Chapter Fifteen

Emma

A carnival is a sad and desolate place on a weekday morning. No matter how brightly painted the stalls and booths are, no matter how loud the music (because apparently Whiskey and Duncan have convinced the carousel operator to let them ride, and their whooping has a kind of Doppler effect as they turn around and around), it’s still an empty carnival. It’s veins without blood. It’s lungs with no air.

Either Ben or his mom is hammering away at something fiercely, like whatever it is will escape if they don’t nail it down. A horse whickers. The sun shines like a spotlight in the drab gray sky. A red-and-white striped popcorn bag drifts down the lane.

“Hey,” Sidney says, nudging my arm with his elbow, “lookit.” Between two pinched fingers, I see a single, shimmering strand of hair. “My first gray!” He brings the strand so close to his face his eyes cross as he stares at it. “Shit. Am I going to have to color my hair now? Am I that vain? I think I am.”

He’s still babbling about whether or not he’ll have his hair professionally done or get Mrs. Potter to do it as we round the corner of Gin and Whiskey’s tent when we see Ben. And Ben looks pissed.

A happy bubble of delight fills my chest near to bursting. Then I find myself quickly trying to puzzle out why he’s angry. Did I do something? I couldn’t have done anything. Unless his mom was mad at him last night? She’d seemed pretty pissed for some reason, and he’d taken off in a hurry.

Sidney pushes me away with the tips of his fingers. “Better stay back, Em. I’ve been waiting a long time for Audrey Jr. to get pissed at me.”

He drops his arms to his sides, slightly spread out in welcome, an almost beatific expression on his face. Benjamin barrels toward him, and I figure out his intentions about a second too late. Benjamin draws his fist back, and with the momentum of his harried walk still with him, he punches Sidney in the jaw. Sidney goes sprawling into the dust.

Benjamin stands over him but doesn’t make a move to hit him again. “That,” he says, his voice uneven as if he ran over here, “was for my mom.” He turns abruptly and walks away, the dust kicked up by his heel drifting into Sidney’s face.

I run over to Sidney. A bright pink patch and smudge of blood mark the place where Benjamin hit him. It’s going to be a terrible bruise. He touches the corner of his mouth tenderly, wincing as he makes contact. As he examines the blood on his fingertip, he says, “It’s okay. That was about fifty years coming.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sidney looks at Benjamin’s retreating form. “Why don’t you go ask him?”

I must hesitate, because he waves his hand at me like he’s got it under control. I chase after Benjamin.

He’s pissed.

“Hey,” I say.

He doesn’t answer.

“Hey!”

Now he stops. I walk around him until we’re facing each other.

“What was that about?” I ask.

He pushes his hand up under his glasses to press against his eyelids. “That was stupid. I shouldn’t have. But I found out something Sidney did a long time ago, and—”

“Oh no,” I say, interrupting him. “Sidney’s an ass. I don’t know what he did, but I have no trouble believing that he deserved it.” Ben gives me a small smile that makes me disproportionately happy. “What I want to know is why you shook me off. What did I do wrong?”

The smile vanishes. “Nothing. I let her get in my head and I don’t know why she’d even— It’s like she thinks I’m a moron or something—I’m sorry.”

He starts walking again, headed vaguely to the backyard.

“Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Apparently,” he says, talking slowly like he’s having trouble corralling his thoughts, “Sidney and my mom had a thing. Before I was born, and before he was trapped in the curse. In fact”—he laughs a bitter laugh—“kissing the Girl in the Box was him cheating on my mom.”

We’ve stopped in front of the carousel, where Pia has joined her brother and Whiskey. The girl chases the spinning platform and jumps on.

“Do it, Whiskey!” Pia yells.

On the next rotation, Whiskey climbs onto the back of her slowly rising and falling carousel horse she’s riding.

A breeze ruffles Benjamin’s hair just as the sun’s coming out, making it glint in the light. His eyelashes are golden with it. “I guess if it weren’t for him being an idiot, I wouldn’t have been born, but that doesn’t make it any better. Damn.”

It isn’t hard to put together the rest. Audrey doesn’t want what happened to Sidney to happen to Ben. Which makes me the lecherous villain in this story, preying on her precious son. Suddenly I feel guilty, even though I wanted nothing more than to be around her son. Last night’s almost kiss flashes through my brain, momentarily leaving me giddy. Maybe I want to do more than just be around her son.

Time is one frozen moment as my mind works out what I’m thinking. Kissing Benjamin. I so, so want to. I’ve imagined it. I wish he’d been my first kiss and not Sidney. I wish I’d found him at a different time in my life. I wish a thousand things that all culminate in his lips on mine. When I look at him, his eyes are the clearest, prettiest aquamarine I’ve ever seen.

I watch Whiskey balance on one foot on top of a prancing scarlet horse with a gilded mane. Her limbs are graceful and steady as she balances out and strikes her pose, triumphant.

I have to look at her, because I can’t look at Benjamin. If I look at Benjamin I’m going to do that weird shaky shuddery thing that is what crying is in this new alien body.

The twins shout a chorus of incomprehensible gibberish at Whiskey, and the only word that jumps out is “handstand.”

“I want you to know, I would never trap you in the curse, I’d never kiss you, I mean—” If my cheeks could still turn red, they’d be visible from fifty feet away. “Not that I wouldn’t ever want to—it’s just that…damn it.” I prop my arms against the metal fencing surrounding the carousel and try to ignore the dull thud it makes when I do.

“I get it,” Ben says.

Dry, golden tufts of dead grass sway around my feet, and I concentrate on them instead of looking at Benjamin. “Sidney was my first kiss.”

Benjamin stills beside me, and I turn in time to witness the play of emotions running across his face. The way his eyes widen in shock then his mouth goes firm and thin in anger. Before he can get too worked up, I say, “It sucks, but I’m over it. Well, I’ll be over it. Although now I’m wishing I’d just gone ahead and kissed Jack Macklin at the homecoming dance last year. But…” But what? But I’d really like to kiss you, Ben, if you’d let me? I can’t say that, even if the words are practically hanging off the tip of my tongue.

That moment where my heart and intentions sit between us stretches longer and longer. God. I don’t think it’s humanly possible to feel more awkward than I do right now.

Benjamin seems nearer when he speaks, but that could be me hoping, wishing. “Will you do it? Kiss someone and trick him into taking your place?” A frown furrows in between his eyebrows. “Maybe even break someone’s heart, like my mom?”

His blue eyes are darker, the color shifting from cloudless sky to angry ocean. He’s seeing me as a weapon for the first time, and oh God, but I hate it. “That’s all I can do, isn’t it?”

I want so desperately for him to understand. But he shifts his gaze away from mine, and I do the same, unable to watch the play of emotions on his face.

Whiskey is standing on both hands the next time the carousel loops around, and the twins are whooping excitedly. Her legs arc backward until her pointed toes almost touch the back of her head. She slowly lifts one hand from the horse until five fingers and one palm are all that’s keeping her upright.

“No,” he says, staring intently at me. “I don’t think that’s all you can do. Everyone assumes that you have to pass on the curse, but what if you didn’t? What if, instead, you broke it?”

I open my mouth to respond, but the words aren’t there. Even in my short time with the carnival, the curse seems as immutable as the color of the sky. Surely if the curse could be broken, someone else would have tried by now. And even if it were possible, what about the consequences?

“I don’t know. No one told me how to break it, just how to pass it on. And Leslie said it isn’t just that the carnival has a charm and a curse upon it, but that the two things are dependent. If I break the curse, it’ll probably ruin the charm. I just don’t know what to do.”

“Screw the charm,” he says deliberately. “If the people who benefit from the curse want it so badly, they’d bear the burden of it themselves. So don’t worry about them. And as for the rest, whatever it is that has to be done, you wouldn’t have to do it alone.”

The grin stretches out my cheeks until I’m surprised my face hasn’t cracked. “You’d help me?”

In answer, he folds me up in his arms. I fit neatly against his chest, and he rests his chin on the top of my head. It’s strange and weird and I have no precedent for this kind of thing, and I’m just so damned happy I swear I’d almost forgotten what happiness felt like.

But all of that is lost in his warmth and the steady beating of his heart under my ear. For a brief moment I pretend I have a heartbeat, too, one that can thump in time with his.

Whiskey’s shriek snaps me out of it.

I turn in time to see her hit the wooden boards of the carousel floor. Ben and I run for the gate as Pia jumps off and stumbles to the control booth.

Ben jumps on the carousel before it stills, dodging around the horses and lions and tigers. When the machine’s revolutions slow a little more, I clumsily follow.

The wooden animals are still rising and falling slowly, creepily. A blue tiger with malicious jeweled eyes knocks into me with its massive paw. A giant parrot, its feathers painted a myriad of colors, each one cut with deep grooves that mark the center line and the barbs, dips in my way. As I twist around a giant bear, I find Duncan and Ben huddled around Whiskey.

A hand grips onto mine, and it’s Pia, her cheeks streaked with tears. Benjamin barks directions at Duncan. The latter has taken off his T-shirt and he’s cutting off strips with a pocketknife. I can’t see Whiskey around their bodies. A trickle of blood fills the grooves between planks of wood, reaching for my shoes.

Duncan lifts Whiskey in his arms. I never thought of her as small, but seeing her cradled there, her arms less than half as big around as his, her whole body neatly tucked in his arms, “fragile” is the only word that comes to mind. Ben is moving with them, winding the fabric Duncan provided him around to her head.

It’s already soaked through with red.