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It wasn’t the light of dawn that woke him, neck aching from sleeping sitting up in the passenger seat, but the change in speed as they took a highway off ramp, slowing to a stop at a sign. Golden, dusty dawn, and he noticed stilled windmills as he wiped the sleep from his eyes. Aside from a sore neck, Roxas felt surprisingly okay. Calm, composed. Resigned to mad whims and shucking responsibility. After all, there was no turning back now, one eight hour drive across state lines behind them. Stifling a yawn, Roxas realized his breath was just short of horrendous.
“We pack any toothpaste?” He squinted at his dad leaned back in the driver’s seat, thumb at six o’clock and looking almost asleep. He nodded, pointed toward the rear of the trailer. On his way to the back, Roxas bumped the shifter into neutral with his hip. One stumbled apology later and he was spitting Colgate out the back window between the bunks, thankful that they were in the middle of nowhere. The lavatory, his dad said, was not for using unless you liked smelling your own shit.
“There’s coffee left if you want some, buddy.” The radio was on, his dad flipping through static and more static before settling on what sounded like someone singing through a tin can.
Settling back into his seat, managing to slosh coffee on himself only twice en route, Roxas sipped at his mug and eyed the horizon. Dawn had given way to sunrise, their accompanying landscape a whole lot of nothing. “We getting close?” His dad nodded, humming along to the radio, a song Roxas had never heard.
He’d hopped out of Naminé’s window at ten the night before, his fingers still smelling like girl despite having washed them at least five times, and hightailed it home. He didn’t think she came, or maybe he didn’t know how to finger her properly. Or maybe it was the pot, a couple celebratory bowls Hayner had provided for his going away party, because he couldn’t get a boner no matter how hard he thought about fucking her. It was supposed to be the night—he was leaving for three months, an entire summer of stolen foreplay—the condom was already in his pocket, and it was supposed to be hot and exciting, not a bunch of flushed awkwardness and his growing nausea about ever having to put his face in there. In the end he watched in a stoned daze as she got herself off. It was lame, mostly, and she’d pressed her fingers to his lips afterward. The least he could do was suck the taste from her skin, creamy ivory acrylics toying with the backs of his teeth while she giggled below him.
“I miss you already,” she’d said into his neck, and he smelled her everywhere.
“I’ll call when I can,” he’d said, kissing her cheeks, her tits, the jut of her hips. As he dashed over damp lawns, cutting through someone’s garden and almost decapitating himself on a clothesline, he wondered if Naminé even liked him at all. He was shitty at knowing what girls were thinking, and just because she was his girlfriend didn’t make her an exception. It was probably worse with her, actually—her little code talk with her friends, and the way her eyes were always laughing at something just beyond his comprehension. Naminé. His girlfriend. The label made him feel faintly aggravated, and he’d begun to worry that he was an asshole.
“There she is,” his dad said, low whistle trilling as spiraling colors peaked in the distance.
“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,” Roxas muttered under his breath, peppermint spires jutting into the early morning sky. The big top was already up, billowing lightly as smaller colorful tents blossomed around it, a pop-up storybook of garish colors and throbbing lights. “Can I just say again how much this truly sucks, dad?”
His dad beamed, tipping his head toward the steadily approaching carnival encampment. “Trust me on this one, kiddo. It’s one summer. Not gunna kill you. Get to see a little of the world before you get tied down with all that grown up stuff.”
“Grown up stuff like what?” Roxas asked, rolling his eyes at the twentieth iteration of this exact same conversation. “Oh, like jobs? Oh, like your job? And college, too, huh? God, all that pointless grown up stuff. I’ll make sure to tell that to the law firm I was supposed to intern at.” Before Roxas could bite back the remark, he said, “What would mom think?”
His dad just shook his head, eyes hardening a little. Roxas had already long decided there was no use in being a child about it, but he didn’t have to agree with the idiocy of the whole thing. He’d just humor his dad for one last summer before he went away to college. Downing the rest of his coffee, Roxas watched the carnival rise.
Walking around was eerily surreal, devoid of the spark and tumult of a carnival gone live, swamped with families and over-eager children all dropped jaw excitement. It was quiet, everything covered in a fine layer of dust that made the brightly colored rides and booths look ancient; candy-coated behemoths that loomed just out of sight in Roxas’ memory. The vomit of a small child, a rainbow of refuse. The sight made his stomach twist. He sold his summer for this? For a ragtag bunch of hippies and their love children? He was supposed to be padding his college application, for fuck’s sake, not playing chaperone to his father’s middle age crisis. As if his father could hear what he was thinking, he ruffled Roxas’ hair, beaming. Roxas almost hated him.
As they neared the center of the encampment, Roxas felt the atmosphere shift, like a switch had suddenly been flipped. Bags of stuffed toys were laying everywhere, people laughing and talking and dancing, an easy joy pushing against Roxas in waves. The entrance to the big top was dotted with rousties and talent carrying paper plates piled with food, hyping for the morning gates. Roxas couldn’t help but notice that everyone looked like they’d stepped out of a catalogue a decade old, clothes dated and haphazard. A group of kids holding dominion over a table worked wonders for his mounting alienation. He would’ve laughed at home, huddled with Hayner and Pence and made fun of the poor, unfortunate freaks dressed like backwoods social rejects. Displaced, he felt like an insect, hands curled inside the pockets of his nice jeans, wishing he could pull his hood up and disappear.
One of the boys sitting on the table, a redhead in a leather jacket, said something that made every kid at the table turn to look at Roxas, a peal of laughter breaking out amongst them. There was a cassette player on the table text to the redhead, sleazy guitar riffs blaring from the shitty speakers. Roxas gave his best unimpressed face and turned in the opposite direction. His dad was standing in a circle of people patting him on the back, hugging him. It was strange to think Roxas had seen most of these people before. He’d been so young then…
“Hey, newbie.” The voice sounded like it belonged to someone stupid.
Roxas turned and tried his very best not to scowl or cuss the kid out. “Hey, what’s up.”
“Holy shit,” the blonde boy exclaimed, peering into his face with disbelief. There was a piece of chicken in the kid’s hand, his face streaked with grease and dirt. “Axel was right. You really are Roxas.”
“Sorry, I don’t—”
“Remember me, man?! It’s me! Tidus! We took baths together!”
Laughter exploded at the table of kids. The redhead was expressionless, staring at Roxas. “S-sorry, I don’t really remember much. I was pretty young.” Tidus, looking put out, invited him to join them, but Roxas declined, thinking that if he started walking now, he might make it back home by next week.
There were differing stories on where he was born, this state or another, and his birth certificate had yet to see the light of day. As far as Roxas knew, it had been a quick ordeal, minimal recovery, and then they were back on the road, his crib secured to a corner in his parent’s trailer as they went on to the next city, the next show. At the time, it was the most natural thing in the world. Of course he lived at the circus. All the kids he knew were born in the carnival, and for a long time afterward he’d have to explain that no, they’d didn’t hole up in one of the rides, and no, clowns didn’t deliver him. How could he have known then, sneaking behind booths with the lion boy to steal handfuls of cotton candy straight from the machine, how could he have known that another world existed? Another world where the circus was a place you went sometimes, or a place to run away to. You didn’t live at the circus, and you certainly weren’t born there.
Except he was.
He would watch his parents sometimes, peeking behind the canvas curtains as his mom pirouetted around the stage, rigid ruffled skirt turning glittering circles around her as his dad climbed out of the tank of water, soaking wet and looping the length of rope used to restrain him in his hands, turning to give Roxas a wink before his mother pulled the coverlet from the tank, revealing his dad triumphant and smiling. It was magic. For a long time Roxas didn’t know how to explain what his parents did. His mom was a ballerina, his dad… well, his dad was a swimmer. Or he was a hostage swimmer. His mom was a hostage swimmer ballerina sometimes, too. Later, when he was old enough to understand, the lion boy, who was six, told him his parents were escapologists, escape artists. Excape-lologists, because he was four years old and spoke in whispers all the time, and what the hell four year old can pronounce a world like escapologist. His mom told him that if he wanted to watch the show, he needed to be quiet, and when you live at the carnival, there’s always a show going on somewhere. So Roxas spoke in whispers, followed the lion boy and the other kids around. They were lawless children in a forever moving city of lawless men. How could he have known there was something else? Somewhere else?
And then, when Roxas was five, his family left the carnival.
“You know,” Roxas said conversationally, stripping off his pajama bottoms, “in the real world people put their kids in different classes if the teacher looks like that.”
“Roxas, this is the real world.” His father found him, crossed arms and staring at the ceiling, in his bunk when he should’ve been sitting center ring under the big top with the rest of the carny kids.
“No, dad. It’s the—“
“You were so concerned with falling behind with your application; this is the perfect opportunity for you to pad it a little.”
“Uh,” Roxas said, face blank, “I’m pretty sure an English class in the middle of a fucking circus is going to look great at Dartmouth.”
“You watch your mouth, kiddo,” his dad warned, finger level with Roxas’ face.
Roxas thought about saying something stupid back, and he would’ve had his dad not looked so beaten. Exhausted. “Sorry,” he grumbled, shoving on a hoodie and making his way out of the trailer. It was a nice change, almost. He’d never had the opportunity to fight with his father before.
Roxas walked down the midway, hands in his pockets, and imagined a sea of people. Last night had been ridiculous, hundreds of people coming from nowhere to the middle of a field. He’d declined a spot in his dad’s show, content to help lower the curtains and hand out flyers for the performance times. A carny girl a little older than Roxas took on the ballerina role, wide eyes and a delicate red mouth in an O of surprise, flouncing around the makeshift stage in a dress hardly as beautiful as his mother’s, her costume flashing under the spotlight. He thought he’d be sick when he saw it, an intense flare of rage at his father flaming up in his stomach, but he’d grit his teeth and it passed. The girl was nice, anyway. An acrobat who, when she saw Roxas the first time, flipped over and swept him into a hug, pulling out an enormous lollipop for him.
“Remember me?!”
No. Roxas didn’t remember anyone.
Pulling aside a flap at a back entrance to the towering center tent, Roxas felt his stomach sink immediately. This was the group of kids sitting on that picnic table yesterday, the redheaded boy in the same embarrassingly tacky leather jacket hunched over, wrists balanced on his knees, sitting on the edge of the center ring, lounging as if he had a cigarette in hand. Roxas scowled and hurried over, taking a seat.
“Nice of you to join us, Roxas.” The man standing in the center of the ring was covered in tattoos—face a mass of swirling black lines, his entire torso the home of an enormous colorful tree branching upward onto his shoulders, his arms. Roxas wondered if his dick was tattooed, too. “As you all know, I am Morgrago the Tattooed Man, but you can all call me Damien. And yes, Axel, before you ask: I have a degree in English literature from Northwestern, and I am as fully qualified to teach you guys this year as I was last year. And the year before that.” Axel, the redheaded boy, was smirking, saying things Roxas couldn’t hear to the people around him, laughing easily. Looking up, the boy caught Roxas’ eye and winked. Roxas, abruptly shocked, looked away quickly.
“This year we’re going to be focusing on the literature of revolt, protest literature. We going to be reading books about people shunned by society, about people who were angry, people who were mad. We’re going to read about revolutionaries and courage and people who refused to be oppressed.” A chorus of “hell yeah!” rang out over the kids, several of the boys, including the redhead, lifting up fists and nodding. Roxas shrunk further into his hoodie. What a bunch of fucking freaks.
Since they couldn’t be expected to go out to a bookstore and buy books, they read aloud from Damien’s personal copies. By the second page, Roxas was tuned out, thinking about his friends at home. Hayner throwing parties on his parents’ boat, Naminé laying out by her pool--golden, supple skin flecked with light, inviting him. Except he didn’t know why hanging out with Hayner on his boat sounded more promising than swimming with his girlfriend.
“So pair up and discuss, and tomorrow we’ll talk about what counts as an acceptable form of protest. For example, hate crimes are not valid forms of protest, kids. They’re valid forms of bullshit. Music, film, art—these are all mediums you should be exploring. Alright? Class adjourned.”
Roxas watched as kids paired together, and he got the distinct feeling he missed something. They had a project? Fuck. He hated group projects. Running his fingers through the dirt around the ring, he tried to think of nothing. Of course people would pair up with people they were friends with. Tidus, the one person whose name he actually knew, was already chattering away with another boy. Maybe if he just left…
“Hey.” The redheaded boy was in front of him, holding a hand out to help Roxas to his feet.
“Hey,” Roxas said, taking the hand and feeling himself being pulled up. Axel’s hand was bony, warm.
“You’re my partner,” Axel said, an almost challenge in his eyes.
“Uh, sure,” Roxas said. They made their way out of the tent, Axel pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
“You smoke?”
Pot. “Nah.”
“So I guess you don’t remember me,” Axel said, exhaling toward the sky.
Roxas opened his mouth to say no, he didn’t, sorry, but Axel grinned quickly at something another kid shouted to him, and Roxas sucked in a breath, a soft “oh” falling from his mouth. He did remember Axel. Axel, red mane of hair like a… “Lion boy,” Roxas said, surprised he hadn’t seen how obvious it was earlier.
“Yep, that’s me.” Axel looked entirely too pleased with himself, hopping on what Roxas took to be the kids’ picnic table, old cassette player still sitting there. Axel jabbed a finger at the play button, the same sleazy guitar riff bleeding over the tinny speakers.
“So you, like, tame lions now?” The singer shouted incomprehensible words over the guitars in a raspy squawk.
“Yeah,” Axel said, shrugging. “Beats being a roustie.”
“No, no,” Roxas said. “I mean, that sounds cool.” Awkward.
“You like AC/DC?” Axel stubbed his cigarette out on the surface of the table.
“What?”
“AC/DC?”
“Um… what?”
Axel turned to look Roxas in the face. “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Reaching over to turn up the stereo, Axel explained, “AC/DC, only the greatest rock band in the history of ever. You’ve never heard of them?”
“I don’t really listen to music.”
Axel’s mouth dropped open a little. “You don’t listen to—oh my god, Roxas. Where did they keep you these last twelve years? In a cave?”
“I just—,” Roxas floundered. He listened to the radio; did that count?
“No worries,” Axel said, pulling up a picnic basket full of cassette tapes and patting it. “I’ve got you covered. And I have the perfect song for this assignment.” The perfect song, singular, turned into a sprawling five hour intensive music lesson where Axel found a whole catalogue of songs, plural, “perfect for this assignment.” By the time they broke for lunch, Roxas’ ears were ringing, the chorus of four different songs battling for dominance in his head.
His own mother never made food, and he got the plastic eggs and rubber bacon from the food tent with everyone, chewing toast that scraped the top of his mouth, stabbing at pieces of tough meat that took him a five year old’s eternity to chew. He preferred having lunch with the lion boy whose lion mother made the crunchy corndogs and pasta from a box. Their “house” was the color of the sea, smelled fuzzy and orange like Fira’s cage. Roxas didn’t like any place better, not even his own bed that smelled like chlorine and the pits of cherries. Feet swinging in his wicker chair, drinking whole milk that left a liquid half-circle Axel kept wiping off his mouth, Roxas wondered if everyone else was coming today, too. When everyone came, they got caught faster, and he always got less of everything. When it was just him, Axel got a lot of cotton candy, his arm a fluffy, sticky mass of pink and blue spun sugar that they ate behind the rollercoaster, dodging the change that fell from people’s pockets. When it was just him, they never got caught.
He asked in his whisper voice if they could get more cotton candy today, but Axel said the machine was broke; someone dropped a stuffed monkey in it. Roxas pouted, set his corndog on the table and crossed his arms. When the funny faces Axel was making didn’t work, he said they could get funnel cakes if he wanted, with strawberries if Roxas did the asking. His eyes rounded and he batted his eyelashes, asking Roxas to copy him. Just like an angel, he said, and he rubbed the apples of Roxas’ cheeks.
He sat on Axel’s shoulders, the lion boy wincing as Roxas pulled on his hair to keep himself steady, tall enough now to look over the counter, two quarters begged from the lion dad clutched in his sweaty palm. The lion dad smelled like bloody steak and the inside of a lion’s mouth since he always had his head in there and that’s what Roxas thought it smelled like, but Roxas did the angel face and the lion dad pulled two quarters out of his ears. Roxas knew funnel cake costed way more, at least three whole dollars, but the lady with the bow was nice, piling extra strawberries on their cakes after he batted his eyelashes like Axel showed him.
They sat on the broken Wave Swinger behind the big top, pulling apart the funnel cakes with their fingers, Axel dusting the powdered sugar from around Roxas’ mouth. When they finished, after Axel made him wipe his hands off on his shirt, Axel pushed him on a swing in the sea of suspended chairs, telling him about the little people that came out at midnight, how they lived in that one minute for the length of an entire day after the carnival had gone to bed. Roxas felt thirsty and breathless, small hands gripping the rusting chains as he went higher, higher, almost to the sun. When he thought he might never come back down, he yelped softly and Axel caught the swing as he fell back to earth, steadying him.
“I found treasure,” Axel said into his ear, lifting him off the swinging chair. “Wanna see?”
The treasure was hidden behind the talent trailers, past the rigging supplies. Plain, dusty, dark green siding, and stuffed to the ceiling with carnival prizes. Stuffed animals bigger than Roxas—pandas, giraffes, dragons—and bags upon bags of small, furry piglets and flowers, strange half-animals that wore clothes all piled chaotically from wall to wall, the single swinging overhead bulb casting a halo of soft, golden light around them as Roxas bounced around with glee. Depositing Roxas onto an enormous stuffed bear, his eyes the size of saucers, Axel leaned close and wrapped his arms around him. He smelled like sugar, like warm cake batter and strawberries, and he whispered, “Never tell anyone, k? This is our secret treasure.”
Roxas nodded, the tips of Axel’s hair tickling his nose as the other boy squeezed him tight, rubbing their cheeks together and calling him his little brother.
The weeks flew by in a flurry of movement, set ups and blow downs and show after endless show, Roxas working game booths with screaming, stubborn children who insisted on having one more ball or one more dart or just one more go. There was pressure from management to rein people in, to shout and flash smiles and be winning, charming, irresistible salesmen. Of course you want to give me your money to play this game you aren’t going to win. Of course you can have another ball, it’ll just be three dollars, please. This was a business, albeit dressed up incognito as a swirling ice cream sundae of candy carefree decadence, but a business all the same. Quotas to fill, pockets to line, and as long as people were having fun, there was no cause for concern. Roxas had an incident with a guido in a wifebeater accusing him of rigging the milk bottle toss as he wrapped his thick, meathead hands around Roxas’ neck. Axel came to the rescue with the mallet used for the game he was operating—one of those Can You Make the Bell Ring ordeals that was impossible to win—but other than that, everything had been fine, strictly non-physical except for the celebratory pie to the face for bringing in over two hundred people to the balloon burst without awarding a single oversized stuffed dragon.
When Roxas really thought about it, though, there was just barely concealed hostility between the carnies and the townies or the city kids. It was often worse with the city kids; snide remarks tossed out like spare change, feeding the homeless. It embarrassed Roxas. Hadn’t he been the same way when he first stepped into their migrating city? Hadn’t he wanted to laugh with his friends at the oddities, the tragically unhip carny trash that would sell you your own shirt if you’d fall for it? Even Axel, who was easy conversation and ready for anything at any time, Roxas had thought was weird. He was still weird, wasn’t he? They all were. The lawless children of lawless men. Knowing this didn’t stop Roxas from wanting to smash in the faces of townies trying to make a thing out of the coin toss (“Fucking carny freak, why don’t you get a fucking real job?”). Axel told him the attitude was nothing more than the way of things. The turn of the carousel, of the Ferris wheel—all inevitable cycling of the traveling circus. It goes up, it comes down, a wheel of fortune and misfortune, and people just didn’t like carnies.
“You get used to it after a while,” Axel shrugged. “Not like it means anything, really. Just white noise. Bitter, white noise because we get to wake people up.” He waved a hand at the flashing, candy lights. “This is fun, this is alive. It’s magical, and they can’t stand it.”
Days started at the food tent, sucking down scalding coffee that tasted like dirt accompanied by toast that simultaneously tore up the roof of his mouth and gave him seriously bizarre déja vu. He sat with the carny kids now, most of them bleary eyed and hungover as they manned their picnic table while the sun climbed over the horizon. Axel would stumble toward them some time during the dregs of breakfast, stare quietly into a cup of dirt coffee until he resembled the living again, Roxas never quite getting over exactly how much Axel was not a morning person. After they were as close to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they’d get, there was class with Damien every morning at ten, a music lesson from Axel until lunch, and then working the rest of the day. On the rare occasions he didn’t feel like crawling to his trailer and sleeping for twelve hours before doing it all over again, he hung out with Axel and the carny kids.
They were a lascivious, snarling bunch that favored hard, dark liquor and flirtations with danger and each other, heaving themselves from one gondola to another on the stationary Ferris wheel in the middle of the night, howling at constellations like a pack of savages. They commandeered the menagerie after the blow down, long after the goats and kangaroos and ducks were brought back to their cages for the night, and made chairs from stacks of hay, swapping bottles and cigarettes and spit for hours. Tidus was with Selphie, or he was with Wakka. Sora was with Kairi, or he was with Riku. Nobody seemed particularly choosy as long as there was some form of whispered, inebriated kissing, the oft-maligned “rolling around in the hay” reckless teenagers were always being warned against. Roxas couldn’t help but notice that Axel didn’t join in with the pleasures of the flesh, smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds lazily up at the top of the tent while working his way through his share of the Makers. Roxas didn’t know if they didn’t do drugs on principal or if it was just because they didn’t have any, but when he pulled his emergency joint from under his bunk, only Axel cared to smoke it with him, the acrid, searing smoke raking up the inside of his throat before blowing the sky open.
Axel was paranoid as hell, kept looking around as if he expected to be caught stealing a car or robbing a bank, pupils blown wider than the full moon. Roxas never saw him without the leather jacket, ill-fitting and showing his thin wrists; bird’s bones all fragile paper skin and veined tracery. Being around Axel felt familiar, often unbearably so like the beginning of a word you can’t remember on the tip of your tongue, working your way down the alphabet until the right word comes, but it never does. Every night Roxas dreamed about a small angel blonde and a lion boy, constantly underfoot in an impossible candy world. Every morning Roxas couldn’t remember his dreams of memories lost to him.
They would go into town sometimes, picking up supplies or looking for some action. Roxas tagged along to make calls on payphones, flipping the carny kids off as he talked to Naminé and called her “baby” a lot (“Miss you, baby,” Axel said, smirking. “Can’t wait to see you, baby.”), called all his friends and left messages when they didn’t pick up. He wondered if he should miss everyone more, if he was a bad person for not feeling an empty ache at being away from them for this long, but it was more of a dull pulse every time he hung up the phone, his store of quarters steadily depleting. Maybe it was the other carny kids keeping him company, feeding him drinks and teaching him tricks like how to walk on his hands or how to get a townie to play a game they were on the fence about. How to win the unwinable games, how to score townie ass, how to do a back tuck—all these things keeping him from remembering he was supposed to be sad. If he noticed he was having too much fun, if he was beginning to smile, Roxas shut down, tuned out.
“You depressed or something?” Axel asked eventually, pulling up at Roxas’ cheeks before Roxas swatted his hands away, scowling.
“Didn’t know having a brain cell was a crime.” He might half-smile or laugh, but never with his teeth and never for long. He just wouldn’t.
“Smart people smile too, sunshine.”
“Call me sunshine again. I fucking dare you.”
Despite his unwillingness to show it, Roxas was having fun. He felt happy, relaxed. At night, after everyone had parted and gone to bed, he hated himself for it.
Two months deep into the summer and Roxas was studiously handing out ping pong balls people were throwing in floating bowls, aiming for the blue bowl in a sea of clears, reds, and yellows. The blue bowl got you the giant smiling star with rounded anime eyes. It hung in the center of the booth like a fluffy, limbless god. There had only been one close call, a ball bouncing in and out of bowls to land in the yellow bowl right next to the blue, but so far so good, and he was trading rude gestures with Axel in the plate toss booth across the midway when it happened.
A group of slinking hipsters, skinny dark denim and neon deep V-neck shirts, swaggered over to Axel’s booth, half of them wearing oversized sunglasses despite it being after dark, eyeing the clear plates distastefully before pulling out change and firing away. Axel, cross armed and terribly amused, watched the hipsters go through a couple rolls of quarters, jeers loud enough that Roxas could hear them thirty feet away over the din of the carnival. Axel, unconcerned, let them toss their coins until they were out. One of the hipsters apparently didn’t like Axel’s attitude, hurling the empty jar of quarters at the plates. There was a brilliant crash, glittering shards of glass thrown wide over Axel, a million trajectories of shattered plates sailing through the air. Axel shook off his jacket in an instant, leaping over the booth and landing a punch in the city kid’s laughing face before Roxas even had the clarity to hurry across the midway. Didn’t Axel know four against one were odds not in his favor?
In the five seconds it took Roxas to reach the destroyed plate toss booth, Axel was bloody on the floor, two city kids holding his arms while a third kicked him in the ribs, the kid who’d thrown the jar nursing a bloody mouth while spitting in Axel’s face.
“Carny trash,” one of the boys spat, kicking Axel hard. Roxas just stared. “Think you’re tough shit in that faggot jacket.” Another kick, and carnies were running toward them now, shouting. The city boy jabbed a thumb at the stereo Axel had playing classic rock. “You listen to that tired rock like you got a clue, but you’re a fucking freak like every fucking loser here.” A couple rousties with bats were tearing out from around the big top, carny girls crying over at the balloon toss while parents hurried their children away to a safe distance. Roxas breathed, thousands of candy lights bouncing off the broken glass and curving over his face. Axel watched him, bleeding. Roxas knew his eyes were telling him to say something, telling him to tell them off. Roxas just breathed and stared. “Bet you think AC/DC is the best band in the world, right? You’re such a fucking loser, dude. It’s called evolution. It’s called reality. Remember that when they have the clowns patching you up, fucking faggot hick.” A final kick to Axel’s ribs and the kids bolted, shoving Roxas hard in their wake, his palms landing on shards of glass as he fell.
Roxas watched as a couple rousties sat Axel up, other carnies chasing down the hipsters at a dead run, and handed him a bottle of Jack, insisting he drink to dull the pain. Axel’s mother, still in the tight white suit she used during shows, auburn hair a low sheen in the dark, dabbed at his face with gauze. They kept most of the medical supplies at the back of the big top for emergencies, animal malfunctions, and they’d been in the middle of a performance when the cry went up. “Hey, Rube!” People streamed around them, chaos and fear bleeding out as the big top emptied. Axel stared at Roxas the entire time.
Axel’s mom, her name lost to Roxas’ memory, picked the glass from his hands and wrapped them in gauze, made him take a few swallows of Jack and handed him a paper cone of cotton candy. There was a lecture Roxas couldn’t hear, Axel nodding and staring at the ground, before the crowd around them dispersed. It was nine o’clock on a Saturday night. The show must go on. Roxas couldn’t formulate a single word, couldn’t even find it within himself to get to his feet, the cotton candy in his hand untouched, eyes staring blankly.
“Do you even care? You care about anything at all?” Axel stared at him, eyes accusing, before he ripped the bottle of Jack from the ground and limped off into the night, both his and Axel’s booths already taken over by other carny kids. Tidus, now at the plate toss, shook his head at Roxas.
“Not cool, man. You just let them wail on him.”
“Fuck you,” Roxas snarled, scrambling to his feet. “You think I want to be here? You think I fucking care about any, any of you?” His throat was tight, coiling rage wound up and choking him, strangling hot, stinging tears from his eyes. “I hate this place. My mom hated this place.” Roxas stormed away, paper cone squashed in his hand, and left Tidus frowning after him. She had hated this place, had hid every article and memory of it from their Long Island home. If she knew what her husband had done, how he’d dragged Roxas back to this hellhole, she would’ve hated him, would’ve clawed at him, screaming. Roxas ran blindly, careening toward his dad’s tent. Throwing himself in the side entrance, his dad still dripping wet from his show, Roxas hurled the cotton candy at the ground.
“Why?” he screamed, shaking. “Why the fuck did you make me come here with these people? Do you hate me that much? Do you hate her?”
The smile fell from his dad’s face, taking in the sight of Roxas’ bandaged hands and streaked, reddened face. “Buddy, what—”
“Fuck you!” Roxas shouted, and his dad’s assistant, the acrobat girl with the wide smile, hurried from the small enclosure. “You tell me why the fuck we’re here when she hated the carnival.”
His dad mouthed wordlessly for a moment, struggling for speech. “Roxas, she didn’t hate the carnival.”
“You liar. She hid every single memory of it from sight. We don’t have anything from those years. That’s why I can’t fucking remember anyone or anything. She hated it, she—”
“No, Roxas,” his dad sighed, peeling off his soaking tuxedo, pulling the single pale yellow rose from his lapel buttonhole and laying it lovingly on the dressing table. “She loved this place. She loved it so much she couldn’t bear to have a reminder that she’d lost it all.”
“That’s—,” Roxas said, sinking to his knees. “That’s bullshit.” He said it without conviction, without the rage that was slowly draining out of him like he’d been punctured. A thick wave of guilt and nausea washed over him.
“We only left after she got sick,” his dad said, leaning forward in his seat, hand settling against Roxas’ face. “She was getting worse that year, the year you turned five. I needed something steady to help with her medicine, to get her a place that was easy; a stress-free, non-chaotic, structured life that was going to help keep her healthy.” His dad swallowed, slight bitterness in his voice. “You think I wanted to end up a stockbroker? You think I wanted to be like my old man? We were bohemians, Roxas. Your mother and I, we… this was our life. Our home. We loved this place very, very much.” His dad sat back, lowered his face to his hands. “You think I did this to disgrace her? I did this because I love her. She would have wanted you to have the joy she once had, the magic.”
Roxas stared at his hands for awhile before he got to his feet, leaving his dad still dripping in his chair, head in his hands. He wandered aimlessly, tracing half-remembered paths of dreams until he was behind the rollercoaster, dodging falling change. Axel wasn’t there, he wasn’t in the empty, broken rides or with the rousties playing poker. When he didn’t find Axel at his trailer, he was on his way to his own, to turn in and sleep the rest of this nightmare away, when his feet carried him past his trailer door. Down, past the row of gaudy trailers dressed up for talent, nodding politely at a bearded lady on her way to her tent, Roxas found himself picking a path across the rigging supplies, leaping over poles and stacked chairs. There, just at the edge of the encampment, was a plain, dusty trailer, dark green siding nearly blending in with the night.
When he opened the door, Axel was in the middle of drinking from the bottle of Jack, sitting atop a stuffed lion, and hardly glanced over. He coughed around the burn of the liquor before he tossed out a quick, “What d’you want?” Roxas decided against saying anything, just closed the door behind him and climbed onto the belly of a stuffed teddy bear, shiny black eyes staring up lifelessly. They sat while Axel drank and drank, a rhythmic swish and swipe that Roxas could’ve set a song to. He hummed under his breath, a melody Axel had played for him that morning, until the bottle was forgotten on the floor and Axel was staring at him.
“I never,” Roxas rasped before coughing, clearing his throat. “I never told anyone.” The words, it seemed, broke Axel. The boy crumpled where he sat, collapsing in upon himself. Roxas dashed over, threw an arm around Axel’s shoulder and listened to him breathe, drunk and messy and the exact kind of boy that Roxas felt the most unnerved around. His own charming downfall, a shuddering, sloppy mess of a boy that was all angles and laughter.
Roxas woke up around two in the morning nestled in a sea of unicorn plushies, the sound of Axel retching just outside the door to the trailer. Peeking out the doorway, he found Axel bent over, one hand steadying himself against the trailer, the other clutching his stomach as he emptied himself in steady, convulsing streams of vomit. He laughed when he was finished, dragging an arm across his mouth. “Sorry you had to see that.”
“What, your shining moment of glory? I like it. It makes you human.”
Axel grinned, that easy, teasing laughter rumbling in his chest. “Since there were doubts about it, right.” Roxas shrugged, pulling a noncommittal face. Axel was… different. Not weird in the same way other carny kids were weird, just… different. Better. Shaking his head, Axel started walking back toward the center of the circus. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
“Something” came in the form of pulling Tidus from a rousing game of strip Connect Four, Axel bribing the boy with a fourth of Jack to stop them at the top of the Ferris wheel for an hour. They were encamped at a city by the sea, a string of lights dotting the shore, the carnival sleeping beneath them. It wasn’t cold, but Roxas felt the offshore breeze in the hollows of his bones.
“Is it because you agree with them?” Axel smoked at the sky, forever turning his head up and away from Roxas, secondhand smoke floating up, kept away from Roxas’ lungs.
Roxas fixed Axel’s jaw with a glare. “Are you retarded?”
“What? It’s a valid question. You just… stood there.” Axel massaged a temple with his free hand, pulling from his third bottle of water. “I saw how you looked at us that first day. Like you were disgusted.” Axel shrugged, looking out to where the sea met the sky, a space of possibility, of hypotheticals. “I know why they do it. They’re trapped in jobs they hate in towns they can’t stand. They’re in prisons they make for themselves, but we’re free. It’s how they all think. I assumed you would hate us, too. I assumed you wouldn’t remember.” He looked quickly at Roxas before looking away again. “I’m glad I was wrong.”
“I though she hated the circus,” Roxas began, staring at the same indistinguishable space of uncertainty—where was the sky? the sea?—beyond the horizon. “There were blank pages in the middle of photo albums where the circus used to be. Whole pages torn from my baby book. Just… disappeared. They kept none of their costumes, none of the tanks.” Roxas smiled wryly, mouth twisting, and he plucked the Red from Axel’s hand, inhaling deeply. “I came home with a book on knots, you know, the kind you can get out of. She took one look at it and turned her back on me. Didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day, like I’d done something terrible. What did I know? I was ten. I could barely remember the carnival at all.” He snuck a glace at Axel, quiet and staring. “I’d forgotten so much already.”
“It’s… hard,” Roxas said, speech coming stilted. Hard wasn’t the right word, but it was close. It felt that way, felt impossible. “I thought she hated it here. I just found out today that she never really wanted to leave in the first place.” He laughed, a mirthless sound lost in the air. “You know what that’s like? Realizing the entire foundation of a belief is actually a lie? Your belief structure just—it falls apart. I can’t even understand. It feels so—so right to be here. I feel like I was supposed to be here all along.” He thought of his friends back home, of Naminé, and he felt years of cultivated patience, years of trying and tolerating, of forcing himself toward an imaginary, hypothetical place just out of reach. The space between the sea and the sky, some unseeable future out in the darkening distance, the big What If. Had he ever wanted any of it at all? Had he?
“When did she—” Axel trailed off, looking pointedly at Roxas.
“What?”
“Your mom. When she did she, y’know. Pass.”
“Oh,” Roxas said, shocked into speechlessness. “Oh, she’s not—not dead. She’s just—,” he paused. Had he said it aloud yet? The reality felt immovable against him, a suffocating burden lodged in his mouth. “She has schizophrenia? Uh, catatonic schizophrenia?” He didn’t know why it came out as a question, as if he were asking Axel—someone, somewhere—if it were true. “She’s in this assisted living place now. It got to the point where we couldn’t feed her because she wouldn’t chew. She just… sat there.” Axel’s arm was around him, rubbing warm circles into his back. His face was wet. Why was his face wet? “I just—I, y’know. It’s hard. It’s so hard.” The words caught in his throat as he tried to explain why he couldn’t be happy. It wasn’t fair if he was happy, if he could laugh. Because she couldn’t. “I figured it was the least I could do. Keep it in, because she’ll never laugh again. She’ll never feel anything again. If she couldn’t, then I wouldn’t either.”
“You think she wants that? You think she wants you to be like that?”
Roxas swallowed, rubbed his eyes. “No. I was just,” he floundered, grasping at words that didn’t fit. “I was angry. I’m still angry.”
“Carnival,” Axel said, tracing the world on the air. “Know what it means?” Roxas shook his head, eyes on Axel’s hands. “If you follow the word back, you find that it’s Latin. Caro and levare.” Axel turned and stared Roxas in the eyes. “To put away the meat. It was a religious celebration, right before Lent, the time when you weren’t allowed to eat any meat at all. Carnival was the last chance believers had to indulge. It’s where Mardi Gras comes from. To put away the meat.” Axel’s gaze slid toward Roxas’ cheek, and he raised a hand, stroking an even dragging touch against the curve of his face with the pad of his thumb. “To put away the flesh. It was the one time people could be free. Let loose, be alive. You’re supposed to have fun here.”
Axel studied him, fingers rubbing steady circles into his back as Roxas quieted. “I wondered if maybe you grew up into someone else. Two months ago you came in here and you wouldn’t smile at all. You walked around pissed off, like you were going to kill someone.” Axel’s voice lowered, dropping into a quiet half-whisper almost carried away entirely be the wind. “You were so different from the Roxas I remembered. You loved to laugh before. It’s all you would do, laugh.” Axel’s hand stilled on Roxas’ back, a calm fluttering building in his chest as Axel spoke. “My mom told me you were coming back, that it wasn’t forever. It was just a little while because your mom got sick. But you didn’t come back. I got older, we kept going city to city. We were in Europe for a couple years. I was sad for a long, long time.” Axel pulled Roxas closer and he felt all the breath leave his body. “When I heard you were coming for the summer I couldn’t sleep. I used to see you here, just turning behind a booth, just out of the corner of my eye.” Axel’s voice broke and he lowered his face to Roxas’ hair. “I never forgot you. I missed you so fucking much.”
It was like finding something you hadn’t even realized was missing, pulling it from a box dusty and leaking colors and smells, whole images springing to life as you take it into your hands and say, “Oh. There you are.” Axel was alive around him, breathing and sweet like warm cake batter dusted with powdered sugar. Axel, Axel, Axel, how could he forget?
Axel lifted his face, lint clinging to the ends of his eyelashes, and time coalesced around them. Oh. There you are. Axel moved with a gust of wind, and then his mouth was pressed against Roxas as the gondola swayed, an industrial cradle keeping 3/4 time with the faint crash of waves in the distance, a lazy aerial waltz. Axel’s tongue lapped at his mouth, hands running through his hair while he melted, melted into the night sky, counting which beat got one. When his lips parted, his hand tangling in the ends of Axel’s hair like it was drawn there, and Axel’s tongue dipped into his mouth, Roxas gasped and pulled away.
Axel froze, hand white knuckling on the edge of the gondola. “Fuck,” he whispered, pupils shot.
“I’m sorry,” Roxas rasped, licking Axel from his lips, his entire body screaming. “I have,” he swallowed thickly, “a girlfriend.” The logic was fuzzy in his head, a vague sense of wrongness. He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t the kind of person who did this.
Axel stared at him uncomprehendingly. He’d just opened his mouth to say something when they lurched backward, Tidus whistling up to them. Axel just stared and stared, a hand still on the back of Roxas’ neck like he’d pull him forward again, anyway. When they reached the landing, Axel let go and hopped out, walking off into the night without looking back.
The summer wound down faster than Roxas could believe, days stretching impossibly long as the temperatures rose. They worked him into the ground, calling up blisters under his hands and trying his patience until he thought the next kid who threw money at him would be getting it shoved up his ass. But he was laughing, smiling. He could do a standing back tuck, could slip out of three different kinds of knots. It made him feel guilty sometimes, in the bare corners of his chest, but he raged against that feeling until it was small, inconsequential.
Despite being unmistakable in any crowd, Axel was surprisingly difficult to pin down. The other boy made certain they were never alone together, attached to the other carny kids at the hip, staying out so late that by the time they broke for the night, Roxas could hardly keep his eyes open, stumbling drunk toward his trailer. Axel was avoiding him, that much was obvious. And maybe, just a little, Roxas was avoiding him, too. Seeing Axel now sent a bolt of electricity through his ribcage, a nervous flutter that held his breath for him when Axel walked into the big top for class, sat down at the table for lunch, caught Roxas’ eyes across the midway. Roxas never had the balls for confrontation, calling someone out on their shit and squashing drama. It was strange to be out of Axel’s good graces, like the sun shone everywhere else but on him. But he did what he could, tagged along into towns and made a lot of long-distance phone calls.
He didn’t even like boys, did he? He had a girlfriend. A girlfriend that he couldn’t stand, but a girlfriend all the same. What was the point of getting all flustered over a summer romance when the summer was ending in a week and a half and he was going home? It would just make him feel guilty for cheating on Naminé, make him feel reckless and fevered and… fuck. Because kissing Axel had felt like realizing some forgotten truth, like a deafening, roaring surf in his stomach. Did he want that context? That he found a little fling over the summer, cheated on his girlfriend? Did he want to be one of those guys? Careless, reckless, selfish. No. He didn’t, he wouldn’t.
They were standing in front of Damien and the carny kids, Roxas with his hands shoved in his pockets as Axel talked over the cassette player, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” warbling over the speakers. Their presentation was going well so far; Axel was like a walking textbook of music trivia, rattling off band members and dates with an easy, knowledgeable authority like he’d been born listening to this band.
“…And it was something that was a misconception at the time, that the soldiers in Vietnam actually wanted to be there and supported the war. They didn’t. Our ranks were full of working-class blue-collar kids who didn’t have a rich daddy to save their asses from getting blown off. That war exploited the kids who had no choice, who were drafted into fighting for a cause they didn’t even understand. Kids like us, kids who worked hard and lived hard. They looked at the rich kids with connections sitting home and waving their little flags, and they were angry. Of course they were angry. But they weren’t crybabying over having to do the dirty work for the people with the power. That’s how it always is. Instead of bitching about it, they stood together. They didn’t want the wealth, the affluence. ‘It ain’t me.’ It ain’t me, and it never will be. They don’t want that life. I don’t want that life. We don’t want that life. We don’t want their fucking silver spoons and comfortable, cushioned, sedated lives. If it means we gotta go to war to do it, hell, at least it’s living.” Axel paused, lifted both of his middle fingers in the air. “This is what ‘Fortunate Son’ is saying. It’s saying fuck you to comfortable lives and trust funds. It’s saying fuck you to handouts and pity parties. It doesn’t apologize, it’s not sorry. It draws a line in the sand between us and them, and, in a sense, it’s calling out for you to do the same.”
Axel paced the center ring like he was born to be there; agile, loping grace and careful articulation, his hands drawing shapes in the air, emphasizing phrases. Roxas watched him with everyone else, awed. The way he spoke drove something up from inside him, a pulsing, throbbing desire to agree, to raise his fist up and nod. But did he really agree? Wasn’t that the life he was going back to? The life he wanted?
“Well said, Axel, very well said,” Damien clapped, nodding. “I could do without some of that language, but it’s a good point.” Turning to Roxas, eyebrows raised, Damien asked, “You have anything to add?”
Axel turned to face him, the first time he’d purposely looked at Roxas in two weeks, with defiant, challenging eyes that Roxas could see himself reflected in. What did Axel see? A scared, safe little boy? Someone confused, scrabbling blindly for a ladder leading vaguely upward? The song finished playing, the opening riff of an AC/DC song starting up before Axel leaned down and clicked the stop button, the same song he’d been listening to when Roxas saw him for the first time in twelve years. Pulling sentences together in his head, Roxas inhaled to speak, and with the breath flooded in a memory.
It was right before his family left, sitting on the floor in the tent that housed the lion’s cage. Fira was lying on the ground, licking her paws lazily while Axel swept the inside of her cage. The cassette player was on the floor next to Roxas, same AC/DC song blaring out of the speakers as Axel swept, strumming an imaginary guitar on the broomstick, howling into the top like it was a microphone. Roxas watched, entranced, and thought Axel was going to be a rock star when he got a little older. Roxas would see all his shows, would sit front row. Or maybe he’d learn to play an instrument—the lion dad had a guitar in their trailer—and they’d be in a band together. He didn’t know how Axel was like that—fearless—unafraid to be in there with Fira even though he told Roxas a hundred times that she was nice. Roxas would only pet her if Axel held his hand and stroked her fur with it, like if he did it on his own, she would know it wasn’t Axel and bite his hand off. Fearless, a great singer, really good at putting on band-aids—these were things Axel was. Roxas didn’t like anyone better.
“Roxas?” Damien asked. “You got anything?”
Roxas swallowed, his mouth dry. Axel, Axel, Axel, how could he forget? “Yeah.” Turning to look out at the carny kids, Tidus smiling encouragingly at him, Roxas balled his fists and stepped forward. “Axel talked a lot about the history of the song, about what it meant at that time. If we think about it in terms of today, the song can take on a different meaning. I think Axel had it right when he said, ‘It ain’t me.’ It’s like,” he said, voice shaking, “it’s like saying you don’t want what we’re all supposed to want. A house, a spouse, two point five kids. Y’know, the American Dream. It’s what we’re all trained to want since we’re little kids. That’s the image of success, of having lived your life the way you’re supposed to.” There was a flutter in his chest, and his voice rose. “That’s great for people born into it. They’re born into that idealized dream, their own self-serving cells. For a lot of people, the American Dream just isn’t going to happen. It’s going to stay exactly that, a dream. And you know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to let someone else’s definition of success define my own happiness. I will never be happy slaving away in some suburban law office, slinging cases all day like it means something. All those people,” Roxas thundered. “They’re asleep. I was asleep. I’m awake now. I’m not a fortunate son.” Roxas shook his head, eyes flashing. “I don’t want to be one.”
The applause crackled in the air, Damien beaming up at him, teeth a smear of white in the depths of the swirling inked lines around his face. Roxas looked over his shoulder to Axel, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt. Small smile on his mouth, Axel nodded.
“You really mean all that?” They were sitting on the picnic table, pulling apart a funnel cake with their fingers. Being this close to Axel felt like being on fire.
“I want to,” Roxas said, sucking traces of strawberries from his fingers. “It’s hard. Scary. But I never felt right wanting any of that.” Roxas laughed, wiping away a trickle of sauce on his chin. “Who the fuck would? Who celebrates their own small, sheep-like lives?”
“Oh, I can think of a couple people,” Axel said, eyeing a passing group of obnoxious city kids. “Your girlfriend, for instance. I mean, probably. Weren’t you saying her parents own a yacht?”
Roxas smiled at his funnel cake. “Yeah, she probably celebrates her sheepness. But you know,” he said, turning to smile at Axel, heart pounding painfully in his chest. “She’s not my girlfriend anymore.” Roxas didn’t have a single quarter left, all of them spent on calls to his friends. He wouldn’t be back for a long, long time.
“Oh?” Axel said, dusting the sugar from around Roxas’ mouth.
Roxas shrugged, cheeks aching from smiling so wide. “New development. I’m so heartbroken I think I might have to stay on at the carnival for a little while. Need a little cheering up.”
Axel was impossibly close, grinning and sticky, his breath edible. Roxas’ eyes had already fallen shut, lips parting, when someone cleared their throat.
“Ahem.”
“Mom.” Axel said, pausing an inch away from Roxas’ face.
“We’re doing a viewing at two, and Fira’s cage is a mess. You have fifteen minutes.” She was smiling at them, gave Roxas a wink as she turned away. Axel sighed, the brush of it against Roxas’ lips plucking shivers down his spine. He left sugared fingerprints on Roxas’ cheeks when he pulled his hand away, laughing as he rubbed them off.
“So,” Roxas said, grinning madly. “Lion tamer, huh?”
Axel laughed, pulling Roxas off the table. “Shut up.”
Later, after Fira’s cage was clean and they commandeered the carousel, shoving in a cassette of Axel’s music and dancing around, Axel standing atop saddles and howling away, they climbed a hill just outside the carnival encampment and spread themselves out on the grass. The circus sounds floated up to them like music from another room; familiar, pleasant. A thousand winking stars stared down at them; a space of possibility, of hypotheticals. Smoothing his hand over the grass, Roxas found Axel’s hand and tangled their fingers together, felt his pulse in his fingertips. So… so maybe he wouldn’t be a lawyer. Maybe he wouldn’t apply to Dartmouth. He didn’t know. He didn’t have to know. Axel’s fingers tickled his palm, and he laughed; a bright, reckless burst of life. The important part—past the uncertain, fearful jumble of butterflies and hope—was just being alive, being awake to the music, the magic.