The Girl Who Would Be King(36)
The show itself is predictable at best, with Joan playing to the crowd more than doing anything too fantastic. She lifts and moves heavy things. I hear occasional gasps from the crowd – as if they didn’t expect to actually be impressed. My physical situation is becoming so bad that I can barely look at her. There’s a bright, unnatural light coming from somewhere that isn’t Joan, but I’m afraid to look for it. What if it turns me to ash? Right now I couldn’t even run from it, let alone fight it. How do you fight powerful mystery light, anyway? I look up to see Joan lifting a large car frame with people in it for a brief moment. There’s a smattering of surprised applause before half a dozen men step in to take it from her. Joan takes a bow and exits quickly and efficiently and it’s as if she was never there. I half-fall, half-run from my seat and duck out the side-exit, both in panic to escape and in crushing fear that she’ll disappear. As I move from the tent, and Joan moves from me, the feeling subsides slightly, enough so that I can at least stand erect and stop cutting into my palms with my clenched fists. I’m hesitant to get closer to her when I see her enter a trailer in the distance, for fear of feeling all those things again, but I’ll also never be able to forget those feelings and I need to know where they’re coming from, what they’re about.
And most of all, I’m desperate to see if she sees anything in me.
•
As the show ends, I sit still, waiting for my bearings to return to me and, sure enough, as the tent empties out, I begin to feel more like my badass self again. I wait until I’m alone in the tent – the lights still on, the dusty floor quiet all around me, empty wooden benches my only company – before I try to move. When I stumble off the bench and make for an exit it’s in the opposite direction of Joan.
The deeper into the carnival I go, and the further from Joan’s tent, the better I feel. It’s strange, when I think about the feeling now I realize it hadn’t exactly made me feel weak, but it had definitely been like touching something powerful, something I wasn’t so sure I was stronger than.
I take a slow walk around the carnival, attempting to shake off the last tendrils of the strange feeling.
Trying to remember what a total badass I am.
°
It starts to rain as I move toward the trailer I saw Joan enter and when I get there I realize that I’ve been holding my breath the whole time. I release it in one massive exhale and rap, as lightly as possible, on her door. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment.
There’s no answer so I rap harder.
A croaking “come” is all I hear in response. It’s certainly not the voice of my mother I realize I’ve still been hoping for. I hesitate, there in the rain, wanting so desperately for something important to happen once we’re face to face.
Wanting someone like me. Someone to talk to. Someone to understand everything.
I turn the handle and push through the door into the darkness. It seems incredibly overwhelming, that darkness, but my eyes adjust and I manage to not trip over the multitude of things that litter the floor. I keep my head down, out of fear or respect; I’m not sure which. A light near the back clicks on and illuminates the space in a pale yellow glow.
“Uh, who are you?” she asks, not unkindly, but confused, her voice coarse. I keep my eyes trained on my shoes as I stand there like an idiot delivery boy waiting for a tip that’s never coming. I reach for my voice but it just cracks. I look up and see the room is covered in posters of Joan. They begin to the left of me and go all the way around the room, seemingly in order of appearance, as the first one is of Joan very young, maybe 16 at most. The poster proclaims her “JOAN ~ THE AMAZON QUEEN”. She is rendered beautifully, barely clothed, long dark hair flowing freely down her back. She is lifting a car in the image, but she looks more like supermodel than a strongwoman. She’s stunning. As my eyes flick around the room I see her beauty declining as age and abuse take hold and her body becomes more and more disfigured, until the last poster, the current poster. The poster I had first seen, a poster in which she is still beautiful, but now, in comparison to the others, seems like a sad testament to time. I look toward the back of the trailer trying to separate her from her silhouette in the doorway.
“Can I help you?” she prods.
“I…I…” I stammer like a schoolgirl with a crush. “I just really wanted to meet you,” I say. She laughs, a kind, almost wise. laugh.
“Why on earth would you want to do that kid?”
“I just thought…” I trail off, feeling stupid. I just thought maybe we were related? That sounds so dumb. She’s going to think I’m an idiot. Suddenly she moves from the doorway into the main room and I almost fall backward in shock. Up close, with no trick lighting, costumes, and makeup, she is nothing like the poster version of herself. Her skin is pockmarked, her body rough, darkly hairy, and strangely-muscled. Her hair has mostly fallen out and she’s holding a long brown wig in her hands. I try to hide my surprise but she sees it anyway.