Circus Read Online Free PDF

the bloom of her banter. Instead, he watched Annie’s face, relaxed and pointed up at the ceiling, bathed in the blue light. Then he closed his eyes and listened.
    Six weeks after they put up the tent, Annie brought friends over after school to see it. As they walked to the house, the girls were suspicious.
    “So, it’s just a tent,” said Miranda, checking her phone.
    “Yep.”
    “Like, in your yard?” asked Juliana, who had wanted to go to the boys’ soccer game.
    “Nope,” Annie replied.
    “Where is it then?” asked Abi.
    “You’ll see,” said Annie, fidgeting with her hair.
    When the girls arrived in the living room, they remained unmoved.
    “I don’t get it,” said Selisha, crossing her arms and looking at Juliana for support.
    Juliana shifted her weight to one foot and stuck out her hip. “So, seriously,” she said, “Kevin is playing goal today.”
    “Patience, grasshoppers,” said Annie, opening the flap and sweeping her hand across the interior as though she were presenting the Taj Mahal. In the girls went, and for the first time since they left school, they stopped checking their phones. Miranda even brought her chewing to a standstill and let her gum harden between her teeth. At first, none of the girls said anything at all. They didn’t quite know how to explain how it felt to be in the blue together. Annie sat in the middle, cross-legged, and closed her eyes. Her friends had never been so quiet. After a few minutes, they started giggling. Leslie snuggled into the corner and gave Krista a cuddle.
    Miranda relaxed and blew a bubble. “It’s awesome!”
    “Thanks for having us, Annie,” said Selisha.
    Her father came home to find that there were eight girls inside the tent, and they didn’t even seem squished, just happy and giggly and tinted a luminous blue.
    “There’s room for one more!”
    “That’s okay. Would you girls like a snack?”
    “No food in the tent,” said Annie.
    “Except space food,” her father countered.
    “Not now, Dad.” Annie closed the door flap, but not before giving her dad a wink.
    After a couple of months, people in the neighbourhood started to ask questions. Mrs. Mooney noticed the tent through the living room window of the house next door when she and herhusband were walking their dogs (she suspected hoarding), while the Jacksons, who drove past the plain brown house every day on their way home from work, wondered whether it was some kind of religious shrine. Some of the other neighbours started to ask one another if the tent had always been there and they’d just never noticed. No one knew Annie or her dad quite well enough to inquire.
    It was the mailman who finally investigated one afternoon after working up the courage to do so for a very long time. For months, instead of delivering the mail to the box, he rang the doorbell every day. When Annie answered, he’d open his mouth as if to say something, but would pause for too long before holding the mail out to her and asking “Your mail?” It took Annie a few weeks to catch on that he was angling not just for an explanation but for an invitation.
    “You’ve really got something here,” he said after his first tent experience, hoisting his bag of letters back onto his shoulder.
    “Don’t I just?” said Annie, avoiding eye contact so as not to seem too proud.
    The postman loved the tent so much that he brought his wife over the next day so that she could experience it too. It was a sensation. The postman told everyone he could about it, and in the days that followed, all of the neighbours came over to give it a try. Of course, Mrs. Mooney was the first to arrive.
    “I hear you’ve got ‘quite something’ set up here,” she said, miming air quotes with her fingers. “The postman won’t tell me what it is, so I thought I’d come see for myself. I brought chocolate-caramel-coconut squares.” She handed over a paperplate full of sticky confections and made a quick beeline for the