You watch the police chief for his reaction to this. You remember more lines from his address to the assembly.Drinking is trouble. Drugs are trouble. Quickest route to an early grave.But he only tips his head back with the rest of them, squeezes the shoulder of the man they are all teasing, the one who was supposedly careening through the woods drunk. There’s a younger man with them standing next to him, taking smaller sips of his beer.
You raise the camera to your eye, frame the shot, snap.
You edge closer, just as the Coyote steps out of the circle and toward the woods, where other men are standing with their backs to the crowd, streams of piss between their legs.
While you watch him another voice calls in your direction. “Hey there, sweetheart.”
You startle and the camera thumps against your body.
“Oh look, we’ve scared the poor thing. Would all of you shut up with your stories—we’ve got a lady present. Damien, look, she seems about your age. Say hi.” The man on the boy’s left slaps him on the back hard enough that he stumbles forward and some of the beer sloshes over the rim of his cup. The boy goes crimson.
All you can do is turn and run.
“Come back, sweetheart!” one of them calls after you. “He doesn’t bite.”
“Maybe she does,” someone else says, and they all laugh again as you retreat. In your haste you bump into a woman carrying a tub of popcorn, who swears as it scatters at your feet. Sorry, you say. Sorry sorry. But you don’t mean it—all you can think of is getting away from them, from the ugly, rough sounds of their laughter.
At the fortuneteller’s booth a red-haired woman eyes you with curiosity from between a pair of cheap gold curtains and you have the urge to duck away from her view. You walk until you find a bottle of cranberry wine abandoned against a tent stake, three-quarters full. You bring the bottle to your mouth and drink as much as you can in one go, closing your eyes and willing whatever people are chasing when they drink to come to you: relief, lightness, oblivion. But mostly, you want to forget the Coyote. Forget the men and their barbs. You want to forget the look on Miss Hamilton’s face when she asked you if you were all right, and the sensation of bubbles rising in your guts. You want to forget Sabrina turning her back to you when you brought the camera home on the bus. No, maybe what you want to forget is Sabrina ever loving you, ever sharing your bed and whispering stories in your ear when you were afraid of the dark. If you could forget that, you’d be free.
The wine makes the world softer at the edges, the lights on the carnival rides ringed in halos as the sun sets. You stop at the funhousemirror. Crimson stains at the edge of your mouth. You take another picture, this garbled version of yourself, proportions all wrong. Out of the corner of your vision you catch the whoosh of the tilt-o-whirl. Girls scream as they are jerked in circles, hair flying. You trudge back through the food stands. Someone must have overturned a crate of cranberries and you crush them under your feet, the pop and give of the fruit bursting from inside its skin making you feel sick.
You look into the dark of the woods and wonder what would happen if you just started walking. If you might just disappear entirely into the ink-black night.
You are sitting with your back against a ticket booth, your eyes closed, when there’s a voice above you.
“Are you okay?”
It is the boy, the one who had been standing in the circle with the Coyote’s friends.He doesn’t bite.
You can only groan in response.
“I can give you a ride home, if you want. Sorry those guys were jerks.”
You manage to nod. “Home,” you say. He tells you his name and it’s like your mind is a sieve. It slips through and is lost, the way the minutes leading up to this moment are lost, big black blots in your memory. The lights of the amusements glow prettily against the dark sky. You feel for the camera strap around your neck, think about taking a picture, but you can’t get your hands to work right.
He helps you up and the two of you walk through the field, toward the parked cars.
In the car he gives you a bottle of water. You start to take long, greedy gulps but he puts his hand out, stops you.
“Slow,” he says, “or else you’ll be sick. Ask me how I know.”
You like his smile, the easy sound of his voice. In another version of the world, you think, you would want to know him better. He’s older than you, but by just a few years.
“Rough day?”
“He’s such a… a… bastard,” you say, deploying the word for the first time but it feels immediately right. Sabrina calls your fathera bastard all the time. You try not to think about him, or at least as he is now. You still remember the years when he would lift you on his shoulders, hold your ankles tight and you would raise your head to the clouds, loving the sensation of being closer to the infinite sky.
“Who?”
“The guy you were with.”
The look on the boy’s face changes. “You… you too?”
You let yourself nod, though you wonder how he knows to ask. But his anger feels good, even secondhand. “My sister, too,” you say.
The boy looks up to the ceiling. You think you see tears forming in his eyes.
“Your sister… you have a twin, right? I’ve seen you guys around.”
