The Funhouse

enjoy that. I'm not going to do anything she would enjoy.
        Tears continued to slide down his cheeks, but he didn't call that crying. Crying was when you wailed your head off and got a runny nose and blubbered and got red in the face and just totally lost control of yourself.
        He turned away from the wastebasket and went to his desk, from which Mama had removed all of the miniature monsters he had collected. The only thing left was his bank. He picked that up and carried it to the bed.
        He saved his money in a one-gallon Mason jar. Most of it was in coins, squeezed bit by bit from his small weekly allowance, which he earned by keeping his room neat and by helping around the house. He also earned quarters by running to the 7-Eleven for Mrs. Jannison, the old lady who lived next door. There were several dollar bills in the jar, too, most of those were birthday gifts from his Grandma Harper, his Uncle John Harper, and his Aunt Emma Williams, who was Daddy's sister.
        Joey emptied the contents of the jar onto the bed and counted it. Twenty-nine dollars. And a nickel. He was old enough to know that it wasn't a fortune, but it still seemed like a lot of money to him.
        You could go a long way on twenty-nine dollars. He wasn't sure exactly how far you could go, but he figured at least two hundred miles.
        He was going to pack up and run away from home. He had to run away. If he stayed around much longer, Mama was going to come into his room one night, really drunk, really pissed, and she was going to kill him.
        Just like she had killed Victor.
        Whoever Victor was.
        He thought about what it would be like, going off on his own to some strange town, far away. It would be lonely, for one thing. He wouldn't, miss Mama. He wouldn't even miss his father very much. But he sure would miss Amy. When he thought of leaving Amy and never seeing her again, he felt his throat tighten, and he thought he was going to bawl.
         Stop it! Be tough!
        He bit his tongue until the urge to cry subsided and he was sure he was in control of himself.
        Running away from home didn't mean he would never see Amy for the rest of his life. She would be leaving home, too, in a couple of years, going away to live on her own, and he could join up with her then.
        They could live together in an apartment in New York City or someplace great like that, and Amy would become a famous painter, and he would finish growing up. If he showed up on Amy's doorstep a couple of years from now, she wouldn't turn him in to Mama, not Amy.
        He felt better already.
        He put his money back in the big Mason jar and screwed the lid on tight. He returned the jar to his desk.
        He would have to get coin wrappers from the bank and package his nickels, dimes, and quarters into rolls, then trade them in for folding money. He couldn't run away from home with his pockets stuffed full of loose, jangling change, that would be childish.
        He slipped into bed again and turned off the light.
        The only thing bad about running away was that he would miss the county fair in July. He had been looking forward to it for nearly a year.
        Mama didn't approve of going to the fair and mixing with those carnival people. She said they were dirty and dangerous, a bunch of crooks.
        Joey didn't put much faith in what Mama said, about anyone. So far as Mama was concerned, there was hardly a person in the whole world who was free of sin.
        Some years his father took him to the carnival on Saturday, the last day of the fair. But other years there was too much work at the law office, and Daddy couldn't get away.
        This year Joey had intended to sneak off to the carnival on his own. The fairgrounds were less than two miles away from the Harper house, and he had to travel only two streets to get there. It was an easy place to find, high up on the hill. Joey had planned to tell his mother that he was going to the library for the day, which he occasionally did, but then he was going to take his bicycle out to the fairgrounds and have himself a real ball all morning and afternoon, getting home just in time for supper, without Mama being any the wiser.
        He especially hated to miss the fair this year because it was going to be bigger and better than ever. The midway would be run by a different outfit from the one that had always come to Royal City in