The Girl Who Would Be King(35)

I realize, as the curtains part, that I’m expecting to see my mother.



•

I stride through the front gates of ‘Joan’s’ carnival, with an eye out for the sideshow. I have to admit, this carnival looks like a winner – there are all sorts of freaks walking around, including actual Siamese twins running the hot dog and corn dog kiosk. If real, honest-to-god, though powerless freaks are running food stands, what might they have lurking in the actual sideshow? I’m getting giddy with anticipation, and buy a corn dog from the prettier of the Siamese with a wallet I lift off a young couple in love.

I see the sideshow in the distance and make my way there while devouring my corn dog and observing the freaks all around me with an annoyed eye. I’m beginning to understand that ‘freak’ is definitely the right word. People with deformities, and even crazier, people who deform themselves on purpose, and people who pretend to be things they aren’t. Ironically, I’ve realized that I at least have more respect for the real freaks, since maybe they don’t have as many options. But what of these people who turn themselves into freaks on purpose? I can’t figure that out at all. I suppose a person could argue that I turned myself into a freak when I killed my mother, but I’d like to see anyone turn down my power. And also, it totally called to me. Long before I even knew what it was I could feel it calling to me, like those Sirens that killed that Othello guy...or whatever that story was. No. I’m not like these people. I’m unique in the world. I’m more and more sure of that every day.

But when I walk into Joan’s tent it’s like someone hits me with a sledgehammer.

Something is here for real.

It’s not like with Lena.

I can taste it.

Real power.

I grab onto some benches nearby and take a seat near the edge of the tent before I almost faint. The feeling is so powerful it’s like the air is water pressing on me from all sides, like I’m a submarine about to be crushed by ocean depths. Some guy next to me offers me a napkin and asks if I’m okay, but it sounds like he’s underwater and a thousand miles away.

“Fine. Leave me ‘lone,” is all I manage. He doesn’t like that and scoots farther away, which is my preference anyway. I put my head between my legs and breathe in some deep breaths trying to get my bearings. What if whoever is here causing me to feel this way is feeling this too? What if I can’t stand up, let alone fight, if they reveal themselves?

What have I done?





PART II: and here we test our powers





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I mostly watch the show through my hands. I can only assume Joan is the one causing all this pain and conflict in my body since she’s the star with the purported power, but I feel so freaking sick I can’t bring myself to do anything but stare at the ground through my hands. The best I can do is an occasional glance at Joan, who seems completely unaffected by my presence.

Through the snippets and stolen glances her show looks like bullshit but that doesn’t mean she is. Maybe she spends half her time hiding out, just like me, pretending she is less than she is. I have to admit, if she’s faking it’s a pretty good cover – hiding out in plain sight and all that. It makes sense in a backwards way.

There’s an unnaturally bright light somewhere in the tent but I’m too disoriented to be able to tell if it’s just part of the show or something more troubling.

I feel vulnerable in a way I haven’t since before I killed Delia. All weak and kitteny, like I couldn’t even take a punch, let alone throw one.

It’s horrible.



°

She is, of course, not my mother.

This is also not the Joan from the poster I have fallen in love with; this woman is only about five foot seven, and though you can see that she was once a great beauty, her face is now streaked with lines and sagging skin caked in too much stage makeup. She wears a complicated costume that covers most of her body and makes it difficult to tell where one part of her begins and another ends. She also looks very unhappy. She’s smiling, of course, but it looks like the forced smile of a professional showman. Her eyes actually look unbelievably lonely. In fact, it’s her eyes that convince me she might be the real thing – seeing my own loneliness reflected back at me so strongly.

My hands tighten on the bench as things inside me continue to roll and screech, and I worry about snapping the bench in half and sending all the people next to me careening to the ground, so I put my hands in my lap. I ball them into tight fists, my nails cutting into my flesh, and trickles of blood seeping out between the cracks of my fingers and onto my jeans. What is happening to me? Is Joan causing it? It’s been building ever since people started filling the stands and if it keeps going I feel like something is going to explode from inside me. As I try to keep my focus on Joan my muscles feel like they’re humming hard inside my limbs, like a car on a starting line, ready to leap forward. The world around me is spongy and unreal. I feel like poking the man sitting next to me, to see if he is made of flesh, or of water that will ripple and collapse away from me. There’s a fire in my gut that is both pleasure and pain, and it threatens to tear open like a cut tension wire, snapping the world around it into glass shards. The feeling is almost enough to solidify my belief in Joan before she does anything and despite her outward appearance.