by Skye Allen
Copyright
Published by
Harmony Ink Press
5032 Capital Circle SW
Suite 2, PMB# 279
Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886
USA
[email protected]
http://harmonyinkpress.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Pretty Peg
© 2014 Skye Allen.
Cover Art
© 2014 Nathie.
creationwarrior.net
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Harmony Ink Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or [email protected].
ISBN: 978-1-63216-054-6
Library ISBN: 978-1-63216-055-3
Digital ISBN: 978-1-63216-056-0
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
June 2014
Library Edition
September 2014
For Nadja
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU:
To my wife Nadja Kuhner, for everything. To David West, who first dared me to write a novel. To Elizabeth Bear, who four years later told me it was done. To everyone who read my early drafts, including Karen Bjorneby, Linda Cleary, Hannah Emery, Matthew L. Lavin, Susanna E. Skelley, and the terrifically talented Emily Salzfass, who died in January 2013, way too young and with way too much not written yet. To the crew at Harmony Ink Press, especially Anne Regan and her team, Rose Archer, Nessa Warin, and Nathie Block.
Books that helped me research the US war with Afghanistan included A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan by Nelofer Pazira, The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban by Sarah Chayes, and Letters from the Front Lines: Iraq and Afghanistan by Rear Admiral Stuart Franklin Platt. Hope in Hell: Inside the World of Doctors Without Borders by Dan Bortolotti gave me an understanding of that organization. Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia by Carol Rose and the website SurLaLunefairytales.com helped me with the world of the Fair Folk.
The plot for this book was inspired by the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Banks o’ Fordie.” Songs are called “traditional” when the songwriter's name is forgotten, but I am grateful to the person who wrote it. Josy sings the first lines in Chapter 11.
Chapter 1
ON MONDAY morning, getting ready for school, I could not find my yellow high-tops. I had other shoes, but Mondays were hideous enough without my favorites. I finally spotted one under the dresser. I pulled it out, and my head came up level with my chair, where my sister Margaret’s puppet theater rested. There was bossy little Mom, front and center, four inches high with a felt-tip frown.
I picked up the paper doll. That wasn’t Mom. This little figure was chubby, with a striped miniskirt and lace-up boots. The short hair was streaked with pink.
It was me.
I ran a fingertip over the lentil-sized heart drawn in orange pencil on her T-shirt. The last time I saw Margaret, I’d had a mass of frizzy dark hair that I mostly kept tied back in a gigantic ponytail. Not a hot look for a seventeen-year-old girl, but I was a size twenty. The only way to survive high school was not to be seen, in spite of my bulk. Or so I’d always thought, until my best friend Neil sat me down for a style makeover before senior year started and made me promise to stop wearing men’s button-downs to school. He’d even gotten me to throw on one of my own Frankengowns to wear to a show at Fern’s Bleedingheart Lounge last week—the first time I’d worn one anyplace other than babysitting his sisters. Next came the swingy skirts and the trip to Sephora. Last week was the latest installment in the transformation of Josy Grant, when he’d put pink streaks in my now bobbed hair.
Margaret had died almost six months ago. There was no way she could have known I’d have pink hair.
I had found the puppet theater last night, looking for batteries in the garage. A big box with MARGARET written on it in Sharpie had been peeking out from a top shelf—a box I’d never seen before. In it was a fat envelope of photos, her blue graduation cap, and a child’s softball mitt that filled my throat with tears when I touched it. And the puppet theater.
Now, in my room, I picked up the little cardboard structure and turned it all the way around. Silver stars drifted out of the velvet curtain and disappeared into the carpet. The construction was not complicated or especially sturdy. Balsa wood beams provided the bones. The cardboard floor was painted with scratched brown tempera paint. Nothing on the back but faded blue construction paper stapled to the old detergent box that formed the frame. The paper Mom doll that had been on the stage last night, with her swirl of silver hair and stern mouth, was gone.
I examined the trinkets that hung from the wire across the top of the theater. Miniature plastic soldiers maneuvered along a knotted string, aiming their rifles at a beer-mug keychain. Maybe the soldiers were my brother Robert and the mug was Dad. An airplane was suspended from fishing line at the other end. That could be Mom. Hooked over the curtain wire was a tiny piano: the universal symbol for my sister Laura, older than me by one year, but not what you’d call wiser. In my opinion.
There was an object dangling from that wire for everyone in the family. I looked for mine, but all I saw was paper Josy, with a devious red smile, ten times prettier than real life.
Laura had to be messing with the puppet theater. I hadn’t shown it to her last night, but she could have snooped. I tried to recall whether I’d heard a break in the piano scales while I was in the shower. That would have been her opportunity to breach security in my room.
I pulled my school gear together and went out to the living room to ask her why the practical joke, but I should have known by the silence that she’d already left for class. If my sister was home, she was practicing. She got married to that instrument way before I could remember. Laura playing was like there being oxygen in the air, or ground-up painkillers in Mom’s tea. That was the Grant family home.
Except that Mom had boarded a plane for India yesterday, return date TBD.
I double-checked the dead bolt before leaping down the steps to run for the bus. The sun was already hot at eight in the morning. The air was full of cut grass and the sound of garbage trucks. September is the summeriest month in Oakland. I hated spending it locked up in McLean High, but this was the last year I would have to.
AT LUNCH, I lay on a picnic table and watched the black birds lined up on the school’s Spanish tile roof. The wide egg-shaped lawn was broken up by a few tables and one gigantic oak. The grass was covered with kids lying with their shirts hiked up for the last hurrah of summer sun. If it weren’t for the dress code, and if you didn’t know about the metal detectors inside the double doors, you could just about imagine you were free to do anything you wanted.
A freedom example: seniors had open campus at lunch. Neil and I had tried it for the first couple o
f weeks, but today we chose the novelty of being the only seniors on the lawn.
“So your mom got on the plane okay?” Neil asked. He looked like one of those saints painted on wood: black hair, sleepy eyelids, sorrowful mouth in a long face.
“Yep, off on the vision quest.” Most people would hesitate to leave two teenage daughters home alone, especially after what happened to Margaret. But Neil knew that in our house, at least for the past six months, I was the one who took care of Mom.
“I hope she finds what she’s looking for. I feel bad for her. I mean”—he caught my eye and looked down—“it sucks for all you guys.”
I nodded. We’d had this conversation a thousand times.
“Where’s your extra-Cs?” Neil was shuffling through my schedule. He palmed the papers down to stop them from lifting into the breeze. “I only see curricular activities here. You need some extra. It’s, like, deep into the semester already.”
“It’s week three. And why would I do after-school stuff at school? Besides, I have to keep the house together.” I dug into the bottom of the little paper box for the last crispy fry.
“And I don’t have to babysit Thing One and Thing Two while my mom is at work?” That shut me up. “Do Recycle Or Die with me. We’re gonna make Christmas ornaments out of crack pipes we find at the marina.” He sighted me down the barrel of his straw.
“I suck at crafts.” I thought about Margaret’s puppet theater. She’d made those paper dolls really look like the Grant family somehow, with just a few strokes of a colored pencil. One more talent destroyed forever. In the last six months, I’d asked myself a lot of questions. Like: why did someone so gifted and driven have to get killed while plain old me was still kicking?
“No you don’t. You just don’t think you need to learn a new one since you’re going to be an Etsy success story before you can vote.”
“I could never sell my babies.” I was good at deconstructing vintage T-shirts to turn into dresses, but I only did it for fun. I couldn’t picture myself following directions from some perky home ec teacher.
A dark-haired boy in a retro polo shirt sauntered in our direction from the double doors. I didn’t know him, but there was a whole crop of new kids this year. Neil sat up and shaded his eyes with a bony hand, then slid back down into a slouch. “Yours.”
Plaid polo was almost to our table now. A stack of hot-pink flyers was gripped in a hand whose wrist was circled with a slender twist of tattooed thorns. The black-and-gray shirt was tight enough that I could see this was not a boy. “How do you do that?” I muttered to Neil.
“Hi, are you guys seniors?” The girl’s voice was throaty. Chocolaty. Round brown eyes flicked over Neil and rested on me.
“Yes we are. I’m Neil Hernandez, and this is Josy Grant. What’s the cause?” Neil sounded too bright. I gave him the do-not-matchmake eye, but he was, on purpose, not looking at me.
“My name’s Nicky. We’re looking for some refurbishing for the theater this fall. Paint and stuff. It’s great if you still need something for senior service.”
“I was just telling her she needed to flesh out her resume! Wasn’t I?” Neil’s hand drew an Etch A Sketch line between me and Nicky.
“I seriously suck at art,” I told Nicky.
“It’s more like sanding down the dressing room doors so they actually close. It’d be really cool if you could sign up. We need some new talent bad.” Her smile made her whole face turn up. Short curly hair, plump lips, round cheeks the color of tea with cream. If a little kid drew her face, it would be all circles.
I folded the flyer she handed me into a tiny square and watched her jaunty walk as she threaded her way through the sunbathers. “Did you hear that? She needs you bad. And Mom would, like, give me a prize if I got you to go out with a Mexican girl,” Neil said.
“Out of my league.” The bell rang, and I zipped up my bag. “Fern’s tonight?” I wanted to talk to him about Margaret and the puppet theater. I’d put it off all through lunch, and now I was out of time.
“Little girls tonight. Mac and cheese tonight. Mom has a church meeting. I’m not letting this go. That girl was obviously hot for you.”
“Uh-huh. Love you.” I pitched the remnants of my lunch into the metal trash can chained to the guard rail and then hesitated with the pink flyer in my hand. Girls who looked like that were never hot for me. But I still slipped the flyer into my pocket before heading to American Government.
AT HOME that afternoon, the house was sweltering. Laura was playing arpeggios, which meant she’d been home for at least twenty minutes. It went scales, then arpeggios, then regular music. There was a quart mason jar of ice water on the floor next to her tote bag.
I twisted my own ice from the half-full blue tray in the freezer and crunched on a chunk while I walked to my room to shove my overheated feet into sandals. Shoes were not subject to McLean regulation. The school insisted that the dress code made the rich and poor kids equal, but all it really did was hone your awareness of who went back-to-school shopping at Bloomingdale’s and who went to Target. The Grants were a Target family.
I kicked my yellow high-tops back under the dresser. There was Margaret’s puppet theater, glinting where the sun hit the little metal pieces. The background was painted with soft blue mountains, and silver lightning was glued to the sky.
And next to the Josy puppet was a horse, made of stiff blue-green paper with tiny silver charms in its mane. That had definitely not been there this morning.
I kept Margaret’s old Camp Golden Eagle T-shirt rolled up at the back of my bottom drawer. I shook it out now. It was thin with hundreds of washes, just how I liked my shirts. This one was a perfect candidate to be recycled into a Frankengown, but I would never cut it. It was a men’s XL—its first owner had been another counselor she’d dated at camp—so it fit me the way it was already. I hugged myself hard and pretended the fabric was her.
Margaret had left for Afghanistan right after college. The idea was to spend a year doing volunteer work, then come back and go to medical school. She’d had her eye on Doctors Without Borders from the beginning. She must have been planning to get posted to someplace dangerous because she started preparing Mom and Dad right away. It turned out she’d even been taking language classes: Dari, Arabic, and Russian, so that, according to her, she could read the old signs from the last foreign occupation.
The long-distance fights were epic, but Dad took her side. Margaret was his princess, way more than me or Laura. “If that’s your dream, honey, you go do it,” he’d said on his annual four-hour visit. Dad had that brick-wall build that made people think of football, but Mom was the one who dominated the room. She’d stomped out, yelling over her shoulder, “I’m not risking two of you! One is too many!”
She’d meant my brother Robert, but he had survived his tour of duty in Helmand Province, outpost of the Taliban, and now the biggest danger he faced was slipping in salmon guts on the deck of the fishing boat he worked on and drowning in the Gulf of Alaska. Margaret—the wrong sibling—was the one who’d died in Afghanistan, doing high-risk activities like trying to get pregnant women to take vitamins. She was twenty-three.
I was tickled that Laura was going to all the trouble of arranging these weird little scenes on the puppet theater stage. Maybe she felt guilty about being gone so much now that she was in college. We weren’t the best-friend kind of sisters, but we weren’t enemies either. Once in a while, she’d make some kind of weird arty gesture to show she tolerated me.
I picked up my bag and shook it for change. It didn’t sound plentiful. A lake of silver lay in my top dresser drawer under all the crumpled receipts and hair clips and candy. I stuffed three dollars in dimes into my bag and made my way past the overloaded kitchen table, behind Laura at the piano, to the doorway where I knew she could see me. She was doing jerky arm moves to a thumpy Beethoven piece. A dress strap was slipping down one thin shoulder, and her glossy pompadour bounced on every beat. “Lor!” I yelled.
“Shit! I’m right in the zone.” She lifted her hands from the keys to her hair and twisted to look at me. Her pale face was blotchy, and her protruding eyes blinked fast. She had the glazed look of someone who’d been staring at the computer for too long.
“Sorry. I’m going to Fern’s.” Part of the deal with Mom: tell each other where we were going. It wouldn’t do any good, but I’d promised.
“Okay.”
“Very funny about the puppet theater, by the way.”
“What?” She was already facing the keys again.
“You know, Margaret’s puppet theater in my room. Don’t you keep moving the little people?”
“No clue what you’re talking about.” She was telling the truth. I could always tell when she was lying. Her cheeks would go blotchy, and her voice would squeak out about an octave higher than usual. Now she was talking in her normal walnutty alto, the voice that startled people who expected waiflike Laura to have a high-pitched lisp, plus her skin was normal. Mom called it her “white-peach complexion.” Mine was “olive.” At least I didn’t blush that fast.
“Come look,” I pleaded. And she actually unglued her butt from the piano bench to follow me into my room.
The puppet theater looked small and childish now that I was seeing it through someone else’s eyes. A line of shiny trim wobbled at one edge where the glue was coming loose.
“Margaret left this? She made this?” Laura touched the velvet curtain. She turned her round face to look at me. “I wish….”
“I know.”
“I mean, I wish Mom could see it too.” Her eyes flicked across mine.
“I know.” We didn’t talk about Margaret most of the time, not directly. Mom came apart whenever anyone said her name. I could relate, even though I didn’t dose myself like Mom to keep it together. My feelings about Margaret were like a raw egg with no shell, just that fragile membrane. I didn’t want anything to burst out and make a mess. It had to be even worse for Mom. I held my breath whenever the subject of my oldest sister came up. As far as I could tell, so did Laura.