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She lifted her arms, and the cape hung down from her wrists like wings. “Welcome, mesdames,” she fluted, Russian accent thick as borscht. “Welcome, messieurs. Welcome. Les Chauve-souris!”
Lenka heard a chittering overhead, and suddenly the air was full of movement, half seen and half heard, a restless, leathery flutter. A woman gave a nervous shriek, and Mama covered her head protectively as small, dark shapes flickered through the lights and down to the stage. A crashing chord, and the shapes transformed into a troupe of performers, caped and masked in brown.
Mama folded her hands in her lap. “Handkerchiefs and trapdoors. They’re fast, though.”
As the organ struck up “Thunder and Blazes,” Battina rose into the air and skimmed over the ramp, her cape flaring out behind her. Everyone gasped, even Lenka. Between the cape and the tricky lighting, the telltale bulk of the harness and the glint of the wire were functionally invisible. Battina looked like she was really flying.
She circled over the audience and disappeared behind the curtains.
“Nice effect,” Mama said.
“Shh,” Papa said. “The acrobats.”
Lenka giggled.
There were three Vaulting Sokols, slender young men with white teeth and incredibly fast reflexes.
Papa watched their flipping and posturing for a moment, then whispered in Lenka’s ear. “They tumble like in your grandfather’s time — much skill, but little imagination.”
Behind Lenka, someone got up and headed for the bar. “They’re losing the audience,” Mama muttered.
The next act was better — a big man in a moth-eaten bear suit and a contortionist in a scale-patterned leotard who slithered around his body with multivertebraed suppleness until he plucked her off and spun her in the air like a living ball.
When the bear man and the snake girl removed their masks, Lenka saw that the girl was about her age, with very fair skin and very dark hair cut in a square bob. She made her compliment to the audience without a glimmer of a smile, one arm raised, her knee cocked, pivoting to acknowledge the applause.
“Very professional.” Mama approved.
The next act was Battina, capeless, and with black velvet cat ears sticking out of her thickly coiled hair. She swept in, proud as a queen, heading a procession of seven cats, their tails and heads held high.
Lenka had seen cat acts before — mostly on YouTube. Cats are cats. Even when they’re trained, they tend to wander off or roll belly-up or wash themselves. Not Battina’s cats. They walked a slack rope, jumped through hoops, balanced on a pole, and most remarkably of all, performed a kind of kitty synchronous dance routine in perfect unison, guided by Battina’s chirps and meows.
“The woman’s a witch,” Mama muttered.
“Shh,” Lenka said.
When the lights came up for intermission, Papa turned to her anxiously. “You like?”
“She’d better,” Mama said.
“The cats were way cool. And the contortionist is the bomb. Can I get a Coke at the bar? I’m really thirsty.”
After the break came a female sword swallower, a Japanese girl on a unicycle, and a slack-rope walker in a striped unitard that covered him to the knees. Lenka judged them all better than competent, but uninspired.
The contortionist reappeared, cartwheeling out between the curtains and down the runway, a simple effect made spectacular by the shimmering bat’s wings that stretched from her ankles to her wrists. Reaching the center of the ring, she reached up, grasped a previously invisible bar, and rode it slowly upward. Lenka’s throat closed in pure envy.
About six feet up, the trapeze stopped and the girl beat up to standing, bent her knees, and set the trapeze in motion, her wings rippling as she swung.
“She’s going to get those tangled in the ropes,” Mama muttered darkly.
She didn’t. Lenka watched the girl flow through her routine, twisting, coiling, somersaulting, hanging by her hands, her neck, one foot, an arm, as if the laws of gravity and physics had been suspended just for her. She must be incredibly strong. She must be incredibly disciplined. She must not have any friends, or go to movies or play video games or be on Facebook, just train and perform and sleep and do her chores and her lessons and train some more. It wasn’t a normal life. Mama and Papa said Lenka would learn to like normal life, if it turned out that she couldn’t perform.
Mama and Papa were so totally wrong. Dear Mama and Papa: When you read this, I will be far away from here.I’m not leaving because I don’t love you, or because I think you’re mean or unfair or anything. You’re the best and most loving parents in the world and you’ve saved my life, even more than Dr. Weiner and the clinic. You’ve given up a lot to make me well, and you haven’t tried to make me feel guilty about it, which is totally awesome.The thing is, I feel guilty anyway. And fenced in and tied down and fed up and generally sick and tired. And it’s not just all about me, although it probably sounds like it. I can see what my being sick has done to you. Temp work? Retail? Get real. Even Papa can’t make it fu
Lenka knew her parents. No matter what her letter said, they’d look for her, and the first place they’d look was the Cirque des Chauve-souris. She spent a couple of days hiding out, mostly in the Cleveland Art Museum, on the theory that it was the last place on Earth they’d expect her to be.
After the Cirque des Chauve-souris’s last show, she gave herself a quick sponge bath in the museum john and headed downtown.
Lenka had been hoping to slip in under cover of the mob scene that was a circus breaking down. When she found the backyard deserted, she was a little freaked out, but she didn’t let it stop her from slipping through the stage door.
A voice spoke out of the darkness. “We wondered when you’d show up.”
Lenka froze.
“Don’t worry,” the voice said. “We won’t call the police.”
“The police?”
The contortionist stepped into the light. Close up, she looked smaller and paler. “They’ve been here twice, looking for Lenka Kubatov, age eighteen, five foot six, brown-brown, hundred fifteen, kind of fragile looking. That’s you, right?”
Fragile looking? Lenka shrugged. “That’s me.”
“You ran away from home? Why? Do your parents beat you?”
“No,” Lenka said. “My parents are great.”
“Then why.?”
Lenka squared her shoulders. “I want to join the circus. This circus. I want to be a roustabout.”
The contortionist laughed. “That’s a new one,” she said. “Well, you’d better come talk to Battina.”
The ringmistress of the Chauve-souris was helping the strong man unbolt the booth partitions and banquettes from the walls. There wasn’t a roustabout in sight.
“The runaway,” she said when she saw Lenka. “Hector, I need a drink.”
The strong man laughed and slotted the partition into a padded wooden crate. “Later,” he said.
Battina settled herself on a banquette, for all the world as if she hadn’t been lifting part of it a moment before. “You must call your parents,” she said severely.
Lenka shook her head. “I’m eighteen.”
“The police said you are sick.”
“I was sick. I’m better now. I need to live my own life, let them live theirs. They’re flyers. They need to fly.”