“But … won’t Dono be mad?”
“Fuck him!” Kes snarled.
“Oh,” I said, my voice flat. “He doesn’t want you to see me.”
“He’s being a complete douche,” Kes growled. “I can barely take a piss without him holding my dick for me.”
My mind spun at the mental image that created, so I quickly batted it away.
“But if you take the truck without permission, won’t he … I don’t know … call the cops or something?”
Kes laughed coldly.
“Nah, he won’t do that, but…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know what he’d do and I don’t care.” Then he took a deep breath. “I’m coming for you, Aimee. Will you come with me?”
The world fell away and I was teetering on the edge.
“What?”
“Come with me!” he whispered, desperation making his voice harsh. “Fuck what everyone says. This is real, I know it is. Come with me. We can make this work, I know we can! Just say yes!”
My heart pounded in my chest, my logical, rational side fighting with desire and need.
“Please!” he begged.
Because he’d never begged me for anything before, I leapt off the cliff.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’ll go with you.”
And so we started to make our plans. I was terrified. I’d be leaving my family, my home; dropping out of school at sixteen for a life of uncertainty. Some days it seemed like a crazy idea, but every time I had that thought, my heart told me to shut the hell up.
Our biggest problem was money for gas. Kes said he had just about enough saved to get here—at least he thought he did—but after that, he was out. I had money that I’d saved up over the years, birthday money and from odd jobs that I’d done, but it was only $200. And that was barely enough to get us the 1700 miles back to California in Kes’s gas guzzling truck. I was afraid we’d get stuck in Utah or lost in the Sierra Nevadas.
I wanted to delay until after Christmas when I’d have some more money, but Kes refused to wait. So we talked in secret every night, plotting our escape. Kes said we could save money by sleeping in the truck. I wasn’t happy about it, but we didn’t have any choice. I was worried that we’d freeze to death as Fall turned to Winter.
But all Kes said was, “I’ve got chains for the tires if it snows.”
That wasn’t my biggest worry, but we were young and in love and everything seemed possible.
Once, I tried to ask Kes what would happen when I got to California.
“You can be part of the show,” he said confidently.
“But what if Dono sends me home?”
“He won’t.”
“But what if he does?”
“Then fuck him,” said Kes, which seemed to be his answer to everything. “We’ll go on the road on our own. Lots of carnivals would take our act. We’re fucking awesome.”
“What about Jacob Jones?” I asked nervously.
Kes swore again. “I don’t fucking know. Jakey’s my horse, so Dono can’t stop me. But I don’t think he’d let me take the trailer. He’d kick my ass if I tried.” He sighed. “Yeah, that’s not going to happen. Don’t worry about it. Dono won’t want me to leave the act. We’ll be fine.”
I wasn’t so sure, but arguing with Kes was hard. Besides, I wanted him to be right.
I lived for our sneaked phone calls every night, sometimes talking till late. We had to cut that down after a while, because neither of us could afford to put more money on our phones.
At school, I went through the motions. I studied, I got good grades, but I couldn’t tell you anything that I learned.
Camilla never came back. Her family made up some excuse about why boarding school was a superior form of education. I felt a twinge of guilt, but not much more. Lauren ignored me, which was just fine.
When Karl Ullen asked me to be his date for Homecoming, I almost laughed in his face. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but wasn’t it obvious that I was in love with another boy and not interested in anyone else? I turned him down as tactfully as I could, which wasn’t saying much.
I didn’t tell Kes because his jealous-o-meter was already out of control if I so much as mentioned another guy.
We had our first telephone fight about that, because he happened to mention that Dono had him putting together a new act where Sorcha had a bigger role.
The jealousy I always felt when her name was mentioned flared up like a rocket.
“Of course I have to do the act with her!” Kes shouted.
“But why does that skank have to get a bigger role?” I yelled back.
“Because she’s hot and the audiences like her,” he snarled.
So not the right thing to say to me.
“I have to put up with you talking about all the guys you see in school!” he yelled.
“That’s ridiculous! I have to go to school. I can’t help that there are boys there!”
And so we tore each other apart until he slammed the phone down. Then we didn’t talk to each other for two days. I broke first and called him back.
We both refused to apologize, but he managed to admit that he missed me, and I told him that I loved him.
And so we went on, plotting and scheming, ironing out the problems that we could, ignoring the ones that were too tough for us.
And then we were discovered.
It was so stupid, such a dumb way of being found out.
I was trying to be a model daughter, trying to buy Mom and Dad’s peace of mind so that I’d be able to sneak away when the time came. Which meant I was being extra helpful around the house.
Mom was grateful, so to thank me, she did my laundry.
And then she put my laundry away.
In my drawer.
Where I hid my phone.
By the time I got home from school, she’d read every text, listened to every voice message that I couldn’t bear to delete because I craved the sound of Kes’s voice, and she knew every secret.
She called my father at work and he rushed back to sort out his wayward daughter.
Within an hour, my suitcase had been packed and I was sent to stay with Dad’s sister in Michigan. I wasn’t allowed to call Kes or text him. I wasn’t allowed to leave a note. I was sent away in disgrace.
I couldn’t sleep, refused to eat. I was desperate for news and I think my aunt took pity on me because she let me call him. I tried. I tried over and over again. I kept the same stupid message: ‘the person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls right now. Please try your call again later.’ I did try again: again and again and again.
I began to plague Mom and Dad with phone calls instead. Every day I asked the same question: Is he there?
And every day I got the same icy answer: No.
I paced my tiny room at night, my body starved, my brain blazing with unanswered questions. I couldn’t go on like that.
So I just stopped.
Stopped talking, stopped eating, just stopped. And then I collapsed.
The doctors called it a breakdown, but the only thing that was broken was my heart.
He never came. I couldn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it. I accused my Mom and Dad of lying, of hating me, of wishing that I’d never been born.
I’d lost all restraint and wasn’t scared of my father anymore.
When I was finally allowed home at the start of January, Minnesota was blanketed in thick snow that glittered, promising a fresh start. It was all lies.
In the weeks that followed my month-long trip to Michigan, I learned an essential truth: sympathy has an expiration date. Friends wear out and lose interest in your broken heart. It’s not their heart that’s broken, and they get tired of you moping around like you’ve lost your reason to live, even though that’s exactly what happened.
The rest of my Junior year of high school was the loneliest of my life.
My cell phone had been destroyed so I couldn’t even read hi
s old messages or listen to his voice.
I googled the shit out of ‘Donohue’ and ‘carnival’, finding only a few out-of-date newspaper articles and Zachary’s old website—but the link was broken.
I tried to find Con, since I knew he was pre-med at Northwestern, but he wasn’t on any student lists, and they refused to give me any information. It seemed as if he’d never been there.
I wrote to Kes at the old address he’d given me in Arcata, but that letter was returned unopened, with ‘return to sender’ scrawled across the envelope.
I was grounded for a month when Dad found out.
Jennifer tried to help me. One of her college friends lived in northern California, and she persuaded them to drive out to Arcata Bay and ask around. I waited, desperate to hear the news. It amounted to a big fat zero.
The log cabins that Kes had described were empty, and Jennifer’s friend didn’t think that they’d been lived in for months.
So, the waiting game continued.
And then everything changed again. Dad left.
It turned out that all those ‘sales conferences’ were really a woman named Dee. He’d been seeing her for years. Mom wanted to blame me. She said all my drama had been the last straw. But she was so apathetic, even her blame was half-hearted. We stumbled on in misery together—all through the Spring, all through the mild warmth of May, and the blazing heat of June.
With Fourth of July out of the way, my heart began to beat again. In just a few weeks, I told myself.
I gazed out of window, waiting for the cloud of dust and rumbling ground that told me the carnival was coming. I was so sure that everything was going to be okay. The certainty of our love was the only thing that had kept me from breaking apart completely, from shattering like a cheap vase.
Mom said I was banned from the carnival, of course, but that wasn’t going to stop me, and in the end, she didn’t even try. She just shrugged her shoulders and said, “On your own head be it,” as if she was some cut-rate Biblical prophet, rather than a sad, middle-aged, soon-to-be divorcée.
Before the thick dust had even settled, I ran all the way to the carnival field.
My heart was beating wildly, and I thought I’d choke on the emotions welling up inside.
“Where’s Kes? Is he here?”
I ran from trailer to trailer, asking the same question, but he wasn’t there. I didn’t believe the first person who told me, or the second, or the third.
I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe that my Kes wasn’t there.
But he wasn’t, and no one could tell me where he’d gone. No Kes, no Dono, no Mr. Albert. No Zachary, no Blake, no Jesse, no Madame Cindy, no Ollo.
I recognized some of the other carnies, but they weren’t talking. For whatever reason, they closed ranks; I wasn’t one of them anymore.
And then I saw Sorcha.
She was helping to set up a hoopla booth when I found her.
“Look, I know you hate me,” I began, “but please, please, where’s Kes? I haven’t heard from him in months. Please!”
She shrugged indifferently.
“No one’s heard from him. Not since Dono died.”
I thought I was going to throw up.
“What? Dono?”
“Yeah,” she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Guy had a heart attack; the carnival has a new owner now. Maybe Kes went to his brother.”
She put her hands on her hips as I swayed on my feet.
“You really fucked him good, didn’t you?”
“W-what?”
She laughed coldly.
“You got Dono so pissed he had a freakin’ heart attack. Nice goin’, rube. Now fuck off, I’m working.”
I stumbled away from the carnival choking on my tears.
Kes was lost and alone, somewhere in the vast emptiness, and I couldn’t find him, couldn’t reach him, couldn’t tell him that I needed him. That I loved him.
END OF PART ONE
EIGHT YEARS LATER
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to punch his perfect white, dentally-approved teeth into the back of his throat and out the other side. I wanted to hurt him.
Because goddamn it! He was hurting me.
I think we should take a break.
“Really, Gregg—that’s what you think? We should take a break?”
“Hon,” he said, as if he was talking to a slightly dim pre-teen, “we’ve been together four years—since we were juniors in college. I don’t think we should just settle for each other without…”
“Settle? You think you’re settling for me?”
He backpedaled immediately, but it was already too late. It was too late as soon as he opened his big fat mouth ten minutes ago and said, ‘We should talk’.
“Well, you know what¸ Gregg? I think you might be right.”
“You do?” he said with obvious surprise.
“Yes, I don’t want to settle for you either.”
He rolled his eyes.
“You’re being melodramatic, Ames.”
“I guess people get like that after they’ve been dating for four years and they suddenly get…”
I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence with the word ‘dumped’, but that’s what it was.
Gregg slipped his arms through the sleeves of his linen jacket, the one I thought looked so debonair and European when I bought it for him, and made sure the lapels were lying flat.
“You know I respect you,” he said seriously. “I hope this won’t affect our professional relationship.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Hell, yeah! Did the prick really think I was going be pleasant to him in the Staff Room where all the teachers met for morning coffee before the hordes descended.
“Of course,” I said, with an insincere smile.
He looked relieved then winked at me. He freakin’ winked at me!
“See you in September, Ames. Have a great summer!”
Oh, he didn’t just go there!
We’d planned to spend summer vacation together visiting his parents in St. Louis and then have a long weekend in NYC doing cultural things before I headed to Minnesota to see my family. Gregg wasn’t planning to go with me for that—too expensive, he said. The pay of an elementary teacher fifty miles from Boston meant that neither of us were rich, and we both had student loans to pay off. But we would have been together, and now he was waltzing away on the first day of summer vacation, leaving me high and dry.
“Wait!” I called after him. “Is there someone else?”
“No, of course not,” he said soothingly.
His right eye twitched, a sure sign that he was lying.
“Really,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “Well, that’s reassuring.”
Then I picked up my purse and followed him out of the apartment.
“Where are you going?” he asked, his voice wary.
“Your place,” I said with a bright smile. “I thought I’d pick up my things.”
“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” he replied hastily. “I already did it,” and he pointed at two cardboard boxes stacked outside my door.
Anger tightened inside me, and a headache started to throb behind my temples.
“You really have it all figured out, don’t you?”
He smiled briskly. “Best to make it a clean break.”
“Fine,” I snapped. “I’ll bring your stuff over later.”
“No need,” he said, patting his pocket. “I’ve got my toothbrush.”
“What about your clothes and DVDs?” I asked.
“Ah,” he said looking down. “I moved those out last week while you had that parent-teacher conference.” He had the grace to look slightly ashamed. “I thought it would make things easier.”
My eyes bulged. “That was Thursday. We fucked on Thursday.”
He winced. “Do you have to be so crude?”
“Seriously, Gregg?! You’d already planned to break up with me, going so far as moving your stuff out, and yo
u still slept with me?”
“I thought you needed comforting—you’d had a rough day.”
Un-fucking-believable.
He must have seen something in my eyes because he backed away.
“You really don’t want to do this, Aimee,” he said, trying to sound like he was still in control. “Have a little dignity.”
“Low fucking blow, Gregg!”
“Please don’t use curse words,” he said. “You’re better than that.”
I lost it. “You don’t get to tell me how to behave anymore!” I screamed at him.
“I’m only trying to help you,” he said, a sharp tone in his voice that usually made me cautious.
“No you fucking aren’t!” I shrieked. “Breaking up with me is not helping me!”
“I can’t do this,” he said firmly. “I’ve tried to be nice, but you’re so emotional.”
“Well, what a fucking surprise,” I yelled. “Because we’ve been together four years! Four years! We talked about getting married!”
He looked uncomfortable. “That was a mistake,” he said.
I slapped him hard.
I’d never hit anyone in my whole life, but damn, it felt good!
His eyes narrowed as he rubbed his cheek. “I could have you charged with assault!”
“Oh, feel free!” I laughed wildly. “I can see the police getting a real kick out of that!”
He frowned, knowing I was right. He’d always hated being in the wrong.
“We’re done here,” he snapped.
He turned and marched away. I watched him for a moment, then something made me follow him. I grabbed my keys and ran down the stairs barefoot.
He crossed the street to his car and surprise, surprise, Lulu Masters, the junior high science teacher was sitting in his passenger seat.
“You cheating bastard!” I yelled, throwing the first thing I could find—which happened to be a large bag of trash—at his shiny red, environmentally friendly car.
I watched with vindictive pleasure as eggshells and banana skins rained down, and coffee grounds stuck to the windshield.
It was a lot of fun seeing Gregg lose his composure, until he finally screeched off.
Adrenaline drained away and I sighed. Four years lost to that asshole—next semester was going to be gruesome.