They were the bane of any decent person’s ear drums. An excess of giggling and gossiping with an overindulgence of glitter and gloss. Frantic whispers erupted into shouts of hilarity. It was a rampage against good common manners.
It was a group of teenage girls at a state fair on a Friday night.
Afterwards, none of the girls knew where Avon came from. Everyone just assumed she was a friend of another girl and because she fit in so well and so immediately, no one questioned if she even belonged there in the first place. And indeed, no one in their group really thought about her afterwards, except, sometimes, Susanna, whose life she had changed forever.
With ride-all-day armbands flanking numerous other jelly and gold-plated bangles, they flew from amusement to amusement, seeking out boys to smile flirtatiously and pointing unabashedly to rival groups of girls from their school and other nearby schools.
It seemed inevitable, then, that their attentions fell toward the Ferris wheel, where the best view of the entire state fair could be found.
While dawdling in the long line, Avon began to feel the eyes of an unwelcome stranger on her. Searching for the hostile eyes was a bit like Jesus finding the woman who touched him, but eventually she found them on a carny running the Ferris wheel. In between opening and closing the chairs and manning the levers, he stared openly at Avon with a level far beyond concern. She tried to ignore him, but she became increasingly anxious as the line shortened in front of her.
Right when she thought she was going to be free from the creepy carny, whose name she had noticed on his uniform was Stratford, he roughly seized her arm as she waited for the other girls to board the chair.
“What are you doing?!” he hissed.
“Let go of me,” she insisted, glancing at her friends to gauge whether they had noticed her distress. They were arguing over seats.
“You’re not following the rules. You should leave them now.”
“No! I’m learning so much,” and she wrenched her arm from his dirty hands and sat down in the car full of happy teenagers, looking slightly ruffled and otherwise carefree. Stratford hesitated, as if he wanted to pull Avon out of her seat by her hair, but instead moved over to the lever, morphing into an anonymous carny once again.
After the Ferris wheel ride, where Judith spotted Francis and Marlow by the High Striker, they decided to head that way on the pretense of buying cotton candy and funnel cakes, but were subverted by the sight of one dark tent with the invitation, “Want to know your future?” on a wooden arrow. To a group of girls obsessed over their next boyfriend, it was too tempting to not try.
The fortune teller was alone, drinking a cup of hot tea in an overstuffed chair that seemed quite inappropriate at a Southern state fair on the fields of dead crops. She was old, of course, and slightly ethnic, but she was surprisingly accepting of the horde of ditsy teenage girls entering her presence.
“You want your fortunes read,” she stated.
Elizabeth sputtered, “We want to know who we will marry.” The girls erupted in giggles at the possibility.
“I will tell you what the spirits want me to tell you, no more or less. If you agree, I require five dollars each.”
They pulled out five dollars, some of them breaking ten dollar bills among themselves. Then they perched in the metal folding chairs surrounding the lady, who closed her eyes.
“My name is Vere, your fortune teller. I will ask the spirits to speak to me concerning these children.”
Silence. The fair continued to rage outside the tent, but inside only the sound of the girls anxious breathing could be distinguished.
Suddenly, with her eyes still closed, Vere began to speak in, surprisingly, her normal voice.
“Elizabeth, if you marry the boy, he will not grow to be the man you wish.” Elizabeth furrowed her brown with a stern mouth.
“Judith, stop searching and let them come to you.” Judith’s eyes opened widely.
“Anne, do not let yourself be separated from those whom you love or you will be forgotten entirely.” Anne looked as if she knew this the whole time.
“Susanna… the spirits are trying to speak, but they are withholding their message. I wonder why…”
Suddenly her voice became harsh.
“Someone is here who should not!”
She opened her eyes and looked at Avon.
“You do not know what you have started. Are you prepared to accept the sacrifice?”
Avon looked in shock at the lady.
“Yes?”
The lady sniffed in doubt and hid her eyes with her hands, an old symbol of washing one’s hands free from responsibility.
“Let the spirits continue to guide you. I can do no more work here.”
The girls sat unsteadily for a few minutes then filed outside. There they stood not looking at each other, trying to decide how to discuss the premonitions or even if they should.
Instead, Anne quietly suggested, “How about that funnel cake? I could go for a Coke, too.”
Waiting at the neon-bright food stand was Francis and Marlow. Having long consumed any food they purchased, they looked like they were explicitly waiting for them. Judith was trying to not bob on her feet, forgetting entirely the Vere’s warning. They commenced to flirt, Elizabeth halfheartedly joining, while Anne sought the refreshing Cokes, and Susanna leaned against a napkin stand, looking bored.
Avon, for once, stood apart and observed. That was what she was there to do, after all, observe life as a teenage girl in the twenty-first century for her studies as an anthropologist. No one from the grant office had connected that the subjects she had chosen for her dissertation contained her direct ancestor. No one had connected that she was preparing herself for more than observation, but for interaction. But how would she form a distinct thesis if she did not integrate herself with her subjects?
She honestly did not know that much about Susanna, except that her ancestress was seventeen at the point of contact. She didn’t know who she married or how many children she had produced, although she assumed she had done both in order to produce the lineage that led to Avon. She could have looked all that information up on the International Genealogical Database, but she was too busy preparing for her life in 2014 to research the history of her 400-year-old great-times-a-thousand grandmother.
Suddenly, a new boy appeared and Susanna perked up. Avon read her lips, “Hey, William. I didn’t expect to see you here.”
The boy, of a slight built but with dark curly hair, grinned nervously at Susanna and answered back. Avon couldn’t read his lips, but decided now would be a good time to just observe teenage body language. Body to body communication had all but ceased during her time. What in the world would they do with their hands while courting?
Susanna at first continued to lean against the napkin stand with a hand on her hip. William stood with his hands by his side, but when a change in the tone of the conversation occurred, William crossed his arms and Susanna put both hands on her hips. Avon thought they must be teasing each other. She grinned in spite of herself.
Then Susanna turned to check on her girls, leaving her Coke on the stand. Williams quickly pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it in Susanna’s drink, where it immediately disappeared, just as Susanna turned around. To cover an awkward moment, Susanna grabbed her drink and swallowed.
Avon stood rooted in her shoes, wondering if she actually saw what she knew she saw. She suddenly felt her heart beating painfully against her ear drums and her breath going in and out of her lungs past capacity. This place was suddenly too loud, too bright, too obnoxious.
She was stuck.
She had to get Susanna away from William, but it would be an act of intervention far beyond what she had done today. Still – what sort of ramification could she expect from saving her direct ancestor from violent acts? Would Susanna not go on to live a better life? Wouldn’t that be better for all of her whole family, then?
Or was the next generation conceived this night?
A choice. She remembered Vere’s words. Was she prepared for the sacrifice?
Somehow, Avon convinced Susanna to leave with her. It took all of her heart-pounding, fake-smiling, quick-thinking, and mind-manipulating, but together they left William, looking angry, and walked to the parking lot, Susanna already tripping over her own feet and Avon feeling slightly stretched then and pale.
Avon found the Honda the four girls had drove to the state fair and lifted Susanna into the passenger seat. She rested herself in the driver’s seat, although she didn’t have any keys. It didn’t matter. She locked the doors.
When Anne, Elizabeth, and Judith later found the car, they wondered where Avon had gone and how Susanna, who had obviously been drugged, managed to get herself to the car and lock the doors.
They didn’t notice the extra armband in the driver’s seat or Stratford the Carny staring with his distant grey eyes, a resigned frown on his half-shaven face.