by Phoebe North
I picked up one of my paintbrushes from the cluttered floor, stuck it in my mouth, chewing on it. And then without thinking at all, I went and got my paints. It was the only thing I’d ever taken solace in—the only thing I’d ever let myself take solace in. Once, I’d created weird artwork of Gumlea. Portraits. Maps. Paintings of princes. Kings. Since Jamie returned, I’d been painting still lifes, fruit that rotted in my room until it attracted flies and Mom screamed. But I knew, if I was honest with myself, that I had better art inside me. Bigger art. I set out a canvas, began smushing oils around. At first, I was aimless, laying out colors without meaning, just to feel the brush against the taut surface, just to see cerulean against umber. I heard the words in my mind, heard the poetry in them, but wouldn’t let myself feel that. Poetry belonged to Jamie, and right now, I needed something that was mine alone. I grabbed a palette knife and scraped the canvas clean. I started over. With a pencil this time. Working slowly, and more deliberately, too.
Cliché, maybe. But I sketched out a person. A freckle-faced girl with snarls in her hair. She wasn’t an empress, or a knight. She was just a suburban kid who burned too quick in the sun. But she had her own sort of magic, didn’t she?
I only stopped sketching when the heel of my hand was covered in graphite. By then, it was almost one, and on a school night, too, but I didn’t care. No one did. Not Mom. Not Dad. Not Jamie.
So I picked up my pencil again, and began to draw.
I have always been a single-minded person. First it was Jamie, then Gumlea, then Vidya that occupied every single cell in my brain. Now I abruptly abandoned everything again in favor of something new: art. I finally dropped out of field hockey, a sport that I’d never really liked or cared about, anyway. I’d already long quit Madrigals. My paintings, which had previously only seemed like dabblings, stretched across bigger and bigger canvases as I tried to make a record of what I saw. I didn’t paint my brother, or hares, or stags, or dragons, and certainly not knives. Those were illusions. Instead I mostly painted myself. My feet, with my bony toes, which I’d always hated. My hands. The faint scar on my upper lip from a fall I’d taken at the pool as a kid. I thought I could somehow freeze time, stop myself from whatever it was that we were barreling toward.
It didn’t work. Junior year ticked away, and Miranda got a boyfriend, and sometimes we’d hang out in the parking lot of the Thai restaurant where he worked, arguing about which Doctor we liked best. Elijah failed math, and Mom was so angry that she was beside herself, and demanded he move back to her house for the rest of the school year. The world was shifting, changing, too fast for me to pin down. I finally stopped redyeing my hair. But I could look back at my paintings of when my hair had been red and pretend that not a single day had passed at all.
And when I painted, I didn’t have to think about the boy sleeping late in the next room. How we didn’t talk anymore. How we didn’t even try. Sometimes I’d hear his weight creak the floorboards in the hallway or sense the pressure of his eyes on me, watching me as I painted. What did he think of me? Did he think I was talented, or a hack? Full of myself? Did he think anything about me at all?
He never told me. I never asked.
Eleventh grade puttered to a conclusion, what should have been my brother’s senior year of high school. While his former classmates were getting their licenses and bragging about their college acceptances in the hall, Jamie quietly got his GED and started working in the produce department of the ShopRite. He grew his sideburns back out, and Mom argued with him about it, but the trial had taken so long at that point that she couldn’t really tell him not to anymore. I stayed out of it. My grades were good, though I got my first handful of Bs. Miranda and her boyfriend and I started a weekly gaming group, and I’d sit with a sketch pad while the boys would argue about video games and I didn’t kiss anyone and I tried to tell myself that it all was fine.
But I missed my brother. And more, worse, I missed Vidya.
I considered talking to her on more than one occasion. Once, between classes, I had to go to my locker to get my copy of Germinal and I saw her standing at the end of the hallway with Harper, chatting about some bulletin board they were decorating. I felt the potential there for connection. She even looked up at me for a moment, smiling just a little. But what would I ever say to her?
I loved you, but I was too crazy then, and I’m better now but it’s too late or Hi, my brother came home and I told him about us and he still hasn’t forgiven me but would you like to get together sometime and catch up? Or I’m sorry I invited you to my imaginary nonexistent kingdom in the woods and I hope you didn’t tell anyone about it because it’s embarrassing even though it was my whole damned life once and are you seeing anyone these days?
I knew I couldn’t say that. I knew I couldn’t say anything. So I snatched my paperback from the bottom of my locker and hustled off to class, pretending like I hadn’t even seen her, or the way she had looked at me.
Our paths would only cross one last time before she graduated. It was the final week of eleventh grade, and all the seniors had been skipping out of our honors classes, leaving just a few juniors lingering behind. We heard rumors about lake trips and parties in the woods, but that part of high school was so out of reach for me and Miranda that it might as well have been mythical. Even on Cut Day, when as many juniors skipped as seniors, I came to class, and stayed late after school, too, to help Mrs. DeGrassio, the art teacher, clean out the supply closet. It was there that Vidya found me, her shadow cutting darkly down from the half-open door.
“Hey,” she said.
When I turned, broken Conté crayons in hand, I almost couldn’t believe it was her. But it was. Her hair was streaked lighter now, up in a sloppy summer ponytail. She was clutching a yearbook to her chest.
“Vidya,” I said, and the name came out in a single whispered syllable. It was embarrassing, actually. I turned away to hide how my cheeks were suddenly blazing red and started to sort the crayons by color in their boxes.
“Hey,” she said again, and her voice was too full of hope for my liking. “Miranda told me I’d find you here. I hope you don’t mind. I wanted to see you before . . .”
She trailed off, but we both knew what was contained in that ellipsis. Before she graduated. Before she moved away. Before she walked out of my town, my school, my life forever.
“I heard you’re moving to the city,” I said, still not looking at her. It hurt to look at her, the same way it hurt to look at the sun. “Julliard?”
“Mm-hmm,” she answered, a little bit of excitement seeping into her voice. She was always so electrified when it came to music, and it was one of the things I loved about her. She understood what it was like to love something you couldn’t see, something that could only be sensed in vibrations on the air.
“Congratulations,” I said, but the word came out limp and wet and useless. I saw the expression on her face out of the corner of my eye, sad and a little bit deflated, and winced. “Sorry. I’m not good at goodbyes. Which is funny, because it feels like I’ve been making them—”
“No, it’s okay,” she said quickly, forcing a smile to light the corners of her mouth, cutting me off before we could talk about Jamie, which was probably for the best. “I just really wanted you to sign my yearbook. You were a part of my story when I was here. I want to be able to read this twenty years from now with my kids and get wistful, you know? And you . . .”
She trailed off again, but she didn’t have to say a word. I understood. In a way, we’d been a missed opportunity, a regret. If only everything had been different. But it hadn’t been. Jamie had come back and shattered that chance, and besides, I’d ruined it, anyway, with all my fantasy talk—my fixation on Gumlea. On him.
I sighed. Yearbooks seemed a little cliché to me—the kind of thing I would never have cared about under normal circumstances. But when I looked at her, she looked so hopeful, and my stomach dipped. I held out my hands.
“Sure,” I told her.
She passed me the yearbook, and I sat down in the corner of the art room supply closet, rifling around for a moment through one of the drawers for a fine-point pen. I only found a .05, not a .07, but it would have to do. While she stood in the doorway, hands folded in front of her, watching in silence, I put Vidya’s yearbook on my knees and started paging through it. It was already full of signatures. The endpapers were packed with well wishes for a good summer and a good time in college and people had drawn little hearts around her name and every single message seemed tender and honest and heartfelt and perfect. Inside my chest, my heart felt squeezed. There was nothing I could say that would be even close to sufficient.
I found my picture among the other eleventh graders. Anne “Annie” R. [Redacted]. Art Club. Honors Society. And nothing else. In the picture, my face looked pale and ghostlike and my eyes seemed more like punctuation than any functioning set of organs. I’d dyed my hair again right before school picture day in an attempt to look like a normal human being, but it hadn’t worked. The color had come out too bright and too splotchy. I looked more like a malfunctioning stoplight.
I looked at the page for a moment longer. Then I started drawing on it. Over it, actually, digging the pen deep into the paper, letting the ink obscure the faces of all my classmates. It had been ages since I’d drawn anything fantastical, but the real world wasn’t good enough for Vidya. I’d wanted to give her magic once, to see how it felt to live on the other side of the Veil. My resolve firmed in my chest. I would draw her a dragon. The last dragon. The best dragon.
She watched as my pen marks eclipsed the entire page. The dragon was coiling her scaly body in on itself, twisting herself in knots. A pair of minuscule wings could be seen in one corner, and on the other side of the page there was a mouth, open and hungry and waiting. I drew gleaming teeth. I sketched an enormous eye. In the eye was a figure, a reflection. It was Vidya, as she looked to me now, a silhouette against a doorway. But I’m not sure that the girl in the dragon’s eye would have been recognizable to anyone but me.
When I was finished, you wouldn’t have even known that there were photos of students on that page. Only a dragon, smoke wafting from her nostrils. I signed the bottom. One word. Annie. Then I handed the book back to Vidya.
She grinned. Instantly, irrepressibly.
“Thank you,” she said, hugging the yearbook to her chest. “It’s perfect.”
The expression on her face released a flock of birds in my belly. I looked down at the ground, letting my hair fall in front of my face. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
“Do you want me to walk you out to the late bus?” she asked, and for a minute, I could see it in my mind’s eye. Maybe this would be the start of something, if only for a few weeks. A summer romance. Kissing Vidya. Curling up around her in the back seat of her car, smelling her hair.
But no. How could I? Jamie would find out, and it would hurt him, maybe worse than before. I couldn’t do that to him. Not again. This, here, would be my punishment for what I’d done. I would not kiss Vidya. I would not kiss anybody.
“No,” I said softly, and my voice sounded hoarse when I spoke. “No thanks. My mom is coming to pick me up.”
“Oh,” she said, and I knew how she felt about my mom from how she said it. “Okay. Have a good summer?”
It was a question that lingered on the air.
“You too” was all I said.
37
That summer was the trial. I wasn’t home for it.
Instead, in late June, just a few weeks after school let out, I flew to Ohio with Miranda. Mom thought it was best that I was away for the trial anyway, and when the opportunity to go on a trip with Miranda came up, I took it. It was my first time on an airplane, and as the engines roared and the plane bobbed upward over a sky dotted with white-and-gold cumulus clouds, I imagined that I was shedding an old skin that didn’t fit me anymore. I could be anyone when we touched ground. I didn’t have to be Anne [Redacted], sister of James [Redacted]. I didn’t even have to be Emperata Annit of Gumlea. I could call myself Elsinora if I wanted. I could call myself anything.
But it turned out that at Miranda’s uncle’s farm, I didn’t need to call myself anything at all. It was an idle summer. We wore cotton sundresses and we fed the llamas and the chickens and walked aimlessly through the fields and the woods behind them, which were nothing like Gumlea. For one thing, it was miles and miles and miles to another farm. You never saw another person, much less their garbage. The woods were sweet and golden and sun kissed and that summer, so were we. We played spit late at night in the guest room at her uncle’s house. We read every trashy romance novel on her aunt’s bookshelf. We tried to do a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with her cousins and failed miserably. We stole wine out of the liquor cabinet and drank until the room bucked and swayed like the hull of a ship and I told her stories I’d never told anyone but Vidya—about pirates and ropes and boats with grinning teeth.
“That’s so fucked up, Annie,” she said, giggling into her pillow. “Have you always been so fucked up?”
When she asked, it didn’t feel like judgment. It felt like honesty. It felt like freedom. In the middle of nowhere Ohio, I no longer had to be ashamed, not even when I puked in her uncle’s wicker wastebasket and we had to sneak it out to the trash in the middle of the night, hoping her uncle wouldn’t hear our weight sagging the stairs.
I was strange. I’d always been strange. Fucked up, even. Not because of my brother’s disappearance, or because of anything that had anything to do with my brother at all. No, it was in the way that I looked at the world, the mythology that formed the very fabric of my life. And the funny thing was, I didn’t even care. I wasn’t ashamed of it, not anymore. Actually, if anything, I missed it. I missed those pirates with their gangrenous limbs, the feral children tearing the bodies of fairies to dust. By the summer of my seventeenth year, I’d learned that the world itself was savage, too—and I was only one of the savage, strange creatures within it.
The next morning, my head pounding over breakfast (eggs, bacon, pancakes, heaps of yellow butter, and biscuits, too), Miranda’s aunt handed me a letter.
“This came for you,” she said. I didn’t have cell reception out there. My mother said I should call on the landline once a week, but somehow, it never happened—and I never bothered checking my messages on the farm’s sluggish Wi-Fi, either. But there it was, her jagged handwriting on that envelope. I tore it open, feeling my eyeballs pulse as I read the piece of folded legal paper.
Annie,
We won. Three life sentences. I’ve written you three emails but you haven’t answered. Are you getting my messages? You should call your brother. He’d be glad to hear from you.
Yours,
Mom
“Can I be excused?” I asked. Miranda’s aunt said of course I could. I wandered out the back door, barefoot, still in my pajamas. The screen door slammed behind me, but before I could walk out into the shifting hot cornfields, I heard it creak open behind me again.
“Annie, wait,” Miranda said. I didn’t stop, but soon she was by my side anyway, our knuckles touching as we walked.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what’s wrong?” I asked. My throat felt parched and dry with every word.
Miranda shrugged beside me. The truth was, she never asked. That was what I liked most about her. “I figure you would tell me if you wanted to.”
I looked at her, her elfin features, her tiny mouth, her kind eyes. I would never love my friend the way I’d loved Vidya. It wasn’t like that with us. But she was the closest thing I’d ever had to a sister. I hugged her. It was all that needed to be said.
“Do you need to use the phone?” she asked as I pulled away from her. I nodded and wiped away the tears. She gave my hands a squeeze. “I’ll tell everyone to leave you alone,” she said.
A few minutes later, I sat in her aunt and uncle’s dim bedroom, the phone tucked under my chin. It took a few rings for Jamie to answer. When he did, his v
oice sounded distant, like he was living in a submarine in an ocean on the other side of the world. I guess, in a way, he was.
“Annie,” he said softly. I gazed out the half-open window, watching the curtains stir.
“You won,” I told him. “I got the letter. You won. You did it.”
A long, crackling pause. And then a small snort of laughter. I couldn’t tell if my brother was happy about it, not exactly.
“Yeah,” he said dryly. “I did it.”
Another pause. I ran a hand through my hair, unsure of what to say. “The Lost Boy Triumphant?” I finally offered, wondering if he could hear the capital letters around the phrase, like I was describing otherworldly heraldry.
Another snort. “Don’t call me that,” he said, but he didn’t precisely sound mad about it, either. Mostly just tired. “I hated it when Muselmaan called me that. I’m not lost anymore, right? I can go back to being nobody again.” Wherever Jamie was, in his room or on the back steps or somewhere else where our family couldn’t hear, he smiled then, just a little. I could hear it in his voice. “If you have to call me anything, call me the Nameless Boy.”
My stomach dipped, though I told myself it was just from the hangover. It was the first direct mention my brother had made of Gumlea since our fight in the woods that night with Neal. In a way, not talking about it had been like another sort of Vow. If we never mentioned it between us, neither one of us had to acknowledge how our magic was now broken.
But maybe it had always been broken, in a way. Because when I closed my eyes, I tried to see my brother as he had described himself way back then. As a Nameless Boy. Taking bits and parts from other places in Gumlea, the people and places I had loved. The Feral Children. The Winter Watchers. The Pirates. None of them had belonged to Jamie. He’d never had anything of his own.
“But, Jamie,” I said softly at last. “You might not be lost, but you’re not nobody, either.”
A sharp silence. Finally, Jamie sighed. “I have to go,” he said. “Celebratory dinner tonight. Mom’s opening a bottle of champagne.”