The Girl Who Would Be King(37)

“They don’t put that part on the poster,” she says, nodding her head at the inaccurate image, “Or if we can help it, on the stage,” she adds. She then looks at the “Amazon Queen” poster opposite the current version. “You know the worst thing? I could lift that car frame back then, I could even do a couple reps with it – I mean with the drugs I could – and I was still so beautiful. But now? Hmmmph. Age, life, and too many drugs, and I look like this and I can’t even lift that car anymore. Not the metal one least ways, just the fake one we use now.”

“Drugs?” I’m dumbfounded.

“How else you think I did it, kid? Steroids. I don’t know of another way…of course if I knew then, what I would have to look at every day, how I’d feel, maybe I’d have thought twice,” she eases herself onto an old sofa. “’Course I was such a glory hound back then…” she stares at the ravishing but faded image of herself. “Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

My whole world crumbles. This woman is not related to me, doesn’t understand me, and can’t tell me the secrets of me. She isn’t a closeted superhero; she’s just a girl in a carnival sideshow who has turned into an old woman in a carnival sideshow. She must see my dejected look.

“Did I disappoint you, kid?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“But I wasn’t what you were expecting?”

I shake my head no again.

“Sorry about that. But it’s probably just as well for you to learn that now, I guess. Most of the world isn’t what a body would expect,” she says wisely, fidgeting with a dark wig in her hands.

I look at her. “Thanks for talking to me,”

“Sure,” she says, and then adds dryly. “Anything for a fan.”

“Take care, Joan,” I say, turning to leave.

She calls out to me as I put my hand on the door. “Hey, what’s your name?”

I turn to her. “Anna,” I say. It’s the name I’ve been thinking I’d use for my ‘all-new life’ but it sounds wrong when I say it aloud and Joan looks at me, one eyebrow raised in question. “No, no, that’s not my name,” I whisper. “My name is Bonnie Braverman,” I say, squaring my shoulders at the sound of it. She presses her lips together and squints her eye a little bit as if she’s imagining up a poster for me.

“That’s a real good carnival name, Bonnie. You could make good use of that name.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But, maybe not here.”

She nods in agreement. “Yeah, maybe not here. I don’t think this is the place for you.”

“I think you’re right,” I say. “Goodbye, Joan.”

As I shut the door behind me, I hear Joan say goodbye to me as well. Outside the trailer, I am suddenly as dizzy as I had been in Joan’s tent while she performed. The powerful nausea comes at me full force in a wave and I run to the edge of the field nearby to throw up. I crawl into the tall grass and heave, for what feels like minutes, into the damp dirt. It exhausts me, and when there’s nothing left to throw up I lie back on the crunchy grass and stare up at the sky. My muscles are humming and everything feels tight and loose at the same time, like I might come unstuck from time, the universe, something. The green and yellow strands of grass sways above and around me in the breeze, occasionally cutting into my view of the black-blue sky and handfuls of stars. I don’t know what’s causing these intense physical symptoms, but it can’t be Joan. I felt nothing standing there with her. I try to think about the people I’d seen in the tent at her show, but I’d been so focused on Joan, and so disoriented that I can’t recall much else.

I suddenly feel a little afraid about what might be watching me, what might be looking for me. Despite my mother’s cryptic dream warnings, I’ve always felt so invisible and so protected because of what I can do and so it’s particularly unsettling to suddenly wonder if I’m being hunted. I crawl under a break in the chain-link fence and then deeper and deeper into the open meadow surrounding the carnival, trying to escape the feeling.



•

I find the right trailer by playing a giant game of hot and cold with myself. Veering one direction and feeling better and then veering the other and feeling the world become a Tilt O’ Whirl on crack. It’s hard to fight my natural impulse to feel better and avoid puking my guts up, but eventually I’m about fifty feet behind a pretty lonely-looking trailer, practically on my knees with the pain in my gut, knowing that, despite the sorry looks of me, I must have hit the goddamn goldmine.