The Curse of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  “Really?” I asked, momentarily wondering if she’d been kidding, after all.

  Lixi stared back at me evenly for a few seconds, her face blank. Then finally her lips parted into a smile and she laughed.

  “No, of course not!” she said, then paused. “I mean, okay, all of that is actually true. Just not the part about me being a Dipsticker. I’m definitely a Sugarhead.”

  I laughed again as we stepped outside into a cool afternoon sea breeze.

  But all of that isn’t to say it was just silly non sequiturs and jokes between us, although I made her laugh just as much—she really did think I was funny for some inexplicable reason, just like she said she had back in sixth grade. We also talked about other stuff, too.

  For instance, after joking around about Fun Dip and the ability to predict serial killers for a few more minutes, she brought up something more serious.

  “I know you guys think Elves have this charmed life in the modern world,” she said. “That because most of us are rich, we have no cares in the world. But being a rich kid isn’t as great as it sounds.”

  It was a sudden shift, but I got the feeling that she’d had an agenda to bring it up from the start. And I guess it was hard to blame her. I mean, nobody likes feeling misunderstood—like other people think they’re something they’re not. In many ways, it’s the worst feeling in the world. So I decided to dive headfirst into this conversation, skeptical or not.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “How so?”

  “There’s a lot of pressure, for one thing,” she said. “Pressure to become something. To outdo and outperform the other kids, not just at school, but in life. And then there’s the built-in guilt. There with you, every day, like a shadow. I mean, not all rich kids felt that way, but I did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” Lixi said, sitting down on an old bench on the roof of a guard tower with a particularly nice view of the San Francisco skyline.

  “Try,” I said. “I’ve got nothing better to do but sit around inside an old prison cell and try to think of creative things to do with my toenails.”

  “Gross!” Lixi said, but she was also laughing. Then it faded quickly and she raised her eyebrows. “You know we all sleep in old prison cells here, right? Even me.”

  “Really?” I asked over the sound of the crashing waves against the rocks below—a sound that had become somewhat comforting to me over the past few days.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, our doors don’t get closed and locked every night, but almost all of us sleep in cells not much different from yours. We’re in the newer wing, though, so the beds are more comfortable and we’ve got the ability to come and go as we please, but still . . .”

  “Spoiled,” I said.

  Lixi laughed that almost musical laugh of hers again.

  I felt a pang of guilt every time I heard it. Talking with her reminded me of Ari—they were different in a lot of ways, but I loved their laughs and they both made me feel so relaxed. It was hard not to feel guilty thinking about Ari, because here I was laughing and joking with a new friend and I didn’t know if Ari was even okay.

  “Anyway,” Lixi said. “To answer your question about Rich Kids’ Guilt, it happened every time I got something expensive. Or got to do things most kids didn’t. Every time. Like, when we went to the West Side in Chicago to sit in my dad’s luxury suite at Blackhawks and Bulls games, I always felt more guilt than joy. I didn’t ask to get to do those types of things, I certainly didn’t do anything to deserve them. I was just born into a wealthy family. So why did I get to live such a charmed life when tens of thousands of kids all around the city struggled to get three basic meals each day? I mean, I could never get over how unfair it all was. How little sense it made.”

  “I never even considered you guys might feel that way,” I said.

  “Nobody does,” she said. “And you can’t really tell anyone because then all they see is a spoiled kid complaining that they have it too good. It’s a no-win situation unless you’re able to just accept that you’re a Lucky Chosen One and simply sit back and enjoy the ride. Something I failed to do. Not that I’m complaining, I mean, I still wouldn’t have traded with other kids. And I think that fact alone makes me more ashamed than anything else. I tried to convince my parents to give more to charity, to be more generous and less frivolous with all our wealth. And they did give a lot to charity, but not nearly enough, still just a fraction of their discretionary money. They were obsessed with building what they called generational wealth. For me. They withheld and hoarded money for me and my kids and their kids, all of whom don’t even exist and maybe never will!”

  She stopped, taking a few deep breaths. It was as if she’d been waiting a long time for someone outside her circle, someone who wasn’t an Elf, to come along so she could finally unload all this and not be judged. And not be told to stop being ungrateful.

  “I understand,” I said. “That really doesn’t sound all that great.”

  And I meant it. Growing up relatively poor wasn’t exactly a blast—having to work a near full-time job at my dad’s store ever since I was eleven while also going to school wasn’t the sort of life kids dreamed of. But at least I truly felt like I had earned most of what I had. And I still enjoyed life in all the small ways that weren’t luxury seats at sporting events and concerts and lavish trips to cool Caribbean islands. I’m not sure I would have wanted to trade places with her, all things considered.

  “It’s weird,” Lixi said with a humorless laugh. “Somehow, getting everything I ever wanted all the time left me feeling weirdly empty. In fact, my therapist once told me I was depressed. You’d think that would have worried my parents, but it only disappointed them.”

  “Really?” I said, hardly able to imagine that. Even though he was sometimes aloof, my dad was always so caring and kind—even now, “episodes” and all.

  “Yeah, they’re not really the affectionate type,” she said. “Which is common among Elves. Very few of us at the PEE, including me, get encouraging words from our parents. Most of us spent more time when we were kids with our nannies than we did our own moms or dads. My dad has never given me a hug, or even once said the words I love you.”

  “Want a hug?”

  I opened my arms, hoping that this wasn’t making light of her clearly unhappy childhood. To my relief, her face lit up with a smile and then she laughed again.

  “It’s a little too early in the day for hugs from a Dwarf,” she said.

  “Well, then, offer rescinded,” I said, pretending to be offended.

  “Besides, it wasn’t all doom and gloom,” Lixi insisted. “There were a lot of good things about growing up an Elf, too.”

  “Name one,” I joked.

  “Elves love music,” she said, prompting me to wonder if this was partially why Froggy was so obsessed with it. “I mean, we practically invented modern pop music. Three of the four Beatles were Elves. And also about half the artists currently atop the Billboard charts. Elves have won over 75 percent of all Grammys ever awarded.”

  “Okay, okay, quit bragging,” I said. “Elvis was a Dwarf, so take that!”

  “Do you even know one of his songs?”

  “Well, um, no,” I admitted—I only knew he was a Dwarf because I overheard Ari and Froggy talking about it once. “But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t good! Back in the day and whatnot.”

  “And what day was that?” she asked with that sly grin on her face.

  “Uhh . . . the . . . 1940s?”

  Lixi just laughed and didn’t reveal if I’d guessed correctly or not.

  “We love our ancient music, too,” she continued. “At all the traditional Elven festivals, like Qitris, a band plays famous Elven folk songs by an ancient Separate Earth band called Method of Valor. There’s even a really good cover band of them called Modus Virtuti. The ban
ds play all night and we dance until our feet and legs are sore. We also love playing games—I mean, just laughing and having fun in general.”

  It sounded like a weird statement to me at first, but then I realized something.

  “You know, Dwarves actually don’t really laugh that much,” I said. “And our version of fun usually involves more serious things like blowing glass, making weapons, mining, eating, and telling stories from Separate Earth. And not even fun ones.”

  “Whereas,” Lixi said theatrically, “Elves like games so much that we were the ones who invented baseball. It’s a variation of an ancient Elven game called pyre pitch. The best team back then, and still the most popular in our inner circles even though they’re well over 100,000 years extinct, was the Felselian United Krakens. They were like the New York Yankees of pyre pitch.”

  We sat outside on a bench and talked about sports for a bit longer, even though the main thread of the conversation was about how neither of us really liked sports. But eventually we started heading back toward my cell.

  At one point during the walk back, magic came up. Lixi seemed genuinely impressed when I said I had the Ability.

  “Won’t you miss magic?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, if Edwin succeeds in banishing it forever,” I said. “Won’t part of you miss magic? All the cool things it can do. Even if you don’t have the Ability, just seeing your friends do magic is really neat.”

  Lixi frowned deeply and looked at her feet as she walked, almost as if there was something she wanted to say but couldn’t because I wouldn’t like it. She remained silent for longer than what would be considered a normal pause.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Do you not have the Ability?”

  “I don’t,” she admitted. “But it’s not that . . . It’s, well, never mind. Magic is complicated for me to talk about, Greg.”

  “Okay . . .” I said, waiting for her to elaborate.

  She didn’t, and we just walked in silence for a bit longer. It was the first time there had been even a hint of tension that day, and that’s probably what prompted her next question.

  “What’s your favorite Marvel movie?” she asked suddenly. “Mine was Thor: Ragnarok. Or are you one of those Dwarves who rejects all things modern?”

  “Uhhh,” I started, not really wanting to admit that I was the only kid alive who didn’t really care for the Marvel movies. “My favorite is the one, like, with the big ship that explodes?”

  “Which one?” Lixi asked with a smirk. “That happens in twenty-one of the twenty-four movies.”

  “Um, I forget the name of it, but it’s also the one where, you know, two of the good guys argue and actually fight each other instead of just the bad guys.”

  This time Lixi laughed.

  “Greg, that still leaves, like, thirteen of the movies it could be,” she said as we arrived at my cell. “It’s okay if you’re a DC nerd. No shame in that.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wasn’t really into any superhero movies, DC or Marvel. So I just grinned and shrugged helplessly.

  “You’re funny, Greg,” she said as I stepped back into my cell. “That definitely hasn’t changed.”

  I kept smiling as the iron bars of my prison door slammed closed between us.

  CHAPTER 33

  Turns Out I’ve Been Eating Quail Supplies

  As the days went on, I really started looking forward to my walks with Lixi.

  In fact, for the next three days, Lixi started showing up two or three times for walks around the old prison instead of just once. Honestly, with the way things were going, it was getting harder to keep seeing Elves as my natural-born enemies. Especially once she started introducing me to some of the other Elves working at the base. If it weren’t for the locked cell, I’d be less a prisoner and more like a guest.

  Take, for instance, the day she introduced me to Elven food.

  It turned out that Elves loved good food every bit as much as Dwarves, even though their idea of a full meal was more what I’d consider a light snack. They believed in quality over quantity. Which sounded insane to me—why not just have both? But some old Elven favorites were dishes like pea tendrils with crispy rice and fermented cucumbers with lavender mustard. Or beet petals with smoked pistachios and black garlic foam. And I had to admit they tasted pretty good, even if the portions were tiny and light on meat.

  I knew all of this because one day we stopped by the kitchen and I met the head chef and her two assistants, who did all the cooking for the complex.

  “Merethyl Umelar,” she introduced herself. “And these are my sous chefs, Tolthe and Tlannatar.”

  They were young, probably just out of college, and had tons of tattoos. We hung out with them for nearly an hour and I could tell right away that they had a blast cooking all day. They laughed and joked around a lot and it didn’t even feel like any of them were actually “working.”

  Chef Umelar even taught me the proper way to chop an onion. Before, during the few times my dad had asked me to help him cook, I’d just hack away at it until it was in smallish pieces. After all, my dad had always said, “Greg, the size and shape of things won’t affect how they taste.”

  But apparently that wasn’t quite the case.

  “Slice it in half first,” Chef Umelar said, showing me how to chop—which partially meant entrusting me with a very sharp Elven cooking knife.

  As I cut the onion in half, I realized it was the first time I’d held a weapon, any weapon, since I lost the Bloodletter. It once again sort of made me miss him, even after the realization of how much he’d been pushing me to endanger my friends for a cause that wasn’t ultimately worth it.

  But even more than that, I was shocked that these Elves would entrust a prisoner with a weapon. A prisoner who, depending on how much Galdervatn might be seeping up through the earth naturally on this very spot, could potentially also perform magic. Which, in some ways, made me a prisoner who could escape right now if I got lucky and tried hard enough.

  Honestly, though, I never even gave escape a thought. They trusted me enough to give me a knife to teach me something out of kindness (or perhaps boredom?). And Dwarves never betrayed a person’s trust. No matter what. Some would call that a fault, but it was something I was personally quite proud of. Which was why I used the knife to cut the onion and nothing more.

  “Good,” the chef said. “Now cut one half into strips to the core but not all the way through.”

  She did one half first to show me and then handed the knife back. None of the Elves present even seemed to bat an eye that they’d given a weapon to a Dwarven prisoner. It made me feel guilty for even mentally making a thing out of it.

  Chef Umelar showed remarkable patience as she guided me through the rest—until I had a pile of decently diced onion in front of me.

  “Uniform food size means that everything will be equally seasoned and cook at the same rate,” she said.

  I found out later that she used to be the head chef at a trendy and successful restaurant in San Francisco called Quail Supplies. That was back before Edwin came calling with a greater purpose in mind.

  On another day, Lixi introduced me to the fortress janitor, an older Elf named Ivlisar Torwraek.

  “But everyone around here usually just calls me Wrecking Ball,” he said.

  “Because you’re clumsy and break things a lot?” I joked.

  He looked at me sideways and laughed.

  “Not exactly,” he said. “I have this condition, and one of the symptoms for me is that everything needs to be perfectly tidy. Neat and orderly and clean as a whistle. So the name, it’s ironic, see?”

  I laughed nervously, worried I might have offended him or made light of his condition. Then Wrecking Ball grinned at my obvious discomfort and laughed along with me.

  “It m
akes this a perfect job for me, though,” he added as he picked a tiny piece of lint off his impeccably ironed gray uniform. “I’d be walking around cleaning anyway. So I might as well help the cause while I’m at it.”*

  Perhaps my favorite Elf of all (aside from Lixi), though, was Foxflame Farro (yeah, his real name), the fortress Spiritual Guide of Ancient Elven Mysticism. Basically he was like a priest. His religion was called Alaflusy Celority, which roughly means Communion of Four Gods. Though now a virtually extinct faith, most Elves still practiced it in passing, merely out of respect and habit. Very few believed any of the founding lore.

  Foxflame was tall and lanky and very funny. He was almost hopelessly happy, goofy, and charming. Which was of course not at all what the Dwarves thought of when they spoke of Elves. In fact, many of the Elves I’d met so far directly contradicted everything the Dwarves believed about them.

  Foxflame was constantly riding around the halls of Alcatraz on a skateboard, often doing cool tricks along the way. Sometimes, when I was alone in my cell in the evenings, I could hear the echoes of his wheels rolling down some distant hallway or cellblock. The guard outside my cell would roll his eyes and sigh. Which always made me smirk.

  Foxflame and I talked a lot about the difference between Elves and Dwarves. He found Dwarven culture nearly as fascinating as I did theirs. Turned out they had a lot of incorrect (and some totally correct) preconceived notions about us as well. Like, they always assumed that Dwarves slept on stone and not in beds (hilarious). And that we refused eat anything that didn’t have meat on it (which wasn’t actually that far from the truth). He nearly choked on his own tongue when I told him I actually had a Dwarven friend who was a vegetarian.

  It was during one of these types of discussions, inside the old prison chapel, that he finally talked about some of the ideas behind the religion he had devoted his life to.

  We had already discussed Human religions and how funny it was to both of us that many Humans actually believed in stuff that had only been written down three or four thousand years ago—which is like a micro-fraction of Human existence.