by Ali Standish
Except my map is a map of my differences. Every chalky island on my skin is another reason that I don’t fit in.
As I return to my bedroom, an owl hoots outside like it’s agreeing with me. I look over to where The World at the End of the Tunnel lies on the table next to the bed, untouched. I haven’t picked it up since last week.
Here is something I’m not proud of. That ball of anger that I felt in my stomach the other night? It hasn’t gone away.
I still miss Gram, but whenever I think about her now, the anger is there, too. I keep wondering why she bothered with all these fairy tales—“Hansel and Gretel” and the rest.
All stories have truth in them, darling Emma, I hear her remind me. Especially fairy tales.
But how can fairy tales be true when they all end the same way? Happily ever after.
That’s not how Gram’s story ended.
And why was it so important to her to make me believe in the charmed folk? In magic? If magic was real, then she could have used it to get better. But she didn’t. She died.
Gram lied to me.
Magic and fairy tales and happily-ever-afters—they’re all just make-believe.
I’m not like Hansel and Gretel. I can’t follow my spots back to a happy ending. I can’t retrace my steps to who I used to be. Because it’s not just the outside of me that’s changing. With every new spot I get, I feel further away from Emma, and more and more like someone I don’t know.
So what’s going to happen if my patches keep spreading and spreading?
I look down at my moonlit skin. I imagine someone taking an eraser to me and rubbing and rubbing until there is nothing left of Emma at all.
32
The village girl had been right. Ivy’s shadow had gone. No matter how many ways she turned beneath the winter sun, she could not get it to return.
Next to disappear were her feet. Two days later, she bent to pick up a dropped spoon, only to find that her toes had begun to flicker like the dying flames in the hearth.
Day by day, the flickering spread. It crept from her toes to her knees, from her fingertips to her elbows.
“It’s the witch’s curse,” Ivy said to Shilling. “She told me I would disappear, and now I am.”
She read through every page of every book her gran had owned, but none of them contained advice on how to reverse a witch’s curse.
The days passed, and Ivy’s heart welled with sorrow until not a crumb of hope was to be found in Poppy Cottage.
Then one night, there came a pounding at her door. Afraid it was the witch, Ivy peered out her window to see half the village standing in front of the cottage. The pounding came again. She opened her door, for if she did not, the villagers would surely break it down.
“Yes?” she said, keeping far back from the light of their torches. She prayed to the shadows to keep her secret.
A man with the chest of three men stepped forward. Ivy recognized him as the baker. “Are you the remedy woman’s girl?” he growled.
“I’m her granddaughter,” said Ivy.
“We’ve heard strange stirrings coming from this cottage,” he said. “Moaning and howling.”
“And now,” said a boy, stepping forward, “my sister says that the remedy woman is dead.”
After all these years, Ivy recognized his laughing blue eyes. A mean light danced in them now. His sister—the one who had brought the pie—stood next to him, eyes downcast.
“That’s not all she tells, neither,” said the baker. “She says you’ve got no shadow. Is it true? Step out into the light where we can see you, girl.”
Shilling growled, but Ivy could see that the villagers had weapons that flashed in the glow of the torches. “Be still, Shilling,” she said.
She took a step out of the house, and as she did, she felt her whole body flicker. A gasp rose up among the villagers.
“She’s unnatural!” cried one.
“She’s freakish!” shouted another.
“She’s wicked!” yelled a third.
“No,” said the baker, his lip curling. “She’s cursed. And as long as she stays here, her curse will keep spreading. Rotting our crops, sickening our children, poisoning our wells.”
Ivy said nothing. The man was right. She was cursed. And perhaps it would spread. What did she know of curses? Her gran had not bothered to teach her about such matters.
“Go,” the man said. He pointed toward the forest. “Go now, and do not return here. You will not be welcome.”
Ivy did not move. Inside the cottage were Gran’s things. Her books. Her remedy jars. All that Ivy had left of her.
But then the boy picked up a rock and threw it at her. Ivy let out a shout of pain, and the boy laughed. A girl picked up a second stone and threw it, and then it seemed they were all bending down and searching the ground for stones.
Ivy reached for the wooden crutch her gran had left her and held it out like a weapon.
“Come, Shilling,” Ivy said. “Run!”
Ivy swung the crutch, and the crowd parted. She and Shilling ran, rocks nipping at their heels, through the villagers and into the trees. They ran deep into the forest, stopping only when they came to the clearing where they had buried Gran. There, Ivy collapsed upon a bed of white snow.
Shilling whimpered and nudged his warm nose against her body.
“No, Shilling,” she said, stroking his head and planting a soft kiss on his nose with her flickering lips. “You’ve done all you can do for me. You should go now.”
The wolf dog gave one last cry before he turned away and loped off into the darkness.
Then Ivy closed her eyes and waited to disappear completely.
When I finish writing the chapter, I lie back on a bed of fallen leaves. I close my eyes, the journal lying open against my chest. Tears streak down my cheeks.
I’ve only been there a few minutes when I hear it.
SNAP.
Boomer growls. My heart seems to yank the rest of me up from the ground. I look around, wide-eyed. And then I see her.
Standing between two trees, one hand on her hip, is Fina.
“Hi, Emma,” she says.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, wiping the tears away.
She knots her arms in front of her chest and takes a couple steps forward, looking serious. “I went to your house. Your mom said you come back here a lot. It took me a while to find you, but . . .” She takes a step closer. “We need to talk.”
I bite my lip. Has Edie sent another message to the whole school? Or is Fina here to tell me she doesn’t want to be friends anymore? “About what?”
She looks at her feet and kicks a little pile of leaves. “I miss you,” she says. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
More tears well in my eyes. They start out as tears of relief, but then a lump rises in my throat and I sink back to the ground, my face buried in my hands. And Fina is there, lifting me up and hugging me while I cry for what feels like a really long time. Boomer sits loyally on my other side, occasionally nudging me with a concerned nose.
When finally my sobs slow down, I drop my hands from my face. “I don’t—I don’t want to disappear, Fina,” I say. “I don’t want to stop being me—being Emma.”
I kind of expect her to ask me what I’m talking about, but she doesn’t. Instead, she looks me straight in the eye and says, “I see you, Emma. You can’t disappear as long as I see you, right? But you gotta stop pushing me away.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just feel . . . separate from everybody. Like no one else can understand what’s happening to me.”
A gust of wind blows through the trees, making Fina pull her jacket tighter. “I’m trying to understand,” Fina says. “But it’s kind of hard when you aren’t talking to me.”
She’s right. I know she is. I need to talk to her. I owe her that much, after she came out here looking for me even though I know I hurt her feelings. But it still takes me a few seconds to summon up the words, to figure ou
t where to start.
“Well,” I say finally, “I keep asking myself why this happened to me. And right after Gram died. It just feels like, one minute, everything was fine, and the next minute, nothing was the way it was supposed to be anymore. Like I was cursed.”
“I don’t know about cursed,” Fina says, “but my mom says bad things always come in threes.”
“I only said two.”
“You forgot about Edie.”
I fish out a smile. It’s small, but it’s real.
“Keep going,” she says.
“When I first got diagnosed,” I say, taking a deep breath, “I was really worried that it would get worse and people would stare at me all the time. And then it did get worse, and Edie sent that text, and my fear came true. But now it’s like people don’t even see me anymore. Like I don’t exist. And that feels even worse.”
Fina reaches over and plucks a yellow leaf from my hair. “Yeah. I get that. But don’t you ever think that maybe you’re kind of . . . making yourself invisible?” she asks, twirling its stem between her fingers. “I mean, I know everything has been super hard since Edie’s text. But people probably aren’t going to look at you if you don’t talk to anyone or look at anyone or raise your hand in class, you know? It doesn’t help. Neither does telling me to sit somewhere else at lunch.”
I have a sudden vision of the Apple Lady, walking around the village like a ghost, never talking or looking anyone in the eye. I think about how people ignore her or cross the street when they see her coming. And for the first time, it occurs to me to wonder what made her that way. Maybe something happened to her, too. But maybe she didn’t have a Fina to come looking for her.
“It’s not that I didn’t want you to sit with me,” I say. “I just don’t want you to have to be Fina, the girl who’s best friends with that girl with vitiligo. I can’t escape my skin, but you can.”
Fina pulls a face. “Emma,” she scolds, “I am your friend because you’re awesome, and I’m awesome, and awesome people stick together. And by the way, it’s not just you who needs me. I need you, too. Moving really sucks, and you’re the only thing that’s made it kind of okay. I don’t know what to do without you.”
I feel my stomach twist with guilt. I’ve been so caught up in thinking about what I’m going through that it didn’t even occur to me that Fina might need a friend right now, too. That I may be missing Gram, but she’s missing her whole family back in California.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “You’re my best friend.”
“I know,” Fina says simply. “And I don’t care what you look like or what people say, but for the record, I think you look great, and people are stupid.”
“I wish everyone thought that,” I murmur, feeling the lump rising in my throat again. “Or at least that my mom did. She cries a lot at night. I think—I think she’s ashamed of me.”
“I bet that’s not true,” Fina says. “I bet she’s just worried about you.”
“You don’t see the way she looks at me sometimes. Or how Lily stares at me like I really am a ghost.”
“Well, you can always come live with me and I’ll be your sister, and me and my mom will think you look amazing,” replies Fina, grinning.
I let out a little sob-giggle. “Even after I hurt your feelings?”
“I’m sure you’ll make it up to me.”
“How?”
“By not giving me the silent treatment anymore,” she says, leaning over to pet Boomer, who is nudging her thigh with his wet nose. “And also by telling me what this place is.”
“It’s—” I start. But I don’t know what to say. How much can I tell Fina? How much do I want to?
“It’s really cool,” she decides before I can say anything, standing and climbing onto Throne Rock. “Look! This rock is like a big chair!”
“A throne,” I correct her.
“Oooh, like the one in Fernlace,” she says. “And look at that huge tree! It’s like the Council Tree where all the Goldengrove elders meet. The stream could be the Ivory River.”
Funny, I’ve never thought of it that way before, but she’s right.
“Yeah,” I say. “Except without all the deadly rapids. My gram’s been bringing me here ever since I was little.”
It’s actually really weird seeing another person here who isn’t Gram. But it’s nice to hear something besides silence in the glade again.
“I can see why,” she says, gazing around. “There’s something really special about it.”
So I tell her everything. About the first time Gram brought me here and what she said about the charmed folk who came over on the ships from Europe. About the stories Gram and I wrote together about them. About how, after Gram died, I started one last story, and how I opened the journal one day to find someone else had written in it, too.
Behind her glasses, Fina’s eyes grow wider and wider the longer I speak. When I’ve spilled out everything I know, she gazes around for a minute, thinking. The forest is silent once more.
“You really saw them?” she asks finally. “The charmed folk?” There’s something in her voice that sounds a lot like hope.
“I used to,” I say. “Not anymore, though.”
Her face falls a little. Then a wrinkle appears between her eyebrows. “But wait. So, you don’t know who’s writing to you?”
“No clue.”
“And that doesn’t, like . . . freak you out?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Whoever it is must have known Gram. Gram obviously trusted them enough to tell them about the hollow and how we wrote stories together.”
“But, Emma! We have to figure out who it is,” she says. “Aren’t you dying to know?”
“Um, I guess so.”
Actually, I’m not sure I have been dying to know. Because having my mysterious pen pal felt like having a little bit of Gram back. Because maybe even after everything that’s happened, I still wanted to believe in that last shred of magic.
“Emma?” Fina murmurs. “I know you said you don’t see them anymore. The charmed folk. But do you think—could we maybe just pretend? Could we pretend that this is the Goldengrove, and we’re Jack and Sarah? Or are we too old for that?”
“No,” I say. “We’re not.”
She beams. “In that case,” she says, “I’ll be Sarah. You be Jack. Boomer, you get to be the hobgoblin king.”
And we spend the rest of the morning running around the Spinney, pretending it really is the Goldengrove, climbing the Council Tree and waving sword sticks at Boomer, who seems to be having the time of his life playing the hobgoblin king.
When we finally leave the glade, we’re both out of breath. We have dirt on our cheeks and twigs tangled in our hair. And neither of us minds a bit.
33
I’m not ready for Fina to leave when Mr. Ramirez shows up to take her home that afternoon. I don’t want the spell to break. When she was here, it was like the wall between me and the rest of the world wasn’t a wall anymore. It felt more like a curtain that could be lifted away.
But as the weekend draws to an end, I feel a familiar weight of dread in my stomach that grows heavier and heavier. And when I wake up on Monday morning, I feel almost too heavy to get out of bed.
When I finally do, I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Sometimes, like today, it’s still a shock to see myself, the splashes of pale across my face. They remind me of the paintings Gram left in her studio, the bits of blank canvas peeking out between all the colors.
All the things she left unfinished.
Saying all that stuff about not letting myself be invisible was easy enough in the Spinney, where there was no Edie to sneer at me, nobody to gawk at me or pretend I’m not there. What if I get to school and the curtain falls again, leaving me alone once more?
There’s no point in worrying about things you can’t change, Gram’s voice chides, and you can’t change what people think of you.
But this time, Gram’s words sound
hollow to me. Maybe you can’t change what people think of you, but sometimes what people think changes you, whether you want it to or not.
Just as I’m finishing my cereal, there’s a knock on the front door. Mom and Dad exchange a puzzled look, then Mom goes to answer it.
“Well, hi, Fina!” I hear her say. I feel my heart rise like a kite, and I get up and run to the door. Sure enough, there’s Fina, waiting on the doorstep.
“Good morning, Mrs. Talbot,” she says. “I thought I might ride the bus with Emma today.”
“How nice,” Mom replies, then waves to Ms. Ramirez. “I’ll just go say hi to your mom.”
“You didn’t have to come,” I say to Fina, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been happier to see her.
“Yeah, well, I thought you could use some company,” she replies. “And also, I have an idea. About your pen pal. A plan.”
We walk to my stop. It’s really cold this morning, so we both kind of hop back and forth from one foot to the other to keep warm. Fortunately, the bus pulls up pretty much right away.
Fina scooches in next to me on the squeaky blue seat, and we huddle close so she can whisper her plan.
“I’ll bet you this person comes to the Spinney at night,” she says. “Because whoever they are, they don’t want to run into you. They want to keep their identity a secret. But why? That’s what I want to know. Anyway, we should have a sleepover on Friday, and we can sneak out of your house just like we did on Halloween. Then we go to the Spinney and wait.”
“So, basically you want to have a stakeout?”
She grins. “Basically.”
“But what if the person doesn’t come that night?” I ask. “What if they come before then?”
“Go to the Spinney as soon as school’s over,” she says, “and take the journal out of the hollow. Don’t put it back until Friday. They’ll probably come and check, and when it’s not there, they’ll come back again until it is.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. Sometimes it takes a while for them to write back.”
Fina shrugs. “Then we do it again the next Friday. What’s the worst that can happen? Either way, it’s an adventure!”