Free Tell My Sorrows to the Stones by Christopher Golden Page A

done, she’d put a hand over her mouth to hide her laughter. And when he confessed that he’d been suspended for three days—even though he was the one with the black eye—she’d laughed so hard she had cried, tears streaming down her pretty face, ruining her makeup.
    Benny had become the class clown by design. He knew every class had to have one, and he’d be damned if he let some other guy take on that role. His classmates—hell, the whole school—would remember him forever as
that guy
, the one with the jokes, the one with the faces, the one who couldn’t be serious for two seconds.
    There were dark moods, of course. Who didn’t have them? Who hadn’t spent a little time studying his own face in the mirror, trying to recognize something . . . anything of value? Who hadn’t tested the edges of the sharpest knives on the hidden parts of their skin just to see how sharp they really were, or sat in the dark for a while and wondered if people were laughing with him or at him?
    By the time senior year of high school rolled around, Benny didn’t know how to be anything but funny, and he didn’t want to learn. His mother had told him he ought to try to do birthday parties, paint himself up as a clown and make children laugh. Benny would rather have cut his own throat. He didn’t want to do gags at birthday parties for a bunch of nose-picking brats; he wanted to perform in a circus.
    The Macintosh Traveling Circus Troupe came to town in the spring of his senior year. The Macintosh was small enough that it still relied on posters hung at ice cream stands and grocery stores and barber shops to pull in an audience. In a little town like Corriveau, Vermont, that sort of thing still worked.
    He’d gone to the circus every day, hung around before and after shows, talked to the workers, the animal trainers, the ticket takers, and eventually worked up the courage to talk to the clowns. By the third day, after hours, they invited him into clown alley to talk with them while they removed their makeup and hung up costumes and props. Benny could barely breathe. It had felt to him as though he had stepped into a film, or into history. He could smell the greasepaint, could practically feel the texture of the costumes, could hear the roar of the crowd, even though the tent had stood empty by then.
    The second-to-last night, his hopes of an invitation fast fading, he confessed his hopes and dreams and begged for an apprenticeship. The clowns had indulged him, patted him on the back, told stories of their own glory days, but none of them had encouraged him. It was a hell of a life, they’d said, something they would never wish on anybody. It was brutal on family and worse on love. Circus life set them apart from the rest of the world, created a distance that could never be bridged. Once you were in, you were in. They were trying to scare him off, but Benny had persisted.
    Two hours after their final performance, as they were packing to move on, Zerbo—the boss clown—had given him the word. They’d take him on for the rest of the season, no pay, just food and a place to lay his head. If he was good enough to take part in the act by the season’s end, and could get some laughs of his own, the circus manager—Mr. Appleby—would hire him on. If not, he’d be sent home.
    Benny had given it his all, pulled out every gag, every funny face, every silly walk he had ever learned. He had studied the troupe, could stand-in for almost any of them if someone fell ill. At the end of the season, on the fairgrounds in Briarwood, Connecticut, they were as good as their word—a spotlight of his own, a chance to prove himself.
    The laughs had been thin and the applause half-hearted, but Zerbo had given him the thumbs up. Tiny had told him later that it had been a near thing, but he’d worked so hard they had wanted to give him a second chance.
    Now, four years of second chances later, he still felt like an apprentice.
    That Friday night,