All the fairgoers smiling like it’s the entrance fee, dressed up for a day out. McCoy, Chad, Tappi. Enjoy, glad, happy. So many people who could be Rayne. My name. Every once in a while, I go into the bathrooms and look in the mirror, scowl hard and rub the lines in until I’m sure I still look ugly. The uglier the better. Beauty is so far from me, so very far from me, it has become the enemy.

The routine is melodramatic, like someone who comes to a fairground fortune teller is asking for: “I am an oracle” (G-d said something like you gotta work by the sweat of your brow, right?); “I come from the east” (east of here, anyways — skid row down Martival Hill); “I will reveal your fortunes” (or at least get my hands on as much as I can).

I ask their names; star sign, too, if they look like they might know. I don’t do anything with it, but for a person who goes to a fly-by-night fortune teller and knows their zodiac, if you don’t ask, it’s like a doctor who doesn’t take your temperature.

From there, it’s improv. The basic rule is that people, unless they’re all decked out in goth, only want to hear good things, and when they say “future predictions,” what they mean is “soppy stuff about my personality.” That’s the stage I’m holding at with a peeling-nosed trucker (Austin Ray Allen, Sagittarius).

“The scent of freedom makes your heart pump,” I busk. Cloras are not poetic. “Your strength lies in doing, rather than being. You will cross oceans one day and follow the call of adventure, and in the future, you will meet a relative you knew not you had. Blood is always drawn back to blood. Eventually.”

“The future,” “one day,” “eventually” —convenient times for fortune tellers, somewhere along the lines of, “when this rattrap is long shut down and you can’t come after me with a lawyer or a baseball bat.”

Austin Ray (tossed in whey) seems satisfied. Probably the claptrap about strengths. He doesn’t even realize that I basically told him he’s no good at existing. Ha. There are some pleasures to this job, after all.

Luckily, none I can’t do without, because it’s closing time. But no worries. Tomorrow, unfortunately, is another day.

Martival Hill is east of here, like I said. ’Bout 15 bus stops. If the fairground is the makeup of this city’s face, Martival Hill is the pimple it can’t cover up. I don’t do skin care. Stretched and cloggy pores, lines that stick around even after I’ve finished frowning, though I’m only 25. Willardton doesn’t wear makeup well either. The fairground is overgrown and scraggly, and if you understand graffiti, you’ll have a nice graphic of the kind of stuff that goes down here at night. Like I said, the fair’s just makeup. The real Willardton has never seen a dermatologist. Or a cosmetician. And Martival Hill is the rawest stretch of skin.

Home sweet home.

Families in Willardton are complicated.

Pop is in Ohio State. At least, so Mom claims; I was just an ankle biter when he got canned. But ’round Martival Hill, the higher the security level of your dad’s slammer, the more respect you get, so maybe Mom was just trying to wangle some schoolyard points for us.

Pop. Exploding danger, lots of hot air, flop. Just a prop.

Mom was in rehab again last I heard. Mom. Throw a bomb. No qualms.

There’s Landon. Abandon. Run all the way to Scranton to live in a mansion. And not because he pulled himself up by his bootstraps either. There are easier ways to make cash.

Bunch of aunts — I guess there’re uncles, too, but not many of them are around — and Gran. Head of the clan. I’m a fan. Gran wore the pants when I was growing up, but she’s senile now.

Then there’s Willow. My roommate. Willow. Reflection in a dreamy pond, graceful wending twigs, pillow, hero, meadow.

Willow, it seems, was my roommate.

Apartment door: open.

Willow’s room: trash all over the floor; decent stuff gone.

Willow’s duffel: unaccounted for.

My room: note on the door. “Trying my luck Clora, you’ve been good memories.”

What in the—

Good memories? Enemies, treacheries, nemeses.

I secure the chain, wilt into a chair.

There’s a sign when you come into Willardton. Welcome To illardton — Where Champions Live.

Willow had a thing with that sign. Every day she came up with another dumb version. All variations of illardton — Where There’s No Future.

Willow gave me a bro hug every time I came back from the fairground, handshake-pull-close-backslap thing. Willow whistled like a farmhand while she made dinner and left her stuff all over the kitchenette, crusting over and gathering flies, but she heated soup for me and made sandwiches. Willow screamed from her bedroom at night in the throes of atrocious nightmares and stumbled round and round the tiny space by day in pajamas, eyes red and unfocused. Willow got a thousand jobs and never lasted more than a week at any of them. In the end, Willow stopped looking.

Now she’s gone.

Welcome to Clora — A Dead-End Life.

The fairground is humming when I show up the next day. Everyone smiling, smiling, smiling, happy, happy, happy. Twinkling with baubles and hard at living. Heavier makeup to cover heavier grief. Still, the fortunes I dispense today have more dark in them than Mr. Bates would like if he heard. Funny, but I think it’s good for business.

The stained-T-shirted mom with scraggly hair in two bunches has a hard face, hard smile, flinty eyes. And like never before, it rattles my cage. Where is she and why is she hiding? I want to shatter that stone, pick through to the vulnerable flesh underneath. “In the place where the cold of heart, bitter, and entitled dwell, in the darkness that is the cradle for light angels, in the frozen wastelands where movement is aberration, there will come a storm,” I tell her. “The storm will leave everything strong standing. Will you be there?”

Ha. Clora the poet, after all. Willow would’ve liked that one.

The mom is quiet. Smiles uncertainly. As if she’s almost fooled herself into believing me.

Willow’s absence aches. Ridiculous, because at this time of day she’d be far away anyway. But somehow the presence of all the distant people at the fair — the people who are so far gone behind their facades that you wonder if there’s anything left there — makes me miss Willow’s friendship. Her reality.

There’s a slow spell, and Bates doesn’t like those, so I better drum up some business if I want to keep my job. Which I don’t, but I do want to keep the paycheck. Behind the Ferris wheel I spot a girl loitering. The grass grows long, still dewy round her ankle-length dress, because no one comes here. So she can’t be too involved in anything. Just watching the wheel with a wistful look like she wishes she could go on it, which is stupid because she’s got the wristband so she can. But who cares.

“I am an oracle,” I tell her. “I come from the East. I can reveal your fortunes.”

Her milk-white cheeks go very red when she blushes. Skittery little smile.

“Oh, I— thank you, but… no.”

“It comes free with the wristband.” Not very oracle-like to put it out there, but convincing anyway.

She shakes her head, jerky, and then blurts like she’s afraid she’s hurt me, “Sorry, I don’t mean….”

Something about her gets to me. “Eh, that’s okay,” I say. “It’s all fake anyway, you know. Not like you’re insulting a profession I studied for years or something.” Then, because she looks so uncomfortable she’s almost writhing, I ask, “What’s your name?”

She goes red again. “Fraidy Katz.”

“’Fraidy Cats?!” I can’t help myself. “As in, yellowbellies?”

Wonder of wonders, now she stops blushing. “No,” she says coldly.

“I don’t even want to know how many times you’ve had to answer that question,” I say. “But then, my name’s not much better. Clora Andersson.”

She smiles. Looks less flimsy for the insult I gave her before. People are weird.

“You’re not from Willardton,” I guess.

“Is that what this place is called?”

“Well, where were you planning to go?”

She shrugs. “The destination wasn’t important.”

“Running away?”

She considers, shrugging with just her head. “Not really. Just looking.”

“Found it yet?”

She laughs with the same wistfulness I’d seen as she watched the Ferris wheel. This time it catches me, because — it’s more Willow-like than anyone else on the grounds. No fake-happy for Miss Cats. “Nope.”

“Well, what are your plans now? If you got any, that is?” Odd that I should ask; what do I care, really? But Willow won’t be there when I get home tonight, and I’m lonely for real human company, conversation that doesn’t revolve around lies and tales.

“I don’t, not really,” she admits. “My parents think—” she stops. Blushing, of course.

“Parents who think; that’s refreshing,” I say. And I mean it — parents, plural, who think, in this context apparently about their daughter. But Fraidy hears what she wants to hear and laughs like we’re both in on a joke.

“They think I’m working in a bookstore in Elmer,” she confides.

Fraidy. Meek little kitty, unraveled edges, genteel lady, oasis shady, full of maybe. When she talks, you get the feeling that there’s a metaphor behind every word, and I find myself trying to crack her sentences open. We’re standing in the same littered patch of grass breathing in the same not-entirely-fresh smell of popcorn, but our lives are in two separate worlds — we could be light-years apart, just seeing holograms of each other. It’s a lonely feeling. And after losing Willow, I want to punch lonely in the face, so I say, “You want a job here?”

Bates glares when I introduce her and snorts into his bristles all through her stammers about who she is. I’m sure he’s gonna tell her to fly a kite, but she lucks out because Logan from the house of mirrors shows up late and drunk again as she’s making her case, and just like that, Fraidy is my coworker.

It’s only on her fourth day that I ask.

She’s been coming on time every morning — I’ve seen Bates lurking, hoping to catch her late, but she cheated him out of that — and leaving on the intercity bus at the end of the day. Parents, Elmer, bookstore; I don’t know what’s up with that, but I assume they don’t know where she’s actually spending her days. Nor do I know why they’d care that she works on the fairgrounds instead of in a bookstore.

Her presence has been itching at me because she’s so different from the fake-happy people all around, and yet still, still, so far away and untouchable. But I hadn’t said anything even though from the first moment I thought it odd for her to be hitching around the country by herself, walking into a bad town without the foggiest clue where she’s going. Fraidy. Little lady. Doesn’t match up. I think she needs help.

But what’s it my business, and what can I do anyway? Nothing. So I do nothing. Until the fourth day, when I give in and ask.

“So what’s it you’re looking for, Fraidy Cats?”

She goes all blotchy and uncomfortable, but by now her discomfort is so standard, it doesn’t make me squirm anymore. “I dunno exactly….”

“Well, roughly, then.”

She giggles uneasily, but I’m not letting go.

“Fine then,” she says when she sees I’m determined, and something dark is on her face. “You know what I’m looking for? For the reason Fraidy Katz exists, okay. Do you know how many girls my age live on my block — just my block? Seventeen. And how many were in my grade in school? Close to 300. Look down the street to the right, a hundred lives like mine, to the left, a hundred lives like mine, what iota of difference will it make if there’s one less in the middle? Even if I do everything I’m supposed to do — anyone could have done it, and—” suddenly she cuts off, as if she’s realized she’s ranting. “And that’s it.”

“You know,” I say, “it’s always confused me, this thing. There are however many jabillion people in the world, but somehow every person feels like they count. Or they should count or have to count. And if they don’t, they don’t know what to do with themselves.”

Fraidy crinkles her snack bag. She has this thing with the weird peanut butter puff snack with the blue-diapered, red-cowlicked mascot on the front. It’s the only thing she’ll eat from the concession stand. “What do you mean?”

“Every Tom, Dick, and Harry feels unique, or at least they hurt for not feeling unique, when there are so many Toms and Dicks and Harrys that there’s no earthly reason any one of them should feel special. ’Cept if it’s a feeling of the soul, I dunno, almost like our spirit telling us that — that we count? That there’s a point to us being?”

Crinkle, crinkle. “Yeah,” says Fraidy, the amateur philosopher. “But what?”

“Dunno,” I say, and it’s not poetic but that’s life. Sometimes you feel all the big things, but then you look around and see that your life is just nitty-gritty pieces of small grey reality, and the notions of meaning and search and why can’t you get a grip on where you actually are.

And who am I anyway? I’m not Rayne, I’m just Clora, misfit and humdrum and of much less earthly use than Fraidy’s neighbors. No answers here, Fraidy Felines. illardton isn’t the kind of place you go to for answers.

The fairgrounds are busy the next day — holiday season. So many people, and each one an island. Or a planet, yeah, that’s better. Orbiting each other, sometimes coming in close, but when all’s said and done, only our outermost edges can ever touch. None of us will ever understand even a fraction of what it means to be someone else.

It’s lonely.

I’m trying not to let Fraidy’s search bother me, but it does. All through palmistry and crystal gazing and telling people whose tiredness is hidden just under the skin that their lives will one day be beautiful. I keep thinking about how she had a purpose, but she couldn’t feel it because she shared that purpose with a million other people, and I wonder — can there be a purpose to my life? Besides making it to payday?

It’s near noon and we’re chatting, me and Fraidy, near the bumper cars — nothing much, just weather/traffic/Bates-bashing — when I catch sight of him, a tiny, unsupervised kid in an unsnapped onesie toddling towards the bucking cars and their oblivious drivers, right under the ridiculously inadequate barrier. “Hey!” I yell, pointing, and a moment later Fraidy’s breaking the speed limit across the grass and gravel and grabbing the little guy ’round the waist just in time.

For a second, it’s drama, and then the kid’s sister or whatever, apathetic enough that a thank-you seems too much to expect, takes him from Fraidy, and that’s it.

For most of the afternoon, it doesn’t even dawn on me.

That it is. It is it.

“Anyone could have done it, and if you hadn’t been there someone else probably would have done it, but you did,” I say to Fraidy when we meet at the gate at closing time, with no introductions. “And maybe it doesn’t matter who else could have. Or how unique and exotic your good deeds are. If the thing is worth doing, then maybe you’re lucky to be doing it, even if a million other folks are doing the same thing on either side of you?”

Fraidy shrinks into herself like a plastic bag getting smaller and smaller in a fire. “I want to be exceptional,” she dares to whisper after a moment, face flaming more than ever before. “I want to be… unique. Worthy.”

“But that’s the thing,” I say, and somehow, a trace of her desire burns across the space between us, and somewhere at the core, our two planets — they do share something. I know and she knows, and we both feel and know that we’re both feeling. “You can be worthy just by doing ordinary things, can’t you? I don’t mean not to try for your best or whatever, but — the value of a deed doesn’t go down because others are doing it, too, does it?”

Fraidy fumbles her bag off her shoulder, pulls out another peanut butter puff snack, jerkily. The bus stop is empty aside from a man who looks like he might have been there all day.

“If all I’m doing is things other people could be, would be, doing, I’m nothing more than a collection of spare parts,” Fraidy says, her tone neutral as white paint, but her fingers viciously shredding the top of her snack bag, little lines torn down from the serrated edge.

“Ahdunno,” I shrug. My bus pulls up, but on the spur of the moment I decide to finish this first. It’s not like there’s anything important waiting for me in Martival Hill. “Maybe. But what better thing to be doing with those spare parts? I mean, if that’s what you have, if that’s where you are, work with it, right?”

Fraidy tosses her snack back into her backpack, uneaten, and shrugs. A moment later, her own bus pulls up, and she’s gone, all the intensity that hides behind her flimsy exterior vanishing with her.

I’m not sure she got me, but somehow I’ve spoken to myself — maybe it’s the planet thing again. There’s me, and there’s illardton, and there isn’t Willow anymore. There’s the fairground, and there’s all the surface-happy people, and my name isn’t Rayne. But maybe it doesn’t have to be Rayne. Maybe I can just be Clora and work with what I’ve got and do my part. Maybe I can find my role, even if it’s a little different from what Bates has in mind. Maybe instead of all that fortune telling I can do a little listening and find the people under the stone without having to smash through with pickaxe predictions.

Fraidy never comes back. I didn’t get her number, don’t know where she lives. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not that she’s done a bunk. She has a way in front of her. Fraidy. Road ahead is shady. Hazy. We may see. Then again, we may not.

But I am here still, in illardton — Where People Learn in the School of Hard Knocks and Climb Slowly, If at All. Where a little bit of skin care does almost nothing for all the scars and wrinkles and blemishes life’s dealt out, but it’s still appreciated — maybe more than on flawless epidermises. The place where nothing, nothing at all, is glamorous. It’s not quite the same for me as for Fraidy, I get it. There are no million neighbors here competing with me in the Goodness Games. But I don’t think it should make a difference.

At work the next day, I look for the person who’s smiling the hardest and whose eyes are the emptiest.

“My name is Clora,” I say. “I come from the east. I can reveal your fortunes.”

“Don’t got none of those,” she says, with a laugh that’s meant to pass it off as a joke. “No fortunes, no.”

“We all do,” I say. “Sometimes they’re hidden, though. I can find them for you — here,” and I hold out the crystal ball.

We talk. The facade, more than thick, is tough. But I am real, and she is real, and we live together, side by side, in this world. That’s stronger than any facade.

She really doesn’t have much by way of fortunes, but who believes in those anyhow? For five minutes, she’s got someone to talk to. Worth a lot more.

I tell her how in the end, after all the storms, we’ll all be standing, and together, and worth it. Then I move on to the washroom trailer to touch up my makeup.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 881)