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“What on earth!”
“Tell her… tell her not to do it. Tell her there’s so much to live for.”
Evie waited nervously for an hour for Zarilda to finish her fortune-telling.
“Well?” she asked when Zarilda emerged for a cigarette.
“You were right, kid. It all came pouring out of her. But when she left my wagon, she seemed lighter. I read her palm.”
“I didn’t know you could read palms.”
Zarilda wiggled her hand and shrugged. “Let’s say I interpret palms. Anyhow, I told her that soon her luck would change, and something new and exciting would come into her life.”
“Is that true?”
“It is if you believe it’s true.”
Evie frowned and Zarilda lit a cigarette. “Oh, look, kid, who can say where hope comes from, huh? Maybe it’s a fella who tells you your dress is pretty. Maybe it’s a picture show you see on a Saturday afternoon. Or the first flower you spy coming up, letting you know there’s spring right around the corner if you just hold on. And sometimes, it might just be a coupla misfit gals working the carny, pulling the con but for good. Folks can think this”—she waved her plump hand with a flourish—“is all smoke and mirrors, but today we gave a woman hope who didn’t have but a lick of it left. Shootfire if that isn’t magic.”
Sam wiped the resin from his hands and went out to look for Evie.
He passed by the stargazer tent. The contraption was really just a glorified kaleidoscope. Sam had always loved those. The line was short and he had a nickel. “What the hell,” he said and waited his turn.
He stepped up onto the orange crate, feeling a little embarrassed to need it, wishing he were taller, and dropped his nickel into the slot. He draped the curtain over his head and peered into the viewing holes. The mechanism clicked. Stars appeared, rotating like clockworks across a night sky. Sam concentrated on making out the various constellations. The stargazer picked up speed. Faster and faster still. Sam had the sensation of zooming into that starry sky, of being pulled deeper into space, of not being able to stop his velocity. His body was melting away. He was losing himself, becoming porous. Tears stung at his eyes but he could not blink, could not look away from all that space, so much like Marlowe’s Eye. Something was in there with him. He could sense its presence. Whispers whizzed past on comet tails. You will forget. The living always do. Stars flattened into points of light, whooshed past like bullets. This land is haunted. All haunted. All are haunted. A scream was building inside Sam, but so was the pressure. It trapped his scream inside him. His mother’s voice: Do not lose yourself to what you see. The thing in there with him was closing in. It was evil. He could feel it. It wanted him. Wanted him with a hunger that frightened Sam. The voices grew louder. We see you. He felt it all around him, nearly touching. He could not let it catch him. Don’t see me, don’t see me, don’t see me, Sam thought, just as the flattening stars on the horizon exploded into a blinding flash of white. A giant mushroom-fat cloud burst up, and everything burned around the edges of the film. Sam gasped and reeled back, rubbing his eyes.
“You okay, mister?” The man behind him in line steadied Sam as he stumbled.
Sam blinked and saw light. He didn’t answer. He staggered out of the stargazer tent, still blinking. On the other side of the Big Top, he thought he saw the King of Crows, his feathered coat fluttering in the wind, and he was laughing. Sam wiped at his streaming eyes. When he looked again, it was only the ringmaster, Mr. Sarkassian, in his top hat and tails, smoking a quick cigarette before heading back inside the Big Top. A minute later, the man who’d steadied Sam came out of the stargazer tent. Sam approached him. “Say, mister—what did you see when you looked into that thing?”
The man smirked. “Just a bunch of stars. Waste of a nickel, you ask me.”
Sam felt wrong. The encounter had slithered under his skin, and he felt that he would infect anybody he touched. Isaiah was running toward him, full of excitement. Sam didn’t want the kid to see him like this.
“Sam! Hey, Sam! I saw the poodle roll the ball all the way across the ring, and then! Then Billy, that’s the goat, he jumped over three rings in a row, and then—”
“That’s swell, kid. Go see the lions. They’re the cat’s pajamas, too,” Sam said, patting Isaiah’s back and brushing past, leaving the kid outside the stargazer tent.
Isaiah was hurt. He’d been excited to share his news, and here Sam had gone and treated him like he was just some kid! The older ones never took him seriously. He was almost eleven! Back home, there were kids his age who were numbers runners and newsies. Why, some of ’em even smoked. He was tired of being treated like a baby.
If he could control his power more, then they’d have to see him as being just as good as they were. But his visions just seemed to show up whenever they wanted to. How did you call down a vision? How did you make it pay attention to you?
Sarah Beth was a seer, like him. Maybe she would know.
Isaiah made his way through the bustling circus. Behind a tent, two clowns practiced a juggling trick. Isaiah peeked into the sideshow wagon and caught a glimpse of Johnny in his cage, teeth bared as he howled at an imaginary moon, making a lady scream. Isaiah needed a place where he could be alone. He snuck into the acrobats’ changing tent and hid behind a trunk.
“Sarah Beth?” Isaiah whispered. He shut his eyes and tried to picture her. Sarah Beth, can you hear me? Sarah Beth… Sarah Beth…
A tingle traveled from his neck to his arms, which stiffened, then relaxed. It felt good, as if he were floating in a warm bath. All he saw was darkness. That part scared him a bit. He didn’t like the idea that there could so much nothing. But then veins of blue light spasmed in the dark, and tiny clouds of jittery, colored light. It reminded Isaiah of shutting his eyes after bright sun and still seeing that light on the backs of his eyelids. Something was coming toward him within the dark. The girl!
“Sarah Beth! I was tryna find you and I did it! I did it!”
“That’s ’cause our powers work real good together.” Sarah Beth smiled. Her teeth were small for her mouth, and Isaiah felt sorry that she didn’t have much of a smile.
“Does that mean our powers will get stronger?”
Sarah Beth nodded vigorously. “Once you get to Bountiful. We’ll work on ’em all the time. Why, we’ll be so strong everybody will be amazed!”
This thrilled Isaiah. He imagined the surprise on Memphis’s face when he showed him what he could do—whatever that was. He imagined his big brother saying something like, Isaiah, today you become a man. Already, he liked that Sarah Beth thought of the two of them as a team. It would be like when the Yankees came from behind and wowed everybody.
