Excerpt: Swamp and the Circus Xavier

Star is perpetually gloomy, a tall wide person who looks as though he’s made out of wire, he’s so thin. He moves a bit like a tumbleweed, the only pattern of movement that could possibly be acceptable for someone so spindly that isn’t an insect. He wears a wizard hat in purple velvet, complete with the silver sequin stars and moons, and it droops to one side and manages to make his straight brown hair more melancholy-looking by pressing it flat. But Star’s hat is like Keenan’s makeup – he sleeps with it on, he notices when it so much as shifts with a gust of air, it’s him.
Mask stomped around outside Star’s bunk until he issued a moan from under the curtains, and then she ripped them aside and tackled him and tore him away from his covers. He whimpered and folded all his spindly limbs into a tangle and shivered and clutched his hat against his face and said “Noooo, Mask,” in a voice that suggested he was being torn away to the depths of hell.
“Michael’s here,” she told him, and rattled the pile that was Star with a sound kick in what might have been his shin, at which he wailed.
“Mask,” he said, “It’s light outside,” and then, with a touch of horror, more slowly, “It’s light outside.” He had an aura of gloom, even to his groggy voice, of prophetic misery. “It’s light outside, and you’ve brought a man named Michael to my bed, where I was sleeping. I was sleeping here, Mask.”
“Sucks for you, don’t it? I’m going back to bed, and Michael here might be gay, because he folds his socks and there are patterns and things, and if you don’t attend to him he might crawl into your bed and do something terrible.”
“Who’s this, who’s this? Who is this Michael, and why is he awake? And why is he named Michael?”
Mask kicked him again. “He’s the one Keenan’s been on about. The trapeze boy.”
I wanted to ask very much right then, but I kept my mouth shut. Mask was liable to kick anything that breathed in her space.
“I’m afraid of heights,” Star said, turning his watery red-rimmed eyes dolefully to me. “Did you know that you have a fifty percent chance of dying from a ten foot fall? Just ten feet. That’s one story. Think what could happen if it’s twenty feet. Twenty feet! But I’d rather die, really, if I fell, because I hate falling, and I hate breaking limbs, and I am very sure I would break my limbs.”
“You might,” I said, trying to make friendly conversation.
“I would,” he told me with great certainty, from under the floppy hat and a wrinkled mess of too-short flannel pajamas. “I know these things. I know.”