But now there’s someone new.
What will happen to Sidney? Sidney has been in the box so long that some of us thought it would always be that way. The fact that there will be a new face in the box is as unsettling as someone telling me that the carnival is disbanding tomorrow.
And to know the girl bearing the curse is the same one I saw earlier, the one who didn’t just glance at my paintings in passing but had really seen them…
“I am telling you, she is not our concern.”
I can feel a fight brewing between us, and I take this moment and file it away. This, this is part of why I need to leave. Even though I’m a few months shy of eighteen, my mom isn’t just my mom, she’s my boss, giving her jurisdiction over my every waking moment. But before I can respond, we’re interrupted by a soft sigh.
“Poor thing.” Gin, Whiskey’s older sister, had ghosted up beside us as we watched the sad little parade go by. Strands of silvery hair float around her face, and the night has leeched the blue from her eyes to make them gray. I sometimes feel like a giant cosmic joke was played on their parents. First they got Gin—quiet and graceful and thoughtful—and, perhaps expecting their next offspring to be similar, three years later they got Whiskey—loud and brash and impulsive.
“I know,” Whiskey says. She tears her eyes off the girl long enough to glance backward at us. “Did you see her haircut? First thing tomorrow, you’re going to help her.”
“Me?” I ask, surprised.
“Yes, Benjamin,” Whiskey says. “Take your tool kit and your power sander and give her a makeover.” I get an eye roll and a snort of laughter. “I was talking to Gin.”
“Whitney,” my mother says sharply, upset enough to call Whiskey by her real name, “now is not the time. I’m sure you need to groom the horses before you stable them for the night.”
“Audrey!” Whiskey whines.
“I’ll help Gin make sure Whiskey doesn’t try to go spy on the new girl,” I say, jabbing Whiskey’s side with my elbow.
My mother nods, one half curl slipping from her braid. “And straight back.”
The second we’re out of earshot, Whiskey mutters, “We’re going to go spy on the new girl, aren’t we?” Moonlight glints off the sequins of her costume and the wry, knowing look in her eyes.
“Of course we are.”
We duck between two campers and cut across the dirt path toward a trailer that most definitely does not belong to Gin and Whiskey’s parents. Leslie’s glossy white travel trailer is parked at the very edge of our encampment. It’s huge, the length of two pickup trucks, and the windows sit a good two feet over my head. A tangle of shadowy forms move across the golden squares of light above us, and I imagine Leslie and Lars must be helping to make the black-haired girl more comfortable. Finally, the shadows are still, and there’s nothing more for us to see.
“I bet I could get on the roof if you give me a boost,” Whiskey says. “Pretty sure there’s a sunroof I can listen at.”
“You always want to do things the hard way,” Gin says, nudging me toward the trailer. “Take a knee, Ben.”
I kneel onto the cold ground just under one of the small windows. The grass is slick with dew, and in seconds my jeans are soaked through. Gin slips out of her shoes and leaps onto my back. She doesn’t waver, but then, she’s used to performing stunts on the back of a moving horse, so I’m sure I’m no problem. Whiskey steps up close, the scratchy netting of her costume practically in my face.
“What do you see?” I ask.
Gin’s toes dig into my shoulders as she moves around. “Hard to say,” she whispers. “The blinds are down.”
Whiskey scuffs up a clod of dirt with her oversize boot. “Well, what do you hear?”
“My kid sister nagging me.”
The tire nearest to me sinks just a bit.
“We have to go,” I say, right before the door to the trailer slams open.
Lars is so big he fills the doorframe, and the light from behind him lines his hair in such a way it seems to glow. “I expect this of you, Whiskey, but not the other two. Go. All of you, before I tell Leslie to dock your wages.” He plants one foot onto the stairs, ready to chase us off if necessary, but we’re already headed down the dirt alley before he has to make good on his threat.
“I wonder what she’s like,” Whiskey says the moment Lars heads back inside Leslie’s trailer.
“I saw her. Earlier,” I add, before Whiskey can make a smart-ass remark about the impossibility of my seeing the new girl from where I kneeled on the ground.
“When you were helping her?”
“Well, yeah,” I say. “But before that, too, when I was helping you with—” I get a rock-hard elbow to the kidney before I can accidentally mention that Whiskey was riding Gin’s horse. Rubbing at the dull throb in my side, I continue, “She seemed…” I struggle to come up with a word to convey what I saw earlier, the gleam in her eyes as she studied my paintings and the way the setting sun made her brown eyes blaze like stained glass. Or a way to describe the deep chill that seeped up from the heart of her or the way her anger seemed as though her body could barely contain it. “Interesting.”
“‘Interesting,’ Benjamin?” Whiskey asks. One eyebrow arches toward her hairline, a sarcasm-o-meter stretching toward its maximum reading. “You saw the new Girl in the Box up close and personal but all you can give me is ‘interesting’?”
I stop in the middle of the dirt path, sending small eddies of moonlight-bleached dust whirling about our feet. “Well maybe I could have had more time to observe her the first time I saw her if I hadn’t been busy helping this girl I know wrangle her sister’s horse back into its stall.”
“Benjamin Singer, you son of a bitch,” Whiskey says.
“You took Tristam out for a ride without asking?” Gin’s voice goes from zero to banshee in two seconds flat, and I wave to Whiskey as her older sister chases her into the night.
When I can no longer hear them yelling at each other—which just means they’re now screaming inside their makeshift stable, not that they stopped fighting—I start to walk along the dirt path back to our Airstream, thinking about the new girl.
Having a body in the box is important. I don’t know the specifics of the curse, but I at least know that. The new girl’s going to have a tough time of things, adjusting to life with the curse; maybe there’s something I can do to help. But worrying over what to do and how to help are problems for tomorrow.
The world is done up in shades of gray again, and I want nothing more than to be back in my bed, where I can pity the black-haired girl in peace. But Mom is waiting for me on the steps of the trailer.
“From here on out, you are to stay away from her.”
I am far too drained to argue with her, but finishing the conversation is the only way I’ll ever see my bed again. “You mean the new girl?”