"I like it," I said.

"I've never seen a kid wearing a suit like that before," Sam said. "Not unless they were at a wedding or a funeral. Are you forced to wear it?"

"No," I said.

"Did you ask your parents if you could join the Cirque?" Evra said then, to distract Sam's attention.

"No," Sam sighed. "I told them about it, of course, but I figured it would be best to take it slowly. I won't tell them until just before I leave, or maybe not until I'm gone."

"So you still plan to join?" I asked.

"You bet!" Sam said. "I know you tried scaring me away, but I'll get in somehow. You wait. I'll keep coming around. I'll read books and learn everything there is to know about freak shows, and then I'll go to your boss and state my case. He won't be able to turn me down."

Evra and I smiled at each other. We knew Sam's dream would never lead to anything, but we didn't have the heart to tell him.

We went to see an old, deserted railroad station, about two miles away, which Sam had told us about.

"It's great," he said. "They used to work on trains there, repair and paint them and stuff like that. It was a busy station when it was open. Then a new station opened closer to the city and this place went bankrupt. It's a great place to play. There are rusty old railroad tracks, empty sheds, a guardhouse, and a couple of ancient train cars."

"Is it safe?" Evra asked.

"My mother says it isn't," Sam told us. "It's one of the few places she tells me to stay away from. She says I could fall through the roof of one of the cars or trip on a rail or something. But I've been there lots of times and nothing's ever happened."

It was another sunny day, and we were walking slowly under the shade of the trees when I smelled something strange. I stopped and sniffed the air. Evra could smell it, too.

"What is that?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, sniffing the air next to me. "Which way is it coming from?"

"I can't tell," I said. It was a thick, heavy, sour smell.

Sam hadn't smelled anything and kept walking ahead of us. Then he realized we weren't beside him, Hopped, and turned to see what was going on.

"What's wrong?" he asked. "Why aren't you-"

" Gotcha !" a voice yelled behind me, and before I could move I felt a firm hand grab my shoulder and spin me around. I saw a large, hairy face, and then suddenly I was falling backward, thrown off-balance by the force of the hand.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Ifell hard on the ground and sprained my arm. I screamed with pain, then tried twisting away from the hairy figure above me. Before I could do anything, he was crouching by my side with a fierce look on his face.

"Oh, hey, man, I didn't hurt you, did I?" He had a friendly voice, and I realized my life wasn't in danger; the look on his face was one of concern, not anger.

"I didn't mean to freak you out," the man said. "I was just trying to scare you a little, man, for fun."

I sat up and rubbed my elbow. "I'm okay," I said.

"You're sure? It ain't broken, is it? I've got herbs that can help, if it is."

"Herbs can't fix broken bones," Sam said. He was now standing beside Evra.

"They sure can't," the stranger agreed, "but they can elevate you to planes of consciousness where worldly concerns like broken bones are nothing but minor blips on the cosmic map." He paused and stroked his beard. "Of course, they burn out your brain cells, too…"

Sam's blank face showed that even he didn't understand that long sentence.

"I'm okay," I said again. I stood up and rotated my arm. "I just twisted it. It'll be fine in a couple of minutes."

"Man, that's good to hear," the stranger said. "I'd hate to be the cause of bodily harm. Hurt's a bad trip, man."

I studied him in more detail. He was big and chubby, with a bushy black beard and long, scraggly hair. His clothes were dirty and there was no way he'd had a bath recently, because he stank to high heaven. That's what the strange smell had been. He was really friendly looking; it made me feel stupid thinking about how afraid of him I'd been.

"Are you guys locals?" the man asked.

"I am," Sam said. "These guys are with the circus."

"Circus?" The man smiled. "There's a circus around here? Oh, man, how did I miss it? Where is it? I love the circus. I never pass up a chance to see clowns in action."

"It's not that sort of circus," Sam told him. "It's a freak show."

"A freak show?" The man stared at Sam, then at Evra, whose scales and color pretty much marked him out as one of the performers. "Are you part of a freak show, man?" he asked.

Evra nodded shyly.

"They don't mistreat you, do they?" the man asked. "They don't whip you or under-feed you or make you do things you don't want to?"

"No." Evra shook his head.

"You're there of your own free will?"

"Yes," Evra said. "All of us are. It's our home."

"Oh. Well, that's okay," the man said, smiling again. "You hear rumors about those small traveling shows. You…" He slapped his forehead. "Oh man, I haven't introduced myself, have I? I'm so dumb sometimes. R.V.'s the name."

"R.V.? That's a funny name," I remarked.

He coughed with embarrassment. "Well," he said, lowering his voice to a whisper, "it's short for Reggie Veggie."

" Reggie Veggie ?" I laughed.

"Yeah," he said. "Reggie's my real name. Reggie Veggie's what they called me in school, because I'm a vegetarian. Well, I never liked that, so I asked them to call me R.V. instead. Some did, but not many." He looked miserable at the memory. "You can call me Reggie Veggie if you want," he told us.

"R.V. is fine by me," I assured him.

"Me, too," Evra said.

"And me," Sam added.

"Cool!" R.V. brightened up. "So, that's my name out in the open. How about you three?"

"Darren Shan," I told him, and we shook hands.

"Sam Grest."

"Evra Von."

"Evra Von what?" R.V. asked, as I had when I first met Evra.

"Just plain Von," Evra said.

"Oh." R.V. smiled. "Cool!"

R.V. was an ecowarrior, here to stop a road from being built. He was a member of NOP — Nature's Opposing Protectors — and had traveled the country saving forests and lakes and animals and stuff like that.

He offered to show us around his camp, and we jumped at the chance. The railway station could wait. This was an opportunity that wouldn't come every day.

He talked about the environment nonstop as we walked. He told us about all the crappy things being done to Mother Nature, the forests we were destroying, the rivers we were polluting, the air we were poisoning, the animals we were driving to extinction.

"And this is all in our own country!" he said. "I'm not talking about stuff happening somewhere else. This is what we're doing to our own land!"

NOP was fighting to save the earth from greedy, dangerous humans who didn't care what they did to it. I had journeyed up and down the country trying to make other people aware of the dangers. They gave out pamphlets and books about how to protect the environment.

"But raising awareness ain't enough," R.V. told us. "It's a start, but we must do more. We have to stop the pollution and destruction of the countryside. Take this place: They were going to build a road through an old burial ground, a place where people buried their dead thousands of years ago. Can you imagine that, man? Destroying a part of history, just to save drivers ten or twenty minutes!"

R.V. shook his head sadly. "These are crazy times, man," he said. "The things we're doing to this planet… In the future — assuming there is one — people will look back on what we've done and call us idiotic barbarians."

He was very passionate about the environment, and after listening to him for a while, so were Sam, Evra and me. I hadn't thought about it much before, but after a couple of hours with R.V., I realized I should have. As R.V. said, those who don't think and act now can't complain when the world crumbles around their ears later.