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“I was trying to make you feel better, okay?” Benny leaned in and said quietly. “We all know what Asher and his mother did to you. I just wanted to make you see that you didn’t need this place, and that you were going to be fine. You can get work doing your henna anywhere. I didn’t want to tell you I’d already been offered a space to share here.”
What Asher andhis motherdid to her? She shook her head with frustration, not understanding, and not wanting to. “I don’t care where you work, Benny. I just want my money back.”
He pushed away from the table and indicated she should follow him out of the booth. “What money?”
She stopped and tourists broke around them in the wide aisles. “The money you took from my backpack before you left my condo in the middle of the night.”
“I didn’t steal any money from you!” He flicked his long dark hair over his shoulder with a nervous jerk of his head.
“Fine, Benny. I’m calling the police.” Of course she wouldn’t, but he didn’t know that.
“Charlotte, I swear. I was just doing you a favor. Asher and Margot worked with everyone who got the notice of the rent increase and couldn’t afford it. We share space now, or work for other companies. But not you, because Margot wantedyouout.”
She looked around immediately, as if she might see proof of this. But the place was too big. She knew how important it was for artists to be where people could easily find their work. Thanks to Margot, they’d closed ranks.
That’s why no one had called her back.
She’d never been particularly intimidated by Margot, not like some of the other artists here. Not that she didn’t understand a healthy respect for the person to whom you paid rent, but the past decade of her life had been one of constant movement, so if things ended, fine, she would just move on.
But leaving and being kicked out were two entirely different things.
She suddenly had to get out of there. In fact, she couldn’t leave fast enough. She had to find her bearings. Benny jogged after her. “Charlotte, I didn’t steal a thing! I left. I got attacked by those birds. I got in my truck. I drove away. That’s it. Wait, wait.” He got in front of her and walked backward, facing her. “There was a woman standing on the sidewalk near the alley to your place. I don’t know if she was homeless or if she lives there, but she looked rough. She was smoking a cigarette, real shady-like. I didn’t lock your door behind me. Maybe it was her. Maybe she came in and stole your money.”
That made her stop. “What did she look like? No, never mind. I don’t want to know,” she said, and pushed past him.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter who took her money.
It only mattered that it was gone, and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Chapter Five
The sun was beginning to set, slanting shadows across the room as Charlotte lay on her bed. She was listening to the music Zoey was playing next door as she was cleaning out Lizbeth’s place. It was such an odd sensation, having music at the Dellawisp. Charlotte was actually beginning to enjoy it. But then, without warning, the music stopped. Zoey must have finished for the day.
The sudden quiet made Charlotte’s bedroom feel as if it had been plunged underwater. Even the small glass ball ornaments she’d hung by fishing wire from the ceiling gave the impression of air bubbles floating to the water’s surface. It was folklore Charlotte had grown up hearing, how these glass spheres called witch balls had been used for centuries to protect homes against ghosts and evil spirits. Her artistic mother used to replicate them out of grapevines, the only thing she had to work with. She would tell customers about their mystical properties at the roadside stand where the camp sold maple syrup and the meager amount of vegetables they managed to grow.
Charlotte now collected them, and the symbolism wasn’t lost on her.
She was trying to protect herself from the ghosts of her past.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand to check her bank balance again, but stopped herself. She knew what it was. And she knew how long it was going to last. She grabbed the remote control instead and turned on her small television, just to fill the quiet.
A few moments later, she rolled over and gave a muffled scream of frustration into her comforter, beating the mattress with her fists for good measure. But even a good temper tantrum didn’t help.
Only one thing would.
She made herself lean over the edge of her mattress. She felt around for the low basket she kept under the bed and pulled it out.
She hadn’t taken anything with her when she’d left Vermont when she was sixteen except the bag of money she’d stolen from the camp, a few clothes, and this diary. Moving as much as she did wasn’t easy. Traveling to a new city sometimes caused anxiety so intense she couldn’t catch her breath. So she kept this diary to reread when things were hard. In it was a long list teenaged Charlotte had made of places she’d wanted to live and rules she wanted to live by when she finally ran away. It never failed to make her feel better that she could check off so many of them now. It reminded her that it was all worth it.
She flipped through the thin pages covered in loopy, girlish cursive, lingering longest on the pages about Pepper Quint.
I braided Pepper’s hair today and told her she should never cut it because it was so beautiful. I wish my hair looked like hers.
I told Pepper that I wanted to be a henna artist because it was the most beautiful thing in the world. She didn’t know whathenna was, so I told her. We checked out a book about it from the library and hid it so Minister McCauley wouldn’t see what we were reading. We spent all day practicing drawing on our legs so that our jeans would cover our work. She was really good at it. Way better than me.
I cried today after my session with Minister McCauley. He hit me when I told him I knew he was a fake. Not hard. But still. He hates that I know. I told my parents what he did, AND THEY TOOK HIS SIDE. But when I told Pepper, she hugged me and gave me an orange she’d brought home from school lunch. Later, I let all the air out of his car tires. I don’t know how Pepper has stood it here all these years. She never thought about leaving until I came along. This is the only place she’s ever known. She thought it was normal. But it’s not. I’ve finally convinced her that it’s NOT normal. I wish my parents had never joined The Church of McCauley. I wish we had never moved here to the camp.
The diary was the story of two girls—Pepper, who had always lived at the scraggy camp where the followers of Marvin McCauley resided, and who didn’t know how to have her own dreams, and Charlotte, who had moved there later with her family, and who had nothingbutdreams.
