Revival was a delicate task, though. Her measurements had to precise, or she risked tainting the very joy she needed to build up. Who in the crowds was actually happy? Vendors’ pleasure at sales could quickly grow into greed. A young couple’s first date often disintegrated into jealousy over someone else’s bare summer skin. Overjoyed children teetered into overtired and wailing children.
But Carlyle hadn’t lied. She and Lady Magda really were the best. So when she spotted an elderly lady on a park bench, smiling at a child playing in the grass, she got to work stealing the woman’s happiness for herself. Once she found her target, it was as simple as pickpocketing.
When dusk fell and the curtain of Magda’s booth was drawn back, Carlyle was ready: seething with good vibes stolen from unsuspecting strangers. Magda sat in the tent’s shadows, candles lighting her dark skin and shiny hair with a beauty most small towns only saw in the movies. She wore bright colors, a scarf in her hair, and tinkling jewelry, perpetuating the stereotype that sold so, so well. Carlyle silently waited her turn, still as a shadow behind a bronze velvet curtain that created the tent’s false back.
“Would you like an adjustment?” Magda said to a customer. Carlyle listened to the gentle balancing of transaction as the person on the other side of the curtain deliberated. But then the hinges on the wooden lounge chair squeaked, and she smelled the cut-rose fragrance of Magda’s triumph. First catch.
When Carlyle was nine and taken out of the foster care system by Magda, she had thought of the woman as the witch with the candy house in the woods, waiting for the innocents to come. Carlyle fancied herself to be the candy – her strange powers baiting the people in the crowd to come to the tent later.
But after eight years of working together to hone her power over the emotions of others, Carlyle knew Magda was actually the candy house. And she herself was the witch.
“Carlyle!” Magda’s voice was soft, but laced with aggravation. She was already done with the hypnosis, and Carlyle hadn’t even noticed. Slipping from behind the curtain, Carlyle saw a middle-aged man prone and relaxed on the silk-draped chair. To anyone else, he could be sleeping.
But Carlyle smelled the ash and midnight-twisted stench of deep depression, and she sighed. What a way to start her night.
“You seem distracted,” Magda murmured as Carlyle knelt beside the man. Carlyle only shrugged and delicately touched the man’s temple, then the nape of his neck, then the back of his skull, her fingers tingling when she found the tangled nest of emotions and memories and expectations of what life was supposed to be.
She closed her eyes and began to unravel, one black thread of self-loathing at a time.
Magda had also taught her the self-hypnosis of meditation, and as she worked, Carlyle slipped into the dream-like state that allowed her to cordon off the depression flowing from the man’s skin into her fingers. Still, those threads were sticky, and some always became tangled in her own expectations of what life was supposed to be.
When finished, Carlyle hid herself behind the curtain again and Magda woke the man, who marveled at his newly-improved outlook. Much better than his psychiatrist, he laughed. But Carlyle knew the effect was just as temporary, which was why they did festival work instead of setting up a permanent shop.
As they waited for the next customer, Carlyle whispered to Magda through the flocked velvet. “I’ll be eighteen next month, you know.”
“I do.”
“We should go somewhere special. The ocean, maybe. I’ve never seen it.”
Magda chuckled. “We won’t be missing festival season for your birthday. Maybe in the late winter months.”
But Carlyle knew that was a lie. It was always festival season somewhere. There was always money to be made.
Together they treated eight people, earning four hundred dollars. It was a good first night. As their reputation spread, each subsequent night of the festival would double or even triple.
“The crowds are all gone,” Magda finally said, drawing back the curtain. Carlyle blinked up at her sleepily. She was always exhausted after a night of pulling negative threads into the fabric of her brain.
But still she helped Magda collect the candles, curtain, and chairs. They never left anything out overnight. Magda parked their camper trailer at a nearby hotel, where it wouldn’t be noticed, and Carlyle curled on her narrow mattress to sleep off some of the customers’ depression. Yet even as Magda’s breathing grew steady, Carlyle continued to toss restlessly.
She was forbidden to leave the trailer at night, but suddenly she just couldn’t bear the feeling of suffocating in this cramped space a second longer. This close to eighteen, Magda’s old threat of turning her back over to foster care just didn’t hold as much weight. Carlyle didn’t know if she could survive on her own yet, but she knew she was ready to stop profiting from others’ depression and begin finding the joy that surely even she deserved.
Behind the shadowy curtains of the candy house, the witch had begun to dream a life of her own.
And so she snuck out of the camper and began to walk, testing her bravery. She left the parking lot, heading past the main street of empty festival booths, onto the road that lead out of town. This wasn’t the night to leave; she needed more savings. But surely there was no harm in pretending.
Up ahead, a narrow bridge spanned the fat river. Two lanes, one for coming and one for going. Carlyle imagined going and never coming back, and that image pulled her from the road and onto the bridge. It was four in the morning and dark, except for the drips of light from each naked bulb welded to the bridge frame. There were no cars.
But there was a boy, she realized suddenly.
He was standing silhouetted in a circle of light, his attention fixated on the black water and muddy riverbank a hundred feet below. Carlyle slipped deeper into the shadows, although she was close enough to be seen if he looked. She hoped he wouldn’t look.
He was tall. Lean. Dark jeans and a dark tee, loose enough to be careless but tight enough to show the muscle tugged into formation by fingers gripping the thick metal railing. Hair the same color as the shadows beyond him. His beauty was as finely crafted as an assassin’s favorite blade, but when he turned his grass-green eyes on her, she saw his jagged edges.
It was the boy who had seen her beneath the maple tree, and he was in pain. Despair snaked around his chest, squeezing his breath into too-small rations. She could smell it. See it. Was consumed by it, as though it were all that mattered in her universe anymore.
He continued to stare directly at her, so Carlyle felt she had no choice but to move from her shadows into his light.
“You’re a festival person, aren’t you? Not from this town.” His voice seemed as far away as the morning light. His accent wasn’t local, either.
Carlyle nodded, stepping closer. “What are you doing?” she asked, watching as he turned back to the railing, leaning over it to look down.
“Nice night for a swim,” he spat back at her. Then before she realized what was happening, he had grabbed one of the bridge’s steel suspension cables and hoisted himself up, so he was balanced lightly on the flat railing, its width barely enough to hold his boots.
The moonlight made him even more beautiful, and Carlyle was struck with the idea that not only was he not local, he wasn’t quite human.
Maybe like her?
She’d never met anyone else like her.
“Jump like that could kill a person,” she said, forcing her voice to be casual.
“That’s the idea,” he answered, turning on his toes so he faced the night and the drop.
“What?” she repeated stupidly. She’d dealt with depressed people her whole life, but she’d never been this close to this sort of danger. “Why?”
“Why not? Life. Death. Whatever. It’s all the same to me,” the boy said. His voice was haunted with the kinds of demons that Carlyle had hoped she’d never see.
“Well, if it’s all the same, then why don’t you just live a wh
ile longer,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
He turned and looked down at her. He even bent his knees, crouching on the railing with one hand still clutching the cable. “What good logic.”
She heard the lie, but at least now he was closer to her than to the empty nothingness at his back.
“Here, I’ll help you down.” She offered her hand up to him. If she could just touch him, maybe she could take in some of his desperation. Just enough that he would come down. Then she could get him some real help. Lasting help.
He grasped her hand and she smiled encouragingly.
His eyes narrowed. Tightening his hold on her fingers, he leaned down further and yanked her up onto the railing with him, like she weighed nothing. Panicked, Carlyle wrapped her arms around his torso, her feet scrabbling for purchase on the railing. One of her sandals slipped off her foot and floated down, down into the blackness below.
If he let go now, she’d be going with him.
“Step right up,” he murmured against her hair, as her toes found just enough railing. She grew still, focusing on calming herself, although she kept her arms locked around him. A few of her fingers were brushing the skin at his waist, and she tried to push in, hurriedly searching for the despair that would have him balancing on a bridge railing in the middle of the night.
She dug her fingers into his skin, trying desperately to focus enough to at least push some of her own stolen happiness into him. But there just wasn’t enough of her power left – not after a full night of work.
He let go of the cables with one hand and reached around to pry her fingers away. “God, you’re strong,” he grunted, pulling one of her arms away and behind her back, pressing her so close to him that she could barely breathe. Her head spun with the irony. She’d never felt weaker or more helpless. She tried again to focus, frantic to push something besides fear or hatred at him.
He laughed, the sound low and grumbly in her ear. “But you can’t push anything on me.”
“What?” she said again, unable to believe he might know what she could do.
“I don’t have emotions. You can’t push any on me.”
“But…the fear. Before,” she stammered. She knew she hadn’t imagined it.
“I’m like a mirror. That was your fear.”
“Impossible,” she muttered. She’d never met someone without emotions.
“Anything is possible. Look at you, right? You steal emotions from one person and give them to someone else. Like a crazy Robin Hood of mind games.”
He twisted just enough that one of her feet slipped off the railing, and she let go of his back to grab the cable instead.
“And you’re still afraid,” he whispered, his breath hot on her forehead. The air was thick with the possibility of it – rancid lemons and graveyard mud. She’d never been able to smell her own emotions before.
She tipped her head back to peer at him, her eyes rolling with the dizziness of black below and black above. The stars above her spun as his eyes glittered, their green unnatural against the black and white around them. She managed to whisper, “Obviously, you idiot. I don’t want to die.”
“But you’re not afraid of me,” he added, his voice lifting at the end as though it were a question.
“No. You just need someone to help you.”
For a shadow of a second, she thought she could smell his surprise – the softest brush of crushed mint. She shifted her weight to the side, hoping to separate herself from him and leap back down to the safety of the bridge. But then he only chuckled, tightening the arm around her waist.
The hem of her shirt had slipped up and his fingers pressed five hot points into her waist. She tried to focus on that connection instead, to work through it, but again she found nothing. No emotion, and no space between them. All the emotion was inside her, and all the space was below them.
“You should be afraid of me,” he whispered, and his eyes glinted as a car swerved onto the bridge. Blue lights swirled in her peripheral vision, and she felt relief hemming in the edges of her panic.
The police would be trouble, but that was better than death.
Suddenly he let go of her waist and grabbed the cables with both hands. The motion shook her loose, and she grasped desperately at his shirt.
“Officers! Help me!” he yelled as the cops threw open their doors. “I didn’t mean it! I want to live!”
Carlyle scrambled to keep up, her mind spinning with confusion.
“Young lady! Take your hands off the boy! Do not jump!” An officer’s voice began to break through the muddied waters of her fear.
“Do not push him!” another officer yelled. Push him? Carlyle thought.
Oh, no. Hell no.
This boy had set her up.
But why?
He laughed without humor as her fingers slipped from his chest, limp with the barest understanding. She wrapped both hands around the cable instead. Now they were both holding on. They were both going to be safe.
But that didn’t explain why.
“I’d like to see you again,” he said, bending low to her ear and grasping her hand back to his chest. She shivered as his breath brushed her neck. “Don’t let me down.”
And he jumped, before she could even scream. His fingers brushed her cheek for scraps of a second. Her balance teetered, and she threw her arms around the cable before her fate became the same.
His body hit the muddy bank below with barely enough sound to register.
Carlyle gasped out a ragged breath that quickly turned into a sob. She felt hands on her legs, pulling her back to the bridge, but she couldn’t move to help them. Every part of her was frozen and numb. The officers were a blur of chaos and blinding blue lights.
Someone yelled into a radio. Sirens came, and a team went skidding down the steep bank to find the boy. Someone handcuffed Carlyle, half-carrying her small frame to the back of a police car.
The closing door muffled the sounds, and her eyes began to feel so heavy. Her brain was shutting down. Then the world went blank.
“Wake up, young lady,” a voice said, prodding her eyes open.
She saw only gray and white light, then bars and a linoleum floor, as her pupils adjusted.
“I’m Deputy Whiting. I’ll be taking you for questioning now.”
She didn’t say a word as the door to the cell was unlocked, and the officer pulled her to her feet. She stumbled, but he helped her along the gray hallway and into another gray room.
“You should be charged with homicide, young lady,” Whiting said as he settled in front of her at the table. “The team who took the call heard your boyfriend say he wasn’t going to jump. But then he was gone. So I’ll ask you straight. Did you push him?”
Carlyle stared at him, shock making it impossible to answer.
“Did you make a pact? Romeo and Juliet deal?”
She blinked. If only she weren’t cuffed, she could touch this man’s arm and make him let her go. Maybe. If her abilities hadn’t worked on that boy, maybe there were others like him.
Others like her.
Panic welled inside her. She could not be arrested for a crime like this. She was almost eighteen. An adult. Homicide.
“I swear I didn’t do anything! I don’t even know that boy!” The words began to tumble from her lips, and then they wouldn’t stop. “Please, Officer. My aunt is at the hotel by the festival. In the camper trailer. Please get her! She’ll tell you. We’re just here for the festival. I’d never met that boy! I just went walking and saw him and tried to stop him and he pulled me up there and I was so scared!”
She ended on a disgraceful sob, but it was one of the most real moments in her entire life.
For someone who shuffled emotions like cards every day of her life, Carlyle had always managed to keep her own safely tucked away, out of anyone’s sight. Sometimes she’d even managed to trick herself into believing she didn’t have emotions of her own.
But she wasn’t like that boy.
Deputy Whiting sighed. Then he nodded and rose to leave the room. “We’ll find your aunt. Hopefully get the rest of this story.”
Carlyle watched him go, thinking of the smell of fear she thought she’d sensed on the boy before he got on the railing. The room stunk with it now, and it was all hers. How had he woken her emotions like that?
She tried to track the time they left her in the questioning room, but minutes dragged into what felt like hours as she lost count. Finally, the door opened again, and Magda entered.
Oh, the look on her face.
Magda hadn’t hit her since the incident with the lost cash box last month, but Carlyle could tell the woman’s hand was twitchy. Even if Magda could get her safely out of this mess, there would be hell to pay and an eternity to make payments.
“Sir, the body still hasn’t been found.” The voice drifted in through the open doorway, and Carlyle saw Whiting’s hands clench tighter on the doorknob.
“Then double the men looking. Call over for a dog. Just find it!”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed with a bang as he stalked into the room.
“Deputy Whiting, I can assure you that Carlyle had never met this boy. We only arrived today for the festival.” Magda sank gracefully into the chair he offered.
“But you don’t have any proof of that, do you? No receipts for a hotel, nobody else to back up your alibi?”
Magda huffed, her fingers tugging on the crystal she wore around her neck. She slid a ferocious glance at Carlyle, as if to say a murder charge was the least of her problems.
“I have receipts from gas stations. We don’t sleep in hotels. Our wages are meager, sir. But everywhere we go, we help people. Not harm them.” Magda was speaking in her hypnotist’s voice now, and she began swinging the crystal. Back and forth, rhythmic, endless.
But Whiting just blinked away.
“Tell your story. From the beginning,” he told Carlyle. And she did her best, trying not to breathe too deeply of Magda’s fury.
That Moment When: An Anthology of Young Adult Fiction Page 63
