by Skye Allen
Something about the way he pronounced the word “keep” made me think that was a real place. “Timothy. Where is his, uh, keep?”
“You know that some of the Fair Folk are prejudiced against mortals. Against interacting directly with mortals.”
“Sure, that was the sticking point with Margaret, wasn’t it?” I knew that could make him angry—the sticking point was that the two of them were together—but I was sick of him beating around the bush.
“Timothy believes in the mortal stain. As far as he is concerned the diary is a fey object now. He thinks it belongs to him. To us.”
What he said sank in after a moment. “You can’t be serious. He’d hold on to—it’s my own sister’s diary! It should be with me and my mom and Laura. And it’s all mortally polluted and shit! Why would he want it?”
“I can’t explain my brother any better than…. But then, you hardly know us. We are very different, Timothy and I.”
Because he’s a snob with a stick up his marble-white ass? “Just tell me where to find it.”
“You’re not following. He has sealed it and hidden it.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “With magic.”
“Okay then, if I can’t have it, what’s in it that’s so crucial?”
Silence. Finally he said, “What your sister wrote can be read, but not spoken aloud. That’s the spell. You must believe that I have tried.”
“I have to read it myself. Let me get this right. Timothy won’t give it to me, and even if I can figure out where he has it, there’s some kind of whammy on it, and the only way I can find out whatever burning news is inside is if I….”
This was a different silence. After a long time I took the phone away from my ear and stared at the Call Ended display in disbelief.
Chapter 10
I WALKED home from the bus stop after school faster than usual. I could hear the piano by the time I got to the front lawn. I dropped my shoulders back down to their normal place. Laura was okay. When I got inside, I saw her on the piano bench, doing something to the keys that looked like she was jerking a needle up through stiff cloth. I looked at her fluttery sleeves moving with every note and wondered when I’d be able to talk to her about Nicky without her going all glamourized. Today was Friday. Whatever happened, it was supposed to happen by Sunday. That was what the Lady had said.
I wanted to look at the puppet theater right away, but I was starving. I went into the kitchen and felt a surge of rage when I saw the low-tide drift of dirty dishes on the counter. Laura had probably been home all afternoon. Sure, Mom. I’ll play Cinderella as long as you want. Don’t feel like you have to rush home or make Laura lift a finger.
Mom had been gone for five days. Not very long, considering that everything in the known world had totally changed. I thought about Mom’s faded skin and the way she wore the same two pairs of slacks and five sweaters to work so she wouldn’t have to make decisions and how she’d be conked out by the time I made dinner for me and Laura most nights of the week. Let the woman have her vacation. Maybe she’d actually come back with some strength so the rest of my senior year wouldn’t be about counting her pills and calling the office to say Mom was home with a migraine again today.
I picked up Nicky’s coffee mug, one Mom had made with a teal crackle glaze and an unstable handle. Nicky had been careful not to hold it by the handle, I could tell, or it would have come loose again where Mom had glued it the last time. I was going to see Nicky again soon. Today, if I could. I realized I had no idea where she lived, and I didn’t have a phone number for her. Should I IM her? Maybe I should write a message in milk like she did this morning.
I dug through the fridge for my favorite peach yogurt and carried it into my room. I toed the door shut to muffle the plinky piano noise. Laura’s whole repertoire had gone modern since she started college. I felt a flicker of nostalgia for this time last year, when she was a senior at McLean and I was a junior, and she entered that Copland competition and spent months playing nothing but the spare melodies of Rodeo. There were no complications from another realm then, just the same old sick Mom and spoiled Laura and me trying to keep the house together and survive my last required semester of PE. We’d had to do diet charts in health class that month. I shuddered at the memory and peeled the foil top off my cup of Brown Cow, pointed away so it wouldn’t splatter on my sweater.
My clothes were still heaped on the floor beside the bed. I flushed at the memory of how they’d gotten there. I kicked the crumpled jeans to the side to clear a path and hunched down in front of the dresser to look into the puppet theater.
I was imagining the worst that could be in the diary. I was adopted. Dad wasn’t my dad. I had some terminal disease, and I was going to die before I reached eighteen. Well, yeah, at this rate I’m definitely going to die before next month. At least I had last night.
The puppet theater was empty. I realized I had been expecting a message from Nicky or another one from Jerome. Seeing the scratched brown paint of the stage floor, dust smears in the corner, the disappointment hit me all at once. There were no puppets anywhere: not hidden in the velvet folds of the curtain, not stuck to the bottom of the box. And no leaves or any other kind of message.
Nicky had IM’d me once. I flipped my laptop open to find no messages waiting. How was I supposed to get in touch with this girl? And how was I supposed to find out where Timothy lived, or where he had Margaret’s diary, without Nicky’s help?
Okay. I wrapped my arms around my ribs and realized I felt hollow. Before I could stop it, the worst-case scenario scrolled across my mind. Last night was a one-time thing. She’s back home laughing her ass off. Oh, I am the biggest idiot I know.
Sometimes I only noticed the sounds in the house when they stopped. Laura stopped playing right then, and the da-da-DA da-DA echoed in my ears. The sound of the bathroom door being shoved closed. It was too warped to close the normal way—you had to shove it at the top while tugging on the doorknob to get any privacy or else the door would drift open on its own. Water running. Then Laura was standing in my bedroom doorway.
I looked at her: print blouse, brown hair falling down out of the pins she kept it up in. Her flared white skirt and stick legs made her look like a shorebird. A line of ink arced across her cheek and dissolved in a smear where she’d probably tried to rub it off. My sister, the girl who’s going to die next. And I don’t know where, or when, and even if I did, I couldn’t stop it. I was the one who was supposed to have the power to protect her. I just wished I knew what that meant. I wished I knew how to use it.
She was biting her thin lips. “Did you see your message?”
“What message?”
“It was on the table.”
And when I went out to the kitchen, it was perched on the upturned bottom of a mason jar in the clutter of the kitchen table, an origami fortune teller like the kind we used to make in fourth grade, made of pink construction paper with JOSY printed on it. You were supposed to open a certain flap and read your fortune. When I was little, it was always personal revelations like “you stink!!” This time my fortune was a phone number, signed NICKY xxx. I retrieved my phone and brushed Nicky’s narrow blue letters with my fingertips while I dialed. It figures. I’m looking all over for some magical communication, but the elf girl just gives me her number.
Once we’d said hello, too eagerly on my part, I told her about what Jerome said. “So I have to get Margaret’s diary, but I have no clue where Timothy would have it,” I finished.
“Probably his tree house, but it’s going to be locked,” she said as if to herself. She cleared her throat and added, “That’d be the place to start. I’ll come by in, say, an hour, and we can see if we can get in, okay?”
“His tree house?” But she was already gone.
I went back into my room to pick out an outfit appropriate for breaking and entering, wondering what the tree house was. I wrote a note for Laura rather than interrupting the weird Sofia Gubaidulina piece she was pi
cking through. I didn’t want her to snap at me. For good measure I texted Neil to tell him I was going out with Nicky. It felt stupid, but that way I could tell Mom I’d done what she asked and told someone when I was going to be away from home. I pressed Send and wondered what kind of vehicle Nicky was going to pick me up in. I knew Neil would grill me about that.
It turned out to be a tandem bicycle. Green ribbon was laced through the back wheel’s spokes, and the handlebars were decorated with a twist of plastic daisies. A Pagan Lounge Lizard sticker glittered pink in the sun. Nicky dismounted and clicked the bike up the driveway.
“Nice wheels,” I said. She was wearing green cargo pants and a tank top the color of rust under her gray-brown-olive jacket. She looked like redwood camouflage.
“I borrowed it from Blossom. Hi.” She stepped up the one step to the front door and kissed my cheek, a feathery child’s kiss. She took a step back and looked in my eyes. She’s trying to guess how I feel. Just like I’m trying to guess how she feels.
I pulled her in for more of a kiss. The fabric on her back was warm from the sun under my hands. I smelled her smoky-cinnamony smell and thought Real. This is real. I have this right now, and nothing can take it away.
The bike worked just like a bike, no magical speed or anything. I didn’t know what I’d expected. I held on to the ram’s-horn handlebars mounted below Nicky’s seat, and she did the steering. The ride lasted maybe twenty minutes, and after we spun uphill behind the UC Berkeley campus, I was no longer sure where I was. I was sweating and breathing hard by the time she slowed the bike to a stop.
A narrow paved road curved up ahead of us and hairpinned down below, where we’d just ridden. To the right was a plastic-covered greenhouse set back from the road in an overgrown vegetable patch. I shook the stiffness out of my arms and headed for the ditch filled with waist-high grass, looking for a logical way through.
Nicky muscled the bicycle until it was lying in the ditch and then broke off a long strand of blond grass, holding it upright, both palms Namaste-style, and her face grew still. She grinned up at me after a few seconds. “That should do it.”
“Did you make it invisible?”
“No, but anyone who came this way would feel a powerful urge not to look in the ditch. That kind of magic is mostly deflection. Illusion,” she finished as she rose to her feet in a boneless motion. “It’s that way.”
I felt trepidation trickle through me. What if Timothy was home? I had no idea what would happen, but I was pretty clear that he didn’t like me. Or the idea of elves dating mortals. “Remind me why we have to break in again? He won’t just give it to you or Blossom?” I asked.
Nicky shaded her wide-set eyes with one hand. One of her rings glinted in the sun. “He thinks it’s his. Ours, I mean. He thinks it’s a fey thing now. He doesn’t want a mortal to have it. So this way he doesn’t know we have it. He’s prickly. Believe me, this is actually easier. We might be able to get him to let us read it, but….”
“Even that wouldn’t work.” I told her about the spell Jerome said was on the diary. If Nicky read it, she wouldn’t be able to tell me what was in it. I had to read it myself.
“He told you all that? Little leaves of spring. You are turning into one of us,” she said. I wondered what that meant.
When her mellow voice stopped, the silence echoed. I didn’t even hear traffic noises or the buzz of power lines. I looked in the direction she was pointing, across the road, as a crow shrieked and fell down into the air from the top branches of a redwood. The trees were thick there, and dark.
The tangy redwood smell hung in the hot air, and I heard small rustling noises everywhere as Nicky led me through the underbrush. If she was following a path, it wasn’t one I could see.
And then I tripped over a rock and looked down, and the path was there. I had to unfocus my eyes and look away before it took shape in my peripheral vision: a straight line of green so pale it was gold, lying on the ground and stretching out ahead. Where it disappeared from the leaf litter, the same color was repeated at knee level in the leaves of bushes and then farther away at the tips of fat oaks. The line twisted to the right just as Nicky slowed down to pull up a sock, and I stumbled against her.
“Whoa, taking over this scout mission, my little mortal?” she teased.
“Isn’t it that way?”
“You can see that?” She sighted along the path where it curved. “Well, rowan and thorn, it’s true, then.”
“What is?”
“I know the Lady gave you her protection. And a gift of your own. So now I guess it’s no wonder you can see things you couldn’t see before. Things that aren’t visible to mortals.” She resumed walking, faster this time.
Can I see things that are only in Faerie? Is there anything there I still can’t see? I watched the green-gold line lead us steeply downhill and worked that thought over.
There, at the bottom of a ravine, I saw the tree house. It was obscured by the circle of redwoods it stood in, and with its round walls, I mistook it for a huge burned stump at first. It was a tower. It was only wide enough for one big room, but it was maybe four stories high. I didn’t see any windows. The walls were a deep black-red color and looked rough. I saw why when we were closer: they were made of vertical boards with the bark still intact. Moss and sprays of tiny leaves lined the cracks.
I also didn’t see a door. I turned to Nicky to ask what to do and discovered that she was already pacing around the structure with both hands flat against the wood, listening. A branch snapped, and I jumped. Was Timothy here? Every rustle of a bird or squirrel was the sound of him approaching. Every breath of wind was a weapon.
“Got it,” Nicky breathed, and where there had been no door, a narrow door was now outlined in the same green-gold as the leaf path. It was beautiful, or I would probably think so if I weren’t so terrified that we were going to get caught.
Dandelion, I thought as soon as I was inside. That was the bitter green smell in the low-ceilinged room: the cut stems of dandelions. Dust twisted in a shaft of light, and I looked up, way up, to see a star-shaped skylight in the center of the roof. A row of low benches the same silver-brown as the smooth walls surrounded the bare floor, and things hung on hooks above them: a shimmer of fabric that could be a coat, a horse’s bridle that looked like it was made of flexible silver. Nicky’s long footsteps echoed in the hush as she strode across the room. “It’ll be up here if it’s here at all,” she called. She jumped up to slap the ceiling, and a rope thudded to the floor. She shook it out and was halfway up, boots squeaking on the dense twine, before I realized it was a ladder. A small square of ceiling had opened when the rope came down.
Oh no. I would never be able to climb a fairy ladder. I’d break it, and probably my tailbone when I landed back on it. With zero dignity.
“See anything?” I called upward.
“Not yet. Come up!” When I didn’t, Nicky’s face appeared in the square. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think I can fit.”
“You can. I’ll pull you.” And with a lot of swaying, I did make it up the ladder. I hated heights. There was a good reason fat girls tended not to climb. But the ladder held, and I felt my T-shirt stretch out as my stomach strained up through the square hole. I flopped out on the floor of the second level, disentangling one sneaker from the rope. Yep, that was some dignity, all right. There’s my new girlfriend, seeing me look like a beached whale. I rubbed a scratch on my forearm and took a long look around. Nicky was looking away at something on the wall. I wondered if she was being polite. I palmed my damp cheeks and knew my face was red.
If the ground floor was the entryway, this room was where the living happened. Bunk beds sat against one wall, the lower one bare, with folded linens on the wood slats. Cupboards followed the tight curve of the room, with green glass doorknobs set in the smooth wood at random intervals. And hugging the hole in the center of the room that let the light fall from ceiling to ground was a full drum kit.
“It’s a bachelor pad, what can I say? Two boys lived here for ages. You know how they can be,” Nicky said when she saw me looking at the drums.
“Two boys?”
“This is Timothy and Jerome’s place. They like their toys. Or T does. Jerome hasn’t lived here in a few years.”
“That serious doctor I met slept in a bunk bed?” I crossed to the cupboards as I spoke. The diary was here somewhere.
“Elves can be multifaceted. You should see him play Scrabble.”
“Oh come on,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was opening the little doors in the cupboards. Books, mostly—why would someone keep their books behind a solid wooden door?—and neat shelves that held clothes. An old-fashioned shaving kit with a straight razor and a fat bristle brush nestled on a shelf below a gold-framed mirror. I wondered where the plumbing was in the tree house.
But I didn’t find anything that looked like a diary. “I don’t think it’s in this room,” I said.
“You have to know him,” Nicky answered, and she shook the shiny turquoise book that was in her hand.
“What? Where was it?”
“In the kick drum. Under this… thing.” In her other hand was a streaked gray rag. “Please tell me he never actually wore this.”
“That’s where he kept that precious thing he bonded to his house?” I took the little book from her. The satin cover was embroidered with little Chinese fans. The pages were edged in gold, and the book had a fat ribbon tight across it that ended in a lock where the knot should be. I smiled at the little-girl nature of my sister’s diary. Literally a diary, like the kind I got for my eighth birthday but never used. Margaret used hers. About two-thirds of the pages were wavy where they’d been written in. It’s in here, the key to all this. Whatever it is. I felt a breath of fear.