Matt & Zoe - Charles Sheehan-Miles Page 0,24

know—the teachers union met this afternoon. The vote was near unanimous to strike.”

I close my eyes. “Do they even care how this is going to disrupt people’s lives?”

I can almost hear his sigh. “Zoe…”

I exhale. “I know. I get that there are reasons. But … you can’t just disappear, Matt. You can’t. She’s lost everyone she depends on. We don’t have any other relatives, and she barely knows me, and you’re the only adult she even knows. You can’t just disappear.”

There’s a long silence. Then he says, “I’ll do the best I can, all right?”

I guess that’s the best I can expect.

Chapter Six

Red (Matt)

Red Jackson wasn’t called Red because of his hair. It was because of his temper. He’d always had a bad reputation as a scrappy little bastard, a dirty fighter, a not so smart guy with a chip on his shoulder. I encountered him for the first time when his family joined the Ringling Brothers Circus when I was twelve. Red was about two years older than me, and at that age two years makes a big difference in size. He had the frame and muscular power of someone already well into puberty, who regularly worked out on top of that. I wasn’t in bad shape… after all, my parents had me up on the rigging by the time I was 10. I was still considerably smaller than he was.

We were on the northern tour that fall—New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia—when Red’s father, a cat handler, joined the circus. If Red ever had a mother around, I never heard anything about her. That Saturday afternoon, I was hiding out. I’d spent the morning doing my chores, laying out the spare ropes, arranging the costumes and laundering them, and cleaning up the trailer. It was almost one in the afternoon when I finished that, and the adults were all practicing for that night’s show. I made myself scarce.

No matter where we were, we always tried to arrange the trailers and equipment in the same way. It made for a much quicker and better organized set-up and teardown. Most of the time, when I wanted to hide, I picked a spot behind the funhouse—it was invariably a dead spot on the lot, surrounded by generators, trailers and ticket booths.

That particular day, I couldn’t take my usual spot. I’m not sure where we were. Allentown? Pittsburgh? Somewhere in Pennsylvania anyway. The lot shape was unusual, long and narrow and curved, so we were configured very differently than normal. I found a spot not far from the ticket booths where I settled in, sorting through my Yu-gi-oh cards.

The cards were precious to me. I didn’t get much of an allowance, though every once in a while Papa would give me spare change. Whenever possible, I would pick up extra work on the lot. Shoveling manure, cleaning out trailers, whatever, it didn’t matter to me. I didn’t get paid anywhere close to minimum wage for those jobs, but over time I’d used that occasional pocket change to amass a sizeable collection of cards, including some rare collectible ones.

Those days were gravel and dust, the heat and humidity of Indian summer, the longing I felt whenever I saw Carlina Herne, the daughter of one of the animal trainers. She was thirteen and had long flowing locks of black hair that hung well below her shoulders. Her eyes were sapphire, her lips curvaceous and inviting.

Or I suppose they were inviting to somebody. Not to me. She was a year older than I was, but she was so far out of reach she might as well have been the daughter of the President.

That didn’t stop me from thinking about her constantly, watching her whenever I could, fantasizing that one day, she would realize that I wasn’t just a kid… I was a flyer; one day I’d be the star of the circus just like Papa. As it was, the only words she’d ever spoken to me were, “Get out of my way, runt.”

They weren’t kind words, but they’d been said in her rich, lilting voice. I treasured them.

The first sign that something had gone awry that day was when a stranger appeared, towering over me. I looked up, assessed the situation, then stood. In front of me was a kid a couple years older than me, with powerful shoulders and upper arms. His expression wasn’t friendly, but it wasn’t hostile either. Looking back, I still think it’s possible Red set out that day to make a