by Lisa Mangum
The Faerie Journal
Megan Grey
I had just finished checking my faerie garden when I heard the rattle and thump of my aunt’s rusty van pulling into the driveway. Normally, I’d hurry through the gate to the front yard to ask if she needed help with the groceries or whatever—Daddy was big on me repaying Aunt Lue’s hospitality with “helpful hands”—but I hung back. Aunt Lue wasn’t coming back from work or the store like usual. This time she’d brought my cousin home from war.
I eyed the bluebells as they trembled in a small gust of muggy Houston wind. Perhaps I should check that patch again. Papa Twilly always said faeries showed themselves more on important days, and today felt important. I parted the small petals carefully. This late in spring their blue was no longer as vibrant and pretty against the dark brown of my hands, the petals beginning to shrivel against the thickening heat of approaching summer.
Nothing. The flicker of a dragonfly, but no faeries.
I closed the journal that lay open beside me. Voices drifted faintly from the driveway: Aunt Lue, even Daddy. Which meant this was an important day for sure. I hadn’t seen Daddy out of his bedroom in over three days. Another voice sounded, softer. Was that Janna? I didn’t recognize my cousin’s voice. I hadn’t seen her since I was seven and we’d visited this very house for Christmas, back before Momma died. But that was five years ago. I wasn’t a little kid anymore, and Janna probably wasn’t the same teenage girl who’d put butterfly clips in my hair and taught me the words to a song that got me grounded when I sang it on Christmas Eve.
Back then I didn’t even know about the faeries. It was only two years ago that Aunt Lue told me the stories of my grandfather, who everyone called Papa Twilly, and I’d started my very own faerie garden. Since then, I’d read every book I could find on the subject. That’s how I knew the proper spelling for them—“faerie,” not “fairy,” which is a mistake a lot of books for little kids make. The serious ones, the ones that tell what kind of flowers and food attract them, the ones that have stories of people who’ve really seen them, always spell it right.
Daddy didn’t believe faeries love cinnamon or are afraid of metal or that their leader is a majestic purple unicorn. Daddy didn’t even believe faeries are real. Once I’d heard Daddy tell Aunt Lue that faeries were a white girl’s foolishness. Which was ridiculous, even if the faerie books mostly did have stories about white girls. Papa Twilly saw faeries all the time, and he was a proud black man. He’d seen faeries in every color of the rainbow, and some besides. Many of them didn’t have human skin at all, but were bark and leaves and moss with wings and limbs. So why would they care about human skin color?
“Lizzy!” Daddy called through the screen door. “You still out there? Luenna and Janna are here. Come in and see your cousin.”
I brushed the loose dirt from my pants, though the knees on these jeans were so dirt-stained from days spent among my faerie garden that no amount of brushing or even washing would make them new again. I left the journal outside. On a day like today, I’d probably need to check again later.
Daddy squeezed my shoulder when I entered the kitchen. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been in last I’d seen him: his bathrobe over worn flannel pants. He didn’t wear normal-people clothes much these days, but I guess that’s not a problem if you never leave your room.
“Remember, Janna’s been hurt, she’s different. No staring,” he said in a whisper.
“Yes, Daddy.” I’d seen the pictures Aunt Lue had sent from the hospital.
But when I walked into the living room and actually saw my cousin in person, I ended up staring anyway. Janna wore a loose-fitting purple T-shirt with her high school track team logo on it and a pair of gray sweatpants that didn’t manage to hide the fact that her left leg was missing, replaced by a fake metal leg that peeked out above her dirty white sneakers. She leaned on short black metal crutches that didn’t look anything like the padded gray crutches I’d had the summer I broke my ankle. These didn’t fit under her shoulders, but had handholds she gripped so tightly her knuckles paled.
Her face, though. The pictures had shown her head wrapped in bandages, so I’d been—like some dumb kid scared by a movie—kind of expecting my cousin to arrive wrapped up and shambling like a mummy, and maybe even drooling.
The truth wasn’t worse, but it wasn’t better.
The left side of Janna’s once pretty face looked like it had melted under the Afghanistan sun. Her left eye was totally closed and nearly skinned over, the corner of it tugged down in a constant tearless weep. Her lip, too. Her black hair, cut close to her head, didn’t cover the ragged hole where her ear should have been. My skin felt itchy all over looking at her.
“Hi, Lizzy,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound like the Janna of the dirty songs of Christmas past. It was too deep, too slurred.
Daddy patted my back, and I remembered my manners. “Hi, Janna. I’m glad you’re back.”
The right side of her lip curled up into a kind of smile, though her right eye didn’t smile with it. Maybe the shrapnel had hit that muscle, too. “Me, too, Sugarcube.”
Her calling me the nickname she’d given me that Christmas after catching me eating sugar cubes straight from the dish should have made me feel more comfortable.
I smiled so she would think it did.
“Let’s get you to your room,” Aunt Lue said. “I’ve kept up those posters you liked, except for that god-awful Kane one.”
“Kanye,” Janna and I said at the same time.
My aunt shook her head. “Either way, Lizzy’s sharing the room with you now, and her momma, bless her soul, would never forgive me for putting her little girl in the same room with that.”
Janna slowly made her way to the bedroom. I didn’t want to go in there, not yet, even though that’s where all my books were. I went back to my faerie garden and peered into the patch of black-eyed Susans.
Daddy watched me through the screen door for a long time, but I pretended not to see him.
* * *
Papa Twilly’s real name was Timothy William, which somehow became T. Willy, which eventually became just Twilly. Daddy’s name was Timothy William, Jr., but everyone just called him Tim. I guess one Twilly’s enough for any family.
I’d never met Papa Twilly, who’d died before I was born, but Aunt Lue told me all about him when Daddy and I moved in with her two years ago. Papa Twilly was a good man, fought in the Vietnam War and came home to a job working in plastics manufacturing. He married his high school girlfriend, my Nana Relia, and had four kids—Daddy and Aunt Lue and a set of twins who died soon after they were born. He also claimed his life was guided by faeries. “Life isn’t easy, Luenna,” he told my aunt one day after the twins died, “but my little friends are here, and we’ll be okay.”
Aunt Lue said he didn’t tell many people about the faeries, because everyone he told thought he was crazy. Papa Twilly kept a journal, though, full of stories and descriptions and drawings of the faeries. Aunt Lue gave it to me a few months after I moved in, when I’d come home crying one day because the kids at school called me Orca. Even then I knew she didn’t believe Papa Twilly’s stories, especially since the Bible doesn’t say anything about faeries. She just wanted to give me something so I’d forget about school and the whale sounds kids made when I walked by.
But when I read Papa Twilly’s journal, I knew it was more than just stories. I knew the faeries were out there, and that one day I’d see them too. I just had to try hard enough, make them know I was here, waiting for them. The rest of the world may not believe in them, but I would believe hard enough to make up for everyone else.
A week after Janna’s return, I sat in a patch of grass damp from the sprinkler Aunt Lue had turned on that morning. I looked back and forth between Papa Twilly’s journal and one of my favorite serious faerie books. This book said faeries hated unnatural smells, perfumes and such, but Papa Twilly said a couple of his little friends used to only come out when h
e’d douse himself in Brut cologne. They’d perch on his shoulder like birds and whisper secrets of the forest into his ears.
Aunt Lue wouldn’t buy me any Brut, so I’d snuck into her room after she left for work and sprayed on some of her drugstore perfume, coughing at the strong blast. It smelled flowery and not at the same time, like gardenia and roses rubbed with old pennies. Then I sat in front of the ring of stones I’d made for the faeries. Inside the ring were little bathroom paper cups filled with cinnamon and honey.
No faeries yet. I didn’t blame them. I wrinkled my nose, still smelling the perfume on me even after a half hour outside.
The screen door banged shut behind me. Janna came out, using her crutches slowly on the steps down. She eased herself into the white plastic chair that was the only one left of the set of four Aunt Lue used to have out on the deck.
Though we shared a room, Janna and I hadn’t talked much. She’d be sleeping when I went to school, and sometimes still be sleeping when I’d come home. Sometimes she’d just be sitting on the bed, staring out the window, tapping her fingers on her leg like there was an invisible keyboard. I’d started leaving my books out in the living room, so I wouldn’t have to go into the bedroom very much.
Between Janna and Daddy spending all their days locked away, the house was very quiet until my aunt got home. I didn’t mind. I was used to it by now.
“Mom says you’re looking for fairies.” The way Janna said it, I knew she wasn’t spelling it right in her mind.
“Yes,” I said, cautiously. I didn’t know Janna’s opinion on Papa Twilly.
“Found any yet?”
I looked down at Papa Twilly’s journal, pages and pages of drawings and experiences. My notebook had pages and pages, too, but only of failed attempts. “Not yet.”
She nodded, as if that confirmed something. “Did you take a bath in Mom’s perfume? Maybe that’s scaring them away.” The side of her lip curled up like it had that first day. I was used to her new face now, but the difference between the two sides—one pretty and smooth, the other melted and scarred—still made my stomach a little floppy. Like my cousin was half herself and half someone else and neither version made a full person.
The smile on her face slipped when she caught me staring. I looked away guiltily and wiped sweat from my forehead. There wasn’t much wind today, not that wind helped any this time of year. It just blew the heavy heat around. A fat bee buzzed near my ear, but I didn’t bat it away. One of my books said bees were faerie scouts. Papa Twilly never mentioned bees, but who knows?
“How’s school?” Janna asked. “Mom said you had a hard time when you first moved here.”
“It’s better,” I said, though that wasn’t really true. The kids didn’t call me Orca anymore, but since I’d gotten boobs before any of the other girls, they started calling me Jugs and the boys laughed and tried to grab my chest in the hallway. But if my teachers couldn’t stop it from happening, what was the point of telling anyone else? Daddy and Aunt Lue and Janna all had their own problems.
More silence, except for the twitter of a bird and the distant hum of freeway traffic two streets over.
“You can ask me, you know. About the war. About my face or my leg.”
I looked back at Janna. “You want me to?”
She shrugged. “Better than no one talking about it all.”
That made sense, I supposed. “Aunt Lue said you were driving a truck and a bomb exploded.”
Janna let out a laugh, though it sounded more like a hiss. “I guess you know it all already, then.”
“Does it hurt?”
“I take lots of pills. It’s not so bad now.”
I thought of Daddy since Momma died in the car accident, closed off in his room almost all the time. Writing his next book, he said, but he hadn’t needed to be alone so much to write the first three. I wished there were pills that took away the pain of losing people like there were for losing legs. I wished even more that the faeries would come.
Janna watched me expectantly, a kind of challenge in her good eye.
I sucked in my lip, thinking. “Did you ever see someone die?”
She blinked, staring back at me, and for a minute I thought I’d failed at some test I didn’t even know I was taking. Then, softly, “Yeah. Lots of people. My friends.”
In Papa Twilly’s journal, he talked about the Vietnam War. The faeries came to him there, too, though they weren’t the same ones he knew from Texas. They were creatures of reeds and water, with wings of palm fronds and bodies slim as blades of grass. They’d whisper to him in a language he didn’t understand and watch over him when he slept. He’d see them flutter over the bodies of the dead no matter what country they were from, saying good-bye to friends who’d never even known they were there.
I wondered what the faeries in Afghanistan looked like.
Janna must have gotten bored waiting for me to ask more questions, because she kept talking all on her own. “We were doing a supply run when we hit a land mine. When I hit a land mine. Then they attacked, pinning us down. Carter, Brooks, the LT, Rice, and Millaney—all of them but me died. Well,” she said, barking out another of those not-laughs, “Rice is still alive, but he’s worse off than me. He’s a vegetable, pretty much. They’ll pull the plug on him eventually. Probably better that way.”
Didn’t sound better to me. I turned back to the ring of stones. A roly-poly crawling around the base of the cup of honey curled into a ball when I touched it.
“You know Papa Twilly was totally bat-shit, right?” Janna said, sounding angry all of a sudden. “Mom told me all those stories when I was a kid, too, and I even believed them for awhile. But mental illness runs in our family. Papa’s mother went to a sanitarium and her sister killed herself. Even your daddy …” She trailed off, then shook her head.
“Daddy’s not crazy. He’s working on his book!” I yelled. Warm liquid spilled onto my fist, and I saw I had crushed the tiny cup of honey. I drew in a shaky breath. Best manners. Anger scared faeries. “And Papa Twilly wasn’t crazy, either. The faeries are out there.”
“Then why haven’t you seen them?”
“Go away, Janna.” I carefully set down the crushed cup, my fingers sticking together at the knuckles. Maybe the faeries didn’t like DollarCo store-brand honey. I should ask Aunt Lue to buy a different kind.
I didn’t look back as the plastic chair scuffled in the dirt as she got up, or as the crutches creaked and her pretend foot dragged across the ground. Then the sounds of her walking stopped.
“I remembered those stories after the bomb hit,” she said. “There was all this movement and heat and pain, but no noise at all. And walking through it all I saw a giant purple unicorn, coming right up to me. Had the horn and everything. It watched me and I watched it. Then the noise came back and all the screaming and the gunfire, and the unicorn was gone.”
My anger disappeared, replaced by pure shock. “You saw the purple unicorn? That’s … that’s …” I was going to say “impossible,” because even Papa Twilly had never seen the purple unicorn that ruled over all the faeries. But if the faeries were real, that meant the unicorn was, too. Joy and envy pulled my thoughts in different directions like kids at tug-of-war.
“There was no purple unicorn,” Janna said quickly. “The therapist said your brain does strange things in situations like that. It’s like a coping mechanism or something.”
But I didn’t care what some therapist who’d probably never even read any serious faerie books thought.
“Maybe the unicorn saved you,” I said.
Janna blinked her good eye, once, twice. “Maybe it shouldn’t have.”
Without another word, she went into the house, the screen door slamming shut behind her.
* * *
I spent days poring over every reference to the violet unicorn, ruler of faeries the world over, in Papa Twilly’s journal. There wasn’t much, really, since he’d never seen so much as a mystical hoofprint, but he’d dra
wn a picture based on what the faeries described to him. I traced that picture with my finger until I worried I’d rub the old ink right off.
I was happy the unicorn saved my cousin. But it chewed at me, deep in my gut. Why her? Why, when she didn’t even believe, would she see the most rare of all the magical creatures?
Why couldn’t I?
“Hey, Jugs,” called a boy biking past with his friends on the way home from school. The boys pulled their bikes around to block me on the sidewalk.
My heart hammered in my chest. There was only a week left of school. Why wouldn’t they just leave me alone? My hands tightened around Papa Twilly’s journal, palms sweating into the black leather.
“Do a dance for us, Jugs. Shake that fat ass,” another of the boys said. His name was Andre, and he was the biggest and meanest of them all.
“Leave me alone,” I said, looking around for a way out. There were four of them, enough to surround me. A car drove past, but didn’t stop.
“We’ll let you past after we see those big ol’ titties dance,” said Andre’s puny shadow, Tyler. He had a face like a ferret and smelled like one, too.
“Go away.” I tried to keep my voice firm and normal, even as I clutched the journal in front of the jugs they wanted so badly to see. I read once that bullies respond to direct statements said without emotion. That they only wanted a reaction and if you didn’t give it to them, they’d leave you alone.
Maybe these bullies hadn’t read that article.
Andre grabbed the journal from my sweat-slick hands and opened it.
“Stop it!” I cried, jumping at him to get it back, but Javier, the boy who’d first spoken, shoved me to the ground.
“Shit,” Andre said, laughing. “There’s like fairies and shit in here. Juggies likes that Barbie Snowflake stuff.”
Tyler snickered.
Tears pricked at my eyes, and my knees stung from scraping against the sidewalk. “I’ll scream! I’ll scream and scream and you’ll go to juvie where you belong if you don’t give me back my book and leave me alone!”
But fear rooted me to the sidewalk, to the pebbles digging into my skin.