The Carnival of Wishes & Dreams Read online

  TO LISA ALLEN:

  You are an amazing person

  and an inspiration to me.

  I’m so glad we’re sisters.

   1

  Audrey

  10 HOURS TO MIDNIGHT

  COME TO THE CARNIVAL OF Wishes and Dreams. Meet me at the Ferris wheel at midnight. We’ll ride it together.

  Audrey McKinley stared at the message on the pumpkin gram she’d just received and blinked. She didn’t need an invitation; of course she was going to the carnival tonight. Everyone in Clarkville was going. It was the biggest social event of the entire year.

  She twisted a strand of curly red hair around her finger and examined the rest of the note. Her name was written in big block letters in the space next to the “To” section. But the space next to the “From” section was blank. Had the sender just forgotten to sign their name? Or was the note intended to be anonymous?

  Pumpkin grams were a big fall tradition at Clarkville Middle School. Students paid a dollar to write a special note to their friends on orange construction paper pumpkins, which were delivered at the end of the school day, a few hours before the carnival opened. The whole point was to know who sent them. To know who your friends were and just how many you had.

  Seriously, why even bother sending one if you weren’t going to sign it?

  Audrey glanced up and looked around Miss Prescott’s seventh-period math class. In the seat in front of her, Grace Chang was staring off into space. She considered asking Grace what she thought about the pumpkin gram, but since Audrey and Grace weren’t supposed to talk to each other anymore, she decided against it. The members of the student government were still making deliveries, so she flagged down Lucas Carter, who had dropped the pumpkin gram on her desk.

  “Do you know who sent this?” she asked. “It’s unsigned.”

  Lucas shook his head. “Maybe you have a secret admirer.”

  An anonymous note. A secret admirer. These were mysterious, wonderful things. But the message itself was not wonderful.

  Audrey loved the Carnival of Wishes and Dreams—the fall festival that blew into town for one magical night every October. She loved the gold-and-crimson-striped tents; the carousel that some people swore could grant wishes; the way the carnival lights frosted everything with a golden glow; the way the whole evening smelled like popcorn and roasted peanuts. This year she especially loved that her dad had gotten a job operating one of the rides. It was good money, and she hoped they’d be able to make rent this month instead of falling behind again.

  The only thing she didn’t love was the Ferris wheel. She was afraid of heights—everyone in town knew that. Last year when she’d tried to ride it she’d had a huge panic attack. She’d been sitting with Harlow Carlson—back when they were all still friends with Harlow—and Harlow had tried to keep her calm until their cart reached the bottom. After that, Audrey swore she’d never ride it again.

  She made a quick list of everyone who had already sent her a pumpkin gram. It was a respectable haul, but still, none of that respectable haul included a pumpkin gram from Julia King, her best friend. Julia had been acting a little weird lately—maybe the message was her idea of a joke? Audrey pulled out her phone and texted Julia, who was sitting three seats up in the front row.

  That’s NOT funny.

  Julia texted back: What’s not funny?

  The message you sent, Audrey answered.

  Julia twisted around in her seat and mouthed, What?

  In response, Audrey held up her pumpkin gram and frowned.

  Julia pretended to smack her forehead, and a few seconds later, she sent another text: Totally forgot to send you one.

  Julia forgot to send her a pumpkin gram? Audrey knew for a fact that Julia had sent twenty pumpkin grams. So how could she forget to send one to her own best friend?

  Audrey could only send five this year. She’d had to spend most of the birthday money Aunt Lisa gave her on groceries—and even then she’d felt bad about keeping five dollars for herself. It could have meant a couple extra boxes of cereal in their bare pantry, but instead she’d used it for pumpkin grams.

  She looked down at the message. If it wasn’t from Julia then it had to be from someone else. Someone who wanted to meet her at the Ferris wheel at midnight tonight.

  But who?

   2

  Grace

  GRACE CHANG HAD DONE A very bad thing.

  Well, actually, she’d done several very bad things, and the worst part of it was she couldn’t tell anyone. While everyone else in Miss Prescott’s seventh-period math class was opening pumpkin grams, Grace was staring straight ahead, feeling sick to her stomach.

  The first very bad thing Grace had done was to tell her mother the truth last night when she’d asked Grace what she thought of her new hair color. Well, colors, plural, because there were three of them. Her mother’s once-long black hair was now a blue that faded to purple, then faded to pink, like a waterfall of color. Her mother said it was something called ombré.

  “Your head looks like the top of an ice-cream cone,” Grace had answered, and they both knew it was an insult. Grace didn’t like ice cream; she was allergic to dairy.

  Her mother’s hair didn’t really look like an ice-cream cone—or any other type of dessert—but actually cool and stylish, because she was a hairdresser. In Grace’s opinion, mothers weren’t supposed to look cool and stylish. But adults seldom want the truth when they ask for your opinion—they just want you to agree with them—so Grace knew it was her own fault when her mother got mad and grounded her.

  Well, she didn’t ground her just because of that. Her mother also grounded her because she’d received a note from school regarding Grace’s lack of participation in class. It was the second very bad thing Grace had done. But in Grace’s opinion there had been no lack; she’d simply been performing a scientific experiment: Exactly how long would it take her mother to figure out she wasn’t bothering to do any classwork whatsoever?

  Two and a half weeks, as it turned out, thanks to the note.

  Her mother had flipped out and said she was sick of Grace’s snarky attitude and that she’d better shape up, pronto, and start being nicer. But Grace didn’t feel like being nice these days. Or happy. You try being happy when your mother up and announces you’re moving in three weeks. One minute you’re eating dinner and then . . . BAM! Just like that, no warning. Those three weeks were up tomorrow morning, when they’d climb into the huge moving truck her mother had rented and head to their new home in California, where her mother said the sun always shone.

  Grace hated California. And sunshine.

  Her mother said she needed to leave Clarkville because she couldn’t handle the memories. Well, maybe she wanted to forget, but Grace did not. Sometimes Grace wondered if leaving Clarkville meant she’d be leaving her dad’s memory behind.

  So now Grace was grounded, which was a very serious problem. She couldn’t spend her last night in Clarkville stuck at home. She had overheard something she wasn’t supposed to hear. Something that had to do with Harlow Carlson, the carnival, and—

  A boy dropped a pumpkin gram on her desk and said, “Hi, Grace! Are you going to the carnival tonight?”

  Grace tugged her lucky Cubs baseball cap down lower so no one would see the stupid grin spreading across her face. It wasn’t just any boy standing in front of her; it was Diego Martinez, the student body president of the eighth grade and the boy she’d loved since forever. Or since the third grade, when he’d told off Ethan McKinley—Audrey McKinley’s twin brother—after Ethan smacked her in the face with a dodgeball. Diego had hollered that you weren’t supposed to hit girls, then he’d hauled off and socke
d Ethan in the stomach. He’d been Grace’s hero ever since.

  But Diego had definitely not been in love with Grace since the third grade. Probably because she rarely spoke to him, even though their families had been friends for years. She glanced down at her pumpkin gram and read the message:

  Come to the Carnival of Wishes and Dreams. Meet me at the Ferris wheel at midnight. We’ll ride it together.

  A text came in from Julia King: Can’t wait for tonight! I’m going out to dinner before the carnival with my parents. Want to come with us?

  Grace’s stomach was really heaving now. Because Julia had asked her to do something yesterday. Something important. And Grace hadn’t done it. But Julia thought she had.

  “Earth to Grace? Hello, anybody home?” A sweaty palm waved in front of her face. That palm belonged to Diego, who had been standing in front of her this whole time, waiting for Grace to answer his question.

  “Sorry, what?” Grace said, looking up.

  “I said, ‘Are you going to the carnival tonight?’ ”

  Having Diego stand so close to her was making it hard to breathe, so she could only squeak out, “Why?”

  “Well . . .” Diego looked like he really wanted to say something, and Grace’s heart sped up and thundered in her ears. But the members of the student government were leaving now, so he just shook his head and said, “Never mind. Hope to see you there tonight.”

  He left and Grace let out a breath. That was the longest conversation they’d had in a while. And he hoped to see her tonight—her last night in Clarkville!

  Except she was still grounded; she wasn’t supposed to go to the carnival. And Grace always did what she was supposed to do.

  She was like her dad in that way. He always did what he was supposed to do. Take running into burning buildings, for instance. That was his job, so he did it all the time. Except for that one time last year. He’d run into a burning building—a factory, actually—but he hadn’t run back out. That was a whole other story, though, and Grace really didn’t want to think about it right now.

  But since she was thinking about it, it gave her another thought, one that has occurred to her a lot lately: Doing what you’re supposed to do doesn’t always work out that great. Maybe sometimes doing what you’re not supposed to do is the way to go.

  Miss Prescott had moved to the front of the class and was yammering on about fractions, but no one was paying any attention. Everyone was too excited about the pumpkin grams and the carnival. Grace didn’t even know why the teachers made them go to school on the day of the carnival. It should be a holiday, in her opinion.

  Grace had a lot of opinions, actually.

  But even though she had lots of opinions in her head, she oftentimes had trouble turning them into words in her mouth. She was the quietest girl in the eighth grade. A lot of her classmates probably thought she was mute. Or maybe just a major dork. Of course, no one could ever actually say that. Not when she was friends with Julia King.

  Which was why Grace definitely should have done the thing Julia asked her to do.

  I can’t go tonight, Grace finally texted Julia back. I’m grounded, remember?

  Julia replied immediately: Can’t you talk your mother into letting you off, just for tonight?

  Grace gulped; she would be in so much trouble if Julia found out what Grace had not done. Maybe it was better that she was grounded and couldn’t go tonight. Except for that thing that she’d overheard in the library the other day. If her ears could be trusted, then she absolutely needed to be at the carnival tonight.

  Jeremy Johnson, the boy who sat next to her and never minded his own business, leaned over. “That’s a strange message,” he said, tapping her pumpkin gram. “Who sent it to you?”

  Grace looked down. The space next to the word “From” was blank.

  “No one,” she answered.

   3

  Harlow

  HARLOW CARLSON SAT AT THE back of Miss Prescott’s seventh-period math class, ignoring everyone, especially the members of the student government as they passed out pumpkin grams. Pumpkin grams at Clarkville Middle School were just one more way for the students to remind one another who was popular and well-liked, or, as was the case for Harlow, who was not.

  Instead she was flipping through the pictures she’d snapped with her phone last weekend. They all featured important places in Clarkville: city hall, the abandoned textile mill, the old-fashioned lampposts on Main Street, the Clarkville Bridge. Her favorite shot by far was of the old water tower, the side of which bore the town’s unofficial slogan in neat red paint:

  CLARKVILLE

  THE PLACE WHERE THE

  PEOPLE YOU LOVE LIVE

  Mrs. Murphy—the adviser for the yearbook club—had asked Harlow to take the photos so they could devote a couple pages to the town itself this year. It was extra work on top of her normal duties as the editor of the yearbook, but Harlow didn’t mind. After all, she didn’t have much else to do on the weekends.

  She kept scrolling and realized she’d forgotten to take a picture of the town wishing well. She glanced outside the window. The sunlight was deep and golden; a perfect autumn afternoon. She’d ask her mom if they could make a small detour on the way home today so she could get the shot.

  Lucas Carter passed by and plopped an orange construction paper pumpkin on her desk. Harlow figured it must be a mistake. But when she tried to hand it back to him he wouldn’t take it.

  “It has your name on it,” he said. “Look.”

  Harlow looked; he was right, it did have her name on it. The sender hadn’t bothered to sign it and he—or she—had written an odd message:

  Come to the Carnival of Wishes and Dreams. Meet me at the Ferris wheel at midnight. We’ll ride it together.

  Harlow still thought it might be a mistake. No one at school wanted to meet her at the carnival, just like no one wanted to sit next to her in class or in the cafeteria.

  Last year she wouldn’t have thought it was a mistake. She would have expected to receive a pumpkin gram. A whole pile of them, actually; more than anyone else, even Julia King. But that was before the fire.

  Even if it was a mistake, Harlow took her phone out of her backpack and snapped a picture of the pumpkin gram. This was a moment; she wanted to capture it. Harlow collected moments the way some people collected coins, or maybe marbles. She took another shot, this time zooming in just to catch the first line: Come to the Carnival of Wishes and Dreams . . .

  After she put her phone away, she glanced out the window again. Beyond the football field the wheat fields stretched to the horizon. A few miles away, at the end of Hilltop Street, the carnival would already be set up; a shadow against the cornflower sky, waiting for the sun to set, for the clock to strike six, when the wrought iron gates would be unlocked and the residents of Clarkville would go charging inside.

  She looked at the message again: Meet me at the Ferris wheel at midnight.

  A cloud inched across the sky, a shadow crept into the classroom, and a chill raced down Harlow’s spine.

  Then again, maybe the note wasn’t a mistake. Lots of things weren’t mistakes. Like when she went to sit at Julia’s cafeteria table last week. She thought maybe enough time had passed and things would be okay again. She’d thought wrong. So maybe it was a joke, a really nasty one. Maybe whoever sent the note was just waiting for her to show up at the Ferris wheel at midnight, only for there to be no one waiting.

  Or—she thought back to the dead sardine someone had shoved in her locker yesterday—maybe someone would be waiting for Harlow. Someone who thought it would be funny to play another prank on her.

  Harlow stared out the window and absently scratched at her nose, trying to puzzle it out. Who wanted to meet her at midnight, and why? She hadn’t even been planning on going to the carnival tonight. Mostly because she didn’t have anyone to go with.

  Except earlier today Mrs. Murphy said she expected Harlow to take tons of pictures of the carnival. So in
a way, it was sort of her job to go.

  Harlow loved taking pictures. She just wished every once in a while someone would want to be in a picture with her, but lately the only time anyone even smiled at her was when she was staring at them through the lens of her camera phone. Otherwise, ever since the fire, everyone pretended like she didn’t exist.

  Like right now, for instance. Harlow glanced down and saw a spider crawling toward Erin Donoghue’s open backpack. Harlow bit back a scream and forced herself to take deep breaths, feeling foolish. It was just a small spider, after all. She didn’t know why they scared her so much. “Erin,” she whispered urgently. “Erin!”

  Erin was sitting right next to her; there’s no way she didn’t hear Harlow’s call. But Erin didn’t acknowledge her at all. She didn’t turn her head; she didn’t even blink.

  “Erin, there’s a spider—” Harlow began, but it didn’t matter. Lucas Carter came by again to drop a pumpkin gram on Erin’s desk, and squashed the spider with his sneaker. Erin ignored Harlow and thanked Lucas.

  A pang echoed through Harlow’s middle. For the last year, she had felt a huge sense of loss. Like waking up one day and finding out something that should be there suddenly isn’t. Kind of like those people who lose an arm or a leg but their phantom limb itches anyway.

  Harlow had a phantom limb. Well, limbs, plural—one for every friend she lost last year. The itching was at its worst when everyone talked and left her out. Because even though Miss Prescott had stopped speaking and the class was quiet now, everyone was talking. Texting, actually. Whole conversations were happening as students tapped on cell phones hidden in their laps. Plans were being made and jokes were being told, but it was all being done silently. The only noise in the room at all was the humming of the air conditioner and the sound of a pencil rolling off a desk.

  And the soft clicking of a camera shutter.

  Harlow snapped out of her thoughts and looked over, but all she saw was Erin tapping innocently on her phone. On the other side of Erin sat Ethan McKinley, scowling because Miss Prescott had given him detention for hiding all the erasable markers again. Still, she felt something like dread ballooning in her heart.