Page 8 of Tricks for Free

The women already in the locker room were no better or worse than me. We were all junior employees, all moving around the Park daily as management decided what our priorities were for the week. We did everything but serve food and sweep streets—and when there was a janitorial emergency, there was always a chance one of us would find ourselves holding a broom. I didn’t mind. At the carnival, anybody could be asked to do just about anything in a pinch. I’m not too much of a fainting flower to mop up outside the Scrambler.

Try telling them that. They had better haircuts, better shoes, more friends, and everything else from the mean girl starter kit. Three of them laughed behind their hands when I walked into the room. The others continued getting ready. That didn’t mean I could shake the feeling that they were watching me, waiting for the moment when I’d try to strike up a conversation and I could be slapped down hard.

Humans are monkeys, and monkeys like to have a pecking order. I’d sealed my place in ours when, during training, I responded to someone asking “where did you move here from?” with “Route 4.” That was all it took. I was formerly homeless, a pity hire, and there was no possible way I could ever be as deserving of comfort or compassion as they were, because poverty is always a personal failing, no matter how it came about.

There are days when I want to punch absolutely everyone around me, and keep punching until they’re no longer capable of fighting back. I’m told those desires are antisocial. Sometimes, I really don’t care.

I crossed to my locker, opened it, and began to strip. I was going to spend my day in the Fairyland section of the Park, where Princesses Lizzie and Laura would be greeting their adoring public in between rides on the Midsummer Night’s Scream (a roller coaster that seemed to have been designed by someone who really hated the kind of people who like to ride roller coasters) and trips around the artificial river in Lizzie’s Goblin Voyage. I’d be swiping credit cards and making change at the Fine and Fair Gift Shop. Pretty standard, pretty boring, and pretty much a job I could do in my sleep.

I caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of my eye as I yanked on my uniform top. My fingertips warmed in anticipation of the coming fight. I tried to will the heat away. It had been more than a week since I’d set fire to anything I’d need to pay for, and almost three months since the last time I’d started a fire in the Park, period. That was a good thing. If I lost my job because I’d been caught burning company property, I was going to have a hell of a time getting hired anywhere else.

(The traditional destination for Lowryland Cast Members who lose their jobs due to minor rules infractions is Disney World, and vice-versa. Half the ride jockeys in Florida get passed back and forth between theme parks like trading cards on a playground. But there are things that render a person unemployable, and destruction of corporate assets is on the list. Also on the list, bizarrely enough, is chewing tobacco. I guess everyone has standards.)

“Hey, Mel,” said a sweet voice.

“Melody,” I replied, and finished adjusting my top. Fairyland has six separate themes, depending on which part of it you’re working. The Goblin Market area is styled in a vague parody of the pre-Raphaelite aesthetic, all deep jewel tones layered over pale pastels. It’s one of my favorite parts of the Park to work in, mostly because the costumes don’t show blood as well as, say, the ones in Candyland.

“Sorry, hon?”

I turned, pasting on an artificial smile. The woman next to me was dressed for a day in Metropolis, all shiny silver chrome and breathable purple mesh fabric. She looked like she was getting ready to skate backup in a production of Starlight Express, even down to the spray glitter in her hair.

“My name is Melody, not Mel,” I said. “That’s all I said.”

She frowned, nose wrinkling. “That’s not friendly of you.”

“Really? Because I thought I’d said I didn’t like being called ‘Mel’ every day for the last eight months.” The heat in my fingertips died back to comfortable embers. The magic was willing. The magic was ready and eager to go. That was soothing, even if I had no intention of using it. “Hello, Robin. What can I do for you today?”

My tormenter straightened, back on comfortable ground. Her cronies giggled behind their hands. I wanted to tell them they were acting like children, but that would have been an insult to children everywhere. Bullying isn’t tied to age. It’s tied to who a person is, and sadly, these people were more interested in being ugly assholes than they were in being decent human beings.

“Did you hear that raccoons got into the dumpsters out back again?” she asked, all wide-eyed and innocent.

A place as big as Lowryland makes a lot of trash, and it can’t all be burned on-property. There’s recycling, and sorting, and disposal to be dealt with. When a guest throws something away, it’s carted off by custodial and added to the mountain of debris we dispose of daily, bussing it—literally—to the dumpsters. They’re concealed from all public view by a concrete corral nearly half a mile from even the employee parking, where the garbage trucks can come and go without being seen.

It was no surprise when raccoons got into the damn things. If anything, it was a surprise when the raccoons didn’t. “No, I hadn’t. Thanks for the update. Does custodial know?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and thrust a brown paper bag at me. “Here.”

I didn’t take the bag. I’m not that stupid. “What’s this?”

“We just thought that if you had someone to bring you a lunch, you wouldn’t need to go diving in the garbage anymore,” she said, eyes wide. She dropped the bag onto the bench. The rest of the girls burst into triumphant laughter as she turned and sashayed away.

I watched her go, clenching my hands to keep myself from burning the whole damn place down. It’s not that I hate my job. It’s that I hate the people I have to do it with.

Fortunately for my sanity, none of the mean girls were assigned to my part of the Goblin Market, at least not this morning, and it wasn’t like they’d risk their usual shenanigans in front of the guests anyway. Fighting amongst ourselves is fine, as long as we do it where no one could see. Upsetting a paying customer, now, that’s grounds for immediate termination, no take-backs, there’s the door. So I stood in Fine and Fair, helping guests find genuine Lizzie and Laura dolls, assisting lost children, and generally doing whatever needed to be done at any given moment.

“Excuse me,” said a familiar voice. “Do you have this in a medium?”

I turned, already smiling, to face my Aunt Mary. “I’ll check the back,” I said.

She returned my smile. As was usually the case when she appeared at my work, she was dressed to blend in: jeans, sneakers, and a dark purple shirt she’d probably copied from a Hot Topic store window, with an art nouveau Lizzie surrounded by a border of pomegranate flowers stenciled down the side. Her long white hair was pulled into a braid. There was nothing she could do about her eyes, which looked like a hundred miles of empty highway, exit markers marching off toward the horizon, but most people either wouldn’t notice them or wouldn’t allow themselves to think too hard about what they’d seen. The dead walk among us. Denial keeps that from becoming too big of a problem. Usually.

Mary Dunlavy isn’t a blood relative, but she’s absolutely a member of the family, because family is more than blood. My Uncle Ted isn’t a blood relative—not of me—but he’s married to my Aunt Jane, and he’s the father of two of my cousins. Mary didn’t live long enough to marry in. She just babysat for my grandmother and my father and my aunt and my siblings . . . and me. She only crossed the country, traveling miles from her own grave, to stay with us and make sure we were safe. She’s always a crossroads and a call away, and while there are rules that govern what she can and can’t do, being a ghost who chooses to exist primarily among the living, she does as much as those rules allow.

She was also the only member of my family who knew where I was hiding. Because she wasn’t a blood relative when she was alive, her presence wouldn’t tip the balance toward the Covenant being able to find me, and because ghosts go wherever the hell they want, her showing up wasn’t going to trigger any alarms.

“Thank you,” she said, and leaned closer. “How you doing, kiddo?”

Being called “kiddo” by someone who looked like she hadn’t even finished high school—mostly because she hadn’t; she’d been dead before graduation—would have been amusing, if it hadn’t been Mary. As it was, being called anything else would have seemed strange. Normal is what you make it.