A Possibility of Magic

by Rachael Ann Mare

  Truthfully he felt like he’d been put in the wrong body suddenly. Nothing seemed to work right. He clopped his way down the street, reading Izzy’s directions. He counted his steps, watching his feet and concentrating, not looking up much. That’s why, when he arrived at the proper street where he was definitely going to know which house was hers, he let out a gasp at the sight of where his new friend lived, and at the sight of her, again, up somewhere she oughtn’t be—hanging upside down from the roof.

  Aristotle gaped at everything.

  Izandria Hydrangea Dauntless lived in a small house—it would not have been entirely inaccurate to call it a cottage, really—made of red brick with a prominent chimney. It was mainly shaped like a little letter A, but then it also had a rather out of place tower, on the other side from the chimney. Aristotle thought it looked like a wizard had added the tower as an afterthought, if there were such things as wizards.

  Either way, it was one hundred and fifty percent an Izzy house. If Aristotle had had to make up a house for her, this is the one he would’ve made up. She’d been right; there would’ve been no mistaking it even if she weren’t hanging from the roof. As it was, Izzy hanging from the roof did indeed make it plain.

  “Hallo!” she shouted out, her face red. “Who are you and what are you doing at my house?”

  He thought she might be teasing him but couldn’t tell. He hadn’t a clue what to say; nothing seemed the same as it had when they’d met at the tree (except possibly for her hanging upside down—that was beginning to seem like an Izzy sort of thing to do).

  “You invited me!”

  She peered at him, and genuine surprise registered. “Ari? Is that you? What on earth have you done with your hair? I didn’t know you from up the street. I said, who is that coming to my house? Because I knew you must be coming to my house because it’s the only house up this way before the street ends. But I thought, it isn’t someone I know, and since I’m the only one here, it seemed odd. And then you got closer and I saw how you walked and I thought it might be you. But that hair! By the time I come down, you’ll need to muss it again so I can recognize you.”

  Matthew wasn’t going to argue with someone who asked him to have messy hair. His mother would disapprove, but—mothers, foo.

  He took both hands and mussed it up right good, but it didn’t make Izzy look like she planned on coming down.

  “Should you be hanging like that?” he shouted.

  “Don’t worry,” she shouted back. “I’ve done this loads of times.”

  “It’s a grand house!”

  “A granmouse? Is that what you call your parents’ parents? Granmice?”

  “House! Grand house!”

  “Oh, yes! It is, that. Grand in an adorable way. I suppose I ought to come down and show you. Except… I don’t suppose you’d like to see things from up here first, would you?”

  Izzy tapped the roof, beckoning. Inviting… she hoped. Izzy never gave up hope on things she figured were unlikely but would be oh-so-magical if they did happen, like Aristotle joining her on the roof. The thing was, that boy had a fear of heights, and a girl could see it a million miles off, so there wasn’t much use in expecting him to join her, but she could keep her hope (and would).

  “I want to see the house,” he said. “Why don’t you come down and show me?”

  Izzy disappeared in a flash down the side of the house. Aristotle wanted to cover his eyes, but resisted the urge. Izzy reappeared directly in front of him. Maybe she’d done a double-backflip off the roof; maybe she’d climbed a ladder she had stashed. Either way he didn’t want to know, and he didn’t want to have to go that way himself. He hoped that girl could be his friend without making him get on a rooftop.

  “Enough roof,” she said. “The inside’s the best part.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It’s bigger than it looks in there. Plus, the switching of the rooms makes it feel like a new place every time, so the smallness ends up not mattering so much.”

  “The switching of the rooms?”

  “Come and see,” she said, jerking her head toward the house and marching up to the giant rose bush that nearly obscured the front. “But first—the holes.”

  Aristotle followed her, but Izzy walked into the rose bush and disappeared, which made him stop. He was about as much a fan of thorns as he was of heights.

  “Can you see them?” she shouted, muffled by rose leaves.

  “Holes? Where?”

  “In the ground.”

  There did, in fact, appear to be a series of medium-sized dips that could well be characterized as holes randomly spaced about the entire width of the flower beds beneath the overgrowth of the rose bush.

  “I think I have a gnome,” Izzy said.

  “A gnome.”

  “Yes. Living at my home.” Izzy snickered at her own rhyme.

  “Why do you think you have a gnome?”

  Izzy poked her head out of the rose bush to glare at him. “I thought you said you saw the holes!”

  “While I may have seen the holes, I did not say that I had seen them,” Ari said with all the dignity he could muster. “But even if I had, I can’t see how that would lead one to the conclusion of: gnome, any more than a voice in a tree leads one to the conclusion of: talking tree. It doesn’t follow.”

  “Of course it does! You’re ugly-stubborn. Something keeps digging up holes in the garden. You see that?”

  “Gophers. Gophers dig up holes in the garden,” Ari said. “My mother hates them.”

  Izzy looked at him like he had two heads. “A pity about your mother. But garden gnomes also dig up holes in the garden.”

  “But gophers are real. Garden gnomes are not.”

  Izzy sighed. “Still,” she said. “I figure it’s a garden gnome.”

  Ari didn’t quite know what to say to that. Iz’s way of explaining things made it so hard to argue.

  But Izzy wasn’t waiting for him to say more; she had dived back into the rose bush. From somewhere inside it, Ari heard a door creak and Izzy calling, “Come ooooon!”

  So he climbed through the bush, careful to avoid getting pricked. He thought one ought not let a rose bush take over the front of one’s house, exactly because of pricking thorns, but his mother did the gardening at his house, so he supposed he didn’t have much to say about what Izzy did with the front of her house.

  The door stood open, and Izzy gestured toward the hallway in front of him. “Welcome to Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen. Officially.”

  Aristotle hardly knew where to start. “Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen? That’s what you call it?”

  “That’s what it calls itself.”

  “You aren’t bothered by the fact that it isn’t a castle at all?”

  “It is, though.”

  Aristotle could hear his mother’s voice in his head, telling him not to be argumentative, but this was not a thing he could let go.

  “A castle has a moat. And a dungeon and a treasure room full of gold and a fierce dragon to guard the treasure room and royalty to live in it and turrets to defend and…”

  Izzy’s Withering Glare of Ultimate Disgust deflated Ari’s enthusiasm for his list of castle-necessary items as he was getting going, and he trickled off, shrugging.

  “Now, then,” Izzy said loftily. “If you are ready, we will begin.”

  When Izandria Dauntless gave a tour of her home, she started wherever she pleased and went in whichever order she pleased. She brought him to the attic first—where she seemed perplexed by the fact that there was hardly anything there but dust and cobwebs. It seemed fairly standard to Aristotle, not that he could claim to be an expert on attics, not having been in one previous to this very one on this very day. But he had read about them, and he supposed that was good enough.

  Then she took him back down the stairs, where she opened a door in a hallway that led onto a closet—which she also seemed surprised by.

  “Oh, bother!” she yelled, and shook a fist at the closet. “T
he kitchen’s gone to the back again. I like it so much better when the kitchen’s at the front.”

  Aristotle followed her as she marched down the hall. “The kitchen… changes places?”

  “Well, no. But I do wish it would. It would be so much nicer at the front.”

  “But you talk about it like it does.”

  “Of course I do! How will it learn what I want if I don’t talk about it? I mean, how do you think I got the bowling alley?”

  “There’s a bowling alley?” Skepticism had crept into Ari’s voice; he couldn’t help it.

  “Well, no. But I really must have one.”

  “It seems a small house for having a bowling alley.”

  “I told you it’s bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. I swear it grows to the size I want it to be each day and the front simply looks the same no matter what the house is doing on the inside. Now let me show you the living room.”

  Aristotle wondered if they would be able to find the way without getting lost. But Izzy barely took three strides before she stopped so suddenly that Ari nearly banged into her. He managed to catch himself in time against the wall rather than plunging into her back and sending them both helter-skelter onto the floor.

  “There’s one more thing you should know about me and my house,” Izzy said.

  Ari rubbed his wrist where he’d jammed it against the wall. “Okay.”

  “We’re in love.”

  “You and the house?”

  Izzy nodded, but it was so sharp her head didn’t really go up and down; it simply fell down once as though that were all there was to it.

  Aristotle wasn’t convinced. “Are in love? Together?”

  “Is that so hard to believe? Don’t you know anything about houses?”

  “Well… I suppose I can see how you would love a house… but I’m not sure how it would love you back.”

  “Haven’t you had one of those days where it’s blowy and snowy and freezy and breezy, and you want nothing more than to snuggle into your bed with a purring cat and a cup of tea? And then you found that, in fact, that was all you had to do for that day?”

  “Well…”

  “That’s your house, loving you back. And what about the way your house lets you have the lights the way you like them? And put the furniture exactly where you want it? And how the floor feels so nice against your bare feet when you wear them and your socks when you don’t? The way the heat rattles just so when it’s so cold a person couldn’t live outside, to remind you how the house keeps you safe and toasty? How can you not know these things?”

  “It’s not my house. I live with my parents. It’s their house. They do the lights. And the furniture. And… it’s sort of cold at our house in the winter. Mom says it costs too much to have the heat high. She tells me to put on a sweater. Even when I already have one on.”

  “Ach, that’s the trouble! You don’t have a house to love. You ought to come over to mine often, then, and be in love with us.”

  Izzy made the house sound so lovely that Ari thought he might have to try it. And so the boy resolved that, in fact, he would try out this girl and her house and see how they suited him.

  Being the Story in Which Ari Discovers the Secrets of Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen

  All this talk of being in love with houses had made Aristotle more aware of a certain question that had been dangling around the inside of his mind for some few minutes, almost since before he stepped into the house, but he hadn’t wanted to ask it because it felt like a violation of Izzy’s space here in Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen. He didn’t know why he felt that, exactly, only that she seemed to treat the whole place with a certain quiet reverence, a way about her that was unlike the way she was outside, in the tree, that he didn’t quite understand. He was coming to think that there might be a few things about Izzy that he didn’t understand.

  “Iz,” he said. “I’ve got to ask you something.”

  “Of course! Questions about Castle Beauregard Mandelgreen always welcomed by tour guides. We here at the castle make it our business to know everything, and when we don’t, we make it up. What can I help you with?”

  “It’s not about the house. Well, not totally.”

  “Ah, something to do with the secrets, then. Well, what is it?”

  “Iz… where are your mother and father?”

  It did seem, now that he thought about it harder, as though it were Izzy who were the one not doing the pruning of the rose bushes. And there didn’t seem, as she led him around the house with her random tour, to be anyone else there but the two of them. It also didn’t seem as if there had been anyone else there recently.

  He didn’t think he’d previously thought about Izzy’s parents, and yet somehow he realized that he didn’t expect her to have them. But she must! Everyone had parents. And thus, the question. It was all incredibly logical, except the part where Izzy maybe didn’t have any parents. That was worrisome.

  She poked her head round the living room wall, sideways. “Well, now, that’s a bit of a personal question, isn’t it?”

  Ari gave her the side-eye. “I think my mother would like to know.”

  From sideways, the side-eye is not so intimidating, really. “OH YOUR MOTHER. A bit of a busybody, ain’t she?”

  “Hey! You don’t know my mother. But yes. It might be true that she likes to know more than is strictly within her purview. Still, she’s only looking out for me. You can’t blame her for that, can you? It’s the thing about mothers. That’s what they do. Which you would know, if you had one.”

  “Well, then.” Izzy’s head had gone back round the wall, where he couldn’t see her face, but Ari thought he heard something strange in her voice. “If that’s the thing about mothers, then I suppose I shall have to confess.”

  “It’s only for safety.” Ari tried to reassure her, though he didn’t know why she would need to be reassured.

  “All right, then. For safety! My father travels the world speaking to people. And my mother is gone.”

  Aristotle waited for the rest, but Izzy didn’t offer more. He felt mildly guilty for saying “if you had one.” If a person hasn’t a mother, you probably don’t want to remind them of it, but it took him a minute to realize that. Oh, he was better with books.

  “What does your father speak about? And where has your mother gone to?”

  “He tells people how to be better. And if I knew where she had gone, she wouldn’t be gone, would she? I’d go there and bring her back.”

  “How to be better at what?”

  “At being people. Adults aren’t very good at it.”

  Aristotle felt he ought to have more to say, but Izzy made him feel like an empty book.

  “It’s all right,” she said, which was not like her. He liked the way it made him feel and wished she would say it more. “You needn’t understand my mother and father to know me, you see. They’re not here, and they’re not coming here any minute, and all of that is neither here nor there, so let’s forget it, and do more important things, like see the house. I’ve got to show you the library.”

  “OK,” Ari said. “But… there’s one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Then… you haven’t any supervision?”

  “Of course I do.” Izzy rolled her eyes.

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  “You can’t be your own supervision.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Ari spluttered. “Who makes you come in when you’ve played out too long? Who tells you to eat your vegetables and not feed them to the dog? Who makes you take a bath? Who-who-who makes you follow the rules?”

  Izzy counted off on each finger, full of force. “One: I’ve never played out too long. I think you ought to explore more fully, Ari dear, whether there even IS such a thing as playing out too long. Two: I eat my veggie-tables every day and I haven’t a dog to feed them to, but I wouldn’t dream of feeding them to him even if I did, because what w
ould become of the poor dog? Dogs aren’t meant to eat veggie-tables! Three: I take a very thorough bath every third day. And four: I make the rules, so of course I make them so I’ll follow them.”

  Ari blinked. “Every third day?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy stuck his nose closer to the girl and sniffed. “My mother says I will begin to rot if I don’t take a bath every day. But you don’t even smell!”

  “Why, thank you,” Izzy said. “But maybe that’s because I’m a girl. Mothers are not often wrong about these things.”

  “Yesterday you said ‘foo’ to mothers.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t have one, and you do, and anyone who has a mother ought to listen to her. I’m sure she’ll grow you up into something quite nice, whereas I shall be tangled and dirty for all my days.”

  Ari was not convinced that he wanted to be something quite nice, nor that his mother would grow him up into it—he thought remaining tangled and dirty might be delightful, but he had already spent most of his life trying to stop being tangled and dirty so as to please his mother and he wasn’t sure he knew how to reverse that sort of thing, so he kept quiet about it.

  “Then tell me something else, Izandria Dauntless! If you have no supervision but you, who tucks you into bed at night? Who reads stories to you? And who makes pancakes for you on Saturday morning?”

  “Why, I do.”

  “You do everything for yourself?”

  “Well, Bentson and Sir Vincent help with some things.”

  “Bentson? Sir Vincent? Who are they?”

  “That’s Bentson.” Izzy pointed.

  A fat white duck with an orange beak and orange feet waddled into the hall. It wore a blue and green plaid bowtie. Ari eyed it suspiciously. He wasn’t too fond of birds.

  “You have a pet duck?”

  Izzy grimaced. “I wouldn’t call him a pet where he can hear you.”

  The duck squawked, and Ari flinched.

  “He’s the independent type. Comes and goes as he pleases, really. I wouldn’t be surprised if he up and flew away some day and never came back.”