Bad Luck Girl

by Sarah Zettel

  I lurched to my feet.

  “I gotta … I’m gonna … I need to use the …” I didn’t even bother trying to finish. I stumbled out the door.

  I went downstairs as quiet as I could. I needed to get out. I needed time to think. Twilight had settled in outside and I could hear the voices of women shouting for their no-good kids. Those same women who had helped Mama, even though they didn’t know us from Adam’s off ox. I wrapped my arms around myself. It wasn’t cold, but I needed something to hold on to, and there wasn’t anybody else. I wandered down to the street’s dead end, and past it, out onto the wasteland of clinker and gray dust heaps. It smelled like old tar and burnt-out ashes and shifted like the dust back in Kansas had under my shoes. The kids who used it as a playground ran past me, heading home to their dinners.

  I trudged up the nearest pile, and back down the far side. The river stretched out in front of me, muddy brown and black in the last of the daylight. It lapped restlessly at the ashy bank. The crows and the gulls had gone off to roost someplace, and the bank was as quiet as anyplace in Chicago ever got. There was more city standing on the other side, and while I watched, its lights came on one at a time like stars. It looked almost pretty on that far bank.

  Something rattled and shifted in the corner of my eye. I didn’t turn my head. I already knew who it was. I felt it.

  “There you are,” said Touhy. The wind off the river buffeted her paper body, so she had to twist and turn to keep from being blown away. “I been waiting for you.”

  I couldn’t muster any feeling about that. My heart and my head were both plain worn-out. “What made you think I’d show?”

  Touhy gave her crinkling shrug. “Sooner or later it was gonna get to be too much for your human friend and he was gonna turn you out. It’s not their fault. It’s just the way it is. We’re too strong for the humans, so they shove us away, and we’re too ugly and strange for the courts, so they swallow us up.”

  “Jack didn’t turn me out.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Touhy quick folded herself into a question mark and back into a scrap-paper girl again. “Then what are you doing out here?”

  “Nothing. Thinking.”

  “So, you can think and follow me.” She flipped and folded and shuffled until she became a patchwork arrow pointing downriver. “Come on.”

  “Why?”

  Touhy folded herself back into the pink-and-paper-bag girl again and grinned. “So you can see what your old man’s so afraid of.”

  I looked back toward the clinker piles. The smokestacks and the sawtoothed skyline jutted out of them like a smoking nightmare of a forest. I couldn’t even see Jack’s building from here. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t go back there. I was the Bad Luck Girl. I couldn’t bring any more of that onto Jack. If I was gone, my father would only have to worry about taking care of Mama, and neither of the fairy courts gave a darn about her. They could leave Chicago, and set up someplace else, and be safe. Maybe they could even go back to Kansas. Without me, or my family around, Jack could get back to being a normal human being with normal human problems. He wouldn’t have to worry about magic or fairies or prophecies or anything. Him or his brothers.

  I hunched my shoulders up to my ears and followed Touhy down the bank of that slow, black river, and I didn’t look back.

  19

  When You’re Down and Out

  If I’d had room inside me for something other than my own misery, I might have been surprised that Touhy took us up to an El platform. As we climbed the two flights of stairs, she put on a complete young-lady shape. Her pink dress unfolded to a long, straight skirt. A matching cloche hat covered her straggly paper hair, and white gloves that were only slightly crumpled covered her wrinkled hands. By the time she pulled the fare out of her tissue-paper pocket, she could have been a girl around my age, maybe even a little older. Not that anybody was paying attention. The people around us on the platform were filled with their own plans and worries, or just trying to get home to their suppers.

  That suited me fine. I huddled in my seat by the window and watched the skyscrapers flashing past. The train muffled up my magic, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything, and that felt almost like freedom. I could feel the flat outline of Jack’s birthday present notebook in my pocket. I told myself I’d get rid of it as soon as I found a good spot for the words and the papers. I didn’t want anything of Jack’s anymore.

  Touhy and I got off the El on the good side of town. Stone town houses lined a broad and well-lit street. She took us across Lake Shore Drive and into a green stripe of open lawn she called Lincoln Park. People strolled on gravel paths between the fountains and the statues, enjoying the summer evening. Every last one of them ignored me and Touhy as completely as the folks on the train had.

  Not everything was carefree, of course. We skirted the Hooverville shacks that hunched at the edge of the park. Men in thin shirts and battered hats bunched together around oil-drum fires and watched us warily as we walked past. I couldn’t help looking for a tree in the middle of the shacks, just in case.

  Past the Hooverville, Touhy turned us through a kind of maze made up of hedges and beds of flowers all shut down for the night. Out of sight of promenades and hoboes both, Touhy scrunched herself into a ball, and became the scrap-paper girl again. She tumbled along, twisting and turning for the sheer fun of it. The wind off the lake tossed her up high. Touhy spread herself out like a patchwork kite and glided on that fresh, cold breeze. Jealousy flashed through me to see her so happy with herself. I grit my teeth against the feeling, and broke into a trot to keep her in sight.

  I didn’t see the boundary we crossed, but I sure felt it. It was like walking into a wall of pure heat. I gasped and gagged and staggered backward. But Touhy wafted up behind, gave me a surprisingly hard shove, and I stumbled through.

  “Don’t the cops run into that?” I asked, rubbing my arms. Touhy laughed and tumbled past.

  “It only gets solid if there’s magic coming at it. For humans, it just … guides their eyes away.”

  I opened my mouth to ask another question, but it was cut off by a shout from up ahead.

  “What says the ’ville? Fair?”

  “Fair!” roared back a whole crowd of voices.

  The voices were coming out of a cluster of the broad, sprawling trees. Their branches had been strung with lights; electric bulbs of all sizes and colors bobbed in the breeze alongside neon tubes and bits of electric sign. The colored lights and their shadows danced over a whole set of little houses. Some had been wedged into the crooks of the branches; others took shelter next to the sturdy trunks. They’d been built out of whatever came to hand, but what came to hand had been squared up and made tight with good roofs and brick chimneys.

  “It’s a Hooverville,” I said, staring. “A Hooverville for Halfers.”

  Touhy was beside me again, little more than scraps and bits and a pair of green eyes. “It’s home,” she said. “Come on.”

  Touhy took me under the trees with their bobbing, mixed-up lights. The breeze kicked up again and a smell I didn’t know I’d been missing hit me—the full, dull, earthy smell of a farmyard. We passed a set of pens with cows, even a few sheep and one old horse. I could hear more voices, muttering, creaking, rumbling.

  “What says the ’ville?” A man’s dry voice rose above the others. “Fair?”

  “Fair!” the others shouted back.

  We cleared the last of the trees. On the far side of the Hooverville, somebody’d dug a shallow amphitheater out of the lawn. They’d lined it with benches, and those benches were lined with Halfers. There were more paper cutouts like Touhy, and people who might just as easily have been cats or rats or dogs or bugs. They sat with people made of stone, of bronze, and brass, of tree branches and tin cans, brick, and marble. I spotted Claremont, the glass-shard girl from Dan Ryan’s gang. She sat with Cedar, and the girder boy, and Dan Ryan himself.

  Halfers whispered and pointed as Touhy led me down
the amphitheater aisle. Ryan glowered at me with his bright rat eyes, and fingered the burlap bag hanging from his rope belt. I tried to lift up my chin and get mad, but I was shaking too much inside to make it work.

  Touhy kept nudging me along until we reached the end of a line of Halfers that snaked down to the bottom of the hollow. A table had been set up there, and three Halfers sat behind it. One was a man who might have been built from a fallen-down house. Splinters stuck out of him like quills and his shirt looked like it had been made from old shingles. The woman in the middle chair was mottled brown and white, with a black nose three times as long as anybody’s should be. The last man reminded me of the Halfer Edison from Los Angeles, except he was smoother around the edges and glowed bright orange instead of silver.

  All three of them were listening to a stooping black-and-gray Halfer that looked to be made of driftwood stuck together with tar. He, or maybe it was she, held a bawling calf on a halter.

  “What did you pay?” the splintery man asked the wood-and-tar Halfer. His voice was the dry voice I’d heard before.

  “The stockman’s daughter has influenza,” answered Tarry. “She’ll start to get better when he kisses her good night.”

  There was some mumbling from the Halfers on the benches, and the splintery man behind the table lifted his voice to them. “What says the ’ville? Fair?”

  “Fair!” The crowd, including Touhy, called back. A man shaped from brick and mortar came up to help Tarry lead the bawling calf away.

  “Okay. Now, Halsted,” the splintery man said. “What have you brought?”

  “A pound of butter.” Halsted had a man’s voice and was mostly a pile of rumpled rags. He pulled a brown paper package out of what could have been a pocket, or a fold of his body. “And a bolt of cotton cloth.” I couldn’t even see where all that calico came from, but Halsted laid it on the table too.

  “What did you pay?” asked Splintery Man.

  “The shopkeeper’s husband’s been gambling to try to make the rent. Tonight he’s going to win.”

  This brought on another round of mumbling before Splintery Man asked his question again. “What says the ’ville? Fair?”

  “Fair!” the ’ville called again.

  It went on like that. Touhy crowded close beside me, making sure I moved along with the line. By now the people at the table had seen me, and they were having a tough time keeping their minds on the rest of the parade. Everybody who wasn’t outright staring at me was sneaking plenty of little glances. But it wasn’t enough to disrupt business. The Halfers kept laying down what they’d gotten hold of. They brought food and clothes, kegs of nails, and scraps of about anything that could be scavenged off the streets. Every one of them named some kind of price that had been paid, and the Halferville accepted them all.

  Finally, the line in front of me and Touhy cleared out. As Touhy led me the rest of the way forward, the noise the Halfers made was more like the clash of a train yard than a crowd of voices.

  “All right, all right, settle down!” Splintery Man hammered his fist on the tabletop and it sounded just like a judge’s gavel.

  “Who’s this, Touhy?” The mottled woman’s skin rumpled almost like Touhy’s did, but she wasn’t paper like I’d thought at first. She was a bird lady, and covered in sparrow feathers.

  “Seems pretty obvious, Ashland.” The glowing man’s voice sputtered like a radio when it’s not quite tuned in to the station. “Looks like we got us the heir to the Midnight Throne.”

  “Well, well.” The feathered woman—Ashland—looked down her long, curving nose at me. “Where did you ever find this, Touhy?”

  That was too much for Dan Ryan. “Touhy didn’t find her! I did!” He shot out of his seat. “She’s mine!”

  Touhy and I both ignored him.

  “She wanted to see the ’ville,” Touhy told the three at the table. “She’s our kind, after all.”

  “The Bad Luck Girl wants to join us?” Ashland’s feathery eyebrows knotted up tight.

  “Callie,” I said back. “I’m called Callie, and I don’t plan on staying anywhere I’m not welcome.”

  Touhy shoved a crinkling elbow into my ribs. “She can help us, Calumet,” she said to the splintery man. “She’s got powers none of us do. She can get our people back.”

  The first thing I wanted to do was yell, at the Halfers and especially at Touhy. She might have warned me what she was bringing me into. Even if I had yelled, nobody’d have heard me. Everybody else had already started up their own shouting, and the air was full of clashing, clanging, rushing voices.

  “What about Stripling?” Dan Ryan hollered above all the rest. “You all heard the story Edison sent down the line. This one”—he stabbed one long finger at me—“she stood around while her old man had a Halfer killed!”

  “That was an accident!” I shouted back. “He didn’t know.” Except he did. He just hadn’t cared.

  Touhy elbowed me again. “It’s not her old man standing here now, is it? When have we ever turned one of our kind away because of how they got made?”

  “She’s not our kind!” Dan Ryan spat. “Look at her! What kind of Halfer’s got a face like that?”

  The force of his words whirled me right around, and I planted my hands on my hips. “So your problem with me is I don’t look right? That’s what my papa says about you all.”

  I regretted those words the second I said them. The Halfers on the benches surged to their feet—or whatever they had under them—and started yelling all over again. They yelled at the three behind the table. They yelled at each other, at Dan Ryan, and at me. It felt like the crowd around the eviction when I’d magicked Ben and Simon.

  “Enough!” Calumet’s brittle shout crackled over the heads of the Halfer crowd and he banged his gavel hand so hard on the table something snapped. “Simmer down, all of you!”

  Everybody must have been used to Calumet being in charge, because enough of them quieted down to make the rest notice they were shouting at their neighbors, and they quieted down too. Which left me standing in the center of a bunch of angry glaring magic folks, and wondering what kind of order Calumet, or feathery Miss Ashland, or Glowing Man would give next.

  “Is that really what you’re doing here, Bad Luck?” Calumet’s splinters quivered under the collar of his shingle shirt, making me think of porcupines and other dangerous critters. “You’ve really come here to help us against the courts?”

  I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t come here to do anything or help anybody. I’d come here to hide. But if I said that out loud, this could turn ugly. Uglier.

  Ashland seemed to be thinking the same thing. She put her feathered hand on Calumet’s shoulder, carefully. “This is going to take some time to sort out. If it’s true this one … Bad Luck … is properly a Halfer, and she’s here of her own free will, she deserves the protection of the ’ville just like any of our people.” She said this straight to Dan Ryan, and all Dan Ryan’s greasy black hair stood on end, but he kept his mouth shut. “That is, as long as she agrees to abide by our laws.” This she said to me. She had gray eyes in her brown-and-white face, and they were warning me not to start any nonsense.

  “What says the ’ville?” Calumet raised his dry voice. “Fair?”

  There was a heartbeat of emptiness, but then the Halfers called back, “Fair.” It was grudging, and it was fainter than it had been for the butter or the calf, but it was there.

  Glowing Man made a noise somewhere between a snort and spitting. “All right, Touhy, you brought her here, you get to keep her. If she makes any trouble …”

  “Thank you.” Touhy wrapped her fragile hand around my elbow. “Come on, Bad Luck. You can stay with me while the council makes its decision.”

  I wanted to say something about the name she’d saddled me with. I wanted to say even more back to Dan Ryan about the way he looked at me as Touhy hustled me up the amphitheater aisle. But what was I gonna do? It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

>   Touhy, it turned out, lived in a tree house even smaller than the back room of Jack’s tenement. Wires ran in through its window to hook up three electric lights hanging from the ceiling beams. Their light fell on a tidy white bed, a braided rug, a carved table, and a chair with an embroidered cushion. The walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were lined with books. They were in bad shape—water rumpled, with covers missing, and pages burned or torn or chewed. Probably they’d been scavenged and mended as well as they could be, just like everything else in this place. Me included.

  “Why’re you doing this?” I asked, keeping my hand over the notebook in my pocket. The pages and words were rustling, like they wanted to come out and play.

  Touhy didn’t answer. She glided over to a dresser made of brass and copper. It even had a mirror fitted together from panes of pale colored glass, two yellow and two pink. She slid open a drawer and pulled out another couple of braided rugs and a lumpy green pillow. “Because no matter what kind of bee Dan Ryan’s got in his bonnet, you are one of us,” she said, spreading the rugs on the floor. “You’re part magic, part not, and you sprang up in this world without nobody asking for you.”

  “That’s what Halfers are? Just part magic and part not?”

  She nodded. “The Seelies, the Unseelies, they come here and they scatter all their magic around, granting wishes and fooling humans. You get too much of it in one place, and eventually, you get one of us.” She spread her arms, letting her trailing scraps flutter in the breeze.

  I pulled my hand out of my pocket and tried not to feel those words and pages twisting around. “Um … yeah, but … are any of you … born?”

  “You mean are we part human, like you? Some. Dan Ryan for instance.”

  My mouth shut hard at that, and Touhy’s wrinkled face split into a big grin. “His father was a human soldier back in the old country, but his mother was a fairy lady. Seelie, I think. Anyhow, she left the baby and that sack with him when she went back to her country.”