“Oh, all kinds,” she said. “Gossip and legends, kids’ stories, stories about our past.”
“Tell me one!” I begged, pressing my hands together.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “You really want to hear one?”
“Yes!”
“Well,” she said, “one of my favorites was a story about a prince and a peasant girl. My mother used to tell it when I was a kid.”
“What was it?”
“Okay,” she said, lowering her voice as if she were sharing a great secret. She leaned back on the grass and I lay next to her. Her hair spread out in corkscrews that tumbled down over my shoulder. I picked up strands of her hair and wrapped the curls around my fingers, and we lay there side by side.
“There was once a beautiful peasant girl,” she began, “who wore dresses that came up to her chin and ended past her toes. The girl lived in a tiny cottage with her husband, who was a good strong man who worked the fields.”
I laughed, imagining him in the fields in Oakley, the ones I ran past every day. I could see it.
“One day a prince rode into town on a gleaming black horse. He was so rich that every time he opened his purse men and women gasped as if he held the moon in there. But those women didn’t have a chance. When the prince saw the peasant girl, he fell instantly in love and was determined to marry her. He didn’t care whether or not the girl loved him back, and didn’t let the fact that she already had a husband deter him one bit. The peasant girl was not interested in the prince at all, and when he began hunting her down in the fields, she was sure that the devil himself had found her. ‘Help!’ she cried, and ran like a ribbon through the crops, so fast the prince thought she’d disappeared. But this only made him more determined; he bought the most luxurious home in town and moved into it that day.”
I closed my eyes, picturing it, imagining a red ribbon streaming through the cornfields, whooshing out into the road.
“Soon enormous crates began arriving, one by one, filled with all the prince’s earthly belongings. He settled in and began trying to lure the girl in every earthly way—hosting lavish parties, sending jewels to her house, writing her poetry-filled letters—but he did not understand the strength of the girl’s love for her husband, or her religious fervor. Finally the prince realized that to possess this girl he’d have to find a way to bind her to him forever, so he sold off every single possession he had ever owned: every last jewel in his gigantic jewel vault, every richly brocaded shirt, every solid-gold candlestick and fork, every exotic bird in his private atrium. When the last item had been sold and he wore nothing but a simple peasant’s shirt and overalls, the prince sold his soul to the devil. He took the sum of his earthly life and brought it to a famous jeweler, who spent a month in his laboratory, mixing it all up in a great iron vat until, finally, he produced one perfect, sparkling opal ring, a ring more valuable than any ring made before or since.”
Mary sat up and pressed her hands into the grass. I thought of every beautiful thing I’d ever seen, reduced down to one stone. My mind wrapped around that image and held it close.
“The next time the prince saw the beautiful peasant girl, he approached her without a fear in his heart. Not even God could save the peasant girl from the fate that had been given her, the strength of that ring and the devil were so strong. Her heart split into pieces, the girl walked into her husband’s barn and came out on her favorite horse. Then she stopped, and the prince leapt upon it, and neither of them was ever heard from again. Until the day he died, the poor, abandoned husband prayed for the soul of his lost wife, who had disappeared into the world and, by all accounts, lived unhappily ever after.
“They used to say that the prince and the peasant girl founded Rain Village. People used to whisper it,” Mary said. “They said that that was why we were all so heartbroken there, because it had been passed down by our ancestors.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, nodding slowly and whisking an eyelash from my cheek with her thumb. “You cannot escape your fate, Tessa, or where you come from.”
I looked at her and was surprised to see how strange she looked, as if something fierce and sad were beating its way out of her.
“What is it, Mary?” I whispered, but she just reached out and entwined her fingers with mine.
CHAPTER FIVE
My thirteenth birthday came and went that second summer. I’d been working in Mercy Library for almost a year. It felt like more time than that had passed; I felt like a whole new person and marveled sometimes as I watched myself with a library patron, recommending The Canterbury Tales or The Divine Comedy. Mary waited until we closed the library to present me with my very own rhinestone-covered skirt she’d sewn for me herself.
“Someday you can wear this to dinner with your boyfriend,” she said, grinning. “You’ll be the prettiest girl in the restaurant.”
I turned red down to my toes as I slipped into it. Before she let me look in the mirror, Mary took out a shiny plastic purse full of cosmetics and spread glitter and powder over my face. She painted black arching eyebrows over my own, and drew my lips into a bow. She twisted my hair onto the top of my head and stuck long ivory pins through it.
“Look,” she said, and I walked straight to the mirror and peered into it, at the strange sparkling girl staring out. Mary came behind me, resting her chin on my shoulder. “Look at our eyes,” she said. “You’d think we were related.” I looked back and forth and saw it was true: my eyes looked big and blue, almost sloped like hers, though in my case it was the makeup more than anything else.
“I don’t look so terrible,” I whispered, and was immediately embarrassed to have said it out loud. But it was true: I looked almost pretty, my light hair falling in my face and piled on my head, my face sparkling with glitter.
Mary laughed. “Of course not,” she said. “You’re beautiful, Tessa. Don’t listen to anyone else. People try to shut out beauty wherever they can in this world, but it’s a mistake.”
I smiled, traced the lines of my face in the mirror. Beautiful, she had said. I couldn’t see it, but I basked in it anyway, rocking back and forth so that the skirt swished around my knees.
It was around that time that, one day, Mary sent me into the library’s depths with a box of old books for storage, and I came across an old dusty box marked “Circus” in faded letters, hidden behind a stack of ancient encyclopedias. Mary’s circus stories had taken on the aura of dreams and myth; this box seemed impossible, sitting here before me. I dropped everything. My hands started to shake as I ripped off the tape that ran in lines across the top. I couldn’t imagine being more excited if I’d happened upon a treasure chest just lifted out of the sea.
Breathlessly, I peeled back the box cover. Even through the tissue paper they were wrapped in, I could see the sparkles and rhinestones and sequins of the leotards. I reached in and lifted out the one on top, carefully unwrapped it and held it up in the dim light. The red sequins shimmered; the leotard was so heavy and ornate that my arms grew tired holding it up. I stood up, my breath quickening, and held the leotard up to my chest, smoothed it over my belly. It extended halfway down my thighs. I could only imagine how Mary had sent hearts racing in outfits like this.
I laid the leotard neatly over another box nearby and lifted out the rest, one after another, not even caring if I messed them up, what Mary would say. One after another I pulled the costumes out of their wrappings and held them up: vivid reds and yellows, a brilliant electric blue with clouds of sequins swirling down the sides. The colors seemed to take on a life of their own in that room, throwing light against the walls. I had never seen anything like it and was surprised at how quickly I felt transformed. This is what the circus is like, I thought. This color, this life.
Why hadn’t Mary shown me this stuff before? Everything she’d told me had