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IMPROBABLE FUTURES
    When I was six years old, my mom sent me to school for a month. It was the first and last time I ever set foot in a real school. My mother said she was tired of moving around and decided it was time to settle down and “plant some roots.” Even at six, I knew it wouldn’t last, but I was willing to take what I could get. That’s what you do when you don’t get much.
    On the first day, I wandered into the classroom holding my mother’s hand like all the other kids. I was wearing a brand-new blue dress. I looked like a regular kid on the outside, which is the only part that counts. It’s the face the world sees, the one you can change as many times as you want. After lunch, the teacher, Mrs. Hale—I’ll never forget her name—called us to the rug in the front of the classroom. It was Share Time, and she asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I had no idea. I spent most of my time thinking about what I didn’t want to be.
    Hands flew up. The girl with the brown pigtails wanted to be a ballerina. The boy in the orange shirt, a garbageman. Hands kept raising and more jobs floated around the room, until the boy next to me called out, “I wanna be in the circus.” A hush fell over the group as the idea circulated like a virus. After that, almost everyone Mrs. Hale called on decided they wanted to be in the circus too.
    When it was my turn, I didn’t say a word. One thought threaded its way through my mind: Who would want to work for the circus? There was only one place worse—a place where the big tent was replaced by dingy trailers and cheap amusement park rides. Where you paid to see fortune-tellers and a bearded lady instead of trapeze artists and lion tamers. The place my mother had worked my whole life, and the one I was sure we would be returning to eventually, because she never left for long.
    Once a carny, always a carny.
    I slip out of my jeans and reach for the peasant top and ankle-length skirt balled up on the floor of the trailer. It has tiny bells sewn around the hem that chime when I walk barefoot across the lot. Between the skirt, bare feet, armload of bangles, and tangle of necklaces laden with mass-produced charms from the mall, I’m supposed to look like an exotic gypsy. It’s beyond cliché, but that’s what the marks—I mean the customers—want. The illusion I’m a mystical fortuneteller, who can watch their futures unfold through a glass ball I bought online for $29.99.
    Two years ago, on my fifteenth birthday, Mom offered to let me have her old crystal ball as if she was passing down a priceless heirloom, instead of the diversion I used to con people out of their money. I ordered my own the same day. There should be some honor among thieves. Even if the thief is your mother.
    It’s just after dark, and by the time I leave the trailer, the lot is already packed with skanky girls in tank tops and cutoffs, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights. They’re crowded around the entrance to the Freak Show, flirting with Chris. I call him CR because he’s a shameless cradle robber. He’s twenty-five, but he looks closer to my age, which is the reason Big John makes him work the Show. The girls line up by the dozens, spending five bucks a pop to flirt with CR for thirty seconds before they check out the two-headed snakes and the Devil Baby—a disgusting silicone “alien” fetus floating in a glass jar full of murky liquid that passes for formaldehyde. CR said Big John bought it from a special-effects studio in Los Angeles that specializes in custom body parts for horror flicks. Between the flat snubbed nose and the curled claws, the Devil Baby is beyond horrific even if it is silicone. The Freak Show tent is really dark inside, but you’d still have to be an idiot to believe that thing in the giant pickle jar is a demon baby.
    This whole place runs on stupidity.
    Everyone knows the games are rigged, the rides are rusted death traps, the hot dogs aren’t made of anything