“So, what exactly do you do with your days?” I asked, my curiosity finally getting the better of me.
For a moment, Wyatt took his eyes away from the road to look at me, and this time I was fairly sure that I noticed flecks of gold in his gaze. But then he looked away before I could really tell, focusing back on the cars and road ahead of him.
His lip turned down slightly as he paused before shrugging. “If you mean for a job, then nothing special,” he said. “I pick up things here and there, haven’t quite decided what it is I want to do yet.”
It was a strange answer to me, since back home most men just worked on their farms. No one, especially one as young and strong as Wyatt, would be allowed to not work or decide for themselves what they wanted to do. Certain jobs just needed doing and you did them. But I wasn’t so naïve that I didn’t understand that it didn’t have to work that way out here. Still, even with more choice, I would have expected most people Wyatt’s age to have already figured out their aptitudes and begun to contribute to their community.
He looked back over at me. “What?”
“What?” I repeated.
“You look like you just sucked on a lemon or something. Does it bother you that I haven’t figured my shit out yet?”
I must have made a face that I hadn’t realized. “No, it’s not that. I mean, it’s just odd to me, that’s all. Where I come from, there isn’t so much choice and… freedom, I guess.” As I said it, I realized that’s really what it was. Out here, there was freedom to choose—or not choose—what it was you wanted to do. That would definitely take some getting used to.
“So you just basically have to do whatever you’re told? Do whatever job needs doing?”
“Of course,” I replied automatically.
“Wow, that fucking sucks. What if, you know, you don’t want to do it? What if you don’t like doing… wait, what is it you guys do, anyway?” Wyatt looked over at me with a bit of a sheepish expression, but I couldn’t fault him for it. I knew most English people had almost as much of a lack of knowledge about the Amish as we had about them. The only reason we knew more was that we were sometimes forced to interact with them, venture out into their world for supplies or such things. But they never had the need to come and visit us.
“Oh, well, plenty of things. Farming is the most common thing for our men to do, while the women spend more time taking care of the home and children. But there are also livestock to feed and groom, buildings and plows that need to be built or fixed, supply or trading runs to go on—”
“Right, okay, so what if you don’t want to be a farmer or if you don’t want to fix shit or trade or whatever? What if you want to do something else?”
“Like what?”
“Like anything? Like what if you wanted to be an entertainer, or a fighter, or— “
This time it was me who interrupted him. “A fighter? Who would you fight? Do you mean like those men were doing on the television last night?” Seeing those televisions had been one of our first surprises when we got to Trick Shots, although we knew about them from school and from some of Hannah’s secret letters where she tried to explain everything we would see and experience if we left home. But I definitely hadn’t expected to see two men fighting each other. I made sure to keep my eyes away from it at the time, but I had noticed that Wyatt was watching it with interest. Until he had noticed me, anyway. I almost blushed again.
“Yeah, sort of like that,” he said.
“Well we certainly don’t have anything like that back home,” I said, shaking my head.
As I spoke, I felt the truck jerk to a stop. “We’re here, by the way,” Wyatt said.
I looked around to see us surrounded by a sea of other cars and trucks that were also stopped, all of them pulled up onto the grass of a huge field. “Wow, why are there so many vehicles here?”
Wyatt laughed, pushing open his door and sliding out. “This is just the parking lot. If this impresses you, wait until you see what’s inside.” He swung around to my side and pulled open the door for me, offering me his hand to help me out of the truck and down the big drop to the ground. His grip was firm and warm, and I was again reminded about how we were alone and unchaperoned. It wasn’t like I’d never touched a boy’s hand before, but for some reason this time it felt much different. Much less innocent.
As soon as my feet touched the grass, I let go, almost as if my palm were on fire. I could swear that Wyatt almost looked disappointed as soon as I did, but he turned his face away quickly, peering around for a moment.
“There’s Reid’s Shelby,” he said, pointing a couple of rows away from us. “And I could hear Ash’s bike a mile away, they’re just pulling in over there.”
Within minutes, the six of us were reunited again and walking towards the front entrance of the fairgrounds. Ash and Hannah took the lead as Reid and Sarah matched our pace a few feet away.
Despite the fact that there seemed to be more people surrounding us than make up our entire community back home, I couldn’t help but get excited. My nose was filled with strange, sweet smells, my ears were being bombarded with sounds of laughter and talking and music, and my eyes were so wide, staring at all of the neon lights and towering, colorful structures beyond the front gates that I thought they were in danger of coming loose from their sockets. I cast a quick glance over at Wyatt and was surprised to see him watching me instead of everything around us.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, feeling self-conscious all of a sudden.
“You,” he replied, a wide grin breaking across his face.
“Why?” Surely everything around us was more interesting and thrilling to look at than me.
“I just love seeing how excited you look. You’re like a kid in a candy store.”
“I’m just… in awe,” I admitted. “I’ve never seen so many people in one place before, or smelled such a strange variety of things all at once, or heard so many loud and strange sounds….” I looked around as I spoke, still taking it all in, and noticed only one thing out of place. My sister Sarah seemed paler than usual, the look on her face seemed more filled with terror than wonder. Although despite the misgivings she’d had about coming here with Reid, her hand was entwined with his and gripping it so tightly her knuckles were turning white. Sarah had always been the most nervous out of the three of us, but I hadn’t expected her to be so tense.
Wyatt laughed beside me, a rich and full sound. “Well, I did promise to keep you surprised. Let’s go get tickets, I can’t wait to get you inside.” At this, Wyatt reached out and let his palm brush against the small of my back as he picked up his pace, weaving through the crowds and passing Sarah and Reid. His touch was distractingly warm, even through my long dress. It may have only lasted a moment, but I still had to suppress a shiver. I wouldn’t have minded if he had left it there just a little bit longer.
We caught up to Hannah and Ash as we approached the main entrance, falling in beside them in the line. They were joking and laughing, seemingly very at ease with each other after only meeting last night. They almost seemed oblivious to the crowd around them, and their hands found reasons to touch each other fairly regularly. If I were back home, such a display between a young, unmarried couple would have been completely disgraceful, but for all I knew, this behavior was the norm out here in the English world. Certainly no one else around us was paying it any attention.
Looking back, Sarah and Reid had almost caught up to us, but Sarah looked no more comfortable now than she had a few minutes ago, and it was obvious that my eldest sister hadn’t even noticed. I wanted to tell her, but didn’t want to embarrass Sarah in front of the others.
Touching Hannah’s arm to get her attention, I spoke in our mother tongue. “Sarah sehnt onwel ous.” Sarah looks unwell.
That got her attention, and she turned just as I heard Sarah’s voice behind me. “I’m all right,” she said, having obviously heard me. I didn’t believe her though. Then she added, in our tongue, that she
was just feeling overwhelmed by everything, but that Reid had offered to take care of her and so she was sure she would be fine.
I watched Hannah’s eyes take in the way that Reid was holding onto our sister, and then she paused before finally nodding. She seemed satisfied, so that was good enough for me as well. Besides, Wyatt was touching my arm again, waving the tickets he had just purchased around excitedly. “Come on, I can’t wait to keep surprising you,” he grinned.
His smile was infectious, and soon my fears over Sarah were forgotten as I stared into his gold-flecked eyes again. Ash was saying something from over my shoulder, and Wyatt nodded at him, never losing his grin. “I was gonna take Beth over to the freak show,” he said, and then he practically pulled me from the others. All I heard was Hannah’s voice calling out to be careful as we squeezed our way through the crowd and into the fairground.
“What’s a freak show?” I asked, curiosity winning out over my desire for surprise. We finally had a bit more space around us, after finally passing through the gates that had funneled the majority of people together into a herd.
Wyatt laughed as he walked next to me, casting a sidelong glance that seemed to slide along my entire body before slipping away again. “Well, at a place like this, it’s mostly just pictures,” he said. “Back in the day, guys like P.T. Barnum would assemble all sorts of strange people or animals. Shit that you would never see in real life. He’d bring them all together and charge admission, calling them freaks—as in freaks of nature, I guess—and letting people stare at them. Eventually, people caught on to a lot of the things being fake, and even for the ones that were real, they objected to the exploitation of it. So now it’s mainly just pictures or models of some of the more famous ones from the past—kind of like a museum.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. We certainly had nothing like it back home, but I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. But Wyatt wore such a look of excited encouragement that I just felt myself nod and follow him along. He’d done nothing yet to shake the trust I already felt for him, so I was open to whatever else he wanted to expose me to. Even if it did sound very strange.
Eventually we arrived at a tent with a man standing in front of it that looked like nothing I had ever seen before—or since. His body was almost completely covered in colorful designs and patterns, and when I say completely, I mean it. He was wearing almost nothing, just a simple piece of cloth for modesty. But the designs and patterns weren’t the end of it. In both of his ears were huge hoops of metal that seemed to stretch the skin of his lobes to an impossible size. I knew it was rude, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, or even close my gaping mouth.
“Step right up,” the man said, in a voice that slurred his s’s just a tad. As soon as he noticed us approaching, he focused his gaze and speech right at me. “Enter to be shocked and amazed at all of the ways the human body can be twisted and deformed, altered and distorted, grown and shrunk, or just plain mixed up!” I couldn’t take my eyes off of him, and as he spoke I noticed the most peculiar thing of all. His tongue was split in two at the tip, forked like a snake. I looked quickly at Wyatt to see if he noticed, but all he did was laugh and pay the man before sweeping aside the flap to the tent and ushering me inside.
Inside, the tent was dimly lit with odd and unsettling music playing from somewhere. If Wyatt hadn’t been next to me, and if I couldn’t still hear the yelling and laughing of the crowd from outside, the whole experience would have been terrifying. Even so, it was quite unsettling and I moved closer to his big frame, making sure not to be left behind as he moved from display to display.
With each stop, we were confronted with a picture—usually black and white—of a strange looking person and a short paragraph of who they were. From bearded women to abnormally-sized men. Each time, Wyatt read the caption and I just stared, wide eyed. I’d never seen anything like any of it.
Finally, we came to an image and miniature sculpture of a strange looking half man, half fish. The label on it called it The Feejee Mermaid.
“Is that real?” I gasped.
Wyatt laughed and shook his head. “Nope, although it did fool people for a long time. The original was actually the head and body of a monkey sewn onto the back half of a big fish.”
“Who would do such a thing? And why?” The whole idea of it was horrifying.
“Why does anyone do anything?” he shrugged. “Money. The guy that did this, P.T. Barnum, was famous for the saying ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. Sometimes I wonder if he pulled crap like this just to prove he was right. Anyway, he would run cons all the time and got rich off of it. It was over a hundred years ago, but I’m sure he wasn’t the first person to get rich off of the gullibility of people, or even their curiosity in stuff that is different than what they consider normal. Wasn’t the last, either.”
“What do you mean? People are still creating things like this?”
“Probably somewhere in the world,” he said. “But I’m more talking about the other part of it, the morbid curiosity that people have in watching the struggles of others. You can’t turn on the TV these days without seeing some show about someone who is really overweight, or really small, or even just shows about famous people and how they fuck up from time to time—like any of us are any better. Some people just want to see other people suffer, I guess.”
A lot of what he was saying went over my head. I had no idea about television shows, or famous people, or even people with extremely different body types. At home, everyone ate healthy meals and did a lot of physical labor, so there were very few people that much larger than anyone else. Sure, a few of the elders had started to put on a few pounds now that they were too old to work the farms anymore. But overindulgence was a sin. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to see things like that so badly that they would pay money for it. If this was the norm out here, I was sure it was something I would never understand.
“Anyway, come on, this isn’t actually what I wanted to show you anyway.” With that, Wyatt led me to the back of the tent, and then through another flap that seemed to take us through a narrow corridor that ended at the entrance to yet another tent. In front of this one, there was a man that had muscles to rival Wyatt’s, and he just stood there staring at us without so much as a word. From inside the tent, I could hear yelling and clapping.
Wyatt approached and handed over some money, at which point the man just nodded and stepped aside. The whole time he kept his eyes on me, as if he were expecting me to make some sort of trouble. When Wyatt reached out for my hand, I didn’t even think twice about it. I just grabbed it gratefully and let him pull me away while I did my best to keep as much distance between me and the other man as I could.
Inside, the tent was packed with people—mostly men. From where we stood, I couldn’t tell what was going on, but there was a lot of yelling, cheering and fist raising. I was still holding onto Wyatt’s hand, but now it was more to keep from being separated and lost in the crowd as he moved forward, pushing his way through to the front. I trailed in his wake, unsure where he was leading us. Most of the men around me were at least a head taller than I was, so I couldn’t see what everyone was so excited about. This was going to be another surprise, courtesy of Wyatt Brody.
When he finally stopped, he half-turned and tugged on my arm, bringing me past the crowd and then sliding me in front of his body. For a moment, I was so distracted by the strength and firmness of his hands on my shoulders, and the brief feel of his body lightly touching mine from behind, that I didn’t pay any attention to where we were or what he was looking at. When I did, I’m fairly sure that I yelped in surprise. But over the shouting of the crowd, no one even noticed.
The spectators in the tent were arranged in a circle, and Wyatt had led us right to the inside edge of it so that I could see what everyone was looking at. In the center of the circle were two men, shirtless, and very bloody. Before I had even really focused on what I was looking at, one of the men thrust a f
ist out that was the size of a large rock, catching the other on the chin and wrenching his head violently to the right as spit and blood flew from his mouth. On impact, the cheer of the crowd rose, as did a dark and uneasy feeling from the pit of my stomach.
The man that threw the punch leapt forward, his fists moving quickly as more and more punches landed against the injured man who could now barely keep his own arms up enough to protect himself. With each punch, my stomach did another flip and I couldn’t stop gaping at the blood that was spattered all along the ground beneath them. Even though they were standing on dark dirt, the red splashes scattered around remained visible, mapping each stagger and burst of pain from the men it had flowed from.
The scene was similar to what had been on the television back at Trick Shots the night before, but at least then I had been able to avoid watching it, focusing instead on Wyatt and ignoring the violence. But now, watching it was unavoidable. And seeing it in person was even worse than on the screen.
It wasn’t as if there were never any fights back home, but when there were, someone was always quick to stop things before they went too far. Someone with some sense would jump in and pull the men apart. But here? Here the men were cheering them on, screaming for the violence to continue, happy for the chance to see someone get hurt. Why were they doing that? And why would Wyatt want me to see it?
I closed my eyes, trying to tune it out, but my nose filled with the odor of blood and sweat, just as my ears couldn’t ignore the screams of bloodlust coming from every angle. Finally, shaking my head, I spun away from Wyatt. I was a fool for feeling safe earlier. I really didn’t know Wyatt at all, and the English world was proving to be a lot more dangerous than I had ever imagined.
For the first time, I started to wonder whether Sarah was right all along, and we never should have left home. I could hear Wyatt saying something behind me, but I couldn’t listen to it. I needed air. I needed to get away from the wanton violence he had led me to. I pushed my way through the throng of men and slipped away before he could stop me.
The Brody Bunch Collection: Bad Boy Romance Page 42
