“You have done well, child,” said Bunny. “Now we will grant your wish. First choice: improvement or hex?”
“Um . . . improvement . . . please,” said the boy.
“Which?” asked Bunny.
“Likability,” said the boy. He shifted uncomfortably.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like mental acuity?” Bunny asked. “I hear you tried to use dried jellyfish instead of seashells.”
The boy shook his head.
“Very well, then,” said Bunny. “Likability it is. Come forward.” She waved her scepter at the boy.
He stepped forward carefully, watching for errant fairies, until he was standing between Bunny and the rest of the Kingdome.
“Now hold still.” She waved her scepter, and the fairies began climbing up the boy’s jeans, up and up until they covered the top of his head (newly shaved, per directions), flocked onto his shoulders, and hung from his clothes in clumps.
“On all their heads
In all their beds
On all their floors
Through all their doors
Yum! It comes from children
Yum!”
As the fairies sang, they danced on the boy’s head, lightly at first, then more and more frantically, until they were pounding their little feet on his bare skin.
He stood still, petrified.
“Hair!”
“Hair!”
“Hair!”
“Hair!”
As one, the fairies jumped off the boy onto the ground and scurried back toward Mrs. Hopper. Only Bunny and her trusty chancellor, Lockner, remained at the front. Lockner took the Grand Miss’s free hand, and together they shouted, “HAIR!”
The boy’s scalp began to glow, softly at first. It glowed brighter and brighter, until after a minute his scalp was lighting up the whole room. Of course, any adult walking by the shop just then would have seen nothing but a dark and deserted storefront, its red-and-white-swirled barber pole still and quiet next to the streetlight.
At the height of the brightness, hair suddenly shot through the boy’s scalp.
The boy screamed and clutched his head.
The hair grew and grew until it came down to his chin, uneven and wild.
He clutched it, panting. “My hair.”
“A beautiful crop,” said Bunny to Lockner.
“Beautiful, Miss,” said Lockner.
“Is that it?” asked the boy.
“Oh, yes,” said Bunny. “You are very likable now. Everywhere you go, other children will crowd around you. You’ll be invited to every party, and people will cry when you don’t come.”
The boy stood still for a second, staring at Bunny and Lockner with his eyes wide and his mouth dropped open. Then he ran for the back door and through it, never stopping to look back or say thank you.
“I’m not sure I like him,” said Lockner.
Bunny chuckled. “We don’t have enough magic for that.”
Fourteen
“I hope it’s really one of the rules that you can’t hurt me,” said Ali. She knew she was being an idiot, but she couldn’t help it. It felt right.
“It is,” said Pilose. She smiled, and if Ali hadn’t been so on guard, she might have thought the smile was genuine. Pilose spoke to the rest of the fairies. “You have nothing to be afraid of,” she said. “Alison is our child. It is her responsibility to grow this flock and make it strong. She will not hurt us, because if she does, then she will only hurt herself.” Pilose’s smile grew wider, and Ali knew that though it might have been genuine, it was a warning.
“What exactly is a flock starter?” Ali asked.
“We are just old imps who channel the incarnation magic well. This is the magic that allows us to create new imps out of seashells and grass. We come from the beach originally, you know. We’ve multiplied using ocean things since before Impoliptus, the Great Imp who brought the magic that tied imps to children. My brother Ringlet and I—” Pilose reached out a long-fingered hand and waved Ringlet forward. He had a rounder face than Pilose and a short, stubby nose. He did not smile as he stepped just behind his sister. “—Ringlet and I make a good team. We started this flock.” She frowned. “And many more. Ever since we un-enslaved ourselves from the chains of Divvy-imp magic, we’ve been starting flock after flock.”
“You said you’d answer my questions,” said Ali. “I want to know about Divvy-imps.”
“We should go inside,” said Ringlet.
The babies—who were almost as large as Pilose and Ringlet and were different only in the way they hung back from Ali—had huddled together in a bunch.
“Come,” said Pilose. “You must see the home you’ve built for us.”
Ali entered the mound simply by standing on top of it. One second she had a view of the forest of the backyard grass, and the next she was somewhere else entirely. And had she not known she was inside a mound made of dirt and seashells, she would never in a million years have guessed it.
The inside was mound-shaped, but the ceiling appeared higher than the mound looked from the outside. An array of chandeliers hung from the ceiling, so far up that they looked tiny. Some hung higher and some lower, so that they dangled haphazardly, more like wind chimes than proper light fixtures. But light was coming from them, and somehow it was enough light to fill the entire interior of the mound.
The floor, too, appeared much larger inside than out. There was no sign of the dirt the mound was made of. The floor was shiny linoleum like the inside of a high-class department store. Along the wall to Ali’s left was a row of five bunk beds, not the standard bunk beds with one little mattress stacked on top of another and a flimsy ladder, but grand affairs. The full height of a fairy separated the bottom bunks from the tops, and over the top bunks there were fancy canopies, which must have been held up by magic, as there were no poles underneath them. At the head of the room was a full-sized four-poster with its own grand canopy.
On the right side of the room was a long table—long enough to seat not only the ten babies that lived in this mound, but all forty-two. The table was laid with a feast. Ali saw slabs of meat, stacks of bread, piles of fruit, and mounds of chocolate at regular intervals—and no vegetables anywhere.
Ali would have asked what the point of all the food was if they only wanted to eat hair, but first she had to ask about something more pressing. After standing on top of the mound, she had appeared here on the floor right in the middle of a pool table. Not on the pool table, but in it. She waved her arms around and found that they went right through the pool table, though the table looked every bit as solid as a normal one.
“How am I doing this?” she asked, flapping her arms.
“The table is not really there,” said Pilose, who never- theless was standing just outside it. “Neither is the rest of it.” Pilose waved a long arm at what filled the room between the bunk beds and the dinner table—a motley assortment of things to play with. There was a Ping-Pong table, a badminton set, a volleyball court, and, in the distance past the four-poster bed, a baseball field. In between these games were slides of varying heights, jungle gyms, free-standing bars, and swing sets. When Ali tried to look closely at them, she realized that there were far too many games for the space, but she couldn’t quite focus on them. They were all there somehow, going on and on into the distance.
Ali stepped out through the side of the pool table to stand next to Pilose. Ringlet was off near the bunk beds, getting the baby fairies settled.
“The babies can’t control their magic yet,” said Pilose. “They create things they want, but they don’t have the power to make them real.” Pilose stared at the phantom games as she spoke.
“Can you make things real?” Ali asked.
“Small things, for a short time,” said Pilose. She pointed to the bunk beds.
“I don’t believe you,” Ali said. “I think you can do lots of things. You made Molly and Tyler and Jennifer and me small.”
“We have more powe
r when it comes to children,” said Pilose. “But our powers over children aren’t for us. They’re for the sake of just deserts.”
“Oh, come on,” Ali said. “There’s nothing just about making us small. You want to do it because you’re evil!”
“Evil is relative to circumstance,” said Pilose, raising her nose high in the air.
“What is that supposed to mean?” asked Ali.
“I never set out to be more than naturally evil,” said Pilose. “I was a Divvy-imp. Like all Divvy-imps, I doled out punishments to children who deserved them and rewards to children who did the right things. I followed the rules, and I never wanted any more.”
“So what happened?”
“Bunny happened,” said Pilose. “She styled herself Grand Miss Coiffure—because the un-enslavement spell required hair, you see. She knew that hair held great power. She wanted to be more than a Divvy-imp. ‘Why should we be enslaved to the behavior of children?’ Bunny asked. ‘Why should we be forced to give rewards?’ Many Divvy-imps agreed.”
“But not you?” Ali asked.
“Never mind that,” said Pilose. “Anyhow, Bunny botched the spell. She thought, ‘the more hair the better,’ so she used a whole ponytail instead of a single hair. We’re un-enslaved, but all we can eat now is hair. We’re hardly enjoying ourselves.”
“You didn’t eat hair before?” asked Ali. She still had only the vaguest idea of what a Divvy-imp was. What exactly had they done to punish and reward children?
Pilose smiled dreamily. “We feasted at the human tables,” she whispered. “Roast beef, pork chops, oranges, ice cream. Anything they had, we had—and when you are small, there is always enough.”
“But what did you do to children?” Ali asked. “You keep saying you’ll tell me, but—”
Just then, a great moaning came from the bunk beds. All ten of the babies were crying at once.
Ringlet hurried over to Pilose and Ali, slipping through a tetherball pole on his way over. His eyes were glassy, and he was holding his stomach. “That hair is making them all sick,” he said, glaring at Ali. “A stale old wig! Are we animals?”
“How could it matter?” said Ali, remembering how it had tasted stale. “All hair is dead anyway. It’s no different in a wig than off somebody’s head. And I’m not . . . oooh . . .” Ali’s stomach churned. Maybe the wig hair was bad. Maybe she was going to throw up.
“I’m going to check on the other mounds,” said Ringlet. “Ugh.” He walked slowly back toward the bunk beds, passed them, and walked straight through the wall.
“How did he . . . oooh.”
Pilose put her arm around Ali. She was looking a little green herself, but she pushed Ali toward the four-poster bed. They passed through the nonexistent games, and Ali found that the distance over which they traveled was not nearly as great as it had appeared. By the time they reached the bed, Ali’s head was pounding and her stomach was churning even more.
“Lie down, Alison, and I’ll tell you a story,” said Pilose. She threw open the covers, and Ali needed no more encouragement. She slipped into the bed, curled into a ball, and closed her eyes.
Fifteen
“We were happy to be imps, once,” said Pilose. Her voice was far away and breathy, as if she were struggling for her words, maybe struggling with indigestion, too.
Ali’s head spun. She kept her eyes closed.
“Ringlet and I—our names were different then, proper imp names—we lived in this very house. We were here long before you and your family moved in.”
As Ali held on to her stomach, she felt even dizzier. She almost didn’t hear Pilose’s words anymore. Instead, she felt like she was inside the scene.
Two imps sat on a step in the middle of a staircase. It was carpeted with brown shag, unlike the white fluff in the house Ali knew, but the shape was the same. The imps were clearly Pilose and Ringlet, but Pilose’s cheeks were chubbier, more like her brother’s. Ringlet wore simple cloth overalls, while Pilose wore a loose, plain light blue dress. Both imps had hair. Pilose’s was long and dark and flowed down her back in curls, and Ringlet’s was short and spiky, not greasy with hair products but naturally wild.
A little boy bounded down the stairs. Oblivious to the imps, his bare foot landed right on top of them but passed through them harmlessly. Suddenly, his body froze, hanging in mid-run above the staircase. His bed hair and striped pajamas combined with the smile on his face to give the impression of action, even more so because it was frozen.
“What a day Andy had,” said Ringlet. “He put salt in the sugar bowl, surprising both of his brothers. He tripped Jay on these very stairs.”
“Resulting in no injury,” said Pilose.
“Yes, but there could have been.” Ringlet sighed. “Still, he stood up for a littler boy in school. He gets points for that.”
Pilose sighed, too. “Only a stage-one punishment, I’d say.”
The boy began moving again, and as he reached the bottom of the stairs, he tripped and fell face-first into the carpet. Just in time to witness this, two older boys bounded down the stairs behind him. They laughed, and Pilose and Ringlet grinned.
The scene shifted. Pilose and Ringlet were now at the dinner table with a mother, a father, and the three boys. They were eating beef stew with potatoes and carrots and onions. Steam rose from a large pot, and the family chattered as they spooned the mixture onto their plates. The imps shoveled food into their mouths from the mother’s plate, gravy dripping down their bodies. Ali could smell the meat as if she were in the room with it. Along with the stew there were biscuits and jam. The aroma of strawberry pressed into Ali’s nose, mixing with the fresh biscuit and stew smell until she was positively starving. The discomfort she felt after eating the bad hair was far away, back in the dismal present with Pilose’s voice.
Now the imps were in a bedroom. The position of the closet and the size of the window showed Ali that it was hers. Instead of her single bed, there was a bunk bed on which the two younger boys slept. The youngest one was on top, an arm and a leg hanging precariously over the edge. The imps had their own set of bunk beds, out in the middle of the floor where a moonbeam coming in through a gap in the blinds bathed them like a spotlight. Pilose was on the top bunk. She lay on her back with her arms folded over her stomach. She breathed in and out deeply in sleep, and she was smiling. Her black hair framed her beautiful, silent face, as if she were Snow White.
Ali opened her eyes. She hadn’t realized that she had fallen asleep, but now the crick in her neck and the sour but less violent ache in her stomach showed her that time had passed. She sat up slowly in bed—and gaped at the scene before her. Pilose sat silently next to her, frowning.
The illusory games were gone. The table with the food was gone. The floor in front of them was nothing but bare dirt. A worm slithered up through a hole only a short distance from Ali and, paying no attention to them, oozed across the room and away. It was as large as a sea monster, a slimy, disgusting animal right in their sleeping space. The canopy above the bed was gone, too. The bed Ali lay on was nothing but a pile of cloth, and the scrap that covered her might have come from the pile of torn T-shirts her mother kept in the closet for rags.
The ten baby fairies were no longer on bunk beds, but huddled together on piles of cloth. Ostensibly, there was a pile for each fairy, but they had ignored the distinctions and were all wrapped in a ball as one. A barefooted fairy leg stuck out from the bundle, shivering in the morning cold.
Ali pulled the scrap of cloth over herself for warmth. “What happened?” she whispered.
“This is how it is,” said Pilose. “Our magic and our hopes keep the mound looking splendid when we are awake, but when we sleep, things go back to how they are.”
“Is this why you wanted me to stay?” asked Ali.
Pilose nodded her bald head. “You call us evil. We only want what you have. We know what you have because we used to live there with you.”
“What do we have that’
s so great?”
“Don’t you know?” Pilose exclaimed. “You have toys and games and birthday parties and junk food, and you can go anywhere you want without being forced to help anyone else.”
“I can’t go wherever I want,” said Ali. “I have to go to school, and my parents make me go to bed early. They’re always telling me to be nice to other people.”
“Yes, but you don’t have to be nice,” said Pilose. “We had to reward children when they were good. If we didn’t, we’d itch terribly, worse and worse until we gave in. There’s a difference between being told to do something and having to do it.”
“You laughed when you punished children,” said Ali. “Is that what you really want? To be able to punish us without ever giving rewards?” She wasn’t sure she was supposed to have seen what Pilose had described so vividly. Surely Pilose hadn’t told her they had laughed at the boy falling, but Ali remembered the fairies’ grins as if she’d seen them herself.
“We’d rather not have to worry about children at all,” said Pilose. “I don’t want to hurt you.” Pilose stared at Ali with those big eyes, and her mouth turned down in the saddest of melodramatic frowns.
“But you want to keep the magic,” said Ali. “Just in case you want to hurt us?”
“We’ve earned it,” said Pilose. “Why should fairies and trolls and unicorns and all those kinds of people have magic and not us?”
“Is that why you said you were fairies?” Ali asked. “Because they have more magic than you?”
“Have you ever heard of a Divvy-imp before?” asked Pilose.
“No,” said Ali.
“And what do you think of when you hear imp?” Pilose asked.
“I don’t know, like a mischievous creature, I guess?”
“What about when you hear fairy?” Pilose demanded, leaning in toward Ali.
“Like, Tinker Bell? Something with wings?”
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