by Chris McCoy
There was silence in the Senate chamber.
“It’s rude to interrupt your president when she is speaking,” said Persephone. “Would the officer of the court please have Senator Thip-Thap taken to a comfortable place where he can lie down? He’s quite old, and not quite sane.”
“Of course, President Skeleton,” said the court proboscis monkey, lumbering toward Senator Thip-Thap, who stared at Persephone.
“And you wonder why nobody loves you,” said Senator Thip-Thap.
“I HAVE THE LOVE OF A WORLD,” she snapped. “Out with this shoddy antique!”
The court monkey grabbed Senator Thip-Thap and dragged him out of the Senate chamber while the rest of the audience looked on, giving their silent consent. As soon as the monkey was out of the room, Persephone straightened her body, cracked her bones, and spoke sweetly into the microphone.
“Now then,” she said. “Let us get this vote under way. I trust there won’t be any more distractions, aside from my beauty. As I was saying …”
X
Being inside a thick sack, Ted only knew that he’d been placed on a wagon of some kind, and he could feel Vango, Dr. Narwhal, and Dwack beside him. Their mouths were taped shut and their wrists bound with heavy ropes.
When the wagon stopped, Ted detected a flurry of activity outside the sack.
“Move!” said a rough voice as Ted was yanked off the wagon and carried by several pairs of hands. Behind him, he heard labored grunting and guessed that the kidnappers were attempting to lift Dr. Narwhal.
“Set his flippers free and make him walk,” said another voice. “If he doesn’t move, we’ll have to roll him.”
Suddenly Ted was dropped roughly onto the ground, and his sack was untied and swiftly removed. He opened his eyes and saw that he was in a wide tunnel constructed entirely of bending, arching trees. Everywhere he looked, other tree-tunnels connected to this main corridor.
Dwack, Vango, and Dr. Narwhal sat beside him.
And standing in front of him was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.
“Mon Dieu!” she said. “You are a ragtag lot. And you stink!”
XI
After the vote, Persephone departed the Senate chamber for her high-rise apartment, feeling great about herself. It was almost unprecedented to see a unanimous yes vote, and the invasion was going to happen. She just needed to hammer out some final details. But that meeting wasn’t for another couple of weeks, so she had some time to relax … and get married.
Persephone looked through the window at the Ab-Com City skyline. Though she knew she should move into the stodgy Presidential Palace on the outskirts of the city, she preferred living in this apartment, her home, which she had been in ever since she had started earning enough money from bribes and kickbacks to have the type of life she had fantasized about during her sailing days.
When she met her Scurvy.
Persephone sat down on her feather bed—made from specific birds whose plumage had made her jealous—and removed her wig. It had been a long day, and she needed to rest if she was going to see Scurvy soon. He was the love of her life, and she wanted to look gorgeous.
“SWAMSTER,” she yelled. “BRING MY BATH SALTS!”
But Swamster didn’t respond.
“Oh yes,” said Persephone to herself. “I sent him to kill that boy.”
Persephone flopped back on her bed and rubbed her eyeholes with the delicate bones that formed her wings. She looked at the ceiling, where years before she had commissioned an artist to paint a portrait of Scurvy, just the way she’d remembered him. Masculine. Dashing. Perfect.
“Ah, mi amor,” said Persephone.
She had first met Scurvy on a pirate ship, where she had been the ab-com of a cabin girl named Grace, who had helped her mother cook, clean, and sew for the sailors. Grace had spent her entire life on the boat and saw plenty of scrap bones that sailors tossed her way after they were done eating. The cabin girl was terribly lonely, and she reconstructed these bones in her imagination to make a friend—her cockatoo, Persephone Skeleton.
One day, the ship stopped in Port Royal, Jamaica, to pick up supplies and replace crew members who had been lost at sea or killed in battle. A sailor came aboard with his young son Myles, who had dreamed of being a pirate since he was old enough to stare out at the boats coming into port. Myles had inherited an abstract companion to match his obsession—Scurvy Gordon. Myles the cabin boy met Grace the cabin girl, and from that day on, Scurvy and Persephone were inseparable.
During the days, Persephone sat on Scurvy’s shoulder as he captained his ship up and down the coast of the Americas, one of her eyes on the ocean, looking for ships, the other focused on Scurvy’s face. She had never seen such a handsome man. In battles, Persephone fought alongside Scurvy, clawing and pecking the eyes of rival sailors and buccaneers. During long days at sea, she entertained Scurvy with her songs: CAW CAW! And Scurvy always smiled and sang along, yelling his own CAW CAWs at the sea.
With Grace’s help, Persephone gradually learned some proper English, though at first she was limited mainly to nautical terms and curse words: CAW CAW! TURN STARBOARD, YA RUM BUCKET! But at night, Scurvy had her sleep on a perch in his personal quarters belowdecks, and it was here that Persephone eventually said the things she really wanted to say:
CAW CAW! I LOVE YOU, SCURVY!
All day long, she would sit on Scurvy’s shoulder and tell him again and again how she felt inside: CAW CAW! LET’S BUILD A NEST TOGETHER! CAW CAW!
But Scurvy never seemed to take her declarations seriously, and it almost seemed like he was confused by what she was saying. Confused by her love! Over time, Persephone could see that he was starting to shut her out completely. He stopped letting her sleep in his quarters and instead kept her in a cage in the galley. He stopped having her ride on his shoulder as he captained the ship.
Eventually, he stopped visiting her altogether, and Grace lost interest in her as well. She was never let out of her cage, nobody came to play with her, nobody came to talk to her. Stuck below the ship’s deck, she didn’t even know if it was morning or night. Persephone became bitter. Scurvy had cut Persephone out of his life completely—just because she loved him.
Then came the night the ship went down. She had been asleep in her cage—she liked to sleep, because sometimes she dreamed that Scurvy loved her back—when all of a sudden she heard a pounding above deck. She heard the shouts of men fighting and the booms of cannons being fired at close range, and shortly afterward came the crackle of the wooden ship burning.
She watched the fire scorch through the ceiling and begin to creep down the walls.
CAW CAW! she yelled.
She watched the flames leap along the floor.
CAW CAW CAW! she pleaded, begging anybody to save her.
She watched the blaze consume the oak stand beneath her and lick the bars of her cage.
CAW? she said, realizing that nobody was going to save her.
GRACE? SCURVY? She looked at the stairs leading down to the galley, willing her love to rush into the room and save her.
But he didn’t. And the ship sank.
And that was that.
XII
Ted was looking at the beautiful girl—staring at her, to be precise. The girl’s skin had a porcelain, polished quality to it, as if she were a statue. He guessed that she was about his age, and considering that she was wearing a pink leotard and a tutu, he guessed that she was a ballerina.
A yellow elk wearing a bowler hat stood next to her. The elk didn’t speak, and it seemed entirely deferential to the incomprehensibly beautiful ballerina.
“So,” said the ballerina. “It’s probably a good time for at least one of you to tell me what you were doing creeping around when my guards picked you up.”
“I am Dwack,” said Dwack. “And these are my associates, Dr. Narwhal, Vango, and Ted, a human who took a bit of a wrong turn from his own world.”
“Human,” said the ballerina, looki
ng at Ted. “Interesting.”
The ballerina let her pretty porcelain eyes remain on Ted for a moment longer than any lovely girl had ever looked at him before.
“Go on,” she said.
“And had your men—or your mammalia,” said Dwack, nodding at the dapper elk, “taken the time to question us about where we were going, they would have found that we were searching for ACORN.”
Dwack paused.
“Which,” he continued, “considering that you are hiding in a tree cave, I’d imagine you’d know something about.”
The ballerina narrowed her eyes.
“How do I know you’re not spies?” she said.
“Simple,” said Dwack. “Look at Vango.”
Even sitting in place, Vango was trembling visibly, and his eye was twitching. He looked completely out of his mind.
“He needs to paint every day,” said Dwack, “or else he has, let’s say, an episode. Now, do you believe that the Presidential Guard would let such a loose cannon join its spies?”
The ballerina was studying Vango. He clearly creeped her out, though she was holding her head high and keeping her face quiet, trying not to betray a reaction.
“Perhaps not,” said the ballerina. “But what of the rest of you?”
“I have nothing ill to say about Dr. Narwhal,” said Dwack. “And as for myself, I find our current administration a bit… gauche. They have no style. I would never be a part of such a flair-free bunch.”
“And what about the near-man?” said the ballerina.
Ted’s face warmed uncomfortably. A near-man? What was with the hyphen?
“He’s just lost,” said Dwack. “But you can question him yourself, if you have any concerns.”
“Well?” said the ballerina. “How do I know you’re not working for President Skeleton?”
Ted thought about this.
“Back in my world I have a family I love,” he said. “I have a little sister, Adeline, who I would never allow anyone to hurt.”
The ballerina thought about this, and then she smiled.
“Very good. My name is Joelle-Michelle Athenais-Benedicte de la Valliere. If you were looking for ACORN, you have found it.”
Part Three
TWEET!
Carolina Waltz didn’t even like football. TWEET, the whistle blew, and a pile of fat grunting guys moved six feet. And then TWEET, the whistle blew again, the referee put down the ball, and the nonsense started all over again.
But still, she cheered when the rest of the crowd cheered, and when her friends commented on which players they thought were cute, she responded in the way that she knew she was supposed to: Oh, he is so NOT! or maybe she would give an Oh, I TOTALLY know what you MEAN. More and more, she found herself talking like a bleached blonde from one of those fake reality shows that had nothing to do with the way she lived on Cape Cod. The guys liked it when she played the stupid girl, and her friends thought “mean beauty queen” was her true personality.
Somehow, she had reached a point where every day she felt like she was playing a role in somebody else’s movie.
CRUNCH! Down on the field, male bodies crashed into each other, and when the whistle stopped the action, one of the players was rolling around on the ground holding his knee, badly injured. It all just didn’t seem worth it to Carolina.
“Ow,” said her friend Shelly. “That looked like it really hurt. We learned in health class that knees are really important.”
Imagine that! Knees are important! thought Carolina. It boggled her mind that Shelly had to learn this from health class. Shelly thought that she was Carolina’s best friend. But Carolina didn’t have a best friend. Not since Czarina Tallow had left her.
“KILL ‘EM, JIMMY! WOO-HOO!” yelled Bridget.
Who cares about any of this? thought Carolina.
Her mother used to joke about the Russian empress Czarina Tallow being Carolina’s imaginary friend, but Carolina never really thought of Czarina like that. It wasn’t like Czarina would walk down the hallways with her in high school or anything—Czarina liked to spend her days in the garden writing letters back home to Russia rather than be cooped up inside—but when Carolina got home at the end of the day, Czarina would be there.
“You look zo lovely,” Czarina would say.
And Carolina would thank her politely.
Of course, in public and in front of her parents, Carolina had kept secret the fact that Czarina was still hanging around. If she was at her mother’s house, and her mom heard her talking to Czarina in her bedroom, Carolina would pretend like she was on the phone. If she was hanging out with her father on a summer weekend, and he noticed her lips moving while she was talking to Czarina on the beach—Czarina sitting modestly on a blanket, holding a parasol—Carolina would simply act like she was singing to herself.
“OH MY GOD, TOUCHDOWN! YAH!” yelled Shelly, and because the rest of the crowd was suddenly standing, Carolina got up on her feet.
Carolina wasn’t quite sure why Czarina had first appeared. When she was little, instead of Dr. Seuss books or stories about Matilda, her mother used to read Carolina Russian novels like The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace. Carolina’s mother had earned a master’s degree in Russian literature at Brown University, and she hoped to inspire the same love for great books in her daughter that she had.
And then one day when she got back from kindergarten, Carolina found a Russian noblewoman sitting on her bed.
“You are an enchanting girl!” the noblewoman had said.
“I am? But, I mean, who are you?”
“I am Czarina Tallow of Russia.”
Carolina recognized this name—her mother had shown her how to rearrange the letters in her own name into “Czarina Tallow.” She called it an anagram.
“EXTRA POINT! YAH!” yelled Bridget.
For half of Carolina’s life, Czarina Tallow had been her secret, and she was fine with that. They were different—Czarina wore lace gloves and a crown; Carolina wore a tank top and jeans. Czarina came from a big family; Carolina was an only child. Czarina adored gold and gemstones; Carolina didn’t care much for jewelry. But they got along famously, and Carolina hoped that Czarina would be a part of her life forever.
Then, a few weeks ago, Carolina came home from her job as a summer lifeguard, and Czarina was sick. She wouldn’t let Carolina see her face. The next day, she was gone. She hadn’t left a letter behind, which was terribly unlike her.
That’s when Carolina started hearing from her friends about how their younger siblings and cousins were crying that their so-called imaginary friends had vanished. There were even reports on the television about how kids were searching for them. Bespectacled experts swamped the talk shows to try to explain what was going on. With all the reports and all the theories, the one thing Carolina could come up with was… Ted Merritt.
“FUMBLE!” shouted Bridget. “Are you even watching this, Carolina?”
“Fumble!” said Carolina. “Woo!” That seemed to satisfy Bridget, who turned her attention back to the game.
Even though she didn’t really know him, she had always felt like she and Ted shared a mutual secret. And he seemed interesting—always wearing long-sleeved shirts, silently hustling from class to class, like he was constantly in his head. She couldn’t help but wonder what went on up there.
Plus, she thought he was cute.
But they were in completely different social circles, and in hers it was a rule that you didn’t speak to Ted Merritt unless you were making fun of him.
The night she’d seen him wrestling on the ground with nothing, she had laughed at him as loud as any of her friends, and she remembered the way he’d looked at her, like she was really hurting him. Carolina still felt terrible about it all.
“GO, JOE! GO, JOE! GO, JOE!” shouted Shelly, yelling at a football player on the sidelines. “I LOVE YOU, JOE!”
“Love you back, Wendy!” said Joe, pointing to Shelly.
“Shelly!” yelled She
lly. “My name is Shelly! We make out, remember?”
“We sure do, Wendy!”
Carolina had been looking for a chance to apologize to Ted at school, but she hadn’t seen him around in a few days.
“You need to get into the game, Carolina,” said Bridget. “Come on, your turn to start the wave.”
Carolina knew that if she didn’t, her “friends” would gossip about why she was acting weird. So she rose out of her seat and threw her arms in the air.
“WOO, FOOTBALL!”
II
For the first time in centuries, Persephone was nervous. She didn’t even know she could get nervous, but she could have sworn she was sweating, and without sweat glands! Butterflies flapped where her stomach would have been. She looked in the mirror on the wall and dragged a cylinder of ColorBoom! brand red lipstick across the bony protrusion that was all that remained of her beak.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she started, just for the heck of it, when all of a sudden the mirror fell to the ground with a bang, shattering into thousands of pieces.
Her interim assistant, Bugslush—a honey possum with an Australian accent and a stuttering problem—had been called up from her cleaning crew to work for Persephone in Swamster’s absence, and he was still getting used to the job. Jittery by nature, he was simultaneously terrified of the president and eternally grateful for his promotion.
Bugslush had taken the job against the advice of everyone he’d talked to about it. His background was in chemistry, but he wanted to get into politics, and this was his big chance.
“D-drat,” said Bugslush. “Th-thousands of ap-pologies, President Skeleton. I d-didn’t know that I was shutting the d-door so hard. I’ll have that m-mirror replaced im-mediately. I’M SO STUPID!”
“Exactly,” said Persephone. “Now, do calm down, Bugslush.”
Bugslush began arranging the two place settings the president had requested.
President Skeleton had told Bugslush that tonight was a special night, and she wanted it to be perfect. Normally she didn’t have dinner because food fell through her empty rib cage and splattered on the floor.