The stone that turned under her foot knew nothing of malice, nor of carnivals, nor of runaway midway princesses fleeing gilded cages. It was an accident, nothing more, but it was enough to send Aracely tumbling head over heels down the slope, over and over again, until a strong hand caught her ankle and jerked her to a sudden, bone-jarring halt.
Aracely lay facedown, panting, trying to reconcile the end of her flight with the way the world had turned itself upside-down and wrongside-up all at the same time. Her chest was tight. Her knees burned, and she knew when she looked at herself, she’d find grass stains and mud and a hundred other proofs of her transgressions.
“My mother’s going to kill me,” she moaned.
A voice—a new voice, a strange voice, unfamiliar as a motel room in the light of morning—laughed, and the hand holding her ankle let go. “Maybe I should have let you keep rolling, then. A broken neck isn’t pleasant, but nobody’s mother ever killed them after they were already dead.”
Aracely stiffened. New voices meant townies, and townies meant danger. She’d listened to the older ladies talking when they didn’t think she was close enough to hear, cigarettes cupped in their hands and secrets hidden in every honeyed syllable. They were her oracles, the grand dames of the carnival, and when she was old enough and wise enough to know everything they knew, she would be allowed to go wherever she wanted. That was how it was, for flowers. They were delicate when they were fresh, but once they’d had time to dry and wither, they were strong. They could perfume the world.
“It’s all right. I’m not mad at you or nothing. Lots of people fall down in this field.” The voice paused. “Well, I suppose not lots. That would take having lots of people hanging around, and that doesn’t so much happen anymore.”
Aracely hesitated. Whoever it was didn’t talk like any townie she’d ever met. Carefully, she pushed herself up onto her hands and twisted around to look over her shoulder.
The girl—woman—girl behind her offered a lopsided smile of greeting, raising one hand in the smallest possible iteration of a wave. “Hi.”
She was striking. Not beautiful: there wasn’t enough softness to her for beauty. There were girls at the carnival that everyone agreed were beautiful, who could stop traffic when they walked the midway, who could talk townies into anything they wanted. This girl wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t quite a woman yet, either; she had the same softness and smokiness that Aracely had, like she could still decide to go in any number of directions, rather than growing up to be one singular thing.
Sometimes girls who weren’t beautiful could be handsome, but that wasn’t this girl, with her hair like coal and her eyes like cinders, with the scars of a bad burn pulling the skin of one cheek upward in a permanent, secretive smile. There were men at the carnival who would say that scar had ruined her, and even without hearing them speak aloud, Aracely felt a wave of hot, terrible hatred for them and their judging eyes. They didn’t have the right to judge. They never could.
“Something wrong?” asked the girl, smile fading.
Aracely’s hate turned into horror in her belly. She thought—the stranger thought—she thought Aracely was staring at her scars. It was plain as anything.
It was awful.
“No,” said Aracely. “I just took a worse tumble than I thought, I guess. I’m sorry. I’m . . .” I’m away from the carnival for the first time in my life, I’m scared, I’m not supposed to be here, I’m never leaving again. “. . . I’m Aracely.”
“Pretty name,” said the stranger, and offered her hand. The only one she could offer, Aracely realized: her other hand was as burnt as her face, and hung, stiff as an old tree branch, at the end of a motionless arm.
I want to kiss her scars, Aracely thought, and her ears burned as she took the offered hand and let herself be tugged to her feet.
“I didn’t choose it; my mama gave it to me,” she said.
“Still, it suits you,” said the stranger. “I’m Joanna.”
“That suits you, too.” Aracely realized she was still holding Joanna’s hand and dropped it, cheeks flaring red. It felt as if there wasn’t any blood left for the rest of her body, with the way it was rushing to her face. “I—I mean, you—I mean, do you live around here?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Joanna jerked her chin, indicating something beyond Aracely. Aracely turned, and there was the house—the big, white, impossible house that had lured her away from the carnival. The mansion in the middle of nowhere, the house that shouldn’t have existed.
“I came back after the fire,” said Joanna. “I couldn’t think of anyplace I wanted to go. This was home. Didn’t matter if it had gotten a little singed-up and smoky. Same thing happened to me. It didn’t seem right to leave without fixing what we’d lost.”
There was a story in every sentence, and Aracely knew if she peeled them back, if she looked them straight in the eye, she’d find things she didn’t want to see. Instead, she smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt and sighed.
“I’m with the carnival that’s setting up over the ridge,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
Joanna raised an eyebrow. “Carnival?” she asked. “I own the land for a mile around here, and this is the first I’m hearing of a carnival.”
The blood that had been rushing to Aracely’s face drained away, leaving her pale as paper. “I . . . Our frontman was supposed to make sure everything was in order,” she said. “He has the papers.” Or did he? She never left the carnival boundary, not under normal circumstances. How would she know if everything was being done correctly?
There was never enough money. She knew that. There was never enough money, and the Ferris wheel needed repairing, and half the games were privately owned, they came and went like flowers in the fall, undependable, nothing you could pin a midway on. Her mother had been making concessions on their rent for years, letting them have their spaces for less than she should have, just to be sure of having steady attractions to sell towns on allowing the carnival to stop there. A big, empty field, near a house that had almost burned down . . . it would have seemed like a good place to set up without paying.
News of disasters travels fast. They could have been states away when the fire happened and still have heard about it, her mother filing the information for a dry spell, a time when an unguarded field would be a necessary thing. News that it had been rebuilt, that someone was living there, well. That wasn’t as interesting. It wouldn’t have traveled nearly as fast.
“I have to go,” said Aracely.
“I suppose you do,” said Joanna—and was it Aracely’s imagination, or did the other girl’s face fall, just a little, the expression dampened by her scars? “No one lingers here for long.”
Aracely wanted to tell her no, no, she wasn’t running away from Joanna; she was running toward the carnival, toward her mother, toward the answers to the uncomfortable questions she was asking herself. She wanted to stay where Joanna was more than almost anything she could think of, wanted to keep looking at this beautiful girl with her tousled hair and her suspicious eyes, wanted to daydream about what it would feel like to run her fingers down both sides of her face at once, to read the secret stories tangled in her scars. Her throat was dry; her tongue was strangled. All she could do was shake her head, and turn, and flee.