by Wendy Delsol
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Stanley. There’s a big announcement he’s giving to his staff. He wants me to be there.”
“He didn’t say what it’s about?” I asked.
“No. Some big surprise.”
Jack was out the door so quickly I didn’t have a chance to ask him about plans for later — or who else would be present at the meeting.
With a half hour to go until meeting time, I sat at the register removing portions of my scalp with the fingernails of one hand, while flipping through The Snow Queen picture book. The first few pages were a prologue, something long and boring. Prologues, if you asked me, were like base coats of nail polish, not worth the time or effort. The book’s illustrations, on the other hand, were beautiful: glittery and silk-spun and all kinds of inspiring. I looked up and got spook-bumps to find Ofelia an arm’s length away. I’d heard nothing, seen nothing.
“You startled me.”
“I’m early,” was all she offered by way of reply.
I noticed the soft brown hat was tucked under her arm; her scalp had no angry lesions; and she appeared torment-free, calm even. So why did her presence now, as on that very first day in Afi’s store, fluster me?
“How do you do it?” I asked.
“Do what?”
“Avoid the cap.”
“Ah.” She turned the Thomas book to face her. “My previous council were renegades in this respect.”
“Renegades?” The word itself had a nice zip to it. “In what way?”
She placed her palm flat on the book, covering the little engine’s body. “What emotion, above all, do you suppose a renegade or maverick — or however you want to term those who effect change — overcomes?”
I was taken aback.
“What is it that grips you the moment the cap appears?” Ofelia asked.
“Pain,” I blurted out.
“But is the pain manageable at first?”
“At first, yes. But, by now, I know what’s coming.” Realization dawned. “Wait, I change my answer to fear,” I said in a choky voice.
“Precisely.” She removed her hand from the book. “Such a sweet story.”
I blinked. She made it seem like she’d absorbed it as we were speaking.
“Do you know the book?”
“I do now.”
I got the willies, one stop past goose bumps on the scare train. And I wasn’t a wait-and-see kinda gal.
“Ofelia, do you have some kind of psychic ability?”
“Ah. You recognize a kindred spirit.”
Kindred? Spirit? We were now pulling into the heebie-jeebies station. And I didn’t even want to think about a final destination. What was it with her?
“Are you talking about me?” I asked.
“Of course.” Her finger ran the length of the Thomas book’s spine, yet it was my own that felt a cold digit trail from nape to waist. “This book is a medium of sorts, right?”
A medium? Hardly. More like a small, as in a small voice that was telling me to run fast and far.
“Kat, your humor is just one of your many gifts.”
Kind of a compliment, sure, except that the only funny bits had been in my head. And the last time someone — Hulda, to be precise — had talked to me of gifts, I’d ended up at a portal to another realm.
“You must trust yourself and your instincts,” Ofelia continued. “Your youth is significant. Now, more than ever, Fru Hulda would encourage you to explore your gifts.”
“Do you know Fru Hulda?”
“No. Shame. Had I arrived just one day earlier.”
The timing of Ofelia’s arrival — the same day as Hulda’s collapse — had me wondering. And how much of a shame was it for her to have the unchaperoned ear of the novice interim leader? “Then how do you know what she would want?”
“I may not know Fru Hulda, but I know of Fru Hulda. Of her open mind. Of her open heart. I feel it is why I was called home.”
Sure, she said all the right things, had big Bambi peeps, but there was still something that bugged me. And I even knew she could sense my distrust, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, or about her, for the time being.
The arrival of Grim and then the others put an end to our meeting of the minds. Our Stork powwow got under way a few minutes later.
We began with an update on Hulda, except there really wasn’t anything to report. She was still in a faraway “safe place,” and there’d been no change to her condition. Our next topic was also a bust; Fru Svana had been unable to discover anything about Dorit’s whereabouts.
I moved on to the evening’s business. Ofelia, with a soul to deliver, had prompted the meeting.
“I have been contacted by an essence,” Ofelia began as was customary. “A girl: vivacious and intelligent. For one so smart, I divine either a thirty-year-old doctor or a thirty-five-year-old teacher as the vessel.”
“You divine!” Grim snapped.
“Yes.”
“We do not claim to divine,” Grim said. “We merely recommend, based upon those candidates by whom we are contacted through dreams or physical manifestations. To divine is to pretend some sort of influence upon the nomination of vessels.”
Ofelia held her hand up in defense. “My apologies, Fru Grimilla. It is simply a misunderstanding of verbiage. My old council tossed about the word divine with quite a different meaning than what you describe.”
“It is not a term accepted here,” Grim said.
We managed to get through the rest of the meeting without Ofelia committing any more acts of heresy. I couldn’t help but be a little relieved that there was finally another rogue Stork to take the heat off me. But exactly why had Ofelia called her previous council renegades? And what was up with her sixth sense? And exactly what had she meant by divine? And why did she rile me so?
By the time our meeting was done, despite the whole time-bending thing, I caught only the last minute of the basketball game. Even though the scoreboard showed us ahead by ten points, I could tell that something was wrong.
“What’s up?” I asked, plopping down between Jack and Penny on the bleachers.
Penny narrowed her lids into mere slits, gazing onto the court. I watched as Pedro stole the ball and drove it back for a layup. Pedro, for a little guy, was one tough point guard.
“Did something happen?” I asked, concerned by the boil in Penny’s coloring. Even her hair seemed redder.
Tina dumped an arm over Penny’s shoulder. “Pedro got editor in chief.”
“No way,” I said.
“No shit,” Penny replied.
Jack pretended to watch the game, but I could tell by the way he bit his lip, he was listening.
“What did Mr. Parks say?” I asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Penny said. The buzzer sounded, signaling an end to more than the game.
Outdoors and out of the chaos of the mass exodus, Jack and I lingered a few paces behind Penny, Tina, and Matthew. “Did you know about Mr. Parks’s decision?”
“Yes,” Jack said.
“What?”
“That doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it.”
“It’s bogus. She has more experience.”
“But he’s a senior. It’s his last chance.”
“Are you on his side?”
“Since when did an opinion constitute a side?”
“So you are on his side.”
“It wasn’t an election. There are no sides. Mr. Parks made his decision. Can we just change the subject?”
“Fine,” I said. Except it wasn’t. We were both irritated. We walked in silence, the mood just as frosty as the night air.
Jack finally broke the stalemate. “I have news from Stanley’s meeting.”
With my Stork meeting and Penny’s sulk, I’d forgotten that Stanley had called a project meeting. “What is it?”
“I’m going to Greenland.”
“You’re what?”
“You h
eard me right.” He was suddenly animated, chipper even. “A two-week field study in April. One week will be during Spring Break. The other I’ll have to get excused for. Brigid has invited a small team of us to observe the gathering of the quarterly ice-sheet measurements. It’s a really big honor. She picked me over some of the graduate students.”
I’ll bet she did.
“It’s gonna be awesome,” Jack continued.
“Greenland?”
“And way, way, up there. We’re talking Arctic, baby.”
Forget chipper. The guy was downright gleeful. And only my snowman would consider the frozen roof of the world as a Spring Break destination. “Congratulations, I guess. You sound really excited.”
“Gonna be epic,” Jack said.
Who was this guy? And what had he done with Jack? And moreover, epic was how Homer’s vacation could be described — if he didn’t just go ahead and call it the Odyssey.
We joined our friends at one of the Kountry Kettle’s back tables. It didn’t feel the same without Jaelle as our waitress, but it was nice to know she was happy working as my dad’s office manager. Shortly after we had placed our orders, the basketball team came bursting through the door, celebrations already begun. Coat still on, Pedro came and stood in front of our table.
“How’s everyone doing?”
“Good,” everyone but Penny replied. She sat staring at the tabletop.
“Not talking to me?” Pedro asked her.
“We can talk,” Penny said.
“How about outside?” Pedro replied.
Penny drew her coat over shoulders and followed
Pedro out the door. About ten minutes later, she returned, while he joined the team at a table up front.
“Well, that’s done,” Penny said with a slight catch in her voice.
“What’s done?” I asked.
“We broke up.”
“You what?”
“For the record, he broke up with me. Said I was being a bitch about the editor thing. That if I couldn’t be happy for him, we weren’t meant to be.” Penny, who had managed to keep it together until then, burst into tears.
Tina and I spent the next half hour in the bathroom with Penny, returning to cold food and the eyes-down faces of Jack and Matthew. When I dropped Penny off that night, she told me not to worry about her. She’d been seeing a jerky side to Pedro since New Year’s. As much as I wanted to think that the split was mutual, for the best, I couldn’t help notice the droop in Penny’s shoulders as she trudged up her front steps.
Monday evening, I stood in front of the Walden Inn clutching the box of sample wedding odds and ends. It had become clear, over these last two weeks of January, that my mom was not going to bounce through this pregnancy, never mind down the aisle on Valentine’s Day. Bed rest, I came to learn, meant that someone else had to do the meals, dishes, laundry, and shopping. Stanley tried to pitch in, but he was so overworked with his research that it looked like he was the one suffering from preeclampsia. The big surprise was my dad helping out when and where he could, driving my mom to some of her doctor’s appointments, and even occasionally shoveling out our driveway so I could get to school, work, or run my mom’s bullet-pointed errands. The woman was nothing if not calculating — a true mathematician. On top of all this, I had rehearsals three nights a week. The physical demands of the dancing were a welcome diversion to everything else that was going on, but still I felt a little guilty for having a life. At least my mom’s odd combination of Pollyanna Does Polynomials resulted in her absolute confidence that she and the baby would be fine. She, therefore, insisted that the rest of us carry on and be go-getters to her stay-putter.
I gave a half-cocked salute to the overly friendly front-desk clerk, who smiled and waved like we were long-losts. I wasn’t in the best of moods, as a crush of obligations was balanced on my head like some primitive earthen water jug — we’re talking both heavy and slosh-prone. Design projects for The Snow Queen production had been turned in that day, and all weekend, Penny and I had drawn until our fingers cramped — gnarled for life a real possibility. I felt good about the costumes, but the set designs had me nervous. Particularly as even glass-so-full-gonna-spill Penny had deemed them “not our best work.” Because of the design project, editor in chief Pedro had extended the deadline for my column and Penny’s article until tomorrow, but that only meant I had a night of writing ahead of me. The breakup between Penny and Pedro was still raw and made our lunchtime journalism club more awkward than Diversity Day at Dunder Mifflin.
Lately, it seemed everyone and everything in my life was cause for worry. Health concerns for my mom and Hulda. Afi so homesick for Iceland that he was symptomatic: fatigued, achy, red-eyed, and sniffly, which only meant that the mysterious Ofelia was a full-time rather than part-time lurker. And Brigid was still slinking around, writhing her way into every corner of my life and charming the Diesels off my dad, the too-short Haggars off Stanley, and the Levi’s off Jack. Jack: another raw edge. We were both so busy that, lately, our relationship had been boiled down to text messages. I was really beginning to hate that smiley-face icon.
With all this bearing down on me, I pushed through the doors to the catering office. Julia smiled up at me.
“Kat,” she said, “your mom e-mailed me you were on your way. It’s such a shame they’ve had to postpone. How’s she doing?”
“OK.” I set the box on her desk. “Bored, more than anything else.”
“And a summer wedding will be beautiful. We can have the ceremony in the gardens.”
“That sounds pretty.” I was reminded of how the essence of my half sister had been revealed to me via a dream sequence as a shy, red-haired lover of nature. She would like an outdoor ceremony.
“And it’s something for everyone to look forward to during these next few months,” Julia said with unreserved cheer.
I felt instantly shamed. Julia had — because of me — recently buried her only child, yet I was the one Eeyoring over every aspect of life while she reminded me how lovely the Hundred Acre Wood would be come summer. Gads, did I never learn?
“I’ll try to remember that,” I said.
“And we’ll make it very special. Twinkle lights and fireflies outshined only by the bride.”
“Fireflies. Jacob would have liked that.” I had no idea where the comment came from. Even I thought it was random. “What little boy wouldn’t, right?” I asked, trying to cover for my blunder.
Julia put her hand to her throat. “He just loved them. That’s probably why I even thought of them. He was fascinated by them. Called them sparkler bugs.”
“How cute.”
Julia’s face flushed pink. At first I thought I’d embarrassed her or made her sad, but then I somehow knew she was happy to remember him, to share bits of who he was with me, with anyone.
“So if Thomas the Tank Engine had needed the help of fireflies to get him out of a dark tunnel . . .” I said with a small lift to my shoulders.
“Oh. Now. Jacob would have thought such a story had been written just for him.”
I pulled my gloves from my pocket. “Thanks again for all your help. We’ll keep in touch.”
“Please do,” Julia said.
And I intended to. I finally had a plan, even.
That night — after making pasta for my mom and me, writing my column, and running a load of towels — I took out Thomas. A part of me had felt silly just buying the book, never mind paging through it, but to read it out loud? The other part, one I was trying to develop, felt determined. I cleared my throat and began. “Thomas the Tank Engine: The Complete Collection by the Rev. W. Awdry. Thomas was a tank engine who lived at a Big Station. He had six small wheels, a short stumpy funnel, a short stumpy boiler, and a short stumpy dome. He was a fussy little engine. . . .”
“From the top,” Ms. Bryant said, emphasizing her displeasure by punching her fists down on her chai-colored pencil skirt.
The dance chorus was rehearsing the ice-
fairy number. It was the point in the story where Penny — as Gerda in her quest to find her playmate Kay — was brought to me, said ice fairy. My fey little forest companions lead Gerda to my tinseled cottage — another team’s set designs — where I warn her of, and provision her for, the perils ahead, all the while dancing my little fairy tail off. All Penny had to do was look lost and frightened, in this scene, anyway.
It was suddenly my turn to feel chilled when I sensed someone watching me. From the wings, Brigid’s level-straight form emerged. I still was yet to warm to the celebrated stranger.
Ms. Bryant looked at her watch. “Let’s wrap here for the day.”
“Did I miss it?” I was surprised to see my dad hurrying in behind Brigid.
“We just finished,” I said, relief running down my neck and even collecting in the cups of my sports bra. I wiped my brow with my forearm.
“What a shame,” Brigid said. “Your father wanted to see you dance.”
“Mr. Higginbottom would prefer we keep the rehearsals closed,” Ms. Bryant said, walking over, her head angling to Brigid.
Clever, the way she made Higginbottom the heavy. Sure, he was the strict director type while she was his good-cop assistant; still, it was a way of confronting Brigid.
“But Mr. Higginbottom would surely make an exception for Kat’s father,” Brigid replied.
“Dad, really.” I stepped in between the two women. It was comforting to think that there was possibly another person in the county who wasn’t fawning over Brigid. “You’d just make me nervous. Can’t you wait until opening night like everyone else?”
“If I have to,” he said with a pout.
“Is Mr. Higginbottom in the choir room?” Brigid asked Ms. Bryant.
“Yes. He’s working with Matthew on his songs.”
“I’ll be back,” Brigid said to my dad in her best — though likely unintended — Terminator impression. “I have some music for him.”
After the chill of Brigid’s displaced air had settled, my dad extended his hand to Ms. Bryant. “Greg Leblanc, Kat’s dad. Pleased to meet you.”
“Sage Bryant,” she said, shaking his hand. “Kat’s design teacher.”