Matt & Zoe - Charles Sheehan-Miles Page 0,27

in the seat next to me, a concerned look on her face.

“Are you okay?” she asked. Up until that point in our lives, I don’t think she had ever spoken more than a dozen words to me. Winter quarters was always a little different than being on the road. Here, we were amongst strangers. We were surrounded by hundreds of kids at the school who looked down on us, harassed and bullied us, and treated us as if we were aliens. Even though Carlina and I had little or no contact when the circus was on tour, here we shared a common bond none of the other students had.

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m just tired.”

“And stiff. I saw the way you walked out of the house. You look like somebody beat you up.”

I tried to hide my reaction. After all, it was only a few months before that Red beat me up in front of her. “My dad is putting me in the ring next season. Training.” I shrugged.

Her eyes widened a little. “You’re going to fly?”

I noded. I was trying to keep my cool, stay collected, and look a little blasé about it. Inside, my heart was beating so hard I could feel the pulse in my ears. “It’s not a big deal.”

“You can say that, your parents are the stars of the show. It looks like a pretty big deal to me.”

I was reminded then that Carlina’s father had once been one of the stars himself—an experienced trick rider who performed dramatic stunts on horseback in the ring. I didn’t know when it happened, but he’d lost his right leg in some kind of an accident. At least I assumed it was an accident. He no longer rode, but he did help take care of the horses and train many of the riders.

“It’s—it’s—it’s just a job. Everybody makes a big deal about flying. Nobody even asked me if I want to fly.”

“Do you?” She tilted her head and studied me after she asked the question.

My breath caught in my throat, and I felt like I was going to fall into the pool of her dark brown, almost black eyes. I shrug. “I don’t know.”

The bus came to a stop. I felt a pinch in my chest at the knowledge that we were going inside and she would never sit with me again.

That afternoon, when she climbed on the bus, her eyes met mine and she smiled. Then she sat down next to me.

###

I never asked her about Red. Were they… Boyfriend and girlfriend? He was a lot older than me, and they had spent much of the fall around each other. I didn’t want to know—because part of me couldn’t forget my humiliation when I met Red—knowing that she had seen what happened, and went off with him anyway.

It’s hard for me to describe the depth of the crush I had for Carlina. For three years, I’d watched her as we toured with the circus all over the country. She was the most graceful thing I had ever seen… Always clean and perfectly dressed, even as the rest of us stank of sweat and unwashed clothes. She was a crowd favorite—riding into the ring on her white horse with her hair flowing back fast as the wind. I knew she’d never have anything to do with me—she was a year older after all. At that age a year makes a big difference. Plus, she was incredibly beautiful—luscious hair, big cornflower eyes, perfect skin.

We didn’t have any classes together that winter, but we did have the same lunch. The circus kids tended to be left on their own—we weren’t in school for the entire year, and the other kids called us—at the most charitable—freaks. So Carlina and I fell into the habit of eating together every day. I always brought a bag lunch – leftovers of whatever Mamma had made the night before. Sometimes it would be lasagna or spaghetti in a thermos. Sometimes it would be sandwiches or leftover stew. Carlina got the school lunch every day. It usually looked awful, and I never understood why she did it, until our third week eating together, when I realized that she was on the free lunch program.

Tactful as always, I had said, “let me see that.” I was pointing at her lunch card.

She flushed red, and stuffed it away in her pocket. “No.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s just a lunch card.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me, except to wonder why the circus