by Dylan Allen
“I don’t hate her—I don’t know. She just—”
“Doesn’t like you very much. Is never happy with you, no matter what you do? Wants to you to be everything you’re not?”
He slides his eyes over to me again and looks me up and down. I push my glasses up my nose and smile nervously. He doesn’t smile back.
“How do you know that?”
“Because, mine’s the same way. And… I heard what your mother said.” I give him a sly smile and he smiles back.
It’s such a nice smile, complete with twin dimples. I’m sad when it disappears as quickly as it was there.
“Yeah… so that’s it. Basically. I’ll never measure up to my dad.”
“Why? Is your dad famous or something?”
“Even worse. He’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He shrugs like he means it. “He did all of these great things before he died. He went to business school and was a marketing whiz. He and my grandfather built Wilde World from nothing and my mom wants me to step in and do the same.”
“Is that like AstroWorld, but with animals?”
He laughs and shakes his head. “No, it’s the name of my family’s business.”
“Oh…” I glance around the library. If this is his house, his family must have some sort of huge business. This library is bigger than our entire apartment and has more books than the public library in my neighborhood.
“So, you’re going to be in charge one day?” I ask him in awe.
“Yeah. I guess.” He shrugs like it doesn’t matter.
“You should count your blessings. I wish I had a family business or something more than my mother’s pretty dresses to inherit,” I tell him.
He flushes. “I know I’m lucky. I know. I just… I don’t know. I want to be myself, too. They want me to be just like him. I just want to play basketball.” He slumps forward and stares forlornly at the carpet.
“The best way to get people to stop telling you what to do is to show them what you can do. If you want to play. Play. Can she really stop you?”
“I like that. Your mom’s advice?” he says slowly.
“Nope. Cosmo. If I listened to my mother, the only advice I’d be able to give you is that you could never be too rich or too pretty,” I say and stare at the door, my eyes trained on the handle for signs of it moving. I really want to have time to get behind that curtain again if snakehead comes back.
“So, what have you done to disappoint your mother?” At his unexpected question, I turn and find him watching me closely. I blush and let my hair fall forward so it hides my face. I worry the tasseled edge of the huge rug with the toe of my peep-toe heels. I can’t wait to take them off.
“Have you heard of The Fly Girl?”
“Yeah.” A flush stains his tanned cheeks and he laughs. “Everyone knows The Fly Girl. aka, public enemy number one.”
My stomach dips. A lump forms in my throat as his words hit home.
“Really? Why?” I whisper.
“Don’t know why. My mom’s little gossip circle calls her a home-wrecker.”
“She’s not,” I protest and look him in the eye earnestly. My mother’s a lot of things, but she’s not that.
“How do you know what she is? Are you a fan?” he asks in amusement.
“She’s my mother,” I grit out.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.” He winces
“It’s okay. I mean, it’s just what everyone else thinks.” I do really hate my mom sometimes. But for some reason the idea that anyone else would makes me want to cry. It’s always just been us.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that—it’s just dumb gossip. I don’t think any of them have even met her. Just seen her picture all over the place.” He peers at me. “I see it, though. The resemblance.”
“That’s because she recreated me in her image. Take the makeup off and throw some water on my hair, I don’t really look like this.”
My mother’s always telling me that girls like us have to use what we’re born with. Except, I wasn’t born with what she was. She’s a bombshell. I’m her skinny, frizzy-headed daughter. When I’m not dressed like this and people see us together, there’s always a double take when I call her “Mama.”
It’s not just that, without her head to toe makeovers, I look like a Fraggle. It’s because she’s only sixteen years older than me and we look more like sisters than mother and daughter.
She treats me like a sister, too. It’s fun when that means we stay up late and watch Grease and paint our nails. But most of the time, I wish she would check my homework, tell me no, and give me a curfew. Instead, she brings me to parties like this.
Dressed like this.
His eyes widen as he puts it together.
“You kind of look like her. The hair… your eyes.”
“You think so? I’m convinced she stole me from a hospital somewhere.”
He bursts out laughing. It’s so easy and uninhibited and I can tell he laughs a lot. Even though he’s just had a fight with his mom, he seems really relaxed. That relaxes me.
“She says I look like an owl with these on,” I confess sheepishly and pull my glasses off.
His laughter dies. “Then, she must never have seen an owl before. And, don’t you need them to see?” He sounds offended.
“I do… it’s just that she says I look better without them.” I say the words like they don’t matter. But they do, so very much. It hurts to know that the way I look drives my mother crazy. So much that she’s always trying to change me.
“I’m not sure how you look when you’re squinting like a creep ’cause you can’t see, I think you’re pretty right now.”
I drop my face again, this time to hide my smile.
“No one’s ever called me that before,” I admit shyly. Even my mother only ever says, “You’d be pretty if…”
“Then everyone else needs glasses.” He says that so easily. I turn to face him fully for the first time. He starts to say something, but then his eyes widen suddenly and he looks back at the door.
I follow his gaze and sigh in relief when the knob doesn’t move. I can hear the distant noise of the party, but that’s been there all night.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“Did you say you’re the Fly Girl—I mean, your mother is here?” The alarm in his voice brings my eyes back to his.
“Yeah.” I nod.
“Oh, shit. My mom’s gonna flip.” He’s wide-eyed as he looks back toward the door.
“But, it’s just a party, isn’t it?” I ask in confusion. Granted, it’s the nicest party she’s ever taken me to, but we walked right in.
“The Listers are here.”
“How do you know about them?” I ask. That lump in my throat is back and my heart’s beat thumps wildly.
“The fight your mom had with his wife at the All-Star Games last year was all anyone talked about for months.”
I look to the curtain and feel a sense of terrible foreboding coming over me. I heard Mama tell one of her friends that if she ever got within ten feet of him again she would “light his ass on fire.”
My stomach drops and I stifle a fretful groan as I imagine what’s happening outside this room. “It was nice to meet you. But maybe you should do what she said and go back upstairs. I’ll just go back behind the curtain.”
He ignores me and stands up and walks over to the window. “What were you doing over there?”
“I told you, I just needed a place to wait for my mom.” I dart around him and get there first. I bend to pick up my notebook and clutch it to my chest.
“What’s that?” He nods at it.
“Just a notebook,” I say impatiently and flash the front at him.
He doesn’t leave, instead, his eyes train onto my notebook. “Happily Ever After?” he reads the words I’ve scrawled on it.
“Yeah.”
“That’s like fairy tales, right?”
&nb
sp; “If I tell you, will you leave?” I ask impatiently.
“Probably not. I like talking to you,” he says with a cheeky smile. I sigh, but I can’t even feign annoyance. I like talking to him, too.
I look at the curtains and then back at him.
“Fine. But let’s sit back there, if your mom comes back she won’t see us.” I cock my head to the windows.
His smile widens, his dimples deepen and I find myself smiling too.
He walks over, holds the curtain open and says, “Come on.”
I duck behind the curtain and he steps behind it to join me. I picked the window because it has a nook underneath it and it’s just big enough for both of us. When we’re both seated and the curtain is drawn, we’re completely hidden. The light that pours in from the room through the top of the curtain makes it easy to see. He scoots close to me until our shoulders are touching. I glance over at him and he’s looking at me. He flushes and looks down at the notebook in my hand.
“So tell me about your fairy tales.”
“They’re not fairy tales… I read a lot of missing person’s mysteries and I like to imagine that they’re out there living a happy life. Instead of just gone, you know? Like, if I disappeared, I would hope people would imagine me out there living my dream. So that’s what I do. In here.” I show him my notebook.
“Wow… That’s cool. So you turn them into fairy tales?”
“No, not fairy tales. These are real people.” I tap the book.
“Hmm,” he says through pursed lips. I flush and imagine what he must be thinking. It’s what everyone thinks.
“I know. It’s weird,” I say to preempt the inevitable teasing.
He frowns and shakes his head in disappointment. “Thank goodness you have other talents; ’cause mind reading isn’t ever going to be a moneymaker for you.”
“Whatever, it’s what everyone else thinks.”
“Are these the same everyone’s who also need glasses? Glad I’m not one of them. It’s not weird.”
“Really?” My shoulders relax a little and I probe him with my eyes for traces of a burgeoning laugh… the one that usually follows when someone finds out my hobby.
He draws a cross over the center of his chest.
“Really. I used to pretend my dad had just gone missing. I would look for his face in airports. I mean, I know he’s dead. It’s just nice to pretend that he’s not gone forever. You know?”
“Yeah. I do,” I say slowly. My heartbeat has slowed a little. The instant understanding and connection I feel at hearing him say that he’s… like me, it feels like a touch coaxing the tension out of me. The fear of being caught that’s been clouding my vision recedes.
He may look like one of the boys I know from school, but I can see now, that he’s not.
“Can I see it?” he asks, not flippantly, not easily, but like he knows he’s asking for a lot.
The respect in his request is disarming, and before I process what I’m doing, I hand it over. He flips to the first page and reads the inscription there. “The Legend is a love story. But it’s also a cautionary tale. It tells you to love deeply, believe in happily ever after, but don’t try to live anyone’s life but your own. That will be your undoing. All legends are lies. Make your own truth.”
He reads the inscription that’s scrawled on the front out loud.
“You wrote that?” he asks and I wish I had because he looks really impressed.
“No. It’s from a book I read once, called The Legend. It was the opening line. I read it in one afternoon, on the floor of the library. I’ve never been able to find it again, but it’s my favorite story. About a girl on a quest to find her father…” I trail off because he probably doesn’t care.
“A missing person story, I see.” He grins at me and looks back at the notebook.
“Yeah, I love them.”
“So you just woke up one day and decided this was what you wanted to read and write?”
“I wouldn’t say that. I just… I don’t know… I just like it.” I don’t add the rest because I know it sounds crazy. I really used to think my mother stole me from my real parents. Parents who looked like me, who spent time with me, who didn’t look at me and wonder where in the world I came from.
I believed it so strongly, that when I was eight, I started searching library archives for newspaper clippings about children who went missing around the time I was born. I’d sit for hours and scroll, hoping that I’d find proof that this woman who cared more about men and parties than she seemed to care about me was just an imposter.
I never found that proof. Instead, I found all these other stories about people who had just gone missing. From grocery stores, from shopping malls, their homes—never been heard from again.
As soon as I was old enough, I used the Internet at the library to really research them.
“Which one’s your favorite?”
“Amelia Earhart. She was my first. And she’s my muse.”
“Amelia Earhart?” he asks as he scans the first page.
“Her story is the most fascinating, I think. I read everything I could find about her. And they all ended the same way—her plane malfunctioned and plunged out of the sky, sending her into a watery grave somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. I just couldn’t believe such an amazing, brave woman, meeting such an ordinary, end.”
“How did you imagine it ending?”
“You really want to know?” I ask.
“No. I’m only asking you to tell me because I don’t want to know,” he says sarcastically and I can’t help my grin.
“Okay.” I flip open my notebook and skim the story.
I peek over the top of the book; he’s watching me closely now, his eyes scanning my face.
I flush. “She was my first. Now, I have notebooks full of happy endings for people I’ll never know, but who I’ll never forget.”
“What’s your name?” His left turn from his questions about my book surprises me, and I offer my name without thinking twice about it.
“Uh, it’s Kal.”
“I’m Remi.” He sticks a hand out for me to shake. I stare at it for a second before I reach for it. Our palms glide together before he wraps his finger around my hand and butterfly wings tickle the inside of my chest. My breaths shorten, and I look up from our joined hands to find him looking at them, too. His eyes snap up to mine, and before I can save myself, I drown in their dark depths. I pull my hand away and he smiles.
“So, have you written a happy ending for yourself?”
It’s just eight words. Just one question.
Yet, somehow, it feels like the key to something. Then, my heart does the strangest thing—it thuds hard against my chest, but not in fear.
In excitement.
“No… I’ve never thought of that.” I admit.
“You should. Maybe write one for me, too. It could be like a roadmap, in case one of us gets lost, and we can find our way back,” he says like it’s actually going to happen.
“You act like we’re going to be friends or something,” I say, even though, that flutter in my chest has spread to my belly at the idea of being friends with him.
“Aren’t we already?” he asks.
“I don’t know… I’m not really a people person. I’ve always preferred books.”
“I have a sister like that… so I’m speaking from experience when I tell you that you don’t have to be a people person, just a Remi person,” he volleys back, and for some reason, the butterfly wings flap and flutter deep inside me.
A Remi person…
The tingle his words cause is muted by the increasingly loud voices behind the door. A sense of doom takes over. I look over his shoulder, my eyes trained on the door handle. “Are you sure your mother’s not going to come looking for you again?”
“Don’t be so nervous, my mother yells a lot, but she wouldn’t really—”
The door bursts open and slams against the wall behind it.
“Lee,” my
mother’s shout ricochets off the walls of the library. I jump out of my skin and scramble out from behind the curtain. She’s racing across the room like a bat out of hell.
She’s carrying her shoes and speed walking. Her bleached blond hair flies behind her like a war banner, her dark green eyes, really the only thing I wished I inherited her from her, are blazing with anger.
My stomach drops and I glance back to the curtain. Remi comes out too, and he’s watching her like she’s some sort of mythical creature come to life.
She takes me by the arm, not even giving Remi a second glance. “Come on, Lee. We’re leaving.” Her voice is angry and anxious all at once, and I don’t resist. I look back at Remi and he’s watching us with undisguised fascination.
“I thought your name was Kal,” he calls after me, and in the midst of all of this upheaval and my mother’s frantic energy and my own panic and fear, I find the presence of mind to explain.
Just as she pulls me the through the door, I look over my shoulder and smile at him. Because that’s how I want him to remember me.
“It’s Kalilah.”
He smiles back. I memorize the expression on his face. It’s the friendliest one I’ve seen in a long time, and I hope I never forget it. And then, I turn around and struggle to keep up with my mother’s hurried steps.
We step out into the huge marble-floored corridor, it’s lined with torches and huge magnolia trees that are so perfect they look fake, but the sugary sweet scent from the tremendous white flowers that bloom on its branches declare them to be the work of nature. Our footsteps are muffled by the long rug that runs down the center of it and from a distance I can hear the strain of music and merrymaking voices.
I look up at my mother in bewilderment. “Mama, what’s going on? Why are we leaving?” Her jaw is clenched, her eyes fixed ahead of us like she’s on a march to battle. Her chest heaves, leaving her breathless as she drags me down the corridor. I try to pull my arm free and she only tightens her grip.
“Mama, there’s no one chasing us, can you please slow down?” I plead with her.
“Oh, they’re chasing us all right. I’ve just got a good head start. Keep up,” she snaps.
We round a corner and the stairs I’d run up to find this library come into sight. She speeds up and then brings us to a sudden, lurching halt when we find our path blocked by a woman flanked by two men.