That Time I Joined the Circus

by J. J. Howard

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Corner of Bowery and Rivington — Tuesday, October 5

  My life has a soundtrack — it plays in my head all the time. Sometimes it’s on automatic, just a song stuck on repeat from the last thing I listened to. And sometimes I’m like a DJ, making a selection to suit my mood or the general circumstance. When there’s music playing in the outside world, though, sometimes it takes over. Like now.

  My father taught me about music, which is how I know that the sound coming out of the bar called Mission doesn’t qualify. I think it’s Nickelback, or someone who was on, like, American Idol, but it’s completely beneath me to know for sure. I am a music snob, and proud of it. I’m a New Yorker; smugness is my birthright. But being alone, cold, and hungry — and homeless as of around ten o’clock this morning — has taken some of the smug out of me. I never thought I’d live anywhere but New York — never even thought I’d live above Houston Street.

  Maybe if I hadn’t messed up quite so completely, one of my two (former) best friends would be standing here with me. Maybe if I’d actually bothered to learn how to drive … maybe if my dad hadn’t died … But no maybes would help: I had, I hadn’t, he had.

  So here I am saying good-bye to my neighborhood, alone, with no plan beyond the bus station and a really crummy song about love stuck in my head. And of course my stupid mother to go and find. What kind of father sends all his money to his crazy ex-wife and leaves his daughter completely broke? And what kind of mother runs away and joins the circus?

  Orchard Street and Avenue A — Thursday, September 30

  Eli won — again. He’s my best friend, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. We were sitting on the floor of his bedroom, which is not that easy, because his room is even smaller than mine. I had just lost seventeen dollars and forty-two cents playing five-card draw. We were trying to stay awake to see a midnight showing of Robot Monster at the Den of Cin on Avenue A. And waiting for Bailey to arrive. Things had been pretty weird since Eli and Bailey — my two best friends — my two only friends, to be completely accurate — started dating each other a few months ago. Having Eli all to myself that night had actually been kind of nice. Being the odd freak out had not been all that awesome.

  Eli Katz and I have been friends since we started at Sheldon in sixth grade. I’d gone to public school for elementary, and Eli had gone to a little yeshiva down the street. Neither of us fit the Sheldon Prep mold very well. I had a dad who looked like a teenager in his D G A: NOW START A BAND T-shirt and a missing mother. Eli had strict parents and almost never ventured more than three blocks from his apartment. My dad, Gavin, and I taught him to be almost as obsessive about music as we are. Gavin even taught him to play the guitar, which was a big improvement over the clarinet he’d been trying to play when I met him.

  Eli and I hated the Sheldon kids — that is, until Bailey Conners came along in ninth. Bailey was pretty enough, and naturally non-awkward enough — and wealthy enough — to fit in with the typical Sheldon kids. But for some unknown reason, she picked us instead. Eli and I had both been flattered and kind of grateful.

  It took me a little while to figure out what it was about Bailey. She certainly looked like someone who could have her own show on The CW. But she didn’t quite fit in with the shiny people at Sheldon. The day she brought the pigeon with the smashed wing to class with her (in a Jimmy Choo shoe box, no less), I started to figure it out. She had a soft spot for wounded birds. Bailey has a good heart, and she loves a project. Her makeover scheme had worked on Eli, at least.

  And I guess if I am honest with myself, I had seen right away that Eli’s feelings about Bailey hadn’t stopped at gratitude. When Bailey spoke, Eli’s head always tilted to the side, and he gazed at her sort of like a faithful hound dog.

  “X? Call?” Eli’s voice brought me back to the game.

  “Fold.” I threw in my cards with a huge sigh. “You’ve got my popcorn money, and my download budget for at least the next two weeks.”

  “Try two days, addict.”

  “You’re so funny!” I said in my best fake voice. “For a retarded person, I mean.”

  Eli threw his cards at me, but he smiled. “Clean up that mess you made, will ya?”

  I leaned back against the side of his bed, stretching my legs while keeping them crossed in my little skirt. I hated shorts, but it was about 112 degrees out, and a little skirt was my only other option. Eli was wearing jeans, as always. I watched him gather up the cards I’d known he wouldn’t make me pick up. Eli was so different now — the way he filled out his T-shirt was such a change from the old string bean he’d been. It was hot in his room — his parents definitely rationed the air-conditioning — and I gathered all my hair up and held it on top of my head for a few seconds, wishing for a hair clip. It was getting really long. Probably time to cut it. I didn’t actually hate my hair — it was sort of medium brown, but thick with a little wave to it. It was just too bad I hadn’t inherited Gavin’s light blue, almost silver eyes. Mine were just regular blue.

  As I watched Eli put away the cards, I was startled by the jolt of my cell phone in the side pocket of my skirt. I slid the answer bar and asked, “Hi, what are you doing?”

  Gavin, I mouthed to Eli’s questioning look. My dad was not the sort of dad that my friends called Mr. Ryan. I started calling him Gavin a long time ago to annoy him, and then it sort of stuck.

  Wherever my dad was, there was synthpop in the background. This was not exactly unusual. My dad is stuck somewhere in the late eighties. He visits me here in the post-millennium, but that’s not where he really lives.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Eli’s.”

  “Shock. I thought you were gonna be home early tonight, though?”

  “When did I say that?” Gavin often got things scrambled.

  “I thought you had that college fair thing.”

  “Oh — last night. I went. No sweat. Already picked my school. The University of Kentucky. I’m looking into maybe getting some horses.”

  “I was supposed to go with you.” He really did sound contrite.

  “That’s okay.” I was mostly telling the truth. Gavin was an awesome dad, but not so big on the nuts-and-bolts stuff.

  “I was working — I totally forgot. I’m sorry, Lexi.”

  I didn’t correct him — Lexi was his pet name for me. He mostly obeyed my wish to be called Xandra now. As long as I didn’t have to be Alex, like that idiot Mr. Rosso, my chemistry teacher, insisted on calling me. When I tried to correct h
im, he said there are no proper names that start with an X.

  “So … horses. Got it. I have to say, I kind of thought you’d go NYU, maybe Columbia. But, you know, Kentucky, that’s cool, too.”

  “You wouldn’t think it was cool if you had to buy the horse,” I told him as I watched Eli flip open his laptop and stretch out diagonally across his bed. “What’s up, Gavin? Did you need something? It doesn’t sound like you’re even home.”

  “My name is Dad. And no, I was calling about that school thing that I already missed. When will you be home?”

  “Before you, probably. Be good, though.”

  “I will if you will.” I heard the click. The man wasn’t big on good-byes.

  “What did Gavin want?” Eli asked, looking up from his screen. His head was close to mine, hanging over the edge of the bed.

  “Just checking in. I need caffeine. I don’t think I’ll make it through Robot Monster. I think I’m gonna head.”

  “That’s too bad,” Eli said, his face aimed back down at the screen. “Bailey just messaged me; she’s bailing on us.”

  I had a weird feeling — a sudden conviction, actually — right at that moment that I should get up off Eli’s floor and go straight home. Eli looked down at me, and I saw something mischievous in his eyes and a lock of dark hair falling over his left eye. When did he get so freaking cute? Why was this my life?

  If only I’d listened to that weird premonition, the worst night of my life would have been a tiny bit less horrible.

  I stood up, but then I sat back down on the bed, with my legs over Eli’s legs, my back against the wall behind his bed. Eli turned over and looked at me for a minute. When he spoke, his voice was pitched low; his eyes still held mine. “So, what do you want to do now?”

  I didn’t make it home that night at all. I wish more than anything that I had.

  The Middle of Freaking Nowhere — Thursday, October 7

  I sat on a Greyhound bus, heading, on purpose, to somewhere in the middle of Florida. There was a chance my mother would be there when I arrived, but I had no way of knowing.

  This was probably what I deserved.

  My dad’s lawyer was the one who made me realize that I had to leave New York. He shook his head. A lot. He talked about investments that hadn’t panned out, about Dad being overextended. I had trouble following his words. The soundtrack in my head was just static.

  The deal was that my dad had a little bit of money left, and Max, his lawyer, had sent it on to my mom, because that was the arrangement Dad had made. “It wasn’t easy,” he told me, leaning back in his fancy chair. The rest of the office wasn’t that fancy; it was on Avenue B, wedged in between a hot pretzel stand and a tattoo parlor. “Your mother moves around a great deal. In fact” — he wasn’t looking at me; he was playing with the Roberto Alomar bobblehead on his desk — “she’s actually on the move now. She’s with a circus that’s working a circuit down south.”

  “Working at a circus? Are you seriously telling me she joined the circus?”

  He handed me a slip of paper; I looked down at the address, but my brain didn’t process the writing on it as words.

  “Your mother’s always performed,” he said matter-of-factly, as though to combat the freak-out I was starting to have by being super calm. He still wasn’t looking at me; now he was fiddling with his shirtsleeves, which he unrolled only to reroll. “At any rate, I tracked down the address for you — even made some calls to find out where they’d be. If you leave New York by the weekend, you should arrive just as the show does.”

  “Um, okay …” I stood up and paced around his small office. “I mean, I guess I don’t actually have much of a choice here.”

  I had already tried going to Sheldon Prep to try to liquidate my assets — since my dad had prepaid, I thought maybe I could get that money back, live on it, and go to public school to finish high school. But the headmistress said no way. In fact, even though I was enrolled and paid, she said she’d need a letter from either my mom or a foster parent before I could even come back. What a sweetheart.

  And getting a job and finding my own place in the city was not gonna happen. I personally knew about ten adults who lived around my neighborhood who were desperately looking for work. A seventeen-year-old with absolutely no experience and no useful skills didn’t have the slightest chance. And the rent on my dad’s apartment, though it was reasonable for the area, was $1950. A month. I had maybe twenty-seven dollars to my name, and no way to get any more. The landlord gave me a few days’ grace. Which was actually pretty nice of him.

  So it really didn’t matter whether I wanted to leave or that I thought chasing after some circus sounded like the stupidest thing in the world to do. This slip of paper in my hand was it. All I had.

  “It’s not so bad,” I heard Max saying. “I mean, I’m sure once you find your mother, it will all be fine.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. But I was lying. I walked out of Max’s office in a daze.

  How had this happened? Gavin wasn’t much of a planner, but this was ridiculous. Had he expected my mom to just magically appear to take care of me if he ever couldn’t? It probably never even occurred to him that he wouldn’t always be there. Or that without enough money to pay even one month of rent, I was going to be evicted and penniless pretty fast. But thinking about my dad being gone was making it hard to breathe, and so I stopped. I was not ready. Not yet. Besides, I had too much to deal with to let myself fall apart.

  I was also more than a little bit afraid that when I let myself think about this whole thing too much, I was not only going to miss my dad, but be really ticked off at him for leaving me with nothing. I had always known that Gavin was not big on the boring, necessary life stuff. I had been the one to pay the electric bill since I was thirteen — well, arrange the payment with a check from Gavin’s checkbook. We’d had our power cut off so many times that I had decided to take over. He had left me so much worse than in the dark this time.

  But the Greyhound bus was because of her.

  I hate my mom. I mean, people say that, but I actually mean it. Like all the time, not just in a moment of anger for being grounded or something. I actually hate her. She left me and my dad, and she never looked back. And if I didn’t miss Gavin so much, and if I didn’t feel like I was going to rip in half every time I started to think about him, maybe I’d hate him, too, for making me come to find her, leaving me with no other way to actually survive.

  I did think, for one second before getting on that first bus, about giving up. Just not caring, not bothering to find my mom, just sitting down in the street and being done.

  But just for one second. For some stupid reason, I guess I actually cared about my miserable, ridiculous life.

  The bus was very hot, but there were only about four other passengers, and nothing to look at out the window. My eyes started to burn, and it hurt to swallow. I tried to think of stuff I could remember without crying. I would not — would not — think about the last week, so I went back further. Halloween — last Halloween — seemed like a good place to start. That was my dad’s favorite holiday, and mine, too, I guess.

  I was getting ready to go out. Eli was taking me to see a Dead Milkmen cover band. I was really excited about my costume; I was turning myself into the gargoyle above the apartments near the library branch building on 10th. I was painting my face gray and attaching prosthetic elf ears while my dad blasted Ministry’s “Everyday Is Halloween” on his big speakers. He was in the kitchen making potato pancakes, which for some reason he made every Halloween. The apartment was loud and smelled like food. I grinned into the mirror and my gray face grinned back.

  “Lex!” I heard Gavin yell from the kitchen. “Come taste the batter!”

  I gathered up the sheet that I was still fashioning into my costume and mummy-shuffled to the kitchen. “Coming!” I yelled, tasting some of the face paint I had applied too liberally around my mouth.

  I spit into the kitchen sink as soon as I
got there.

  “Aw, Lex, gross — you haven’t even tasted them yet!”

  After some more spitting I accepted the glass of water Dad held out to me. “I’m gonna need some help spray-painting my body,” I told him.

  “As long as you mean the sheet covering your body, I’m in. Otherwise, we are going to have to go get Mrs. Murchison from downstairs.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you mean to say that you’d let me go out in nothing but body paint?”

  Gavin laughed. “If I thought there was any chance you’d ever do that, maybe I’d worry about trying to prevent it.”

  I flounced inelegantly onto a bar stool. “I hate being so predictable! I should make you worry — and have gray hair! It’s like my job as your child, and I just can’t help but feel I’m failing you.”

  He added some pepper to his batter and stirred. “My mother did promise me, many times, that when I had a child of my own, I’d have to deal with even worse behavior than mine, and then I’d see … But” — he looked at me for a moment — “nah, nope, never had to worry with you. My mother was so totally wrong!” Gavin triumphantly spooned up some pancake batter and zoomed the spoon toward my mouth.

  “Ew, Dad, how many times do I have to tell you I hate uncooked batter?” I swallowed the raw potato liquid, sputtering and resisting the urge to wipe my mouth (in honor of my makeup).

  “Sorry, Lex, I forgot. See, again, you are so proper. You won’t eat the cookies until they are properly baked at the proper temperature …”