THE LITTLE GIRL’S Sewing Book. Pink dress and matching bow on her pretty pretty head, dark ringlets, sewing a lace handkerchief as her dolls looked on. Three of the dolls were naked, that was naughty, and he looked away but only for an instant.

One doll had three smaller dolls of her own. A toy bear, too, but he snipped that out and squashed it in between his fingers and threw it away dirty paper. He cut very carefully around the girl, very carefully don’t slice her hand, the one that held a needle so tiny it could not be seen. There were daffodils in the window and he cut them out, too, and got the paste and pasted them onto the girl’s hair so soft such pretty pretty hair such

Goddamn it oh goddamn it oh fuck the filthy bastard white paste on her face and in her little eyes and it was ruint now all ruint oh fuck he didn’t mean to

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

PIN WANDERED ALONG the Pike, hoping she might run into Ikie or Joe Bean or even Mugsy Morrissey, who was dumb as a switch but could recite the alphabet while burping. She wanted to tell someone she’d seen Charlie Chaplin. Her only currency with the boys she ran with was the stories she told them. Stuff she read in the papers or stories she made up, based on the movies she watched in the Comique.

But everyone she knew was at work. The boys all had fathers employed by the park, men who repaired the merry-go-round when it broke down, repainted the flames on its dragons and swans, recalibrated the gears if it ran too fast or slow. They operated the roller coasters and dark rides, took money for the rigged games of chance, chanted the bally for Clyde’s magic show and the High Striker, the Casino Restaurant and Palace Ballroom and Woodland Cabaret. Mugsy’s father ran the Velvet Coaster, and Mugsy worked with him, a job Pin coveted—people riding the coasters lost coins, wallets, eyeglasses, jewelry, false teeth. When he wasn’t sniping, Louie cleaned the stables at the racetrack. Ikie worked backstage at the Sunny South minstrel show and helped out as a ticket taker for Clyde, who was his uncle.

Pin stared at the crowds, remembering her mother’s words back in their tenement room. You have to stay safe…In the fall it will be different. Till then, you need to stay safe.

Yet here were all these people, all of them paying to be not safe, to pretend they’d fall off a cliff or drown, or be snatched at by ghouls in the dark.