by Ronald Malfi
“So what? You didn’t do this? No? So maybe it was someone else, right? Maybe someone else in the house went into your room and threw your father’s socks out the window. Is that it? Did I solve the case?”
“I didn’t do—”
Her mother’s hand shot out and smacked Kelly across the face. Pain exploded in her head and she nearly fell off the chair. Glenda, who had tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible, turned from the sink at the sound of the slap. Her face burning and her left ear ringing, Kelly brought her face back around to meet her mother’s. Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks.
The assembly of emotions that swam across her mother’s face at that moment were too great to know what the woman was thinking, was feeling. She looked like she might begin to cry too, Kelly thought.
Her mother stuck a finger out at her. “I’m not your father, you little witch,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you. Don’t forget that.”
Her mother seemed to hang above her for an eternity before leaving. Staring straight at the kitchen wall, Kelly listened to her mother’s heavy footfalls slamming against the hardwood floor until they disappeared.
Glenda shuffled over, gathered the socks and stuffed them into the pocket of her apron. With one hand, she smoothed back Kelly’s hair and departed again for the sink. “Finish your breakfast, dear,” Glenda said without looking at her.
“You’re getting me in trouble,” she told him.
The boy was slinking behind some bushes, as if trying to hide from Kelly, yet being casual about it. Every once in a while he coughed, sounded close to choking, then she’d hear him spit repeatedly. “I didn’t do anything,” he said after a time.
“You did. You sneaked into my room through my window and stole my father’s socks. My mom found two that you must have dropped.”
“I wanted to try them.”
“You don’t need clothes.”
“I don’t care,” he said. Briefly, his eyes flashed up to meet hers. They were dark and calculating. And they looked blue now, not black. Was that possible? Was she now imagining his eyes as blue? “I wanted to try.”
“And my mother hasn’t noticed yet, but you’ve been taking other things from the house too. There’s food missing from the refrigerator, stuff I only eat so no one’s said anything about it. But I know.”
“I don’t like food,” he told her. “It is disgusting, the whole process. It’s painful and it doesn’t feel good. I’m crazy with it.”
She leaned forward, trying to peer over the veil of shrubbery. “What are you doing back there?”
He didn’t answer; she could hear him breathing loudly. Again, he coughed, sputtered, and spat on the ground.
“Are you all right? What’s the matter?”
She hopped down from her rock-throne and crossed over through the bushes. She paused as she reached the other side, not quite knowing what to make of the situation.
Simple Simon was crouched on the ground, leaning forward on the balls of his feet. His toes—now fully developed—lay splayed like fingers in the grass. His hands were up to his face, to his mouth, working with something like a squirrel packing acorns into its mouth. When she appeared before him, he poked his head up and watched her with insect-like eyes, unnaturally still. He held something white and plastic in his hands.
“What are you doing?” she repeated, this time with a hint of caution. “You don’t look well.”
“It’s making me crazy,” he muttered, refusing to move. His eyes drilled into her.
“What is?”
“How do you do it? I can’t stand it.” It was a plastic fork he was holding, she saw. Only three of the four prongs had been broken off.
“Do what? I don’t understand what’s wrong.”
“Food,” he said. “There are things in my throat now. Big, fleshy things. I got food stuck in them. It hurts, it’s driving me crazy.”
“Those are tonsils, I think…”
“I don’t want them. Why did you give them to me? Think them away.”
“I can’t…”
“Do it.”
“I never thought them there in the first place.”
She thought she would turn and run screaming out of the woods if he didn’t take his eyes from her, avert that piercing stare. The anger behind those eyes reminded Kelly of her mother—that fueled cocktail of anger, fear and confusion.
His eyes still trained on Kelly, the boy opened his mouth as wide as it could go—and for the first time, Kelly realized just how real he had become. She saw yellow, crooked teeth and a pink slab of tongue. She recognized the moisture of saliva, saw ill-looking gums. With a trembling hand, Simple Simon pushed the single-pronged end of the plastic fork into his mouth and all the way toward the back of his throat. His whole fist went into his mouth to the second knuckle. Slowly, he began to rotate his hand in small circles, the fork’s prong scraping along the back of his throat. Kelly could clearly hear it scraping through the mucus. Just watching him repulsed her.
“Oh my God,” she muttered, turning away. “Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”
Something snapped. He withdrew the fork with a wet, sucking sound. The prong had broken off. “I don’t hurt.”
“Stop it,” she repeated.
“It’s making me insane,” he said. “I can’t stand it. How do you stand it?”
“I don’t even feel it. I’ve never noticed it before.”
He stood, his meager body trembling. “I need more forks. Plastic ones, so I can break the other points off. Or anything else that will fit in the back of my throat—”
“Stop it!” she suddenly shouted, a well of anger erupting from her chest. The unexpected outburst surprised and frightened her. “I didn’t imagine you like this! You’re in my head! You shouldn’t be this real!”
Shaking, she hugged herself and backed up a step, catching her breath.
“I’m here,” the boy muttered. “Real or not, I’m here. And another thing—I don’t like being called ‘Simple Simon’ anymore. It’s stupid. It’s for children. Like you.”
“I…don’t call you that anymore.”
“No, but that’s how you think of me. Stop it.”
Leave, her mind suddenly said. He doesn’t want you here anymore so just leave, run, get away. Maybe Glenda was right after all—there’s no perfect fairy tale world. Sooner or later, everything comes crumbling down.
“What are you going to run from?” He could read her thoughts. He was her thoughts. “Why would you want to run from me?”
She was backing away slowly. She watched as Simple Simon—Simon—backed around a cluster of bushes, his own eyes narrowed, never leaving her face.
“You don’t have to get upset,” he said…but she didn’t like the look on his face. Something was swimming below the surface there, like a corpse submerged in swamp water. He crept along the guard with a slight bend to his posture, as if his head had suddenly become too heavy to carry. “You can just blink me away. Do it. After all…what’s the sense of having an imaginary friend if you’re going to be afraid of him?”
And that was it—she’d just needed to hear the word. She was suddenly afraid of him. He wasn’t natural; he was a monster.
“You’re not real,” she breathed, her voice shaking, her heart racing. “You’re not. You’re in my head.”
“That stone was pretty real, wouldn’t you say?”
“What stone?”
“The one you flung at Ugly-Girl,” he snickered. “It seemed pretty real to her, didn’t it? Or did you forget about that again so quickly? Why is it your mind keeps trying to block out the scary stuff, Kellerella? Why can’t you just accept the truth for what it is?”
But he was talking over her head now and she didn’t fully understand where he was headed, what he meant by his words. Confused and frightened, she turned to run…and screamed, suddenly accosted by a web of sharp, jutting tree branches. Yet she didn’t stop, and pushed through them. She felt a stinging tear at her forehead
, was aware of wetness running down into her eyes, but she didn’t stop until she passed through the thicket and broke out into a shade-covered clearing.
Out of breath, she bent at the waist and gripped her knees with her hands. Her throat felt like dry burlap. Her breath pushed from her throat in hot wheezes.
None of this is real, none of it exists, she tried to convince herself. There is no Never-Never Land. There never was. It was all in my head. It was never real…Never never existed.
Yet she was here, trapped in the middle of Never.
Wary, she looked over her shoulder for Simon but he hadn’t followed her. Around her, the woods stood like a corral, closing her off from the rest of the world. And was this really what she’d wanted? To be closed off, to be alone? No—she’d wanted someone. And that’s how this all started in the first place…
She started heading in the direction of the brook, to follow it back up to the house instead of along the path. Half-dazed, she stumbled through the woods, her mind and body still shaken. Frightened and not quite certain why, she passed through a stand of firs and broke out along the bank of the brook just as she caught the sound of someone sobbing quietly. A boy. Could it be Simon? Had he tried following her through the forest, weeping? Kelly paused just below the embankment that ran toward the brook, and noticed a boy her own age fighting off tears further down the brook. Stunned, she only stood there and stared at him. She’d never seen anyone else in these woods before. It was almost surreal.
She stepped closer and crunched a branch on the ground. The boy jerked his head up in surprise and they both froze, staring at each other.
He was slight and fragile, with square glasses covering his face, and shoulders like two little knobs poking from beneath his shirt. The knees of his corduroys were shredded, the skin beneath cut and bleeding. His face was pale, but bright flowers of red had blossomed across his cheeks and neck. His chest hitched the slightest bit, as if he’d been fighting off tears for some time now.
Seeing him, she felt intrusive, as if she’d walked into a part of this boy’s own personal world and interrupted him. “Hello,” she whispered. Uncertain what to say, she found her eyes skirting back over his injured knees. “Did you get hurt?”
“I fell,” the boy said. His throat sounded choked and frightened. He turned and pointed to a makeshift swing hanging from a rope tied to a high branch on one of the trees.
“You’re hurt.” She moved along the brook, following her reflection in the ripple of the water.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said, suddenly trying to sound both tough and casual. In his hands he held a piece of wet cloth. He held it out and wrung it over the water.
“Did you tie that swing up in that tree?”
The boy nodded.
“How did you get it all the way up there?”
“I climbed.”
“That whole tree?”
“Just up to the branch.” He pointed. “See?”
“That’s pretty high up.”
“It’s not so high,” he told her, now exuding confidence. His birdlike chest seemed to puff out before her eyes and she fought back a grin. “I can climb higher.”
“Higher than that? Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall again?”
He shook his head, but his eyes had crept up and to the right in contemplation. “I can climb to the top,” he stated.
“Wow. You’ve climbed to the top before?”
“Well, no, not yet. But I’ve been practicing. I climb up a little at a time, and each time I go up some more and up some more and pretty soon I’ll make it to the top. Just not yet.”
“You should be careful,” she told him. “You could fall and hurt yourself again.”
“You too.”
“Me too what? What do you mean?”
He pointed at her forehead and said, “You’re bleeding too. What happened?”
She brought a hand up to her forehead and gently touched the tender area. When she brought her fingers away, she saw they were slick with blood. Staring at it made her feel dizzy and she thought she might pass out. For a second or two, while talking with this boy, she’d forgotten all about Simple Simon and the Land of Never.
In my head, she told herself. All of it.
“I don’t know,” she said.
The boy shrugged. “Oh,” he said. Then he nodded toward the brook. “Clean it with the water. It’s clean water. Cold. It’ll make it feel better.”
“Will it sting?”
“No.” Then: “Maybe a little. But not much. You’ll be okay.”
Smiling, she hunkered down beside him along the edge of the brook. With both hands, she reached into the brook and cupped some water, brought it up to her face, hesitated.
“It feels good,” he promised her.
“Yeah,” she said, and patted her hands against her forehead. It stung, but felt good, too.
“I’m Gabriel,” said the boy.
“Kelly,” she responded, a blushing heat flooding her face. Then said, “Do you want to come see a baby?”
Gabriel smiled. “I’ve never seen a real one before,” he said.
Kelly spent the following few weeks getting to know and befriend Gabriel Farmer. He lived with his parents in a small cottage on the other side of the wooded valley and was an only child. He seemed fascinated by the idea that Kelly had a younger sister, and although he never questioned her about it much, Kelly knew he wanted to ask her what it was like…if it was like anything at all…
He taught her to draw. On warm days, they’d sit by the brook and scrawl with crayons in Gabriel’s notebooks endlessly, laughing and telling jokes, and sometimes shooting spit-rockets into the brook water.
“You ever see anything strange down here?” she asked him once.
Not looking up from his artwork, Gabriel said, “Nope. Like what? Bears?”
“Not bears.”
“What?”
She shrugged, her eyes trailing off into the forest depths. “I don’t know. Just stuff. Nothing, I guess.”
Gabriel laughed. “Look at this.” He held up a picture of Kelly in a pink princess gown and pointed hat. She held a star-crowned wand trailing glitter in one hand.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing to a green lump at Princess Kelly’s feet.
“That’s me,” said Gabriel. “A frog.”
“A frog?” Kelly laughed. “Why a frog?”
Blushing, Gabriel turned back to his drawing pad and rubbed at his eyes from beneath his glasses. “Because that’s what the prince looks like before the princess kisses him.”
She laughed harder and stuck out her tongue. “Oh, gross!” she said.
“Yeah, I know—”
Giggling, she leaned over and kissed Gabriel Farmer on the cheek, shocking him into silence. As she pulled away, the boy clamped a hand over the targeted spot, too embarrassed to look her in the face. She could see tiny droplets of sweat breaking out along his face and neck.
“Nope,” she said, “still a frog.”
He laughed. “Shut up! Shut up!”
“Give me that.” She grabbed the picture from him, examined it at arm’s length. “Kellerella,” she muttered, her face completely sober now.
“What’s that?”
She looked at him. “What?”
“What you said,” he said. “Like Cinderella.”
The palms of her hands began to sweat. “Yeah,” she said, “like a fairy tale.”
Hours later, as she headed back through the forest toward home, she heard the clatter of something up ahead and froze. Movement caught her eye and she turned in time to see several white objects drop from a tree branch and rattle to the ground. They were forks, she saw. Plastic forks with all but one prong busted off.
“Simon,” she whispered.
One of the boy’s pale, thin legs swung down from the tree branch, dangled several feet in front of her. Its sudden appearance startled her and she jumped back, uttered a small cry. Craning her neck, she could barely
make out Simon’s poorly-defined form crouched among the leaves and branches of the tree.
“What are you doing up there?”
He tossed another fork down at her and spat on the ground. “Found a new friend?” he said.
“His name’s Gabriel,” she said.
“Do you like him? Is he your boyfriend?”
“No,” she stammered.
“Oh.” He shifted positions in the tree, sending a wave of leaves fluttering to the ground. His swinging foot moved out of the way and Kelly noticed that something had been carved into the bark of the tree, just above her reach. They were initials, she saw: K.K. + S.S.
“Did you tell him about me?” Simon said, and she looked up at him.
“No.”
“Why not?”
She sidestepped the tree. “I have to go home,” she said.
“I don’t like being by myself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re not,” he told her. “You ignore me, just like your parents ignore you. You’re just as evil.”
His words hurt her. “That’s not true!”
“Let’s go to the house,” he said, “the gingerbread house.”
“I can’t,” she told him. “I have to get home.” The truth was, she’d been having a difficult time seeing the gingerbread house lately. It no longer existed for her.
“You’re supposed to be the Princess of Never,” he muttered, hiding his face behind a pall of leaves. “I’m supposed to be the Prince.”
“Some other time,” she said. “I have to go.”
Not looking back, her head down, she pushed on through the forest toward home. And although she didn’t want to think about Simon, Prince of Never, she could hear him yammering in her head: You’re just as evil as your parents, Kellerella. You left me. You left me.
Go away! she thought, and ran the rest of the way home.
Gabriel’s birthday was in the fall, and two days prior to it, Kelly slipped down into the forest to hang a newly made swing from the tallest tree she could find. She’d wanted to do something special for him and, having never had a close friend, she didn’t want to disappoint him and scare him off. Not that she thought Gabriel was like that. Would it be possible to ever scare him off? she wondered.