The big truck’s tires crunch over dirt and gravel as Chelsea turns in to the empty fairgrounds. These places are made for thousands of people to come together and ride brightly colored rides or cheer for cowboys or judge quilts and sheep, maybe even pull up a table and sell some antiques or iguanas. Without those people, exposed to the light of day, it’s just a big, barren space, ugly and used-up and dried-out, baking in the Florida sun.
Out in the field beyond a crooked fence topped with barbed wire are two tour buses, the kind they use for bands or seniors descending en masse at Medieval Times, as well as tractor trailers. They’re parked in a loose sort of circle with several RVs, set up with extended awnings and lawn chairs and large barbecue grills, one of which is puffing smoke. People are moving around over there, but the day is bright and it’s far away. Something about the scene feels private.
A handwritten sign by the gate says VFR RECRUITMENT and points to the nearest of the cavernous metal buildings. Chelsea steps down from the truck in a puff of dust, feeling the grit seep between her toes. She was supposed to wear “clothes that allow movement,” and technically hers do, but flip-flops are never an advantage at a job interview, and there’s no way she could run in them. She wishes she had options, but all her clothes are back in her minivan with Jeanie’s corpse.
Her lips tremble at the thought, at the image that flashes in her head, her last glimpse of what she did to her only friend.
She can’t think about that now. What’s done is done. It wasn’t her fault. They both knew the risk when they got in the car together. It could’ve easily gone the other way, could’ve been Jeanie standing here, willing herself to stop shaking and not walk into the interview covered in snot as well as blood.
At least she has her wallet in her back pocket, plus the old man’s phone. His name is George, and his phone is unlocked, and all of his texts are to other guys his age with names like Ed and Rick and Dan, mostly about fishing, lunch plans, and libtards. No wonder they didn’t get along in their brief interaction.
She can’t do much for her appearance just now. She did the best she could with the baby wipes, and she smells less like car cleaner. There’s no way she’s going to use the greasy black comb she found in the center console, and the red splatters on her shirt are undeniably blood, but she has literally nowhere else to go, so she just locks the truck, pockets the keys and the phone, and follows the sign. There are other cars parked in the lot, most older than the truck and her minivan, both, but she doesn’t see any actual people. Jeanie said it was an open call that lasted all day today and tomorrow, so at least she isn’t late. At least she hasn’t missed it. Whatever this is, it feels like her lifeline, like the only thing that could save her.
The building’s glass front wall shows about a dozen people waiting inside, but Chelsea stops and slides into the shade under an overhang before joining them. She opens the phone and clicks the green CALL button and stares at the keypad. Ella’s phone got stolen last year, and she got a new one with a new number, and this is the very first time Chelsea has been forced to realize that she has no idea what her daughter’s number is. She knows the area code and seems to think it has a bunch of sevens and fours, but that’s it. She stares so long that the phone goes dark, and she flicks it on again.
She has to remember this.
It’s the only connection she has with her girls.
She doesn’t know her mother’s number, either, but that’s one she’s never even considered memorizing. It’s just how life works these days, choosing a contact and hitting CALL. Or, in most cases, texting, because calling now feels strange and awkward.
“Goddammit,” she murmurs.
She starts pressing numbers, but they don’t look right. There are thousands of variations, and she’s not going to find the right one randomly while standing outside a big metal shed at an abandoned fairground while covered in someone else’s blood. An intrusive and unwelcome thought crosses her mind: I’m a terrible mother. But it’s localized to not knowing her daughter’s number. She’s not ready yet to list all of her errors, every wrong turn and bit of bad luck that led her to here.
She tried, dammit.
She tried so hard it hurts.
And it still wasn’t enough.
Her shame and guilt turn to rage as if she’s flicked a switch.
Rage is so much easier.
All of this is David’s fault, not hers.
The shame and the guilt—they don’t belong to her. She’s a victim.
She’s doing the best she can.
But it’s insidious. Everything David has ever said to her about her own inadequacies lives under her skin. She’s stupid, she’s bad with numbers, she’s not a decent cook, she’s selfish, she’s slow, she didn’t teach the girls how to behave, she’s not a good mother.
Over time, they built up until she just assumed they were true.
But what if…he’s been wrong all along?
Tires crunch on gravel, and she whirls, brain screeching back into panic mode because that is what victims do, that is what prey animals do, that is what people who black out and wake up holding their friend’s dented Yeti cup covered in chunks of brain do.
They react. They spin and prepare to fight for their lives.
But it’s not David in a Mad Max car, roaring toward her with a flamethrower. It’s not George in her minivan, ready to perform a citizen’s arrest. It’s just a beat-up SUV with a beachy-looking guy in his twenties who gets out, walks to the building in his own flip-flops, gives her an up-nod, and goes inside as if it’s the most normal thing in the entire world. She gives the phone one last, hateful stare, shoves it in her pocket, and follows.
Inside, the air is frigid. A Black woman in her forties with her hair under a colorful turban sits at a folding table with a pile of papers and a jar of cheap pens. She smiles at Chelsea with a mischievous look in her eyes, and Chelsea smiles back.
“You trying out?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” Chelsea says.
In the quiet way that things come to mind after a major trauma like killing your last friend, Chelsea is vaguely aware that it might be weird to call someone just a little older than she is ma’am, but everything feels pretty unreal right now and the woman doesn’t seem to take offense.
“Just fill this out. Sorry we don’t have any clipboards. You know how it is.”
Well, yes. With everyone staying home and avoiding crowds, plenty of stores have had to close, and since the mail carriers use open trucks and mosquitoes are everywhere, they got hit especially hard by the Violence in the South, which has slowed down the delivery of the next-day packages everyone is so accustomed to. While life goes on in cooler climes, Florida is struggling to stay afloat with the effects of the pandemic. Missing clipboards are the least of Chelsea’s problems.
She takes an application, or whatever it is, and a pen and goes to sit by the sunny windows. The room is painfully chilly and sparse in the way of underfunded local governments. A crappy TV blares the news in the corner, and most of the people sitting in plastic chairs stare at either the TV or their phones. These people—they have a desperate look about them, one Chelsea can relate to. Like Jeanie promised, they are all ages, all sizes. Chelsea was expecting buff guys, but most of the hopefuls are just the sort of folks she would see at the store.
She sits cross-legged on the ground and uses her chair as a backing for the paper. It’s the strangest application she’s ever seen, not that she’s had a job since she was a teen, before David, and even then she only had to fill out one.
Name, birthday, address, phone, all that is normal. So are the spaces for past jobs and the skills they encompassed.
But then it asks for three emergency contacts and allergies and clothing sizes. It demands height and weight and information on health problems and past surgeries.
And then there’s a section for circling her skills. Gymnastics, sports, running, wrestling, martial arts, cheerleading, theater, singing, stunts, circus skills, clowning, barbering, makeup application, camerawork, PR, food service, commercial driving, forklift operation. The longer and stranger the list gets, the more Chelsea realizes that she has none of the skills they require.
At a loss, she circles theater, cheerleading, and singing. She did all three in high school, and she has a decent voice, even if she hasn’t sung in public in twenty years. She swallows hard, the memory hitting her like a wave crashing as her eyes go unfocused, gazing out at the empty brown field in the hot sun.
It happened the night of the high school talent show. She was a senior, and she and her best friend, Whitney, had been planning their act for weeks—“The Point of No Return” from Phantom of the Opera. Whitney was Christine, wearing a big, poofy gown she’d found at the thrift store and altered to look less 1980s party and more 1800s. Chelsea was the Phantom, her thrift store tux a little ill fitting but mostly covered by a vampire cape they’d dug out of Whitney’s brother’s closet. She had a half mask and was in the dressing room, penciling in stubble. She’d been doing theater all through high school and loved nothing more than the energy of the dressing room, the hot lights and giggles and frenzy, everyone running around half dressed and fizzing, their eyes outlined in black. As she leaned in, carefully stippling her jaw with a Dollar Store eyeliner, David appeared behind her in the mirror, his hand behind his back.
He’d been so hot then, his hair gelled and his skin tan from summers lifeguarding. Every time she saw him, she swooned. They’d only been on a couple of dates, but she spent most of her time thinking about him, hoping he’d ask her out again, praying that when they talked by his car in the lot after school, he would lean in and kiss her for the first time. He looked amazing, dressed up in a white button-down and khakis, and he was smiling, right up until he recognized her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, clearly confused—and not in a good way.
She capped the eyeliner and turned around, smiling brightly. “Makeup. You’re not supposed to be back here! It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
David squinted and cocked his head, taking in her face. She wore thick pancake, black eyeliner and mascara—the usual theater getup, even if half her face would be hidden by the mask. His lip curled in disgust, and her stomach clutched tight.
“I’m the Phantom of the Opera. See?” She took her wig from the Styrofoam form and draped it over her pinned-back hair, then added the mask for full effect. She’d done a lot of work putting it all together, and she knew it looked great. But his reaction didn’t change.
All that energy and frenzy she’d felt began to wilt, and everyone else in the room faded into background as the boy she was crushing on super hard looked at her like she was an absolute idiot—a hideous, absolute idiot.
“You look like a dude.”
“That’s the whole idea.”
She looked up at him, hopeful, wanting him to understand what all this meant to her, how she felt when the song’s notes soared up and up as the Phantom pulled Christine into his sick world. They’d chosen the song for max drama, and there were even gobo lights that would make it look like they were in an underwater cavern, with light-blue ripples dancing on the black wall behind them.
David pulled flowers out from behind his back—tulips already going limp—but instead of dramatically offering them to her, which should’ve happened after the show, anyway, he placed them on the table behind her. He gently removed the mask and her wig, but he didn’t put it on the form, he just flopped it down on top of the flowers. Her skin zinged at his touch, her knees weak.
“I thought you were going to be the girl. I was hoping to see you in a sexy dress.” He clasped her jaw in both hands like he was going to kiss her, running his thumb over her chin, smearing the stubble dots she’d so carefully drawn. “It’s just weird, right? You in a tux?”
“There’s a historical precedent for gender swapping in theater. All the parts of women in Shakespeare’s plays went to men.” She looked up at him, hating how he was staring at her like she was a gross bug. “Wait. Aren’t you in the talent show, too? Where’s your costume? I’ve never seen you in the greenroom.”
He pulled away, smirking, and pulled something out of his back pocket. It was a gold wire circlet of fake leaves.
“I’m reciting from Julius Caesar. I’ll put on my toga beforehand, and my laurels. But no makeup or anything.” He looked around the room at all the theater and dance kids getting ready, at the splashy costumes and sequins and rouged cheeks. “It’s crazy back here.”
“Yeah, but it’s fun.”
It was actually kind of weird that he hadn’t been in the greenroom. He wasn’t in drama or chorus, and he was a late entry to the talent show—his Academic Bowl captain had suggested it would look good on college applications, he’d told her.
“Are you not putting on makeup? It’s hard to see features from the audience without it. I could help you—”
He scowled. “Uh, no thanks. Not my thing, historical precedent or not.” He glanced back at the door. “I was going to ask if you wanted to come hang with us in the lobby, but…” He looked her up and down, frowning. Her heart sank. He couldn’t show her off like this, was what he meant.
Whitney ran up right then looking amazing in her gown, her hair in huge curls. David stared at her like Chelsea didn’t exist. “Are you ready? What happened to your beard? We need to fix that.”
But Chelsea was watching David, and his interest in her seemed to be fading like the flowers he’d brought as he looked Whitney up and down. She’d had a crush on him for so long. He was so smart, so funny, so good looking, the kind of golden boy who was popular because he was involved in everything, knew everyone. And she was losing him. For whatever reason, seeing her in costume had killed that spark in his eyes, and he was now looking at Whitney like maybe he’d picked the wrong girl.
“See you in the lobby, after?” Chelsea asked, a hand on his arm.
He looked up, flinched away when he saw her face again. “Yeah, maybe.” But he didn’t smile, and he didn’t say anything else as he walked away.
“So that’s going well?” Whitney asked once he’d left the room.
“It was.” Chelsea turned back to the mirror. Her eyes were turning red and her stubble was a smear of brown. She didn’t care about that; she just wanted to fix things with David, wanted him to light up when he saw her and give her compliments and do that sweet, old-fashioned thing where he offered her his arm and made her feel safe and cared for. She’d never felt this way about another boy, and she liked that he was waiting to kiss her, that he cared about doing things right.
So what if he didn’t care about theater? If he didn’t really get something as special and incredible as Phantom of the Opera? People could have different interests. As long as he loved her, she would be free to do her own thing, just as he could do his. It’s not like she was over the moon about Academic Bowl and basketball.
“Chelsea?”
Whitney held up a baby wipe, but Chelsea felt frantic, trapped, like she was being held back. She tossed her wig aside and picked up the limp bouquet of tulips.
“I’m sorry,” she said, unable to meet Whitney’s eyes. “I feel sick. Think I’m going to throw up. Gotta go.”
She grabbed the baby wipe and her backpack and ran for the door. In the lobby, she darted into the bathroom and cleaned off all the stubble and most of the pancake until only her eyes were left, the heavy liner and mascara making her blue irises pop. She took out her tight bun and all the pins holding back her hair, fluffing it and running a little water through it until the honeyed waves came back. She sloughed off the vampire cape and hung it on the hook on the door and put on her regular clothes from her backpack, hip-hugger jeans and a tight-fitting tee. And then she went out into the lobby to find David, clutching his tulips to her chest and praying that she hadn’t lost him.
No, there he was, talking to his Academic Bowl buddies. She touched his elbow, and when he turned and saw her, he lit up. “Now, that’s more like it,” he said, sliding an arm around her waist and tucking her protectively and possessively against him, right in front of his friends. “You guys know Chelsea, right?”
She and Whitney were supposed to go on any second, but she waited outside with David. She didn’t want to know if Whitney was going to muscle through without her or maybe sing one of Christine’s solos instead, didn’t want to watch Whitney onstage and know she’d betrayed her best friend and missed out on something she’d been waiting months for, nor did she want to watch the stage stay black a little too long as the crew figured out how to skip ahead to the next act because Whitney had given up. She hid during intermission and only slipped into a seat in the back when David was going on.
There he was in his regular clothes with a white bedsheet belted over it and the little gold tiara on his head. With no makeup, his face was washed-out white. He raised his hand stiffly and recited the lines perfectly, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was almost like he thought he was in on a joke, and Chelsea wondered if this is what he’d felt like when he saw her in her Phantom makeup, like it just didn’t make any sense. But she wasn’t about to let him know that she was disappointed in his performance, didn’t want to make him feel self-conscious or weird. When he was done, she clapped, and afterward, she gave him one of her tulips, and he leaned in and pecked her lightly on the lips, and she knew she had made the right decision.
Whitney found out, of course—theater kids talk. And she chewed Chelsea out in B hall and called her every name in the book, including coward and slut, although Chelsea didn’t know which one hurt worse because neither felt true. Deep down, Chelsea knew she deserved it, that she’d been a shitty friend and that Whitney deserved better. But she had David, so it didn’t sting as much. That night after the talent show, instead of going to the cast party, he drove her home and pressed her against his car with a hand on either side and kissed her until her lips stung, his stubble scraping her jaw nearly raw.
Looking back to that night, she should’ve known then what he was.
Should’ve seen how he belittled her interests, was disgusted by the things she loved, ignored her friend except as a sexual object, welcomed her sacrifice as if it were his due.
But she didn’t see any of that at the time. She only knew that when he looked at her, something inside her longed to feel his arm tighten around her waist, pulling her close, making her feel small and safe. She didn’t know she was cozying up to a monster.
Hurray for hindsight.
Since then, she’s tried to find Whitney via every route the internet has offered. Friendster and then Myspace and then LiveJournal and then Facebook, but Whitney has never turned up—that, or she has Chelsea blocked everywhere she goes. A few times a year, whenever she thinks about it, Chelsea writes up an ad for the Tampa Craigslist Missed Connections, pouring her heart out to the Whitney she used to know, offering her sincerest apologies. She’s gotten plenty of garbage in response, but she’s never found Whitney, and this feeling lives like a splinter in her heart.
“You done with that?” The woman in the turban is standing over her, hand out for the application. It looks pretty pathetic. Only two of the three job spots are filled, the first with her high school job at the movie theater and the second, embarrassingly, with homemaker, a job of the past eighteen years.
“I guess so.” Chelsea stands to hand the application over, and the woman takes it and saunters back to her desk.
Chelsea sits down in her chair and looks around the room, dreading the fact that there’s no way on earth anyone would offer a job to someone with her qualifications—and her disease. Most of the people are staring at their phones, infinitely scrolling in their own little worlds, but the surfer guy who passed her on his way in meets her eyes, and his jaw drops open.
“Holy shit,” he murmurs.
Chelsea looks behind her, out the window, terrified she’s going to see George in his red hat, followed by the police, or maybe even David with his baseball bat, but there’s no one there.
“It’s her,” the guy says, pointing at the TV.
The brunette beside him stares at the TV, then at Chelsea. “Holy shit is right.”
“What?” Chelsea says, her stomach dropping. “Are you talking about me?”
But no one answers. They’re all focused on the TV.
On one side is an old photo from Chelsea’s phone, a selfie of her smiling at the beach. The words underneath, in all caps, say WANTED BY POLICE.
On the other side is George, standing by her minivan on the side of the highway.
“I barely escaped with my life,” he says angrily. “I guess that’s what happens when you stop to help someone these days. She attacked me and stole my truck.”
Now a reporter dominates the screen. “Police are looking for Florida woman Chelsea Martin—”
Holy shit, all the way.