Grim anthology
Grim anthology
Christine Johnson
In the days when fairy tales were first spun, they weren’t the sweet and cheerful stories we tell today. Back then, fairy tales were terrifying. They were a warning to the listener to stay out of the night, to keep away from the mystical and ignore the mysterious. Prepare to open a treasure box of the unusual and the macabre.Grim features some of today’s best young adult authors sharing their own unique retellings of classic fairy tales from around the world. These talented writers, many of them New York Times bestsellers or award winners, put their own spin on these magical worlds.Ellen HopkinsAmanda HockingJulie KagawaClaudia GrayRachel HawkinsKimberly DertingMyra McEntireMalinda LoSarah Rees BrennanJackson PearceChristine JohnsonJeri Smith-ReadyShaun David HutchinsonSaundra MitchellSonia GenslerTessa GrattonJon Skovron.
Inspired by classic fairy tales, but with a dark and sinister twist, Grim contains short stories from some of the best voices in young adult literature today:
Ellen Hopkins
Amanda Hocking
Julie Kagawa
Claudia Gray
Rachel Hawkins
Kimberly Derting
Myra McEntire
Malinda Lo
Sarah Rees-Brennan
Jackson Pearce
Christine Johnson
Jeri Smith Ready
Shaun David Hutchinson
Saundra Mitchell
Sonia Gensler
Tessa Gratton
Jon Skrovan
Edited by Christine Johnson
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This is for you.
Table of Contents
The Key (#ub0835894-18c1-5ff8-99a0-388c7e4c99e6) by Rachel Hawkins
Figment (#u75aeb2d3-14de-5ddf-bf61-e597593b0f2c) by Jeri Smith-Ready
The Twelfth Girl (#u243b6b7e-79e3-569e-ad21-ea6a002d7137) by Malinda Lo
The Raven Princess (#u3253aabc-333d-5a99-a0f9-4801911a50ce) by Jon Skovron
Thinner Than Water (#litres_trial_promo) by Saundra Mitchell
Before the Rose Bloomed: A Retelling of The Snow Queen (#litres_trial_promo) by Ellen Hopkins
Beast/Beast (#litres_trial_promo) by Tessa Gratton
The Brothers Piggett (#litres_trial_promo) by Julie Kagawa
Untethered (#litres_trial_promo) by Sonia Gensler
Better (#litres_trial_promo) by Shaun David Hutchinson
Light It Up (#litres_trial_promo) by Kimberly Derting
Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tongue (#litres_trial_promo) by Christine Johnson
A Real Boy (#litres_trial_promo) by Claudia Gray
Skin Trade (#litres_trial_promo) by Myra McEntire
Beauty and the Chad (#litres_trial_promo) by Sarah Rees Brennan
The Pink: A Grimm Story (#litres_trial_promo) by Amanda Hocking
Sell Out (#litres_trial_promo) by Jackson Pearce
About the Authors (#litres_trial_promo)
THE KEY
by Rachel Hawkins
High school is hard enough without having a psychic for a mom.
And no, I don’t mean she has that uniquely Mom-like sixth sense. I mean she’s literally a psychic. Reading your palms, telling you your future, all for the bargain price of fifty bucks a session (a hundred if you want a full hour, but no one ever does).
Momma runs her business out of our trailer. I know there are people who say that trailers can be nice, fancy even.
Those people had never been to our trailer.
It isn’t even a double-wide, which would have at least given us enough space for more than one ratty couch. I think the couch had belonged to my nana at some point. I knew whoever had had it before us had smoked on it, though. It carried the scent of thousands of cigarettes, millions even, deep inside every cabbage rose on its stained and burned cushions.
Momma’s “studio,” as she liked to call it, was in the second bedroom. When she wasn’t reading people’s fortunes, I slept on an air mattress on the floor in there. It was either that or share with Momma, which no, thank you. And like I said, the couch stunk—and was haunted besides—so I made do with the air mattress, no matter how big a pain in the ass it was to pump it up every single night, only to roll it back flat every morning.
The studio was the one nice room in the whole trailer. In there, the linoleum didn’t have duct tape over the cracks. In fact, you couldn’t see the linoleum at all. Momma had bought a real nice rug from Walmart years ago. It was a little too big for the room, curling up against the walls, but Momma kept it so dark in there that no one ever really noticed.
There had been a beaded curtain separating the studio from the rest of the trailer, but I’d talked Momma into getting rid of it. It looked cheap and trashy. I realized that was kind of an ironic statement, considering the rest of our place, but I had some limits. She’d hung a paisley shawl in the doorway instead, and while that wasn’t great, at least it didn’t rattle every time you walked past it.
Momma was standing in front of that shawl on Saturday morning, yawning as she cradled a cup of coffee in her hands. I stood at the sink, washing last night’s dinner dishes and looking out the window. On the porch of the next trailer over, a little girl with hair nearly the same white-blond as mine was playing with a water hose, giggling as she sprayed the vinyl siding. I was smiling at her and nearly missed what Momma was saying. Only when she said, “So you’ll need to stay close by today,” did I turn around, frowning at her.
“I can’t,” I told her, the dish in my hand dripping water onto the stained and faded linoleum. “I have track practice at noon.”
Momma scowled. Years ago, she had been pretty, but there was something hard in her face now that had nothing to do with aging or wrinkles. “You had track practice last weekend.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Yeah, I have it every weekend. And three times a week after school. Come on, Momma. Use your powers and envision me jogging around the track.” I wiggled my sudsy fingers at her. “Because trust me, that’s my future today.”
Momma sighed, crossing over to me and dropping her nearly empty mug in my newly cleaned sink. I bit my lip as coffee splashed over the enamel. Then she held her hands out to me and I groaned. “Oh, come on, Momma, I was joking.”
Moving closer, Momma insisted, “Give ’em here.”
Still grumbling, I laid my palms flat on hers, and taking a deep breath, Momma closed her eyes. Almost immediately, she frowned. “Girl, you weren’t kidding.”
“About what?”
“The running. You are gonna run and run today. Fast.”
I took my hands back even as I smiled a little bit. “I am trying to beat my best time today—4:07. School record is 4:01, so I’m almost there.”
“Well, if what I saw was any indication, you’re gonna sail right through it, sweetheart. You were runnin’ like your life depended on it, from what I could see.”
Turning away from her, I started to rinse her coffee out of the sink. “In that case, I guess I’ll be going to track practice today, after all.”
Momma patted my shoulder blade. “The appointment is at ten, so we’ll definitely be done by noon.”
They’d be done by 10:30—10:15, probably. Usually once people got a look at our place, they didn’t like to stay long. I glanced at Momma, still in a mismatched set of pajamas, before looking at the clock on the microwave. “It’s nearly ten now—you might wanna go get into character.”
I’d expected another comment about making fun, but Momma just swatted me with a dishcloth and snorted. “I will. Thanks for cleaning up for me, baby. You’re a good girl.”
She said that to me a lot.
As Momma drifted off to her bedroom to drape herself in scarves and eyeliner—People expect a certain look, Lana—I busied myself straightening up the living room. There was only so much I could do, but I could at least make sure things were clean. I always hated the looks on Momma’s clients’ faces when they first walked in. Like, hello, maybe you shouldn’t be so disgusted when you’re the one driving out to the boondocks to get your palm read, you know? That seemed way more offensive than an ugly couch and some fake paneling.
Still, I swept up and fluffed the throw pillows on the couch and sprayed some air freshener. The scent of incense was already wafting out of Momma’s studio, and I knew I’d have a headache before the day was over.
At exactly 9:57, I heard the rumble of a truck outside. “Momma, they’re here!” I hollered as I shoved last night’s pizza box into the trash can. The truck’s ignition cut off and I glanced out the front window, wondering which kind of client this one would be. Momma’s main business came from bored ladies in Auburn, the nearest town over. They were almost never under the age of fifty, and they looked so similar that I couldn’t swear Momma hadn’t just been seeing the same client over and over again for the past few years.
But when I saw the shiny blue truck, I knew there was no old lady behind the wheel. My heart hammered in my chest, stomach jumping. What was he doing here now?
The passenger side door opened, and a girl came tumbling out, her long legs pale in the late-morning light. As soon as I saw her, I ducked back from the window, the butterflies in my stomach suddenly turning to lead.
“Momma!” I hissed, crossing over to her studio and yanking back the paisley curtain. She was already sitting at her table, shuffling the tarot cards.
“What?” she asked, raising her eyebrows so that they nearly disappeared under her headscarf.
“Those are kids from my school,” I told her, trying to keep my voice low. Trailers aren’t exactly soundproof, and I could already hear the heavy tread on the stairs outside. “You promised never to read for kids.”
Momma blinked at me before returning to her cards. “Well, Lana, it’s not like people tell me how old they are when they call and schedule a reading. Besides, they booked a whole hour, and if you wanna keep having nice things like, oh, I don’t know, electricity, water...”
There was a knock at the door and I winced, afraid the kids on the porch may have overheard.
“Go answer it,” Momma said, flinging a hand out, her mismatched bangles rattling.
“Please,” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I was asking for. For her to go answer it herself, for her not to make me do this with people I knew. For her not to be a psychic in a trailer, maybe.
But Momma just fixed me with her big hazel eyes, eyes that looked just like mine, and said, “You’re not ashamed of your momma, are you, Lana Banana?”
There is no way to answer that question. It’s a trick that parents throw at you, like Do you want a spanking? or What did you just say?
Besides, I was ashamed, and the guilt of that stung even more than the potential humiliation awaiting me at the front door.
They stood there on the porch, the girl leaning against the railing. Big aviator sunglasses covered nearly half her face, but I would’ve recognized that bright red hair anywhere. Milly Ross and I might not travel in the same circles at our school, but we’d had a few classes together.
I kept my eyes on her rather than the boy standing just beside her. I could feel the weight of his gaze on me.
“Um...Lana, right?” Milly asked, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “You’re in algebra with me? Third period?”
I wondered if everything she ever said sounded like a question even as I said, “Yeah. And fourth-period history.”
“Right,” Milly said, and then she jerked her head at the boy. “Do you know Skye?”
I didn’t want my cheeks to flame, but I could feel heat rising up my neck as I said, “Yeah, Skye Bartlett, right? I think we have English together?”
The corner of his lips lifted for just a second, a crooked smile I’d seen a hundred times. It never failed to make my pulse leap.
“French,” Skye said, and I nodded.
“Right, that’s it. Anyway, y’all, uh, wanna come in?” Moving out of the doorway, I gestured for them to come inside. Milly went first, and as Skye followed her into the trailer, he briefly let his hand brush my waist. It was a tiny touch, but even through my T-shirt, I could feel the heat of his fingers.
Milly stood in the middle of the room, shoving her sunglasses on top of her head. “So...you live here?”
No, I just hang out in this lady’s trailer. “Yeah, I do. You guys can have a seat if you want.”
Milly swung her head in the direction of the couch, the silver hoops in her ears flashing. Earlier, I’d thought that with the pillows fluffed, the sofa had actually looked a little bit better, but seeing it now through her eyes, I knew it was as shabby and ugly as ever.
“We can just stand here and wait,” Milly said, her nose crinkling as she took in the faded flooring, the mismatched furniture.
I knew Mom was waiting for me to do my thing, but I really didn’t want to. It was one thing when I was helping her with overweight, middle-aged ladies who just wanted to know if their husbands were cheating on them or if they were going to win the lottery. But these were kids I knew. This was Skye.
Skye was still standing by the door, and even though I wasn’t looking at him, I was aware of the way his arms were folded across his chest, the thin material of his T-shirt stretching over his biceps.
“I didn’t know this was your mom,” Milly said at last, fiddling with the end of the oversize shirt she wore over a white tank top. It was a boy’s shirt, hanging past her hips, and for a moment, I thought it looked kind of familiar. Had I seen that shirt on Skye before? I couldn’t remember.
Then I realized the silence had stretched a little too long, and blinked. “Oh. Right, yeah, I don’t exactly wear shirts that say Hey, My Mom’s a Psychic.”
Milly laughed at that, but it was too loud and too high to be genuine. From behind the paisley curtain, I heard Mom clear her throat.
She wasn’t going to come out until I’d done the prep work, so with a sigh I asked them if I could get them anything to drink.
Milly cast a concerned look at the kitchen, but before she could answer, I’d crossed to the fridge and pulled out a couple of diet sodas. They were the off-brand kind from Winn-Dixie, but Milly and Skye both took one. As they did, I let my fingers brush against the thumb ring Milly wore.
It was always the same. Like coming across a closed door and opening it just a crack, peeking inside. As soon as I peeked inside Milly’s mind, I saw a familiar face. Kimberly McEntire had been in my grade and had been Milly’s best friend.
And Skye’s girlfriend.
I saw her and Milly riding in Kimberly’s car, singing loudly with the radio. Now they were sitting on Kimberly’s bed, and she was crying, Milly wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Milly sitting on the floor of her bedroom, listening to Kimberly’s mom asking where Kimberly was, if Milly had seen her. And over all of that was this feeling—worry, anxiety, anger, all balled up together.
I was just drawing my hand back when there was a flash of another emotion, another face and name. It startled me so much I nearly dropped the soda I’d been handing to Milly, and she caught it with a little scowl.
“Whoa. You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, even as I shook my head. “Yeah, totally. Sorry, the can was slippery. Uh, if y’all will wait right here for a sec, I’ll go get Mom—er, Madame Lin.”
I’d begged Momma to drop the stupid name, but unlike the Beaded Curtain Argument, I’d lost. According to Momma, people felt better hearing their psychic readings from a woman named Madame Lin than from one named Lynette.
Ducking behind the paisley curtain, I found Momma sitting expectantly at her table. “Well?”
Keeping my voice at a whisper, I told her what I’d picked up from the jewelry. “She’s mostly here to ask about Kimberly McEntire.” I didn’t mention the other thing. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to without Momma knowing something was wrong with me.
Momma scowled. “Did she bring something belonging to the girl?”
I shook my head. “Don’t think so.”
Throwing up her hands, Momma blew out a long breath. “Well, how am I supposed to answer any questions about someone who’s not even here? That’s not how this works,” she hissed.
There was no sense in reminding Momma that I knew how this worked. The powers Momma had—the powers I had—were really specific. I could touch people and, if I wanted to, get impressions of what they were thinking, little bits of their present and past. The future was a total no-go for me. But Momma, she could see only little snatches of a person’s future. But that person had to be sitting there with her or she had to touch something of theirs. In other words, if Milly wanted to find out where Kimberly had disappeared to all those months ago, she was crap outta luck.
“Just lie to her,” I said with a little shrug. “Everybody says Kimberly ran away from home after a fight with her parents. Make up some kind of glamorous story about Kim living out in, like, L.A. or something.”
Momma mulled that over, twirling the end of her headscarf. “That’s good,” she said at last. “After all, what do I always say? If you can’t tell someone the truth—”
“At least make them happy,” I finished. It was basically Momma’s motto as a psychic.
Momma smiled at me, her teeth white against the dark wine of her lipstick. “You’ll be good at this.”
It was pointless to remind Momma that there was no way in hell I was going to end up reading palms in a trailer. Just because she and Grammy had both done it didn’t mean that I was going to. I had my eye on a track scholarship to the University of Alabama, and after that, I was getting as far away from the Woodland Hills Trailer Park as I possibly could.
Maybe Kimberly McEntire had felt like that, too. Sure, she lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in town and seemed to have everything going for her. Good grades, pretty face and Skye Bartlett. But clearly something had been pulling her beyond the city limits. She’d taken off over six months ago, and other than a note left on her pillow, no one had heard from her since. I found myself hoping the future I’d told Momma to make up for her was close to the truth.
Momma got up from the table, and I trailed after her back into the living room. Milly was still standing hesitantly by the couch while Skye stood near the front window. Momma looked back and forth between them. “Will both of you be sitting for the reading, or—”
“Just her,” Skye said, inclining his head toward Milly. “No offense, but this kind of thing freaks me out.” He grinned at Momma and she practically giggled. Behind her back, I rolled my eyes, and Skye’s grin widened.
“Very well, then.” Momma held her hand out to Milly, who glanced over at Skye, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.
“So you’ll just...wait out here, right?”
He gave an easy roll of his shoulders. “Sure. Laura here can keep me company.”
“Lana,” I corrected, my lips twitching in a smile.
He snapped his fingers, nodding. “Right, right. Lana.”
It was a little too much, and just for a moment, Milly’s brow wrinkled with something like confusion. Or maybe suspicion. But then Momma was taking her hand and guiding her toward her studio.
The moment the curtain twitched closed behind Milly, Skye’s hands grabbed my waist, tugging me close to him. He ducked his head to kiss my neck, but I spun away from him, swatting at his hands. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
His bright blue eyes sparkled as he leaned closer and he whispered, “I was trying to kiss you.”
For a second, I nearly wavered. It was hard to be mad at him when he was looking at me like that.
Shooting a glance at the curtain, I grabbed Skye’s hand and tugged him out onto the porch, closing the door softly behind me. Once we were down in the yard by his truck, I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up at him. “I wasn’t talking about the kissing. I mean why did you bring Milly here?”
Skye sighed. “She’s been wanting to come out here for months. Pretty much ever since Kimberly bailed. When she said she’d made the appointment, I offered to drive her.”
In the sunlight, his black hair glinted nearly as blue as his truck. Skye was beautiful in that way that is almost girlie. Only the dark stubble lining his jaw, the veins in his forearms, the blunt width of his hands saved him from looking too pretty. He smiled at me, leaning back against his truck. The move did nice things for his arms. It also showed off the tattoo inked on the inside of his forearm. It was a key, one of those big ornate kinds you sometimes see in old movies. I’d asked him once why a key, but he’d only kissed the tip of my nose and said, “Why not?”
“I wanted to see you today,” he said now, looking at me over the tops of his sunglasses. “And I figured this would kill two birds with one stone. Keep Milly and your mom occupied for an hour. So.” He reached out, his hand closing around my wrist, and pulled me to him. “Can we please get to occupying that time?”
My palm pressed flat against his chest. “Not here,” I told him, looking around.
Our trailer was at the very back of the park, and just beyond was the thick pine forest that gave Woodland Hills its name. Skye followed my gaze, squeezing my hand. “She paid for the whole hour,” he murmured low in my ear, and I shivered.
With one more quick glance at the trailer, I wrapped my fingers tighter around Skye’s and pulled. “Come on.”
The woods were thick and smelled like pine, dirt and that mossy, green scent of things growing. They were also cooler, the thick branches nearly blotting out the sun. We walked hand in hand until I couldn’t see the trailer anymore, and then, finally, I turned and let Skye wrap me up in his arms.
We hadn’t had a chance to be alone in over a week, and as Skye kissed me, I felt like I was melting into him, like there was nothing else in the world except me, him and the forest around us, the sound of birds in the trees, the distant burble of the creek. His lips moved over mine, and my fingers twisted in his shirt.
“I missed you,” he breathed when we pulled apart, and I smiled against his collarbone.
“I missed you, too.”
I always missed him. Even though I saw him every day at school, it wasn’t the same as this, being alone with him, kissing him, feeling his arms around me.
Looking down at me, Skye pushed my hair away from my face. “Admit this was a good idea.”
When he was holding me, everything seemed like a good idea, but I still wasn’t exactly thrilled that he’d come out here. Or, really, that he’d brought Milly out here.
With that in mind, I stepped away from him, walking a little farther into the woods. He followed, and while I let him link his fingers with mine, I didn’t say anything until we were even deeper into the trees, the ground underneath growing harder to navigate. Vines and low bushes pushed against the trees here, and even though I could hear the distant hum of I-85, it was like being in the middle of nowhere.
Once we’d reached the edge of the creek, I turned back to Skye and asked, “Why are we still sneaking around?”
He raised his dark eyebrows, blowing out a long breath. “Wow. Okay. What brought that on?”
There was a clump of dandelions at my feet, and I bent down to pick one. Twirling it between my fingers, I watched the fluff take to the air. “It’s just... Skye, are you ashamed of me? Of all this?” I flung the headless dandelion out in the direction of the trailer, and Skye immediately stepped forward, holding my arms with both hands.
“No,” he said, looking into my eyes. “God, no, Lana. Never.” Skye’s fingers dug into the flesh of my biceps, almost a little too hard.
“Then why?” I asked, hating the whiny note in my voice but unable to stop it.
He pulled away, rubbing one hand up and down the back of his neck. He always did that. He’d done it the first day I’d noticed him in French class, back at the beginning of the school year. Skye had been new, and in a county where everyone knew everyone, that had been enough to make him exotic. And then of course there was the unusual name, the blue-black hair, that beautiful, golden key covering the pale skin of his forearm. I was hardly the only girl who’d fallen in love with Skye Bartlett back in August. But he’d fallen for Kimberly McEntire, and that had been that.
Or so I’d thought.
After Kimberly had skipped town, things had changed. Skye had started sitting next to me in class, and even though he spent every lunch period with Milly and the rest of Kimberly’s friends, he had always smiled at me. Then one day after French, he’d asked if I’d help him study at the library. He’d kissed me that night up against a shelf of reference books.
Now I looked at Skye in the late-morning light and asked, “Is it Milly? Is there...? You spend a lot of time with her.” In front of people. In public.
Skye dropped his hand. “We’re friends, Lan. I only drove her out here today because I wanted to see you.” He stepped closer and I backed up until my elbows dug into the bark of the pine tree behind me. It wasn’t that he scared me. It was that I was afraid if he stood too close, I’d once again forget to be angry, forget how crappy this whole situation made me feel.
Forget what I’d seen in Milly’s head.
“It’s just not good timing right now, Lana.” Skye reached out and brushed a sweaty piece of hair from my forehead, his touch featherlight. “Kimberly’s only been gone a few months, and it might look bad if I suddenly had a new girlfriend, you know?”
Overhead, something rustled in the trees, and on the distant interstate, I heard the blast of a car horn.
“Is that what I am?” I asked, folding my arms tightly across his chest. “Your girlfriend?”
Skye lifted an eyebrow, a smirk twisting his lips. “Do you want a ring or something? My letterman’s jacket? I mean, I don’t play a sport, and I’m not even sure they make those things anymore, but maybe Goodwill would—”
I shoved at his chest. “Don’t make fun of me.”
Something flashed in his eyes, something dark and angry. But it was gone as soon as it had appeared, and when Skye took my wrist in his hand, his grip was light. “I’m not, I promise. But this is tough for me. I don’t want to look like the dick who doesn’t even miss Kim, you know?”
This whole conversation was going nowhere, and suddenly I wished I’d never brought it up. We only had an hour, and we’d spent half that already, walking and arguing. Skye was right. There was enough weirdness about Kimberly’s disappearance, and we didn’t want to add to that.
But then I remembered Milly, the images I’d gotten when I’d touched her ring. “Milly—” I started, and Skye’s fingers tightened around my wrist.
“I told you, there’s nothing going on. She doesn’t even like me like that.”
“Yes, she does,” I said before I could stop myself. “I saw it.”
I hadn’t quite shouted the words, but they’d still come out a lot louder than I’d intended. In a nearby bush, a bird suddenly took wing, and Skye startled.
“What do you mean you ‘saw it’?” There was a deep crease between his brows, and his grip on my wrist was tight enough to hurt now. I shook him off, irritated.
“I...I can see things. When I touch people. Same as my mom.”
Skye blinked, once, then twice, his whole body going still. “So...this psychic crap is for real? Because you said your mom just—”
“I know what I said.” Shoving my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, I tilted my head back, looking up at the snatches of blue sky through the branches. “I didn’t want you to think I was a freak, but yeah, Momma can really tell a person’s future, and I can get...I don’t know, impressions. When I touch somebody. It’s not a big deal.”
Skye had backed away from me now, his face pale. “Have you done that to me?” he asked, and I immediately shook my head.
“No,” I promised. “Never. I only do it to help Momma out before her readings. Anything else feels—” I shuddered “—gross. Like a violation or something.”
Skye seemed to sigh with his whole body, the breath ruffling his hair where it fell over his forehead. “So when you touched Milly—”
“She’s into you, trust me.” I left it at that. The longing coming off Milly for Skye had practically wavered there in the air earlier. True, I hadn’t picked up anything else. If anything had ever happened between them, I hadn’t seen it. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.
“I can’t help it if she likes me, Lana,” Skye said. His own hands were in his pockets now, almost mimicking my pose. “But I don’t feel that way about her. I swear.”
When I didn’t say anything, Skye took a step closer. “When we kissed earlier... If you’d wanted to, you could’ve looked into my head, right?”
“I told you I wouldn’t do that,” I snapped.
Skye was watching me closely now, ducking his head so that he could see into my face. “Do you promise, Lan? Do you promise you would never do that?”
If he hadn’t said that, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so tempted. But there was something so intense in his gaze, something that made the hairs on my arms stand up. And it was like any temptation, like Skye himself—once I’d been told I couldn’t, I had to.
“Yeah,” I heard myself say. “I promise.”
His expression softened. “And I promise Milly and I are just friends. She’s only hanging around me because we both miss Kim. That’s it.”
He smiled at me, a dimple flashing in one cheek. In the shady woods, his eyes seemed a darker blue, and when he tugged me to him, I let him.
When he leaned in to kiss me, I closed my hands around his forearms. The key tattoo was just there underneath my palm, and there was one brief moment when I tried to tell myself not to do it. That he had said there was nothing going on with Milly, and I needed to trust him.
But another darker part whispered, Then why is he still keeping you a secret?
He had asked me never to read him, and I had promised, but standing there in the woods behind my home, his skin pressed against mine, the temptation was too strong. Just a little bit, I told myself. So I can be sure.
As always, it felt like opening a door, and I tried to keep the door opened only a crack. Just enough to see if he was lying to me about Milly.
But the moment the door from my mind to his opened, it was like a hurricane blew through it. Skye kissed me as image after image assaulted my mind. Kimberly crying. Kimberly shoving at Skye’s shoulders. They’re in a field somewhere, and it’s dark, and she needs to shut up, just shut up, shut up. Skye’s hands around Kimberly’s throat, and she’s kicking him, but he’s stronger and her kicks are getting weaker and weaker, and sweat is dripping down his face as he wonders why she won’t die, would she just die already—
My heart was in my mouth, my stomach rolling, and it took every bit of strength in me not to scream, not to push him away. But we were alone out here, far from anyone, and I’d told him I wouldn’t look. If he knew that I knew...
We parted, and he pressed his lips to my forehead while I shook. Please let him think it’s from the kiss.
I wasn’t sure how I managed to smile when he looked down at me. His eyes were so blue. Kimberly had looked into those eyes as he’d choked the life out of her. Kimberly, who had never left town, who had no glamorous future in L.A. Kimberly, who was probably at the bottom of a lake, or in a hole somewhere in that field I’d seen. Kimberly, who’d loved and trusted Skye like I had.
We stood there in the woods, looking at one another, and I tried to force my heart not to beat out of my chest, tried to keep my breathing calm. All I had to do was get back to the trailer. Get back to Momma, and get away from Skye. I could do this. I could.
And then Skye winced.
We both looked down, seeing my hand where it still clung to his forearm. I may have slowed my pulse and steadied my breathing, but I hadn’t stopped my fingers from digging into him, hard enough to break the skin. My nails had pierced his flesh, and Skye and I both watched as a single drop of blood welled up just over the teeth of his key tattoo.
His eyes met mine, and I knew there was no lie I could tell that would convince him that I hadn’t looked inside his mind. That I hadn’t seen. That I didn’t know.
I was in the woods behind my trailer with a boy who’d killed the last girl who loved him. I could look off to the horizon all I wanted, but no one was coming to save me. Maybe I couldn’t tell the future like Momma, but in that instant, I swore I could see it. When her reading with Milly was done, she’d come out and find Skye sitting there. Maybe there’d be dirt on his knees, and he might be breathing a little hard. He’d tell her I’d left. Maybe I headed out for track practice early, caught a ride with a friend—no, he wasn’t sure who. And then maybe later, he’d come back to this quiet place in Woodland Hills, and by the end of the night, I’d find myself lying next to Kimberly McEntire, wherever she was. For just a second, I thought of taking one more peek, trying to see what he had done with her. But I was too afraid to look again, afraid that anything I saw might break what was left of my mind.
Skye’s hands were tight around my wrists now, and I could feel that same dark anger I’d sensed earlier pulsing through him. Oh, Momma, I thought almost from a distance. You were wrong. I’m not going to track practice today.
But as the bones in my wrists creaked and popped, I remembered what Momma had said.
You are gonna run and run today. Fast.
A laugh nearly gurgled out of my throat, high and hysterical. “You’re damn right I am,” I muttered. I reached out.
I shoved.
I ran.
* * * * *
FIGMENT
by Jeri Smith-Ready
It begins, as always, in darkness.
I awake in transit, amid the clamor of voices and the clatter of trucks. Then a steady jet-engine roar lulls me to the edge of sleep.
If I’m waking, it means that someone believes in me again. Maybe it’s the man, woman, boy or girl I’ll soon befriend. Maybe it’s a person close to them. Or maybe it’s only my ex-friend’s employee who took this padded envelope I’ve been trapped inside and put it on a plane.
All that matters is that someone, somewhere, believes.
* * *
A woman’s soft footsteps accompany what I hope is the final leg of my journey. Her hands hold my envelope level before her, not swinging casually at the end of her arm the way the deliveryman carried me. It reminds me of the way Gordon’s butler used to deliver his vodka and pills on a silver tray.
“No more tears,” she murmurs. “He wasn’t worth it.”
But I’m not crying. I never cry.
She sniffles, then takes a deep, slow breath. “No more tears,” she repeats.
Ah, you weren’t talking to me. Never mind. If she can’t hear my thoughts, that means she’s not the one I’m meant for.
She stops and knocks on heavy wood—a door, likely. I hear the muffled voice of a young man, a begrudging beckoning over the strum of guitar.
Hinges creak. The guitar grows louder, doesn’t pause while the woman who carries me stands still at what must be a seldom-crossed threshold.
“Eli, your father is dead.”
The guitar doesn’t stop, but it hits a sour note. Then Eli continues to play, picking up where he left off. “So?”
“He left you this.”
The guitar is set aside with a soft gong. Eli takes my envelope and squeezes it, crushing my face. “It’s soft. Is it a big fat wad of cash?” he asks with a mixture of harshness and hope.
“Just open it.”
Eli tears the sealing strip, letting in the first light I’ve glimpsed in...I won’t know how long until I see a calendar.
“What the hell?” He clamps the envelope shut, smothering the light. “Mom, is this a joke?”
Pull me out. Please don’t let me stay in here.
“There’s a story behind it,” his mother says. “It’s rather interesting, actually. Your father—”
“What did the others get?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Never mind, I’ll look it up online. It’ll be in the news. One-hit wonder Gordon Wylde, 45, dies of— What did he die of?”
“A boating accident. They said it was instant. He didn’t suffer.”
“Good for him.” Eli’s voice cracks, causing me to wonder how far past puberty he is. His hands are large and strong, squeezing me tighter than ever, so perhaps the voice-crack is...sadness? Anger? I wouldn’t know.
“Eli, if you want to talk, I’m here.”
“I know you are,” he snaps. Then his voice softens. “Thanks, Mom. I’m sorry—I mean, if you’re upset he’s gone.”
“Not really.” She gives a wistful laugh. “Your father’s always been gone.” Her footsteps come closer, then a kiss, muted, laid upon hair instead of skin. “I’ve got a roast in the oven, but how about pizza tonight instead?”
“That’d be cool. Thanks.”
She retreats and closes the door. Eli takes a deep breath—as would I, had I lungs—and pulls me out of the envelope.
Amber eyes examine me, the same color as the streaks in his disheveled black hair. Eli pulls in his lower lip, brushes his tongue over the silver ring there. He could be as young as sixteen, but the piercing makes me think he’s closer to eighteen. “I don’t get it,” he mutters. “I do not get it.”
Eli tosses me on the bed—faceup, luckily. The ceiling features a wood-and-green-metal fan, currently off, as well as a poster of a brunette girl with wide blue eyes. The right edge is torn, the poster ripped in half to eliminate her partner. At the bottom it reads “she &” in a whimsical cursive hand.
He pulls a note from the envelope, the folded sheet of paper I’ve been lying on for...a long time, I think. I don’t remember how long, or even what form I’ve taken. It must be the same form as when I was Gordon’s friend, because vessels contain our spirits until they disintegrate (the vessels, that is). I never forget disintegration.
I am eternal. I can never die, only sleep. My kind has existed since humans first drew pictures on cave walls and told stories around campfires. We were born at the dawn of imagination.
“Call Tyler,” Eli says in a flat voice. It sounds like a command, but not, I hope, for me.
A tinny male voice emits from a cell phone speaker. “Eli! What’s up, bro?”
Eli picks me up and stares into my eyes, his own turned dark with loathing.
“My father left me a cat.”
* * *
I’m four inches long. My plush fake fur is black, except for my paws, which are white. My eyes are stitched yellow-thread rings surrounding felt black centers. Their perfect roundness makes me look perpetually astonished.
All of this I’d forgotten, because when no one holds you for...years?...you lose sense of your shape.
All of this I remember, because Eli has thrown me against the wall and I’ve landed, fortuitously, in front of a full-length mirror.
My puffy white forepaws extend forward, like I’m asking for double fist bumps, or worse, protecting myself. But nothing can hurt me, aside from being ignored.
Eli is ignoring me. In the mirror I see him sitting cross-legged on the double bed, his back turned. The fan is on low now, its wood-and-metal arms making lazy circles, casting hazy shadows on the ceiling and the girl in the poster.
I examine what details I can, to determine Eli’s state of living. His dresser and nightstand are basic pale wood, IKEA-ish. The boots sticking out from under the bed appear to be Timberland knockoffs. His jeans and black T-shirt are threadbare and distressed, but that might be the style still (or again). Through the floor I hear his mother in the kitchen, opening the oven door, then letting the door crash shut. A two-story house, then. Eli and his mother seem neither rich nor poor.
My gaze sweeps the walls for a calendar. I’m used to lying dormant for years between allies, but not knowing how many years is unsettling. Eli’s father crammed me into that envelope in 1997, when the world was throwing itself at his feet. He thought he didn’t need me anymore. I wonder how that worked out.
Some months or years later, Gordon opened the envelope, but only to add the note, which Eli read to his friend Tyler over the phone.
“My dear Elias,
Of all my sons, I’ve given you the least in life, so in death I give you the most.
This wee kitty has been more than a good-luck charm to me. It’s been a friend, perhaps the most loyal one I’ve ever had. I advise you to keep it at your side at all times if you want to succeed. And when (not if, but when) you find that success, do not make my arrogant mistake and cast the cat aside. Give credit where credit is due.
Your father,
Gordon Wylde”
Tyler laughed his ass off, naturally, and then Eli threw me across the room, where I wait, neither patiently nor impatiently, since I do not feel.
I do have opinions, however, an important one of which is forming now: Eli has more musical genius in that pouty lower lip than his father had in his entire body. His voice needs no enhancing, and his playing needs no amplification. He could most likely make hundreds a day busking in a subway station. God only knows what a decent record label could do for him.
But he needs more than talent. He needs me. Not just to set him on the path to greatness, but to keep him there. When inevitable misfortunes beset him, he must believe he’s destined. He must believe that luck is on his side.
First, however, he must believe in me.
Eli draws in a sudden hiss of pain between his teeth, then shakes out his hand. He’s played too long.
Sucking the pad of his right thumb, he turns and slides off the bed. For a moment I wonder what it would be like to unfold long legs so effortlessly—or to move at all. He lays the guitar in its case and starts to close the lid.
Eli, wait.
He hesitates but doesn’t look at me.
You can’t hear my words yet, I tell him, but you can feel what I want. Please, put me inside. It all starts there.
Eli snatches me up by one ear, then drops me facedown in the compartment in the guitar case’s neck. “There, Dad. Happy?”
He slams the lid shut and flips the latches. But instead of shoving the guitar case back under the bed where he got it, he lays his hand over the place where I am, pressing this end of the case against the floor. The carpet gives a little.
All it takes is a little belief to bring me to life.
Thank you, Eli.
His breathing stops. A soft suction pop marks his sore thumb coming out of his mouth.
I’m inside the case. But don’t worry, I won’t suffocate. I don’t breathe.
Eli’s whimper has a question mark at the end.
Yes, I’m real. Sort of. I used to know your father. If he bequeathed me to you, it means that you were important to him. Or that I was not. In any case, we’re together now.
“What the—” The latches rattle as he fumbles to open them. The lid lifts, letting in light.
Eli doesn’t pick me up. I wish I could see his expression, but I’m still facedown and can’t turn over.
He tugs my tail. “I’m going insane.”
On the contrary, you have a normal, healthy imagination. That’s what keeps me alive.
He lets out a curse and slams the guitar case shut again. A few moments later, he speaks in hushed tones, but not to me.
“Ty, have you had any, like, weird thoughts since Saturday night?”
The phone speaker is loud enough—and my cat ears sensitive enough—that I can hear the reply. “What kind of weird thoughts?”
“I don’t know. Hallucinations?”
“It was just a little weed. You didn’t even smoke any.”
“I know, but even secondhand, I definitely felt the effects.”
“Are you saying you’re seeing things?”
“Hearing things,” Eli corrects.
“It was a loud concert. My ears were ringing afterward.”
“This isn’t a ringing.”
“What is it?”
Eli pauses. “Nothing. I guess it is sort of like a ringing. I gotta go. Mom’s calling me for dinner.”
His mom’s not calling him for dinner, but after hanging up, Eli stalks from the room, shouting her name.
I hope she has answers.
* * *
“So you’re from Cleveland?” Eli has propped me up on his other pillow so that I can see him, but he doesn’t look at me as we talk. He sits against his headboard beside me, arms crossed, legs straight out, looking stunned.
Not originally, but that was where my essence was encapsulated in this temporary form. The musician who gave me to your father was from there. He was in a band called Raise an Axe. Ever heard of them?
“No.”
That’s because they had only one heavy-metal hit in the late eighties, off their self-titled album, Raise an Axe. Can you guess the song name?
“‘Raise an Axe’?”
Very good. That singer abandoned his band to embark on a solo career. He also abandoned me. When he realized his mistake, it was too late. I had no luck left for him.
Eli groans. “This is so bizarre.” He sweeps both palms over his wavy dark hair, holding it back against his scalp. Under all those tumbling locks, he has a pronounced widow’s peak, just like his father. “So who are you?”
A figment.
“That’s your name?”
It’s what I am.
“Like a figment of my imagination?”
I give the vocal equivalent of a shrug. A bit redundant, since by definition a figment is something that exists only in the imagination.
Heels together, Eli taps his bare feet against each other. “Like an imaginary friend.”
Precisely.
“I thought only little kids had imaginary friends.”
They’re not the only ones who need them.
“I’ve got plenty of friends.”
Friends or fleas? His father’s penthouse had been overrun with bloodsucking sycophants, people who only loved him for his money and fame.
Eli pulls his knees to his chest and rests his chin on them. “What I mean is, I’m not lonely or anything.”
I decide not to challenge this assertion. May I ask, what became of your father’s career once he left Boyz on the Korner?
Eli scoffs. “Nothing. He never had another hit like BotK had with ‘Ready, Set, Dance.’ Because he basically sucked. People realized that after he hit twenty-one and wasn’t adorable anymore.” He looks at me quickly. “Wait. Was that when he put you away?”
That’s when I entered the envelope, yes.
“Wow.” He shakes his head hard. “This can’t be real.”
You need to redefine “real.”
“Obviously. So why are you here?”
To help you succeed in life by bringing you good luck. You need the right people in the right place in the right mood. I can make that happen. Your talent will do the rest.
Eli gives me a sideways, suspicious look. “What’s in it for you?”
If I help you, you’ll believe in me, and I get to keep existing. I remember my image in the mirror. Also, I’d very much like some clothes.
* * *
Eli, it turns out, used to play with dolls when he was a boy. I don’t judge.
“If anyone sees me doing this, I’ll have my man card permanently revoked,” he says as he buttons my sparkly blue shirt.
So I won’t be meeting your friends?
“No, you’re staying here.”
But unless I’m in your presence, I can’t influence the thoughts of others around you in your favor.
He looks up from the box of doll clothes, horrified. “Other people can hear you?”
Not in words, the way you can. They can sense my desires and be swayed by them, but only if they’ve seen me and acknowledged my existence.
I catch sight of the doll sneakers he’s picked out of the box.
Please, no pink.
“So you are a boy. I wondered, since you don’t have any—you know.” He flips up my shirttail. “Anything to cover.”
Technically, I’m neither a boy nor a girl. I can be whichever you prefer.
He narrows his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘prefer’?”
In a friend.
“Oh. Well, a human for starters.”
You have no pets?
“Just fish. I’m allergic.”
And I’m relieved. Some dogs chew stuffed animals, and some cats hump them. Humiliating in either case.
Eli rummages through the box, which appears to have all sorts of doll clothes jumbled together in one mass. “If you’re an imaginary friend, why don’t you look human? Why are you trapped in this stuffed cat?”
Figments need a physical vessel so their friends can take them places. Or leave us behind, if you like.
“Us?” He casts a wary gaze around his room. “There’s more than one of you here?”
No, you only get one. But there are others of my kind in the world. There always have been.
“Huh. Hey, here’s a cool hat.” Eli holds it up with a flourish. It has three points and a giant purple feather, like one of the Three Musketeers.
Yes! Put that on my head. Now.
He laughs. “You like the bling, huh?”
I love the bling.
“Pimp my cat.” He tugs the hat down over my ears, then tilts it sideways. “Figment’s got swag, yo.”
Is that what you wish to call me?
“Or Fig for short. Is that okay?”
You may call me whatever you like. I hide my next thought from him: just don’t ever put me away.
“Well, Fig, guess what? You’re getting yourself some fine-ass boots.”
* * *
Over the past week, Eli has learned to entertain me. When he’s downstairs with his mother, he sets me on the windowsill or in front of his aquarium so I have something to watch. He leaves on the radio, which teaches me about current events and the latest musical trends.
When he leaves the house he brings me with him, buried deep in his messenger bag to school, or tucked into his guitar case to band practice, which double as makeout sessions with his girlfriend, Vanessa. He hasn’t gotten up the nerve to introduce me to anyone yet, so I have influence on nobody but him.
Just before history class on my third day of school, a girl behind Eli whispers his name. His chair creaks as he turns to her.
“Sorry about your dad,” she says. “I heard on the news.”
I expect him to growl “It doesn’t matter” or “whatever,” as he has to every other sympathizer. Instead he just says, “Thanks, Lyra.”
“I know what it’s like. I mean, I don’t have a famous father, but—”
“Semifamous.”
“Well. Anyway, I never knew my mom. She left right after I was born.”
He shifts in his chair again, perhaps turning all the way round. “That probably sucks more than not knowing your dad.”
“If they left, they probably weren’t worth knowing, right? At least, that’s what I tell myself every birthday.”
“Seriously. I never got a birthday or Christmas card. Just some child-support money in a bank account, but not as much as you’d think. Not with two other sons to take care of.” Eli lowers his voice until I can barely hear it. “When he died, he left the oldest one a house and the middle one a car.”
“What did you get?”
He pauses for a long moment. If I had breath, I would hold it. But he finally says, “Nothing.”
The bell rings and the teacher clops across the floor in what sound like platform heels. I can feel the vibrations from here.
She begins the lecture, on the French Revolution, a topic I know well, since I’ve heard it in classrooms ever since a few years after the event itself. The facts remain the same, but the perspective changes as the centuries pass.
I wish you’d bring me out in class just once, I tell Eli. You’d get much better grades, or at least I could keep the teacher from calling on you.
He gives the bag a slight kick to shut me up. Since I feel no pain, it doesn’t work.
For the record, girls think I’m cute.
No response.
Perhaps you could bring me out at band practice today, when you see what’s-her-name. The one who treats you like an imbecile. She’d find it charming, you carrying a tiny stuffed cat with a feather hat and silver boots in your guitar case.
No response.
Tap the bag once for no, twice for yes.
Eli gives a heavy sigh, shifts his feet beneath the desk next to my bag. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then finally, I feel a single tap. Followed by another.
* * *
“Oh, my God, he’s adorbs!” Vanessa squeezes my belly and shakes me from side to side, making my hat’s feather flop against my head. “Where did you get him?”
I appreciate that she refers to me as “him” instead of “it,” but her tone is a bit patronizing. She’s a year older than Eli, a fact she points out as often as possible.
Sitting on the basement couch with his arm around Vanessa’s shoulders, Eli says, “My father left him to me as a good-luck charm. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Aww.” She strokes his cheek with the backs of her black-lacquered fingernails, then kisses him softly. “Are you sad you never got to meet him?”
“Not really,” he replies, but gives me a nervous glance.
Liar.
Eli opens his mouth to tell me to shut up, but catches himself in time.
Vanessa tugs my shirtsleeve. “Did he come dressed like this?”
“Of course. Where would I get doll clothes?”
I don’t bother repeating my call of “liar.”
“Eli, come on.” Behind me, Jules, the drummer, taps his sticks together.
Eli reaches for me, then pulls his hand back. “Take good care of him, okay?”
“I will.” Vanessa kisses me right between the eyes. My opinion of her is softening somewhat.
Eli takes his guitar and joins Jules and the other boy, Tyler, who fancies himself a lead singer but often seems more fascinated with his collection of unusual instruments.
As they play, Vanessa dances me atop her bare knee in time to the music. During a slow ballad, she rests me on her shoulder, my feet tucked into her long blond hair streaked with green and blue. At the end of each song, she waves me in the air, cheering with exaggerated enthusiasm. The boys scowl at her silliness, but it’s the most fun I’ve had since I reawakened.
The tunes are intricate for a songwriter of Eli’s age, but sadly, he’s the only one who seems capable of playing them. When they take a break, I seize the opportunity to speak to him.
You should go solo. You’re too good for these poseurs.
Eli doesn’t glare at me. Instead the corner of his mouth tugs into a sad frown. He knows I’m right, but he loves his friends.
Also the band name, Trending Frenzy? What does that even mean?
“Long story,” he says under his breath.
After the break, it takes Trending Frenzy a full hour to rehearse three more songs. Tyler keeps trying to change the key to take it up to his singing range and make it easier to play, but it sounds like crap when they do that. Even Tyler recognizes this truth, once I’ve sent this mental message to him ten or eleven times.
Eventually Vanessa gets bored and lies down on the couch, cuddling me close. She presses me to her chest, blocking my eyes and ears. It’s just as well—Eli is growing tired of my running commentary, and the band’s playing is growing ever unruly. I let myself zone out to the sound of Vanessa’s slow, rhythmic heartbeat.
“That’s all I can take,” Eli says finally. “I’m gonna grab a soda. You guys want anything?”
They grumble a response I can’t hear, then his footsteps ascend the staircase over my head.
“Lucky cat,” says a soft voice close to the couch.
Vanessa stirs, then gives a low laugh. “Jules. Where’s Eli?”
“Upstairs. Tyler’s in the bathroom.” He leans in, and her heart starts to race. “So I thought I’d come do this.”
Uh-oh.
They kiss, loud and wet, and her hand leaves me to move to him. I’m flipped on my back, looking up at their chins. Their mouths move like they’re starving.
Then Jules’s hand displaces me. For a moment I teeter on the edge of the sofa, long enough to see him reach down her shirt. Then his elbow tips me off the side, and I tumble onto the floor. I focus on the frayed brown fabric of the couch skirt and think to Vanessa with all my might, What about Eli?
She pulls away from Jules. “I can’t do this to him. His dad just died.”
“So? He didn’t even know the guy. He makes fun of that stupid ‘Ready, Set, Dance’ song all the time.” Jules leans in again, making a slurping sound against what I assume is Vanessa’s neck.
“Stop.” She pushes him away, and this time he relents, letting both hands fall onto his knees. “Eli’s been different since it happened,” she says. “If you can’t see that, you’re a shitty friend.”
“I’ve been hooking up with you for a month. I’m already a shitty friend.”
Down the basement hallway, a door opens, letting out the liquid sound of a flushing toilet. Jules hurries to stand up and move away from the couch. “Hey, Ty, wanna play some Ping-Pong? Loser buys pizza.”
“Nah, I gotta get out of here before I stab Eli with one of your drumsticks. One more ‘Why can’t you sing it the way I wrote it?’ and I’m going solo.”
“If you do that, then Eli’ll go solo, too. I don’t want to see you guys competing.”
“Plus, you’ll be out of a gig, right?”
“You think that’s all I care about?” Jules laughs. “You wound me, man. I’ll see you Friday.”
Vanessa calls goodbye to him as he goes up the stairs. Then she picks me up from the floor. “Aww, sorry, little guy.” She dusts off my tail and the front of my shirt. “Ty, you need a roadie to carry out your million instruments?”
“Very funny, but no. I’m leaving my guitar here. Eli said he’d adjust the bridge for me. Intonation is totally out of whack.”
He’s the talented one.
“He’s the talented one, you know,” Vanessa says.
“And you’re the slutty one,” Tyler answers. “Eli finds out about you and Jules, that’s the end of the band.”
“Why do you care? You just said you wanted to—”
“Shh.”
Eli is coming down the stairs. “You’re leaving?” he asks Tyler, his voice devoid of disappointment.
“Yep. Friday practice still on?”
I wouldn’t commit if I were you.
Eli commits, despite my warning. Ah, well, I suppose band breakups, like all breakups, are best done in person.
Vanessa sets me on the coffee table in front of the couch, propped up against a stack of books. Then she straightens my clothes and gives me an indulgent smile.
You don’t deserve him.
Her smile fades, then she moves over to give Eli room on the couch. He picks up Tyler’s Fender and starts to tune it, but keeps glancing between Vanessa and me.
I’m not the one you should be jealous of.
She slides her hand up his thigh. “I have to leave in about half an hour, so...can you do that later?”
Eli sets Tyler’s guitar aside, then pulls her into his arms, kissing her, tangling his fingers in her hair. I wonder if her heart is beating as fast as it did when Jules kissed her.
I clear my throat, figuratively. I’m sitting right here. Do you mind?
Eli opens one eye to look at me, then extends his middle finger ever so slightly in my direction, below her arm, where she couldn’t see it even if her eyes were open.
There’s something you should know about her before you—
She tears off his T-shirt, then Eli leans back to lie on the sofa, pulling her on top of him. Things progress faster.
This is your last chance before I blurt out a hard truth. Trust me, you don’t want to hear it in front of her. I’m warning you.
Her sweater comes off, then the camisole beneath it.
Vanessa’s been cheating on you with Jules.
Eli’s hands go still on her bare waist, his thumb tracing beneath the edge of her bra. She doesn’t notice at first, too busy kissing or maybe biting his neck.
“Stop,” he whispers.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her blond hair hanging like a veil between us, so I can’t see his face.
“It’s not— I—um. I just remembered I have to be somewhere.”
“Now? Where?”
Coward. Don’t drag this out. I saw them kissing. More than kissing. You know I’m telling the truth, don’t you? You’ve suspected for a while.
“I just— I need you to go. I’ll call you later. I’m sorry.”
Why are you apologizing to her?
Vanessa doesn’t budge. “I don’t understand.” She clutches his arm harder, her voice taut with fear.
I turn my attention to her. He knows about you and Jules. Go now. Now!
Vanessa lifts her head, like she’s hearing her name shouted from far away. “Okay. But call me?”
“I will,” he says. “Promise.”
She grabs her sweater from the back of the couch and yanks it over her head. “I guess I’ll be early for work instead of late for once. My boss’ll die of surprise.” Vanessa picks up her bag, leans over for a quick kiss, then runs up the stairs.
Eli lies there on his back for a second, hands covering his face. The black tattoo on his upper arm twitches, a bare tree with birds rising from its branches.
Sorry.
He lets his hands fall to his side with a thud. “Sorry? Do you know what you just interrupted? Or are all figments celibate?”
It depends on the imagination that sustains us. I’ve taken some interesting forms in the past. For instance—
“I don’t want to know.” Eli taps his fingers against his ribs. “What do I do?”
Break up with her. What choice do you have?
“I could pretend I don’t know. Then everything stays the same. Otherwise I lose her and Jules. Tyler, too, probably, because I’ll have to break up the band. They’re my only friends.”
I doubt that’s true, and if it is, then you need to make better friends.
“I know.” Eli turns on his side to face me. “But even bad friends are better than being alone.”
He suddenly looks years younger. I have to make him feel better. It’s what I do.
I promise you this, Eli, right here and now: you’ll never be alone again.
* * *
After dinner, Eli paces his bedroom floor, clutching his Magic 8 Ball. “Should I break up with Vanessa and the band?” He flips the ball. “‘Outlook good.’ Does that mean yes or no?”
That sounds definitively yes.
“But not as definitive as Yes.” He shakes the ball hard and repeats the question. “‘Reply hazy, try again.’ You know what? I don’t trust this for big decisions. I’ll ask the cookie.” He sets down the ball and shoves his hand into his jar of fortune-cookie fortunes, a jar that looks like a giant ceramic Oreo.
He reads the first slip. “‘The secret to good friends is no secret to you.’ I don’t know what that means.”
It means time to man up and clear your life of douchebags.
He tilts his head at me. “You’re starting to sound less proper.”
And you’re starting to sound less smart. End it now.
After another half hour of my cajoling, Eli breaks up with Vanessa via text. She doesn’t reply. No begging, crying, threatening. Deep down she knows why he’s ended it, because I told her. She’ll chalk it up to intuition.
At bedtime, rather than setting me on the nightstand or in his guitar case, Eli takes off my hat and boots, wraps me in the blue silk cami Vanessa left behind and holds me close as he lies down to sleep. I fit perfectly under his chin.
This is something new, this...cuddling. Even when I belonged to women, I was in unhuggable forms, such as a crystal elephant or a carved wooden Woman of Willendorf fertility statue. Maybe if I’d ever been a child’s figment, I’d have experienced this closeness, this neediness. For the first time, I’m more than an advisor and miracle worker. I’m a friend.
Eli sleeps fitfully, and soon I tumble out of his arms and onto the floor. I’ve never spoken to him in his sleep, but he needs settling.
Wake up and write. You’ll feel better.
He comes awake with a sharp breath, then without a word, slips out of bed and crosses to his desk, the direction I’m facing. He lifts his Magic 8 Ball from atop a stack of notebooks, takes the top pad, then sets down the worthless prediction device.
On the way back to the bed, he accidentally steps on my face. “Sorry, Fig!” Eli picks me up, unwraps the camisole from around my torso and brings both to the bed with him.
Do you need my help?
He shakes his head and pulls the cap off the pen with his teeth. “This is one thing I do best on my own.”
* * *
Pen in one hand, Vanessa’s cami in the other, Eli scribbles furiously for the next four hours, frowning and crossing out as many lines as he writes. Just after 3:00 a.m. he pulls out his guitar and plays a series of chords—softly, so as not to wake his mom.
The next day at school, he returns Vanessa’s shirt, wrinkles ironed out. She takes it without a word, or at least none that I can hear from inside his bag.
In history class, he sets me on the corner of his desk, facing forward. “Good-luck charm for the exam,” he explains to Lyra.
“Let me see.”
He spins me to face him and Lyra. Instead of gushing over my cute widdle boots and hat, she takes a good long look at me. “That expression,” she says finally. “Like the whole world is amazing.”
It’s just the way the manufacturer shaped my eyes. The world is most definitely not amazing.
Eli gives me a skeptical smile.
But maybe she is, I add.
* * *
Friday afternoon, Eli meets Tyler and Jules for burgers at Five Guys before band practice. I’m left in the bag, of course, on the seat of the booth. His so-called friends sit across from him.
“I’m leaving the band,” he tells them when their food’s arrived.
“Aw, man.” Tyler pounds the bottom of a ketchup bottle. “Why now, when we’re finally getting good?”
“I don’t think we’re getting good, but that’s not the main reason. My main reason is that Jules here can’t keep his hands off my girlfriend.”
“What?” Jules stammers. “How do you know?”
“I knew this would happen,” Tyler says. “I told her to knock it off.”
“Wait, how did you know?” Jules asks him.
“I have eyes. Eyes that saw you feeling her up in the school parking lot last week.”
“Tyler, you knew and didn’t tell me?” Eli says. “I thought you were my best friend.”
“I didn’t want to make you mad.”
He didn’t want you to break up the band, I tell Eli. He wanted to do it himself.
“Well, I’m twice as mad now.”
“I can see that.” Tyler pounds the ketchup bottle again. “What is with this stuff? It’s stuck.”
“Eli, I’m sorry, man. I really am.” Jules sounds sincere.
He’s not sorry.
“It’s my fault,” he continues with a full mouth. “You shouldn’t blame Vanessa. I’ll stay away from her, I swear.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“I’m just saying, it’s over with us. So you might as well keep her.”
“Keep her?” Eli’s voice rises above the din of the crowd. “She’s a girl, not a doll!”
Tyler snorts. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eli’s voice is colder than I’ve ever heard it.
“You’ve gotten a little too attached to that stuffed cat your loser dad gave you.”
“I’m not attached.”
“Oh, really? Then let me have it for a week.” Tyler sets down the bottle hard on the table. “It’s the least you can do, Mr. I’m Too Talented for My Band.”
“Why would you even want him?” Eli’s voice turns hot with anger again.
“It’s a ‘him’ now? Is he your new best friend? Is that why you don’t need me anymore?”
Jules breaks in. “Take it easy, Ty. Eli didn’t say we weren’t still friends. The band stuff is just business.”
“‘Business’?” Ty says. “This is your fault, Jules! It wasn’t business when you had your hand inside Vanessa’s shirt.”
Eli’s silverware hits the table with a clatter. A fork or knife bounces onto the booth seat beside my bag. “Screw you guys both.”
Suddenly I’m lifted, bag and all. He’s walking fast toward the door, faster than he’s ever headed to class. The corner of his calculus textbook digs into my stomach with every step, and I’m very glad I have no pain nerves.
A door creaks open, and Eli says, “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Sorry.”
“It’s okay, but what...” The girl’s familiar voice fades as Eli keeps going.
We stop suddenly, and a car door handle rattles. Eli curses. He tears open the bag, letting in bright sunlight I can’t blink away.
Your keys aren’t in here. I didn’t hear them jangle.
“Looking for these?” Tyler says behind us.
Now I hear them jangle.
“Give me my keys,” Eli demands.
“I’ll trade you.” Tyler laughs. “The keys for the kitty.”
“Why do you want him so much?”
He doesn’t want me. He wants to destroy me to hurt you, because you hurt him.
Eli lunges, and now it’s Jules’s turn to laugh, though more nervously than Tyler did. “We’re just messin’ with you. Come on, our burgers are getting cold. Give Ty the stupid doll for two seconds so he’ll stop being a dick. Or give it to me, whatever.”
Eli drops the bag on the ground. “Haven’t I given you enough? My songs, my time, my girlfriend?”
“Vanessa wasn’t your girlfriend—she was just a regular hookup. You know what she called you? Her favorite charity.”
There’s a smack of bone against bone, and Jules cries out. Then a thud and the sound of denim skidding over blacktop.
Suddenly, I’m pulled out into the brightness. By Tyler.
“How do you like him now, dude?” He rips off my hat and boots. “Nothing better than a naked p—”
Tyler buckles over with an “oof!” He clutches me against his stomach, groaning. Something in bright blue leather—a gloved fist? A booted foot?—flashes past me, up into his chin. Released from his grip, I fall to the pavement, rolling to rest faceup.
Appearing above me are wide blue eyes, like those belonging to the girl on Eli’s ceiling. Lyra scoops me up and stuffs me into her bag. There’s candy in here. Watermelon flavored, I think.
Tyler cries out again, higher-pitched this time.
“Let go of the keys,” Lyra says. Her body rocks forward, and Tyler shrieks louder. “Sorry, does that hurt? You know what would hurt worse? If you didn’t let go of the keys and my foot accidentally broke all your fingers.” She bends over, and the bag on her back rises. “If you ever want to play that stupid ukulele again, you know what to do.”
A sharp jangle, then Lyra says, “Thank you.”
I can’t hear much over the rush and jostle of her bag, which is soon dumped on the floor of Eli’s car (I recognize the smell).
“You okay?” she asks.
Not bad, but—
“I’ll be all right,” Eli answers.
Oh, she wasn’t talking to me. Sorry.
Lyra starts the engine. “I live around the block. We can go to my house and get some ice for your face, then you can bring me back to get my car later.”
“Thanks for rescuing us. I mean, rescuing me. I mean, rescuing Fig.”
“You named your stuffed cat after a fruit?”
Eli pauses. “It’s short for Figment.”
She laughs and backs out of the parking space so fast, a book in her bag smashes my legs. “Interesting, considering he actually exists.”
* * *
I sit on Lyra’s kitchen table, propped against the salt and pepper shakers. Eli holds an ice pack to his bruised left eye and another to his lower lip, where he was lucky not to have the ring pulled out. Popcorn is popping in the microwave.
“Okay, kitty, your turn.” Lyra enters the kitchen with a large plastic bin. “Time for some new clothes.”
Yes! I would pump my fist if I could.
Eli can’t hide his interest as she lifts the lid. “You have a separate compartment for each item of clothing? I’m in awe.”
“I was a little OCD when I was a kid, at least with the stuff that was important to me.” Lyra tucks a lock of her long dark hair behind her ear in a self-conscious gesture. “It’s been years since I even looked at my dolls, much less dressed them up.”
Eli puts down one of his ice packs and pulls out an orange boa. “Isn’t this from one of the Bratz girls?”
“Yeah, I owned, like, ten of those. So you must have a sister, huh?”
He holds the boa up in front of me.
Too much.
“I don’t have a sister,” Eli says without meeting her eyes.
She pauses in her search, then smiles. “You played with dolls? That’s so cool.”
He shrugs like it’s nothing, but the skin around his visible eye loosens in relief. “That’s one of the advantages to being dad-free: no one to force me to play with trucks or try out for football.” He places the boa back in the bin. “Mom didn’t care, though I think she was confused when I turned out straight.”
Lyra laughs. “I’m glad you turned out— I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with— I mean, I’m glad for my sake. Ugh, can we just pretend I didn’t say any of that?” She lifts a pair of golden slippers. “Fig must have new boots, if nothing else.”
And you thought you’d be alone if you ditched your fake friends. Ask her to hang out.
Eli picks up the other ice pack, but before pressing it to his mouth, he says, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
* * *
Over the next six months, Eli plays a series of successful solo gigs, he and Lyra get serious, and he graduates magna cum laude. I play a role in all of these fortunate events, but only a developmental one. Mostly it’s his doing. Mostly.
During the summer between high school and college, Eli ramps up his appearance schedule, and after each performance, a music journalist or blogger sits him down for an interview. They ask the expected questions about his one-hit-wonder of a father, how Eli will avoid the same trap of overconfidence, how he’ll stay down-to-earth despite drowning in contract offers, each bigger than the last.
He always answers, “My friends keep me humble. They remind me that success doesn’t come from my efforts alone. Some of it’s luck, of course, and I feel very lucky right now.”
But each time he says it with less conviction. When they start asking about me, his “good-luck charm,” Eli gets antsy.
These days, we don’t talk much.
One night, after a standing-room-only concert at a local nightclub, a reporter with a different sort of angle wants to talk to Eli.
“Hi.” The lady is about thirty years old and carries a bag that screams organic living. “I’m doing a story about good-luck charms and successful performers—musicians, sports stars, that sort of thing. The article is called ‘Beyond Rabbit’s Feet.’” She sinks into a chair and signals the waitress. “Your little cat is quite the legend.”
“It is?” Eli glances over to the chair next to him, where I’m sitting atop his guitar case.
You just called me “it.” Not cool.
The reporter smiles at me. “So I’ve done some digging...”
“Great,” he mutters, reaching for his Coke.
“It is my job.” She flips a page in her notepad. “Turns out, your father was also known for carrying around a cat-shaped good-luck charm when he was with Boyz on the Korner.” She points her pen at me. “Is this the same one? Did he give it to you?”
Eli just sips his Coke and stares at her impassively, saying nothing.
She reaches into her bag. “I have pictures, if that would help.”
“Don’t bother.” Standing quickly, almost knocking his chair over, he sweeps me up and crams me into his inside jacket pocket. “For the record, yes, the cat was my father’s, but it’s just a gimmick. My girlfriend likes holding it during shows. It gives her something to do with her hands when she gets nervous for me.”
“If it’s just a gimmick, then why is it insured for over a hundred thousand—”
“I have to go. Good night.”
Her protestation fades behind us as Eli stalks out of the club.
Once we’re outside where it’s quiet, I ask him, Am I really a gimmick to you now?
He pulls out his phone to pretend he’s talking to someone else instead of the bulge in his coat. “Fig, I think next time you should stay home.”
* * *
I do stay home for the following gig, perched on his windowsill, angled so that I can also see the aquarium. As frustrated as Eli is with my influence over his life, he still takes the time for small kindnesses.
Just after 2:00 a.m., he pulls into the driveway. I can feel the slam of car doors from up here. Soon the stairs, then the floorboards shake with his footsteps.
The bedroom door jerks open. Eli dumps his guitar case on the bed, then paces, hands on his hips, shoulders lowered in defeat.
How’d it go? I ask, though I can guess.
“It sucked.” He sinks onto the edge of the bed. “I suck.”
You do not suck. That’s one thing I know for sure about you.
“Maybe you know, but I’ll never know. Not as long as...” He raises his head from his hands to stare at me. A look I recognize all too well comes into his eyes.
No...
He gets up and crosses the room toward me, slowly, as if I’ll bite. I wish I could bite.
“I have to do this.” Eli picks me up with the gentlest of touches, but I can feel the fury in his bones.
Don’t put me away. You’ll regret it.
“No, Fig, I won’t. Not in the long run.” He slides me into the envelope his dad sent me in. “I have to make things happen for myself. I don’t even know whether people like me because they want to, or because you’re making them.”
Fine. Let me stay here in your room. Just don’t put me away. Please. Don’t be like your father.
“I’m not like him. You were the one who told me I could succeed on my own. He needed luck, but I don’t.” Eli staples my envelope shut, as if I could escape.
I’ll miss you if you put me away. I’ll be miserable and lonely.
“No,” he whispers, on the verge of tears. “Figments feel nothing, remember?”
I’ve become more than a figment with you. I thought we were friends!
“I’ve given up friends before, when they’ve hurt me.”
But I’m still your Fig. I lower my thought-voice to a whisper. I’ll always be your Fig.
Eli’s hands begin to shake, but I still hear him clearly. “No matter what?”
The toes of my boots bend against the interior of the envelope, and my paws reach out, forever. No matter what.
* * *
In a box in the attic, I lie upon something soft—clothes, I imagine—and wait for Eli to return. Because he still believes in me, I can still feel him. Sometimes I hear him downstairs in his room, playing the song I woke him to write, the song that could make him huge.
It’s cold up here. My cat ears pick up the scrabble of insects and mice, creeping about in what must be an ideal home. My plush body conforms to the shape of whatever I lie upon, the way my soul (if I have one) conforms to the shape of whomever I—well, serve is the wrong word, but it’s better than love.
When Eli moves away—to college or stardom—I begin to fade. It takes months, maybe years. Time loses meaning. My senses dull. I forget who I am.
It ends, as always, in darkness.
Epilogue
A veiled light meets my eyes.
“There you are,” a woman whispers. “Just where he said you’d be.”
A slight rip of paper, then I’m tugged out to see her. Familiar, I think, but...was her hair always that gray?
She stands, crosses the attic, then carries me down creaky stairs, clutching me to her side.
We enter a living room, where the television is on, playing the Grammy Awards. “My friends were going to come over to celebrate,” the woman says, “but I told them I was sick. Eli wanted to make sure you saw, so I figured it should just be you and me.”
Eli...I know the name. Was I once his? Were we each other’s?
I don’t think she can hear me. She sets me on a coffee table, propped against a stack of magazines.
Wait! Was that his face on the cover?
She definitely can’t hear me, and I can’t turn to face the magazines. I strain to see out of the corner of my eye, but these eyes don’t seem to have corners.
“Coming up next,” says the voice on TV, “Grammy nominee for Best New Artist—Eli Wylde!”
Eli...
When they return from commercial break, he’s there onstage, just him and his guitar. His age shocks me—I expected to see a twenty-year-old Best New Artist, but this man’s closer to thirty. It took him thirteen years to reach this height without me, but he reached it, with the song I made him write.
When he wins, his acceptance speech is full of names I don’t recognize. The only name I know is Lyra, whom he refers to as his “oldest friend.” I feel so displaced by this; at our last time together, she was his newest friend.
Finally Eli looks straight at the camera. “Last of all, I’d like to thank my father, Gordon Wylde. We never met in person, but he gave me the most important, most real gift I’ve ever received.” He leans in close to the mic and speaks in a near whisper, holding up his award. “Fig, I’m bringing home a new pair of boots.”
* * * * *
THE TWELFTH GIRL
by Malinda Lo
Harley was the kind of girl who could get away with anything. That was the first thing Liv learned when she arrived at the Virginia Sloane School for Girls in mid-October. It wasn’t only that Harley flouted the dress code and skipped class and ignored the curfew without ever being reprimanded. There was something disquieting yet seductive about her, like walking on the edge of a cliff while gazing down at the violent beauty of the ocean breaking below. Somehow it seemed as if Harley could jump—would jump—but instead of falling, she’d spread her arms and fly like a blackbird.
Liv had known girls who acted like Harley before, but never someone quite so successful at pulling it off. Harley was definitely the most interesting thing about the Sloane School, and from the first time Liv saw her—walking into class twenty minutes late, dressed in tight jeans and boots instead of the uniform, her black hair wind-tossed and wild—Liv didn’t know if she wanted to be Harley or if she wanted to kiss her.
Harley’s friends, too, seemed to benefit from her apparent invincibility. They lived together in Eleanor Castle Hall, a small, turreted fantasy of a dorm on the edge of campus. Castle had twelve rooms, all singles, each taken by Harley and her group. Everybody knew they went out dancing every night until three in the morning, and they never got caught, even though the campus gates were locked at 10:00 p.m., and every dorm had a resident advisor who knocked on your door if you even played your music too loud. The rumor was that Harley had a rich father who had given so much money to Sloane that Harley—and everybody she liked—was immune from the rules.
Liv wanted to be immune, too. Her parents had transferred her to Sloane after she got in trouble at her old school in New York City for missing curfew too many times. Liv was pretty sure her parents had chosen Sloane because there was nothing to miss curfew for in Middlebury, Massachusetts, the quiet town where Sloane was located. If Harley somehow got off campus to party every night, Liv wanted in, but neither Harley nor any of her friends seemed the least bit interested in getting to know the new girl. Their collective cold shoulder annoyed Liv, who was used to being noticed for all the right reasons, and it only made her more determined to figure out how they got away with what they did.
One afternoon about a week after she first arrived at Sloane, Liv walked into Middlebury to buy shampoo at the drugstore. As she approached the shop, she saw a pink neon hand in the window upstairs. The sign next to the hand read Madam Sofia’s Fortunes & Favors. Liv was gazing curiously at the sign—it seemed, almost, to beckon to her—when the door next to the drugstore that led upstairs opened. A girl dressed all in black barreled out onto the sidewalk, nearly smacking into Liv.
“Hey, watch it!” Liv cried.
The girl didn’t stop, tossing her only a brief glare before she continued down the street in the direction Liv had come from. She recognized the girl; it was Paige, one of Harley’s friends. Liv watched Paige disappear around the corner, then glanced at the door she had come out of. There was a small placard in the glass window. Sale: Five Minutes for Ten Dollars. Find Your Future Here. Impulsively, Liv opened the door and went up to the palm reader’s shop.
A gray-haired woman in a green velvet dress turned from the window overlooking the street when Liv entered. The woman’s eyes narrowed on her. “Can I help you?” she said.
“Are you Madam Sofia?” Liv asked, glancing around the shop. It was stuffed with knickknacks and baskets of trinkets.
“Yes.”
“I saw your sign in the window,” Liv said. “‘Five minutes for ten dollars.’”
An odd expression passed over Madam Sofia’s face; it reminded Liv of a key turning in a lock. “Follow me,” the woman said. She led Liv through the cluttered shop to a back room hung with curtains and furnished with a round table and two chairs. Madam Sofia sat down and took out a kitchen timer from beneath her chair. She set it for five minutes and placed it on the table. “Give me your hand,” she said.
Liv sat across from the fortune-teller and placed her hand in the woman’s palm. The instant they touched, Liv felt a strange sensation run through her, as if she were a marionette and the puppeteer had tugged on her strings. She watched as the woman bent over her palm, studying the lines in her skin. The rapid ticking of the timer in the background began to make Liv nervous, as if it were counting down the seconds to—well, Liv didn’t know what, but it was unsettling, and she had the sudden urge to leave.
As if she could sense Liv’s change of heart, Madam Sofia’s hand tightened over hers. “You want to know about the girl who was just here,” she said.
“How—how did you know that?”
“It’s my job to know what brings you into my shop.”
The ticking of the timer seemed to grow louder, and Liv had the disconcerting sensation that she was shrinking while the room around her was expanding.
“You should stay away from those girls,” Madam Sofia said, her voice sounding like liquid smoke.
“What girls?” Liv’s palm was sweating.
“The girls who live in the castle.”
Castle Hall. “Harley and her friends?” Liv asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They’re dangerous. You should stay away from them.”
Liv hated it when anyone told her what to do. “I’ll hang out with whoever I want,” she said.
Madam Sofia gazed at her with small, dark eyes. Liv twitched under the scrutiny and tried to pull back, but the woman wouldn’t let go of her hand. “They are playing with forces beyond their control,” Madam Sofia said. “If you value your life, you’ll stay away from them.”
The cautionary words only stoked Liv’s curiosity. As that venturesome emotion snaked through her, she said, “I thought you were supposed to tell my fortune, not give me a warning.”
“I’m doing both,” Madam Sofia said, and she dropped Liv’s hand as if it had burned her.
Liv cradled her hand to her chest—it trembled now, free from the woman’s grasp—and stood. “You’re crazy,” she said, and turned to leave.
“Ten dollars,” Madam Sofia said, her voice ringing in the small room. “You don’t want to owe me a debt.”
Liv stopped, feeling as if the woman had grabbed her with an invisible hook. Liv reached into her pocket with her other hand—the one Madam Sofia hadn’t touched—and pulled out her wallet. She fished out a ten-dollar bill and tossed it at the fortune-teller. It caught in the air and fluttered to the floor.
Madam Sofia gave her a shrewd smile and said, “You’re welcome.”
* * *
Everything Liv learned about Harley was like finding another piece to a puzzle. The problem was, she had no idea what the puzzle was supposed to depict.
All the girls at Sloane had definite opinions about Harley and her friends. They were stuck-up; they were slackers; they were daddy’s girls. Beneath the criticism, though, was a palpable yearning to be one of them. To be part of that tight-knit pack of girls who prowled the campus like panthers, beautiful and cunning. To dance every night—no one knew where, but it had to be good—and come to breakfast with last night’s makeup on, leaning on each other and laughing about what they had seen and done until dawn.
Liv soon discovered that the only way to join them was to wait for one of the twelve girls who lived in Castle Hall to leave Sloane, and then hope that Harley chose you to take the vacant room. Two girls had left so far: Melissa Wong, last spring, and Andrea Richmond, at the start of the school year in September. It didn’t look like there would be any vacancies in the near future, which was why the sudden departure of Harley’s younger sister, Casey, was such big news.
Harley didn’t come to breakfast the morning that Casey left. She didn’t show up in public at all until late afternoon, and then her eyes had the unmistakable red rims of someone who had been crying.
Liv saw it up close and personal, because Harley was waiting for her after biology class. “You want to be the twelfth girl?” Harley asked, oblivious to the stares of the girls coming out of the classroom behind them.
Liv couldn’t believe this was happening. She didn’t understand why Harley had picked her and not one of the hundreds of other girls at Sloane. Girls who had been there for much longer; who had been campaigning for Harley’s affections for months. Girls who had more-powerful parents; who had private planes to fly Harley and her friends out of the country if they wanted. Liv’s family was well-off—she wouldn’t be at Sloane if they weren’t—but in comparison to the rest of the students, she fell squarely in the middle. Perhaps that was why Harley’s invitation gave Liv a sense of raw satisfaction, as if she had made this come true because of the strength of her desire, as if she had created a physical arrow from her craving and shot it straight at Harley. Now all she had to do was answer in the affirmative, and her every wish would come true.
“Yes,” Liv said, and Harley’s full lips turned up in the tiniest of grins, and she gestured for Liv to follow her outside.
The trees in the quad had shed half their leaves by now, and with the wind picking up, it was likely they’d lose quite a few more before the end of the day. Harley led her to a nearly bare oak tree in the center of the quad, and Liv understood that the first thing she had to do was survive the hungry gazes of all the students streaming out of the academic buildings around them. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked at Harley, trying to act like she didn’t care, even though her heart was pounding as hard as if she were sprinting toward a prize.
Out of the corner of her eye, Liv thought she saw a man standing nearby. His shadow stretched across the browning grass as though the sun was rising behind him, but the sky was slate-gray, and when she turned her head, there was no one there. Only Harley was watching her, her dark eyes fringed with long lashes as black as her hair. Liv wondered if she dyed it to attain that shade of midnight.
“These are the rules,” Harley began. “First, you will tell no one about anything I’m about to say. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” Liv said.
“Rule number two is that once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no backing out, no matter what happens. Do you agree?”
The curiosity that had lit within her at Madam Sofia’s shop only burned brighter. “Sure.”
“You have to say ‘I agree,’” Harley said, sounding irritated.
“I agree,” Liv said, puzzled.
“Good. Rule number three: You do what I tell you. We are not a democracy. But if you follow the rules, I’ll watch out for you. Agree?”
Now Liv hesitated. She didn’t like being told what to do. She thought she saw the shadow again, but this time she also saw wings unfolding from it. She blinked, and it was gone.
“Liv,” Harley said.
There was a feverish insistence in Harley’s eyes that made Liv’s contrary nature soften. She felt as if the only thing she had ever wanted was to make Harley happy. “I agree,” she said.
Harley’s shoulders slumped uncharacteristically, and for a second Harley didn’t look invincible; she only looked tired. But the moment passed as quickly as it had come. “Good,” Harley said. “Then you go back to your room and pack your things. Bring them over to Castle Hall before lights-out.”
“Tonight? Don’t I have to fill out some paperwork or something?”
“I’ll take care of it. It’ll take a couple of days to process, but you can still move in tonight. You can stay in my sister’s room.”
“Where’d your sister go?” Liv asked, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew she shouldn’t have said them.
Harley’s face closed up and she looked away. “None of your business. Go get ready. We’re going out tonight.” She began to leave, heading toward the administration building.
“Wait,” Liv called after her. “What should I wear?”
Harley glanced over her shoulder but didn’t slow down. “Dress to impress,” she said.
A blackbird fluttered down from the branch of the oak tree above Liv’s head and landed on the ground a few feet away. It turned to look at her, and as it folded its wings along its body, Liv felt a deep, dark cold inside, as if she had made a bargain with someone or something she did not understand.
* * *
Casey’s room was on the third floor of Castle Hall, and she had left her sheets and blankets on the bed. The first thing Liv did was swap out Casey’s flowered sheets for her own yellow ones. As Liv changed out of her school uniform and into black jeans and a glittery black tank top, she had the unsettling feeling that the room wasn’t empty. It still smelled like another girl’s shampoo.
There was a knock on the door, and Harley called out, “Liv, you ready? Party’s starting.”
“Coming,” Liv answered, and she checked her makeup one last time in the mirror. She had always thought of herself as confident; she had never been a wallflower. Tonight, though, she was nervous. The anticipation of what might happen spread over her cheeks in a rosy flush. She didn’t need any blush.
The girls were all waiting in Harley’s room when she arrived. Harley said, “Say hi to Liv,” and they did, each one of them. Paige, Carmody, Ruby, Skyler, Devin, Sarah, Angela, Tara, Brooklyn and Kirsten. Liv was glad she had worn black, because that seemed to be their favorite color. Black jeans, black leggings, black tanks, black lace, black boots, black eyeliner, black nails. The only spots of color were on their lips and eyes—crimson and purple and blue—and in the jewelry each girl wore. Carmody had a shining steel cuff embedded with blue stones on her right wrist. Paige put up her blond hair with garnet pins. Sarah had a gold mesh bracelet studded with what looked like diamonds. Harley wore a gold ring set with a faceted black jewel on her left hand. Every time she raised her hand, it sparkled.
They passed around a bottle of vodka while they waited for midnight. “We don’t go out till then,” Paige informed Liv. Liv’s mouth grew numb from the liquor, and she wondered if she was going to be drunk before the party even started, but then Harley put the bottle away, and it was time.
“These are the rules,” Harley said to Liv as the girls stood up. “We have to return by three in the morning. No exceptions. And nobody brings anything back with them.”
Liv nodded, and then Harley did something very strange: she pushed her bed aside along well-worn grooves on the wooden floor, revealing a trapdoor. Harley lifted the door’s black iron ring and pulled it up, and Liv saw a flight of stairs descending into the dark. Liv wondered if she was seeing things because of the vodka. They were on the third floor of Castle Hall. Did those stairs go to the second floor?
Nobody questioned it, so Liv didn’t, either. As the girls began to troop down the stairs, Harley caught her eye and said, “Don’t forget what you agreed to, Liv.”
Warmth suffused her skin. “I won’t,” Liv said, and she stepped into the hole in the floor beneath Harley’s bed.
The stairs seemed to go on forever—well past the point where they should have struck the first floor. Liv gripped the metal railing as she followed the girls ahead of her, listening to them chatter about where they were going, who would be there, whether the music would be good. “It’s always good,” said one of them, and the others laughed in agreement, their voices throaty in the dim stairway.
Finally the stairs ended in a steel door like an emergency exit, and Paige pushed the bar to open it. They spilled out into a rain-slicked alley that smelled faintly of gasoline. As Liv looked around, the world seemed to spin. She didn’t understand how they could have climbed all the way down those stairs from beneath Harley’s bed to emerge in this alley in a city that was clearly not Middlebury.
“Where are we?” she asked, feeling dizzy.
Harley grabbed her arm, steadying her. “This way,” she said, and led Liv down the alley to another door. There was a flyer taped to it that depicted a stylized girl’s face with spiky hair and a big, full mouth. Across the place where her eyes should be were four letters: AARU. Harley reached for the handle of the door and pulled it open. Music blasted into the alley.
Liv and the other girls followed her inside. In front of a velvet curtain, a bouncer waited with a flashlight. Harley pulled Liv forward and said, “She’s new. The twelfth girl.”
The bouncer swept his flashlight over Harley’s hand, and her ring glowed. Then he turned the light on Liv’s face, and she winced at the brightness.
“All right,” the bouncer said, flicking the light away.
Harley grabbed her arm again. “Come on,” she said, and pulled her through the velvet curtain.
It was like stepping into another world. The music was overpowering, the bass so heavy it seemed to snake up her body from the floor to shake her from the inside out. The lights that strobed over the crowd obscured as much as they revealed: dancers in glitter and vinyl and fur, their bodies glinting with metal in places she would never think to pierce, their hair caught up in crowns and headdresses that looked like antlers. Instead of mirrored disco balls, there were trees made of glass rising from the floor, reflecting the lights. Crystal leaves hung from the clear branches overhead, making it seem as if the ceiling was heaving in time to the music.
The other girls slipped around Liv and Harley, disappearing into the crowd. Harley—who was still holding Liv’s wrist as if she were a child—leaned over to say, “This is the main room. There are two more. I’ll show you.” Then she began to lead Liv around the edge of the dance floor.
The next room seemed to be made of gold. The walls were hammered gold, and gold leaves hung from weeping golden willows while golden spotlights illuminated a dancer in a cage hanging above the crowd, her whole body painted gold. After that was the room made of silver: curving silver tree trunks; silver leaves that shivered in the warm, perfumed air; silver strobe lights that made every dancer’s skin look like platinum. Harley took Liv toward the bar in the silver room, and when Harley let go of her, she realized that sometime during their circuit of the club, Harley had switched to holding her hand.
Harley leaned close and said, “I have to go look for someone. I’ll come back for you before three. You should have a drink.” She pressed a goblet into Liv’s hand, and before Liv could object, Harley was gone.
The goblet was made of heavy gold and encrusted with jewels; it was the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a fairy-tale castle, not in a nightclub. Liv stared at the reflected lights in the shimmering liquid and sniffed it suspiciously. She still felt tipsy from the vodka and wasn’t sure if she should mix it with this...wine? She looked out at the crowd, wondering where Harley had vanished to so quickly, but she couldn’t find her. She couldn’t see any of the other girls from Castle Hall, either. She was about to put the goblet down—she had a sudden urge to look for Harley—when a boy appeared in front of her. He had spiky black hair and both of his arms were covered with full-sleeve tattoos. Liv couldn’t quite make out what the tattoos were—they seemed to swim in her vision—but she noticed that he was holding a gold goblet like hers.
“Hey, you’re new here,” he shouted over the music. He smiled at her, and she stared at him, unexpectedly transfixed. He clinked his goblet with hers and took a sip of his drink. Without thinking, she mirrored him. The wine was bracing—cool and sharp, as if she had inhaled a breath of winter.
She didn’t remember much of what happened after that, but she did remember him taking the empty goblet out of her hand and saying in her ear, “Dance with me.” His words slid like honey down her throat, and she let him lead her onto the dance floor beneath the silver leaves. He was lithe and beautiful and he tasted as icy as that wine when he kissed her. The music seemed to embed itself in her body beat after beat, and she felt as if she could dance with this unnamed boy forever and never be sated.
And then Harley was back, pulling her away from the boy and saying, “Come on, Liv. Time to go.” And Liv stumbled through the crowd, holding Harley’s hand, and she couldn’t remember why she had ever wanted to dance with that boy in the first place.
* * *
Liv awoke the next morning in Harley’s sister’s room, feeling like her head had been stuffed with cotton balls. She glanced at the clock and realized she had already missed breakfast and most of history class, but when she ran across campus and burst into the classroom, the teacher didn’t even notice.
It took almost all day for Liv to shake off her hangover. It wasn’t until she and the others were back in Harley’s room that night, passing the vodka bottle around again, that she felt as if she had finally returned to the real world—just in time to leave it.
At midnight, Harley reminded them of the rules: They had to return by 3:00 a.m., and nobody could bring anything back with them. Then she pushed the bed aside and pulled up the trapdoor, and once more a flight of stairs was revealed. Liv was prepared for a long descent, but tonight it was different. This time the stairs ended after only ten steps, delivering the twelve girls into a tunnel dug out of the earth. Liv didn’t understand how it was possible, because they should only be on the second floor, but there appeared to be roots growing out of the walls.
“It wasn’t like this yesterday, was it?” Liv whispered over her shoulder to Paige.
“Sometimes it’s different,” Paige said.
Liv wanted to ask how—or why—but she knew somehow that she shouldn’t. She was meant to accept this, the same way she had accepted the rules that Harley laid out. So she kept walking and swallowed her questions.
The tunnel ended in a short flight of steps that led to an ancient-looking wooden door. Harley lifted the latch on the iron handle as if everything was totally normal, and the door opened into the same city alley. The entrance to the club bore a different flyer tonight. It was printed with a black tree drawn like a tattoo, and gothic letters spelled out words Liv couldn’t pronounce: Magh Meall.
Inside, the club had changed in ways that made Liv wonder if she had simply remembered it wrong. The first room had trees of gold, not glass, and instead of a caged dancer hanging above there were aerial acrobats, bare legs wrapped around rippling golden silk. Liv gazed at them as the music thudded through her, and she decided that she wouldn’t drink the wine tonight, because tomorrow she wanted to remember this place.
She turned to look for Harley, but she was nowhere in sight. Liv began to push her way through the dancers, searching for her. Strangers’ hands brushed against her, their fingers sweeping over her arms, and when she looked down she saw trails of gold dust on her skin. A woman with long green ropes of hair caught hold of her, urging her to dance, and she smelled like the ocean, salty and clean. Although Liv wanted to stay with her, she forced herself to remember what she was after: Harley. She had to find Harley. Liv pulled away from the woman, whose face suddenly contorted into anger, and when she snarled at Liv, her teeth looked like fangs.
Recoiling, Liv’s gaze darted around the room, seeking anyone familiar who could explain what she had seen. Finally she glimpsed Harley slipping through the doorway into the next room. “Harley!” Liv shouted, but her voice was lost in the pounding music. She went after her, pressing against the walls so that she could avoid the dancers, but when she entered the next room—silver trees, lit with pulsing red-and-white strobe lights—she had lost her again.
Someone grabbed her elbow and she spun around, her heart racing. It was Paige. “You okay?” Paige asked.
“I’m looking for Harley,” Liv said. “Is it three yet?”
Paige shook her head. “We’ve only been here about fifteen minutes.”
That didn’t feel right.
Paige saw her confusion and said, “Let me get you a drink.” She led Liv to a curtained alcove along the wall—there were many of them, mostly full of couples—and pushed her inside. “Wait here.”
When the curtain fell, it muffled some of the music. The low red lights made the alcove feel like being inside someone’s heart. Liv’s skin itched, and she rubbed at her forearms idly until she realized something was sloughing off. She looked down in horror, but it wasn’t her skin; it was glitter.
Paige returned with two goblets—still gold and jewel-encrusted—and sat down beside her. “Here,” Paige said, handing her a drink. “You need this.”
Liv took the goblet but didn’t drink. “I think it gave me a hangover last night.”
“You get used to it,” Paige said, sipping from her own goblet.
“Where’s Harley?” Liv asked.
“Why? You have a thing for her?”
Liv’s face grew warm. “No.”
“It’s okay. Everybody has a thing for her at first.” Paige sounded resigned.
“Did you?” Liv asked.
Paige shrugged. “Sure. We were together for a while, but that’s over.”
“Do you know where she is?” Liv asked again. It was the only thing she could remember, as if her mind was stuck on repeat, and she didn’t know why.
Paige didn’t respond at first, instead studying her carefully. Liv clutched her goblet with both hands, the jewels digging into her skin, and she wished—she willed—Paige to answer her question. Finally Paige said, “Harley’s looking for her sister.”
Casey. “I thought she left school,” Liv said.
“No,” Paige said, and for a moment she looked frightened. She took another sip of her wine. “She came to the club with us a few nights ago, but we couldn’t find her before we left.”
“You mean she stayed here?”
“I don’t know. Harley thinks she can find her, but...” Paige took another sip, and the drink seemed to calm her. “Melissa and Andrea stayed, too, and we haven’t found them.”
Liv rubbed a hand over her forehead, trying to clear the fuzziness from her brain. “You mean all three of them stayed here? They never returned? How come nobody talks about that at school? Everybody says they just transferred.”
“They didn’t transfer,” Paige said flatly.
“Then what happened to them?” Liv asked. “Why would they stay here? I don’t understand.”
Paige sighed. “You’re not supposed to know this,” Paige said deliberately. “At least, not yet. You can’t tell anyone that you know. You can’t tell Harley.”
Liv was mystified. “Why did you tell me, then?”
Paige looked annoyed. “I don’t agree with everything Harley decides. And you’re one of us now—or you will be tomorrow. You might as well know.”
“What do you mean about tomorrow?” Liv asked. “Aren’t I one of you already? I promised Harley I’d do what she wanted.”
“Tomorrow everything will be finalized. Third time’s the charm.” Paige took another drink. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She stood, her head nearly brushing the ceiling of the curtained alcove. “I’ll see you later. I have to dance.”
The way she said it—I have to dance—was so strange, as if she was being compelled to do it. Liv watched Paige leave, and then she put her own goblet of wine down on the floor. Bit by bit, like a knife scraping against the frost on a windshield, she was beginning to see.
This place. This beautiful, horrific place. What had she gotten herself into?
* * *
Liv woke to the repetitive screeching of her alarm at 7:00 a.m. She shut it off quickly. The rest of Castle Hall was silent; the other girls probably wouldn’t wake up for hours. Liv threw off her blankets and got dressed. She didn’t feel as hungover as she had the day before, but there was definitely something wrong with her perceptions. The real world seemed blurry.
She threw her laptop into her messenger bag and walked through the chilly late-October air to the dining hall. As she passed the quad, a flock of blackbirds took off from the oak tree, the beat of their wings loud in the silent morning.
The dining hall was beginning to fill with students. Liv poured herself a giant cup of coffee, took a seat alone at the table traditionally reserved for Harley’s group and opened her laptop. Three girls had stayed behind at that club. Melissa Wong, Andrea Richmond, and Harley’s sister, Casey. Liv searched for the girls’ names online, looking for evidence of how their disappearances had been reported. Melissa and Andrea both had Facebook pages, but Melissa’s was private, so she couldn’t read it. Andrea’s, however, was mostly public. Her page was filled with messages from people saying they missed her and were worried about her, but oddly, none of the messages appeared to be from any Sloane students. One was from someone identified as Andrea’s brother, and it said, “We’re looking for you, Ann. Please come home.” It took Liv a while to read through her timeline, but the last update she had posted had been back in August. “Can’t wait to party with the girls again!”
Where had Andrea gone? Liv thought about the flyers posted on the door to the club in the alley. She couldn’t remember how to spell the name that had been on the flyer last night, but she remembered the four letters from the first night: AARU. She entered the word into the search bar. It was a term from Egyptian mythology. A heavenly paradise where souls could exist in pleasure for eternity. Similar to: Elysium, Avalon, Magh Meall. She caught her breath and clicked on the link to Magh Meall and read, “From Irish mythology, a pleasurable realm able to be accessed by only a select few...a place of eternal beauty...occasionally visited by mortals.”
Liv stared at the screen, her mouth going dry. These places were myths, fairy tales. It wasn’t possible for them to exist. But it wasn’t possible for a stairway to open up beneath Harley’s bed, either, and lead to a city where there shouldn’t be one.
It had been real, hadn’t it? Liv thought about the dancers, the wine, the music. If it wasn’t real, she was coming unhinged, and that was even more disturbing than the idea that Harley had found a magical door to another world.
By the time breakfast was over and the students began leaving for class, Liv knew what she had to do. She put away her laptop and headed for the school gates. Technically, she wasn’t allowed to go off campus during the school day, but she knew no one would stop her. She was one of Harley’s now.
The walk into Middlebury cleared away more of the fogginess in her head. When she arrived at Madam Sofia’s Fortunes & Favors, she felt almost entirely real again.
Liv had wondered if it was too early for the shop to be open, but Madam Sofia appeared to be expecting her. “Welcome back,” the woman said as Liv entered the shop.
“I need to know what’s going on with Harley and her friends,” Liv said. “You told me they were dangerous. What did you mean?”
Madam Sofia didn’t seem surprised. “Come sit down.”
“What is that place that Harley takes us to?” Liv asked as they went into the back room. “It’s not this world, is it? How is that possible?”
Madam Sofia sat down at the table. “It is not our world, no.”
Liv felt a brief flush of relief to hear that Madam Sofia knew exactly what she was talking about.
“But it is entwined with ours,” Madam Sofia continued. “Harley has discovered a way to enter it.”
“How?”
“She has made some sort of bargain. I don’t know the exact details, but she will have agreed to something.”
“Does it have anything to do with the girls who stayed there? Melissa and Andrea and Casey?”
“There is a price to pay for entry to that world, and that is the traditional trade.”
“Are you saying that those girls were forced to stay there? That they’re...payment?” Liv was sickened. “That’s insane.”
Madam Sofia folded her hands on the table. “As I said, I don’t know precisely what Harley has agreed to, but she may be getting something out of it that we are not aware of. Nobody strikes this kind of bargain without a great need of her own.”
“What could possibly be worth kidnapping three girls?” Liv couldn’t believe it of Harley. She didn’t want to believe it. “Someone must be making her do it. How do I get her to stop?”
“She cannot stop on her own,” Madam Sofia said. “It is a curse now. There is only one way to break it.”
“Tell me how,” Liv insisted. “I’ll do it. It can’t go on.”
Madam Sofia nodded. “This is what you must do: You must take something dead from the other world and bring it to life in this one.”
Liv’s forehead wrinkled. “How am I supposed to do that? What do you even mean?”
“It is a riddle,” Madam Sofia said. “And it is a test. If you can decipher it, then you are the one who will break the curse. If you cannot decipher it...” She trailed off, raising one open hand as if she were letting something unseen fly away.
“Then the curse remains unbroken,” Liv whispered.
Madam Sofia leaned forward. “Tonight is your last opportunity to do this.”
“Why?”
“After tonight, you will have entered the other world three times. You will have sealed your own bargain, and you will not be able to break it.”
Liv remembered what Paige had told her, and she remembered that afternoon in the quad under the tree with Harley, saying “I agree” three times. She could practically feel the golden chains of that other world tightening around her.
“Tomorrow morning,” Madam Sofia continued, “if you have not broken the curse, you will be given your own talisman to mark your acquiescence to the curse.”
Liv remembered the girls’ jewelry—bracelets and necklaces and hair ornaments that all seemed to come from the same jeweler. Part of Liv still wanted to be one of them, but even as the idea of having her own otherworldly charm thrilled her, she was also repulsed by the fact that it would bind her to that place. “I’ll break it tonight,” Liv said. “Will Melissa and Andrea and Casey be able to return then?”
“I don’t know. They struck their own bargains when they stayed.”
“But they could return?”
“It depends on how deeply they’ve fallen for that other world, whether they have strong enough ties to this one. It’s possible, but it’s not up to you.”
Liv stood. “Okay.” And then she asked, “How do you know all this?”
Madam Sofia’s thin mouth turned up in a self-mocking smile. “I broke the curse myself, when I was your age. You girls are not the first to discover the allure of that other world, and you won’t be the last.”
* * *
The tunnel to the other world was the same that night, and the sign on the door in the alley said Magh Meall again. Liv wondered if they were truly entering that mythical world, or if whoever ran this nightclub thought of the name as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Inside, the club was as crowded as before, but tonight Liv could see that the dancers were not wearing costumes. What she had thought was clothing made of unusual materials was actually skin: skin covered in scales, skin erupting with downy feathers, skin rippling with spiny ridges the color of gold.
As the other girls disappeared into the cacophony of the club, Liv kept her eyes open, looking for anything that might solve Madam Sofia’s riddle. In the room with the crystal trees, there was a band playing on a stage Liv hadn’t noticed before. The lead singer was a woman with long white hair, her eyes outlined with the shapes of stars. Liv edged around the room, studying the crowd gathered at the bar. Most of the people were watching the show, but one of them, a man with tattoos of tiger stripes running up his wiry arms, had turned his back to the stage. He raised a cigarette to his mouth and plucked a matchbook from a glass bowl on the bar. The sight of someone smoking indoors startled Liv—they could do that here? she thought—and then she felt stupid. Of course they could. They could do anything here.
The tiger man tossed the matchbook back into the bowl after he had lit his cigarette, then vanished into the crowd on the dance floor. Liv crept into the gap he had left at the bar, taking the stool he had vacated. The glass bowl nearby held a whole bunch of matchbooks, and when she lifted one out, she saw that it was stamped with the words that had been on the flyer posted on the door: Magh Meall.
Liv didn’t have any pockets that night. She was wearing a tank top and leggings and boots, so she tucked the matchbook into her bra. It only took a second, but her heart began to accelerate the moment the matchbook’s sharp edges scraped against her skin. When she turned around, Harley was standing only a foot away from her, and Liv jerked in surprise.
Harley’s black hair was loose tonight, falling in thick waves over her shoulders. She looked suspicious. “What’re you doing?” she asked.
Liv thought fast. “Looking for you.” She slid off the stool and reached for Harley’s hand. Harley didn’t move; she only continued to scrutinize Liv’s face. “You want to dance?” Liv asked, and she pulled her toward the dance floor.
Liv hadn’t had anything to drink tonight—she had even avoided the vodka upstairs—but the music was intoxicating enough. There was something hypnotic about the woman’s voice, as if she gave Liv permission to do whatever she wanted, and there was something hypnotic about dancing with Harley, too. The movement of her muscles beneath the slippery fabric of her tank top; the warm flushed skin of Harley’s upper back; the tickle of Harley’s long black hair over her neck as Harley seemed to wind herself around Liv. After a while, it didn’t even feel like they were moving anymore. The dancers around them were moving; the bass from the band was shuddering; the lights above were flashing. But the two of them stood motionless, their bodies pressed together, and Liv closed her eyes so that she could feel Harley better, so that she could shut out the dream world all around them and make this real.
The voice in her ear seemed to come at her from a very great distance, the sound of it bubbling up from the depths of a dark sea, until she felt someone else’s hand—not Harley’s—on her shoulder, shaking her. “Liv! Liv! It’s time to go.”
She blinked her eyes open, and Harley peeled herself away, and beside them, Paige was shaking her head as if she had caught two children misbehaving.
“Come on,” Paige said. She glared at Harley. “You should know better.”
Harley’s cheeks were flushed and most of her lipstick had been rubbed off. She shook her head. “What time is it?”
“It’s time,” Paige said in a clipped voice.
Harley cursed. “Let’s go.”
Liv’s legs wobbled as she followed the girls out of the club. Harley didn’t even give her a second glance as she stalked through the crowd. Out in the alley, the night air was freezing on her skin. Still, Harley didn’t look back. She threw open the door to the stairs, and the other girls followed in drowsy silence. Only Paige gave Liv a meaningful glance as she pulled the door shut behind her, and then it was too dark to do anything but pay attention to where she was walking.
When they arrived back in Harley’s room, Liv headed for the exit with everyone else. She felt completely disoriented, and she could still taste Harley’s mouth. Harley had been drinking the wine.
“Liv,” Harley said. “Wait.”
Liv stopped. “What?”
When all the other girls had gone, Harley shut the door, and it was only the two of them. Harley turned to face her. Liv’s heart raced. This was the real world, she reminded herself. Whatever happened here...was real. It scared her, how much she wanted this to be real.
She had forgotten that she wanted to break whatever curse Harley was under. She had forgotten that Andrea and Melissa and Harley’s own sister might have disappeared because of what Harley had done. All she could remember was what it felt like to dance with her.
Harley went to her dresser and pulled a tissue out of the box, wiping off the remains of her lipstick. Then she went over to Liv, who was standing right where she had been when Harley asked her to wait, and kissed her.
Real: Harley’s full lips, slightly dry now, her tongue still tasting like wine. Real: Harley’s hands on the hem of Liv’s tank top, lifting it and sliding beneath. Real: Harley’s body against hers, warm and soft.
Liv reached for Harley’s slippery shirt and Harley raised her arms so they could peel it off. Harley had a tattoo of a blackbird over her heart, and Liv bent her head to kiss it, tasting the salty sweat on her skin. Harley’s breath was uneven as she pulled Liv’s tank top over her head. Her ring caught on the fabric, and Harley swore and took off the ring, letting it clatter onto her nightstand. Then Liv’s shirt was off, too, and something tumbled out of Liv’s bra and skittered onto the wood floor.
Liv froze.
“What was that?” Harley whispered.
“Nothing,” Liv lied, hoping that Harley wouldn’t notice.
But the matchbook had fallen into the circle of light cast by Harley’s bedside lamp, and the words printed on it practically glowed: Magh Meall.
Liv remembered the curse and the riddle. The sticky sweet desire that had made her dizzy only seconds before turned sour.
Harley jerked away from her. “What did you do?” Harley asked, fear in her voice.
Liv lunged for the matchbook a moment before Harley did. Liv’s knees banged against the floor. Harley’s nails scraped over her arms. Liv scrambled away, her fingers trembling as she opened the matchbook.
“Stop it!” Harley cried.
Liv didn’t stop. She tore out a match and struck it, and the flame flared into life.
Something dead from that world, brought into life in this one.
The smell of sulfur seemed to fill the room. The flame burned blue, and Liv saw it reflected in Harley’s dark eyes, full of horror.
“What did you do?” Harley demanded.
The ground shifted beneath them. The bed moved. Harley tried to stop it, but it rolled back over the trapdoor in the floor, and when Harley tried to push it aside, she couldn’t. She screamed in frustration, bending down to look beneath it, and then her shoulders heaved, and Liv knew that the trapdoor was gone.
The match burned out, scorching Liv’s fingertips, and she dropped it onto the floor.
Harley stood. Her face was hard with anger. “Why did you do that? You’ve screwed everything up!”
Liv’s heart was pounding so hard she was breathless. “I had to break the curse,” Liv said.
“You don’t know what you did,” Harley snapped.
The disgust in Harley’s voice made Liv angry. She scrambled to her feet. “I couldn’t let it keep happening! They couldn’t keep taking the girls.”
Suddenly Harley sat down on the edge of her bed, her shoulders sagging. “I never wanted them to take any girls, but that was the price.”
“For what? What was so important you’d let those girls be kidnapped? Your own sister!”
“I did it for Casey,” Harley snarled. “So she and I could stay here at the Virginia Freaking Sloane School for rich bitches. We would have been kicked out for not paying tuition if I hadn’t made that deal.”
Liv took a step back. “What do you mean? I thought your dad was loaded.”
Harley gave a choked laugh. “That’s what everybody thinks, but no. My dad was the janitor here. While he worked here, we got to come here for free, but after he died last year, that was it. We were going to be kicked out. But where would we go? To live with my deadbeat mom in the city? She has no money, and she spends what she gets on drugs. The only way I could keep Casey here—to keep her safe—was to make a deal with that guy. But now you’ve messed it all up. He said they wouldn’t take Casey. He said—” She broke off and looked at Liv furiously. “And now she’s gone, and I can’t find her. He’ll never make a deal with me again.”
Liv’s stomach fell. Had she made a mistake? “She might come back—Madam Sofia said—”
“Nobody comes back once they take them,” Harley interrupted. She looked utterly defeated.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” Liv whispered.
Harley wouldn’t look at her, and after the silence between them became too awful to bear, Liv snatched up her shirt and left. She couldn’t stop shaking, even after she climbed into Casey’s bed and buried her head beneath the covers.
* * *
Things began to change immediately. Harley was reprimanded by the headmistress for wearing boots to class. The paperwork that Harley said she had filed to move Liv from Sheffield to Castle turned out to be forged, and Liv had to move back to Sheffield. The other girls in Castle Hall began to be called in to teacher meetings to discuss their many absences.
Halloween came and went in a gust of wind and rain, stripping the last remaining leaves off the trees. Every time Liv walked by the oak tree where she had made her promises to Harley, she felt someone watching her, but it was only the blackbird that seemed to have made its home there. Once she thought she saw a tall, thin man in the shadows of the tree, but as soon as she noticed him the air itself seemed to shift, as if someone were pulling a shade closed.
Harley’s friends began to drift apart, too, turning inward and barely eating at meals. Rumors went around that they had been doing some serious drugs, and now their supply had been cut off and they were going through withdrawal. And everyone whispered the shocking news about Harley: that her father wasn’t some fabulously rich guy; that he had been the school janitor; that she might have to leave at the end of the semester because she had no money for tuition.
Liv felt bruised inside, as if she had lost something, not saved the lives of the other girls. For weeks, she went through the motions of school and homework in a daze, half awake, half still caught in that world she had visited three times. At night she dreamed of the glittering gold trees, the throbbing music and Harley.
All through November, Harley faded. She had been vivid before, unbreakable, and now she was more ghostly every day. Her skin, her eyes, her hair—pale, dull, limp. Liv realized that she might have broken the curse, but she had also broken Harley.
The day that Harley didn’t show up for breakfast, none of the students noticed at first. It wasn’t until lunch, when Liv heard others whispering about how nobody had seen Harley since the night before, that Liv began to wonder if something had happened. She walked across the quad toward Castle Hall, her feet crunching over the blades of browned grass. She passed the oak tree and saw that the blackbird was gone.
Inside Castle, the dorm was quiet and empty. Everyone was supposed to be in class, and Liv knew she would be reprimanded for skipping, but she was drawn up the stairs to Harley’s room just as she had been drawn to Harley from the beginning. Harley’s door was closed, and when Liv knocked, there was no answer. She put her hand on the doorknob, and it turned easily.
There was a creak behind her.
Liv spun around, an excuse on her lips, but the sight of the girl across the hall stopped her. She looked like Harley, but younger. Her face was gaunt, as if she had been living on nothing but air for much too long, and her eyes were too bright. “Who are you?” Liv asked, afraid that she already knew.
“I’m Casey,” Harley’s sister said. Her voice sounded just like Harley’s.
Liv’s skin crawled. “Where’s Harley?”
“She traded herself for me,” Casey said. There was a haunted flatness to her speech, as if she were a doll that had just come awkwardly to life.
Everything inside Liv went cold. She opened Harley’s door and barged into her room. It was empty. The bed was rumpled, and a pile of dirty clothes lay on the floor by the dresser. Liv ran to the bed and pushed it, but it wouldn’t move. She knelt down to look beneath it, and all she saw was dust.
Casey came into Harley’s room and went to the dresser, where she began to look through the drawers. She pulled out her sister’s shirts one by one, holding them up and then tossing them onto the laundry pile.
“What are you doing?” Liv asked.
“Looking for something to wear,” Casey replied in her odd, emotionless voice. “Harley always has the best stuff.”
Liv stared at her in shock. She had wanted Casey to come back, but she hadn’t expected she would be like this. Casey might be standing in her sister’s room, but she wasn’t all there.
Casey found a shirt she liked and laid it on top of the dresser, then took off the one she was wearing. The bones of her spine jutted out like teeth beneath her skin. In the mirror, Liv glimpsed a tattoo of a blackbird on Casey’s chest before she pulled on her sister’s shirt. She turned to face Liv, crossing her arms, and Liv noticed the ring Casey was wearing. It was a black stone set in a gold band.
“My sister told me about you,” Casey said.
Liv swallowed the rising panic inside her and met Casey’s feverish gaze. “Where is she?” Liv demanded.
“Someplace a lot more fun than this.” A cold grin crossed Casey’s face, and for one second she came alive—potent, forceful, just like Harley. An instant later she shriveled, once again more specter than girl. “We’re going there tonight,” Casey said to Liv. “You wanna come? Harley might be there.”
* * * * *
THE RAVEN PRINCESS
by Jon Skovron
The princess wouldn’t stop crying. The queen had fed her and changed her diaper. She didn’t know what else to do.
“I can host a banquet for a hundred lords and ladies. But what do I know about babies?” The nanny had asked for the day off and now the queen regretted letting her have it.
The princess stood at the edge of the crib, howling at the top of her lungs. Tears and snot ran down her plump face as she reached out with wet slobbery fingers.
“What do you want?!” The queen gripped the edge of the crib hard. She wanted to shake the ungrateful little creature until she stopped.
No, she would never do that. But she felt trapped by the tiny, impossible thing who shrieked mindlessly at her. She moved to the other side of the room, turned her back on the princess and took a slow breath.
The coarse call of birds cut through the princess’s cries. The queen looked out the window and spied a flock of ravens. She had always found the raven’s caw grating and distasteful, but right now, it seemed preferable to the endless wail of the little brat. As she watched them wheel slowly up into the sky, she said out loud:
“I wish you would just fly away with those ravens.”
The crying stopped and silence fell suddenly in the room. The queen turned around, half expecting to find the child passed out from exhaustion. But the princess stood in her crib, her eyes wide. Her little bow mouth was quirked in the corners, as if she had just taken a bite of something and its flavor surprised her. She sat down hard and let out a cough that sounded strangely like the caw of a raven.
“My darling.” Fear crept into the queen’s chest. “What’s wrong?”
The princess looked up and her bright blue eyes slowly filled with blackness until even the whites were gone.
“Oh, God,” whimpered the queen.
Thick black hairs began to sprout on the princess’s arms, legs and face. No, not hairs. Feathers.
“Please,” whispered the queen. “I didn’t mean...”
The princess opened her mouth wide and made a gagging sound until a black, curved beak emerged and her lips peeled back into nothing. Her legs grew thinner, then, with a loud crack, suddenly bent in the wrong direction, as her feet curled in like claws. Her body shrank into her white dress until the queen could no longer see her.
“My darling?”
A raven’s head poked out from the dress. The bird shook herself as she untangled her wings from the dress. She hopped up onto the edge of the crib, black claws digging into the wood. She regarded the queen for a moment, her head cocked to one side. Then she let out a harsh caw and flew past the queen and out the open window.
The queen never spoke of what happened that day. It was thought that the princess had been abducted by mercenaries or brigands. The king searched everywhere, but didn’t find her. As the years went on, the queen’s secret shame aged her into a crone before her time. Finally one night she could no longer bear it, and left the castle without a word. The king did not search for her.
* * *
The young man was not a good hunter. He had some skill with a bow when the target was a bull’s-eye, but he simply could not bring himself to shoot a living thing. His parents had sent him away in disgust, and none of the village girls showed any interest in him. So he lived alone in a small cottage in the forest, where he ate berries and the vegetables he grew in his small garden.
The young man would have been content to live this way, except he was lonely. He hoped that if he conquered his fear of hunting, he might finally catch a girl’s eye. So one morning he set out into the forest, resolving not to return until he had made a kill.
First he came across a deer. But he was so petrified, he could not move until it was out of sight. Later, he spied a badger waddling along. But his hands shook so badly that by the time he was able to nock an arrow, the badger had slipped down into its hole. He cursed himself, wondering how he could be so cowardly.
Finally, near sunset, he spied a lone raven standing on an outcropping of rock in a small clearing. Ravens were loathsome animals, eaters of the dead and dying, and harbingers of bad luck. The world would be a better place with one less raven. He quietly set an arrow and drew back on the bowstring. This time, he would claim his place as a man.
But the instant before he released the arrow, the raven turned to look at him and cocked its head in such a curious, intelligent way that the young man flinched and the arrow flew wide, embedding itself in a tree five feet away.
“That,” remarked the raven, “was a terrible shot.”
“Luckily for you,” said the young man. Then his eyes grew wide. “You speak!”
“Truly,” said the raven. “I have seen boys of ten and old men shaky with weariness who had better aim.”
“Amazing! I nearly kill a magic talking raven and he criticizes me for not piercing his breast with a wooden shaft.”
“I am not a ‘he,’” said the raven, feathers ruffling. “And I’ll thank you not to talk so casually about my breasts.”
“My apologies, Lady Raven,” said the young man with a slight bow. He slowly walked out into the clearing. “But I must know, how is it you talk?”
“Because I am not really a raven, but a maiden princess under a curse. Now I must know, how is it you are such a terrible marksman?”
“I happen to be an excellent marksman!”
“Oh?” The raven turned toward where the arrow was still embedded deep in the bark. “Were you hunting trees today, then?”
The young man sighed and shook his head. “My aim fails me the moment I target a living thing.”
“And why is that?”
He thought about it a moment, then finally said, “I don’t know.”
“Could it be that you are afraid to kill?”
“Well, that would be an unfortunate trait in a hunter.”
“Indeed. You would have been better off born to a shoemaker or a tailor, perhaps.”
“We cannot choose who we are born to.”
“Truly.” The raven turned away and raised her wings to take flight.
“Please don’t go yet!” said the young man. “Meeting you is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.”
“Unsurprisingly.”
“Won’t you tell me of your curse?”
She lowered her wings. She did not turn back around, but craned her head toward him.
“I have been cursed like this since I was but a year old.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Seventeen.”
“That is terrible!” said the young man. “Is there no way to break this curse?”
The raven turned back all the way around to face him. “There is. Why, would you be willing to attempt it?”
“Of course!” Then he looked suddenly hesitant. “That is...if it is within my ability.”
“You wouldn’t have to kill.”
“Then yes, I would consider it a privilege. What must I do?”
“On the edge of this forest, a small house sits next to a crossroads. By the house is a pile of wood chips. Sit upon that pile and wait for me. The curse allows me to appear in my true form for one hour every night at midnight. I will come for you, and if you are awake when I arrive, the curse will be broken.”
“That doesn’t seem so hard.”
“Beware,” said the raven. “There is an old woman who lives in the house. She will try to give you food and drink. But if you accept it, you will not be able to stay awake that night.”
“Hunger and thirst are not new to me,” said the young man. “I will prevail easily.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said the raven.
* * *
The young man hiked through the darkening forest and arrived at the cottage just as the sun slid behind the tree line. The cottage was even smaller and coarser than his own. The walls were made of stacked logs sealed with mud, and the hay thatched roof looked rotten in places. The young man felt sorry for the old woman who lived there, whoever she was.
He found a bed of oak chips by the side of the house, just as the raven had described. It wasn’t very comfortable, but he thought that might help him stay awake. So he sat down and waited.
Darkness had fallen when the old woman emerged from the cottage, holding a lantern. She had a gentle smile, and eyes that were warm yet sad.
“A guest!” Her voice was as soft as worn velvet. “Oh, how wonderful!” She came over and held out the lantern to look at him. “Handsome face. A little thin and pale, though. You could do with a bit of meat.”
“It has been a long time since I have eaten meat,” he admitted.
“Well, you are in luck, then, my boy. I have a nice fat rabbit turning on the spit. Far too much for me to eat. Won’t you come inside and share it?”
“It’s generous of you, but I must remain out here until after midnight.”
“Ah, the old legend of the Raven Princess, eh?”
“Old legend? Have others tried to break the curse before me?”
“Of course! And who can blame them! According to the legends, her beauty is like no other.”
“I had not heard of her beauty,” he said.
“Oh? Then why do you sit here?”
“So that she may be free of the curse.”
“And that is all?”
“Should there be more?”
She smiled briefly. “I suppose not. Now, won’t you come in and share supper with me? It is still several hours until midnight. You would be able to return to this spot in plenty of time.”
“I thank you for your hospitality, but I cannot.”
Her face grew suddenly sad. “I understand. What is the company of a poor old woman when there is the promise of a beautiful princess.”
“Please, that isn’t what I meant....”
But she turned and slowly walked back into the cottage as if she hadn’t heard him.
As he sat on the woodpile, he thought of her, eating alone inside. He had eaten many meals alone and knew how it felt. The silence broken only by one’s own chewing. How many meals had she taken in solitude? How many more lay before her, an unbroken line stretched out until her life ended?
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Christine Johnson
In the days when fairy tales were first spun, they weren’t the sweet and cheerful stories we tell today. Back then, fairy tales were terrifying. They were a warning to the listener to stay out of the night, to keep away from the mystical and ignore the mysterious. Prepare to open a treasure box of the unusual and the macabre.Grim features some of today’s best young adult authors sharing their own unique retellings of classic fairy tales from around the world. These talented writers, many of them New York Times bestsellers or award winners, put their own spin on these magical worlds.Ellen HopkinsAmanda HockingJulie KagawaClaudia GrayRachel HawkinsKimberly DertingMyra McEntireMalinda LoSarah Rees BrennanJackson PearceChristine JohnsonJeri Smith-ReadyShaun David HutchinsonSaundra MitchellSonia GenslerTessa GrattonJon Skovron.
Inspired by classic fairy tales, but with a dark and sinister twist, Grim contains short stories from some of the best voices in young adult literature today:
Ellen Hopkins
Amanda Hocking
Julie Kagawa
Claudia Gray
Rachel Hawkins
Kimberly Derting
Myra McEntire
Malinda Lo
Sarah Rees-Brennan
Jackson Pearce
Christine Johnson
Jeri Smith Ready
Shaun David Hutchinson
Saundra Mitchell
Sonia Gensler
Tessa Gratton
Jon Skrovan
Edited by Christine Johnson
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This is for you.
Table of Contents
The Key (#ub0835894-18c1-5ff8-99a0-388c7e4c99e6) by Rachel Hawkins
Figment (#u75aeb2d3-14de-5ddf-bf61-e597593b0f2c) by Jeri Smith-Ready
The Twelfth Girl (#u243b6b7e-79e3-569e-ad21-ea6a002d7137) by Malinda Lo
The Raven Princess (#u3253aabc-333d-5a99-a0f9-4801911a50ce) by Jon Skovron
Thinner Than Water (#litres_trial_promo) by Saundra Mitchell
Before the Rose Bloomed: A Retelling of The Snow Queen (#litres_trial_promo) by Ellen Hopkins
Beast/Beast (#litres_trial_promo) by Tessa Gratton
The Brothers Piggett (#litres_trial_promo) by Julie Kagawa
Untethered (#litres_trial_promo) by Sonia Gensler
Better (#litres_trial_promo) by Shaun David Hutchinson
Light It Up (#litres_trial_promo) by Kimberly Derting
Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tongue (#litres_trial_promo) by Christine Johnson
A Real Boy (#litres_trial_promo) by Claudia Gray
Skin Trade (#litres_trial_promo) by Myra McEntire
Beauty and the Chad (#litres_trial_promo) by Sarah Rees Brennan
The Pink: A Grimm Story (#litres_trial_promo) by Amanda Hocking
Sell Out (#litres_trial_promo) by Jackson Pearce
About the Authors (#litres_trial_promo)
THE KEY
by Rachel Hawkins
High school is hard enough without having a psychic for a mom.
And no, I don’t mean she has that uniquely Mom-like sixth sense. I mean she’s literally a psychic. Reading your palms, telling you your future, all for the bargain price of fifty bucks a session (a hundred if you want a full hour, but no one ever does).
Momma runs her business out of our trailer. I know there are people who say that trailers can be nice, fancy even.
Those people had never been to our trailer.
It isn’t even a double-wide, which would have at least given us enough space for more than one ratty couch. I think the couch had belonged to my nana at some point. I knew whoever had had it before us had smoked on it, though. It carried the scent of thousands of cigarettes, millions even, deep inside every cabbage rose on its stained and burned cushions.
Momma’s “studio,” as she liked to call it, was in the second bedroom. When she wasn’t reading people’s fortunes, I slept on an air mattress on the floor in there. It was either that or share with Momma, which no, thank you. And like I said, the couch stunk—and was haunted besides—so I made do with the air mattress, no matter how big a pain in the ass it was to pump it up every single night, only to roll it back flat every morning.
The studio was the one nice room in the whole trailer. In there, the linoleum didn’t have duct tape over the cracks. In fact, you couldn’t see the linoleum at all. Momma had bought a real nice rug from Walmart years ago. It was a little too big for the room, curling up against the walls, but Momma kept it so dark in there that no one ever really noticed.
There had been a beaded curtain separating the studio from the rest of the trailer, but I’d talked Momma into getting rid of it. It looked cheap and trashy. I realized that was kind of an ironic statement, considering the rest of our place, but I had some limits. She’d hung a paisley shawl in the doorway instead, and while that wasn’t great, at least it didn’t rattle every time you walked past it.
Momma was standing in front of that shawl on Saturday morning, yawning as she cradled a cup of coffee in her hands. I stood at the sink, washing last night’s dinner dishes and looking out the window. On the porch of the next trailer over, a little girl with hair nearly the same white-blond as mine was playing with a water hose, giggling as she sprayed the vinyl siding. I was smiling at her and nearly missed what Momma was saying. Only when she said, “So you’ll need to stay close by today,” did I turn around, frowning at her.
“I can’t,” I told her, the dish in my hand dripping water onto the stained and faded linoleum. “I have track practice at noon.”
Momma scowled. Years ago, she had been pretty, but there was something hard in her face now that had nothing to do with aging or wrinkles. “You had track practice last weekend.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Yeah, I have it every weekend. And three times a week after school. Come on, Momma. Use your powers and envision me jogging around the track.” I wiggled my sudsy fingers at her. “Because trust me, that’s my future today.”
Momma sighed, crossing over to me and dropping her nearly empty mug in my newly cleaned sink. I bit my lip as coffee splashed over the enamel. Then she held her hands out to me and I groaned. “Oh, come on, Momma, I was joking.”
Moving closer, Momma insisted, “Give ’em here.”
Still grumbling, I laid my palms flat on hers, and taking a deep breath, Momma closed her eyes. Almost immediately, she frowned. “Girl, you weren’t kidding.”
“About what?”
“The running. You are gonna run and run today. Fast.”
I took my hands back even as I smiled a little bit. “I am trying to beat my best time today—4:07. School record is 4:01, so I’m almost there.”
“Well, if what I saw was any indication, you’re gonna sail right through it, sweetheart. You were runnin’ like your life depended on it, from what I could see.”
Turning away from her, I started to rinse her coffee out of the sink. “In that case, I guess I’ll be going to track practice today, after all.”
Momma patted my shoulder blade. “The appointment is at ten, so we’ll definitely be done by noon.”
They’d be done by 10:30—10:15, probably. Usually once people got a look at our place, they didn’t like to stay long. I glanced at Momma, still in a mismatched set of pajamas, before looking at the clock on the microwave. “It’s nearly ten now—you might wanna go get into character.”
I’d expected another comment about making fun, but Momma just swatted me with a dishcloth and snorted. “I will. Thanks for cleaning up for me, baby. You’re a good girl.”
She said that to me a lot.
As Momma drifted off to her bedroom to drape herself in scarves and eyeliner—People expect a certain look, Lana—I busied myself straightening up the living room. There was only so much I could do, but I could at least make sure things were clean. I always hated the looks on Momma’s clients’ faces when they first walked in. Like, hello, maybe you shouldn’t be so disgusted when you’re the one driving out to the boondocks to get your palm read, you know? That seemed way more offensive than an ugly couch and some fake paneling.
Still, I swept up and fluffed the throw pillows on the couch and sprayed some air freshener. The scent of incense was already wafting out of Momma’s studio, and I knew I’d have a headache before the day was over.
At exactly 9:57, I heard the rumble of a truck outside. “Momma, they’re here!” I hollered as I shoved last night’s pizza box into the trash can. The truck’s ignition cut off and I glanced out the front window, wondering which kind of client this one would be. Momma’s main business came from bored ladies in Auburn, the nearest town over. They were almost never under the age of fifty, and they looked so similar that I couldn’t swear Momma hadn’t just been seeing the same client over and over again for the past few years.
But when I saw the shiny blue truck, I knew there was no old lady behind the wheel. My heart hammered in my chest, stomach jumping. What was he doing here now?
The passenger side door opened, and a girl came tumbling out, her long legs pale in the late-morning light. As soon as I saw her, I ducked back from the window, the butterflies in my stomach suddenly turning to lead.
“Momma!” I hissed, crossing over to her studio and yanking back the paisley curtain. She was already sitting at her table, shuffling the tarot cards.
“What?” she asked, raising her eyebrows so that they nearly disappeared under her headscarf.
“Those are kids from my school,” I told her, trying to keep my voice low. Trailers aren’t exactly soundproof, and I could already hear the heavy tread on the stairs outside. “You promised never to read for kids.”
Momma blinked at me before returning to her cards. “Well, Lana, it’s not like people tell me how old they are when they call and schedule a reading. Besides, they booked a whole hour, and if you wanna keep having nice things like, oh, I don’t know, electricity, water...”
There was a knock at the door and I winced, afraid the kids on the porch may have overheard.
“Go answer it,” Momma said, flinging a hand out, her mismatched bangles rattling.
“Please,” I said, but I wasn’t sure what I was asking for. For her to go answer it herself, for her not to make me do this with people I knew. For her not to be a psychic in a trailer, maybe.
But Momma just fixed me with her big hazel eyes, eyes that looked just like mine, and said, “You’re not ashamed of your momma, are you, Lana Banana?”
There is no way to answer that question. It’s a trick that parents throw at you, like Do you want a spanking? or What did you just say?
Besides, I was ashamed, and the guilt of that stung even more than the potential humiliation awaiting me at the front door.
They stood there on the porch, the girl leaning against the railing. Big aviator sunglasses covered nearly half her face, but I would’ve recognized that bright red hair anywhere. Milly Ross and I might not travel in the same circles at our school, but we’d had a few classes together.
I kept my eyes on her rather than the boy standing just beside her. I could feel the weight of his gaze on me.
“Um...Lana, right?” Milly asked, pushing her hair out of her eyes. “You’re in algebra with me? Third period?”
I wondered if everything she ever said sounded like a question even as I said, “Yeah. And fourth-period history.”
“Right,” Milly said, and then she jerked her head at the boy. “Do you know Skye?”
I didn’t want my cheeks to flame, but I could feel heat rising up my neck as I said, “Yeah, Skye Bartlett, right? I think we have English together?”
The corner of his lips lifted for just a second, a crooked smile I’d seen a hundred times. It never failed to make my pulse leap.
“French,” Skye said, and I nodded.
“Right, that’s it. Anyway, y’all, uh, wanna come in?” Moving out of the doorway, I gestured for them to come inside. Milly went first, and as Skye followed her into the trailer, he briefly let his hand brush my waist. It was a tiny touch, but even through my T-shirt, I could feel the heat of his fingers.
Milly stood in the middle of the room, shoving her sunglasses on top of her head. “So...you live here?”
No, I just hang out in this lady’s trailer. “Yeah, I do. You guys can have a seat if you want.”
Milly swung her head in the direction of the couch, the silver hoops in her ears flashing. Earlier, I’d thought that with the pillows fluffed, the sofa had actually looked a little bit better, but seeing it now through her eyes, I knew it was as shabby and ugly as ever.
“We can just stand here and wait,” Milly said, her nose crinkling as she took in the faded flooring, the mismatched furniture.
I knew Mom was waiting for me to do my thing, but I really didn’t want to. It was one thing when I was helping her with overweight, middle-aged ladies who just wanted to know if their husbands were cheating on them or if they were going to win the lottery. But these were kids I knew. This was Skye.
Skye was still standing by the door, and even though I wasn’t looking at him, I was aware of the way his arms were folded across his chest, the thin material of his T-shirt stretching over his biceps.
“I didn’t know this was your mom,” Milly said at last, fiddling with the end of the oversize shirt she wore over a white tank top. It was a boy’s shirt, hanging past her hips, and for a moment, I thought it looked kind of familiar. Had I seen that shirt on Skye before? I couldn’t remember.
Then I realized the silence had stretched a little too long, and blinked. “Oh. Right, yeah, I don’t exactly wear shirts that say Hey, My Mom’s a Psychic.”
Milly laughed at that, but it was too loud and too high to be genuine. From behind the paisley curtain, I heard Mom clear her throat.
She wasn’t going to come out until I’d done the prep work, so with a sigh I asked them if I could get them anything to drink.
Milly cast a concerned look at the kitchen, but before she could answer, I’d crossed to the fridge and pulled out a couple of diet sodas. They were the off-brand kind from Winn-Dixie, but Milly and Skye both took one. As they did, I let my fingers brush against the thumb ring Milly wore.
It was always the same. Like coming across a closed door and opening it just a crack, peeking inside. As soon as I peeked inside Milly’s mind, I saw a familiar face. Kimberly McEntire had been in my grade and had been Milly’s best friend.
And Skye’s girlfriend.
I saw her and Milly riding in Kimberly’s car, singing loudly with the radio. Now they were sitting on Kimberly’s bed, and she was crying, Milly wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Milly sitting on the floor of her bedroom, listening to Kimberly’s mom asking where Kimberly was, if Milly had seen her. And over all of that was this feeling—worry, anxiety, anger, all balled up together.
I was just drawing my hand back when there was a flash of another emotion, another face and name. It startled me so much I nearly dropped the soda I’d been handing to Milly, and she caught it with a little scowl.
“Whoa. You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, even as I shook my head. “Yeah, totally. Sorry, the can was slippery. Uh, if y’all will wait right here for a sec, I’ll go get Mom—er, Madame Lin.”
I’d begged Momma to drop the stupid name, but unlike the Beaded Curtain Argument, I’d lost. According to Momma, people felt better hearing their psychic readings from a woman named Madame Lin than from one named Lynette.
Ducking behind the paisley curtain, I found Momma sitting expectantly at her table. “Well?”
Keeping my voice at a whisper, I told her what I’d picked up from the jewelry. “She’s mostly here to ask about Kimberly McEntire.” I didn’t mention the other thing. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to without Momma knowing something was wrong with me.
Momma scowled. “Did she bring something belonging to the girl?”
I shook my head. “Don’t think so.”
Throwing up her hands, Momma blew out a long breath. “Well, how am I supposed to answer any questions about someone who’s not even here? That’s not how this works,” she hissed.
There was no sense in reminding Momma that I knew how this worked. The powers Momma had—the powers I had—were really specific. I could touch people and, if I wanted to, get impressions of what they were thinking, little bits of their present and past. The future was a total no-go for me. But Momma, she could see only little snatches of a person’s future. But that person had to be sitting there with her or she had to touch something of theirs. In other words, if Milly wanted to find out where Kimberly had disappeared to all those months ago, she was crap outta luck.
“Just lie to her,” I said with a little shrug. “Everybody says Kimberly ran away from home after a fight with her parents. Make up some kind of glamorous story about Kim living out in, like, L.A. or something.”
Momma mulled that over, twirling the end of her headscarf. “That’s good,” she said at last. “After all, what do I always say? If you can’t tell someone the truth—”
“At least make them happy,” I finished. It was basically Momma’s motto as a psychic.
Momma smiled at me, her teeth white against the dark wine of her lipstick. “You’ll be good at this.”
It was pointless to remind Momma that there was no way in hell I was going to end up reading palms in a trailer. Just because she and Grammy had both done it didn’t mean that I was going to. I had my eye on a track scholarship to the University of Alabama, and after that, I was getting as far away from the Woodland Hills Trailer Park as I possibly could.
Maybe Kimberly McEntire had felt like that, too. Sure, she lived in one of the nicer neighborhoods in town and seemed to have everything going for her. Good grades, pretty face and Skye Bartlett. But clearly something had been pulling her beyond the city limits. She’d taken off over six months ago, and other than a note left on her pillow, no one had heard from her since. I found myself hoping the future I’d told Momma to make up for her was close to the truth.
Momma got up from the table, and I trailed after her back into the living room. Milly was still standing hesitantly by the couch while Skye stood near the front window. Momma looked back and forth between them. “Will both of you be sitting for the reading, or—”
“Just her,” Skye said, inclining his head toward Milly. “No offense, but this kind of thing freaks me out.” He grinned at Momma and she practically giggled. Behind her back, I rolled my eyes, and Skye’s grin widened.
“Very well, then.” Momma held her hand out to Milly, who glanced over at Skye, worrying her lower lip between her teeth.
“So you’ll just...wait out here, right?”
He gave an easy roll of his shoulders. “Sure. Laura here can keep me company.”
“Lana,” I corrected, my lips twitching in a smile.
He snapped his fingers, nodding. “Right, right. Lana.”
It was a little too much, and just for a moment, Milly’s brow wrinkled with something like confusion. Or maybe suspicion. But then Momma was taking her hand and guiding her toward her studio.
The moment the curtain twitched closed behind Milly, Skye’s hands grabbed my waist, tugging me close to him. He ducked his head to kiss my neck, but I spun away from him, swatting at his hands. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
His bright blue eyes sparkled as he leaned closer and he whispered, “I was trying to kiss you.”
For a second, I nearly wavered. It was hard to be mad at him when he was looking at me like that.
Shooting a glance at the curtain, I grabbed Skye’s hand and tugged him out onto the porch, closing the door softly behind me. Once we were down in the yard by his truck, I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked up at him. “I wasn’t talking about the kissing. I mean why did you bring Milly here?”
Skye sighed. “She’s been wanting to come out here for months. Pretty much ever since Kimberly bailed. When she said she’d made the appointment, I offered to drive her.”
In the sunlight, his black hair glinted nearly as blue as his truck. Skye was beautiful in that way that is almost girlie. Only the dark stubble lining his jaw, the veins in his forearms, the blunt width of his hands saved him from looking too pretty. He smiled at me, leaning back against his truck. The move did nice things for his arms. It also showed off the tattoo inked on the inside of his forearm. It was a key, one of those big ornate kinds you sometimes see in old movies. I’d asked him once why a key, but he’d only kissed the tip of my nose and said, “Why not?”
“I wanted to see you today,” he said now, looking at me over the tops of his sunglasses. “And I figured this would kill two birds with one stone. Keep Milly and your mom occupied for an hour. So.” He reached out, his hand closing around my wrist, and pulled me to him. “Can we please get to occupying that time?”
My palm pressed flat against his chest. “Not here,” I told him, looking around.
Our trailer was at the very back of the park, and just beyond was the thick pine forest that gave Woodland Hills its name. Skye followed my gaze, squeezing my hand. “She paid for the whole hour,” he murmured low in my ear, and I shivered.
With one more quick glance at the trailer, I wrapped my fingers tighter around Skye’s and pulled. “Come on.”
The woods were thick and smelled like pine, dirt and that mossy, green scent of things growing. They were also cooler, the thick branches nearly blotting out the sun. We walked hand in hand until I couldn’t see the trailer anymore, and then, finally, I turned and let Skye wrap me up in his arms.
We hadn’t had a chance to be alone in over a week, and as Skye kissed me, I felt like I was melting into him, like there was nothing else in the world except me, him and the forest around us, the sound of birds in the trees, the distant burble of the creek. His lips moved over mine, and my fingers twisted in his shirt.
“I missed you,” he breathed when we pulled apart, and I smiled against his collarbone.
“I missed you, too.”
I always missed him. Even though I saw him every day at school, it wasn’t the same as this, being alone with him, kissing him, feeling his arms around me.
Looking down at me, Skye pushed my hair away from my face. “Admit this was a good idea.”
When he was holding me, everything seemed like a good idea, but I still wasn’t exactly thrilled that he’d come out here. Or, really, that he’d brought Milly out here.
With that in mind, I stepped away from him, walking a little farther into the woods. He followed, and while I let him link his fingers with mine, I didn’t say anything until we were even deeper into the trees, the ground underneath growing harder to navigate. Vines and low bushes pushed against the trees here, and even though I could hear the distant hum of I-85, it was like being in the middle of nowhere.
Once we’d reached the edge of the creek, I turned back to Skye and asked, “Why are we still sneaking around?”
He raised his dark eyebrows, blowing out a long breath. “Wow. Okay. What brought that on?”
There was a clump of dandelions at my feet, and I bent down to pick one. Twirling it between my fingers, I watched the fluff take to the air. “It’s just... Skye, are you ashamed of me? Of all this?” I flung the headless dandelion out in the direction of the trailer, and Skye immediately stepped forward, holding my arms with both hands.
“No,” he said, looking into my eyes. “God, no, Lana. Never.” Skye’s fingers dug into the flesh of my biceps, almost a little too hard.
“Then why?” I asked, hating the whiny note in my voice but unable to stop it.
He pulled away, rubbing one hand up and down the back of his neck. He always did that. He’d done it the first day I’d noticed him in French class, back at the beginning of the school year. Skye had been new, and in a county where everyone knew everyone, that had been enough to make him exotic. And then of course there was the unusual name, the blue-black hair, that beautiful, golden key covering the pale skin of his forearm. I was hardly the only girl who’d fallen in love with Skye Bartlett back in August. But he’d fallen for Kimberly McEntire, and that had been that.
Or so I’d thought.
After Kimberly had skipped town, things had changed. Skye had started sitting next to me in class, and even though he spent every lunch period with Milly and the rest of Kimberly’s friends, he had always smiled at me. Then one day after French, he’d asked if I’d help him study at the library. He’d kissed me that night up against a shelf of reference books.
Now I looked at Skye in the late-morning light and asked, “Is it Milly? Is there...? You spend a lot of time with her.” In front of people. In public.
Skye dropped his hand. “We’re friends, Lan. I only drove her out here today because I wanted to see you.” He stepped closer and I backed up until my elbows dug into the bark of the pine tree behind me. It wasn’t that he scared me. It was that I was afraid if he stood too close, I’d once again forget to be angry, forget how crappy this whole situation made me feel.
Forget what I’d seen in Milly’s head.
“It’s just not good timing right now, Lana.” Skye reached out and brushed a sweaty piece of hair from my forehead, his touch featherlight. “Kimberly’s only been gone a few months, and it might look bad if I suddenly had a new girlfriend, you know?”
Overhead, something rustled in the trees, and on the distant interstate, I heard the blast of a car horn.
“Is that what I am?” I asked, folding my arms tightly across his chest. “Your girlfriend?”
Skye lifted an eyebrow, a smirk twisting his lips. “Do you want a ring or something? My letterman’s jacket? I mean, I don’t play a sport, and I’m not even sure they make those things anymore, but maybe Goodwill would—”
I shoved at his chest. “Don’t make fun of me.”
Something flashed in his eyes, something dark and angry. But it was gone as soon as it had appeared, and when Skye took my wrist in his hand, his grip was light. “I’m not, I promise. But this is tough for me. I don’t want to look like the dick who doesn’t even miss Kim, you know?”
This whole conversation was going nowhere, and suddenly I wished I’d never brought it up. We only had an hour, and we’d spent half that already, walking and arguing. Skye was right. There was enough weirdness about Kimberly’s disappearance, and we didn’t want to add to that.
But then I remembered Milly, the images I’d gotten when I’d touched her ring. “Milly—” I started, and Skye’s fingers tightened around my wrist.
“I told you, there’s nothing going on. She doesn’t even like me like that.”
“Yes, she does,” I said before I could stop myself. “I saw it.”
I hadn’t quite shouted the words, but they’d still come out a lot louder than I’d intended. In a nearby bush, a bird suddenly took wing, and Skye startled.
“What do you mean you ‘saw it’?” There was a deep crease between his brows, and his grip on my wrist was tight enough to hurt now. I shook him off, irritated.
“I...I can see things. When I touch people. Same as my mom.”
Skye blinked, once, then twice, his whole body going still. “So...this psychic crap is for real? Because you said your mom just—”
“I know what I said.” Shoving my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, I tilted my head back, looking up at the snatches of blue sky through the branches. “I didn’t want you to think I was a freak, but yeah, Momma can really tell a person’s future, and I can get...I don’t know, impressions. When I touch somebody. It’s not a big deal.”
Skye had backed away from me now, his face pale. “Have you done that to me?” he asked, and I immediately shook my head.
“No,” I promised. “Never. I only do it to help Momma out before her readings. Anything else feels—” I shuddered “—gross. Like a violation or something.”
Skye seemed to sigh with his whole body, the breath ruffling his hair where it fell over his forehead. “So when you touched Milly—”
“She’s into you, trust me.” I left it at that. The longing coming off Milly for Skye had practically wavered there in the air earlier. True, I hadn’t picked up anything else. If anything had ever happened between them, I hadn’t seen it. But that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.
“I can’t help it if she likes me, Lana,” Skye said. His own hands were in his pockets now, almost mimicking my pose. “But I don’t feel that way about her. I swear.”
When I didn’t say anything, Skye took a step closer. “When we kissed earlier... If you’d wanted to, you could’ve looked into my head, right?”
“I told you I wouldn’t do that,” I snapped.
Skye was watching me closely now, ducking his head so that he could see into my face. “Do you promise, Lan? Do you promise you would never do that?”
If he hadn’t said that, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so tempted. But there was something so intense in his gaze, something that made the hairs on my arms stand up. And it was like any temptation, like Skye himself—once I’d been told I couldn’t, I had to.
“Yeah,” I heard myself say. “I promise.”
His expression softened. “And I promise Milly and I are just friends. She’s only hanging around me because we both miss Kim. That’s it.”
He smiled at me, a dimple flashing in one cheek. In the shady woods, his eyes seemed a darker blue, and when he tugged me to him, I let him.
When he leaned in to kiss me, I closed my hands around his forearms. The key tattoo was just there underneath my palm, and there was one brief moment when I tried to tell myself not to do it. That he had said there was nothing going on with Milly, and I needed to trust him.
But another darker part whispered, Then why is he still keeping you a secret?
He had asked me never to read him, and I had promised, but standing there in the woods behind my home, his skin pressed against mine, the temptation was too strong. Just a little bit, I told myself. So I can be sure.
As always, it felt like opening a door, and I tried to keep the door opened only a crack. Just enough to see if he was lying to me about Milly.
But the moment the door from my mind to his opened, it was like a hurricane blew through it. Skye kissed me as image after image assaulted my mind. Kimberly crying. Kimberly shoving at Skye’s shoulders. They’re in a field somewhere, and it’s dark, and she needs to shut up, just shut up, shut up. Skye’s hands around Kimberly’s throat, and she’s kicking him, but he’s stronger and her kicks are getting weaker and weaker, and sweat is dripping down his face as he wonders why she won’t die, would she just die already—
My heart was in my mouth, my stomach rolling, and it took every bit of strength in me not to scream, not to push him away. But we were alone out here, far from anyone, and I’d told him I wouldn’t look. If he knew that I knew...
We parted, and he pressed his lips to my forehead while I shook. Please let him think it’s from the kiss.
I wasn’t sure how I managed to smile when he looked down at me. His eyes were so blue. Kimberly had looked into those eyes as he’d choked the life out of her. Kimberly, who had never left town, who had no glamorous future in L.A. Kimberly, who was probably at the bottom of a lake, or in a hole somewhere in that field I’d seen. Kimberly, who’d loved and trusted Skye like I had.
We stood there in the woods, looking at one another, and I tried to force my heart not to beat out of my chest, tried to keep my breathing calm. All I had to do was get back to the trailer. Get back to Momma, and get away from Skye. I could do this. I could.
And then Skye winced.
We both looked down, seeing my hand where it still clung to his forearm. I may have slowed my pulse and steadied my breathing, but I hadn’t stopped my fingers from digging into him, hard enough to break the skin. My nails had pierced his flesh, and Skye and I both watched as a single drop of blood welled up just over the teeth of his key tattoo.
His eyes met mine, and I knew there was no lie I could tell that would convince him that I hadn’t looked inside his mind. That I hadn’t seen. That I didn’t know.
I was in the woods behind my trailer with a boy who’d killed the last girl who loved him. I could look off to the horizon all I wanted, but no one was coming to save me. Maybe I couldn’t tell the future like Momma, but in that instant, I swore I could see it. When her reading with Milly was done, she’d come out and find Skye sitting there. Maybe there’d be dirt on his knees, and he might be breathing a little hard. He’d tell her I’d left. Maybe I headed out for track practice early, caught a ride with a friend—no, he wasn’t sure who. And then maybe later, he’d come back to this quiet place in Woodland Hills, and by the end of the night, I’d find myself lying next to Kimberly McEntire, wherever she was. For just a second, I thought of taking one more peek, trying to see what he had done with her. But I was too afraid to look again, afraid that anything I saw might break what was left of my mind.
Skye’s hands were tight around my wrists now, and I could feel that same dark anger I’d sensed earlier pulsing through him. Oh, Momma, I thought almost from a distance. You were wrong. I’m not going to track practice today.
But as the bones in my wrists creaked and popped, I remembered what Momma had said.
You are gonna run and run today. Fast.
A laugh nearly gurgled out of my throat, high and hysterical. “You’re damn right I am,” I muttered. I reached out.
I shoved.
I ran.
* * * * *
FIGMENT
by Jeri Smith-Ready
It begins, as always, in darkness.
I awake in transit, amid the clamor of voices and the clatter of trucks. Then a steady jet-engine roar lulls me to the edge of sleep.
If I’m waking, it means that someone believes in me again. Maybe it’s the man, woman, boy or girl I’ll soon befriend. Maybe it’s a person close to them. Or maybe it’s only my ex-friend’s employee who took this padded envelope I’ve been trapped inside and put it on a plane.
All that matters is that someone, somewhere, believes.
* * *
A woman’s soft footsteps accompany what I hope is the final leg of my journey. Her hands hold my envelope level before her, not swinging casually at the end of her arm the way the deliveryman carried me. It reminds me of the way Gordon’s butler used to deliver his vodka and pills on a silver tray.
“No more tears,” she murmurs. “He wasn’t worth it.”
But I’m not crying. I never cry.
She sniffles, then takes a deep, slow breath. “No more tears,” she repeats.
Ah, you weren’t talking to me. Never mind. If she can’t hear my thoughts, that means she’s not the one I’m meant for.
She stops and knocks on heavy wood—a door, likely. I hear the muffled voice of a young man, a begrudging beckoning over the strum of guitar.
Hinges creak. The guitar grows louder, doesn’t pause while the woman who carries me stands still at what must be a seldom-crossed threshold.
“Eli, your father is dead.”
The guitar doesn’t stop, but it hits a sour note. Then Eli continues to play, picking up where he left off. “So?”
“He left you this.”
The guitar is set aside with a soft gong. Eli takes my envelope and squeezes it, crushing my face. “It’s soft. Is it a big fat wad of cash?” he asks with a mixture of harshness and hope.
“Just open it.”
Eli tears the sealing strip, letting in the first light I’ve glimpsed in...I won’t know how long until I see a calendar.
“What the hell?” He clamps the envelope shut, smothering the light. “Mom, is this a joke?”
Pull me out. Please don’t let me stay in here.
“There’s a story behind it,” his mother says. “It’s rather interesting, actually. Your father—”
“What did the others get?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Never mind, I’ll look it up online. It’ll be in the news. One-hit wonder Gordon Wylde, 45, dies of— What did he die of?”
“A boating accident. They said it was instant. He didn’t suffer.”
“Good for him.” Eli’s voice cracks, causing me to wonder how far past puberty he is. His hands are large and strong, squeezing me tighter than ever, so perhaps the voice-crack is...sadness? Anger? I wouldn’t know.
“Eli, if you want to talk, I’m here.”
“I know you are,” he snaps. Then his voice softens. “Thanks, Mom. I’m sorry—I mean, if you’re upset he’s gone.”
“Not really.” She gives a wistful laugh. “Your father’s always been gone.” Her footsteps come closer, then a kiss, muted, laid upon hair instead of skin. “I’ve got a roast in the oven, but how about pizza tonight instead?”
“That’d be cool. Thanks.”
She retreats and closes the door. Eli takes a deep breath—as would I, had I lungs—and pulls me out of the envelope.
Amber eyes examine me, the same color as the streaks in his disheveled black hair. Eli pulls in his lower lip, brushes his tongue over the silver ring there. He could be as young as sixteen, but the piercing makes me think he’s closer to eighteen. “I don’t get it,” he mutters. “I do not get it.”
Eli tosses me on the bed—faceup, luckily. The ceiling features a wood-and-green-metal fan, currently off, as well as a poster of a brunette girl with wide blue eyes. The right edge is torn, the poster ripped in half to eliminate her partner. At the bottom it reads “she &” in a whimsical cursive hand.
He pulls a note from the envelope, the folded sheet of paper I’ve been lying on for...a long time, I think. I don’t remember how long, or even what form I’ve taken. It must be the same form as when I was Gordon’s friend, because vessels contain our spirits until they disintegrate (the vessels, that is). I never forget disintegration.
I am eternal. I can never die, only sleep. My kind has existed since humans first drew pictures on cave walls and told stories around campfires. We were born at the dawn of imagination.
“Call Tyler,” Eli says in a flat voice. It sounds like a command, but not, I hope, for me.
A tinny male voice emits from a cell phone speaker. “Eli! What’s up, bro?”
Eli picks me up and stares into my eyes, his own turned dark with loathing.
“My father left me a cat.”
* * *
I’m four inches long. My plush fake fur is black, except for my paws, which are white. My eyes are stitched yellow-thread rings surrounding felt black centers. Their perfect roundness makes me look perpetually astonished.
All of this I’d forgotten, because when no one holds you for...years?...you lose sense of your shape.
All of this I remember, because Eli has thrown me against the wall and I’ve landed, fortuitously, in front of a full-length mirror.
My puffy white forepaws extend forward, like I’m asking for double fist bumps, or worse, protecting myself. But nothing can hurt me, aside from being ignored.
Eli is ignoring me. In the mirror I see him sitting cross-legged on the double bed, his back turned. The fan is on low now, its wood-and-metal arms making lazy circles, casting hazy shadows on the ceiling and the girl in the poster.
I examine what details I can, to determine Eli’s state of living. His dresser and nightstand are basic pale wood, IKEA-ish. The boots sticking out from under the bed appear to be Timberland knockoffs. His jeans and black T-shirt are threadbare and distressed, but that might be the style still (or again). Through the floor I hear his mother in the kitchen, opening the oven door, then letting the door crash shut. A two-story house, then. Eli and his mother seem neither rich nor poor.
My gaze sweeps the walls for a calendar. I’m used to lying dormant for years between allies, but not knowing how many years is unsettling. Eli’s father crammed me into that envelope in 1997, when the world was throwing itself at his feet. He thought he didn’t need me anymore. I wonder how that worked out.
Some months or years later, Gordon opened the envelope, but only to add the note, which Eli read to his friend Tyler over the phone.
“My dear Elias,
Of all my sons, I’ve given you the least in life, so in death I give you the most.
This wee kitty has been more than a good-luck charm to me. It’s been a friend, perhaps the most loyal one I’ve ever had. I advise you to keep it at your side at all times if you want to succeed. And when (not if, but when) you find that success, do not make my arrogant mistake and cast the cat aside. Give credit where credit is due.
Your father,
Gordon Wylde”
Tyler laughed his ass off, naturally, and then Eli threw me across the room, where I wait, neither patiently nor impatiently, since I do not feel.
I do have opinions, however, an important one of which is forming now: Eli has more musical genius in that pouty lower lip than his father had in his entire body. His voice needs no enhancing, and his playing needs no amplification. He could most likely make hundreds a day busking in a subway station. God only knows what a decent record label could do for him.
But he needs more than talent. He needs me. Not just to set him on the path to greatness, but to keep him there. When inevitable misfortunes beset him, he must believe he’s destined. He must believe that luck is on his side.
First, however, he must believe in me.
Eli draws in a sudden hiss of pain between his teeth, then shakes out his hand. He’s played too long.
Sucking the pad of his right thumb, he turns and slides off the bed. For a moment I wonder what it would be like to unfold long legs so effortlessly—or to move at all. He lays the guitar in its case and starts to close the lid.
Eli, wait.
He hesitates but doesn’t look at me.
You can’t hear my words yet, I tell him, but you can feel what I want. Please, put me inside. It all starts there.
Eli snatches me up by one ear, then drops me facedown in the compartment in the guitar case’s neck. “There, Dad. Happy?”
He slams the lid shut and flips the latches. But instead of shoving the guitar case back under the bed where he got it, he lays his hand over the place where I am, pressing this end of the case against the floor. The carpet gives a little.
All it takes is a little belief to bring me to life.
Thank you, Eli.
His breathing stops. A soft suction pop marks his sore thumb coming out of his mouth.
I’m inside the case. But don’t worry, I won’t suffocate. I don’t breathe.
Eli’s whimper has a question mark at the end.
Yes, I’m real. Sort of. I used to know your father. If he bequeathed me to you, it means that you were important to him. Or that I was not. In any case, we’re together now.
“What the—” The latches rattle as he fumbles to open them. The lid lifts, letting in light.
Eli doesn’t pick me up. I wish I could see his expression, but I’m still facedown and can’t turn over.
He tugs my tail. “I’m going insane.”
On the contrary, you have a normal, healthy imagination. That’s what keeps me alive.
He lets out a curse and slams the guitar case shut again. A few moments later, he speaks in hushed tones, but not to me.
“Ty, have you had any, like, weird thoughts since Saturday night?”
The phone speaker is loud enough—and my cat ears sensitive enough—that I can hear the reply. “What kind of weird thoughts?”
“I don’t know. Hallucinations?”
“It was just a little weed. You didn’t even smoke any.”
“I know, but even secondhand, I definitely felt the effects.”
“Are you saying you’re seeing things?”
“Hearing things,” Eli corrects.
“It was a loud concert. My ears were ringing afterward.”
“This isn’t a ringing.”
“What is it?”
Eli pauses. “Nothing. I guess it is sort of like a ringing. I gotta go. Mom’s calling me for dinner.”
His mom’s not calling him for dinner, but after hanging up, Eli stalks from the room, shouting her name.
I hope she has answers.
* * *
“So you’re from Cleveland?” Eli has propped me up on his other pillow so that I can see him, but he doesn’t look at me as we talk. He sits against his headboard beside me, arms crossed, legs straight out, looking stunned.
Not originally, but that was where my essence was encapsulated in this temporary form. The musician who gave me to your father was from there. He was in a band called Raise an Axe. Ever heard of them?
“No.”
That’s because they had only one heavy-metal hit in the late eighties, off their self-titled album, Raise an Axe. Can you guess the song name?
“‘Raise an Axe’?”
Very good. That singer abandoned his band to embark on a solo career. He also abandoned me. When he realized his mistake, it was too late. I had no luck left for him.
Eli groans. “This is so bizarre.” He sweeps both palms over his wavy dark hair, holding it back against his scalp. Under all those tumbling locks, he has a pronounced widow’s peak, just like his father. “So who are you?”
A figment.
“That’s your name?”
It’s what I am.
“Like a figment of my imagination?”
I give the vocal equivalent of a shrug. A bit redundant, since by definition a figment is something that exists only in the imagination.
Heels together, Eli taps his bare feet against each other. “Like an imaginary friend.”
Precisely.
“I thought only little kids had imaginary friends.”
They’re not the only ones who need them.
“I’ve got plenty of friends.”
Friends or fleas? His father’s penthouse had been overrun with bloodsucking sycophants, people who only loved him for his money and fame.
Eli pulls his knees to his chest and rests his chin on them. “What I mean is, I’m not lonely or anything.”
I decide not to challenge this assertion. May I ask, what became of your father’s career once he left Boyz on the Korner?
Eli scoffs. “Nothing. He never had another hit like BotK had with ‘Ready, Set, Dance.’ Because he basically sucked. People realized that after he hit twenty-one and wasn’t adorable anymore.” He looks at me quickly. “Wait. Was that when he put you away?”
That’s when I entered the envelope, yes.
“Wow.” He shakes his head hard. “This can’t be real.”
You need to redefine “real.”
“Obviously. So why are you here?”
To help you succeed in life by bringing you good luck. You need the right people in the right place in the right mood. I can make that happen. Your talent will do the rest.
Eli gives me a sideways, suspicious look. “What’s in it for you?”
If I help you, you’ll believe in me, and I get to keep existing. I remember my image in the mirror. Also, I’d very much like some clothes.
* * *
Eli, it turns out, used to play with dolls when he was a boy. I don’t judge.
“If anyone sees me doing this, I’ll have my man card permanently revoked,” he says as he buttons my sparkly blue shirt.
So I won’t be meeting your friends?
“No, you’re staying here.”
But unless I’m in your presence, I can’t influence the thoughts of others around you in your favor.
He looks up from the box of doll clothes, horrified. “Other people can hear you?”
Not in words, the way you can. They can sense my desires and be swayed by them, but only if they’ve seen me and acknowledged my existence.
I catch sight of the doll sneakers he’s picked out of the box.
Please, no pink.
“So you are a boy. I wondered, since you don’t have any—you know.” He flips up my shirttail. “Anything to cover.”
Technically, I’m neither a boy nor a girl. I can be whichever you prefer.
He narrows his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘prefer’?”
In a friend.
“Oh. Well, a human for starters.”
You have no pets?
“Just fish. I’m allergic.”
And I’m relieved. Some dogs chew stuffed animals, and some cats hump them. Humiliating in either case.
Eli rummages through the box, which appears to have all sorts of doll clothes jumbled together in one mass. “If you’re an imaginary friend, why don’t you look human? Why are you trapped in this stuffed cat?”
Figments need a physical vessel so their friends can take them places. Or leave us behind, if you like.
“Us?” He casts a wary gaze around his room. “There’s more than one of you here?”
No, you only get one. But there are others of my kind in the world. There always have been.
“Huh. Hey, here’s a cool hat.” Eli holds it up with a flourish. It has three points and a giant purple feather, like one of the Three Musketeers.
Yes! Put that on my head. Now.
He laughs. “You like the bling, huh?”
I love the bling.
“Pimp my cat.” He tugs the hat down over my ears, then tilts it sideways. “Figment’s got swag, yo.”
Is that what you wish to call me?
“Or Fig for short. Is that okay?”
You may call me whatever you like. I hide my next thought from him: just don’t ever put me away.
“Well, Fig, guess what? You’re getting yourself some fine-ass boots.”
* * *
Over the past week, Eli has learned to entertain me. When he’s downstairs with his mother, he sets me on the windowsill or in front of his aquarium so I have something to watch. He leaves on the radio, which teaches me about current events and the latest musical trends.
When he leaves the house he brings me with him, buried deep in his messenger bag to school, or tucked into his guitar case to band practice, which double as makeout sessions with his girlfriend, Vanessa. He hasn’t gotten up the nerve to introduce me to anyone yet, so I have influence on nobody but him.
Just before history class on my third day of school, a girl behind Eli whispers his name. His chair creaks as he turns to her.
“Sorry about your dad,” she says. “I heard on the news.”
I expect him to growl “It doesn’t matter” or “whatever,” as he has to every other sympathizer. Instead he just says, “Thanks, Lyra.”
“I know what it’s like. I mean, I don’t have a famous father, but—”
“Semifamous.”
“Well. Anyway, I never knew my mom. She left right after I was born.”
He shifts in his chair again, perhaps turning all the way round. “That probably sucks more than not knowing your dad.”
“If they left, they probably weren’t worth knowing, right? At least, that’s what I tell myself every birthday.”
“Seriously. I never got a birthday or Christmas card. Just some child-support money in a bank account, but not as much as you’d think. Not with two other sons to take care of.” Eli lowers his voice until I can barely hear it. “When he died, he left the oldest one a house and the middle one a car.”
“What did you get?”
He pauses for a long moment. If I had breath, I would hold it. But he finally says, “Nothing.”
The bell rings and the teacher clops across the floor in what sound like platform heels. I can feel the vibrations from here.
She begins the lecture, on the French Revolution, a topic I know well, since I’ve heard it in classrooms ever since a few years after the event itself. The facts remain the same, but the perspective changes as the centuries pass.
I wish you’d bring me out in class just once, I tell Eli. You’d get much better grades, or at least I could keep the teacher from calling on you.
He gives the bag a slight kick to shut me up. Since I feel no pain, it doesn’t work.
For the record, girls think I’m cute.
No response.
Perhaps you could bring me out at band practice today, when you see what’s-her-name. The one who treats you like an imbecile. She’d find it charming, you carrying a tiny stuffed cat with a feather hat and silver boots in your guitar case.
No response.
Tap the bag once for no, twice for yes.
Eli gives a heavy sigh, shifts his feet beneath the desk next to my bag. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then finally, I feel a single tap. Followed by another.
* * *
“Oh, my God, he’s adorbs!” Vanessa squeezes my belly and shakes me from side to side, making my hat’s feather flop against my head. “Where did you get him?”
I appreciate that she refers to me as “him” instead of “it,” but her tone is a bit patronizing. She’s a year older than Eli, a fact she points out as often as possible.
Sitting on the basement couch with his arm around Vanessa’s shoulders, Eli says, “My father left him to me as a good-luck charm. Isn’t that hilarious?”
“Aww.” She strokes his cheek with the backs of her black-lacquered fingernails, then kisses him softly. “Are you sad you never got to meet him?”
“Not really,” he replies, but gives me a nervous glance.
Liar.
Eli opens his mouth to tell me to shut up, but catches himself in time.
Vanessa tugs my shirtsleeve. “Did he come dressed like this?”
“Of course. Where would I get doll clothes?”
I don’t bother repeating my call of “liar.”
“Eli, come on.” Behind me, Jules, the drummer, taps his sticks together.
Eli reaches for me, then pulls his hand back. “Take good care of him, okay?”
“I will.” Vanessa kisses me right between the eyes. My opinion of her is softening somewhat.
Eli takes his guitar and joins Jules and the other boy, Tyler, who fancies himself a lead singer but often seems more fascinated with his collection of unusual instruments.
As they play, Vanessa dances me atop her bare knee in time to the music. During a slow ballad, she rests me on her shoulder, my feet tucked into her long blond hair streaked with green and blue. At the end of each song, she waves me in the air, cheering with exaggerated enthusiasm. The boys scowl at her silliness, but it’s the most fun I’ve had since I reawakened.
The tunes are intricate for a songwriter of Eli’s age, but sadly, he’s the only one who seems capable of playing them. When they take a break, I seize the opportunity to speak to him.
You should go solo. You’re too good for these poseurs.
Eli doesn’t glare at me. Instead the corner of his mouth tugs into a sad frown. He knows I’m right, but he loves his friends.
Also the band name, Trending Frenzy? What does that even mean?
“Long story,” he says under his breath.
After the break, it takes Trending Frenzy a full hour to rehearse three more songs. Tyler keeps trying to change the key to take it up to his singing range and make it easier to play, but it sounds like crap when they do that. Even Tyler recognizes this truth, once I’ve sent this mental message to him ten or eleven times.
Eventually Vanessa gets bored and lies down on the couch, cuddling me close. She presses me to her chest, blocking my eyes and ears. It’s just as well—Eli is growing tired of my running commentary, and the band’s playing is growing ever unruly. I let myself zone out to the sound of Vanessa’s slow, rhythmic heartbeat.
“That’s all I can take,” Eli says finally. “I’m gonna grab a soda. You guys want anything?”
They grumble a response I can’t hear, then his footsteps ascend the staircase over my head.
“Lucky cat,” says a soft voice close to the couch.
Vanessa stirs, then gives a low laugh. “Jules. Where’s Eli?”
“Upstairs. Tyler’s in the bathroom.” He leans in, and her heart starts to race. “So I thought I’d come do this.”
Uh-oh.
They kiss, loud and wet, and her hand leaves me to move to him. I’m flipped on my back, looking up at their chins. Their mouths move like they’re starving.
Then Jules’s hand displaces me. For a moment I teeter on the edge of the sofa, long enough to see him reach down her shirt. Then his elbow tips me off the side, and I tumble onto the floor. I focus on the frayed brown fabric of the couch skirt and think to Vanessa with all my might, What about Eli?
She pulls away from Jules. “I can’t do this to him. His dad just died.”
“So? He didn’t even know the guy. He makes fun of that stupid ‘Ready, Set, Dance’ song all the time.” Jules leans in again, making a slurping sound against what I assume is Vanessa’s neck.
“Stop.” She pushes him away, and this time he relents, letting both hands fall onto his knees. “Eli’s been different since it happened,” she says. “If you can’t see that, you’re a shitty friend.”
“I’ve been hooking up with you for a month. I’m already a shitty friend.”
Down the basement hallway, a door opens, letting out the liquid sound of a flushing toilet. Jules hurries to stand up and move away from the couch. “Hey, Ty, wanna play some Ping-Pong? Loser buys pizza.”
“Nah, I gotta get out of here before I stab Eli with one of your drumsticks. One more ‘Why can’t you sing it the way I wrote it?’ and I’m going solo.”
“If you do that, then Eli’ll go solo, too. I don’t want to see you guys competing.”
“Plus, you’ll be out of a gig, right?”
“You think that’s all I care about?” Jules laughs. “You wound me, man. I’ll see you Friday.”
Vanessa calls goodbye to him as he goes up the stairs. Then she picks me up from the floor. “Aww, sorry, little guy.” She dusts off my tail and the front of my shirt. “Ty, you need a roadie to carry out your million instruments?”
“Very funny, but no. I’m leaving my guitar here. Eli said he’d adjust the bridge for me. Intonation is totally out of whack.”
He’s the talented one.
“He’s the talented one, you know,” Vanessa says.
“And you’re the slutty one,” Tyler answers. “Eli finds out about you and Jules, that’s the end of the band.”
“Why do you care? You just said you wanted to—”
“Shh.”
Eli is coming down the stairs. “You’re leaving?” he asks Tyler, his voice devoid of disappointment.
“Yep. Friday practice still on?”
I wouldn’t commit if I were you.
Eli commits, despite my warning. Ah, well, I suppose band breakups, like all breakups, are best done in person.
Vanessa sets me on the coffee table in front of the couch, propped up against a stack of books. Then she straightens my clothes and gives me an indulgent smile.
You don’t deserve him.
Her smile fades, then she moves over to give Eli room on the couch. He picks up Tyler’s Fender and starts to tune it, but keeps glancing between Vanessa and me.
I’m not the one you should be jealous of.
She slides her hand up his thigh. “I have to leave in about half an hour, so...can you do that later?”
Eli sets Tyler’s guitar aside, then pulls her into his arms, kissing her, tangling his fingers in her hair. I wonder if her heart is beating as fast as it did when Jules kissed her.
I clear my throat, figuratively. I’m sitting right here. Do you mind?
Eli opens one eye to look at me, then extends his middle finger ever so slightly in my direction, below her arm, where she couldn’t see it even if her eyes were open.
There’s something you should know about her before you—
She tears off his T-shirt, then Eli leans back to lie on the sofa, pulling her on top of him. Things progress faster.
This is your last chance before I blurt out a hard truth. Trust me, you don’t want to hear it in front of her. I’m warning you.
Her sweater comes off, then the camisole beneath it.
Vanessa’s been cheating on you with Jules.
Eli’s hands go still on her bare waist, his thumb tracing beneath the edge of her bra. She doesn’t notice at first, too busy kissing or maybe biting his neck.
“Stop,” he whispers.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, her blond hair hanging like a veil between us, so I can’t see his face.
“It’s not— I—um. I just remembered I have to be somewhere.”
“Now? Where?”
Coward. Don’t drag this out. I saw them kissing. More than kissing. You know I’m telling the truth, don’t you? You’ve suspected for a while.
“I just— I need you to go. I’ll call you later. I’m sorry.”
Why are you apologizing to her?
Vanessa doesn’t budge. “I don’t understand.” She clutches his arm harder, her voice taut with fear.
I turn my attention to her. He knows about you and Jules. Go now. Now!
Vanessa lifts her head, like she’s hearing her name shouted from far away. “Okay. But call me?”
“I will,” he says. “Promise.”
She grabs her sweater from the back of the couch and yanks it over her head. “I guess I’ll be early for work instead of late for once. My boss’ll die of surprise.” Vanessa picks up her bag, leans over for a quick kiss, then runs up the stairs.
Eli lies there on his back for a second, hands covering his face. The black tattoo on his upper arm twitches, a bare tree with birds rising from its branches.
Sorry.
He lets his hands fall to his side with a thud. “Sorry? Do you know what you just interrupted? Or are all figments celibate?”
It depends on the imagination that sustains us. I’ve taken some interesting forms in the past. For instance—
“I don’t want to know.” Eli taps his fingers against his ribs. “What do I do?”
Break up with her. What choice do you have?
“I could pretend I don’t know. Then everything stays the same. Otherwise I lose her and Jules. Tyler, too, probably, because I’ll have to break up the band. They’re my only friends.”
I doubt that’s true, and if it is, then you need to make better friends.
“I know.” Eli turns on his side to face me. “But even bad friends are better than being alone.”
He suddenly looks years younger. I have to make him feel better. It’s what I do.
I promise you this, Eli, right here and now: you’ll never be alone again.
* * *
After dinner, Eli paces his bedroom floor, clutching his Magic 8 Ball. “Should I break up with Vanessa and the band?” He flips the ball. “‘Outlook good.’ Does that mean yes or no?”
That sounds definitively yes.
“But not as definitive as Yes.” He shakes the ball hard and repeats the question. “‘Reply hazy, try again.’ You know what? I don’t trust this for big decisions. I’ll ask the cookie.” He sets down the ball and shoves his hand into his jar of fortune-cookie fortunes, a jar that looks like a giant ceramic Oreo.
He reads the first slip. “‘The secret to good friends is no secret to you.’ I don’t know what that means.”
It means time to man up and clear your life of douchebags.
He tilts his head at me. “You’re starting to sound less proper.”
And you’re starting to sound less smart. End it now.
After another half hour of my cajoling, Eli breaks up with Vanessa via text. She doesn’t reply. No begging, crying, threatening. Deep down she knows why he’s ended it, because I told her. She’ll chalk it up to intuition.
At bedtime, rather than setting me on the nightstand or in his guitar case, Eli takes off my hat and boots, wraps me in the blue silk cami Vanessa left behind and holds me close as he lies down to sleep. I fit perfectly under his chin.
This is something new, this...cuddling. Even when I belonged to women, I was in unhuggable forms, such as a crystal elephant or a carved wooden Woman of Willendorf fertility statue. Maybe if I’d ever been a child’s figment, I’d have experienced this closeness, this neediness. For the first time, I’m more than an advisor and miracle worker. I’m a friend.
Eli sleeps fitfully, and soon I tumble out of his arms and onto the floor. I’ve never spoken to him in his sleep, but he needs settling.
Wake up and write. You’ll feel better.
He comes awake with a sharp breath, then without a word, slips out of bed and crosses to his desk, the direction I’m facing. He lifts his Magic 8 Ball from atop a stack of notebooks, takes the top pad, then sets down the worthless prediction device.
On the way back to the bed, he accidentally steps on my face. “Sorry, Fig!” Eli picks me up, unwraps the camisole from around my torso and brings both to the bed with him.
Do you need my help?
He shakes his head and pulls the cap off the pen with his teeth. “This is one thing I do best on my own.”
* * *
Pen in one hand, Vanessa’s cami in the other, Eli scribbles furiously for the next four hours, frowning and crossing out as many lines as he writes. Just after 3:00 a.m. he pulls out his guitar and plays a series of chords—softly, so as not to wake his mom.
The next day at school, he returns Vanessa’s shirt, wrinkles ironed out. She takes it without a word, or at least none that I can hear from inside his bag.
In history class, he sets me on the corner of his desk, facing forward. “Good-luck charm for the exam,” he explains to Lyra.
“Let me see.”
He spins me to face him and Lyra. Instead of gushing over my cute widdle boots and hat, she takes a good long look at me. “That expression,” she says finally. “Like the whole world is amazing.”
It’s just the way the manufacturer shaped my eyes. The world is most definitely not amazing.
Eli gives me a skeptical smile.
But maybe she is, I add.
* * *
Friday afternoon, Eli meets Tyler and Jules for burgers at Five Guys before band practice. I’m left in the bag, of course, on the seat of the booth. His so-called friends sit across from him.
“I’m leaving the band,” he tells them when their food’s arrived.
“Aw, man.” Tyler pounds the bottom of a ketchup bottle. “Why now, when we’re finally getting good?”
“I don’t think we’re getting good, but that’s not the main reason. My main reason is that Jules here can’t keep his hands off my girlfriend.”
“What?” Jules stammers. “How do you know?”
“I knew this would happen,” Tyler says. “I told her to knock it off.”
“Wait, how did you know?” Jules asks him.
“I have eyes. Eyes that saw you feeling her up in the school parking lot last week.”
“Tyler, you knew and didn’t tell me?” Eli says. “I thought you were my best friend.”
“I didn’t want to make you mad.”
He didn’t want you to break up the band, I tell Eli. He wanted to do it himself.
“Well, I’m twice as mad now.”
“I can see that.” Tyler pounds the ketchup bottle again. “What is with this stuff? It’s stuck.”
“Eli, I’m sorry, man. I really am.” Jules sounds sincere.
He’s not sorry.
“It’s my fault,” he continues with a full mouth. “You shouldn’t blame Vanessa. I’ll stay away from her, I swear.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“I’m just saying, it’s over with us. So you might as well keep her.”
“Keep her?” Eli’s voice rises above the din of the crowd. “She’s a girl, not a doll!”
Tyler snorts. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eli’s voice is colder than I’ve ever heard it.
“You’ve gotten a little too attached to that stuffed cat your loser dad gave you.”
“I’m not attached.”
“Oh, really? Then let me have it for a week.” Tyler sets down the bottle hard on the table. “It’s the least you can do, Mr. I’m Too Talented for My Band.”
“Why would you even want him?” Eli’s voice turns hot with anger again.
“It’s a ‘him’ now? Is he your new best friend? Is that why you don’t need me anymore?”
Jules breaks in. “Take it easy, Ty. Eli didn’t say we weren’t still friends. The band stuff is just business.”
“‘Business’?” Ty says. “This is your fault, Jules! It wasn’t business when you had your hand inside Vanessa’s shirt.”
Eli’s silverware hits the table with a clatter. A fork or knife bounces onto the booth seat beside my bag. “Screw you guys both.”
Suddenly I’m lifted, bag and all. He’s walking fast toward the door, faster than he’s ever headed to class. The corner of his calculus textbook digs into my stomach with every step, and I’m very glad I have no pain nerves.
A door creaks open, and Eli says, “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Sorry.”
“It’s okay, but what...” The girl’s familiar voice fades as Eli keeps going.
We stop suddenly, and a car door handle rattles. Eli curses. He tears open the bag, letting in bright sunlight I can’t blink away.
Your keys aren’t in here. I didn’t hear them jangle.
“Looking for these?” Tyler says behind us.
Now I hear them jangle.
“Give me my keys,” Eli demands.
“I’ll trade you.” Tyler laughs. “The keys for the kitty.”
“Why do you want him so much?”
He doesn’t want me. He wants to destroy me to hurt you, because you hurt him.
Eli lunges, and now it’s Jules’s turn to laugh, though more nervously than Tyler did. “We’re just messin’ with you. Come on, our burgers are getting cold. Give Ty the stupid doll for two seconds so he’ll stop being a dick. Or give it to me, whatever.”
Eli drops the bag on the ground. “Haven’t I given you enough? My songs, my time, my girlfriend?”
“Vanessa wasn’t your girlfriend—she was just a regular hookup. You know what she called you? Her favorite charity.”
There’s a smack of bone against bone, and Jules cries out. Then a thud and the sound of denim skidding over blacktop.
Suddenly, I’m pulled out into the brightness. By Tyler.
“How do you like him now, dude?” He rips off my hat and boots. “Nothing better than a naked p—”
Tyler buckles over with an “oof!” He clutches me against his stomach, groaning. Something in bright blue leather—a gloved fist? A booted foot?—flashes past me, up into his chin. Released from his grip, I fall to the pavement, rolling to rest faceup.
Appearing above me are wide blue eyes, like those belonging to the girl on Eli’s ceiling. Lyra scoops me up and stuffs me into her bag. There’s candy in here. Watermelon flavored, I think.
Tyler cries out again, higher-pitched this time.
“Let go of the keys,” Lyra says. Her body rocks forward, and Tyler shrieks louder. “Sorry, does that hurt? You know what would hurt worse? If you didn’t let go of the keys and my foot accidentally broke all your fingers.” She bends over, and the bag on her back rises. “If you ever want to play that stupid ukulele again, you know what to do.”
A sharp jangle, then Lyra says, “Thank you.”
I can’t hear much over the rush and jostle of her bag, which is soon dumped on the floor of Eli’s car (I recognize the smell).
“You okay?” she asks.
Not bad, but—
“I’ll be all right,” Eli answers.
Oh, she wasn’t talking to me. Sorry.
Lyra starts the engine. “I live around the block. We can go to my house and get some ice for your face, then you can bring me back to get my car later.”
“Thanks for rescuing us. I mean, rescuing me. I mean, rescuing Fig.”
“You named your stuffed cat after a fruit?”
Eli pauses. “It’s short for Figment.”
She laughs and backs out of the parking space so fast, a book in her bag smashes my legs. “Interesting, considering he actually exists.”
* * *
I sit on Lyra’s kitchen table, propped against the salt and pepper shakers. Eli holds an ice pack to his bruised left eye and another to his lower lip, where he was lucky not to have the ring pulled out. Popcorn is popping in the microwave.
“Okay, kitty, your turn.” Lyra enters the kitchen with a large plastic bin. “Time for some new clothes.”
Yes! I would pump my fist if I could.
Eli can’t hide his interest as she lifts the lid. “You have a separate compartment for each item of clothing? I’m in awe.”
“I was a little OCD when I was a kid, at least with the stuff that was important to me.” Lyra tucks a lock of her long dark hair behind her ear in a self-conscious gesture. “It’s been years since I even looked at my dolls, much less dressed them up.”
Eli puts down one of his ice packs and pulls out an orange boa. “Isn’t this from one of the Bratz girls?”
“Yeah, I owned, like, ten of those. So you must have a sister, huh?”
He holds the boa up in front of me.
Too much.
“I don’t have a sister,” Eli says without meeting her eyes.
She pauses in her search, then smiles. “You played with dolls? That’s so cool.”
He shrugs like it’s nothing, but the skin around his visible eye loosens in relief. “That’s one of the advantages to being dad-free: no one to force me to play with trucks or try out for football.” He places the boa back in the bin. “Mom didn’t care, though I think she was confused when I turned out straight.”
Lyra laughs. “I’m glad you turned out— I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with— I mean, I’m glad for my sake. Ugh, can we just pretend I didn’t say any of that?” She lifts a pair of golden slippers. “Fig must have new boots, if nothing else.”
And you thought you’d be alone if you ditched your fake friends. Ask her to hang out.
Eli picks up the other ice pack, but before pressing it to his mouth, he says, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”
* * *
Over the next six months, Eli plays a series of successful solo gigs, he and Lyra get serious, and he graduates magna cum laude. I play a role in all of these fortunate events, but only a developmental one. Mostly it’s his doing. Mostly.
During the summer between high school and college, Eli ramps up his appearance schedule, and after each performance, a music journalist or blogger sits him down for an interview. They ask the expected questions about his one-hit-wonder of a father, how Eli will avoid the same trap of overconfidence, how he’ll stay down-to-earth despite drowning in contract offers, each bigger than the last.
He always answers, “My friends keep me humble. They remind me that success doesn’t come from my efforts alone. Some of it’s luck, of course, and I feel very lucky right now.”
But each time he says it with less conviction. When they start asking about me, his “good-luck charm,” Eli gets antsy.
These days, we don’t talk much.
One night, after a standing-room-only concert at a local nightclub, a reporter with a different sort of angle wants to talk to Eli.
“Hi.” The lady is about thirty years old and carries a bag that screams organic living. “I’m doing a story about good-luck charms and successful performers—musicians, sports stars, that sort of thing. The article is called ‘Beyond Rabbit’s Feet.’” She sinks into a chair and signals the waitress. “Your little cat is quite the legend.”
“It is?” Eli glances over to the chair next to him, where I’m sitting atop his guitar case.
You just called me “it.” Not cool.
The reporter smiles at me. “So I’ve done some digging...”
“Great,” he mutters, reaching for his Coke.
“It is my job.” She flips a page in her notepad. “Turns out, your father was also known for carrying around a cat-shaped good-luck charm when he was with Boyz on the Korner.” She points her pen at me. “Is this the same one? Did he give it to you?”
Eli just sips his Coke and stares at her impassively, saying nothing.
She reaches into her bag. “I have pictures, if that would help.”
“Don’t bother.” Standing quickly, almost knocking his chair over, he sweeps me up and crams me into his inside jacket pocket. “For the record, yes, the cat was my father’s, but it’s just a gimmick. My girlfriend likes holding it during shows. It gives her something to do with her hands when she gets nervous for me.”
“If it’s just a gimmick, then why is it insured for over a hundred thousand—”
“I have to go. Good night.”
Her protestation fades behind us as Eli stalks out of the club.
Once we’re outside where it’s quiet, I ask him, Am I really a gimmick to you now?
He pulls out his phone to pretend he’s talking to someone else instead of the bulge in his coat. “Fig, I think next time you should stay home.”
* * *
I do stay home for the following gig, perched on his windowsill, angled so that I can also see the aquarium. As frustrated as Eli is with my influence over his life, he still takes the time for small kindnesses.
Just after 2:00 a.m., he pulls into the driveway. I can feel the slam of car doors from up here. Soon the stairs, then the floorboards shake with his footsteps.
The bedroom door jerks open. Eli dumps his guitar case on the bed, then paces, hands on his hips, shoulders lowered in defeat.
How’d it go? I ask, though I can guess.
“It sucked.” He sinks onto the edge of the bed. “I suck.”
You do not suck. That’s one thing I know for sure about you.
“Maybe you know, but I’ll never know. Not as long as...” He raises his head from his hands to stare at me. A look I recognize all too well comes into his eyes.
No...
He gets up and crosses the room toward me, slowly, as if I’ll bite. I wish I could bite.
“I have to do this.” Eli picks me up with the gentlest of touches, but I can feel the fury in his bones.
Don’t put me away. You’ll regret it.
“No, Fig, I won’t. Not in the long run.” He slides me into the envelope his dad sent me in. “I have to make things happen for myself. I don’t even know whether people like me because they want to, or because you’re making them.”
Fine. Let me stay here in your room. Just don’t put me away. Please. Don’t be like your father.
“I’m not like him. You were the one who told me I could succeed on my own. He needed luck, but I don’t.” Eli staples my envelope shut, as if I could escape.
I’ll miss you if you put me away. I’ll be miserable and lonely.
“No,” he whispers, on the verge of tears. “Figments feel nothing, remember?”
I’ve become more than a figment with you. I thought we were friends!
“I’ve given up friends before, when they’ve hurt me.”
But I’m still your Fig. I lower my thought-voice to a whisper. I’ll always be your Fig.
Eli’s hands begin to shake, but I still hear him clearly. “No matter what?”
The toes of my boots bend against the interior of the envelope, and my paws reach out, forever. No matter what.
* * *
In a box in the attic, I lie upon something soft—clothes, I imagine—and wait for Eli to return. Because he still believes in me, I can still feel him. Sometimes I hear him downstairs in his room, playing the song I woke him to write, the song that could make him huge.
It’s cold up here. My cat ears pick up the scrabble of insects and mice, creeping about in what must be an ideal home. My plush body conforms to the shape of whatever I lie upon, the way my soul (if I have one) conforms to the shape of whomever I—well, serve is the wrong word, but it’s better than love.
When Eli moves away—to college or stardom—I begin to fade. It takes months, maybe years. Time loses meaning. My senses dull. I forget who I am.
It ends, as always, in darkness.
Epilogue
A veiled light meets my eyes.
“There you are,” a woman whispers. “Just where he said you’d be.”
A slight rip of paper, then I’m tugged out to see her. Familiar, I think, but...was her hair always that gray?
She stands, crosses the attic, then carries me down creaky stairs, clutching me to her side.
We enter a living room, where the television is on, playing the Grammy Awards. “My friends were going to come over to celebrate,” the woman says, “but I told them I was sick. Eli wanted to make sure you saw, so I figured it should just be you and me.”
Eli...I know the name. Was I once his? Were we each other’s?
I don’t think she can hear me. She sets me on a coffee table, propped against a stack of magazines.
Wait! Was that his face on the cover?
She definitely can’t hear me, and I can’t turn to face the magazines. I strain to see out of the corner of my eye, but these eyes don’t seem to have corners.
“Coming up next,” says the voice on TV, “Grammy nominee for Best New Artist—Eli Wylde!”
Eli...
When they return from commercial break, he’s there onstage, just him and his guitar. His age shocks me—I expected to see a twenty-year-old Best New Artist, but this man’s closer to thirty. It took him thirteen years to reach this height without me, but he reached it, with the song I made him write.
When he wins, his acceptance speech is full of names I don’t recognize. The only name I know is Lyra, whom he refers to as his “oldest friend.” I feel so displaced by this; at our last time together, she was his newest friend.
Finally Eli looks straight at the camera. “Last of all, I’d like to thank my father, Gordon Wylde. We never met in person, but he gave me the most important, most real gift I’ve ever received.” He leans in close to the mic and speaks in a near whisper, holding up his award. “Fig, I’m bringing home a new pair of boots.”
* * * * *
THE TWELFTH GIRL
by Malinda Lo
Harley was the kind of girl who could get away with anything. That was the first thing Liv learned when she arrived at the Virginia Sloane School for Girls in mid-October. It wasn’t only that Harley flouted the dress code and skipped class and ignored the curfew without ever being reprimanded. There was something disquieting yet seductive about her, like walking on the edge of a cliff while gazing down at the violent beauty of the ocean breaking below. Somehow it seemed as if Harley could jump—would jump—but instead of falling, she’d spread her arms and fly like a blackbird.
Liv had known girls who acted like Harley before, but never someone quite so successful at pulling it off. Harley was definitely the most interesting thing about the Sloane School, and from the first time Liv saw her—walking into class twenty minutes late, dressed in tight jeans and boots instead of the uniform, her black hair wind-tossed and wild—Liv didn’t know if she wanted to be Harley or if she wanted to kiss her.
Harley’s friends, too, seemed to benefit from her apparent invincibility. They lived together in Eleanor Castle Hall, a small, turreted fantasy of a dorm on the edge of campus. Castle had twelve rooms, all singles, each taken by Harley and her group. Everybody knew they went out dancing every night until three in the morning, and they never got caught, even though the campus gates were locked at 10:00 p.m., and every dorm had a resident advisor who knocked on your door if you even played your music too loud. The rumor was that Harley had a rich father who had given so much money to Sloane that Harley—and everybody she liked—was immune from the rules.
Liv wanted to be immune, too. Her parents had transferred her to Sloane after she got in trouble at her old school in New York City for missing curfew too many times. Liv was pretty sure her parents had chosen Sloane because there was nothing to miss curfew for in Middlebury, Massachusetts, the quiet town where Sloane was located. If Harley somehow got off campus to party every night, Liv wanted in, but neither Harley nor any of her friends seemed the least bit interested in getting to know the new girl. Their collective cold shoulder annoyed Liv, who was used to being noticed for all the right reasons, and it only made her more determined to figure out how they got away with what they did.
One afternoon about a week after she first arrived at Sloane, Liv walked into Middlebury to buy shampoo at the drugstore. As she approached the shop, she saw a pink neon hand in the window upstairs. The sign next to the hand read Madam Sofia’s Fortunes & Favors. Liv was gazing curiously at the sign—it seemed, almost, to beckon to her—when the door next to the drugstore that led upstairs opened. A girl dressed all in black barreled out onto the sidewalk, nearly smacking into Liv.
“Hey, watch it!” Liv cried.
The girl didn’t stop, tossing her only a brief glare before she continued down the street in the direction Liv had come from. She recognized the girl; it was Paige, one of Harley’s friends. Liv watched Paige disappear around the corner, then glanced at the door she had come out of. There was a small placard in the glass window. Sale: Five Minutes for Ten Dollars. Find Your Future Here. Impulsively, Liv opened the door and went up to the palm reader’s shop.
A gray-haired woman in a green velvet dress turned from the window overlooking the street when Liv entered. The woman’s eyes narrowed on her. “Can I help you?” she said.
“Are you Madam Sofia?” Liv asked, glancing around the shop. It was stuffed with knickknacks and baskets of trinkets.
“Yes.”
“I saw your sign in the window,” Liv said. “‘Five minutes for ten dollars.’”
An odd expression passed over Madam Sofia’s face; it reminded Liv of a key turning in a lock. “Follow me,” the woman said. She led Liv through the cluttered shop to a back room hung with curtains and furnished with a round table and two chairs. Madam Sofia sat down and took out a kitchen timer from beneath her chair. She set it for five minutes and placed it on the table. “Give me your hand,” she said.
Liv sat across from the fortune-teller and placed her hand in the woman’s palm. The instant they touched, Liv felt a strange sensation run through her, as if she were a marionette and the puppeteer had tugged on her strings. She watched as the woman bent over her palm, studying the lines in her skin. The rapid ticking of the timer in the background began to make Liv nervous, as if it were counting down the seconds to—well, Liv didn’t know what, but it was unsettling, and she had the sudden urge to leave.
As if she could sense Liv’s change of heart, Madam Sofia’s hand tightened over hers. “You want to know about the girl who was just here,” she said.
“How—how did you know that?”
“It’s my job to know what brings you into my shop.”
The ticking of the timer seemed to grow louder, and Liv had the disconcerting sensation that she was shrinking while the room around her was expanding.
“You should stay away from those girls,” Madam Sofia said, her voice sounding like liquid smoke.
“What girls?” Liv’s palm was sweating.
“The girls who live in the castle.”
Castle Hall. “Harley and her friends?” Liv asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“They’re dangerous. You should stay away from them.”
Liv hated it when anyone told her what to do. “I’ll hang out with whoever I want,” she said.
Madam Sofia gazed at her with small, dark eyes. Liv twitched under the scrutiny and tried to pull back, but the woman wouldn’t let go of her hand. “They are playing with forces beyond their control,” Madam Sofia said. “If you value your life, you’ll stay away from them.”
The cautionary words only stoked Liv’s curiosity. As that venturesome emotion snaked through her, she said, “I thought you were supposed to tell my fortune, not give me a warning.”
“I’m doing both,” Madam Sofia said, and she dropped Liv’s hand as if it had burned her.
Liv cradled her hand to her chest—it trembled now, free from the woman’s grasp—and stood. “You’re crazy,” she said, and turned to leave.
“Ten dollars,” Madam Sofia said, her voice ringing in the small room. “You don’t want to owe me a debt.”
Liv stopped, feeling as if the woman had grabbed her with an invisible hook. Liv reached into her pocket with her other hand—the one Madam Sofia hadn’t touched—and pulled out her wallet. She fished out a ten-dollar bill and tossed it at the fortune-teller. It caught in the air and fluttered to the floor.
Madam Sofia gave her a shrewd smile and said, “You’re welcome.”
* * *
Everything Liv learned about Harley was like finding another piece to a puzzle. The problem was, she had no idea what the puzzle was supposed to depict.
All the girls at Sloane had definite opinions about Harley and her friends. They were stuck-up; they were slackers; they were daddy’s girls. Beneath the criticism, though, was a palpable yearning to be one of them. To be part of that tight-knit pack of girls who prowled the campus like panthers, beautiful and cunning. To dance every night—no one knew where, but it had to be good—and come to breakfast with last night’s makeup on, leaning on each other and laughing about what they had seen and done until dawn.
Liv soon discovered that the only way to join them was to wait for one of the twelve girls who lived in Castle Hall to leave Sloane, and then hope that Harley chose you to take the vacant room. Two girls had left so far: Melissa Wong, last spring, and Andrea Richmond, at the start of the school year in September. It didn’t look like there would be any vacancies in the near future, which was why the sudden departure of Harley’s younger sister, Casey, was such big news.
Harley didn’t come to breakfast the morning that Casey left. She didn’t show up in public at all until late afternoon, and then her eyes had the unmistakable red rims of someone who had been crying.
Liv saw it up close and personal, because Harley was waiting for her after biology class. “You want to be the twelfth girl?” Harley asked, oblivious to the stares of the girls coming out of the classroom behind them.
Liv couldn’t believe this was happening. She didn’t understand why Harley had picked her and not one of the hundreds of other girls at Sloane. Girls who had been there for much longer; who had been campaigning for Harley’s affections for months. Girls who had more-powerful parents; who had private planes to fly Harley and her friends out of the country if they wanted. Liv’s family was well-off—she wouldn’t be at Sloane if they weren’t—but in comparison to the rest of the students, she fell squarely in the middle. Perhaps that was why Harley’s invitation gave Liv a sense of raw satisfaction, as if she had made this come true because of the strength of her desire, as if she had created a physical arrow from her craving and shot it straight at Harley. Now all she had to do was answer in the affirmative, and her every wish would come true.
“Yes,” Liv said, and Harley’s full lips turned up in the tiniest of grins, and she gestured for Liv to follow her outside.
The trees in the quad had shed half their leaves by now, and with the wind picking up, it was likely they’d lose quite a few more before the end of the day. Harley led her to a nearly bare oak tree in the center of the quad, and Liv understood that the first thing she had to do was survive the hungry gazes of all the students streaming out of the academic buildings around them. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked at Harley, trying to act like she didn’t care, even though her heart was pounding as hard as if she were sprinting toward a prize.
Out of the corner of her eye, Liv thought she saw a man standing nearby. His shadow stretched across the browning grass as though the sun was rising behind him, but the sky was slate-gray, and when she turned her head, there was no one there. Only Harley was watching her, her dark eyes fringed with long lashes as black as her hair. Liv wondered if she dyed it to attain that shade of midnight.
“These are the rules,” Harley began. “First, you will tell no one about anything I’m about to say. Do you agree?”
“I agree,” Liv said.
“Rule number two is that once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no backing out, no matter what happens. Do you agree?”
The curiosity that had lit within her at Madam Sofia’s shop only burned brighter. “Sure.”
“You have to say ‘I agree,’” Harley said, sounding irritated.
“I agree,” Liv said, puzzled.
“Good. Rule number three: You do what I tell you. We are not a democracy. But if you follow the rules, I’ll watch out for you. Agree?”
Now Liv hesitated. She didn’t like being told what to do. She thought she saw the shadow again, but this time she also saw wings unfolding from it. She blinked, and it was gone.
“Liv,” Harley said.
There was a feverish insistence in Harley’s eyes that made Liv’s contrary nature soften. She felt as if the only thing she had ever wanted was to make Harley happy. “I agree,” she said.
Harley’s shoulders slumped uncharacteristically, and for a second Harley didn’t look invincible; she only looked tired. But the moment passed as quickly as it had come. “Good,” Harley said. “Then you go back to your room and pack your things. Bring them over to Castle Hall before lights-out.”
“Tonight? Don’t I have to fill out some paperwork or something?”
“I’ll take care of it. It’ll take a couple of days to process, but you can still move in tonight. You can stay in my sister’s room.”
“Where’d your sister go?” Liv asked, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew she shouldn’t have said them.
Harley’s face closed up and she looked away. “None of your business. Go get ready. We’re going out tonight.” She began to leave, heading toward the administration building.
“Wait,” Liv called after her. “What should I wear?”
Harley glanced over her shoulder but didn’t slow down. “Dress to impress,” she said.
A blackbird fluttered down from the branch of the oak tree above Liv’s head and landed on the ground a few feet away. It turned to look at her, and as it folded its wings along its body, Liv felt a deep, dark cold inside, as if she had made a bargain with someone or something she did not understand.
* * *
Casey’s room was on the third floor of Castle Hall, and she had left her sheets and blankets on the bed. The first thing Liv did was swap out Casey’s flowered sheets for her own yellow ones. As Liv changed out of her school uniform and into black jeans and a glittery black tank top, she had the unsettling feeling that the room wasn’t empty. It still smelled like another girl’s shampoo.
There was a knock on the door, and Harley called out, “Liv, you ready? Party’s starting.”
“Coming,” Liv answered, and she checked her makeup one last time in the mirror. She had always thought of herself as confident; she had never been a wallflower. Tonight, though, she was nervous. The anticipation of what might happen spread over her cheeks in a rosy flush. She didn’t need any blush.
The girls were all waiting in Harley’s room when she arrived. Harley said, “Say hi to Liv,” and they did, each one of them. Paige, Carmody, Ruby, Skyler, Devin, Sarah, Angela, Tara, Brooklyn and Kirsten. Liv was glad she had worn black, because that seemed to be their favorite color. Black jeans, black leggings, black tanks, black lace, black boots, black eyeliner, black nails. The only spots of color were on their lips and eyes—crimson and purple and blue—and in the jewelry each girl wore. Carmody had a shining steel cuff embedded with blue stones on her right wrist. Paige put up her blond hair with garnet pins. Sarah had a gold mesh bracelet studded with what looked like diamonds. Harley wore a gold ring set with a faceted black jewel on her left hand. Every time she raised her hand, it sparkled.
They passed around a bottle of vodka while they waited for midnight. “We don’t go out till then,” Paige informed Liv. Liv’s mouth grew numb from the liquor, and she wondered if she was going to be drunk before the party even started, but then Harley put the bottle away, and it was time.
“These are the rules,” Harley said to Liv as the girls stood up. “We have to return by three in the morning. No exceptions. And nobody brings anything back with them.”
Liv nodded, and then Harley did something very strange: she pushed her bed aside along well-worn grooves on the wooden floor, revealing a trapdoor. Harley lifted the door’s black iron ring and pulled it up, and Liv saw a flight of stairs descending into the dark. Liv wondered if she was seeing things because of the vodka. They were on the third floor of Castle Hall. Did those stairs go to the second floor?
Nobody questioned it, so Liv didn’t, either. As the girls began to troop down the stairs, Harley caught her eye and said, “Don’t forget what you agreed to, Liv.”
Warmth suffused her skin. “I won’t,” Liv said, and she stepped into the hole in the floor beneath Harley’s bed.
The stairs seemed to go on forever—well past the point where they should have struck the first floor. Liv gripped the metal railing as she followed the girls ahead of her, listening to them chatter about where they were going, who would be there, whether the music would be good. “It’s always good,” said one of them, and the others laughed in agreement, their voices throaty in the dim stairway.
Finally the stairs ended in a steel door like an emergency exit, and Paige pushed the bar to open it. They spilled out into a rain-slicked alley that smelled faintly of gasoline. As Liv looked around, the world seemed to spin. She didn’t understand how they could have climbed all the way down those stairs from beneath Harley’s bed to emerge in this alley in a city that was clearly not Middlebury.
“Where are we?” she asked, feeling dizzy.
Harley grabbed her arm, steadying her. “This way,” she said, and led Liv down the alley to another door. There was a flyer taped to it that depicted a stylized girl’s face with spiky hair and a big, full mouth. Across the place where her eyes should be were four letters: AARU. Harley reached for the handle of the door and pulled it open. Music blasted into the alley.
Liv and the other girls followed her inside. In front of a velvet curtain, a bouncer waited with a flashlight. Harley pulled Liv forward and said, “She’s new. The twelfth girl.”
The bouncer swept his flashlight over Harley’s hand, and her ring glowed. Then he turned the light on Liv’s face, and she winced at the brightness.
“All right,” the bouncer said, flicking the light away.
Harley grabbed her arm again. “Come on,” she said, and pulled her through the velvet curtain.
It was like stepping into another world. The music was overpowering, the bass so heavy it seemed to snake up her body from the floor to shake her from the inside out. The lights that strobed over the crowd obscured as much as they revealed: dancers in glitter and vinyl and fur, their bodies glinting with metal in places she would never think to pierce, their hair caught up in crowns and headdresses that looked like antlers. Instead of mirrored disco balls, there were trees made of glass rising from the floor, reflecting the lights. Crystal leaves hung from the clear branches overhead, making it seem as if the ceiling was heaving in time to the music.
The other girls slipped around Liv and Harley, disappearing into the crowd. Harley—who was still holding Liv’s wrist as if she were a child—leaned over to say, “This is the main room. There are two more. I’ll show you.” Then she began to lead Liv around the edge of the dance floor.
The next room seemed to be made of gold. The walls were hammered gold, and gold leaves hung from weeping golden willows while golden spotlights illuminated a dancer in a cage hanging above the crowd, her whole body painted gold. After that was the room made of silver: curving silver tree trunks; silver leaves that shivered in the warm, perfumed air; silver strobe lights that made every dancer’s skin look like platinum. Harley took Liv toward the bar in the silver room, and when Harley let go of her, she realized that sometime during their circuit of the club, Harley had switched to holding her hand.
Harley leaned close and said, “I have to go look for someone. I’ll come back for you before three. You should have a drink.” She pressed a goblet into Liv’s hand, and before Liv could object, Harley was gone.
The goblet was made of heavy gold and encrusted with jewels; it was the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a fairy-tale castle, not in a nightclub. Liv stared at the reflected lights in the shimmering liquid and sniffed it suspiciously. She still felt tipsy from the vodka and wasn’t sure if she should mix it with this...wine? She looked out at the crowd, wondering where Harley had vanished to so quickly, but she couldn’t find her. She couldn’t see any of the other girls from Castle Hall, either. She was about to put the goblet down—she had a sudden urge to look for Harley—when a boy appeared in front of her. He had spiky black hair and both of his arms were covered with full-sleeve tattoos. Liv couldn’t quite make out what the tattoos were—they seemed to swim in her vision—but she noticed that he was holding a gold goblet like hers.
“Hey, you’re new here,” he shouted over the music. He smiled at her, and she stared at him, unexpectedly transfixed. He clinked his goblet with hers and took a sip of his drink. Without thinking, she mirrored him. The wine was bracing—cool and sharp, as if she had inhaled a breath of winter.
She didn’t remember much of what happened after that, but she did remember him taking the empty goblet out of her hand and saying in her ear, “Dance with me.” His words slid like honey down her throat, and she let him lead her onto the dance floor beneath the silver leaves. He was lithe and beautiful and he tasted as icy as that wine when he kissed her. The music seemed to embed itself in her body beat after beat, and she felt as if she could dance with this unnamed boy forever and never be sated.
And then Harley was back, pulling her away from the boy and saying, “Come on, Liv. Time to go.” And Liv stumbled through the crowd, holding Harley’s hand, and she couldn’t remember why she had ever wanted to dance with that boy in the first place.
* * *
Liv awoke the next morning in Harley’s sister’s room, feeling like her head had been stuffed with cotton balls. She glanced at the clock and realized she had already missed breakfast and most of history class, but when she ran across campus and burst into the classroom, the teacher didn’t even notice.
It took almost all day for Liv to shake off her hangover. It wasn’t until she and the others were back in Harley’s room that night, passing the vodka bottle around again, that she felt as if she had finally returned to the real world—just in time to leave it.
At midnight, Harley reminded them of the rules: They had to return by 3:00 a.m., and nobody could bring anything back with them. Then she pushed the bed aside and pulled up the trapdoor, and once more a flight of stairs was revealed. Liv was prepared for a long descent, but tonight it was different. This time the stairs ended after only ten steps, delivering the twelve girls into a tunnel dug out of the earth. Liv didn’t understand how it was possible, because they should only be on the second floor, but there appeared to be roots growing out of the walls.
“It wasn’t like this yesterday, was it?” Liv whispered over her shoulder to Paige.
“Sometimes it’s different,” Paige said.
Liv wanted to ask how—or why—but she knew somehow that she shouldn’t. She was meant to accept this, the same way she had accepted the rules that Harley laid out. So she kept walking and swallowed her questions.
The tunnel ended in a short flight of steps that led to an ancient-looking wooden door. Harley lifted the latch on the iron handle as if everything was totally normal, and the door opened into the same city alley. The entrance to the club bore a different flyer tonight. It was printed with a black tree drawn like a tattoo, and gothic letters spelled out words Liv couldn’t pronounce: Magh Meall.
Inside, the club had changed in ways that made Liv wonder if she had simply remembered it wrong. The first room had trees of gold, not glass, and instead of a caged dancer hanging above there were aerial acrobats, bare legs wrapped around rippling golden silk. Liv gazed at them as the music thudded through her, and she decided that she wouldn’t drink the wine tonight, because tomorrow she wanted to remember this place.
She turned to look for Harley, but she was nowhere in sight. Liv began to push her way through the dancers, searching for her. Strangers’ hands brushed against her, their fingers sweeping over her arms, and when she looked down she saw trails of gold dust on her skin. A woman with long green ropes of hair caught hold of her, urging her to dance, and she smelled like the ocean, salty and clean. Although Liv wanted to stay with her, she forced herself to remember what she was after: Harley. She had to find Harley. Liv pulled away from the woman, whose face suddenly contorted into anger, and when she snarled at Liv, her teeth looked like fangs.
Recoiling, Liv’s gaze darted around the room, seeking anyone familiar who could explain what she had seen. Finally she glimpsed Harley slipping through the doorway into the next room. “Harley!” Liv shouted, but her voice was lost in the pounding music. She went after her, pressing against the walls so that she could avoid the dancers, but when she entered the next room—silver trees, lit with pulsing red-and-white strobe lights—she had lost her again.
Someone grabbed her elbow and she spun around, her heart racing. It was Paige. “You okay?” Paige asked.
“I’m looking for Harley,” Liv said. “Is it three yet?”
Paige shook her head. “We’ve only been here about fifteen minutes.”
That didn’t feel right.
Paige saw her confusion and said, “Let me get you a drink.” She led Liv to a curtained alcove along the wall—there were many of them, mostly full of couples—and pushed her inside. “Wait here.”
When the curtain fell, it muffled some of the music. The low red lights made the alcove feel like being inside someone’s heart. Liv’s skin itched, and she rubbed at her forearms idly until she realized something was sloughing off. She looked down in horror, but it wasn’t her skin; it was glitter.
Paige returned with two goblets—still gold and jewel-encrusted—and sat down beside her. “Here,” Paige said, handing her a drink. “You need this.”
Liv took the goblet but didn’t drink. “I think it gave me a hangover last night.”
“You get used to it,” Paige said, sipping from her own goblet.
“Where’s Harley?” Liv asked.
“Why? You have a thing for her?”
Liv’s face grew warm. “No.”
“It’s okay. Everybody has a thing for her at first.” Paige sounded resigned.
“Did you?” Liv asked.
Paige shrugged. “Sure. We were together for a while, but that’s over.”
“Do you know where she is?” Liv asked again. It was the only thing she could remember, as if her mind was stuck on repeat, and she didn’t know why.
Paige didn’t respond at first, instead studying her carefully. Liv clutched her goblet with both hands, the jewels digging into her skin, and she wished—she willed—Paige to answer her question. Finally Paige said, “Harley’s looking for her sister.”
Casey. “I thought she left school,” Liv said.
“No,” Paige said, and for a moment she looked frightened. She took another sip of her wine. “She came to the club with us a few nights ago, but we couldn’t find her before we left.”
“You mean she stayed here?”
“I don’t know. Harley thinks she can find her, but...” Paige took another sip, and the drink seemed to calm her. “Melissa and Andrea stayed, too, and we haven’t found them.”
Liv rubbed a hand over her forehead, trying to clear the fuzziness from her brain. “You mean all three of them stayed here? They never returned? How come nobody talks about that at school? Everybody says they just transferred.”
“They didn’t transfer,” Paige said flatly.
“Then what happened to them?” Liv asked. “Why would they stay here? I don’t understand.”
Paige sighed. “You’re not supposed to know this,” Paige said deliberately. “At least, not yet. You can’t tell anyone that you know. You can’t tell Harley.”
Liv was mystified. “Why did you tell me, then?”
Paige looked annoyed. “I don’t agree with everything Harley decides. And you’re one of us now—or you will be tomorrow. You might as well know.”
“What do you mean about tomorrow?” Liv asked. “Aren’t I one of you already? I promised Harley I’d do what she wanted.”
“Tomorrow everything will be finalized. Third time’s the charm.” Paige took another drink. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She stood, her head nearly brushing the ceiling of the curtained alcove. “I’ll see you later. I have to dance.”
The way she said it—I have to dance—was so strange, as if she was being compelled to do it. Liv watched Paige leave, and then she put her own goblet of wine down on the floor. Bit by bit, like a knife scraping against the frost on a windshield, she was beginning to see.
This place. This beautiful, horrific place. What had she gotten herself into?
* * *
Liv woke to the repetitive screeching of her alarm at 7:00 a.m. She shut it off quickly. The rest of Castle Hall was silent; the other girls probably wouldn’t wake up for hours. Liv threw off her blankets and got dressed. She didn’t feel as hungover as she had the day before, but there was definitely something wrong with her perceptions. The real world seemed blurry.
She threw her laptop into her messenger bag and walked through the chilly late-October air to the dining hall. As she passed the quad, a flock of blackbirds took off from the oak tree, the beat of their wings loud in the silent morning.
The dining hall was beginning to fill with students. Liv poured herself a giant cup of coffee, took a seat alone at the table traditionally reserved for Harley’s group and opened her laptop. Three girls had stayed behind at that club. Melissa Wong, Andrea Richmond, and Harley’s sister, Casey. Liv searched for the girls’ names online, looking for evidence of how their disappearances had been reported. Melissa and Andrea both had Facebook pages, but Melissa’s was private, so she couldn’t read it. Andrea’s, however, was mostly public. Her page was filled with messages from people saying they missed her and were worried about her, but oddly, none of the messages appeared to be from any Sloane students. One was from someone identified as Andrea’s brother, and it said, “We’re looking for you, Ann. Please come home.” It took Liv a while to read through her timeline, but the last update she had posted had been back in August. “Can’t wait to party with the girls again!”
Where had Andrea gone? Liv thought about the flyers posted on the door to the club in the alley. She couldn’t remember how to spell the name that had been on the flyer last night, but she remembered the four letters from the first night: AARU. She entered the word into the search bar. It was a term from Egyptian mythology. A heavenly paradise where souls could exist in pleasure for eternity. Similar to: Elysium, Avalon, Magh Meall. She caught her breath and clicked on the link to Magh Meall and read, “From Irish mythology, a pleasurable realm able to be accessed by only a select few...a place of eternal beauty...occasionally visited by mortals.”
Liv stared at the screen, her mouth going dry. These places were myths, fairy tales. It wasn’t possible for them to exist. But it wasn’t possible for a stairway to open up beneath Harley’s bed, either, and lead to a city where there shouldn’t be one.
It had been real, hadn’t it? Liv thought about the dancers, the wine, the music. If it wasn’t real, she was coming unhinged, and that was even more disturbing than the idea that Harley had found a magical door to another world.
By the time breakfast was over and the students began leaving for class, Liv knew what she had to do. She put away her laptop and headed for the school gates. Technically, she wasn’t allowed to go off campus during the school day, but she knew no one would stop her. She was one of Harley’s now.
The walk into Middlebury cleared away more of the fogginess in her head. When she arrived at Madam Sofia’s Fortunes & Favors, she felt almost entirely real again.
Liv had wondered if it was too early for the shop to be open, but Madam Sofia appeared to be expecting her. “Welcome back,” the woman said as Liv entered the shop.
“I need to know what’s going on with Harley and her friends,” Liv said. “You told me they were dangerous. What did you mean?”
Madam Sofia didn’t seem surprised. “Come sit down.”
“What is that place that Harley takes us to?” Liv asked as they went into the back room. “It’s not this world, is it? How is that possible?”
Madam Sofia sat down at the table. “It is not our world, no.”
Liv felt a brief flush of relief to hear that Madam Sofia knew exactly what she was talking about.
“But it is entwined with ours,” Madam Sofia continued. “Harley has discovered a way to enter it.”
“How?”
“She has made some sort of bargain. I don’t know the exact details, but she will have agreed to something.”
“Does it have anything to do with the girls who stayed there? Melissa and Andrea and Casey?”
“There is a price to pay for entry to that world, and that is the traditional trade.”
“Are you saying that those girls were forced to stay there? That they’re...payment?” Liv was sickened. “That’s insane.”
Madam Sofia folded her hands on the table. “As I said, I don’t know precisely what Harley has agreed to, but she may be getting something out of it that we are not aware of. Nobody strikes this kind of bargain without a great need of her own.”
“What could possibly be worth kidnapping three girls?” Liv couldn’t believe it of Harley. She didn’t want to believe it. “Someone must be making her do it. How do I get her to stop?”
“She cannot stop on her own,” Madam Sofia said. “It is a curse now. There is only one way to break it.”
“Tell me how,” Liv insisted. “I’ll do it. It can’t go on.”
Madam Sofia nodded. “This is what you must do: You must take something dead from the other world and bring it to life in this one.”
Liv’s forehead wrinkled. “How am I supposed to do that? What do you even mean?”
“It is a riddle,” Madam Sofia said. “And it is a test. If you can decipher it, then you are the one who will break the curse. If you cannot decipher it...” She trailed off, raising one open hand as if she were letting something unseen fly away.
“Then the curse remains unbroken,” Liv whispered.
Madam Sofia leaned forward. “Tonight is your last opportunity to do this.”
“Why?”
“After tonight, you will have entered the other world three times. You will have sealed your own bargain, and you will not be able to break it.”
Liv remembered what Paige had told her, and she remembered that afternoon in the quad under the tree with Harley, saying “I agree” three times. She could practically feel the golden chains of that other world tightening around her.
“Tomorrow morning,” Madam Sofia continued, “if you have not broken the curse, you will be given your own talisman to mark your acquiescence to the curse.”
Liv remembered the girls’ jewelry—bracelets and necklaces and hair ornaments that all seemed to come from the same jeweler. Part of Liv still wanted to be one of them, but even as the idea of having her own otherworldly charm thrilled her, she was also repulsed by the fact that it would bind her to that place. “I’ll break it tonight,” Liv said. “Will Melissa and Andrea and Casey be able to return then?”
“I don’t know. They struck their own bargains when they stayed.”
“But they could return?”
“It depends on how deeply they’ve fallen for that other world, whether they have strong enough ties to this one. It’s possible, but it’s not up to you.”
Liv stood. “Okay.” And then she asked, “How do you know all this?”
Madam Sofia’s thin mouth turned up in a self-mocking smile. “I broke the curse myself, when I was your age. You girls are not the first to discover the allure of that other world, and you won’t be the last.”
* * *
The tunnel to the other world was the same that night, and the sign on the door in the alley said Magh Meall again. Liv wondered if they were truly entering that mythical world, or if whoever ran this nightclub thought of the name as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Inside, the club was as crowded as before, but tonight Liv could see that the dancers were not wearing costumes. What she had thought was clothing made of unusual materials was actually skin: skin covered in scales, skin erupting with downy feathers, skin rippling with spiny ridges the color of gold.
As the other girls disappeared into the cacophony of the club, Liv kept her eyes open, looking for anything that might solve Madam Sofia’s riddle. In the room with the crystal trees, there was a band playing on a stage Liv hadn’t noticed before. The lead singer was a woman with long white hair, her eyes outlined with the shapes of stars. Liv edged around the room, studying the crowd gathered at the bar. Most of the people were watching the show, but one of them, a man with tattoos of tiger stripes running up his wiry arms, had turned his back to the stage. He raised a cigarette to his mouth and plucked a matchbook from a glass bowl on the bar. The sight of someone smoking indoors startled Liv—they could do that here? she thought—and then she felt stupid. Of course they could. They could do anything here.
The tiger man tossed the matchbook back into the bowl after he had lit his cigarette, then vanished into the crowd on the dance floor. Liv crept into the gap he had left at the bar, taking the stool he had vacated. The glass bowl nearby held a whole bunch of matchbooks, and when she lifted one out, she saw that it was stamped with the words that had been on the flyer posted on the door: Magh Meall.
Liv didn’t have any pockets that night. She was wearing a tank top and leggings and boots, so she tucked the matchbook into her bra. It only took a second, but her heart began to accelerate the moment the matchbook’s sharp edges scraped against her skin. When she turned around, Harley was standing only a foot away from her, and Liv jerked in surprise.
Harley’s black hair was loose tonight, falling in thick waves over her shoulders. She looked suspicious. “What’re you doing?” she asked.
Liv thought fast. “Looking for you.” She slid off the stool and reached for Harley’s hand. Harley didn’t move; she only continued to scrutinize Liv’s face. “You want to dance?” Liv asked, and she pulled her toward the dance floor.
Liv hadn’t had anything to drink tonight—she had even avoided the vodka upstairs—but the music was intoxicating enough. There was something hypnotic about the woman’s voice, as if she gave Liv permission to do whatever she wanted, and there was something hypnotic about dancing with Harley, too. The movement of her muscles beneath the slippery fabric of her tank top; the warm flushed skin of Harley’s upper back; the tickle of Harley’s long black hair over her neck as Harley seemed to wind herself around Liv. After a while, it didn’t even feel like they were moving anymore. The dancers around them were moving; the bass from the band was shuddering; the lights above were flashing. But the two of them stood motionless, their bodies pressed together, and Liv closed her eyes so that she could feel Harley better, so that she could shut out the dream world all around them and make this real.
The voice in her ear seemed to come at her from a very great distance, the sound of it bubbling up from the depths of a dark sea, until she felt someone else’s hand—not Harley’s—on her shoulder, shaking her. “Liv! Liv! It’s time to go.”
She blinked her eyes open, and Harley peeled herself away, and beside them, Paige was shaking her head as if she had caught two children misbehaving.
“Come on,” Paige said. She glared at Harley. “You should know better.”
Harley’s cheeks were flushed and most of her lipstick had been rubbed off. She shook her head. “What time is it?”
“It’s time,” Paige said in a clipped voice.
Harley cursed. “Let’s go.”
Liv’s legs wobbled as she followed the girls out of the club. Harley didn’t even give her a second glance as she stalked through the crowd. Out in the alley, the night air was freezing on her skin. Still, Harley didn’t look back. She threw open the door to the stairs, and the other girls followed in drowsy silence. Only Paige gave Liv a meaningful glance as she pulled the door shut behind her, and then it was too dark to do anything but pay attention to where she was walking.
When they arrived back in Harley’s room, Liv headed for the exit with everyone else. She felt completely disoriented, and she could still taste Harley’s mouth. Harley had been drinking the wine.
“Liv,” Harley said. “Wait.”
Liv stopped. “What?”
When all the other girls had gone, Harley shut the door, and it was only the two of them. Harley turned to face her. Liv’s heart raced. This was the real world, she reminded herself. Whatever happened here...was real. It scared her, how much she wanted this to be real.
She had forgotten that she wanted to break whatever curse Harley was under. She had forgotten that Andrea and Melissa and Harley’s own sister might have disappeared because of what Harley had done. All she could remember was what it felt like to dance with her.
Harley went to her dresser and pulled a tissue out of the box, wiping off the remains of her lipstick. Then she went over to Liv, who was standing right where she had been when Harley asked her to wait, and kissed her.
Real: Harley’s full lips, slightly dry now, her tongue still tasting like wine. Real: Harley’s hands on the hem of Liv’s tank top, lifting it and sliding beneath. Real: Harley’s body against hers, warm and soft.
Liv reached for Harley’s slippery shirt and Harley raised her arms so they could peel it off. Harley had a tattoo of a blackbird over her heart, and Liv bent her head to kiss it, tasting the salty sweat on her skin. Harley’s breath was uneven as she pulled Liv’s tank top over her head. Her ring caught on the fabric, and Harley swore and took off the ring, letting it clatter onto her nightstand. Then Liv’s shirt was off, too, and something tumbled out of Liv’s bra and skittered onto the wood floor.
Liv froze.
“What was that?” Harley whispered.
“Nothing,” Liv lied, hoping that Harley wouldn’t notice.
But the matchbook had fallen into the circle of light cast by Harley’s bedside lamp, and the words printed on it practically glowed: Magh Meall.
Liv remembered the curse and the riddle. The sticky sweet desire that had made her dizzy only seconds before turned sour.
Harley jerked away from her. “What did you do?” Harley asked, fear in her voice.
Liv lunged for the matchbook a moment before Harley did. Liv’s knees banged against the floor. Harley’s nails scraped over her arms. Liv scrambled away, her fingers trembling as she opened the matchbook.
“Stop it!” Harley cried.
Liv didn’t stop. She tore out a match and struck it, and the flame flared into life.
Something dead from that world, brought into life in this one.
The smell of sulfur seemed to fill the room. The flame burned blue, and Liv saw it reflected in Harley’s dark eyes, full of horror.
“What did you do?” Harley demanded.
The ground shifted beneath them. The bed moved. Harley tried to stop it, but it rolled back over the trapdoor in the floor, and when Harley tried to push it aside, she couldn’t. She screamed in frustration, bending down to look beneath it, and then her shoulders heaved, and Liv knew that the trapdoor was gone.
The match burned out, scorching Liv’s fingertips, and she dropped it onto the floor.
Harley stood. Her face was hard with anger. “Why did you do that? You’ve screwed everything up!”
Liv’s heart was pounding so hard she was breathless. “I had to break the curse,” Liv said.
“You don’t know what you did,” Harley snapped.
The disgust in Harley’s voice made Liv angry. She scrambled to her feet. “I couldn’t let it keep happening! They couldn’t keep taking the girls.”
Suddenly Harley sat down on the edge of her bed, her shoulders sagging. “I never wanted them to take any girls, but that was the price.”
“For what? What was so important you’d let those girls be kidnapped? Your own sister!”
“I did it for Casey,” Harley snarled. “So she and I could stay here at the Virginia Freaking Sloane School for rich bitches. We would have been kicked out for not paying tuition if I hadn’t made that deal.”
Liv took a step back. “What do you mean? I thought your dad was loaded.”
Harley gave a choked laugh. “That’s what everybody thinks, but no. My dad was the janitor here. While he worked here, we got to come here for free, but after he died last year, that was it. We were going to be kicked out. But where would we go? To live with my deadbeat mom in the city? She has no money, and she spends what she gets on drugs. The only way I could keep Casey here—to keep her safe—was to make a deal with that guy. But now you’ve messed it all up. He said they wouldn’t take Casey. He said—” She broke off and looked at Liv furiously. “And now she’s gone, and I can’t find her. He’ll never make a deal with me again.”
Liv’s stomach fell. Had she made a mistake? “She might come back—Madam Sofia said—”
“Nobody comes back once they take them,” Harley interrupted. She looked utterly defeated.
“I’m—I’m sorry,” Liv whispered.
Harley wouldn’t look at her, and after the silence between them became too awful to bear, Liv snatched up her shirt and left. She couldn’t stop shaking, even after she climbed into Casey’s bed and buried her head beneath the covers.
* * *
Things began to change immediately. Harley was reprimanded by the headmistress for wearing boots to class. The paperwork that Harley said she had filed to move Liv from Sheffield to Castle turned out to be forged, and Liv had to move back to Sheffield. The other girls in Castle Hall began to be called in to teacher meetings to discuss their many absences.
Halloween came and went in a gust of wind and rain, stripping the last remaining leaves off the trees. Every time Liv walked by the oak tree where she had made her promises to Harley, she felt someone watching her, but it was only the blackbird that seemed to have made its home there. Once she thought she saw a tall, thin man in the shadows of the tree, but as soon as she noticed him the air itself seemed to shift, as if someone were pulling a shade closed.
Harley’s friends began to drift apart, too, turning inward and barely eating at meals. Rumors went around that they had been doing some serious drugs, and now their supply had been cut off and they were going through withdrawal. And everyone whispered the shocking news about Harley: that her father wasn’t some fabulously rich guy; that he had been the school janitor; that she might have to leave at the end of the semester because she had no money for tuition.
Liv felt bruised inside, as if she had lost something, not saved the lives of the other girls. For weeks, she went through the motions of school and homework in a daze, half awake, half still caught in that world she had visited three times. At night she dreamed of the glittering gold trees, the throbbing music and Harley.
All through November, Harley faded. She had been vivid before, unbreakable, and now she was more ghostly every day. Her skin, her eyes, her hair—pale, dull, limp. Liv realized that she might have broken the curse, but she had also broken Harley.
The day that Harley didn’t show up for breakfast, none of the students noticed at first. It wasn’t until lunch, when Liv heard others whispering about how nobody had seen Harley since the night before, that Liv began to wonder if something had happened. She walked across the quad toward Castle Hall, her feet crunching over the blades of browned grass. She passed the oak tree and saw that the blackbird was gone.
Inside Castle, the dorm was quiet and empty. Everyone was supposed to be in class, and Liv knew she would be reprimanded for skipping, but she was drawn up the stairs to Harley’s room just as she had been drawn to Harley from the beginning. Harley’s door was closed, and when Liv knocked, there was no answer. She put her hand on the doorknob, and it turned easily.
There was a creak behind her.
Liv spun around, an excuse on her lips, but the sight of the girl across the hall stopped her. She looked like Harley, but younger. Her face was gaunt, as if she had been living on nothing but air for much too long, and her eyes were too bright. “Who are you?” Liv asked, afraid that she already knew.
“I’m Casey,” Harley’s sister said. Her voice sounded just like Harley’s.
Liv’s skin crawled. “Where’s Harley?”
“She traded herself for me,” Casey said. There was a haunted flatness to her speech, as if she were a doll that had just come awkwardly to life.
Everything inside Liv went cold. She opened Harley’s door and barged into her room. It was empty. The bed was rumpled, and a pile of dirty clothes lay on the floor by the dresser. Liv ran to the bed and pushed it, but it wouldn’t move. She knelt down to look beneath it, and all she saw was dust.
Casey came into Harley’s room and went to the dresser, where she began to look through the drawers. She pulled out her sister’s shirts one by one, holding them up and then tossing them onto the laundry pile.
“What are you doing?” Liv asked.
“Looking for something to wear,” Casey replied in her odd, emotionless voice. “Harley always has the best stuff.”
Liv stared at her in shock. She had wanted Casey to come back, but she hadn’t expected she would be like this. Casey might be standing in her sister’s room, but she wasn’t all there.
Casey found a shirt she liked and laid it on top of the dresser, then took off the one she was wearing. The bones of her spine jutted out like teeth beneath her skin. In the mirror, Liv glimpsed a tattoo of a blackbird on Casey’s chest before she pulled on her sister’s shirt. She turned to face Liv, crossing her arms, and Liv noticed the ring Casey was wearing. It was a black stone set in a gold band.
“My sister told me about you,” Casey said.
Liv swallowed the rising panic inside her and met Casey’s feverish gaze. “Where is she?” Liv demanded.
“Someplace a lot more fun than this.” A cold grin crossed Casey’s face, and for one second she came alive—potent, forceful, just like Harley. An instant later she shriveled, once again more specter than girl. “We’re going there tonight,” Casey said to Liv. “You wanna come? Harley might be there.”
* * * * *
THE RAVEN PRINCESS
by Jon Skovron
The princess wouldn’t stop crying. The queen had fed her and changed her diaper. She didn’t know what else to do.
“I can host a banquet for a hundred lords and ladies. But what do I know about babies?” The nanny had asked for the day off and now the queen regretted letting her have it.
The princess stood at the edge of the crib, howling at the top of her lungs. Tears and snot ran down her plump face as she reached out with wet slobbery fingers.
“What do you want?!” The queen gripped the edge of the crib hard. She wanted to shake the ungrateful little creature until she stopped.
No, she would never do that. But she felt trapped by the tiny, impossible thing who shrieked mindlessly at her. She moved to the other side of the room, turned her back on the princess and took a slow breath.
The coarse call of birds cut through the princess’s cries. The queen looked out the window and spied a flock of ravens. She had always found the raven’s caw grating and distasteful, but right now, it seemed preferable to the endless wail of the little brat. As she watched them wheel slowly up into the sky, she said out loud:
“I wish you would just fly away with those ravens.”
The crying stopped and silence fell suddenly in the room. The queen turned around, half expecting to find the child passed out from exhaustion. But the princess stood in her crib, her eyes wide. Her little bow mouth was quirked in the corners, as if she had just taken a bite of something and its flavor surprised her. She sat down hard and let out a cough that sounded strangely like the caw of a raven.
“My darling.” Fear crept into the queen’s chest. “What’s wrong?”
The princess looked up and her bright blue eyes slowly filled with blackness until even the whites were gone.
“Oh, God,” whimpered the queen.
Thick black hairs began to sprout on the princess’s arms, legs and face. No, not hairs. Feathers.
“Please,” whispered the queen. “I didn’t mean...”
The princess opened her mouth wide and made a gagging sound until a black, curved beak emerged and her lips peeled back into nothing. Her legs grew thinner, then, with a loud crack, suddenly bent in the wrong direction, as her feet curled in like claws. Her body shrank into her white dress until the queen could no longer see her.
“My darling?”
A raven’s head poked out from the dress. The bird shook herself as she untangled her wings from the dress. She hopped up onto the edge of the crib, black claws digging into the wood. She regarded the queen for a moment, her head cocked to one side. Then she let out a harsh caw and flew past the queen and out the open window.
The queen never spoke of what happened that day. It was thought that the princess had been abducted by mercenaries or brigands. The king searched everywhere, but didn’t find her. As the years went on, the queen’s secret shame aged her into a crone before her time. Finally one night she could no longer bear it, and left the castle without a word. The king did not search for her.
* * *
The young man was not a good hunter. He had some skill with a bow when the target was a bull’s-eye, but he simply could not bring himself to shoot a living thing. His parents had sent him away in disgust, and none of the village girls showed any interest in him. So he lived alone in a small cottage in the forest, where he ate berries and the vegetables he grew in his small garden.
The young man would have been content to live this way, except he was lonely. He hoped that if he conquered his fear of hunting, he might finally catch a girl’s eye. So one morning he set out into the forest, resolving not to return until he had made a kill.
First he came across a deer. But he was so petrified, he could not move until it was out of sight. Later, he spied a badger waddling along. But his hands shook so badly that by the time he was able to nock an arrow, the badger had slipped down into its hole. He cursed himself, wondering how he could be so cowardly.
Finally, near sunset, he spied a lone raven standing on an outcropping of rock in a small clearing. Ravens were loathsome animals, eaters of the dead and dying, and harbingers of bad luck. The world would be a better place with one less raven. He quietly set an arrow and drew back on the bowstring. This time, he would claim his place as a man.
But the instant before he released the arrow, the raven turned to look at him and cocked its head in such a curious, intelligent way that the young man flinched and the arrow flew wide, embedding itself in a tree five feet away.
“That,” remarked the raven, “was a terrible shot.”
“Luckily for you,” said the young man. Then his eyes grew wide. “You speak!”
“Truly,” said the raven. “I have seen boys of ten and old men shaky with weariness who had better aim.”
“Amazing! I nearly kill a magic talking raven and he criticizes me for not piercing his breast with a wooden shaft.”
“I am not a ‘he,’” said the raven, feathers ruffling. “And I’ll thank you not to talk so casually about my breasts.”
“My apologies, Lady Raven,” said the young man with a slight bow. He slowly walked out into the clearing. “But I must know, how is it you talk?”
“Because I am not really a raven, but a maiden princess under a curse. Now I must know, how is it you are such a terrible marksman?”
“I happen to be an excellent marksman!”
“Oh?” The raven turned toward where the arrow was still embedded deep in the bark. “Were you hunting trees today, then?”
The young man sighed and shook his head. “My aim fails me the moment I target a living thing.”
“And why is that?”
He thought about it a moment, then finally said, “I don’t know.”
“Could it be that you are afraid to kill?”
“Well, that would be an unfortunate trait in a hunter.”
“Indeed. You would have been better off born to a shoemaker or a tailor, perhaps.”
“We cannot choose who we are born to.”
“Truly.” The raven turned away and raised her wings to take flight.
“Please don’t go yet!” said the young man. “Meeting you is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.”
“Unsurprisingly.”
“Won’t you tell me of your curse?”
She lowered her wings. She did not turn back around, but craned her head toward him.
“I have been cursed like this since I was but a year old.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Seventeen.”
“That is terrible!” said the young man. “Is there no way to break this curse?”
The raven turned back all the way around to face him. “There is. Why, would you be willing to attempt it?”
“Of course!” Then he looked suddenly hesitant. “That is...if it is within my ability.”
“You wouldn’t have to kill.”
“Then yes, I would consider it a privilege. What must I do?”
“On the edge of this forest, a small house sits next to a crossroads. By the house is a pile of wood chips. Sit upon that pile and wait for me. The curse allows me to appear in my true form for one hour every night at midnight. I will come for you, and if you are awake when I arrive, the curse will be broken.”
“That doesn’t seem so hard.”
“Beware,” said the raven. “There is an old woman who lives in the house. She will try to give you food and drink. But if you accept it, you will not be able to stay awake that night.”
“Hunger and thirst are not new to me,” said the young man. “I will prevail easily.”
“I am not so sure of that,” said the raven.
* * *
The young man hiked through the darkening forest and arrived at the cottage just as the sun slid behind the tree line. The cottage was even smaller and coarser than his own. The walls were made of stacked logs sealed with mud, and the hay thatched roof looked rotten in places. The young man felt sorry for the old woman who lived there, whoever she was.
He found a bed of oak chips by the side of the house, just as the raven had described. It wasn’t very comfortable, but he thought that might help him stay awake. So he sat down and waited.
Darkness had fallen when the old woman emerged from the cottage, holding a lantern. She had a gentle smile, and eyes that were warm yet sad.
“A guest!” Her voice was as soft as worn velvet. “Oh, how wonderful!” She came over and held out the lantern to look at him. “Handsome face. A little thin and pale, though. You could do with a bit of meat.”
“It has been a long time since I have eaten meat,” he admitted.
“Well, you are in luck, then, my boy. I have a nice fat rabbit turning on the spit. Far too much for me to eat. Won’t you come inside and share it?”
“It’s generous of you, but I must remain out here until after midnight.”
“Ah, the old legend of the Raven Princess, eh?”
“Old legend? Have others tried to break the curse before me?”
“Of course! And who can blame them! According to the legends, her beauty is like no other.”
“I had not heard of her beauty,” he said.
“Oh? Then why do you sit here?”
“So that she may be free of the curse.”
“And that is all?”
“Should there be more?”
She smiled briefly. “I suppose not. Now, won’t you come in and share supper with me? It is still several hours until midnight. You would be able to return to this spot in plenty of time.”
“I thank you for your hospitality, but I cannot.”
Her face grew suddenly sad. “I understand. What is the company of a poor old woman when there is the promise of a beautiful princess.”
“Please, that isn’t what I meant....”
But she turned and slowly walked back into the cottage as if she hadn’t heard him.
As he sat on the woodpile, he thought of her, eating alone inside. He had eaten many meals alone and knew how it felt. The silence broken only by one’s own chewing. How many meals had she taken in solitude? How many more lay before her, an unbroken line stretched out until her life ended?
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Christine Johnson
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: In the days when fairy tales were first spun, they weren’t the sweet and cheerful stories we tell today. Back then, fairy tales were terrifying. They were a warning to the listener to stay out of the night, to keep away from the mystical and ignore the mysterious. Prepare to open a treasure box of the unusual and the macabre.Grim features some of today’s best young adult authors sharing their own unique retellings of classic fairy tales from around the world. These talented writers, many of them New York Times bestsellers or award winners, put their own spin on these magical worlds.Ellen HopkinsAmanda HockingJulie KagawaClaudia GrayRachel HawkinsKimberly DertingMyra McEntireMalinda LoSarah Rees BrennanJackson PearceChristine JohnsonJeri Smith-ReadyShaun David HutchinsonSaundra MitchellSonia GenslerTessa GrattonJon Skovron.