This new piece of knowledge just made me deeply sad for all of us. I didn’t know how to feel vengeful or angry the way that Shiny did. I could only grasp the aftereffect—that she was hurt and I was hurt. Maybe everyone was.
Shiny scowled, shaking her head. “He was hateful back then and he’s hateful now.” She turned away and began sweeping the porch with a vengeance.
I sat on the steps and leaned my elbows on my knees while Shiny muddled around with the broom, pushing the dust over the edge and into the flowerbed.
“Fine,” I said, looking down into the yard. For just a second, I could see that clear, perfect picture in my head again—the neat, well-tended flowerbeds and the candy-pink peonies. It hurt the spot between my eyes. “Fine, we don’t have to ask her. But you have got to quit acting like she’s some kind of horror. She’s not the one who made you get stuck out here in the Willows, with everyone acting like you’re the devil.”
Shiny stared out at the weedy yard. “No, I know that. When I stop and think, I do know that. It’s just easier, sometimes, pointing it at her, or at anyone. Because when it’s the reckoning, then it’s something too big to point fingers toward at all. Then it’s no one’s fault.”
But the words made something tighten in my chest— a tangled knot of guilt—telling me that it might be mine.
The blank sheet seemed to flap and ripple in my head, waiting for a picture to come clear. I nodded, but I was remembering the day I found the stone tomato, there on the vine like a secret, tucked in with all the regular ones. That one round, perfect stone suddenly seemed like the center of my whole life, powerful enough to ruin everything.
* * *
In town, all of Main Street was alight, blazing with colored streamers and carnival lights. It seemed like pretty much everyone in Hoax County was wandering through the tents and the arcade games, talking and laughing. Down at the end of the street, the rides were all lit up, turning like giant steel pinwheels. Lights raced and flashed. The metal cages rocked, and the screams tumbled down to us from a long way off.
Rae was sitting up on one of the sawhorses by the curb, nearly finished with a corndog on a wooden stick. When she saw us coming, she jumped down and slipped her arm through Shiny’s.
“You ready to make a dollar?” she said, pointing across the street to where a little group of girls was lounging on a picnic bench, looking bored and glossy. “I see some chickens waiting to pay good money for love charms.”
I squinted at them, trying to see what Rae saw. “But they look so clean and normal. Are you sure they’re the kind of folks who want what you’re selling?”
“Clementine,” Rae said, dropping her empty corndog stick into one of the metal trash barrels. “I’m going to let you in on a secret. Around here, you don’t have to look too far to find someone willing to pay for something crooked. Everybody you meet is talking out both sides of their mouths.”
Shiny studied the girls and shook her head. “You go if you want, but I have no desire to make small talk with Laurie Tuttle and her friends. And don’t you even tell me to be nice.”
Rae dug primly in her bag and pulled out a grape sucker. “Don’t take that tone with me, Shiny Blackwood. I wasn’t thinking any such.”
“Well, sorry—I just figured this was the part where you explain to me how everyone in this shitty little town is not so bad, how if I give her a chance, Laurie is just a sad girl with a big nose and an overbearing mother, and how Mike Faraday has some kind of crush on me!”
Rae surveyed Shiny with her eyebrows up and the sucker sticking out of the corner of her mouth. “Well, he does. But so what? Him liking you’s got nothing to do with whether or not he’s a bag of bullshit.”
Shiny just gave Rae a long, sulky look, but when she turned away, I saw that she was smiling.
Rae took Shiny’s arm again and tugged her toward Main Street. “Fine, we’ll peddle sin some other time. But when you finish up those cards for me and we get a real moneymaking scheme going, that’s the day you start being nice to people. A person cannot run a business if they’re chasing off every second customer because they don’t like someone’s face.”
“It’s not the faces,” Shiny said, “so much as just the generalized ugliness.”
The three of us made our way along the sidewalk. People were gathering all along the street, and Rae said it was because they were waiting for the parade to start.
We stood on the corner, watching the floats as they came through, each one preceded by a pair of little kids carrying vinyl banners printed with the name of the association or club responsible, the Campfire Girls following along behind the Junior Farmers and the baton twirlers and the 4-H float.
“Oh, no,” said Rae mildly, peering over her shoulder through the crowd. “Here comes trouble.”
Fisher was cutting his way through the crowd, followed by Mike Faraday and the Maddox brothers and a handful of other boys. He looked taller and more wonderful than I’d ever seen him, his hair curling against his neck, his eyes fixed on mine. His T-shirt showed a jagged row of thin pink lines on his bare arm where only two days ago, the skin had been laid open, and I could tell by the way the shirt pulled across his shoulders that the bandages were gone.
He cut straight through the crowd, coming up to me like it was nothing, reaching for my hand.
“Hi,” was all he said, and I said it back, trying not to smile too hard.
When I leaned my arm against his, his skin was slippery and smelled like salt. The easy way we leaned into each other made my heart skip. His hand was very warm, rough on the palm and the pads of his fingers.
The other boys all watched us from the safety of the curb, and I couldn’t tell if it was me they were eyeing, or if they were just making sure to stay well back from Shiny.
Fisher twined his fingers with mine and when he did, the feeling was the best thing in the world, like it was always better to be this tangled up, to always have a piece of each other.
“Do you mind if they come with us?” I said, glancing at Shiny.
She rolled her eyes grandly. “What do you think? Anyway, I’d be more concerned about whether or not they mind it, because if a single one of them calls me any kind of craft-this or crooked-that, I cannot guarantee their safety.”
It didn’t matter, though. The boys were already falling back, wandering away from us into the crowd, but Fisher stayed right where he was. He didn’t let go of my hand.
The carnival was in full swing, lit up all over the east side of town. We wandered through the booths and tents, looking at the chickens and the pigs. After we’d seen the fair, we went down to the midway and pitched pennies into rows of plastic cups to win cheap wire-handled sparklers and silk roses, which Shiny thought were the most hilarious things in the world, but she kept pitching for them anyway. She and Fisher were doing a good job of pretending not to notice each other.
He pitched at a velvet rabbit with a plastic hat sewed on until he won it, and I laughed. The idea that he should want anything with a stuffed bunny was ridiculous, but when the man from the carnival took it down from the hook under the awning, he handed it to me.
I tried to pass the bunny back to Fisher, but he shook his head. “It’s yours.”
“I don’t have anything for you, though.”
Fisher shrugged and looked away. “You’re not supposed to. It’s like a . . . thing.”
“Well, that seems kind of unfair.”
“Sexist, you mean,” Shiny said, slinging another penny into the cup, holding her bunch of roses like a beauty queen.
Rae didn’t pitch for anything, just stood by and sucked her sucker, watching the rest of us and reaching up from time to time to twist the ends of her hair.
The carnival was like a dream from being little, and I was happy to stay there forever, smelling fryer oil and sugar and farm animals, watching the crowds and the col
ored lights.
I would have spent another hour just standing next to Shiny while she pitched for roses, but Fisher took my hand, pulling me over to the midway rides, where he led me through a rusty little gate and paid the fare to ride the swings. The seats hung on thin, jingling chains, and the speakers played Neil Diamond songs with a crackling hiss that made me think of my mama and how she’d danced around the living room in the evening.
As the ride began and the swings rose up, Fisher leaned sideways in his seat, reaching through the forest of chains for me until I reached back and let my fingers get twisted up with his. The swings rose higher, so that my feet hung out over nothing. Every time the ride dipped, I wanted to tuck my legs up so they wouldn’t drag over the roofs of the tents, even though I knew we were much too high.
I leaned back in the seat, laughing at the way the wind caught in my hair, and nothing in the world was wrong, and everything was beautiful. It didn’t matter that the town was small or that Shiny was angry or Fisher sometimes acted like he wanted to destroy himself and couldn’t tell me why. Up here in the swings, there was only warm, heavy air and “Sweet Caroline” on the speakers and Fisher’s hand holding onto mine.
From off in the hills, a whole mess of black clouds was rolling in. The sky overhead was still clear, but if the wind didn’t change direction, we were in for a storm.
When the ride stopped, we climbed off and filed down the metal ramp with everyone else. I was all set to get back in line and do it again, but Fisher leaned toward me, smiling, kissing my cheek, my ear, the corner of my mouth.
His lips moved to mine and I smiled against his smile, because in the warmth of his kiss, I understood that this was my life. This was my home, and the years I’d missed were gone but not lost, because I knew the taste of the dough from the fryer cart, and my mama used to dance around the house with Neil Diamond on the radio, and nothing was ever really forgotten.
I put my arms around his neck and leaned into him, his body warm and solid. Since last night in the meadow, he seemed less guarded, more sure. He kissed me harder, lifting me off my feet, and wrapped his arms around my waist so tight our whole bodies pressed together, and we sank back into the shadows, against the empty raffle booth.
He put his mouth against my ear. “You know how I said the hollow was the only place I ever felt okay?”
I nodded into the curve of his neck, holding on so tight the tips of my fingers left pucker-marks in his shirt.
“This is better.”
And I laughed at that, even though nothing at all was funny. He smelled like all the things I had missed and wished for and wanted, and I turned my face and looked down because looking at him was almost too much to bear at once.
On the ground around us, there was a strange thing, like someone had dropped a box of glass Christmas ornaments at our feet, so that even the dirt seemed to flash and glitter.
I grabbed his hand and pointed. “Look.”
Lilies grew in huge bursts, pushing their way up through the weeds by the empty raffle booth, blooming in clusters around Fisher’s boots. They were white. And red. And gold-and-yellow striped and pink and orange. It was like watching a garden grow in fast-forward, leaves sprouting out and uncurling, turning darker as they grew, and flowers opened in huge splashes of color.
The sight was so strangely beautiful that at first, I didn’t understand. Then he spoke and my blood got cold.
“Oh God,” he said, and his voice was dark and awful, like opening a door and finding something rotten. Like the moment in the hollow just before the hell dogs came out of the trees.
I dropped his hand. The air was suddenly electric.
Fisher stood under the awning, shaking his head. “No.”
He said it hoarsely, again and again until the words all ran together in one noise, low in his throat. Around our feet, the lilies bloomed, bursting with huge clusters of flowers.
“Holy shit,” said a voice behind us, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
But it was only Shiny, coming up behind me with a paper cone of cotton candy, her arm through Rae’s. Shiny, who stood in the dirt at the edge of the midway, was gaping at me.
Fisher was still staring at the ground with a look of pure horror. Then he plunged away from me, stepping down hard on the flowers. The petals all shriveled and turned black, but they didn’t stop growing. Now they were transforming, turning to thorns and brambles and all kinds of poisonous blooming plants. They lay on the ground like disease, monkshood and foxgloves and nightshade. Strange, hungry kinds of plants I didn’t know, but they all looked sharp and toothy, more like animals than plants at all.
On the other side of the midway, people passed in bunches, laughing, eating fried dough and candy apples, holding rainbow paper hats. The fair moved in peaceful currents around us, so many people it seemed impossible they didn’t look over. All I could think was that in a second they’d look and see the toxic flowers, and then it wouldn’t matter whose name was Blackwood, Dalton, Fisher, or DeVore—we’d all burn.
Suddenly, I was cold. I knew that in a minute, someone would look, someone would glance over and see that the ground was sick with craft straight out of the hollow. They’d see what we were, and then we’d find out how kind the town was to the old families really. We would see exactly how much things had changed.
I was nearly frantic for something to save us, some way to hide, when the string of lights hanging over the midway burst and glass went raining down into the crowd. The four of us stood frozen in the shadows. I could feel the tight hum of some sort of craft that had nothing to do with Fisher, and I looked over in time to see Rae snap the wicker bag shut. On the ground at her feet a little speckled egg lay broken open. Something powdery and black had spilled out from the cracked shell and was smoking in the dirt. She looked back at me with wide, worried eyes, but didn’t say a thing.
Out in the midway, everyone had stopped and was staring around in the new darkness. People were muttering, stepping out of the way and looking up at the dangling wires, and I yanked the tarp off the raffle table and threw it down on the dying flowers.
They were still moving, squirming under the canvas. In a minute, they’d crawl out where everyone would see, only by then, they might not even look like plants at all anymore.
“Fisher,” I said. “Stop.”
He stood frozen with his shoulders squared, breathing hard as vines crept from under the edge of the tarp and crawled over his boots.
I stepped into the middle of the canvas, feeling it ripple and squirm under my feet. “Stop right now.”
His throat worked, like he was swallowing down the strange, unholy power that seeped out of him, clenching his hands and breathing in huge gasps, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. “I can’t. It’s too far gone.”
Shiny stared at the rumpled tarp. Her stick of cotton candy hung limp in her hand, pink sugar sticking like fur to the side of her leg. “Is he doing that? My God, Clementine. Make him stop!”
Rae was the one who moved, though. She darted across to Fisher like she was about to slap him. “Hey!” Her voice was so sharp and unlike her, it made the hair on my neck stand up.
He spun around to face her, but his eyes were flat and out of focus.
She stood between us, looking up at him. She was tiny and fierce and her hair stuck out in delicate twists around her head. “If you can’t get control of whatever bullshit is going on right now, then you climb in your redneck trash machine and get yourself down in the hollow where you belong!”
“No,” I said, pushing in front of her. “You can’t do that. You’re in no state to go down there now—it’d kill you. Look at me.”
When Fisher didn’t answer, I reached up and grabbed his chin. I could feel the power of his craft running right there under his skin. “Look at me. Yes, it’s bad, but you can fix it.”
He took a deep, shudd
ering breath. Then he took another. At the edges of the tarp, the flowers were dying back, turning into a little heap of soggy black rot. Into nothing.
They sank back into the ground, while he stood shivering and gasping.
After what felt like ages, Shiny let her shoulders slump and breathed out. “Holy shit.”
Fisher didn’t look at her. His voice when he spoke was hoarse. “How can that happen?”
But no one said anything. I wondered if the word on everyone’s tongue was reckoning, if we just didn’t even have to say it because it was what we all were thinking.
Then, from the midway behind us, there was an uneasy muttering, a scuffling of feet, and I looked around. The Maddox brothers and Tony Watts were all standing in the shadow of the raffle sign, staring like they’d been stricken dumb.
I started toward them with the little velvet rabbit held against my chest, already coaxing them not to say anything, not to make a scene, but all three of them stepped back from me like I was something diabolical.
Cody Maddox spit in the dirt at my feet. “Get yourself straight to hell,” he said, and the words sounded raw, like they were caught in his throat. “You and your devil cousin—get right back out to the Willows and stay there.”
The way he said it was so nasty I couldn’t think of anything to say back. I could barely breathe.
Shiny drew herself up and stepped in front of me. Her shoulders were hard, and I could already feel her skin going hot and crackly. “Don’t you even talk to her like that.”
“No, Shiny,” I said in a small, shaky voice. “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not a big deal. He’s just scared.”
“Okay? I saw what you just did. You were the one trying to clean up the mess, and this one here—” She jerked her head at Fisher. “Well, I saw where it came from, too.”
Luke Maddox shook his head, slow and heavy. He never took his eyes off Fisher. “Listen to her, trying to blame it on you. Have you learnt your lesson now, running around with your Blackwood girlfriend? Maybe they’re good for a tumble, but this is what happens when you mess with fiends.”