The Girl Who Would Be King(39)

My instinct is to leave immediately, but I can’t resist a few more passes around the grounds in the hopes of tracking down whatever was giving off the power I had wrongly attributed to Joan.

I pace the carnival, reaching out with all I’ve got, trying to locate that horrible feeling from before. It’s bizarre but as sick as it had made me feel, it had also been strangely intoxicating. In a way, I can’t wait to get another taste, as much so that I can devour that raw untapped power, as for the chance to kill it and make sure there’s nothing standing in my way on my path to awesome world domination.

But if I’m totally honest, part of me is relieved not to find it. I’m not sure I’m stronger than it is. Whatever it is. Once I finally get ushered out of the carnival near closing time, I hop on my bike and head west. At first I’m headed for Los Angeles, as I’ve been planning all along, but when I see the sign for Reno, I change my mind and head back home instead. I never wanted to go back there, but I’ve got questions now, questions that I suddenly feel very sure I can get answers to in that stupid old trailer.

I’m pretty happy now that I didn’t burn it down.



°

I must have passed out in the field, because I find myself about a mile from the carnival in the morning, all alone and feeling almost myself again. The colored lights in the distance are flat and dark, no longer twinkling. I stand up, unsure, like a baby deer, and when I don’t fall over I decide that I should get as far away from this place as possible. It doesn’t have what I’m looking for anyway, and with the memory of my entire being telling me to run, I’m not even sure I have a choice.

And so I run, as fast as I can, truly letting loose for the first time in my life. And it turns out I can run very very fast.

When I find the train tracks again I jump the first empty car I find headed east. At some point – maybe in my conversation with Joan – maybe before, or maybe just now – running away from whatever was at that show, I’ve decided that I should go to New York. Manhattan sounds like the kind of place a superhero should go. The kind of place where there’s a lot of good to be done, and also the kind of place where someone like me can both do good and also maybe slip into the shadows and blend in.



•

I’m lying in my old bed from the days I lived with Delia in this god-forsaken trailer, in the middle of nowhere, staring at the curved ceiling. The bed, the room, the trailer, all feel so small. It seems like a hundred years since I lived here and it hasn’t even been one. I feel so old for sixteen. Like a million things have happened to me since I left, most of them crappy. I wonder if that’s how it was for Delia too. She died so young. She couldn’t have been older than 40, but she seemed older than that to me, she always did, even when I was little, but she must have been young back then.

Maybe it’s in our DNA. Live hard and fast – and short.

I head to Delia’s room to find what I came for – evidence of someone like me. I guess that whatever or whoever I felt at Joan’s show must have had the same idea as me – that maybe something like us would go there. But did it feel me as I felt it? And if it did, was the feeling as intoxicating and horrifying as it was for me?

So yeah, despite never wanting to come back to Nevada, and most especially not to this old trailer, I’m here trying to detective my way through all this crap. Not my strength. Of all the times I’ve been annoyed not to have the stereotypical supervillain brain, this one is the most frustrating. But half an hour into tearing Delia’s room apart I do find something: a small wooden trunk, buried underneath cheap suitcases and tacky clothing in her junky closet. I drag the trunk out into the room. It’s locked and I see no key so I just smash an old metal jewelry box against the lock until it breaks open. Inside, there’s no treasure or jewelry or ancient tomes, in fact, it’s practically empty, just a stack of old letters tied with a pink ribbon sitting in the bottom of the chest. The pink ribbon strikes me as odd; Delia didn’t seem like a pink kind of person. I tear the ribbon off and flip through the stack. There’s sixty or seventy letters, all addressed to Delia, and all from someone named Scarlett Braverman. They’re pristinely preserved and in chronological order, the oldest at the bottom. Seeing them, the whole thing seems so unlike Delia that I wonder again what else I’ve missed in my mother. The thought, as always, is unpleasant and so I push it away. I slide out the first letter from its envelope; it’s fairly short, on thin white paper, the writing a pretty and compact cursive.



March 6th