“These tasks must be completed to my satisfaction before you may go home,” she said. “The blackboard must be washed down until not a single streak remains, and the erasers taken outside and cleared of their dust. You may begin.”
Nickel and I looked at each other. “Board first?” he asked.
I nodded and followed him to the front of the classroom. Mrs. Cooper pointed to a pile of rags and a bucket by the sink under the windows. We wet our rags and started to wash.
The thing about chalkboards was that they looked lovely and black and clean while they were wet, but the minute they dried, they were nothing but chalky streaks. We got to the end of the huge board and realized we would have to start all over again with a fresh bucket of water.
What was so wrong with dry-erase boards, anyway? They were good enough for every other teacher in the entire universe and needed zero scrubbing—which was probably the whole point.
“It looks good this time,” I said as I stood back at the end of our second pass.
“Uh, not so much.” Nickel pointed back at the start, where the board had dried. There were almost as many streaks as on the last pass.
Mrs. Cooper chuckled to herself at her desk but kept reading her papers.
We went back to the sink and refilled the bucket. It took five passes before we had the board streak-free and up to Mrs. Cooper’s standards. Water from the rags dribbled down my good arm.
“There are eight erasers. Four each. Off you go.” Mrs. Cooper pointed at the dusters sitting on the wooden ledge under the board.
Since my cast did not allow for smacking wooden erasers together, I carried them all stacked in my arms. Nickel banged the felt sides of the first two dusters together, sending clouds of pink and white chalk dust into the air. A couple of times, he stopped and opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, then closed it again. I hoped that whatever he wanted to say came in the form of an apology for getting us detention.
Summer was close in Calliope, and that day the sun shone like it wanted to make up for lost time, sucking all the wet out of the ground and turning everything sticky and miserable. Without even a light breeze to carry the chalk dust away, it stuck to our skin and turned our mouths gummy and dry. By the time the first erasers ran out of chalk dust, the powder clung to my sunscreened skin in colorful smears and streaks.
Instead of driving to Densdale with Mrs. Bugden, we were filthy and cranky, wasting what little time I had left. But I’d only had my best friend back for a few days, and I’d learned my lesson about putting satellites and fathers before our friendship. That didn’t mean I had to like it, though.
We were almost finished when Nickel stopped pounding erasers and looked at me. He took a deep breath. “I can’t stand it anymore. There’s something I have to tell you.”
He pointed at the steps outside the classroom. “You better sit down.”
Uh-oh. The only words that worried me worse than “There’s something I have to tell you” were “You better sit down.”
I sat down on the concrete steps outside Mrs. Cooper’s classroom and wrapped my arms around my knees. Nickel looked guilty and a bit shaky, which didn’t make me feel any better.
He took a deep breath and went for it. “When you and your grandma went inside after the filming of What’s Current, Felicity Kildare and I talked. I wanted to tell you what she said, but I didn’t know how.”
Even in the sunshine, the little hairs on my good arm stood up. “What did she say?”
“She said the other kids are all like Michael, out of control. You’re the only nice one. If that’s true, can you imagine how bad they are?”
I could have been insulted, but I knew he was right.
“That’s not all. She said that she’d met Benjamin O’Malley before too, on another story about men who’d come home from the war. He got hurt and traumatized. He’s…well, she said he probably wouldn’t remember your mom, or about you.”
It was too late now to decide I didn’t want to hear it.
Nickel reached out and held my shoulders, all stiff and awkward. “Unless your mom tells you about him or he goes for blood tests or whatever they do, you won’t get any answers. Even if you met him, I don’t think he’d be able to do any of the things you want him to do.”
I wanted to be angry at Nickel. For this news. For ruining my father. But I couldn’t.
“They were just some random family Felicity Kildare met,” I said. “She wouldn’t remember him that well. It could have been any of them. Or maybe he’s not my dad, and one of the others is.”
“Do you really think that?” Nickel’s voice got all gentle.
“Well, it could be. It could be that he was pretending. It could be anything….” I stopped, because I knew it wasn’t anything. Alyssa had said in the car that he wasn’t the same since fighting overseas. It had to be the same Benjamin O’Malley.
My eyes felt hot and my nose ran, but I couldn’t let myself cry. If I did, Mrs. Cooper would want to know why, and I had no more lies left. I had wasted them all on a father who never wanted me and wouldn’t know me now, even if he changed his mind.
My cousins, or relatives, or whatever, weren’t worth finding either. They were all horrible. Every one of them, except me. It was just another way I didn’t fit in, even in the one place where it should have been easy.
“You don’t need him,” Nickel said. “You really don’t. I can help. I—I’ve been coming over as often as I can so I can protect you if the satellite comes. He couldn’t do any better than me. And your name is just fine. It’s awesome, and it suits you. And Puck wasn’t a silly fairy—he was a cool one. I read the whole story. Trust me. It’s a great name.”
I looked at Nickel and blinked. “You’ve been coming over to look out for me?”
He nodded and stared down at his dusty fingers. “Don’t get all full of yourself or anything.”
Despite everything, I smiled.
Mrs. Cooper called us inside, but I didn’t move. Nickel held out his hand to help me up, hauled me to my feet, and led me inside.
“C’mon. It’s time to go home.”
* * *
• • •
As soon as I reached our driveway, I felt a little better. I was home. At least I still had that.
I jumped over the roses and headed inside.
Maybe Mom had heard me before I arrived, because when I flung the door open, she was there, waiting. Small, with ridiculously big green eyes and a relieved sort of smile.
Grandma stood in the Fairy Wonderland doorway, not smiling much at all. “Come in and sit down, both of you. We can talk in the living room.”
Talk? So this was it. Grounded for eternity.
The kitchen smelled buttery and delicious. Grandma baked when she got stressed. My stomach had gurgled the whole way home from school, but my appetite had left the moment I saw how serious their faces were.
For the second time that day, someone said, “There’s something I have to tell you.” At least I was already sitting down when Mom said it.
She was staring at her hands, which were folded on her lap.
“Oh?” I asked, doing a pretty good impression of a girl who hadn’t done anything wrong, which I technically was if you didn’t count the detention, snooping through Mom’s things, and a sneaky trip to Densdale in a rickshaw.
“You’ve been trying to find your father, haven’t you?” Mom closed her eyes and took a deep breath. For a split second I thought of making a run for it.
If she’d asked me the day before, I probably could have lied. But today was different, because now I knew that my father was not the dad I’d thought he was; he was just a bunch of memories in a jar.
My lip trembled, even though I bit down hard to make it stop. “Don’t worry, Mom. It doesn’t matter anymore. He wouldn’t know me or want me anywa
y.”
“We realize that you think you know all about your dad. We had a visitor this morning,” Grandma said. “Alyssa O’Malley. She saw you on TV and came to find to us.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I whispered.
Mom’s face softened a bit, which made things much worse. “Don’t be. I should have talked about all this a very long time ago, but I wasn’t ready. I am now.”
I looked up, curiosity beating out everything else. Even though I knew almost all of it, I wanted to hear it from her.
“I haven’t always been totally honest with you, Bob.” Of all the secrets she could have told, that was the least surprising. I had known that even before the O’Malleys came along. After another deep breath, she carried on. “You know how I told you that your dad left us, and I hadn’t heard from him since?”
“Sure.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “What I said is true, sort of, but not entirely. He—he was gone, and I decided it would be better if you thought you had a mysterious dad who’d left us….”
“Because he didn’t want me?” I finished for her. It was like someone had sprayed me with father repellent. “Because he probably doesn’t even remember us? I know.”
“No, Bob, you don’t know at all. He never even got to meet you.” She rested her hand on her belly. “All he knew was a tiny little bump. And he wanted to be your dad very much.”
I thought of the card in her mason jar. My father had seemed to want me when he wrote it. But why had he written that and then left us? All of this had made sense to me the day before, but now I had no idea what was true anymore. “I don’t understand.”
For a second, I thought she had nothing else to say. Her smile was weak and sad. “I know you think your dad was called Benjamin O’Malley, but that’s not him. His name was Byron. He was an actor. We met when we were both cast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Majestic in Densdale. I was Titania, he was Puck. That’s why I—”
“Named me Robyn Goodfellow.”
“Yes. And your names are connected too. Robyn and Byron, same letters, different order. Robyn and Robin Goodfellow/Puck. Plus, his last name was Goode, so that worked too. We never got a chance to marry. I thought I would change our name to Goodfellow, because it seemed almost like naming you after him. Do you see?”
My whole life made a kind of sense it never had before. “Benjamin O’Malley isn’t my dad?”
Mom shook her head. “I’m impressed with how you came to the conclusion he was, though.”
Resting my chin on my hands, I closed my eyes to process everything. Now I knew why Mom obsessed about fairies, why she hadn’t wanted me to study the play, and why she’d named me Robyn. It was still awful, but in a completely different way than it had been an hour earlier. I also had a mother with a very flimsy relationship with the truth. On the bright side, I had no genetic connection to Michael at all.
What I didn’t understand was why she had never let me meet my real father. Where was he now?
“Anything else I should know?” I had to work hard not to sound angry or upset or sad, because I wanted her to keep talking. We had never talked like this in my whole life about anything to do with my father.
Mom tried on a shaky grin. “He was an ordinary but wonderful man with curly copper hair and icicle-blue eyes. You look so much like him, but pale. Almost like his ghost.”
I touched my hair and smiled. I’d been compared to a ghost before as an insult, but this was the first time it seemed like a good thing, like it made me more real, more me. “Can I meet him? I could find him if you don’t know where he is. It turns out I’m pretty good at that sort of thing.”
Mom put a finger to her lips to hush me. “Listen. I wanted more than anything for you to meet your dad. But he’s gone.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, and I realized she didn’t mean he had moved away. Without her saying anything or sharing any more secrets, I knew what had happened. And it was the worst thing ever.
“One day, he was rehearsing the play. I was home, resting up for the performance the next day. Your dad was onstage, practicing his final speech. The lighting tech was up in the rigging, adjusting the setup.” Mom swiped a tear away from under her eye with her thumb. “A lighting can fell. They’re big. Weigh a lot. So, that was that.”
My heart had gone absolutely still in my chest. “He died because something fell on him?”
Mom nodded, holding the hem of her sleeve under her nose.
I had to grip the edge of the chair to keep from swaying. My father was dead. I would never meet him, no matter how much I planned or how many ways I found to get to Densdale. Nothing I did would take me far enough.
But that wasn’t all.
Something else made sense now. Something huge and terrifying.
Our roof wasn’t magnetic or a klepto-thingamabob.
I was.
Now I knew it for certain. Things landed on our roof because I was under it.
My father had died because something fell on him. I was genetically predisposed, just like with albinism and icicle-blue eyes and springy hair.
Mom’s chair scraped as she stood up. “Are you okay?”
“Mom, did things fall on our house before I was born?”
“Once in a while, I suppose. I don’t remember. Momma, what do you think?”
Grandma, who had not said a word through all this, took a sip from her dainty cup of tea. “I don’t think so. It’s a recent thing. Kids didn’t have so many newfangled flying toys in my day.”
They had kites, though. They had balls. They had plenty of things that could have found their way onto our roof even back then. A horrible shiver wriggled its way through my body. I wanted to get up and run away. Where would be far enough? Where could I go that the satellite wouldn’t be able to find me?
Mom put her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, baby. Even if the satellite did come down in Calliope, there are a million places it might land other than here.”
I managed to control my shakes but got a whopping case of hiccups for my trouble. “Even the newspeople think it’s going to happen, or they wouldn’t bother filming us.” Hic. “Have you ever looked properly at our roof? It was my room the stupid tree landed on.” Hic. “My room and my headquarters. It’s me things land on, not the house.”
Ever since the first news broadcast about the satellite, even when I’d concentrated on finding my dad, I had been scared, even very scared sometimes, but not quite terrified. Now, as Mom hugged me tight, I was. I so was.
She took my face in her hands. “I want you to listen to me. The area where NASA estimates the satellite will land is huge. Beyond huge. So far beyond huge it’s like floating a leaf in the middle of Lake Erie and trying to throw a stone to hit it.”
The odds of being born with albinism or having a lighting can fall on your dad’s head or a tree land on your bedroom had to be almost as tiny. Look how that had turned out.
“But it’s possible you could hit it, right?” I said. “It could happen, and you can’t swear and promise it won’t. And if that leaf was genetically destined to be hit by a flying stone, the chances would go up and up.”
Mom’s face twitched a bit as she tried not to smile, which was plain rude of her under the circumstances. “There is no such thing as a genetic destiny for something like that. Besides, I’m your mother, and things don’t fall on me.”
Except she was only half of my parents. Now did not seem like the right time to remind her of that, though. I had gotten an awful lot of the things that made me me from my dad. My dad. Byron Goode.
Grandma put down the plate of chocolate fairy’s-food cake she had been eating and pointed her fork at the TV. “Someone turn the sound up. It’s a newsflash about the satellite.”
After everything I had learned about my dad, it was hard to switch my brain to concentrate on the televisio
n. I did my best to focus as the special-bulletin theme finished.
Barry Cardogan—world’s least accurate satellite forecaster—cleared his throat and said, “It would appear the satellite will make landfall in approximately the next ten days or so, around the fourteenth of June, as predicted earlier. We feel that the most likely landing zone is between twenty-five and fifty-five degrees north latitude.”
“Where does that zone fall in North America?” the reporter asked him.
“From the middle of Canada to the southern tip of Florida. But the satellite could fall anywhere within that zone around the globe.”
Ten more days.
Felicity Kildare phoned within minutes of the broadcast’s ending. This time, Mom spoke to her. After she hung up, the phone rang again. In fact, it rang and rang until Mom swore at it and took it off the hook. I watched her, my eyes bulging until they made my skull ache. She turned around slowly and gave me a wobbly smile.
“This doesn’t mean anything. That area is practically the whole of the Northern Hemisphere,” she said, clearly not believing it herself. “But just in case, we’ll pack up Grandma’s car and go on vacation in Wisconsin, won’t we, Momma?”
Considering how far away Wisconsin is, Mom obviously thought it did mean something.
Grandma nodded. “Sure we will. We can make a week of it. Picnic, hike, fishing. Whatever.”
“That’s a nice idea,” I said, “but it won’t matter if it’s me the satellite is after. We’d have to drive to Mexico City to be sure.”
“Then we’ll go to Mexico City. It’s about time we had a break,” Mom said. “We could fly down.”
“Really?” I asked, feeling relief, sweet and cool, run through my body. Maybe I had a future after all, even if it would be a homeless one.
“Sure,” Grandma said. “We couldn’t go till the week after that, though. We’re booked solid for parties till then.”
The lovely cool feeling dried up into something cold and sickening. “Oh.”
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