Kenji leans against a black lamppost and laughs. “Just like a fairy tale. Only usually the prince gets turned into a frog.”
“You better watch out,” Briar tells him. “You might be next.”
“Me?” Kenji asks, blinking. “What did I do?”
Briar puts one fist on her hip but keeps the other arm around me. “Nothing,” she says. “That’s the problem.”
“What’d you expect me to do?” Kenji asks. “I couldn’t stop Timber.”
“You guys,” I say. “He’s not my boyfriend. He can do whatever he wants to do.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Briar says. “I’m talking about Kenji.”
Kenji looks at me, helpless, but I don’t know what Briar’s getting at either. “Are you really mad at him?” I ask.
Briar looks up into the graying sky. “I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Well,” I say. “We can go home or hang out in the park or call Ari ...”
“No,” says Briar. “I mean, I don’t know what this is. What we’re doing.” She motions between herself and Kenji. “Why do you hang out with me all the time?”
Kenji pushes himself away from the lamppost. “I was under the impression that you liked hanging out with me.”
“I do. That’s my point,” says Briar.
He shoves his hands into his coat pockets. “Then why are you pissed?”
“Because I realized today that you’re just like Timber,” she says. “You can’t make up your mind! But I’m not like Zephyr. I’m not waiting around forever.”
Kenji’s eyebrows lift. “Waiting around for what? I have no idea what you’re talking about, Bri. I thought we were friends.”
“That’s it? Friends?” she asks.
A slow flush crawls up Kenji’s neck and over his ears. “You know ...” He squirms, kicking a pile of grayish snow. “I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” He looks at me. “Especially in front of your cousin.”
“Fine,” says Briar, hands on her hips. “Why don’t you give me a call when you do want to talk about it.”
Kenji shakes his head. “Timber and I tried to plan this fun day ...”
“Right,” Briar says with a huff. “And then he blows off my cousin.”
“Don’t get pissy at me because Timber acted like a jerk,” Kenji says.
“Hey, you guys ...” I say, but they’re not listening to me.
“I’m not mad at you about Timber. I’m mad at you about you!” Briar almost yells.
“I don’t need this,” Kenji says, and starts to walk away.
“Fine!” Briar yells.
Kenji looks over his shoulder. “I just thought ...”
“What?” Briar demands.
“Never mind.” He turns and walks away.
“Ugh!” Briar stamps her foot. “Come on.” She pulls my arm, and I follow her into the park. “I need to move before I explode or turn someone into a rat!”
We trudge through the snow. Our thick, fur-lined, deerskin boots are perfect for this weather. Instead of heading up into the tree line at the top of the hill, Briar walks toward a pristine expanse of white in the middle of the snow-covered meadow.
I jog to keep up with her. “What just happened?” I ask. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “Seeing Timber treat you like that today made me realize that I can’t do what you do. I can’t let Kenji string me along.”
I stop in my tracks. “You think Timber’s stringing me along?”
She turns around but keeps walking backward. “I don’t know what he’s doing, Zeph. But that’s the point. I won’t let that happen to me. Either he’s in or he’s out.”
“You really like Kenji, don’t you?”
She nods. “But I don’t know how he feels. He’s so closed off. It’s like hanging out with a tree.”
“I know what you mean.” I point to an elm and a sycamore at the edge of the meadow. “There’s Timber. And there’s Kenji.”
“No,” she says. “Kenji would be a Japanese maple.” I snort. Then she lifts her head and yells into the sky. “I need to blow off some steam. I need to dance!”
“I’ll dance with you,” I say, almost smiling for the first time in hours. “Let’s go.”
Holding hands, we run through the snow, past groups of kids stock-piling snowballs for an epic battle and toddlers making snow angels on the ground. A couple whizzes past us on skis. I look over at the hill, trying to see if our family might be sledding, but it’s too far away to see anything clearly. When we get to the center of the meadow, we are alone. We both stop, facing each other, our breath pluming into the early evening sky. The gray-bottomed clouds, tinted pink on top, hide the sunset, but a pale sliver of moon perches above the clouds calling in the night. The betwixt time, Grandma Fawna calls it, and it is the perfect time to dance.
Briar drags her foot, marking out a large circle in the snow. In the summer we tramp down grass or use rocks and flowers to make the ring. We throw down our bags then take off our coats and scarves before we step inside the circle, Briar on one side, me on the other. We close our eyes, breathe deeply, and silently call the wind, the water, the moon, and the sun. We lift our arms above our heads and clap. Then, we open our eyes and start the dance.
I haven’t felt this good in a long time. Skipping after Briar in the circle, hopping with my knees high, a one-footed turn, then sweeping the ground before we jump to the middle to join hands and back out again, not unlike the frenzied dance of the sandhill crane. We sing the ancient songs that we learned as little kids. The words are nonsense to us, but we feel their meaning deep in our chests.
“Sha we no, hallenschor, um triden fayre la dolly. For maden kling um schaden flang, um triden fayre la dolly.”
Briar is beautiful when she dances. She has the grace and speed of a young, strong doe who runs for the freedom and fun of moving. When she spreads her arms to spin, she is a majestic crane soaring.
She sings loudly as she dances. “Sha we no, hallenschor, um triden fayre la dolly. For maden kling um schaden flang, um KENJI fayre la dolly!”
I laugh, hearing her shout his name in our song. It sounds so funny. I try the same thing. “Sha we no, hallenschor, um triden fayre la dolly. For maden kling um shaden flang, um TIMBER fayre la dolly!”
We howl as we go around and around, singing their names as we dance away all our frustrations about them. I have no idea how long we dance. Ten minutes, two hours? All time gets lost when we’re in the circle, but at some point, we’re both exhausted. We slow the dance, whisper the chant, let our arms float to our sides. We close our eyes and breathe in deeply until finally we’re still. I stand, letting the blood pump through my body, warming me, reminding me that I am alive and no one, not Bella or Timber or anyone else in the world, can take happiness from me unless I allow them. A smile fills me and I sigh, then open my eyes.
I nearly jump when I look up. A huge group has formed around our circle. The snowball fighters, the skiers, families with sleds in tow. People with dogs and backpacks, a guy pushing a bike. They surround us, nearly silent in the gently falling snow. The sun is gone, the sky is gray with only the faint light of the first few stars and thin moon above the trees. Briar turns around, taking it all in. Then she grins, grabs my hand, and pulls us both into a deep bow. The crowd applauds.
As we step out of the circle, people flock to us.
“That was amazing.”
“What do you call that?”
“What language were your speaking?”
“Do you do birthday parties?”
Briar and I laugh, gathering our things, slipping on our coats, saying thanks and I don’t know and no, we don’t do parties. How funny these erdlers can be! Then there’s a commotion. People jostle and push until the crowd parts and Kenji stands in front of us. He’s breathing deeply, his face is flushed, and his hair is wild as if he’s tried to pull it out.
“Bria
r!” he says, more loudly than I’ve ever heard him speak.
“What?” she asks, startled
Kenji rushes toward her. “Oh Briar!” he says. “I love you.” He flings his arms around her neck and knocks her flat on her back. They lie in the snow, surrounded by strangers as Kenji, for the first time, kisses my cousin.
Briar couldn’t be happier as we walk home with Kenji hanging on her arm, but I’m not so sure. He can’t take his eyes off her and he’s nearly drooling. Everything she says makes him laugh and he wants to stop every five feet to kiss her again.
“What the heck happened to you, Kenji?” I finally ask when we’re out of the park and away from the crowd.
“What do you mean, what happened?” he asks as we walk toward our house. “Nothing happened. Everything happened! I came back to talk to you,” he says to Briar. “To work this out because I realized that you’re right.” He holds her hand and rubs her back while we walk. “That this is more than just being friends. And then I saw you. Dancing. Dancing. Dancing. Shouting my name. I’ve never felt anything like it. Like some force of nature was pulling me. Like tug-of-war between the moon and sun and I was in the middle. But there you were!” He presses his hands into her cheeks. Strokes her hair. “I realized then that you are the most beautiful person in the world. That you are everything I’ve ever wanted in my whole entire life.” He stops and kisses her again at the corner. Long and slow for the length of the red light. When he comes up for air he says, “That I love you, Briar.”
Briar’s face blossoms. Her eyes sparkle. She takes his hand in hers and gently pulls him near.
My eyes sting as we cross the street to our house. Kenji’s madly in love with Briar. Timber is off with Bella. And I’m alone. How wrong is that?
chapter 10
KENJI STAYS FOR dinner and manages to stop mauling Briar long enough to let her eat, but he stares at her nearly the whole time and laughs at everything she says. Mom and Dad exchange perplexed but amused looks over the turkey dinner leftovers. Grandma Fawna looks slightly worried, but no one says anything until after Kenji is finally out the door.
“Kenji seemed, um ...” Dad starts to say while we clear dishes from the table.
“Different,” Mom adds.
Briar floats around the table, picking up one piece of silverware at a time, lost in her own private la-la land. “I know,” she says with a sigh. “He finally realized how he feels about me.”
Mom and Dad look at each other. “Do all erdlers act like that when they take a liking to someone?” Dad asks.
“How would I know?” I huff, because obviously Timber has never acted this way around me.
“Oh, Zeph,” says Briar dreamily. “Don’t be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous,” I say, wadding cloth napkins into a ball. “I think it’s weird. Don’t you, Grandma?”
Grandma stops stacking cups. “What?”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that all of a sudden Kenji’s fawning over Briar like he’s a bear and she’s covered in honey?”
“Is he?” she asks. “I hadn’t noticed.” She goes back to stacking cups and my mouth drops open. I figured as soon as it was clear that Kenji’s into my cousin, my grandmother would go cold on him like she is to Timber.
“But you looked worried,” I say to Fawna.
“Did I?” she asks. “I must’ve been thinking about something else.”
“Just remember, Briar,” Mom says, “Kenji is different from you. And there are things about our lives that he can’t know.”
Briar nods. “You don’t have to worry about that. I would never put our family in jeopardy.”
I glance at Grove. He rolls his eyes at me, then carries a large stack of plates into the kitchen.
“As long as you can keep up with your schoolwork and follow the rules of our family, then Kenji is welcome here anytime,” Dad tells Briar.
“Yes, Uncle Drake,” says Briar, and I want to gag. She hasn’t been so sweet and polite since she was six years old.
Mom and Dad seem to think it’s a little bit strange, too, but they just shake their heads and laugh.
When the dishes are clean and tucked away in the cupboards again, my parents gather us all in their bedroom.
“We have a letter from Willow.” Mom’s face blossoms into a smile as she presses the letter to her heart.
Poppy, Persimmon, and Bramble scramble onto the bed to sit on my parents’ laps. Grove, Briar, and I sit side by side on the window seat, and Grandma lowers herself into a rocking chair.
My dad hands me the letter. “Will you read it aloud?”
I nod and feel a twinge of sadness that Willow isn’t here with us. I can just imagine her at Aunt Flora’s heavy wooden table in front of the open-hearth fireplace, writing this letter that smells slightly of wood smoke. “‘Dearest Ones,’” I begin. “‘We’re all hunkered down like rabbits snug in our warrens beneath the blanket of snow. As you know, winter came early this year and is making quite a spectacle of itself. The drifts have reached the back porch roof now.’ ”
“The roof!” Bramble throws himself backward onto a pile of pillows. “That’s not fair. The snow here is almost melted.”
“We’ll get more,” Mom tells him.
I read on. “‘I can imagine how much fun Poppy, Bramble, and Persimmon will have sliding down into the deep snowbanks with all the cousins.’”
“I bet Tulip’s been sledding without me,” Poppy pouts.
Persimmon crosses her arms, mimicking Bramble and Poppy. “Not fair,” she says.
“Oh now,” Dad tells the kids. “There’ll be plenty of snow when we get there.”
I continue. “‘Ash made me a new pair of skis this week and we’ve spent lots of time up at the bluffs. The snowshoes Dad made last winter are still hanging strong. We didn’t even have to restring them.’” I look up. “I can’t wait to snowshoe,” I say.
“I can’t wait to do the solstice dance,” Briar says with a sigh.
“Keep reading,” Mom says, eager for more.
“‘Now a bit of sad news,’” I read. Fawna stops rocking and the kids all settle down. “‘Mama Ivy has begun to fade.’”
“Oh dear,” says Grandma, rubbing one of the amulets. “That must have been what I’ve sensed.”
“Which one is Mama Ivy?” Poppy asks.
“Six greats,” says Mom. “Ivy, Hortense, Apricot, Laurel, Jonquil, and Lily.”
“Lily is my mother,” Fawna says. “Your great-grandmother.”
“Is Mama Ivy the one who makes strawberry candy?” Poppy asks.
“That’s right,” Dad tells her.
“And lives in that house with all the wildf lowers around it?” Bramble asks.
“Yes,” says Fawna.
“What else does it say?” asks Mom.
“‘Grandmother Jonquil sent word through cousin Umber. He says Ivy’s comfortable and peaceful, but her magic is dwindling fast.’ ”
“Hmm.” Grandma looks at my mom. “Won’t be long.”
“Until what?” asks Bramble.
Mom cups Bramble’s cheek in her hand. “Until she passes.”
“Passes what?” Poppy asks.
“Dies,” Dad says.
Tears immediately quiver at the edge of Poppy’s eyes. “I don’t want her to die.”
“A minute ago you didn’t remember who she was,” I say. Mom frowns at me, then she opens her arms for Poppy.
“Mama Ivy’s lived a very long time,” Dad says.
“But I want her to live forever,” says Poppy.
Mom gives her a hug. “That’s not the way life works, my dear.”
“Yeah, erdlers don’t even live to be a hundred,” Briar says.
Poppy wipes her eyes. “I’m glad I’m not an erdler, then.”
“What else does Willow say?” Grandma asks me.
I look back at Willow’s neat handwriting. “‘Jonquil says Ash and I should come look at the house soon, but I can’t face that without Mom a
nd Dad and Grandma Fawna.’”
“What’s she mean?” Bramble asks.
“Willow will inherit Mama Ivy’s land because she’s the next first-first in line,” Mom explains.
“First-first?” Poppy says.
“Because Willow is my first daughter,” Mom says.
“And your mother is my first daughter,” Grandma adds. “And I was the first daughter of Lily, and Lily was the first daughter of Jonquil, all the way back to Aster, the very first mother. So we’re a line of first-firsts.”
“Then what am I?” asks Poppy.
Mom kisses the top of her head. “A middle.”
“You all are, except for Briar,” Fawna says.
Briar looks surprised. “What am I then?” she asks.
“A youngest daughter of a youngest daughter,” Grandma says. “But it stops there because I’m Flora’s mother and I’m a first.”
I shake my head. “This is all too confusing for me.”
“Yes, it’s a bit much, isn’t it?” Grandma says. “None of it really matters except for true first-firsts and true youngest-youngests, so don’t worry about it.”
I turn back to the letter. “There’s more here for you, Grandma.”
“Go on,” says Mom.
“‘Jonquil also says to tell Grandma Fawna that your aunt Iris shifted and has been gone for a week.’”I look up. When we first moved to Brooklyn, Grandma Fawna shape-shifted into her totem animal, a red-tailed hawk, so she could fly here and check on us. Only the most powerful elves can do such a thing. I won’t even know what my totem is until after my apprenticeship.
“What’s Iris’s totem?” Mom asks.
Grandma thinks for a moment. “A mink, I think. Or maybe a fox.” Briar sits up straight. “That reminds me, do you remember seeing that fox at the Red Hook club the other night?”
“They’re keeping a fox at a club?” Grandma asks.
“I wish I had a fox,” Bramble tells Poppy.
“No, you don’t. It would eat your bunny,” Poppy says.
Selfish Elf Wish Page 10