Chapter Five

Emma

I can’t stop shaking. Twitching. Jerking.

A chill has seeped into my bones, into my skin, and it refuses to go away. Leslie—the blond woman who seems to be in charge—cranked up the heater in her double-wide, but it’s not doing a damn thing. Every now and then, my arm or my leg will snap out—one time I hit Lars squarely in the chin, and punching him felt like a teeny tiny bit of retribution for his part in tonight’s hellish events—but I can’t stop it.

My skin still looks like skin, but it’s gone hard, like I’ve been petrified. No one ever thinks about bending their arms or their knees, but now I have to, I have to really want it, and even then, my joints are stiff and everything aches when I move. Somewhere, really deep down, I can feel the sluggish beat of my heart. But there’s only one beat for every two, and all the other signs of life—breath, pulse, tears, sweat—are long gone.

Everything I touch is dull and far away. I know I’m sitting on a slick vinyl booth in the kitchen area of the camper, but I can’t feel the plastic-y seat under my palm or the sharp angles of the wooden frame pressing against my legs. I can’t tell if the table’s surface is cold, or if the vinyl is trying to bond permanently with the skin exposed by the hole in my jeans. Everything feels uniformly the same. Everything feels like nothing. The only thing I can feel is the cold deep in my bones.

I should be panicking. I think if I could breathe, I’d be hyperventilating. Instead, I sit across from Leslie, unable to feel anything but the relentless cold. And the only thought running through my head is that I should have taken up Jules on finding and devouring as many fried candy bars as possible.

Oh God. Jules. Is she going to think I abandoned her? That she said something or did something to make me run off into the night? What will she do when her dad comes to pick us up? Will she lie, say that I went home on my own? Or will she tell the truth, that I’ve gone missing? And if it’s the latter, how many times will she have to tell her story, to her dad, to the cops, to my family?

My family.

Shit, shit, shit. They’re going to think I’ve run away. I never bothered to hide my dislike of this tiny town, of the cramped house, of the water stain on the ceiling of my room that kind of looked like James Brown. Will my dad think I don’t care about the life he’s put together for us in Claremore? Thomas, my older brother, is going to be pissed, and Jonah, only seven, isn’t going to have anyone to go to when he has a nightmare and needs to cuddle before falling back to sleep. And my mom. She might have to come back from Guatemala. She might lose the research funding she worked so hard to get.

All because of my stupid decisions.

Leslie cradles a cup of something warm and steaming in her hands, and all I want is to shove my fingers into the hot liquid to see if I’ll feel it. Sidney and Lars nurse their own mugs, though Lars slipped something from a flask into his.

“Can I have one?” I ask, pointing to the kettle on the little two-burner stove.

I might drown under the waves of their pity.

“It won’t do you any good,” Sidney says. His head jerks to the side when Lars bumps into him accidentally on purpose.

I glare at Sidney, at his cheeks with their flush of pink and his crooked teeth. “You need to shut the hell up.”

“I am trying to help.” Each word is sharp edges and overpronounced consonants.

“You want to help?” I yell. “Tell me what the hell you did to me and how to fix it!”

There’s nothing but Leslie’s unblinking silence, and Sidney chugging his coffee, and Lars standing uncomfortably in the corner.

Leslie spins her mug but keeps her blue, blue eyes on me. When she talks, it’s with the slow, measured speech of someone trying to soothe a cornered animal. “First of all, you should know that we don’t want to hurt you any more than you’ve already been hurt. We’re here to help you and take care of you, okay?”

I don’t know if I believe that, but Leslie takes my silence for agreement and continues. “A long time ago, before you or I were born—and I was born quite a long time ago—a curse was placed on our carnival.”

“Do you have any oranges?” Sidney asks as he slams down his mug. “I would kill for an orange right now.”

“If you’re going to be an insensitive jackass,” Lars growls, “then you should leave now.” He looms over Sidney, like a storybook giant threatening some puny villager.

“No,” Leslie says in the kind of voice that gets shit done, “I need him here. He’s part of the story.” She points to one of the cupboards by the sink and sure enough, after a few moments of digging, Sidney pulls out a fat orange. His fingers tear at it, like there’s no way he’ll ever get the peel off quickly enough. A thin mist of juice sprays out from the opened fruit.

I should be able to smell the bright citrusy scent, but I can’t.

My legs are as hard to move as a porch door swollen from rain, but I manage to stand and nearly take the tabletop with me. “Someone tell me how to fix this! I shouldn’t be here. All I did was kiss a boy—” I turn and point an accusing finger at Sidney, though what I really want to do is hit him. “My first kiss, by the way, asshole, and now I am this. I shouldn’t! Be here! I should be at home…” My next words die on my tongue. Home is Mom, and right now, Mom is thousands of miles away. Home is a family who, if they don’t already, will soon think I’ve abandoned them.

I’m even more alone than I thought possible.

I stare at my fingers and try to keep the wobble out of my voice. “Just take me to my dad, or call Jules, or if you can’t be bothered, at least call 911 and I’ll wait for the ambulance by myself!”

The three exchange a glance, and the chill in my bones deepens.

“Bad idea, Em,” Sidney says. “So there was this one time, outside of what, Tempe? Somewhere. Point is, I was feeling rebellious. So rebellious that I let everyone believe I was with the caravan, when in actuality, I had stayed behind. I think they got maybe a mile or two away when it happened. Everything seized up on me, and I collapsed. I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk. The only thing I could do was stare at the passing clouds. I had to watch as the sun moved across the sky and the moon came up. I had no idea what I was going to do. Even if someone found me, what could I do? Stare into their soul until they figured out what happened to me? Pray that I had an ‘If Lost, Return to Le Grande’s Carnival’ printed across my back that I didn’t know about? Sit in an antique shop for all of eternity? Finally, someone figured out I was missing, and Leslie came back for me. The closer we got to the carnival, the more I could move. It wasn’t until I was back among the trailers and the machines and the people that I was myself again. Well, as much as you can be yourself while cursed.”

I stare at Sidney, at the way his skin looks so flushed against the white face paint and the way his eyes glint and sparkle. How could I have possibly thought he was alive before? How could I have been so stupid? “So you’re telling me I’m trapped?”

“Not trapped, not quite,” Leslie says, at the exact same time Sidney says, “Pretty much.”

Leslie glares at Sidney but says, “We can’t let you leave.”

“Watch me.” My chest heaves, like there’s something in my lungs clawing up my throat to escape, and I realize this is what sobbing feels like in my new, alien body.

Sidney and Lars melt out of the way as I clumsily escape the trailer. The door slams behind me, a loud bang in the still night. It’s colder out here under the silver stars. Slowly, so slowly I might not have noticed if it wasn’t for the fact that I can barely feel anything at all, and what I can feel is amplified, the twitching worsens. I’m in the middle of a row of trailers, campers, two tents that have seen better days, and one old but brightly painted wagon.

Remembering how hard the simple task of walking had been earlier, I put each foot forward slowly, making sure my stiff legs are solidly planted beneath me before I take a step. Between two trailers I find a huge tin bucket; I flip it over with clumsy hands and sit with a dull thunk.

I splay my fingers over my knees. Under the glow of the moon, they’re white like bone, like shell, like things that have had all the life leeched out of them. A shudder trembles at the base of my spine, but a quiet animal snuffling keeps me from giving in to my breakdown. Peeking out from beneath the shiny trailer is a little black nose bracketed by tufts of dirty white fur.

The rest of the dog emerges from the shadows, a wriggling mass of terrier-shaped happiness. I’m not sure if this dog is particularly friendly or maybe I just smell appealing (though what on earth do I smell like anymore?), but the dog immediately props its front paws onto my leg, leaving little muddy paw prints.

And oh, but he’s warm.

Even that little bit of contact feels heavenly, warmth radiating out from where he’s touching me. I heft him onto my lap, and it’s more like I’m holding a small fire on my legs instead of a dog. Though a fire wouldn’t nuzzle at my hands, slyly positioning them in the perfect place for a scratch behind the ears. Happy to keep this relationship beneficial for the both of us, I oblige, and scritch at the spot that makes his back leg go berserk.

I’m not sure how long the dog and I sit there—me happy to soak up all the warmth he has to offer, him ecstatic for the unending scratches and pets—but eventually I hear footsteps. Lars rounds the corner, and he sags against one of the trailers, an olive-green monstrosity that groans beneath his weight.

“Is this where you tell me that everything is going to be okay?” I ask, searching for the glitter of his dark eyes in the shadows that surround him.

“No,” he says solemnly. The honesty hurts, but not as much as a lie would, I think. “There’s a lot more about this curse that you’ll need to know and that I can’t tell you. And before you ask, I know I played a part in this, and I am sorry. And I’d do it again, because I’ve been here helping Leslie run this show for longer than you can imagine. But—” He pauses here, and the word is heavy, loaded. Something inside me clenches tight, like my rock-hard lungs are compressing into diamonds. “Leslie will tell you the technical bits. But here’s what she isn’t going to tell you.”

My hands go still, mid-scratch. The dog in my lap gives a long, high-pitched whine.

“The curse changes you. It changes everyone it touches, really, because I hate having a part in it, but damn if I don’t love the perks that come with it. Did you learn about the Korean War in school, Emma?”

He shifts over into a beam of moonlight, like he wants me to get a better look at him. Every detail is crisp. Laugh lines arc out from his eyes, but there aren’t many and they aren’t deep. Two furrows sit between his eyebrows, like they’re permanently pinched together in mild frustration. His mustache covers most of his mouth, so I can’t see if any lines have made their mark there. In this light, his orangey hair has been bleached to some sort of indiscriminate gray, but I don’t remember seeing any silver in his hair earlier. He doesn’t look to be any older than forty-five, though I know that if he’s talking about the Korean War he must be older. “Are you trying to tell me that you’d be old as balls without the curse?” I ask, finding it hard to be excited for his relatively youthful appearance.

“I am old as balls, but only because of this place. Before I got here, I was dying from lung cancer. Docs said it was thanks to exposure to chemical agents in the war.”

“Don’t bullshit me.” The anger I felt before, the stuff bubbling just under the surface, threatens to roil again, and my arms tighten around the dog, though I’m not sure if I mean to protect him or if I want him to protect me. My grandfather had lung cancer, died of it, and Lars could probably model for some sort of mountain man, outdoor living magazine.

“You want to see my old x-rays, kiddo? I was dyin’, and now I’m not. Leslie found me doing chemo with her dad, thought I still had some life in me, and brought me here. I can breathe, and I don’t even think I’ve coughed in decades. And I’m not the only one reaping the benefits of the charm. We like it, Emmaline. We want nothing more than for things to continue as they are.

“But that’s just it. There are no perks in it for you. You won’t age, but you won’t live, either. Every day you’ll need to be in that booth, waiting to trap the next sucker. And the longer it takes for you to charm some boy—or girl, that’s a thing now, right?—into taking your place, the more stunted and dark your heart becomes. You’ll sacrifice bits of your soul all under the umbrella of the curse. You’ll tell yourself it’s okay when the lies tumble out of your mouth to steal someone’s life away from them. Because that’s the bottom line: if you want to leave, you’ll have to screw someone over.”

The breath blows out of him like the troubled rumble of a slumbering lion. “But this…this is the first time I’ve really been directly involved. Gotten my hands dirty, so to speak. And I don’t like it much. I know we need someone in that booth, but it doesn’t have to be someone I helped put there. So I want you to get up. Get in there. And let Leslie and that jackass tell you how to pass this curse along.”

He places a big hand on my shoulder, just for a second, so quick that his warmth doesn’t get the chance to seep into my skin. Then he’s gone just as quickly as he came, surprisingly quiet for someone so big, leaving me to find solace in the black and gray and white world lit by the moon.

One by one, the sounds come back into the night. Crickets chirp back and forth at one another, and if I listen really hard, I can hear some people talking farther down the alley. But, louder than any of those things are the dull clacks of the dog’s nails as he resituates himself on the hard, unyielding surface of my legs.

I want to go home. I want to tell Jules I’m sorry. Catch her before she tells my dad and brothers, to spare them any pain or anxiety that might result from my disappearance. I want to fix this.

I have to fix this.

Gripping him gently, I lift the dog from my lap and place him on the ground. Slowly, so as not to set off another round of uncontrollable twitching, I stand. The little dog looks as if he doesn’t understand why we had to get up, and, if we did have to get up, then why is he not in my arms, but I shoo him along, and he trots down the aisle, looking for trouble to cause or another lap to sit in. I take a careful step, and when my legs don’t give out beneath me, I make my way to the trailer. The muffled conversation within is cut short as I clunk up the stairs. Stealth, something I never particularly excelled at before, is completely impossible in this graceless body. My fingers slip once against the door handle—just one smooth surface skipping along another—but I get it on the second try and go in.

Lars and Leslie watch me as though I’m a bomb about to go off; Sidney, occupied with a bowl of cereal and another cup of coffee, couldn’t care less. I stumble back into my seat opposite Leslie and put my hands on the table, pressing one down hard into the other in hopes it’ll calm the twitching.

“Tell me about the curse,” I say.

Leslie shifts in her seat and sighs. “These are the basics as we understand them. The cursed one chooses someone to take his or her place. They get the—”

She pauses, her mouth tightening into a grimace, and I jump in. “Just say victim, because that’s what I am.”

“Hey,” Sidney says around a mouth full of food, “I was that victim once, too.”

“Are you asking me to pity you?” I feel colder than cold, more still than I have all night. I am an iced-over lake, a glacier. At that moment, I would have gladly accepted the consequences of the curse if it came with the ability to freeze him like an icicle I could shatter against the floor.

Leslie leaps back into the conversation before Sidney can make things worse. “There is a series of events that have to be done in a certain order. The victim must give up their true name. He or she must drink all the wine, brewed and charmed by our psychics, and if even a little of it remains in the bottle, the curse won’t transfer. And then the victim must be broken, so the curse can put them back together again.”

“Are you telling me that this asshole didn’t have to kiss me?” I ask.

Leslie shakes her head. “The kiss seals the pact between you. It must be those things all together—name, wine, a kiss to enter the deal, and a kiss to seal it. Just one or two of those things doesn’t mean anything.”

“But I didn’t agree to anything!” I’m close to running out again; my legs itch to get away from this trailer and keep going. To find my father and let him help me figure this all out. To get help from anyone who isn’t a member of this damned carnival.

Leslie’s hands reach across the table again, though far more tentatively than before. When I don’t yank my fingers out of the way, she rests hers on mine so gently that I’m only able to register the touch because of the heat that radiates from her hand into mine. “You might not have agreed, but you kissed him, and the curse isn’t all that discriminating. I know this is not how you expected your evening to end. But we’re here for you, and we’ll do everything we can to make you as comfortable as we can while you’re with us, however long that may be.”

My stiff fingers curl into fists. “Then take it back.”

Leslie draws in a sharp breath and Sidney carefully puts his spoon into his bowl.

“No,” he says.

Sidney stands in one fluid motion, graceful, like a dancer. “I got rid of it. It’s a hard thing to manage, but I did it. You can, too.”

Lars clearly wants to say something to him, but Sidney is out the door before he can. The heaving, shuddering feeling hits me again, and I feel like I might shatter into a hundred pieces. But then Leslie’s there, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me close. Nonsense words meant to soothe and comfort fill my ears, but I don’t really hear them. All I hear are the shuddering screams that pour out of my mouth.

I want my home. I want my bed and the four walls I’ve made mine. And if I can’t have that, then I want the room in my dad’s house with its shitty garage-sale bed and the water stain on the ceiling. I want to hear Dad and Thomas argue about which college team does or doesn’t deserve a spot in the playoffs. Hell, right now, I’d walk across a fire pit of Jonah’s Legos and smile like a pageant queen when I got to the other side if it meant I could wake up from this nightmare tomorrow.

But I don’t have that. None of it. All I’ve got is Leslie, who holds me so tight her heat feels like it belongs to me, and Lars, who glares daggers at the door as though he might be able to strike Sidney dead with a look.

I search for stillness. For calm. Slowly, the shuddering, shaking explosion of emotions calms to a slight twitch here and there. If I want to go home, I need to know how to do it. I need to learn about the curse.

As my trembling becomes less violent, Leslie releases her grip and returns to the other side of the table. “If you want to talk about this tomorrow…”

“No!” My response is loud enough to startle Lars from his attempt to psychically throttle Sidney. “I mean, no. Let’s get it out tonight.”

Leslie’s gaze darts to Lars, then back to me, and when she talks, her voice is gentle. “Okay. As I said, there’s a curse, and right now, it’s living in you. And there’s a charm, one that protects the carnival so we, in turn, can take care of you.”

I roll my eyes at that bit but don’t argue. From what Lars said, it sounds like they benefit from the charm far more than I do.

“But what most people who work here don’t know is that the charm and the curse are codependent. When Sidney was stuck in that field after we had driven away, we had a string of accidents. Small things at first. Sprained wrist, twisted ankle. Then our fire-eater got a nasty burn, covered half her body. Of course, we didn’t realize what was going on right away, but afterward, when we had Sidney back safe and sound and the accidents stopped, Lars and I put it together.”

She presses her mouth into a firm line, and right then, I can see how she, like Lars, must be far older than she appears. Every year of her life is in the small tight frown and the hard glint in her eyes. My fingers clench around the fabric of my shirt.

“From right now until the minute you pass on the curse, we are linked,” Leslie says. “The carnival thrives when you thrive. It suffers when you suffer. We need you and you need us, and there is nothing that will change that fact.”