by Jodi Picoult
But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It’s like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation’s there, but it’s useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone’s imagination.
This morning, just like every other morning I’ve been here, I am awakened by the sound of Pyro doing his seven a.m. flyby. Roosters have nothing on dragons, which sound like a cross between a howler monkey and a braying donkey; I have no idea how he doesn’t wake up the entire kingdom as he streaks his way across all sixty pages. I blink at the stone ceiling of the castle, still kind of expecting my mom to walk in and tell me I’m going to be late for school. Then I sit up and let my gaze fall on the spacesuit draped over the golden chair in the corner of the room.
In the new story, I lead the citizens of the kingdom to battle the Galactoids from the planet Zugon, in order to bring down the mighty Zorg. It involves the kidnapping of space princess Seraphima, which starts an intergalactic war, and includes trolls swiping spaceships from the sky with their meaty paws, fairies listening in on top-secret meetings (giving new meaning to the term fly on the wall), mermaids running covert submarine operations into the core of the Earth, and Rapscullio being exposed as a double agent working as a henchman for Zorg. The skeleton of the story was part of a video game I used to play back in the other world; all I did was connect the dots. I used to spend six hours a day with a controller in my hands. Sometimes I’d even wake up thinking about ways to make it to the next level. It’s every gamer’s dream to actually live as your avatar—to swing the sword instead of pushing a button to make it happen, to kiss the princess instead of watching the action unfold on the screen while your score goes through the roof.
I’m totally psyched to be here. I am.
I just have to keep reminding myself.
After I get dressed and brush my teeth, I head down the spiral staircase, sniffing out the source of the heavenly aroma that has been wafting through the castle. I find Queen Maureen, wearing her silver supersuit, her platinum-braceleted wrists sunk in a bowl of dough. “Good morning, Edgar!” she says, smiling brightly. “How did you sleep?”
“Great, until that dragon flew by.”
“He is an early riser,” she muses. “You get used to it.”
I grab a scone from a stack that’s still warm from the oven and grunt in response.
Maureen hesitates, then offers me a half smile. “I was just wondering . . . do you mind if I finish baking before I come down to rehearsal? After all, it’s been weeks since we were read . . . surely it won’t be a problem if I miss an hour to finish this pain au chocolat?”
When I don’t answer right away, she wipes her hands on a dish towel.
“That’s fine, then. I can always finish later—”
“No, no,” I reply. “Whatever. Stay if you want to. If we need you, you’re only a shout away.”
Her face brightens. “I’ll let you have the first taste,” she promises.
I strap on my laser pistol and my force field interrupter, planning to head down to Everafter Beach to rehearse. I have to admit, it took a little while to get used to living in two dimensions. When you first walk through this world, it feels like you’re crossing through a pop-up picture book. Pluck a flat apple off a tree, and in your hand, it somehow morphs into something tangible, luscious, and real. I’m not sure if that’s because it actually becomes a true apple or because I’m as flat as it is. And it’s disconcerting to have to leap the fault line that the spine of the book creates to get from a left-hand page to a right-hand one. There’s gravity here, but it’s different—it’s not like being in water, where you have to work to stay sunken, but it’s not as strong as the pull in the real world either. I can easily do a backflip or climb a sheer rock wall without breaking a sweat—everything is somehow effortless. And there are no maps, and no roads to speak of. You don’t count turns, you count pages. To get from the castle to Orville’s cottage, for example, is seven jumps. And moving from page to page isn’t just continuing down a path—you step off into a great, black, dizzying nothing, letters swinging overhead, and suddenly find yourself standing at your destination without any memory of how you got there.
Just when I pass the drawbridge on my way out of the castle, Pyro screams overhead, and I turn around. For just a moment, I’m not seeing the scene in front of me. The path leading to the castle winds and twists in the exact same pattern as my driveway at home—which I remember failing to back out of while practicing to get my driver’s license. My whole body aches, and I realize there’s a reason it’s called being homesick. Suddenly I want nothing more than to be sitting in my kitchen with my mom giving me the same old cereal boxes to choose from. I want her to yell at me to pick up the clothes littering my bedroom floor. I want . . . well, my mom.
My mother created this book; her fingerprints are bound to be all over it. But the whole point of coming into the fairy tale was to have an adventure. And I’m not going to let a little bit of homesickness ruin that for me. I take a deep breath and turn away from the castle walkway, which might look familiar but is actually a whole world away from what I’m used to.
Everafter Beach is the last page of the book, so it takes the longest to reach from the castle. I hike through the Enchanted Forest, past the troll bridge and Orville’s cottage. Grimacing, I dive off the cliff into the ocean, past the mermaid scene, and emerge dripping wet on the shores where Pyro lives. By the time I get to Captain Crabbe’s ship, I know I’m late, because nobody’s around. So I scale the rock wall extra fast and dive out the window, somersaulting onto Everafter Beach.
Frump stands on a stump, trying to get the attention of the others. The trolls Biggle and Snort are having a laser fight, which is good practice for the new plot, except I think they’re getting more joy out of beheading palm trees and igniting sand into glass than out of rehearsing actual swordsmanship. Pyro is snoring, rings of smoke puffing from his nostrils. The mermaids are having snail races, betting with pearls. Trogg the troll is playing his flute. The fairies have braided daisy chains that they’re weaving through Socks’s mane; he’s beaming so much he basically emits a glow. Orville and Captain Crabbe are playing five-card stud, using sand dollars and shells for chips.
“What’s going on?” I ask, putting my hand on Frump’s shoulder.
He jumps, scratching his ear, a reflex. Old habits die hard, I guess. Until a couple of months ago, Frump was a basset hound. “I think people just aren’t feeling . . . inspired,” Frump says.
“Well, how could we?” Seraphima announces, arriving on the page. “We haven’t had a Reader for, like . . .” She rolls her eyes up, as if she’s counting, and then her eyebrows knit together. “For, like, a long time.”
Seeing her, Frump hops down from his perch. He takes her hand and kisses it. He is so whipped. “Princess,” he says, “every time I think you can’t look any more radiant, you prove me wrong.”
“I don’t think she looks radiant,” I point out. “Where’s your space gear?” She’s wearing some silly dress from the Renaissance, with little slippers that look about as substantial as socks and are totally inappropriate for kicking alien butt.
“Oh, do shut up, Edgar,” she says with a sigh. “As if. The aliens haven’t come for us. This is all just a joke. I am a princess. I’m not doing your dirty work for you anymore.”
Frump and I exchange a glance. On her good days, Seraphima is about as smart as a brick. Somehow, even performing a fairy tale over and over has not clued her in to the fact that she is not actually a princess but only a character in a book. I thought she would be the easiest to convince, when I came inside, that the story had a new twist, one in which Oliver was an imposter and this fairy tale was a decoy to keep the aliens from Zorg from annihilating our planet. But when she learned that she would no longer be wearing her royal gowns and getting married to a prince every day, she lost interest.
Rapscullio comes up to us. “
Hate to interrupt,” he says, “but I can’t help noticing that everyone here is a little . . . shall I say . . . on edge? I’ve been taking a self-taught course on conflict resolution, and, well, I don’t mean to belittle your contributions, Edgar, but the problem does seem to be stemming from the revisions to the story. Seraphima has a point—it’s been a while since we had a Reader, and one can only assume that perhaps the changes aren’t appealing to our audience. Maybe we should try returning to the original version. You can learn Oliver’s lines, and as for the rest of the cast, we can go back to doing what we do best. We’re pirates and princesses and fairies, not space warriors. The mermaids know how to scare the living daylights out of sailors. Socks is a grand master of dressage.” His gaze cuts across the beach to where Snort is setting Biggle’s hair on fire with an errant laser beam. “And the trolls really should stick to construction. Without power tools.”
It’s easier to change one character than to change thirty. I suppose I could have worked my way into the book by switching Oliver’s name to mine, by deleting him from his own life and replacing him with me. But that isn’t what I signed up for.
What if it turns out I’m stuck here, doing something I never asked to do? The whole reason I agreed to swap with Oliver was because I’d get a chance to experience adventures and thrills I’d only witnessed on a computer screen. But every time you play a video game, it’s different. In this world, it’s like I play a tape of the same game over and over again. I know what’s around the corner. I know what creature is going to jump out at me. I know when the aliens are landing, and that I will ultimately kill Zorg. The element of surprise is gone, and that was the fun of it in the first place.
Now I get why Oliver wanted to leave. But if he knew this was a prison, why would he wish it on anyone else?
“You know,” I say, “what we all need is a breather.”
Seraphima stamps her tiny foot. “I absolutely refuse to put any more gear on.”
“I just mean we need a break.” I turn to Frump. “Do you want to do the honors?”
Frump climbs back onto his perch and barks. Even though in my revised story, he’s been changed from a basset hound back to a human again, I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
“Attention!” he cries. “All characters are dismissed for the day.”
There is a moment of shocked silence on the beach, and then a bustle of excitement and activity as everyone realizes that they’re being left to their own devices. The fairies zip by my face like fireworks.
“Milady,” Frump says to Seraphima, “since we have a bit of a break, maybe you could walk me? Erm, I mean, maybe we could go for a walk?”
The princess’s eyes flicker over him. “Rain check?” She picks up her skirts and floats across the sand, toward the edge of the page.
Frump looks disappointed for only a second, then turns to me. “Guess I’ll head out too,” he says. “Someone has to make Seraphima’s bed before she realizes she doesn’t actually have handmaidens.”
Suddenly a blinding light slices the sky in half. I wince, raising my hand as a shield. The ground shifts under my feet, and I watch everyone instinctively grabbing the nearest solid object: a tree, a rock, a dangling participle. I go tumbling head over heels and smack into a troll’s bottom, which feels like the side of a battleship. “Sorry,” I mumble, and Trogg shrugs.
“No worries. We’ve all had a bit more practice.”
The sand stops whirling and the ocean settles as the pages flatten, and I find myself looking up at a giant replica of my own face.
“Oliver!” Frump says, his butt wagging. Seraphima races from the edge of the page to stand front and center, her hands clasped at her chest. Queen Maureen—who appeared on Everafter Beach with everyone else as soon as the book was opened—waves with delight. The characters, excited about being pulled into place for an actual reader, are even more pumped to see who it is.
Oliver, on the other hand, doesn’t look so happy. “Is everything all right?” he asks. A second face appears beside his: Delilah’s. She looks scared to death.
Frump tugs at the hem of his shirt. “We’re fine!” he says, cheery. “You know how it goes. Business as usual. I mean, granted, we haven’t had too many Readers lately. . . .”
Their faces relax. “Then who sent the note?” Oliver asks.
I frown. “What note?”
“Hold on tight,” Oliver says, and the world spins again as he gently lifts the book, turning it away from him. It seems to be a girl’s bedroom, blurry, the way things look underwater. I see a crapload of pink, and as things slowly start to come into focus, I can make out a collage of pictures over the bed. Most of them are of Delilah with a girl who looks like a pierced hedgehog. I mean, a really pretty pierced hedgehog, but still.
I don’t understand why Oliver’s showing us Delilah’s wall, and then I notice the floating letters.
COME HOME.
“What is that?” I ask.
The book tilts and rights itself again, so that Oliver hovers above us. “I assumed you would be able to tell me.”
“Well, I didn’t write it,” I say.
“Rapscullio?” Oliver asks. “It came from your easel.”
“Sorry, Ollie. The only thing I’ve drawn lately is a teinopalpus imperialis. Gorgeous specimen, with iridescent wings . . . normally found in India and—”
“Perhaps someone else has been using your easel,” Oliver interrupts. He peers at each of the characters in turn.
We all start glancing at each other nervously, wondering who is unhappy and unwilling to admit it.
Guess I’m not the only one.
Could it be Frump, missing his best friend? Maureen, missing her fictional son? Could Rapscullio’s comments about the new version of the story not working out be only the tip of the iceberg? Could Seraphima—stuck with a guy like me—be dreaming of the prince she used to have?
It’s hard to believe that I could be just as much of a disappointment in the world of this book as I was in reality.
Frump clears his throat, the way he does when he is commanding us to start rehearsal. “It appears that all of us are just fine.” He tilts up his chin. “But enough about us. How are you?”
A slow grin stretches over Oliver’s face. “This place,” he says, “it’s everything I dreamed of. There are so many people in this world I can’t name them all. When I talk to them, I have absolutely no idea what they’re going to say. Every day since I’ve been here has been different—there are so many scenes you could spend your life trying and never see them all.” His eyes cut to Delilah. “And of course,” he says, “the company is rather enchanting.”
Oliver takes Delilah’s hand and kisses the back of it. To my right, I hear Seraphima draw in her breath, and Frump moves slightly closer to her.
“How’s my mom?” I blurt out. Until I’ve said that, I don’t realize how much she has been on my mind. I wonder if she can tell that Oliver isn’t me. It’s really hard to think that I’m missing her but she has no idea she’s supposed to be missing me.
“She’s perfect. Except when she tells me to clean my room.”
My chest gets tight. “She does that. A lot.”
A strange expression must cross my face, because Oliver’s gaze narrows on mine. “Edgar,” he asks, “are you all right?”
I open my mouth, about to tell him the truth: I miss my mom. I miss my home. Nobody likes me here; nobody likes my story; nothing is going the way I planned. But all that comes out is “Great!” My face tightens into what might pass for a smile.
“Well, if you’re sure . . . ,” Oliver replies. “Delilah’s mother is about to serve supper.” He hesitates. “I miss you all. I miss you . . . a lot. There are many people in this world, but none like you.” Then he tosses us another smile. “All right, then. Hang on tight.” As he starts to close the book, as we tumble through the pages, I hear his voice fading away: “I promise I’ll read you later.”
As the characters
disperse, I listen to their chatter. Socks walks with Captain Crabbe. “He looks great, doesn’t he? So handsome.”
“He looks happy,” Maureen adds. “What more could a mother ask for her son?”
The mermaids slip into the shallows of the water. “I guess you can eat, breathe, and sleep true love,” Kyrie says, “but I’d go for the chocolate, the oxygen, and the featherbed instead.”
Seraphima is the only one frowning. She walks off the page slowly, her arms wrapped tightly around her body, as if she’s hoping to hold herself together.
I sit down on the beach, tossing the remaining sand dollars from the poker game into the water. When Frump comes up behind me, I’m surprised. I thought I was alone.
“You did a good thing, Edgar,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not the only one hiding something to make him happy.” Frump turns around, lifting up the back of his shirt, to reveal a long brown-and-white tail. He faces me again, sober. “Rapscullio may be more right than he knows. It’s not just the characters who want to return to the original story. It’s the book.”
Think about the last time you got a new shirt.
What made it new?
That the tag still itched? That it smelled like the store and not detergent? That you weren’t used to seeing it hanging in your closet when you opened the door? That you wanted to wear it more than any of your other clothes, because it was unique?
At some point, that shirt stopped being so special.
At some point, it became just another shirt in your wardrobe.
When does something stop being new? When does it start just being . . . yours?
OLIVER
There’s a treadmill in Jessamyn Jacob’s spare bedroom, where she runs for an hour every day, going absolutely nowhere. This, Delilah has informed me, is exercise. To me, it seems pointless.