I'd always loved the circus.
I'd loved the circus for as long as I could remember, I loved watching the acrobats and the clowns and I loved to be surprised. I loved to see something different something that I'd never seen before. So I jumped at the chance when Lucy - my older (and meaner) sister - mentioned something about a travelling freak show.
I had heard the freaks were suppose to be hideously deformed aggressive creatures, Lucy thought the 'freaks' would be faked, but she agreed to take me along with her and her friends. She took the money for my ticket out of my allowance, plus extra because and I quote 'I should get paid if I have to baby-sit all day'.
Usually I'd have argued and shouted at mum and dad till they made her give me back my money. But they were off somewhere for their anniversary and she had been left in charge. I guess I could have gone to my uncle's, but he works nights, and he definitely wouldn't't't have let me go to anything as cool as a freak show.
You see my 'uncle' - really just my mum's best friend - hated anything like that. He hated discrimination and stereotypes, if everyone thinks something is right it's probably wrong. I remember talking to him about vampires when I was younger, everyone else just humoured me or tried to frighten me, but he kept telling me that "almost everything people think about vampires is wrong" He'd tell me stories of good vampires and evil vampires (which he referred to as Vampaneze). Looking back I guess I should have asked more questions, asked how he knew so much, but I was too interested in what he was talking about to think about how.
I refused to talk to my sister until we got to the freak show, I sat in the back of the car and read my book in silence. I had to read Oliver Twist for my English class, I hated reading books for school, but it was one of my favourite books so I didn't mind. I loved the idea that even though Oliver had no parents and all these terrible things kept happening to him, somehow all those bad things helped him find the one place he truly belonged, with a real family. No one would have noticed me even if I hadn't been reading my book, or if I'd tried talking to them.
Lucy had brought her two best friends with her: Krissy and Annabel. Krissy was a tall lanky girl with bleached blond hair, she was the head of the cheerleaders in Lucy's school, and she was the meanest girl I'd ever met. I once heard that her brother was in a wheelchair because Krissy pushed him down the stairs, after she was kicked out of primary school for aggressive behaviour. Annabel on the other hand was short with long ginger hair, her hair was almost always tied in two plaits behind her back which trailed down her back so they just scraped the top of her waist. Annabel seemed to follow Krissy everywhere and agreed with everything she said, I often wondered if Krissy thought of Annabel as more of a pet then a friend.
After hearing Krissy and Lucy make jokes about their teachers being locked up in cages, I started to wonder what to expect from the freak show. After a while I decided to ask:
"Jason? What do you think It'll be like?" Jason was the one driving us there, he was Lucy's current boyfriend, and the most likely to give me a truthful answer. He and Lucy had been going out for almost a year now, and he'd always tried to stick up for me if Lucy was teasing me or taking the Mick out of me during an argument.
"What?" He asked turning his head slightly so he could hear me better
"The freak show."
"I don't know, I'm not really into them myself." Jason admitted shrugging his shoulders, he reached over Lucy and grabbed the flyer from the dashboard with his left hand and passed it back to me, keeping his right hand on the steering wheel to keep the car from drifting into the other lanes.
I read the battered flyer over and over again, it didn't really explain a lot about the show, Just listed some of the freaks and how to get to the show. I imagined bright colours and performers everywhere, every 'freak' showing off their own freakish talent and talking to the crowd of awestruck people who came to watch them. In my mind the show was absolutely magical, and I grew more and more exited with every passing second.
I knew that I'd never forgot what I'd see beyond that last corner to the show. You can't imagine, how many times I've wished that I'd left that car and ran home as fast as I could. Before I'd realised just how right I was…