“Hey! You’re from the freakshow, aren’t you?” The girlish voice startled me.
I froze on my way across the parking lot to the van.
A slim girl in frayed denim shorts and a worn leather jacket was leaning against a parked pickup truck.
“I saw you in the ticket booth this morning.” She blew a pink bubble from the chewing gum in her mouth.
Keeping my head down, I circled the girl, giving her a wide berth, then laid course back to the van again.
She peeled her back off the pickup and jogged after me. “Hey, what’s the matter? I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to ask you something.”
Whatever it was, I already knew I wouldn’t be able to answer. Madame didn’t allow speaking about the menagerie with strangers. It was always a wise choice to remain quiet.
The girl blew another gum bubble, then popped it with a loud sound. I drew my head further into my shoulders until both my mouth and my nose were buried in the scarf around my neck.
“So, what’s the deal with all those things you guys have in there?” the girl asked, blocking my way.
I had no choice but to stop, finally taking a good look at her.
Her copper-red hair was shaved off on one side, reaching down to her shoulder on the other. Shiny metal piercings decorated her lip, one nostril, and an eyebrow. Several rings and hoops glistened on each ear.
She was a colorful character, almost as colorful as Madame. Unlike Madame, though, she didn’t look evil. I liked staring at her.
The girl smirked, shoving the gum behind her cheek with her tongue.
“I’m Amber.” She offered me her thin, bony hand. “What’s your name?”
Clutching the paper bag from the store with one arm, I kept my injured hand in my pocket.
She shrugged, shoving her unshaken hand into the pocket of her shorts, but didn’t move out of my way.
“I need to go,” I mumbled, avoiding the girl’s hazel eyes.
“But are all those things in your tents real?” Her face split with a wide grin. “The animals, too?”
I nodded.
The animals of the menagerie were very real to me. Yenric, the two-headed piglet that, according to Madame, should’ve had three heads but was born with a defect and ended up with only two; the red snake-birds that looked like feather boas with claws and wings; the glow-in-the dark bog turtles that burst with colors brighter than any fireworks I’d seen—all of them were more real to me than this world’s cows or horses that I’d never seen up close.
“Cool!” Amber kept gazing at me with curiosity.
A sudden roar of an engine made me flinch and stagger back a few paces. A man on a motorbike pulled over behind Amber, his face concealed by a black helmet.
“Shoot, I’ve got to go. Well, bye, ticket girl.” She hopped on the seat behind the man and gave me a wave before circling his waist with both arms.
Wind caught her bright hair as the motorbike sped up along the dirt road, raising clouds of dust in its wake.
I stared after them, watching the dust settle. I’d never ridden a motorbike. Now I wondered what it felt like. Wind rushing by. Road ahead, endless as it could be.
Freedom.
Amber swept away on a motorbike was the epitome of being free when I was tied by invisible chains to the place I could never escape.
I squeezed the key to the van in my hand. I had a vehicle with enough gas in the tank to take me hundreds of miles away from Madame and her menagerie.
Except, where would I go?
Madame often said that money was everything in this world. I had none to my name, not a penny. I knew people earned money by working, but I had no idea how one would even get a job.
So much about the world outside of the menagerie confused and terrified me. Every now and then, I heard fragments of people’s conversations in the fairgrounds. Taxes, IDs, bank accounts, social security, college, rent, loans were the words often used by people. They sounded like a foreign language to me.
Radax was my one source of information, but he couldn’t help me with any of that either. He belonged to the menagerie, to Madame. Like me, he’d never really lived in this world, either.
Getting in the van and driving as far as it would take me was tempting. Except that this plan had no final destination and therefore ended nowhere.
Climbing into the driver’s seat, I started the engine. Then, I headed back to the fairgrounds and to Madame’s tents—to the tried and familiar, to the only place in the world where at least one person cared about me.