by Fiona Roarke
“Well done,” he couldn’t have said. Because Polaris Brighton didn’t speak to her. Polaris Brighton didn’t speak to anyone.
She was about to tell him she had no idea what he was talking about when he added, “I have a proposal for you. Walk with me.”
Merri was too shocked and too curious to think of anything else to do, so she started walking. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye as they strolled to the courtyard—he was a hard boy to look at. Not that he wasn’t as handsome as Samson; if anything he was more so. But where Samson had the warm, welcoming demeanor of a summer elf, Polaris Brighton was cold, even for a winter elf. His features were angular and perfect, as if he’d been sculpted from snow, and he was as distant as the star he’d been named after. If Samson was a flame, Polaris was an iceberg, with great hidden depths that no one dared brave the frozen waters to discover.
Merri was turning out to be quite the daring fairy today. She kind of liked it.
“You have a rare talent,” Polaris said as they approached the fountain. “You’re already an aloof and detached sort of person…”
That’s the pot calling the kettle black, thought Merri. It was something her mother always said, but she hadn’t truly understood the phrase until now.
“…which makes you exactly the type who would pull pranks like the one in class today. But you’re also highly intelligent. No one would ever suspect you were the instigator.” After all their classes together, this brief speech was the most Merri had ever heard him say. His voice was deeper than she’d thought it would be, and softer, but still condescending.
“No one except you, obviously,” she said.
Polaris grinned, and the wickedness of it chilled her to the bone. “It takes one to know one. You remember the roosters?”
Last fall, right after the start of the school year, several roosters had been discovered running amok through the halls of Harmswood, each labeled one through five. Over the course of several weeks’ worth of crowing alarm clocks, 1, 2, 3, and 5 had been caught. Even after several more weeks of searching, Rooster 4 had never been found. No one had ever taken credit for the prank, and to the best of Merri’s knowledge, no one had ever been caught.
“That was you?” It was impossible to keep the awe out of her voice.
“The one and only,” he said with surprising humility. “With your help, I’d like to do more.”
Merri thought back on the bubbles, how they had all frozen in midair at the end. Frozen. That had been Polaris’s doing, of course. She had not intended to do anything more. How was she going to get out of this without admitting why she’d played the prank in the first place? “But…” she started to say.
“But you did this all because you’re secretly in love with Samson Sol and the idiot doesn’t even know you exist?”
Merri’s jaw dropped. The winter elf’s words cut like a knife. Even her mother couldn’t see straight into her soul like that.
“Merriaurum…sorry, what’s your middle name?”
“Grandiflora,” she managed to croak.
“Merriaurum Grandiflora Larousse,” he said formally. “I hereby propose that we join forces. Together, we shall perpetrate shenanigans the likes of which Harmswood has never seen…and doubtless will never see again.”
“What do I get out of this?” she asked before accepting.
Polaris shrugged. “Considerably more chances to ‘accidentally’ get tangled up with that fool Samson Sol again.”
As much as she hated to admit it, she wouldn’t mind at all if that happened. She narrowed her eyes. “And what do you get out of this?”
He paused before answering, as if considering his confession. Merri decided she wouldn’t participate in this partnership if he decided to lie to her. With twelve little brothers and sisters, Merri was sure she’d be able to tell if he was lying.
Polaris sighed. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t mind getting similarly tangled up with a certain future prom queen.”
Merri managed to stop her jaw from dropping again. He had a thing for Taylor Hayden? That pretty little bit of nothing with fluff for brains? Granted, most of the male population at Harmswood—and most of the females, for that matter—wanted to walk hand-in-hand with beautiful, boring Taylor Hayden. Merri didn’t understand any of them, but to each their own. Polaris’s interest made even less sense. Dating Taylor just seemed so…beneath him.
But it wasn’t for her to judge. She had promised herself not to partner up with him if he’d been lying, and he definitely wasn’t lying about his crush on Taylor. No one would lie about admitting something as ridiculous as that.
She stuck out her hand. “It’s a deal,” she said. “But my name is Merri. No one but my grandmother calls me Merriaurum.”
“In that case, I’m Bright,” he said. His handshake was soft and firm and cold. “Nice to meet you, partner.”
That same afternoon, they decided what their first prank would be: changing the horn-signal for classes. They planned carefully—if they made the mechanics too simple, then they would be too simply undone. They decided that each alarm should have its own sound, and that each spell to manufacture the sounds needed to be different. It took them a week to plan.
“One of the spells shouldn’t be a spell at all,” Merri whispered to Bright. They sat together in the library, heads bent over their books as if deep in study. “That way, the administration will spend all sorts of time trying to trace a spell that doesn’t exist.”
“Brilliant,” Bright replied. “I assume you have something in mind?”
The next day, the sound of a noisy herd of elephants preceded first period. A banshee wailed to announce lunch. Throughout the day, students were greeted with wind chimes, car horns, a baby crying, a manticore’s roar, a plague of locusts, and Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. One by one, each sound was discovered and stopped (though that same baby cried for three days straight—Merri had to give Bright points for that one). The teachers lost most of the day to unproductive students awaiting the next “horn.”
The pièce de résistance, however was an ear-shattering “cock-a-doodle-do!” that greeted the residents of Harmswood first thing the following morning. A live rooster was eventually discovered in the room where the school announcements were made. On his side, the number four was painted on his russet feathers in bright blue.
Neither Merri nor Bright had orchestrated a run-in with Samson or Taylor—this first collaborative stunt was purely an exercise to see if their partnership would work. But they did hear later about two students who had visited the Head Witch, oddly disturbed by the false manticore’s roar. They had arrived at her office as strangers and left as a couple.
“We managed to match up someone, anyway,” Merri murmured to Bright as she passed him on the stairs. “Too bad it wasn’t the intended targets.”
“Let’s still call it a win, shall we?” It was amazing how he always managed to sound so full of himself with that overly formal way of speaking.
“We shall,” Merri replied with equal pomp as she continued down the stairs.
The rest of that semester was the most fun Merri could ever remember having at Harmswood. Probably because she’d never really had a friend before. She actually cared about getting up in the morning. She studied harder in class. She even chatted excitedly during her mother’s weekly phone call. Not about Bright, of course, but about everything else.
The pranks were tremendous. They snuck smelly things into at least thirty vents in both the boys’ and girls’ wings. They had Salvatore’s deliver a pizza to Professor Beketaten’s class three times in one day. They wrote a spell based on old Fortran code that alphabetized every keyboard in the computer lab.
They were always sure to cover their tracks, but they didn’t totally avoid their own gifts—Merri once used her flower fairy skills to stuff one student’s locker full of goldenrod. Bright once used his winter elf talents to freeze pennies to floors all over the school.
But there wa
s an odd side effect to their shenanigans: every time they played a prank, a couple was created from two people who otherwise might have never noticed each other. Merri and Bright kept trying to fabricate scenarios involving themselves and Samson or Taylor, but it never worked. The universe seemed set against them.
Like today, when Merri and Bright found themselves locked together in the janitor’s closet.
“You were supposed to wait until we were in the hall to freeze the hinges!” Merri scolded as she yanked on the door’s handle.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That door wasn’t supposed to be closed in the first place!”
Merri sighed and sank down to the floor. “It will thaw eventually. I’m just sad we can’t run around and see the looks on everyone’s faces.”
“We can imagine them, though, can’t we? Besides, this way, we definitely won’t be suspected of anything.” He smiled as he settled himself beside her. That grin wasn’t half as disturbing to her as it once had been. “So…got any siblings?”
“I’m the oldest of twelve,” she said. “It’s about to be thirteen.”
“Wow! And…congratulations.”
It was nice to be able to shock him for a change. “My family is crazy huge,” she said. “Being locked in a closet with only one other person is a dream come true in our house. What about you?”
“Oldest of three boys. And that’s quite enough, thank you very much.”
They had chatted little in passing since that first conversation, in dark corners between classes, hidden in the bushes by the courtyard fountain, and at the library. They hadn’t wanted to broadcast their partnership, so they’d never before had the chance to get to know one other.
That closed door was one of the best things that had ever happened to Merri. For the first time, she got to talk about her giant odd family back in South Carolina with someone other than a relative. In return, Bright told her about his high-born parents’ impossible standards, the family lodge in Vermont, and the extended family they visited in Tasmania every summer break. Which made perfect sense—it was winter down there while it was summer up here.
The more they talked, the more real Bright seemed to her. Much less like the untouchable rich-boy celebrity act he put on in public. Oh, he was still too beautiful for words, but she wasn’t scared of him anymore. He bloomed before her like a bed of violets after the spring thaw. Any coldness between them now came only from his winter elf nature.
By the time Merri and Bright emerged from that closet—long after the doors had come unstuck and the traffic in the hallways had died back down—they were the best of friends.
And more determined than ever to get their schemes to work.
Chapter Two
“Come on, Thuban,” said Taylor.
“Yeah, Thuban, don’t tease,” added her little sister. “You published another half-page article in the school paper right before fall break.”
“You can’t expect us to believe you have no idea who the Mad Bandits are,” said Taylor.
Bright’s younger brother held up his hands—the skin of his palms glowed white in the firelight. “I can’t reveal my sources,” Thuban said with feigned innocence.
The gathering of young people around the fire pit groaned. Several of them threw marshmallows.
“Hey, now! Cut that out!” Thuban protested, laughing all the while.
Well, he brought that on himself, Bright thought as he stepped away from the gathering. Thuban wouldn’t reveal his sources, because he didn’t have any. Every “fact” in every piece his brother had written about the Mad Bandits had been fabricated out of thin air. Merri and Bright would chuckle over the articles…and then use the headlines to papier mâché the Head Witch’s ceremonial broomstick.
Even with Thuban’s recent exposé, the Harmswood administration was no closer to revealing the identities of the Mad Bandits after all these years. The only consensus so far was that there had to be more than one prankster, but exactly how many could never be settled upon.
Thuban had been the one to name them, back when he was but a lowly op-ed writer for the Harmswood Gazette…but only because Bright had given him the moniker. “Why don’t you write something about the Mad Bandits?” Bright suggested one morning over breakfast.
“The who?” his clueless brother asked.
“You know, the ones who keep pulling all the stunts at school. The Mad Bandits. Isn’t that what your friends are calling them?”
“Of course. Sorry, it’s early.” Much like their mother, Thuban was never one to admit he was ignorant about anything. “Should I be pro- or con-bandit?”
“Does it matter?” Bright asked before he walked away. There was no more to discuss. The seed had been successfully planted.
The major downside to Bright and Merri’s secret partnership was that it had to stay at school. The younger Brighton brothers always invited handfuls of friends to the family lodge near Stowe over fall break. The only person the eldest Brighton brother wanted to invite was the one person he couldn’t admit to knowing in public.
It was too bad, too. Merri would have loved the colors of New England in October. She’d spent all her life in South Carolina and Georgia. There were seasons in the South…but nothing like up here. Especially during peak leaf season. On the flip side, he’d much rather be back at school with her, plotting the final tricks of their senior year. He’d challenged her to come up with a solo prank over the long weekend while he was away with his family. He could only imagine what amusing mischief she’d devised in his absence.
“Star light, star bright,” an airy voice said behind him. “Don’t wander off too far or you’ll get eaten by a goon.”
Bright turned to see Taylor standing just behind him, her long red-gold hair illuminated by the fire they’d left behind. The game she referenced was one they’d played as children, taking turns as the “goon” that chased the others through these very woods. Well, Taylor and her sisters, Bright’s little brothers, and whatever friends had come to the lodge on vacation. Bright never took part in those reindeer games. They teased him with “Star light, star bright,” because he always stayed so far away from the rest of them.
Even as a child, Taylor had been exquisitely beautiful. Her other two sisters were pretty enough—Hayden witches always came in threes—but Taylor possessed a rare inner grace that only magnified as she got older. Even in these shadowed woods she looked like a doe caught in a shaft of light.
As far as money and position went, Taylor Hayden was his equal. His parents would definitely approve of the match. But she was a lively sort of person, always chasing after mindless entertainment. She was much more likely to end up with one of his far more gregarious brothers.
“Why are you wandering out here all alone?” she asked. “Are you still too good to play with us lowly brats?”
Bright didn’t know how to answer. Merri would have said “yes” without hesitation, and the thought made him want to laugh.
“Your cider’s cold.” Taylor took the mug he’d forgotten he held in his hands. “Here.” She whispered a spell and blew across the top of the mug before returning it to him, piping hot.
Bright stared at her. “Why are you being nice to me?”
Taylor rolled her eyes. “Because I want something, silly. Why else?”
“Hmm.” Bright sipped at his mug before his cider got cold again. “Out with it.”
“I want to play a prank on Samson Sol, and I want you to help me.”
Bright was so shocked by her declaration that he almost spat out the cider. “Why me?” he managed to ask.
“Because you don’t care about anybody,” she said. “No one would ever suspect you. And there are already so many Mad Bandits running around our school now, I figure I might as well join them.”
Bright wanted to argue with every sentence she spoke, but he bit his tongue. Yes, there had been a few copycat jokers over the years, but their deeds had always been subpar, and they’d always been caught. Me
anwhile, he and Merri had become masters of the craft.
“Why Samson?” He had to ask. Seriously, why did every girl in school fall for that sunburnt surfer-boy knucklehead? That elf had about as much depth as a kiddie pool. How could anyone tolerate someone so boring?
“Because he hasn’t asked me to the Midwinter Masquerade, but I know he’s going anyway. I want him to think that whatever girl he brought instead gave him bad luck.”
Bright wasn’t sure what to say to that either. He and Merri had never discussed the exclusivity of their partnership, but only because neither of them had ever been approached in this way.
But wasn’t this his end game? To orchestrate events so that he got tangled up with Taylor? For the first time, and for whatever reason, Taylor was paying attention to him. Surely Merri wouldn’t begrudge him this one small deed, whatever it was. Especially with so little time left before graduation.
Taylor sighed. “Bright, if you’re in, then you need to say so out loud. You forget, the rest of us can’t see inside that busy brain of yours.”
His brow furrowed. Merri never said such things. She always let him think in peace. Weren’t people supposed to think before they spoke? It was his own fault that he thought so much. Some folks had so little patience that they filled in the silence themselves before he ever spoke a word. Which suited him just fine—he could go for days without having to speak a word to anyone. Except Merri.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I will help you.”
He wasn’t sure how he was going to tell Merri. He met with her the first day back, during the lunch period, at their secret spot by the hollow tree in the woods. She waited for him there, her lunch already spread out on her blanket. She was growing out her hair—it was bright cornsilk blonde at the roots and fading reddish-black to her shoulders. Her hands were clasped before her, and she was grinning from ear to ear. Bright wondered if she realized her giddiness had made the clearing behind her bloom with foxglove.