By a Charm and a Curse(4)
While Marcel checks out the RPMs, I walk around the car to see what I need to work on next. The ancient weather stripping around the passenger window crumbles beneath my fingertips; I’ll need to see about replacing it when I go into town. And I’ll need to finish patching up the gaping wound of rust over the left rear tire.
I run my fingers along the body filler covering the spots where rust had eaten through the metal, searching for any imperfections in my patchwork. I have a scrap of sandpaper in my pocket, and as I reach in, my fingers bump against the other reason why I’d stopped by this evening.
“Hey.” I toss a roll of cash Marcel’s way. “Half of this month’s wages.” I kneel and begin to buff away the small ridge that had caught under my fingertips, hopefully hiding the giddy tremble in my fingers. “That should do it, right? If I didn’t screw up my math, that gives us plenty to live off of for three months.”
Marcel riffles the corners of the bills with his thumb, staring at them like he’s trying to memorize the serial numbers, before tucking the roll of cash alongside its brothers in a hidden compartment of his toolbox. Rows and rows of money, most of our wages and tips from the last several months, line the tray. I’ve never seen that much cash before. It’s our future. Our ticket out. And the sight of it makes me feel lighter than I have in months.
“So when do you want to leave?” I glance at Marcel over my glasses, sure I’m going to see a roil of excitement playing over his features, but he’s busying himself with tightening the clamps on some tubing coming off the engine. And that’s when I know that after months of meticulous planning, Marcel and I are no longer on the same page.
Putting the only thing I have that resembles a home in my rearview mirror will be hard, but we both have our GEDs, a good store of cash, and, though the car isn’t much to look at, she’ll get us where we need to go. We won’t have the charm’s protection, but I don’t want to depend on it forever.
I stop sanding and rock back on my heels. “What’s up, man?”
Marcel stands, shaking out his long arms and cracking his knuckles. “I need more time.” A nervous sort of energy that’s not like him at all limns his edges, makes him jumpy. Like he expects me to lash out in anger.
Instead, I drop to the ground with a little flurry of dirt and lean against the car. “It’s Gin, isn’t it?”
Marcel plops down beside me, yanks the scrap of sandpaper from my hands, and begins to shred it into tiny pieces. “I gotta try, right? I mean, if we ditch this place and I never tried to see if there’s something between us, I’d always wonder. And that’s no way to live. Or so Mom’s self-help books tell me.”
Marcel has never understood why I don’t want to be dependent on the carnival. Maybe it’s because his family has been circus performers for generations, or maybe it’s because what I want seems contradictory. And I get that. But to me, there’s no contradiction at all. I want to choose a place and for once in my life put down roots. Let them sprawl and grow until I know where I belong.
The longer I stay with the carnival, the more the charm feels less like an oddity and more like a necessity. Less like a safety net and more like a net to pull me along, forever in the wake of something bigger than myself.
“Okay,” I say, plotting my words out carefully. “My birthday is in three months. That’s plenty of time for you to get off your ass and ask her out.” Marcel opens his mouth as though to argue, but I cut him off before he can get started. “It’s plenty of time. We’ll stick a pin in this until then, but…we will make a decision about leaving on my birthday and we will stick to it. Deal?”
I hold out my hand, and I need him to take it. Even though we move around the country every few weeks, even though there are dozens upon dozens of people who would love to take my place, I’m done. Each day that has the potential to run into a Moretti is one too many. And Marcel might have Gin, and that’s great, but there’s no one here for me. Briefly my thoughts flicker to the dark-haired girl, to the wry quirk of her lips as her friend laughed her head off, to the pretty flush in her cheeks as the blond girl gave her a friendly smack. But by the end of the night, she’ll be gone, too, and in a week, so many other faces will have passed before me that I won’t even be able to remember hers.
Slowly, with none of the surety that typically flows through his movements during one of his shows, Marcel reaches out and takes my hand. “Deal,” he says. His grip is loose, and even though we’ve come to an agreement, it doesn’t seem like we have, and I feel no closer to leaving this place than I did yesterday.
Chapter Three
Emma
Jules can’t sing for shit. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t stopped her from scream-singing her lungs out for God, Jesus, and the rest of Oklahoma to hear.
“Jules!” I have to yell to be heard over screaming children and the rush of the nearby roller coaster running on decades-old tracks. I tighten my coat, a small measure in a losing battle against the cold. “Leave the guy alone, he’s just doing his job.”
After I’d found Jules cradling a bacon-wrapped turkey leg like it was the world’s most precious cargo, we’d made our way through the carnival, working in ever-tightening spirals until we wound up here. The carnival has set up a booth to look like one of those old automated fortune-tellers. The bottom half is ornately carved wood painted a red so fiery it almost glows, and the panels of glass making up the top half are covered in swirling gold paint proclaiming Futures seen! Fortunes told! Small bulbous lights line the ceiling of the booth, filling it with a warm light, but it doesn’t hide the fact that the paint is chipping and the glass is covered in sticky, child-size fingerprints.