Girl in the Shadows (27 page)

thirty-nine

“Don’t move.” I dragged the mascara brush slowly across Dita’s eyelashes. “Don’t blink either.”

“Sorry.”

“You never do your own?”

“I have a thing about fingers around my eyeballs, especially my own. I always flinch. But I like how it looks,” she said. “My mom, or the makeup lady, always does them.”

“Perfecto.” I finished it up. I had learned a lot about makeup hanging out backstage in Vegas.

“Hurry up,” Jules called from the living room.

“Just keep making out. We’re almost ready,” I called back.

I heard Remy laugh. We were about to leave for the buses to the beach fete. I hadn’t seen or heard from Dez all day, and I almost regretted what I’d said to him. His life was even more complicated than mine. He was in big trouble.

I couldn’t get either of us out of this on my own. He was going to have to show up not just for me, but for himself.

My phone trilled with a call, and I expected it to be Dad. We hadn’t talked since his visit.

Dez and Brandon’s number popped up. My heart thumped as I answered. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Dez said. “I knew you wouldn’t trust a text.”

“Good thinking.”

Dita was watching me with curiosity, so I kept my tone light. I didn’t think she had any idea I’d gone out last night. She’d given no sign of waking when I came in.

Dez went on. “I was thinking we could skip the bonfire. I heard what you said last night.”

“You did?” I asked.

“Meet me at the Ferris wheel in half an hour. We’ll start making a real plan—to save both of us.”

“Come on!” Jules again, and this time she stomped back to get us.

“See you then,” I said. And to Dita and Jules, “I’m staying here.”

Dita blinked her freshly mascaraed lashes. She was dressed in a pair of knee-length shorts and a short-sleeved men’s button-down for the beach. “What?”

Jules eyeballed the phone in my hand.

“Dez has got a lot going on,” I said. “We’re going to stay here and talk.”

“You’d tell us if there was something you needed?” Dita asked.

“Of course.”

Not.

They both looked at me; finally, Jules shrugged and said, “It’s your call.”

“You guys better get going, then. I don’t want you to miss out.”

Jules took Dita’s arm and steered her out. I stayed in the bedroom, butterflies butterflying around in my stomach. To pass the time, I decided to practice some transformations. Never again would I freeze up like I had the night before.

I didn’t have any wisdom to go on—only my gut. I tossed a coin into the air, calling my magic, feeling it heat me from the inside out and radiate from my palm, and watched a paper butterfly flutter down to the floor.

I checked the time on my phone.

I took a handful of prop coins from my case and tossed them in the air, then watched them float down on paper wings.

I imagined what I could do with my magic onstage, with more time and better control. Would it be so different than just doing regular magic? I’d thought of it as cheating, but I might have been hasty. Stage magic was all about the effect, what the people in the crowd saw. Giving them an experience they didn’t know how to explain.

With another coin, I made a paper dragon and watched it sail past me and down. I imagined it breathing fire at the Rex. I checked my phone for the time.

It had only been fifteen minutes. I’d have just barely missed the bus out to the barbecue.

Maybe I should have wondered whether I was about to experience a repeat of the night before. It was possible I trusted Dez too much at this point. But while he’d defended Brandon, I still couldn’t believe that he’d betray me outright. I picked up the paper representations of my nervous energy and stuffed them into the trash can.

I headed out the front door and through the darkened caravans and RVs. The midway was quiet and subdued with all of its lights killed, the last of the so-called magic hour right before sunset casting everything with a soft, slowly dying glow.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one of us who couldn’t wait. Dez stood at the base of the Ferris wheel. He lifted his hand in greeting.

He moved to meet me halfway. There was no one else standing by to run it this time, and the wheel was as dark as everything else. In fact, we were probably the only two people around besides Thurston’s security. Speaking of which . . .

“Are we going to get busted by the flashlight-and-Taser brigade?” I asked.

“I alerted Steven. He’s a pal,” Dez said.

“Steven?”

“Oh, he’s on security tonight. He’s, um, giving us some privacy.”

“Where were the security guys last night?” I asked.

“Brandon’s smart.”

I must have made a face, because he said, “No, he is. He called in a trash-can fire on the other side of the grounds. They were probably checking it out.”

I shivered again. Brandon had put more thought into what he’d done than I’d assumed.

Dez grew solemn. It was always a shock when it happened, his face showing what was beneath that rakish exterior. I felt like I had only the vaguest clue, even after all the time we’d spent together. But I also knew it was important that he let me see there was anything there at all.

“I’m sorry that I defended him,” Dez said.

That was a good start.

“So, we’re making a plan?” I asked.

“I have a confession to make first.”

Don’t tell me you were in on last night. I couldn’t take it.
“What’s that?”

“This is where I come at night. Whenever we’re not together, after everyone’s asleep, I come here. Just lately.”

“Here?” I glanced at the ground, relieved that the confession wasn’t about Brandon’s tip-off.

He raised his hand and pointed up. “No, there. I want to show you what I see from there, explain. Then, we plan.”

“Let’s go, then,” I said.

“You don’t mind climbing?” he asked, but he’d already reached into his back pocket and pulled out a flashlight.

“It’s not like I haven’t climbed it before. Just tell me when to stop.”

Sunset had ceded to darkness. He flicked on the flashlight and shone it up the left-hand side of the big metal behemoth. A thrill raced through me. This was better than any beach barbecue.

I was glad I’d worn sneakers and jeans. I went to the first car and pulled myself up onto the arm, then again, finding a path and making steady progress. I jumped up and grabbed part of the arm above, climbed onto the next car, and did it again. Dez anticipated each move, the flashlight illuminating what I needed it to, and the security light taking over when I got too high for his beam to reach.

“There,” he shouted up.

I swung down to sit in a car almost at the top, looking out over the quiet grounds. San Diego light pollution didn’t hide all the stars, just most of them, and that ever-present breeze made the car sway slightly with a lullaby-rocking motion.

I looked down to see Dez making fast progress up the darkened wheel below, no light for him besides what came from the evening sky and the nearest security lamp. He clearly knew the way by heart, and my pulse kicked into high gear watching him. One hand in the wrong place and he would tumble down. He’d catch on metal on the way, or hit his head.

This is where I come at night . . .

If he fell out here by himself, how long until someone found him? Sure, I took risks, but I rehearsed. There were fail-safes. This was something else.

He finally reached me, pulling himself over the side of the red-white-and-blue-painted car and onto the leather seat beside me. I gave his shoulder a shove. There was nothing hot about the risk he’d just taken. The risk he’d been taking regularly, it seemed.

“You are reckless and stupid, Desmond—” I broke off. How could I yell at him without even knowing his full name? “What’s your last name?”

“I think it’s Robinson, but that could have just been a favorite alias of Dad’s.”

Two different worlds we came from, but his had a hold over us both.

“Anyway,” I said, shoving him again, “this is dangerous. Stupidly dangerous. Not cool in any way. What if you fell?”

He settled back, resting his head against the metal lip that rose up behind us. He turned his head toward me. “When I sit up here, I’ve been thinking about just that.”

His face was so much more familiar to me than it had been that first date night.
We
, the two of us together, were familiar. I reached over and touched his arm, and my pulse sped up again with the faintest skin-to-skin contact. Familiarity hadn’t changed the chemistry between us.

“Just what?” Even though he wasn’t in danger of falling anymore, my heart pounded. I had already fallen for him.

“About what would happen if I fell,” he said. “How no one would care, really. It would make things simpler, for you.”

“Hey,” I said. “I would care. It would
not
make anything simpler.”

He sighed. “But you shouldn’t. And it would. You’re wrong.”

“Dez, I thought we were here to make a plan.” This talk frightened me. I wanted him to see his life was more valuable than he considered it, not less.

“We are. I just wanted you to . . . understand.” He closed his eyes and released a frustrated breath. “I’m messing this up.”

“Let’s start from a different place. What do you want, if you get free of them? What do you want to do with your life?” I could try to make him see that he was worth saving, that the future could be different than he’d imagined. “Any secret dreams? Like I want to be a magician, you want . . .”

“I don’t know.” He said it like it was ludicrous. “I never thought about anything except being Praestigae.”

“You’re making me want to push you off of here,” I said, but the opposite was true. I wanted to make him see that he mattered. That they had no real claim on him. On either of us. “It doesn’t matter if anyone cares if you fall. That is irrelevant.
You
should care. That’s what I meant last night.”

I was breathing hard, and so was he. We’d gone to a deep, dark place here, and he was resisting my attempts to shine sunlight on it. I wasn’t sure if he’d push me away.

He was silent for a long moment. “I’m trying.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to take that for now. “Now, what makes you happy?”

“You.”

“I should have banned that as an answer.”

But when he held up his hand, I laced my fingers through his and rested my head on his shoulder. “What do you feel best at? Don’t be funny. Be honest.”

He was quiet for a long time, and I had almost given up on an answer. “This isn’t what you mean, I don’t think.”

“Try me,” I said, gazing up at him.

“So,” he said, “the thing about running a con is that people are so easy to manipulate into what you want them to do.”

“You’re right, this wasn’t what I expected. Go on, though.”

“A lot of con artists talk about how dumb people are. How greedy. But I always felt like I could be a mark. The marks and me have a lot in common.”

“How so?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“We want to believe the lies.” He nudged his shoulder into me. “I think that’s why I like watching you perform so much.”

“You want to believe lies? That’s not much of a goal.”

“No. That’s not it.” He stopped and searched for words. “I want my life to be the kind where the stuff I always thought was lies is actually true.”

“Where things
are
good,” I said. “I love that. Now we both have something we’re planning for—me to be a magician, and you to have a life where good things can be true. And no Praestigae for either of us.”

He gave a wry smile.

“Don’t start doubting it’s possible already,” I said. “Now we figure out how to con the con artists—including my mother, but mostly the Rex.”

“Sounds easy enough,” he joked. “Anything else?”

After last night I still couldn’t necessarily count on my mother to stand up to her man. It had made me think I could count on her not actively contributing against us, though. She had something she wanted out of all this: power.

“There is something else. I know this is petty, probably stupid . . .”

“What is it?” Dez asked.

“I want to scare the Rex as bad as I was scared last night.”

“I would like to see that,” Dez said, but there was an undercurrent of fear in his voice. “I can’t help with that part, but the other part, the conning part, I can. To get the Rex to a deal-making place, where he might let us go, he’ll need to feel like it’s possible for him to lose.”

“To not get the coin, you mean?”

“The coin
or
you.”

“Why?”

He grinned. “So he’ll settle for the coin.”

“Aha, okay,” I said. “But he doesn’t get you either in this scenario.”

“Agreed.”

We were both quiet, rolling over the problem. What had my mother said—that I could see more possibilities than she was able to? So I looked for solutions they wouldn’t expect.

After a little while, an idea began to come together in my mind. First, we would set our terms to create Dez’s possibility that the Rex would lose. Then, I would design an illusion that was so enormous I could barely begin to fathom how I’d do it. Dez had come here and fantasized about vanishing, so . . . why not make it happen? This could secure both our dreams: Dez’s of a real future and mine of being a great magician.

For a disappearance on a mass scale to facilitate a trade (of the coin) and to mask a small-scale getaway (mine and Dez’s), the Ferris wheel we were sitting on would be perfect. Making this massive metal monster seem to disappear and reappear would take a lot of preparation—and I’d need Dad’s help—but if David Copperfield could make the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish, why not this? If we could convince the Rex and Regina that I truly
had
made it disappear, I could also probably convince them that most of my magic was gone. That I was too used up to be of use to the Praestigae, my cup all but emptied of magic.

For this plan, the gauntlet would have to be thrown to the Rex and Regina much sooner. We’d need as much space as we could get to focus on the illusion, without worrying about them showing up to monkey-wrench things again before we were ready.