Drawn Away

by Holly Bennett

  “Jack! You came back!” she says, and for some reason her smile and warm welcome creep me out.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m back, but I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t even know how I got here.”

  “Oh.” I’m up close now, so I get a good look at the strange expression that flits across her narrow face. It looks like… disappointment? Maybe even a bit hurt. Then she gives a little shrug, fastens those big blue eyes on me and smiles again.

  “Well, no matter. You’re here now, and that’s lovely. I’ve been hoping you’d come.”

  I shuffle uncomfortably, with no idea how to respond. Then I have the really uncomfortable thought that I am worrying about my manners with a hallucination.

  The Match Girl gazes up at me, and it strikes me that her eyes are a lot like Lucy’s, and that the look in them right now is not so different from how Lucy looked at me right after we—no, no, no, I don’t want to have this thought, but I’m having it anyway.

  “Jack,” she says—and suddenly I don’t like her using my name, wish I’d never offered it—“you’re the first person to ever visit me. I never knew how lonely it was here until you came. So of course I’m happy to see you. Will you stay and talk longer this time?”

  “Well.” I clear my throat, stalling. For the first time, it occurs to me that I have no idea how to go home, or wake up, or whatever. And now I am scared. “The thing is, um—look, won’t you tell me your name? I can’t very well call you Match Girl.”

  Her face shuts down and hardens for a second. “Other people do.”

  I backpedal. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a good idea to make her mad. “Okay, that’s cool.” Her expression changes to confusion, and I realize cool is probably not part of her vocabulary. “No problem, Match Girl. See, I don’t seem to have any control over this, coming or going. I just…find myself here.”

  I’m actually trying not to think about this fact—that way lies panic. And in groping for a different thought, I get a great idea. I’ll take a pic, and then when I get home—if I get home, my mind corrects, and I shove that word away, hard—when I get home, if the photo’s there I’ll know I didn’t imagine her.

  I reach into my jeans pocket, but there’s no phone. I pat down my other pockets, come up blank and think it’s probably in my jacket or backpack. Then I realize I don’t have my meter either. It’s almost always in my front right pocket. I grope at my beltline—no pump. What the hell?

  “What’s wrong?” asks the Match Girl. She’s watching my performance with bright interest.

  “I’m missing some things—some important things.” I do feel the familiar lump from my glucose tabs, but there’s something odd about it, and when I pull them out the tablets are in a little cloth bag instead of a plastic tube.

  The girl nods knowingly. “Pickpockets. They’re thick on this street.” Then, puzzled, she corrects herself. “Were thick. There’s nobody now. What have you lost?”

  I open my mouth and then realize she won’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. Instead I ask, “What year is this, and what city?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Copenhagen, of course. And it was 1823 when I died, but that was some time ago.”

  She says it so casually—when I died—and now my floaty little don’t-worry-this-can’t-really-be-happening bubble bursts, and I’m so scared I’m afraid my legs might buckle. I’m in a time warp with a dead girl and none of the technology that keeps me alive came with me, maybe because it doesn’t actually exist here. I start to shake, and I’m shaking so hard my head’s nodding back and forth and—

  “JACK!”

  —and I’m staring up into wide blue eyes, but they’re Lucy’s eyes. She’s standing over me, shaking my shoulders and shouting my name and looking terrified.

  “I’m okay,” I blurted out.

  Lucy kind of collapsed with relief, rolling back into the leaves.

  “Oh God. Christ, you scared me.” She sat up and eyed me carefully. “You sure you’re okay?”

  I gave a shaky nod. I wasn’t that sure. Something was definitely not right. I felt my waistband and was relieved to find my pump where it should be, clipped to my belt loop.

  Lucy raced on. “I couldn’t remember—I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I go get a Coke or something?”

  I shook my head. “That’s not the problem. Let’s go inside—I’m getting cold.” I was cold, but that wasn’t what was making me shiver so hard. I felt like a vibrating cell phone.

  Inside, I was glad to see we had the house to ourselves for once. We went straight to my room anyway, like we both felt the need for a small private space, and sat on my bed. Lucy took my hand and trained her eyes on me. “So what happened out there? You were totally away with the fairies, as my grampa would say.”

  I’d been away somewhere, all right. And I just blurted it out. “I had this really weird experience. It’s the second time it’s happened. I’m starting to think I have a brain tumor or something.”

  She listened quietly until I started talking about the girl, and then her features morphed into some drama-class parody of astonished shock. When I was little, one of our babysitters was this guy Andrew, who used to bring his old Ghostbusters figures for us to play with. My favorite had “fright features”—Jaw drops, eyes bug out! Lucy looked like that. She thought I’d totally lost it, I realized, but she didn’t say anything. Instead she yanked her sketchbook out of her bag and started flipping pages frantically.

  Then she thrust it at me. There she was—same clothes, same frail frame, same eyes too big for her pinched little face. Lucy had drawn the Match Girl.

  “I saw her.” Her voice was so quiet I had to lean in to hear her. “On my way home the day I met you, I saw her.”

  SEVEN

  KLARA

  My Jack came to see me again. He’s just as handsome as I remembered, and I’m certain now he’s a gentleman, despite his odd clothes. His shoes are strange, but they look very new, and he uses words I’ve never even heard. But he’s not one of those gentlemen who look down on the small folk like we are vermin or criminals; not Jack. He speaks to me so politely, like I was a fine lady. Only he doesn’t say “Miss” or “m’Lady,” of course; anyone can see I’m not really a lady.

  He said he didn’t know why he came, but I think that was bashfulness. He must have come to see me—why else would he come here? There’s nothing here but me. To think that he was missing me the way I miss him—oh! Nobody has ever missed me, not ever!

  He went away so quickly though, and then the street was emptier and lonelier than ever before. As night came on, the mist oozed out of the alleys and hung in little tendrils over the street, and I had that feeling—the idea that if it got thick enough and swirled right around my feet, it might swallow me up, and then I’d be gone too. But it’s just a feeling. Since I met Jack my thoughts have been clearer. The mist is just mist. The reason the people are all gone is that they died. One by one, young or old, they died. But when they died, they left—to heaven or hell, I suppose. Perhaps the mist is filling in for all the people who have left.

  Only I stayed, just as I stayed the night I died. I don’t know why or how I stayed, but I know I don’t want to disappear into the mist—especially now that I’ve met Jack. He’ll come back, and he’ll stay longer next time. I’m sure of it.

  I had a thought after he left, a thought so exciting it makes me feel bright and strong.

  I don’t think Jack is dead.

  EIGHT

  LUCY

  Bugs and spiders, up and down my spine.

  Something beyond weird was happening. I couldn’t even seem to find any words to talk about it, and I guess neither could Jack, because he just sat there, gaping at my sketch.

  The silence stretched out, and then Jack looked at me kind of wild-eyed and blurted out, “How did she get here?”

  Like I would know. But as I thought about it, I answered slowly, “You know, I’m not sure she was here—not the way you mean. She
was sort of floating over the river, and she didn’t seem to see anything around her.” I paused, wondering whether to add the part about her saying his name, and decided that would just freak him out. More, I mean. “Maybe I just somehow saw her,” I finished lamely.

  “But who is she? Why am I going there? Why are you seeing her?” Jack’s elbows were on his knees, and he dropped his head into his hands. “None of this makes any fucking sense.”

  Resourceful Take-Charge Lucy didn’t have a clue what to do. So I said the first thing that came into my head. “Let’s just go through the whole thing from the start, everything you can remember, and maybe…” I trailed off because I couldn’t actually come up with anything this might accomplish.

  But it seemed to make Jack feel better. “I was in math class,” he began.

  JACK

  I hadn’t got very far into telling Lucy about my first Weird Encounter when she stopped me.

  “She was selling matches?”

  “Yeah. I asked her name, and she looked at me like I was a moron and said, I’m the match girl.”

  “Oh my god, it’s the Little Match Girl!”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “You know, ‘The Little Match Girl’! The story?” She looked at me, all expectation, and got nothing but a blank. Reconsidered. “No. I guess when I think about it, it’s probably not common kids’ knowledge.”

  “So what’s it about?”

  “It’s old—kind of a fairy tale, I guess. It gave me nightmares when I was a kid.”

  Of course it did. Too much to hope that it would be a nice story. “You better tell me about it.”

  Lucy hesitated, glanced at her watch and said, “It’s just five. If we leave right now, we can catch the bus back to my place. I’m pretty sure I still have the book. I think we should read it.”

  I was on my feet before she’d finished talking. I wanted to see the book, yes, but I also wanted to get out of the house. I wasn’t sure where everyone was, but I knew at least some of them would be back for dinner—and I was so not ready to talk to anyone but Lucy.

  I scrawled a note, and we hustled out the door. Buses don’t run too often in this town, and the routes are often pretty roundabout. Luckily, Lucy and I lived at opposite ends of the same route. We jogged the two blocks to Riverside and then stood around for ten minutes, wondering if the bus was late or if we’d missed it. “They’re always late this time of day,” said Lucy, and, sure enough, it came lumbering into view. We didn’t talk at all for the entire ride north along the river. It’s like we were just holding the interrupted conversation in our heads, waiting to pick it up again.

  Lucy lived on a street full of tiny one-story brick houses, strung together in pairs or foursomes. They weren’t really old, like my house, but the trees were pretty big, and the houses had grown distinguishing features like front porches and back additions.

  Lucy’s house had a bright-blue front door and a small concrete stoop. Inside, it was tidy but sort of bare. Of course, I was used to the debris of four people—including two slobby boys—so probably it was just normal. Lucy led me straight to her room.

  It was way different there. The walls were covered in her artwork—lots of sketches and a few finished paintings that I’d have loved to spend time really looking at. Clothes and books were scattered around. A hand-lettered sign on her dresser mirror said BE WHO YOU ARE. I bent to take a look at the photos on the dresser while Lucy rummaged in a bookshelf. There was one of Lucy at about five, between her mom and dad, holding their hands while they swung her in the air. She looked like a little elf child with her big eyes and heart-shaped face and swirl of dark hair. They all looked happy.

  “Here it is.” Lucy sat on the bed with an old hardcover book and flipped pages. I squeezed in beside her. She still smelled like fresh air and leaves, and all I really wanted was to kiss her neck and hold her against me and feel her shoulder bones, like little wings, under my hands. I felt a sudden flare of anger that the memory of our first kiss would always be eclipsed by the weirdness that happened next.

  “Okay, ‘The Little Match Girl,’ by Hans Christian Andersen.” Lucy laid the book in my lap, open at an illustration of a young girl in ragged clothing, standing on a dark, snowy street. It didn’t look exactly like my Match Girl, but I recognized the scene, all right, and it spooked me enough that I forgot about Lucy’s neck.

  “Andersen…that’s my mom’s last name.”

  “Really?” Lucy shot me a quick glance. “He wrote tons of famous fairy tales. This one though—it’s pretty dark.”

  We read through it together, and when we were done I just shook my head. “He wrote that for kids? No wonder you had nightmares.”

  Lucy snorted. “I guess we’re supposed to be all happy she got her reward in heaven. But really, it’s a story about a poor abused girl who freezes to death while rich people ignore her.”

  Then we went quiet, each of us, I guess, trying to put the story together with the Match Girl I’d met and find some kind of answer there. It was impossible.

  And then I went low. I didn’t notice at first—I was feeling too weird already to notice I was feeling weird—but I clued in when my fingers started trembling. Then that starving-but-pukey wave rolled through me. I groped in my pocket for my glucose, stuffed three sugar tablets into my mouth and pulled out my meter. I could feel the sweat standing out on my forehead now—never a good sign. I tested at 2.7, low enough to make me a bit loopy. With everything that had gone on, I realized, I hadn’t tested or eaten anything since lunch. I popped another sugar tab.

  “Jack? You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m just low.” I tried to smile reassuringly though I felt like crap. “I’ll be okay, but I should eat something more than sugar. You got anything like crackers and peanut butter?”

  By the time she ran back with a sleeve of Premium Plus and a jar of PB, I was already perking up. “Sorry if I scared you. It doesn’t usually take me by surprise like that.” I felt like I could inhale the entire contents of a fridge, but I’d probably given Lucy enough excitement for one day. I made four cracker-and-peanut-butter sandwiches and resisted the urge to cram them all into my mouth at the same time.

  LUCY

  At least Jack going low broke the spell, or we might have sat there, baffled, on the bed forever.

  “Let’s make dinner,” I suggested. “At least, if I can find anything to make.” It was Thursday. My mom usually shops on Friday, her day off, so the cupboards were pretty bare.

  We found decent salad fixings, odds and ends of vegetables, a frozen ham (when did my mother think we would ever eat such a big ham?) and two frozen blocks of tofu. I looked at them glumly. “I bought three of these because I thought I should eat more vegetarian,” I confessed, “but I don’t really know what to do with it.”

  I’d choked my way through a stir-fry dotted with tasteless white blobs and given up. I looked in the cupboard where we keep the canned stuff. “There might be some tomato sauce in here—there’s always spaghetti.” I was embarrassed—here was Jack at my house for the first time, and I couldn’t even make him a decent dinner. His kitchen was always full of food.

  But he pulled the tofu out of the freezer. “This is good,” he said. “We’ve got onions, peppers, some other stuff—I’m thinking tofu scramble. You got potatoes? Maybe with hash browns and salad?” He caught my look. “My mother was vegetarian for years—haven’t you noticed what a total ex-hippie she is? Not even ex. We eat vegetarian a lot.” He was rummaging in the fridge, pulling out ingredients. “How about I do the tofu, and you do the rest?”

  We set to work. He asked for maple syrup and limes (which we didn’t have), garlic and soy sauce and brown sugar (which we did). He nuked the tofu, squeezed it till it bled a bunch of clear liquid into the sink and sliced it up. Then he whipped up this brown concoction, set the tofu to soak in it and started chopping onions. I just watched him, sort of entranced. I’d never realized how sexy a man wielding a ki
tchen knife could be. Jack paused and glanced up, as if he could feel my eyes on him, and my face flushed. You’d think I’d been caught peeping at him in the shower. Ridiculous.

  “Um, right, potatoes,” I muttered and busied myself washing and peeling. “How do you do hash browns—cut them up really small and fry them?”

  “Sure. Unless there’s something else you want to do?”

  So polite, not wanting to take over. I smiled and dropped a little curtsy. “Nope. I’m happy to take orders here.”

  I chopped up the potatoes and set them frying with a sprinkle of the onions. Then I asked Jack to walk me through the tofu, and he told me about marinating it so it takes on some flavor.

  We had so much fun cooking together. Studiously ignoring what had happened before, we just concentrated on playing house. I ripped up lettuce, and Jack fried the vegetables and tofu together, then poured some of the leftover marinade over the pan.

  It was so yummy—the tofu salty and sweet and a bit crispy on the outside, all mixed in with the onions and peppers.

  “To the chef.” I held up my water glass and we clinked.

  “Merci, Mademoiselle. Tu es charmante.” He laid it on with a thick accent, then grinned. “Actually, I can only cook about three other things. It’s lucky you didn’t ask me to make the ham.”

  NINE

  JACK

  Thank God for Lucy. I’d have been really going crazy if not for her. By the time I left her house I actually felt pretty normal—normal enough, anyway, to give her a long and heartfelt kiss goodbye.

  “You sure you have to go home now?” she murmured, and that’s all it took to set everything racing. Stay, stay, my body commanded. But instead I nodded reluctantly.

  “I really do need to tell my parents what’s going on, and I don’t want it to be too late.” You told Lucy, you can tell them, my Good Boy mind insisted. They would probably march me straight to the hospital for a tox screen. But I couldn’t think of a better plan.