by Anne Ursu
Sometimes Iris had nightmares of a whole murder of crows swirling around her sister, cawing Freak and Crow Girl, so many of them they darkened the sky, so many of them she couldn’t see Lark anymore. Then she shouted and clapped her hands and they dispersed. But Lark was gone.
They were just nightmares, just Iris’s mind spinning shadows into monsters. She knew that.
Still. She was fine if the shadows stayed away.
Chapter Thirteen
Camp Awesome
On Monday after school Lark headed down to the art room and Iris rode the bus to the library for the next exciting stage of growing as an individual. She had not been to the public library since the day the school envelopes came, when they’d stood outside Treasure Hunters and met the mustard mole man. Indeed, she’d forgotten all about the store, and him. She had so many other things to worry about, most immediately the next ninety minutes of her life.
Her bike was waiting for her there in the bike rack, just as they’d planned, so she could bike home afterward. This would work until it was winter, at least, and maybe by then her parents would have gotten over this ridiculous idea.
Until then, though, she was going to have to grin and bear it.
Or at least bear it.
She walked into the community room of the library to find the eyes of seven other girls move to her. At school she’d been ignored for being utterly boring; now she was walking into a group of people who didn’t even know the most important thing about her, who didn’t even know what was missing. And suddenly she was being examined, not for being a matching set, but for who she was alone.
As if that was interesting at all.
She slid in next to a pale girl with cat-eye sparkly glasses and curly black hair piled on the top of her head. The girl wore a black-and-white polka-dotted sweater and a Ravenclaw T-shirt and gave Iris a big grin.
“Hannah!” she whispered, as if it were a very important secret.
“Iris,” Iris whispered back.
“Ah.” She nodded knowingly. “Like the messenger goddess.”
“Yeah,” Iris said. It was true. Iris was the name of Hera’s messenger in Greek myths, and she was also the goddess of rainbows. Lark always found this hilarious, because if Iris Maguire were going to be the goddess of anything, it probably wouldn’t be rainbows.
“I like your dress. Wise choice,” she said meaningfully.
With Lark still dressing like she came from a colorless world, Iris had decided she needed to bring a little spark back to things, so today she was wearing the dress with the dubious-looking owl. Iris was no less dubious than she had been the week before.
“Thank you. I like your shirt.”
“Are you Ravenclaw too?”
“I don’t think so.” She wasn’t. Lark had made her take the test once. She was all Gryffindor, which Lark said was completely obvious because she liked to run headfirst into battle and had no common sense.
A suspiciously cheerful pink-cheeked college-age girl bounced in front of the room, long brown ponytail bouncing with her. She clapped her hands excitedly and announced she was named Abigail and she was Camp Awesome’s counselor, and it was her job to help show them awesome things and, more importantly, show them how awesome they were.
Abigail announced they were going to start off with a game of Two Truths and a Lie, a fun get-to-know-you exercise, in Abigail’s words. But Abigail said everything as if it had an exclamation point afterward, so it was more like Two Truths and a Lie! A fun get-to-know-you exercise!
In Two Truths and a Lie, you introduce yourself and say three “fun facts” about yourself—except one of those things is a lie and everyone has to guess which one. (!)
For some reason, Iris had no trouble spotting the other girls’ lies.
Hannah did not go to circus school.
Preeti had never stuffed ten olives in her mouth on a dare.
Amma had never had a pet frog.
Novalie had never been to Disney World.
Gabrielle had not been on Kids Baking Championship.
And Iris had no trouble thinking of lies about herself: I have thirty-seven fish! I can play the harmonica! I’m on the robotics team at school! My school has a robotics team!
But truths were harder. They were slippery things: they needed to be caught and held tightly so they didn’t fall away.
“I uh . . . have thirty-seven fish, my dad is living in London for the year, and I have an identical twin.”
“That’s the lie,” exclaimed one of the girls—Morgan, a brown-skinned girl with freckles, who had never plotted a coup. “That you’re a twin.”
The other girls nodded.
Iris gaped at them. Wasn’t it obvious? “No, I do have a twin sister. Lark.”
Morgan leaned back in her chair, wide-eyed. “That’s so cool.”
“What’s it like having a twin?” the girl on her other side whispered. It was Emily—a skinny suntanned fourth grader in a softball T-shirt and baggy gym shorts, who was not allergic to people.
Iris didn’t have a better answer for this than she did the week before. “Good?”
Ten minutes into camp and she’d proven herself uninteresting.
“Do you guys dress alike?”
“No.”
“Did you ever switch places?”
“No.”
“Does your mom ever have trouble telling you apart?”
“No.”
“Huh,” Emily said.
“I didn’t think people would think that was my lie,” Iris said. “I thought thirty-seven fish was kind of an obvious lie.”
Next to her, Hannah leaned in and whispered, “I have twenty-six snails.”
Iris looked at the table. That had not come up in Two Truths and a Lie. Hannah, apparently, had so many interesting things about her that having over two dozen snails was an afterthought.
“I started with two,” Hannah continued, “but then . . . you know snails.”
Iris did not know snails, not like that. But she certainly was going to look it up later.
Now that the get-to-know-you exercise was over, Iris started rummaging through her backpack looking for her pen while Abigail bounced around the room passing out composition books and talking about something Iris realized she should probably be paying attention to, but wasn’t.
“What’s wrong?” Hannah whispered.
“I can’t find my pen!” Iris said.
Hannah started slightly, as if she was not expecting Iris to sound so upset about office supplies. “I have pens,” she said in soothing tones, handing one to Iris. “Lots of them. It will be okay.”
“Thank you,” Iris said. “I just . . . I don’t usually lose things.”
“Oh.” Hannah nodded knowingly. “Portal, probably.” And with that she gave Iris a quick smile and turned her attention back to Abigail.
The composition books were, Abigail said, courtesy of Camp Awesome, and the girls should always have them out while camp was in session and should feel free to write anything they wanted—any thoughts or feelings or ideas or inspirations or motivational phrases, anything that came to them. And most days they’d begin with “journaling,” which Abigail explained was the process of spending time writing personal things in your journals. Why she couldn’t just say it that way, Iris didn’t know, but adults, apparently, were fond of making up verbs to suit their own purposes. And thus she opened up her new composition book and wrote:
Adults like to make up verbs to suit their own purposes.
At Abigail’s instruction the girls set to work decorating their composition books, and soon the room was full of the smell of glue sticks and Sharpies, the snip of scissors and the low mutterings of girls talking to themselves here and there. For inspiration, Abigail showed some of her own notebooks, on which she’d pasted a series of motivational phrases cut out of magazines, like a self-actualized ransom note.
Iris flipped from her blank cover to the sentence she’d written on the first page. She sq
uinted at it, and then added the next line:
Journaling
She tapped the pen on the paper and then wrote:
Gifting
Friending
And of course, from her dad:
Dialoguing
The words looked funny in the ink from Hannah’s light blue pen. It wasn’t the right color and the writing didn’t flow. Iris liked her own pens: weighty, with a smooth gray exterior, flowing dark blue ink, a good grip, and a thick enough tip that the words you wrote looked like they mattered. Her parents had gotten a set for her for Christmas the year before; they even had a silhouette of an iris imprinted on the cap. But her pen was gone.
Next to her Hannah was drawing some intricate flower design on the cover of her book, while on her other side Amma was cutting out a model’s eye from a magazine ad. Iris flipped back to her blank cover and stared at it, while everyone snip-squeaked-stuck around her. This should not be hard, she told herself. It was just a notebook.
But it was hard.
Amma looked up and caught Iris watching. “Do you want some eyes?” she asked, motioning to the growing pile of cutouts in front of her. “I have a lot of them.”
“Oh, thanks. I just . . . wouldn’t know what to do with them. I don’t really know what to do at all.”
“Whatever you want!”
“I know, but . . . I don’t want not to like it.” Once you drew a line in a gold Sharpie, that was it: that line was on your composition book for the rest of time.
No one else seemed to have a problem committing themselves. Amma was making a pinwheel shape out of the eyes, which was not something that would have ever occurred to Iris. Hannah’s flowers had morphed into peculiar birds, the kind a witch might send out to look for you if she were so inclined. Preeti was adding whiskers to a giant silver cat; Novalie was turning glitter blobs into sparkly monsters; Emily had covered her pages in rows and rows of reveling stick figures; and Gabrielle had pasted phrases onto hers—Iris saw ONCE UPON A TIME and WHEN ROBOTS DREAM and MAGIC SCATTERED EVERYWHERE.
Lark would have loved it.
They all looked so studious, so determined, so focused. They looked like girls with purpose. It wasn’t like Iris didn’t have a purpose—she did, but Being Lark’s Twin wasn’t something you could paste on a journal. So Iris sat there, staring at the blank cover, chin propped in her hands.
“What’s wrong?” As if magically summoned by Iris’s not-Awesome mood, Abigail was before her, gesturing toward Iris’s blank book.
“Oh,” Iris said. “I’m not good at art.”
“But! It’s not about being good at something. It’s about being yourself!”
“I just . . .”
Abigail eyed her, ponytail swinging slightly in a nonexistent breeze. “Don’t think of it as art. Sometimes art is a lot of pressure. Just think of it as crafting. Crafting is for fun!”
When Abigail moved on, Iris flipped back to the page in her book and wrote down:
Crafting
Chapter Fourteen
Alice
After camp was over, all the girls gathered in the lobby waiting for rides, shifting a little on their feet, not quite sure where to stand. It was only the first day, and no one knew yet how the girls would arrange themselves over the course of the camp—a series of open circles, or in tight sharp immovable shapes. One way or another geometry would have its hold on them, but for now they all shuffled and giggled and looked curiously into one another’s bright open faces.
As for Iris, she had no ride to wait for, so she slipped past the group on the outskirts of the lobby and wandered outside. She knelt down and spun the lock on her bike chain, but then stopped, stood, and squinted down the street. It was hot out still, too hot to bike up the hills between the library and home.
Across the street, a teenager yelled something in front of the candy store. Like most of the other stores on Upton Avenue, that one had been there as long as the girls could remember, with its toxically bright awning and giant sign in curlicue letters reading Treatz, as if an s were just too ordinary a letter to describe the wonders that lay inside, as if the regular conventions of language simply weren’t sufficient for this particular store. There was the butcher shop, which advertised ostrich, which apparently people were supposed to eat. Iris found this too disgusting to consider further; Lark had once said she wanted to find the secret ostrich farm and liberate all the prisoners. There was a store filled with what her mother called bric-a-brac—that meant useless things like fancy dish towels and tiny vases and impractical plates that their mom said were decorative but the girls guessed were what you would use to serve the ostrich.
Lark loved that last store: she liked to walk into it and admire the goods inside as if she herself were searching for the perfect vase (which Lark said fancy people pronounced vahz) to accent her living room, the ideal decorative plate for the sort of person who wanted to decorate with plates. She walked around examining each trinket as if she were the interior designer for a grand castle. She’d turn over figurines while the store clerk watched warily. Lark didn’t even notice, but Iris did; Iris could see the clerk’s eyes turn over the twins as if decorating a castle with a whole room of girls.
And then there was the new store, Treasure Hunters, with the weird mustard mole man. It looked like it was open now, though no one was walking in or out. The chalkboard easel on the sidewalk no longer read We Are Here, but rather:
ALICE,
WHERE
ARE
YOU?
(I know what you are going to ask. Yes, this is how it always happened.)
Iris squinted, as if the words might rearrange themselves into something sensical, something like Open Till Eight or Huge Sale on Tiny Teacups. But they did not.
ALICE,
WHERE
ARE
YOU?
Iris chewed on her lip, eyeing the sign. And then crossed the street to the store.
Iris was not in the habit of going to antique stores, but if you’d asked her what one might look like, she’d probably have described something a lot like the interior of Treasure Hunters—dimly lit, little chimes ringing as soon as you walked inside, and stuff everywhere. Like your grandmother’s attic, if you had the sort of grandmother who kept things. Iris’s grandmother was not this sort—the only things she kept were books on decluttering—but she could imagine that this sort of grandmother did exist.
You would not know from the inside that the store hadn’t been around long. Sometimes you pull a book from the library shelf and you suddenly feel like you’ve woken it up from a long sleep: the book opens tentatively; the pages turn slowly and stiffly, as if only dimly remembering that that was once their function. This is how the store felt.
There was furniture everywhere, odd art on the walls, vases big and small, a whole display case full of decorative plates. Treasure Hunters was where you went, apparently, when you wanted used bric-a-brac. One wall was full of clocks. On one bureau was a collection of creepy old dolls, the sort of dolls with stiff dresses and perpetually dazed expressions that people buy for children and then inform them the dolls are not to be played with. Some adults do things like that.
A few moments after Iris entered, the mole-faced man, now in a mustard vest and plaid shirt, emerged from a room in the back and moved behind the tall glass counter.
If he remembered Iris at all, his face didn’t show it. Perhaps he did not recognize her when she wasn’t in a matching set. The only thing on his face was suspicion, though that was a feeling Iris could relate to.
It’s strange when you’re the only customer in a store and a man in mustard clothing is watching you. You can’t just turn around and leave, because that would be weird. But it’s weird that you’re there in the first place: you’re an eleven-year-old girl, and the mole man knows an eleven-year-old girl doesn’t belong in an antique store by herself, and you know it too but neither of you is going to say anything. And you can’t say, I don’t know why I’m here ei
ther but your sign was weird before and it just got weirder, and now I want to know where Alice is too, and it is not nice when things get lost.
Instead you’re going to walk around and pretend to browse for whatever is a normal amount of time for a normal person to be in a store for normal reasons, hoping desperately the mole man doesn’t speak to you, and then smile and nod and rush out and never come back.
“May I help you?” the mole man asked.
So that did not work. Iris turned to him, sticking her chin up in the air. “Yes, you can. I was wondering what your sign meant.”
He looked around at the store. “Which sign?”
“The chalkboard one. Outside.”
His eyes narrowed. “That is not for you.”
“But . . . it’s on a public sidewalk!” She blinked. “It’s a sign!”
“Actually, that sidewalk is store property.”
“But—” She stopped. He was squinting at her like she was the bottom line of an eye chart. “Never mind.”
“I shan’t. Are you looking for anything in particular inside the store?” He articulated these last three words very carefully.
“Um . . . just . . . dolls,” she said, waving at the creepy collection above her, as if she was actually interested in them.
“Ah, yes, to be sure. Well, those are not for playing with.”
Right. “So . . . who’s Alice, anyway?”
“How do you know about Alice?”
“It’s on the sign! On the public sidewalk!”
Her eyes fell to a glass bowl on the counter. It was filled with water and had something floating in it. She took a step closer. The something appeared to be a slice of cork with a needle stuck in it, and it was spinning in a circle.
Iris knew what this was. Once, she got a book on homemade science experiments from the library, and she did them in the backyard until her homemade volcano burst all over her dad’s hydrangeas. One of the experiments was about making your own compass, and this looked just like that—a magnetized needle floating in a bowl of water. But it was not the sort of thing she expected a grown-up to have, and definitely not a shopkeeper.