by Tahereh Mafi
Anyone and everyone had a different answer.
All anyone knew was that Father took nothing but a ruler when he left, so some said he’d gone to measure the sea. Others said the sky. The moon. Maybe he’d learned to fly and had forgotten how to come back down. She never said this to Mother, but Alice often wondered whether he hadn’t planted himself back into the ground to see if maybe he’d sprout taller this time.
She touched her circlets of gold and silver and stone. Mother gave her three finks every month and she always spent one on a bangle. They weren’t worth much to anyone but her, and that made them even more precious; Father had been the one to give her the first bangle—just before he left—and for every month he stayed gone, Alice added another to her collection.
This week, she would have thirty-eight altogether.
Maybe, she thought, her eyes heavy with sleep, her bangles would help Father find her. Maybe he would hear her looking for him. She was sure that if he listened closely, he would hear her dancing for him to come home.
And then she rolled over, and began to dream.
Now, while our young Alice is sleeping, let us make quick work of important details.
First: The magic of Ferenwood required no wands or potions you might recognize; no incantations, not really. Ferenwood was, simply stated, a land rich in natural resources, chief among them: color and magic. It was a very small, very old village in the countryside of Fennelskein, and as no one ever went to Fennelskein (a shame, really; it’s quite lovely in the summers), the people of Ferenwood had always kept to themselves, harvesting color and magic from the air and earth and building an entire system of currency around it. There’s quite a lot to say on the history and geography of Ferenwood, but I shouldn’t like to tell you more than this, lest I spoil our story too soon.
Second: Every citizen of Ferenwood was born with a bit of magical talent, but anything more than that cost money, and Alice’s family had little extra. Alice herself had never had more than a few finks, and she’d always stared longingly at other children, pockets full of stoppicks, choosing from an array of treats in shop windows.
Tonight, Alice was dreaming of the dillypop she would purchase the following day. (To be clear, Alice had no idea she’d be purchasing a dillypop the following day, but we have ways of knowing these things.) Dillypops were a favorite—little cheekfuls of grass and honeycomb—and just this once she wouldn’t care that they’d cost her the remainder of her savings.
It was there, nestled up with the pigs, dreaming of sugar, skirts up to her ears and bangled ankles resting on a nearby stool, that Alice heard the voice of the boy with the chest.
He said something like “hello” or “how do you do” (I can’t quite remember), and Alice was too irritated by the interruption to remember to be afraid. She sighed loudly, face still turned up at the planets, and pinched her eyes shut. “I would not like to punch and kick you again,” she said, “so if you would please carry on your way, I’d be much obliged.”
“I can see your underwear,” he said. Rudely.
Alice jumped up, beet-red and mortified. She nearly kicked a pig on her way up and when she finally managed to gather herself, she tripped on a slop bucket and fell backward against the wall.
“Who are you?” she demanded, all the while trying to remember where she’d left the shovel.
Alice heard a pair of fingers snap and soon the shed was full of light, glowing as if caught in a halo. She spotted the shovel immediately, but just as she was crafting a plan to grab it, the boy offered it to her of his own accord.
She took it from him.
His face was oddly familiar. Alice squinted at him in the light and held the sharp end of the shovel up to his chin.
“Who are you?” she asked again angrily. Then, “And can you teach me how you did that just now? I’ve been trying to snaplight for years and it’s never worked for m—”
“Alice.” He cut her off with a laugh. Shook his head. “It’s me.”
She blinked, then gaped at him.
“Father?” she gasped.
Alice looked him up and down, dropping the shovel in the process. “Oh but Father you’ve gotten so much younger since you left—I’m not sure Mother will be pleased—”
“Alice!” The perhaps-stranger laughed again and grabbed Alice’s arms, fixing her with a straight stare. His skin was a warm brown and his eyes were an alarming shade of blue, almost violet. He had a very straight nose and a very nice mouth and very nice eyebrows and very excellent cheekbones and hair the color of silver herring and he looked nothing at all like Father.
She grabbed her shovel again.
“Impostor!” Alice cried. She lifted the shovel above her head, ready to break it over his skull, when he caught her arms again. He was a bit (a lot) taller than her, which made it easy for him to intimidate her, but she wasn’t yet ready to admit defeat.
So she bit his arm.
Quite hard, I’m afraid.
He yelped, stumbling backward. When he looked up, Alice hit him in the legs with the shovel and he fell hard on his knees. She stood over him, shovel hovering above his head.
“Goodness, Alice, what are you doing?” he cried, shielding his face with his arms, anticipating the final blow. “It’s me, Oliver!”
Alice lowered her shovel, just a little, but she wasn’t quite ready to be ashamed of herself. “Who?”
He looked up slowly. “Oliver Newbanks. Don’t you remember me?”
“No,” she wanted to say, because she’d been very much looking forward to hitting him on the head and dragging his limp body inside for Mother to see (I’ve protected the family from an intruder! she’d say) but Oliver looked so very scared that it wasn’t long before her excitement gave way to sympathy, and soon she was putting down the shovel and looking at Oliver Newbanks like he was someone she should remember.
“Really, Alice—we were in middlecare together!”
Alice considered him closely. Oliver Newbanks was a name that sounded familiar to her, but she felt certain she didn’t know him until she noticed a scar above his left ear.
She gasped, this time louder than before.
Oh, she knew him alright.
Alice grabbed her shovel and hit him in the legs so hard his snaplight broke and the shed went dark. The pigs were squealing and Oliver was squealing and she chased him out of the shed and into the night and was busy telling him to never come back or she’d have her brothers eat him for breaksnack when Mother came into the yard and announced she was going to cook her for breaksnack and then Alice was squealing and by the time Mother caught up to her, Oliver was long gone.
Alice’s bottom hurt for a whole week after that.
Alice’s evening had left her in a foul temper.
She’d woken up this morning with the smell of pig fresh in the air, straw sticking to her hair and poking at her toes. She was angry with Mother and angry with Oliver and one of the pigs had licked her face from chin to eyeball and, good-grief-and-peanut-pie, she very desperately needed a bath.
Alice shook out her skirts (stupid skirts) as best she could and set off for the pond. She was so preoccupied with the sorts of thoughts that preoccupied an almost twelve-year-old that even a perfect morning full of rainlight couldn’t soothe her.
Stupid Oliver Newbanks—she kicked a clump of dirt—had the gooseberries to talk to her—she kicked another clump—no good ferenbleeding skyhole! She scooped up a handful of dirt and threw it at nothing in particular.
Alice hadn’t seen Oliver Newbanks since he told the entire class that she was the ugliest girl in all of Ferenwood. He went on and on about how she had a very big nose and very small eyes and very thin lips and hair the color of old milk and she thought she might cry when he said it. He was wrong, she’d insisted. Her nose was a nice nose and her eyes were quite lovely and her lips were perfectly full and her
hair looked more like cotton flowers but he wouldn’t listen.
No one would.
It was bad enough that Father had left, bad enough that Mother had become a prune of a person, bad enough that their life savings consisted of only twenty-five stoppicks and ten tintons. Alice had been having a rough year and she couldn’t take much more. Everyone had laughed and laughed as she stomped a bangled ankle, furious and blinking back tears. She’d decided that perhaps she’d leave more of an impression on Oliver if she spent all her finks pulling off his ear and making him eat it in front of everyone. That will teach him to listen to me, she thought. But then Alice was kicked out of school because apparently what she did was worse than what he said, which seemed awful-cruel because mean words tasted so much worse than his stupid ears and anyway, Mother has had to hometeach her ever since.
Alice was starting to understand why Mother might not like her very much.
Alice sighed and gave up on her skirts, untying the ties and letting them fall to the grass. Clothes exhausted her. She hated pants even more than she hated skirts, so on they stayed, as long as Mother was around. It was indecent, Mother had said to her, to walk around in her underthings, so Alice decided right then that one day she would grow a pair of wings and fly away. Were it up to Alice, she would’ve walked around in her underthings forever, barefoot and bangled, vanilla hair braided down to her knees.
She pulled off her blouse and tossed that to the ground, too, closing her eyes as she lifted her head toward the sun. Rainlight drenched the air, bathing everything in an unearthly glow. She opened her mouth to taste it, but no matter how desperately she’d tried, she never could. Rainlight did not touch the people, because it was made only for the land. Rainlight was what put the magic in their world; it filtered through the air and into the soil; it grew their plants and trees and added dimension and vibrance to the explosion of colors they lived in. Red was ruby, green was fluorescent, yellow was simply incandescent. Color was life. Color was everything.
Color, you see, was the universal sign of magic.
The people of Ferenwood were all born with their own small spark of magic, and the food of the land nurtured that gentle flame of their being. They each had one gift. One great magical talent. And they would perform this magical talent—a Surrender, it was called—in exchange for the ultimate task. It was tradition.
Alice opened her eyes. Today the clouds seemed puffed into existence, exhalations from the mouth of a greater being. Soon the clouds, too, would rain, and Alice’s life would thunder into something new.
Purpose.
She would be twelve years old. This was the year.
Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow.
She let herself breathe, casting off the Oliver Newbankses of the world, casting off the pain Mother had caused her, casting off the pain Father had caused them, casting off the uselessness of three entire brothers who were far too small to be of any help when help was needed most. So what if she wasn’t as colorful as everyone else in Ferenwood? Alice was just as magical, and she’d finally have the chance to prove it.
She picked up a fallen twig and tied its bendy body around her neck, pinching it together with her thumb and index finger as she hummed a familiar song. Eyes closed, feet dancing their way toward the pond, she was her own music, her body her favorite thing she’d ever owned.
Oh, life had been a lonely one, but she knew how to pass the time.
The warm pond was the color of green amethyst. It smelled of sweet nectar but tasted like nothing at all. Alice untied her underthings and left them in the grass, pausing only to unweave her braid before jumping in.
She sank right to the bottom. She sat there awhile, letting her limbs relax. Soon, she felt the familiar tickles of kissingfish and opened her eyes long enough to see them nibbling at her skin. She smiled and swam up, the fish following her every move. They wriggled alongside her, nudging her elbows and knees in an attempt to get closer.
Alice swam until she was so clean she practically shined, and then the warm air dried her hair and skin so quickly she had time left to wander before her ferenberry picking for the day.
Alice was always trying to find her own adventures while the other kids were in school. Mother was supposed to be home-teaching her, but she rarely did. Two years ago, when Mother was still freshly angry with Alice for getting kicked out of school (and for what she’d done to Oliver Newbanks), she’d left a stack of books on the kitchen table and told Alice to study them, warning her that if she didn’t, she’d grow up to be the silliest girl in all of Ferenwood, never mind the ugliest.
Sometimes Alice wanted to say unkind things to Mother.
Still, Alice loved her mother. Really, she did. Alice had made peace with her parental lot in life long ago. But let us put this plainly: Alice had always preferred Father and she had no trouble saying so. Father was more than a parent to Alice; he was her friend and confidant. Life with Father had made all hard things bearable; he’d seen to it that his daughter was so thoroughly loved that she’d never known the depth of her own insecurities. In fact, he took up so much room in her heart that she’d seldom noticed she had no other friends to name.
It was only when Father disappeared that Alice began to see and feel the things she’d been long protected from. The shock of loss unlatched her armor, and soon cold winds and whispers of fear snuck through the cracks in her skin; she wept until the whites of her eyes dried up and the lids rusted open, refusing to close long enough to let her sleep.
Grief was a tangible weight Alice’s small body slowly learned to carry. She was just nine years old when Father left, but even tiny Alice would wake up scraping the bottom of her heart in search of him, and each time she came up raw, hollow, and aching.
Dear reader: You should know that Alice, a decidedly proud girl, wouldn’t approve of my sharing this personal information with you. I recognize that the details of her grief are private. But it is imperative, in my humble opinion, that you know just how deeply she loved Father. Losing him had unzipped her from top to bottom, and yet, her love for him had solidified her spirit. She was broken and unbroken all at once, and the longer she stayed in Ferenwood without him, the lonelier she became.
For Alice Alexis Queensmeadow, some things were very simple: If Father had gone, so too would she, because Alice had never wanted anything more than to follow his lead.
Succeeding in the Surrender, you see, was her only way out.
Mother was waiting in the yard when Alice got back. Her amber eyes were bright against her brown skin and narrowed in Alice’s direction. She had one hand on her hip and one hand holding a basket. Mother wore skirts, just as Alice did, but Mother liked hers clean and simple, solid colors and layers; long-sleeved blouses tucked into her skirts and folded up to the elbows. Alice’s skirts were cumbersome, weighted down with beads and jewels and sequins, intricate patterns embroidered into the cloth.
Plain fabric gave Alice headaches.
Alice watched Mother closely—her hay-green curls had sprung all about her face—and Alice thought she was growing finer and lovelier every day. Sometimes looking at Mother made Alice miss Father even more. If he’d had any idea how much beauty was waiting for him at home, Alice thought, surely he would have returned.
Mother’s eyes softened their stare as Alice approached. She shifted her weight and let the basket gentle onto the grass, holding her now-empty hand out to her daughter.
Alice took it.
They walked in silence toward the four-room cottage that was their home, its honeyed-stone exterior a familiar sight. A room for eating, a room for sitting, a room for Mother, and a room for Alice and the triplets. It wasn’t enough, but somehow it was.
The clay shingles were suffocated by climbing ivy that had braided itself across the roof so tightly it was nearly impossible to remove. A few tendrils had escaped down the sides of the house, and Mother pushed stray vines
out of the way as they walked through the open front door.
The house was still. Her brothers were still at school.
Mother pointed to an empty chair. Alice stared at it.
Alice took her seat, and Mother sat down beside her and set her with a look so fierce that Alice hadn’t even realized she was in trouble until just then. Her heart, poor thing, had grown feet and was kicking her from the inside. She clasped her hands together and, despite a sudden moment of panic, wondered what she should eat for noonlunch.
Mother sighed. “I had a visit from Mrs. Newbanks this morning.”
Stupid Mrs. Newbanks, Alice nearly said out loud.
“She says Oliver has been trying to get in touch with you. You remember Oliver, of course.”
More silence from Alice.
“Alice,” Mother said softly, looking at the wall now. “Oliver was Surrendered last year. He’s thirteen now.”
Alice knew this already.
Alice knew Oliver was a year older than she was, that he was never supposed to be in her middlecare class. But she also knew he’d taken a year off to tend to Mr. Newbanks when Mr. Newbanks had come down with the fluke, so Oliver had to stay back a year and ended up in her class. Stupid, sick Mr. Newbanks ruining her entire stupid life. Stupid Mrs. Newbanks having such a stupid kid. Stupid Newbankses being stupid all over the place.
Alice didn’t care if Oliver had already Surrendered. Who cared? She didn’t. She didn’t care about him. She cared about her.
Tomorrow was the day her whole life would change.
She was sure of it.
Alice crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. “I don’t know why we’re having this conversation,” she finally said. “I don’t care a knuckle for Oliver Newbanks. Oliver Newbanks can choke on a toad.”