, but sweat was dripping down his brow.
“Let me have a try, Hutch,” Roxie said.
“What?” He turned to look back at her. “Door’s stuck.”
“I can see that. That’s why I said let me have a try.”
“Okay.” Hutch shrugged and stepped back.
Hutch’s real name was Donald Hutchence, but nobody ever called him anything but Hutch. He didn’t have any special powers, unless you considered being really agreeable and easygoing a super power, so, like me, he was left doing whatever else needed to be done.
Roxie grabbed the door and started pulling on it, and when it didn’t budge, I joined her.
“Luka, go and push from the inside,” Roxie commanded through gritted teeth.
Both Luka and Hutch went inside, pushing as Roxie and I pulled. And then all at once, the door gave way, and we all fell back on the gravel. I landed on my back, scraping my elbow on the rocks.
Roxie made it out unscathed, and Hutch fell painfully on top of me, so he’d avoided injury. Luka crashed right on the gravel, though, and the rocks tore through his jeans and ripped up his knees and the palms of his hands pretty badly.
“Do you need me to get a Band-Aid or anything?” Hutch asked as he helped me to my feet.
“No, I’ll be okay.” I glanced over at Luka and the blood dripping down his knees. “What about you? Do you want anything?”
“Nah. Just give it a few minutes.” Luka waved it off and sat down on the steps leading up to the museum door.
No matter how many times I saw it, I couldn’t help but watch. His knee was shredded, with bits of gravel sticking in the skin. Right before my eyes, the bleeding stopped, and the rocks started falling out, as if pushed by his flesh, and the skin grew back, reattaching itself where it had been little mangled flaps.
Within a few minutes, Luka’s knee was healed completely.
6. prejudice
Gideon’s old F150 groaned to a halt in the town square, and I gulped down my nerves as he turned off the engine. The cracked plastic stuck to my thighs below the hem of my dress.
As soon as Gideon agreed to go into town, I’d changed quickly out of my cleaning overalls and into a paisley sundress that had been my mother’s in the seventies. He’d stayed in the grubby clothes he wore for setting up—tattered jeans and a blue work shirt stained with oil and paint.
He rested his arms on the steering wheel, leaning forward and staring ahead at the small building before us. Stone pillars flanked the doorway, and Caudry Police Station had been written in iron letters across the top.
Neither of us wanted to be here. Working on a traveling sideshow, we’d had more than our fair share of run-ins with cops who thought we were nothing but trouble. I’d once seen a sheriff in a small town actually spit on my mom, calling her a witch playing with voodoo.
But when I’d gone to talk to Gideon, to see if we should look for Blossom, Mom had overheard, and insisted that we do everything we could to track her down. Gideon tried to calm my mom, reminding her that Blossom hadn’t even been gone for twenty-four hours yet and she’d probably still turn up.
Since we didn’t really know the town or where to look, Mom suggested we go to the police station. To keep her from losing her mind, Gideon and I had reluctantly agreed.
“All right, let’s get it over with,” Gideon grumbled, and got out of the truck, so I followed suit.
He opened the door to go inside, and a bell jingled loudly. I meant to follow him, but I had the strangest feeling of being watched. My feet felt frozen on the sidewalk, and I looked around the town square, half expecting to see a crowd of beady eyes staring at me.
But there was nothing. No one.
“Mara?” Gideon asked, still holding the door for me.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, and hurried in after him, trying to ignore the feeling.
Inside the station, avocado and off-white tiles checkered the floor, and dark wood paneling closed us in. A man sat behind a desk in a brown police uniform, pecking away at an ancient typewriter next to an overgrown fern.
He glanced up at us with small brown eyes, then immediately turned his attention to the document before him. His lips were unusually full, and as he typed, they puckered, like he’d just eaten a lemon. The shiny metal tag on the front of his uniform read DEPUTY BOB GENDRY.
“Ahem.” Gideon cleared his throat and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. I’d taken to playing with a small braid I had in my thick hair and staring at the Louisiana flag that had been pinned up on the wall behind the desk.
With great flourish, the deputy pulled the paper from the typewriter and set it aside. Then he looked up at us, managing a sickly smile as his eyes darted over the thick black tattoos that covered Gideon’s forearms.
“What can I do you for today?” Deputy Bob asked, his Southern accent dripping with condescension.
“We were just wondering if you could help us find someone,” Gideon said, and his words came out low and defeated. His shoulders slumped, and he fidgeted with the silver band he had on his finger.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Deputy Bob arched an eyebrow.
Gideon sighed. “No. We’re with the carnival that’s in town for the week.”
“A girl who travels with us didn’t come home last night,” I added, before the deputy could comment on the fact that we were carnies.
“Maybe she’s just lost her way around town,” Deputy Bob suggested.
“We thought that was maybe the case,” Gideon said. “But we don’t really know where to look for her either.”
Deputy Bob let out a heavy breath, like he was doing us some great big favor. He opened the drawer to his desk and pulled out a form. Without saying anything to us, he took a pen and jotted down a couple things on the form.
&nb
sp; “Since she hasn’t been gone long, I can’t file a missing persons report, but I can take her information in case she turns up somewhere,” Deputy Bob said finally. “Describe her for me.”
“Her name is Blossom Mandelbaum,” Gideon began. “She has frizzy brown hair, brown eyes. Lots of freckles. She’s about 5'2", maybe 5'3", I would guess. She’s sixteen.”
Deputy Bob looked up at us then, narrowing his already tiny eyes. “Sixteen? Is she your daughter?”
Gideon shook his head. “No.”
“Are her parents traveling with you?” Bob asked.
“No,” Gideon replied, swallowing hard. “She’s a runaway.”
The deputy set down his pen and folded his hands on the desk. “You’ve been harboring a runaway?”
“It’s not like that,” Gideon started, but Deputy Bob wasn’t having any of it. He leaned back in his chair.
“Maybe she ran back home.” Deputy Bob shrugged one shoulder.
“She didn’t,” I insisted, and he turned his harsh gaze to me.
Before he could say anything, the bell of the door chimed loudly. I glanced back over my shoulder to see a woman carrying a stack of fliers and folders in her arms.
“Hello, hello,” she beamed, her lips stained bright with lipstick.
She appeared to be in her early forties. She wore a pink pencil skirt with a loose blouse, and her blond curls cascaded around her, adding a couple inches to her petite frame. Her pumps clacked on the tiles as she walked over to the desk, and her golden chandelier earrings jingled.
The sour feeling returned to my stomach, twisting it up, and I realized that now would be a good time to make our escape, lest Deputy Bob decide to press charges against Gideon for traveling with a sixteen-year-old runaway.
“Sorry to interrupt, I just gotta get all these papers down,” the woman said as she slid in past me and plunked the stack on Deputy Bob’s desk. I’d taken a step back, but she turned her attention toward Gideon, alternating between speaking directly to us and the deputy.
Freeks Page 4