Ellen slept on the floor that night, huddled in a ball. The next morning, her muscles and bones ached so badly she might as well have been beaten.
When Sophie turned up at the back door to usher Nico through the garden to her house, she did not say anything. She kept her eyes on the ground, and hurried their patient away. Ellen knew how she felt. Lost.
Still habit took her to her needlework. She had only a little to go, so Ellen took her dress to the window, sat on her stool, and began. The morning was nearly done when a commotion out on the street got her to her feet. The village seldom had much shouting these days, but there it was: the sounds of a man’s voice barking orders, swearing.
Without thinking, Ellen got to her feet and went out to see what was happening. Her throat tightened when she saw Rose surrounded by the soldiers. The commandant had her by the arm and was shaking her like a rag doll. Rose didn’t cry out, but her glasses flew off her nose and bounced across the cobblestones. Ellen approaching the group, her hands out. “Jar Commandant, what is happening? Why do you have this poor old lady?”
The commandant’s eyes narrowed on her, and she suddenly felt the emptiness of the street pressing in on her. He had a platoon of soldiers at his back, while she had nothing.
“This poor old lady,” he said giving Rose another shake as if to prove his point, “has been reported as a wool thief. She has been stealing from the glorious war effort.”
Ellen and Rose’s eyes met, and the captured woman gave a tiny shake of her head. Ellen knew it meant, back off, go away, don’t get involved. However, after last night Ellen had found out what not getting involved led to.
She straightened as much as her back would allow. “Rose has been a faithful worker for the cause for more years than you have been alive, Jar Commandant. She has given her two sons, and her health. I hardly think she would take wool from their backs.”
The soldiers behind the commandant shifted, just a little. They were somebody’s sons too, and a flicker of emotion on one or two of their faces said they weren’t comfortable with this. Ellen hoped she read them right.
The commandant frowned, but his grip tightened on Rose, making her flinch. Old flesh hurt as much as young.
“Jai Ambrose is an honest sister of the State.” Sophie was out on her front steps, babe in her arms, speaking to the armed men as boldly as Ellen remembered her grandmother doing.
“Look at her fingers.” Now it was Catelyn who spoke, leaning against the door of her house. “See how she has worked them for the Glorious Cause.”
The commandant glanced down at Rose’s bent and crooked hands, and he let go of her arm.
“Her life is nearly spent, Jar Commandant. Let her work her remaining days.” Molly stood at the bend of the road. She was huffing and puffing, so she must have run as fast as she could to follow the soldiers.
Ellen realized that the rest of the knitters had formed up around the men, with Rose in the middle. The air felt odd, warm, with a faint hint of spring in it. She wondered why she had not noticed that before.
She also wondered if the entire circle was about to be killed.
The commandant shook his head, and let out a short laugh. “Rumors, stupid rumors. Go on, you old biddy, back to work.” And with that he turned on his heel to leave, but then spun around. “Besides, I have more important things to do.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he looked as though he didn’t quite know why he had said them, but it was too late. He and his soldiers turned and marched back towards the village square.
In a brief moment, it was only the five women of the knitting circle standing on the empty street. They drew together. Sophie picked up Rose’s glasses, which had miraculously survived, and handed them back to her.
“What just happened?” Catelyn gave voice to the jumble of thoughts crowding all their minds. “Did you…did you feel that?”
Ellen glanced down, and realized she still had her needlework in one hand. It was even prettier outside in the sunlight.
“I think we need to ask Nico a few questions,” she said.
All of them hustled over to Sophie’s house, whispering amongst themselves. Yes, indeed, they had all felt it, but what exactly it was remained to be seen.
Nico was looking positively charming sitting in the garret among the boxes of Sophie’s former family life. He looked up as the women climbed the stairs, and his initial smile faded. “Ladies?”
They all settled around him, sitting on the boxes.
“Here’s the thing,” Molly began as she had a wont to do, “we have never met anyone from Mensognes—let alone a magician.”
He frowned again. Sitting up straighter, he replied, “Never met a magician…but I thought you were a circle of witches?”
They all burst out laughing as if he had delivered the best joke in Doumount. Molly dissolved into a hacking cough.
Rose carefully cleaned her glasses on her sleeve. “What would make you think that?”
His frown was almost adorable. “Well, you found me, you healed me, you have protected this village even though it is right on the border with my country…and well…your country was known for its powerful witches. At least that is what our school children learn.”
Ellen wondered if perhaps she was dead and dreaming all this. She went to tell Nico he was completely wrong, and then stopped in her tracks. A memory, dusty but beloved, scrambled up in her mind. Her grandmother with her curly gray hair standing in the sunshine holding Ellen’s little cat. It had been hit by a cart, and all of Ellen’s sisters had told her it would be dead soon. She had known to bring it to Nona. Sitting in the sun, her grandmother had laid it on her lap as she began to knit. Its blood stained her apron, but she worked on stitching and singing in the sun. After an hour or so, the cat had sat up, purring with its whole ginger body as if nothing had happened.
Nona had told her to tell no one, and kissed her granddaughter on the forehead. After that, the memory went strangely fuzzy and distant.
Ellen grabbed one of Sophie’s hands and one of Rose’s. “He is right, dearest friends. He is right.”
They all looked around at each other, slow smiles dawning on their faces.
“I never thought to see anything worth smiling about,” Molly grumbled, as if she couldn’t help herself.
“Oh, tosh,” Rose said with a grin, “You say that every night.”
“But how does it work?” Catelyn asked. “Is it the knitting, the sewing?”
Nico shrugged. “I do not know. Each magic is different. Mine… mine is like a breeze in my face. I must sing.” He raised his hands, a smile spreading over his bruised face. “And then it comes to me. I am as free as a bird.”
“The commandant will keep looking for you though,” Rose said, her shoulders slumping. “How will we protect you?”
“We just shall,” Ellen said, her hands tightening on the sleeves of her cardigan, “and in return you shall teach us.” Out of her pocket she fished the sewing she’d been doing when they had come looking for Nico. “This was how they couldn’t find you. This is our weapon.”
“It’s only women’s work,” Catelyn said, the sunlight gleaming off the gray in her hair.
“But it can be powerful.” Ellen leaned forward. “Imagine if we knitted the commandant a scarf. Imagine if we knitted a set of socks for all the boys out there fighting. Imagine if we made something, just a little line of somethings to change The Glorious Cause. Stop it even.”
Nico beamed up at them, and she knew he could also imagine the possibilities.
But it was Sophie that spoke, jiggling Corwin on her knee. “Maybe the time for perseverance is over. Maybe the time for safety is done. I think it is time to get angry.”
The woman shared glances, which became broader and wickeder by the moment. It was heady, this taste of power and hope combined.
Rose planted her glasses on her nose and looked about. “Well then, let’s get back to the library. I’m heartily sick of the machines of war and the
lies, so let’s make something new, shall we?”
Ellen thought of all those men and boys gone. She thought of their broken lives, and she decided that getting angry was entirely appropriate.
“I rather think it is time to cast on and do something different.”
AN ESSAY BY
SHANNA GERMAIN
FOR THE LOVE OF ETTA CANDY:
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FEMALE FRIEND
“Fight? We use our principles. Although, I am not opposed to engaging in a bit of fisticuffs should the occasion arise.”
—Etta Candy
THIS WAS THE BEGINNING OF my downfall: a pair of red glasses and hot pink stirrup pants and a note in my locker. The scene: middle school. Mid ’80s. Me, the geek when geek wasn’t a good word. The girl who didn’t get it. The girl whose mother had dumped her so many years ago and who’d been raised by her father and who did not understand women. Or girls. Or boys. Or, really, anything at all. The not-quite-bisexual because she-didn’t-have-those-terms-yet girl. The girl in red glasses that she hated and the cheap-but-new hot pink stirrup pants that she realized in zero-point-zero seconds of getting on the bus that morning were a giant, giant mistake.
In my memory, the glasses, the giant, giant mistake of pink stretch pants, and the note in my locker are woven together in the seamless tapestry of story. Consequential, or at least correlational. But perhaps it was a different day. A different year. A parallel universe.
In my memory, I am wearing the glasses and the pants when I open my locker. I am about to go to the lunchroom and sit with my friends.
Friends.
It’s such a beautiful word, such a pure word. My whole life, I’ve wanted friends so badly. Particularly friends who were girls. I am a reader, a quiet scared girl who looks like a haunted ghost-child in photos, so pale, so sad. Those big eyes. The girls in my books all have girl friends. Nancy has Bess. Laura has Mary. Even Harriet the Spy has Janie.
And now I too have friends, half a dozen girls who seem to like me, who spend time at my house and who invite me to theirs. Who tell me their secrets. One has an alcoholic mother. The other believes she must match her socks to her underwear before she can leave the house or else something bad will happen. Another has a story about her brother that she hints at via Duran Duran lyrics, but has not yet spoken aloud. I believe in the power of these friendships, in what will blossom if given enough of my time, attention, and yearning.
The day of the pink pants, I open my locker. Inside is a piece of paper, tucked into the metal slats. It hangs there, poised with possibilities. Boys sometimes put notes in girl’s lockers. Do you like me? Y/N Can we hold hands between classes? I’ve never had a boy give me a note, except my father to miss class for an orthodontist appointment (did I also mention the braces?). I am not a note-getting girl. I am not the hero of anyone’s story, and I am definitely not the hero’s love interest.
But today? Maybe that is changing. Because there is a note. In my locker. Hanging. I am already imagining what I will tell me friends at the lunch table. How S. will flatten it out on the table with her perfect hands so we can see it better. How A. will say, “Who do you think it’s from?” and I will say, “I have no idea!” And together, we will dream.
I open it, this untold possibility, this secret promise.
The handwriting is not from a boy. It is, based on the curves of the letters, from my friend S.
WE DO NOT WANT TO BE YOUR FRIENDS ANYMORE. DO NOT SIT WITH US AT LUNCH.
A pair of red glasses and hot pink stirrup pants and a note in my locker. My feet poised on the edge of a rocky descent that I can’t yet see. When I get home, tear-smeared, devastated, destroyed, my new step-mother says, “Girls are just mean. Why don’t you play with boys instead?”
I took her advice. For the next ten or so years of my life, I had few female friends. They were, I believed, untrustworthy, likely to stab me in the back, dump me at a moment’s notice, break my heart with words. My male friends were fun, exciting. They taught me to play soccer and D&D. They didn’t talk about diets or shoes. They let me ride their motorcycles. But most of all, they didn’t dump me. They were loyal, at least until they got girlfriends, and then our friendship succumbed to a slow fading away, a ghostly afterimage of what we’d once had. Sad, but not painful.
Who, after all that, needed female friends?
It turned out that I did. I just didn’t know how to find them, or even what a healthy female friendship might look like. And so, I did what I always do when I am lost and uncertain, when I need information or a role model: I turned to books.
In the pages of my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels and comic books, I searched for what I then thought of as the confusing and elusive female friend. But it turned out she wasn’t confusing and elusive at all. She was right there, in novels and short stories and particularly in my favorite old Wonder Woman comics.
There, in the faded and yellowed pages, I rediscovered Wonder Woman’s female friend extraordinaire, Etta Candy. Etta traveled to another planet to rescue the hero. She stormed a Nazi concentration camp with candy and her wits as her only weapon. She jumped in front of a bullet to save Wonder Woman from being shot. She was smart, sexy, unashamed, and unafraid. Etta Candy, it turns out, was the perfect role model for the woman—and the friend—that I wanted to be.
After that, I started seeing the friend everywhere. She was the one answering the door in her pajamas to a late-night knock, seeing her friend-turned-werewolf, saying, “Oh my gosh, what happened?” She was up late in the library, looking up the method for getting rid of demons so that her best friend could kick their asses. There she was, crawling through the air ducts of the spaceship, so that she could overhear the evil overseer’s plans and relay them back to the hero.
In reading about Etta and the others, I discovered a lot about myself, about my own prejudices and perceptions, about the way that my uncertainty about my sexuality colored my understanding of friendships, and about my own role in the world. In the beginning, I’d thought I was the hero of this story, looking for a friend. Instead, I was the friend of this story, looking for a hero.
Stepping back, we can look at the female friend from a more analytical perspective. When it comes to common story archetypes, we see a number of characters that typically work alongside the hero: sidekick, mentor, love interest, caretaker…the list is extensive, but rarely do we see the word “friend” on there. Granted, sometimes the friend also fits into one or more of the archetypes listed above, but that is not their main role. Their main role is to be a friend—a true friend—to the hero.
Why isn’t friend on there? Some might argue that it’s not important enough or that it doesn’t play a big enough role in and of itself to merit recognition. That a friend is essentially a sidekick with a little mentorship (or love interest or family ties) rolled in.
But I would argue otherwise. I would argue that the role of the friend in fiction is a vital—if oft overlooked—one, with the opportunity to teach us a number of important life skills. Such as:
It’s Okay Not to Be the Hero of Every Story
“Woo-@&#%ing-Woo” —Etta Candy
I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO grow up in a time and place where people said things like, “Everyone can be a hero!” and “You can be whatever you want to be!” and “It doesn’t matter that you’re a girl!” But even then, I understood that sometimes grownups tell lies to make shy, bespectacled, bookwormish girls feel better.
Except that it didn’t make me feel better. Instead it made me feel awful because I knew I wasn’t a hero. I even made a list of all the heroes I wasn’t: I wasn’t the plucky hero (too shy). I wasn’t the ass-kicking hero (too nice and the only weapon I had was made by a toy company). Or the sassy hero (I never thought of the right thing to say until the day after). I wasn’t the daredevil hero (near in sight, short in stature, and afraid of almost everything). I wasn’t even the sneak-around-looking-for-clues hero (too clumsy and impatient, and also not very obser
vant).
As an adult, I understand that I am sometimes the hero after all, and sometimes I am the friend. And that both of these roles matter. That I am greater, not lesser, for choosing the role that best suits me and the situation at any given time.
I’ve run into a fair number of people who believe they’re the hero (or at the very least, the main subject) of every story, even if they’re not the ones who are best equipped to do the job. If it seems like someone else might be the hero, they’re not quite sure what to do with themselves, because they never learned vital lesson number two:
How to Act When You Aren’t the Hero
“Sweetie, just go. You were given all that power for a reason, weren’t you?” —Etta Candy
FICTIONAL FRIENDS TEACH YOU WHAT you can do when you’re not the one in the limelight. In short, they teach you how to support other people in order for the entire story to have a better ending. Sometimes that support is kicking the asses of the enemy alongside the hero. Sometimes it’s listening, doing research, cracking jokes, or serving up candy when candy is required. Sometimes it’s just shutting up and being there—always.
Being the friend isn’t about lurking in the shadows, taking a back seat, or being lesser than. It’s a vital role, one upon which outcome of the story hinges. While everyone’s looking at the hero, the friend is the one who’s setting plans in motion behind the scenes. But perhaps the friend’s most important role isn’t what she does, but who she does it for: the hero. It’s the relationship between the friend and the hero that creates the catalyst for beautiful, world-saving things to happen.
And that brings me to the final lesson that friends in fiction teach us:
How to Change the World
“Here’s the enemy. Let every girl get her man!” ~Etta Candy
I HAVE NEVER FELT MORE alone than the moment I stood in that school hallway in my pink stretch pants and read that note. That moment stretched into something so much larger than itself. It changed me, it defined me, and it haunted me. I knew that I didn’t want to ever make someone else feel the things that I was feeling, but I didn’t know how to prevent it.
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