20. the fool
“Let’s talk outside,” I told Gabe with my head bowed. He tried to take my hand, but I pulled away and walked ahead of him.
Outside the darkness of the trailer, the lights felt blinding, and I blinked as I waited for my eyes to adjust.
“What’s going on?” Gabe asked, but I kept walking ahead of him, wanting to get as far away from the bright sounds and flashing lights and curious eyes as I could. “Mara!”
I stopped then, just on the other side of the booths and tents. My back was to the carnival, and I could see the campsite through the chain-link fence. I could just about make out the shape of my old Winnebago, the dusty trailer I’d called home for the past several years, and my mind flashed onto the beautiful mansion that Gabe lived in.
“Mara, if I did something wrong, you can tell me,” Gabe said. “If you want me to slow things down, I can. I just—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, and I turned to face him. It wasn’t cold, but I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Was that guy your boyfriend?” he asked tentatively.
I shook my head. “No. It’s nothing like that.”
He relaxed then—the lines of his body slacking—and let out a breath. “Then what’s going on?”
“That guy was my coworker.” I motioned to the midway. “I work here.” Then I pointed to the Winnebago. “And I live there.”
“You…” His brow furrowed, deep creases stretching out in his smooth skin above dark eyebrows. “You travel with the carnival?”
“That’s right.” I smiled bitterly. “I’m a carnie, and I work with a freak show.”
He looked at me, and I felt the shift in his gaze as he tried to search out what I did in the freak show. What thing made me a freak.
And I couldn’t talk to him anymore. I couldn’t bear the thought of hateful words coming from his lips, the same lips I could still taste on mine. I’d heard all the insults before, and they shouldn’t hurt, but they still did, and so far Gabe had been nothing but sweet to me. I didn’t want to tarnish that memory by hearing him call me something that could never be taken back.
“And I shouldn’t even be out with you.” I started to back away, toward the fence. “I have work I should be doing, so I really don’t even have time to see you.”
“Mara,” Gabe began.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be gone next Sunday, and you won’t ever have to see me again.”
“Mara,” he repeated, and took a step toward me, so I turned and started running.
I didn’t really have anywhere to go, so I ran until I found the gap in the fence, and I slid through it. The pointed edges scraped my skin, but I didn’t care. I kept running until I got to my Winnebago, and I never looked back.
Once I was inside, I leaned against the counter and struggled to catch my breath and slow the racing of my heart. Gabe and I hadn’t known each other that long, but I liked him, and it hurt knowing I wouldn’t be able to see him again.
What hurt the worst was knowing that he wouldn’t think of me the same way. For a while, he’d seen me as a real person. He’d really seen me, and he’d liked me. But now I was reduced to a disposable, forgettable, dirty freak. An accidental foray onto the other side of the tracks, one that wouldn’t be repeated.
“Mara?” Gideon’s voice came through the screen door, his British accent softening his words. “Is everything all right, love?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine,” I lied as I bit back tears.
“Are you sure?” Gideon asked, and his voice was closer now, right on the other side of the door.
“Yeah.” I sniffled. “It’s just been a long day, and I need to go lie down.”
“All right.” He sounded reluctant to let it go. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“I will,” I told him, and to ensure the conversation was over, I walked back to my bedroom and rattled the beaded curtain as loudly as I could.
I threw myself onto my bed, causing the thin mattress to bounce. The shelving above my bed was filled to the brim with books, and when I flopped into bed, it knocked a book loose and it fell onto my head.
“What a perfect way to end a perfect night,” I muttered to myself.
I rolled onto my back and picked up the book. Enough light was streaming in through the beads from the kitchen that I could read the title, embossed in gold on a pale red cover. It was a book of poetry by Mary Howitt.
My stomach soured as I turned the brittle pages, and the book opened almost immediately to “The Spider and the Fly.” I’d gotten the book last summer for a nickel at a yard sale, and one day, a couple months back, Blossom had pulled it out.
We’d been stuck in some dry town, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table, playing a game of solitaire, and Blossom lay stretched out on the floor, with a rolled-up sweater under her head like a pillow.
And as I played, she’d read the poems aloud. I could almost hear her voice now, reading in an exaggerated falsetto, “‘O no, no,’ said the little fly, ‘for I’ve often heard it said,/They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed.’”
I slammed the book shut and set it on my nightstand before rolling over onto my side, putting my back to it. I closed my eyes tightly, trying to push away all my thoughts about anything.
Blossom being gone, Seth’s attack, Leonid’s claims, Gabe’s kisses, the coldness in my chest, and the fact that I’d never kiss Gabe again. All these things swirled inside me, and I pushed them all down until finally sleep enveloped me, quieting all the things that hurt and frightened me.
21. shadows
I opened my eyes to the blackness. Darkness engulfed me, wrapping me up in the nothingness. There was no ground below me, no sky above. Only the black, and the cold.
The icy cold was coming from within me, spreading out from my chest and freezing me from the inside out. I wanted to scream, but the words were frozen in my throat.
Then a face began to take shape before me, and I realized it was her—the old woman from my nightmare. Her gray hair swirled around her head like a halo as she floated across the nothingness toward me.
Her mouth hung open with her long talonlike fingers extended toward me, and she began to scream. Again her words came too quickly in a language that I didn’t understand, but they were insistent and angry, echoing inside my brain.
I couldn’t move or speak, so I closed my eyes, trying to will her away. And then I felt her hands on me, gripping my shoulders painfully and digging her nails into my flesh as she began shaking me.
Her breath felt cold on my face, and she smelled musty and tangy, like rotten fruit. I turned my head to the side, squeezing my eyes shut as tightly as I could, and her hands were like a vise on my shoulders.
She began screaming the same phrase over and over, right in my ear. My arms felt like they were going to snap as she tightened her grip, and I couldn’t take it anymore.
I opened my eyes, expecting to see her rotting face floating in front of me, but instead it was only the ceiling of the Winnebago, tinged slightly brown from an old leak in the roof.
Gasping for breath, I sat up with her words still ringing in my head. I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like she was saying “id-hab-bee-in-who-nah” again and again. I rubbed my arms, trying to convince myself it was only a dream, but my arms still ached from where she’d grabbed me.
My mom snored softly in the twin bed across from mine, and I had no idea what time it was, but I had to talk to her. If these nightmares I was having were anything more than simple dreams, Mom would know.
I got out of bed and went over to where she slept. “Mom?” I shook her gently. “Mom? I need to talk to you.”
“Not tonight, Mara,” Mom mumbled, her voice thick with sleep, and she buried her face deeper into her pillow. “My head is still throbbing, and I need to sleep.”
“It’s okay,” I told her softly. “It can wait until the morning.”
“I love you, qamari,” Mom said, and within seconds, she began snoring again.
After the nightmare I had, I knew sleep wouldn’t be an option. I was still wearing the skirt and top I’d gone to bed in, so I changed into a more comfortable tank top and baggy pajama pants before heading out into the kitchen/living room.
I flicked on the small light above the kitchen sink, bathing the trailer in dim yellow light. Using my grandma’s ancient kettle, I put a pot of tea on the tiny stovetop. I grabbed my still-unfinished V. C. Andrews novel and settled back on the couch, preparing to spend the rest of my night reading and drinking a cup of tea.
I’d only just finished reading a page when I heard a strange sound outside. The nights were cool, so all the windows in the motorhome were open. Setting the book aside, I tilted my head, listening more closely, and it came again—a hushed hissing sound, not entirely unlike the one I’d heard right before Seth was attacked.
Last night, I’d assumed it had been the punks spray painting the trailer. They could be back to cause more havoc. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
Then I heard a loud clattering sound—metal on metal—and I jumped to my feet. I’m not sure what exactly I planned to do, but I had to see what was going on, so I threw open the screen door.
“You woke up Mara,” Luka grumbled, speaking barely above a whisper, probably so as not to wake anyone else in the campsite.
With the aid of the full moon and the streetlamp on the other side of Gideon’s trailer, I could easily see in the dark. Luka stood with his arms crossed over his chest, while Hutch sat on the ground beside him, struggling to untangle himself from a lawn chair.
“It’s not my fault that Betty didn’t put away her chairs before she went to bed,” Hutch protested.
I climbed down the steps of the trailer and walked over to them. “What are you two doing?”
“Luka thought he heard a noise, and he made me go out with him to investigate.” Hutch shot a glare up at Luka. “Stupid buddy system.”
Luka held up his hands. “These are Gideon’s rules, not mine.”
“You didn’t have to go out and check out the noise. It’s seriously like you’ve never seen a horror movie.”
Hutch grimaced because he still hadn’t freed himself from the chair, so I crouched down and helped him. I pulled apart the plastic slats, and his foot was finally able to slide free.
“Thank you,” he whispered before standing up.
“Sorry about accidentally outing you with that guy,” Luka said to me. “Since you spent the rest of the night holed up in your Winnebago, I’m assuming that it didn’t go well?”
“Don’t worry about it.” I shook my head and tried to ignore the painful lump in my throat. “It’s not like it could last forever, anyway, right?”
“I know, but it still sucks when things have to end abruptly like that,” Luka said.
“So what was the noise that drew you out of your trailer?” I asked, changing the subject.
“It was like a hissing, kind of, like the air being let out of a very large tire,” Luka explained.
“That wasn’t you guys?” I glanced around the campsite, realizing that it meant that we weren’t alone.
“Why would we hiss?” Hutch asked incredulously. “People don’t hiss.”
“Exactly,” I said under my breath.
“There!” Luka said, managing a whispered shout. He pointed frantically to the far side of the camp, where Gideon’s trailer butted up to the overgrown swamp behind us.
“What?” Hutch asked, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, I saw it.
A dark, low shadow moving quickly behind the trailers. I couldn’t tell if it was a dog, a bear, or even a man. It was just a blur of darkness running around the campsite.
Without thinking, I sprinted after it, and Luka ran beside me. We raced around Gideon’s trailer, following the shadow, but we were always too many steps behind to really see it. We chased it around the periphery of the campsite, and when it turned beside Betty and Damon’s trailer, I knew we had it. Beyond their trailer was just the open field that backed up against the chain-link fence. There was nowhere for it to hide.
I sped up, my legs pumping as quickly as they could beneath me. I rounded the trailer with my heart pounding in my chest, knowing I’d finally have caught sight of whoever—or whatever—it was that had probably attacked Seth.
But then there was nothing. The field was completely empty, and there wasn’t any sign of the shadow running anywhere. It was just gone.
22. apologies
The motorhome smelled like coffee, and that’s what pulled me from my sleep. After the shadowy thing had disappeared, Luka, Hutch, and I had sat on the picnic table in the center of the campsite, waiting for it to return. But it never had.
Eventually, when the sun began to rise, I decided to call it a night and head back to my camper. Hutch had actually fallen asleep on the picnic table, lying on his stomach on the bench, and Luka woke him up and dragged him back to their place.
I curled up on the dinette bench, propping my head on the cushions, and attempted to read my book, but I must’ve dozed off, because I woke up to my mom brewing coffee and humming an old Fleetwood Mac song. A quilt had been draped over me, the same one that Blossom used whenever she crashed on our couch.
“Morning,” Mom said without looking back at me, as if she could somehow sense me waking up behind her.
“Morning,” I mumbled, and pushed myself up so I was sitting. “What time is it?”
“Eight thirty.” She kept her back to me as she put a pan on the stovetop. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really. I could use a cup of coffee, though.”
“I already poured you one.” She pointed behind her to a mug sitting on the table beside me, and grabbed two eggs from the fridge. “Why are you sleeping out here? Did something happen last night?”
I gulped down my coffee—bitter, warm, and black, just the way I liked it—before answering. “Nothing happened, exactly, but I did have this really strange dream.”
There was no point in telling her about the thing that Luka and I had chased, because it wasn’t even really a thing. We hadn’t actually seen anything, and in the bright light of morning, it made me realize that it had probably been nothing more than our own paranoia.
Or maybe it was the peculiar power of the Nukoabok Swamp that seemed to be affecting everyone around here. It would make sense that it played tricks with our imagination, and that even explained the bizarre nightmares I’d had since I got here. Zeke claimed he’d been having nightmares too.
“What was it about?” Mom asked.
The old woman flashed in my mind, screaming her string of angry syllables at me—id-hab-bee-in-who-nah. I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts of her. “It’s … nothing. Just a bad dream.”
“Dreams can be an important way of our spirit telling us things that we need to know…” Mom trailed off and leaned forward so the skull key fell out of her blouse. She liked to wear it under her clothing, close to her heart, but she didn’t even notice it had escaped as she looked out the small window above the stove. “There’s a boy.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“There’s a strange boy in the campsite, and he’s coming over to our motorhome.” Mom looked back at me, like I should understand what was going on.
I set down my coffee and tossed off the quilt. I’d only just gotten up, and by then he was close enough to our screen door that I could see him.
Gabe.
I didn’t move. I didn’t even breathe. I could only stand, petrified, hoping that he would move on before he saw me or my home.
When he knocked, his fist rapping loudly on the metal door, I nearly screamed. Mom moved to get it, but I rushed past her and answered it before she could. I held the door open, but I didn’t go outside or move so he could come in. The height difference of the trailer meant that I was actually taller than him, looking down a
t him.
“Hi.” Gabe smiled sheepishly up at me. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, I was awake,” I said through lips that felt numb and clumsy.
I was acutely aware of the haggard appearance of everything. The once avocado-green carpet of the motorhome had become a sickly shade of brown, and it was balding in patches. The cupboards behind me were duct-taped to keep them from falling open, and cushions on the dinette were patched with old pieces of my mom’s dresses.
Not to mention how unkempt I looked personally—no makeup and dark circles under my eyes, my black hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and my rumpled pajamas with no bra.
And Gabe stood before me without a hair out of place, designer jeans, and black-and-safari-patterned Nike sneakers that easily cost more than my family made in a month.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded, because I couldn’t possibly imagine what he wanted with me, or how he had even known which motorhome was mine.
“I was wondering if we could talk.” His eyes were imploring me, absent of any glint I’d seen in them last night.
I looked past him, to the campsite, where everyone was beginning to wake up and start their day. Damon was standing shirtless outside his trailer, grilling up some type of sausage for breakfast, and Brendon kept giving Gabe the eye as he hauled acrobatic equipment out of his trailer.
Talking to him outside wouldn’t be good, but going into the motorhome, where my mom lurked a few feet away, wouldn’t really be any better.
“Mara, invite your friend in,” Mom commanded with a weary sigh. “I have business to attend to in Gideon’s trailer anyway.”
“Come in,” I said, since I didn’t have a choice. I stepped back to let him in and folded my arms over my chest.
Even though it was first thing in the morning, Mom had already put on a long, flowing dress and adorned herself in jewelry, from earrings to necklaces to half a dozen rings. Her long black hair cascaded around her in waves, and she held her hand out to Gabe.
“I’m Lyanka Beznik, Mara’s mom,” she said as she shook his hand.
“Gabe Alvarado, Mara’s friend.” His eyes flitted to me briefly. “I think.”
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