When she reached the ridge, she looked back.
Joanna was gone.
So was the house.
* * *
The carnival had continued to unfold while Aracely was running, was tumbling, was falling, although she did not know it yet, into the fringes of a thing that looked very much like love. As she walked along the familiar, ever-changing aisles, lights twinkling on every side, the Ferris wheel turning gently in the distance, she worried.
To any other girl, it might have seemed strange for a house to be there one moment and gone the next: houses were meant, after all, to be rooted, stationary things. But Aracely had grown up with the carnival. It moved. If it stopped moving, it would die. She hadn’t heard of houses that did the same: that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. Maybe the house had simply wandered off for a little while, and would be back when it felt like it.
The entrance to her mother’s tent was closed, but the buzzing of the needle had stopped. Aracely tugged it aside and peeked through. “Mama?”
Daisy looked up from cleaning her needles and smiled. “There’s my girl,” she said. “Everything coming together out there?”
“Not from anything I’ve done,” said Aracely, stepping inside. “Mama, did we pay to set up here? Do we have permits?”
“Aracely, what . . .” Daisy stopped mid-sentence, eyes narrowing. “What have you done to your dress?”
“It’s not nice to answer a question with a question,” said Aracely. “You taught me that.”
“I also taught you to respect your mother, and not to go getting grass and mud all over your clothes. Where have you been?”
Aracely lifted her chin, trying to look brave. She wasn’t sure what brave looked like, but she thought she could do it, if she didn’t flinch. “I went running in the grass. It’s beautiful out there, Mama, you wouldn’t believe how—”
But her mother was on her feet, eyes wide and horrified, cleaning rag and tattoo gun forgotten in her haste to cross the tent and grasp Aracely’s shoulders, fingers digging in until they left paths of pain behind them. “You went outside the carnival?” she asked, and her voice was as shrill as the screams from the roller coaster, the ones that hung in the air like a promise of bigger fears to come. “You left the boundary?”
“I wasn’t hurt! I met the girl who owns this land, Mama, and she’s beautiful too, she’s not like a townie at all. She lives in the house past the ridge.” The house that wasn’t there. But that was all right, because it would come back. Right? That was probably the real difference between a carnival and a house. Houses had to stay on the same land all the time, planted like roses, while carnivals went wherever they wanted to go, like wildflowers.
“Did she touch you?” Daisy’s hands grasped tighter, tighter, until Aracely gasped and pulled away, shoulders throbbing.
“Mama, stop! You’re scaring me!”
“Answer the question!”
Aracely took another step back, and did the unthinkable.
She lied.
“No, Mama. She didn’t want to get her hands dirty.”
Lies are meant to be false things that seem believable, but this lie didn’t seem believable to Aracely. She couldn’t imagine Joanna—beautiful Joanna, with her house that is and isn’t there—being afraid of a little mud, especially not when that mud came from land that she already owned.
Daisy relaxed, and Aracely did the same, knowing her deception had been successful. A pang of pain shot through her heart. She was a bad girl now. She was a girl who could deceive her mother, and not even feel a little bit sorry for it.
“Good,” said Daisy. “I don’t know what possessed you to leave the carnival, but you must never, never do that again, and even more, you must never, never let an outsider touch you. You’re delicate. People like that, in places like this, they don’t understand how to be kind to delicate things. I won’t have you risking yourself like that. All right?”
Aracely didn’t answer. Daisy grabbed her again and shook her by the shoulders, seeming to have forgotten her own warning.
“All right?” she repeated.
“All right, Mama,” said Aracely.
This time Daisy let go of her own accord. “Good girl,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “Good, good girl.”
Aracely turned and fled the tent, and Daisy did not pursue her.
* * *
The sun dipped lower in the sky. Not quite sunset, when the midway would light up like a summer morning and the townies would start rolling in, drawn by the lights and the sound and the promise of something better than their quiet, ordinary homes, but getting closer. Dawn was a distant memory, the moment closer to tomorrow than yesterday.
Aracely stumbled between the familiar attractions, clutching the front of her gown and trying to swallow the fear that had grown in her breast with every panicked word that dropped from her mother’s lips. Daisy wasn’t supposed to lose her temper. Not with her. Daisy was her mother, her sole protector in a world full of dangerous things, and if Daisy was a danger, too, well . . .
Aracely didn’t know what she’d do if her mother had somehow become another danger in a world she’d always known was out to do her harm. She was innocent, yes, and she was delicate, but she was both those things because it had been safer than the alternative. If she allowed herself to be innocent and delicate and naïve, her mother would take care of everything, and the dangers of the wider world would never be able to consume her.
“You look lost.”
Aracely froze. Charlie emerged from the shadows between two tents, a bandage on his arm and a rolled cigarette in his hand, sweet smoke drifting up to tint the air. He looked at her frankly, assessing her fear. Aracely clutched her gown tighter, the fabric bunching under her fingers.
“What happened, Aracely?” he asked, and his voice was kind—kinder than her mother’s had been, kinder than she would ever have expected it to be. “Somebody hurt you?”
Silent, she nodded, unable to make her traitor tongue admit who had done the hurting.
Charlie sighed, taking a long drag on his cigarette as he considered the mud on her hem and the grass stains on her skirt. When he spoke again, it was to ask, “You go off the grounds?”
This time, her nod had a sliver of defiance in it. She glared at him, her fingers unclenching from her gown as she silently dared him to say something, anything, against her going wherever she liked.
Instead, he smiled. “Good girl. You’re almost grown. You have the right to leave if you want to. It’s not right to keep you cooped up. You’re not the first person born to the midway, and I daresay you won’t be the last—the world may be shutting shows like ours down as fast as it can manage, but people keep making babies, and we’ve got a little time yet. That doesn’t mean you have to stay here. You can’t choose the carnival if you’ve never once been outside it.”
“Mama says I do,” said Aracely.
“Your mother . . .” Charlie paused, choosing his words as carefully as he could. “Your mother worries about you. That’s all. Mothers always worry about daughters. Yours maybe more than most. But she has her reasons.”
“What are they?” Aracely narrowed her eyes. “Everyone says she has her reasons, everyone says she’s doing the best she can, but everyone also acts like it’s normal for me to always be in the carnival, even when they come and go as they please. I’ve never even been inside the Walmart!”