By a Charm and a Curse(11)
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.