Enid Strange

by Meghan Rose Allen

  What about the second bang? It was out back. That trash can couldn’t have rolled down the street.

  “I’ll go check, just to show me nothing untoward is going on.” I crept to the upstairs bathroom to look out its window, ready to see one of the black plastic cylinders lying in our flower bed. Instead, toppled against the side of the house was one of the saplings. Poking out from around the corner was the head of another. The two bangs. Two trees taken down by the wind.

  I ran back downstairs. Maybe this threat to our house’s faerie protection would be enough for the notebook to reveal something. But each page, every page, was still blank. I redialed the Will O’Wisp number, hoping Amber was on break. My fingers slipped. The handset clattered to the ground. I scooped it back up and tried again.

  “Hello.” Amber’s voice sounded pleasant when she wasn’t being nasty. “Women’s Psych Ward.”

  I hung up.

  The book and I went to my bedroom. I checked that the curtains, blackout ones three layers thick, were in place. (My mother had gotten them for me when I finally told her that no matter how I placed my bed in the room, the street lamp always shone directly into my eyes at night. I had tried to keep that from her, she being already annoyed by our forced move into the town proper, but one look at me after our third night in our rented house and she knew by the way the bags under my eyes dragged all the way down to my jowls that I hadn’t been sleeping and correctly surmised that the street lamp was keeping me awake.) I lay on the bed and told myself it was the wind that had knocked the trees over. A coincidence.

  With the empty notebook of spells your mother left for you? Don’t be daft, Enid. This is faerie work.

  I jumped up as another bang hit right under my win-dow. I could have looked out, but that would have meant ripping the blackout curtains from the wall (to ensure maximum protection from the street lamp’s attempts to ruin my slumber, I’d glue-gunned off-brand Velcro squares to the edges of my blackout curtains and the window frame to keep drafts from lifting the curtain).

  Focus, Enid.

  Well, what did I want me to do about it? The trees were falling, and my mother’s notebook was empty.

  “I don’t control the weather,” I said aloud. “And I’m not an expert in steganography, either.”

  Steganography?

  “Steganography means the art of hidden writing. You should know that since I do.”

  I was humoring you so you’d feel better, all right?

  “Fine.”

  Now the faeries?

  I took in a gulp of air. “How serious can this actually be? She wanted us to do prep work. And this is our mother we’re talking about. The woman who has bought clothes for me already all the way up to adult size.”

  I doubt playing dress-up in our future clothes will bam-boozle any faeries.

  “I mean that she’s a planner. She’s prepared. She’s some other p-word that fits in with prepared and planned.”

  Perfected? Primed? Practised?

  “Exactly. I’d bet that the impermanent magic protecting our house is still ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent effective. She just wants to touch it up. So I will be fine. I’ll stay in my room. The blackout curtains work both ways. Any mischievous faerie skulking about outside won’t know I’m here. Even if I turn on a light to read —”

  Or for comfort.

  “Or for comfort,” I admitted, “they can’t see in. So, I’m all good.

  All good?

  “All good.”

  Then why am I crying?

  I was crying because my own bravado couldn’t com-pensate for the fact that I’d failed. My mother had finally entrusted me with a faerie task, and I couldn’t do it. She’d come home at the end of her shift, sigh, and then do it herself. She would never never never never never ever delegate any other faerie tasks my way. I would never learn anything more about the faeries.

  “It’s not real,” I told myself. “I’m not crying.”

  I hated crying the way Mrs. Delavecchio hated rain. My eyes puffed out and my cheeks got red and my nose clogged up so that I had to breathe loudly through my mouth. I looked like a baboon. I lay back on the bed with a book in my arms pretending to read while I sobbed. I hated being young and the faeries and my mother and Amber and this rented house. I wanted to go home, real home, farmhouse home.

  My eyes, I noticed, had closed. Crying was tiring, but I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I was going to stay awake until my mother came home. The lids opened unwillingly. Fine. I could blink a few times, in compromise. Three blinks. That would be all. Just three. Only three.

  “Enid?” my mother whispered. I opened my eyes. I’d been dreaming of our farmhouse all fixed up, us moving back in, and my mother taking down the For Sale sign, but here was my mother, her blush-colored scrubs now dirtied with something wet and orange down the front. She smelled of Jell-O. One of her patients must have thrown her dessert at my mother. She knelt beside my bed. “You fell asleep with the light on.”

  I pushed myself up. My clothes were rumpled and saltily stuck to me. Tears had dried on my cheeks, and my skin cracked as I opened my mouth to speak. “What, ” I began. My mother had her notebook in her hands. She cracked the spine and began turning the pages.

  “I didn’t … there were …” My sentences couldn’t get past the second word. “You don’t …”

  “Yes?”

  “Your shift is over?” I finally struck on a sentence that made it all the way through to its conclusion. But I couldn’t shake the grogginess from being woken up. It didn’t seem like I’d been asleep for eight hours, the length of my mother’s shift.

  “I came during break to check up on you.”

  “So, you don’t even trust me?” I said. “Typical.”

  “Should I have trusted you? Did you complete the pre-parations I asked of you?”

  “No,” I admitted sullenly.

  “Then perhaps your pugnacity towards me is misplaced, as my checking up on you was necessary.”

  “The trees have fallen over.” I finally managed to sputter out something useful. “I heard them. I saw two.” I remembered the crash outside my window. “Maybe three.”

  My mother put a hand on my head like I was a child or a puppy. “That’s for tomorrow.” Then she pressed some fingers to her forehead. “That’s not true. Today. This even-ing. It is after midnight, and so we will handle that today. Now go back to sleep.”

  “But —”

  “Sleep. Now. School tomorrow.”

  My mother moved to the door in an uncharacteristic slide. I rolled over for one glimpse of her before she left. My reading light, plugged in beside my bed and set on a stack of school library books I had no intention of return-ing, spotlit her in the doorway and the wall alongside. And on the wall, by the door, was a shadow, with a penumbra elongated and gossamer-like: a faerie’s shadow.

  Enid! Do you know what this means?

  Yes, that faeries don’t mind LED light bulbs. That’s pretty inter—

  Enid! There is a faerie in the house! There is no way for a faerie to cast a shadow like that unless it is in our room!

  What? I have to alert my mother!

  I went to raise my head, but as my neck lifted from the pillow, my mother flicked off the light switch and darkness dragged my exhausted self back to sleep.

  y mother stood, with mixing bowl, in the kitchen.

  “I need to tell you,” I began, racing downstairs as soon as I woke up to tell my mother what I had seen before she’d turned off the light: a shadow from a faerie that had to have been in our house.

  Instead, she lectured over me.

  “I hadn’t planned on having to do this all from scratch this morning. I’ll likely be late for my shift. I know you did try yesterday, Enid, so I won’t say that I’m disappointed —” Maybe she wasn’t disappointed
(she didn’t sound disappointed), but she also didn’t say anything more. She froze, looking out the window at Mrs. Delavecchio’s garden.

  “So, you’re not disappointed,” I prompted.

  “I just wonder why,” my mother said, returning to whisking, “you didn’t turn out differently.”

  Ouch. So much for the lack of disappointment. “How so?” Stay calm.

  “You’re perfectly acceptable, Enid. I just thought I was making you extraordinary.”

  More ouch. A harder, harsher, overwhelmingly painful ouch.

  “I’ll try not to be so ordinary anymore,” I whispered.

  “I never said you were ordinary.” My mother set the mixing bowl down and gave me a rare look, not at the top of my head like usual but right in the eyes.

  “No, just that I’m not extraordinary enough for you.”

  “And do you think that I am extraordinary enough for you, Enid?”

  Of course she was. She was my mother. Not that I was going to tell her that. Ever. Especially after this.

  “I thought so,” she said. More mixing bowl. More whisking. “Now let me finish this banishing powder in peace.”

  Emotional scarring aside, this seemed important. Banishing? “What did you just say? What are you making?”

  “I wouldn’t get your hopes up for muffins or the like. I said banishing powder, Enid. What you didn’t help me with yesterday. What we’ve been dusting around regularly since we moved in.”

  “It’s called banishing powder?”

  “Yes, Enid, it is.”

  “I always thought it was called vanishing powder, like with a V.”

  “No,” my mother said. “Banishing with a B.”

  Which meant, even if I had seen a faerie in the house last night, the powder would banish it. Eureka! I wouldn’t have to tell my mother about the faerie intrusion, and my mother couldn’t then, somehow, blame me for letting the faerie inside (I hadn’t, at least not on purpose). Plus, I’d have a secret from her. How was that for extraordinary: Enid Strange, survived faerie attack on her own home.

  Yes, saw a shadow and survived. What pluck.

  Oh, hush.

  My mother began pouring her mixture into a line of salt shakers. “I made this spell stronger than usual to give us a well-earned reprieve. Of course, we’ll need some more trees.” Her expression softened. “The money we have spent on trees since our move. What must the nurseries around here think of us? Maybe we should borrow Mrs. Delavecchio’s car and drive to some other nursery in some other town.”

  “Why?”

  “They won’t know us there, Enid. No more smirks of recognition from the employees staffing the till. I hope you have noticed that these employees are always university boys, Enid, working at nurseries for the summer. Perhaps you can break that tradition when you go to university.”

  “And work at a nursery?”

  “Why not?” Setting aside for the moment her dreams of egalitarian botanical salespersonship, she continued glumly. “I hardly feel like spending my days off canvassing nurseries. I suppose I could call around to see if I can secure a delivery for a large enough order.”

  “We should plant our next batch of trees inside,” I said, “so the faeries can’t knock any more of them over.”

  “Indoor trees.” My mother’s mouth opened into a wide circle of surprise. “Oh, Enid, why haven’t I thought of that before? We could get some banana trees and hibiscus in large pots and place them in the corners and by the win-dows. What an extremely wonderful idea. Amazing even.”

  “Some might say extraordinary,” I muttered.

  But not my mother. “Although,” she said, “we will need to get the trees from somewhere for your plan. I’ll sort that out later. Here.” She handed me one of the salt shakers. “Let’s go.”

  The principle is the same as spreading around the white silica powder to keep ants out. Spread your vanishing banishing powder along door frames and entryways, including windowsills. (This is why one should never live in a house with overly shallow windowsills; they should at least be hamster-depth.) A thin layer of powder is adequate.

  NB: Sweeping the powder away while cleaning, spring or otherwise, renders this method ineffective. As such, it is recommended to affix the grains to the surface. Traditionally, honey or molasses is suggested. However, as these also attract ants (the worst!) I recommend a non-sugar-based sticking agent, like double-sided tape or running a glue stick along the surface you’re going to pour your powder onto.

  For faerie variants with wings, mix the powder with water in a spray bottle and spray your window screens.

  No one likes having gritty feet. That must be why faeries don’t like to walk across the powder. Flying ones: I guess they don’t want something sticky in their wings. Plus whatever magic is in the pow-der that upsets a faerie’s temperament.

  did upstairs, my mother did down, and it took less than fifteen minutes to cover the house since we were old hat at it by now. I had left my room until last. I lay on the bed, trying to recreate my position of the night before. If I’d seen the shadow there and the light was there, that meant the faerie had to have been … I knocked over the stack of books while reaching the salt shaker over to where the faerie must have been standing.

  “Enid,” my mother yelled, when the books had finished their gravity-driven thumps. “Stop dallying!”

  “I’m not dallying,” I shouted back angrily. “Just because I don’t rush around like you always do doesn’t mean that I’m dallying.” I just hoped she couldn’t tell I was yelling this while lying down; my bed’s embrace was simply too cozy.

  In reply, my mother slammed a cupboard door with force enough that the windows in my bedroom rattled in their frames. “Scornful comments are unnecessary,” she called up hypocritically. “Feel free to talk to me again when you can exercise some decorum. And bring your salt shaker down once you’ve finished, hopefully soon. I need another one.”

  When I got back downstairs, my mother was in the vestibule, completing her dusting of the beaded curtain that hung inside the frame of our front door. One of my mother’s many decrees was that our front door be the only means of entry, ensuring that the beads would brush off any faeries that might have latched on to us or our visitors outside. When not protecting us from the plague of faeries my mother insisted were assailing our house, the beads were caught by drafts and knocked incessantly against the steel of the front door. I couldn’t stand the noise the beads made and shuddered as my mother ran her fingers through the strings, clattering them together.

  “Done,” she said, stepping down from the white plastic stool.

  “I thought you said you needed this.” I held up my salt shaker.

  “I did but didn’t.”

  “So you told me you needed it even though you didn’t need it at all. Why would you do that?”

  “It meant you got done quicker,” my mother explained. “Now you have your own time back.”

  “What if I didn’t want my own time back? What if I wanted to go at my own, leisurely pace?”

  “You can’t because your school starts in ten minutes and you have a twenty-minute walk to get you there.” My mother raised her left eyebrow. “You needed that time.”

  “I need to develop my own time management skills, not rely on you for them,” I retorted, shoving my feet into my shoes and grabbing my backpack off the floor. Banishing powder flew up in a cloud all around me as I slid my arms through the straps. I coughed. The powder tasted of cardamom.

  “It’s not always going to be like this,” my mother said.

  “Good,” I yelled back, and I dashed out the door.

  nid.”

  I put down my head and walked faster.

  “Enid,” the voices called out again in stereo. Then “Enid” again in quadraphonic sound. I’d almost made it to the crosswalk when, g
rabbing the loop on the top of my backpack, Amber pulled me to a stop. Sadly, she was neither banished nor vanished by any motes of powder still on my bag.

  “Rushing off, are we?” asked Amber.

  “I have to get to school,” I muttered.

  Amber and her coterie laughed.

  “Oh, do hold up, Enid.” She sounded just like my mother, a skill likely honed during all their time together at work. Yay. A new way to annoy me. “I’m so glad I caught you,” Amber continued, all faux-sweet. “You can give these back to your mother for me.” She extracted a pair of novels from her army-green messenger bag. “She lent these books to me so that we could discuss them together.” To prove it, Amber flipped the cover open of the topmost book to show me my mother’s name written in my mother’s super straight block caps: MARGERY STRANGE. “It’s not like she can expect you to discuss these books with her.”

  “So now she’s lending you X-rated novels?” I raised my left eyebrow in an attempt to look wise. If Amber thought my mother wouldn’t share the books with me they must have contained some adult-only content (although my mother didn’t bother herself with censoring my reading; she let me read whatever books she left lying around the house). I stifled a yawn. I was too tired to engage in Amber’s and my usual useless sparring. “So what?” I readied my weapon to get this interaction over with. Amber may have had her newfound maternal mimicry to upset me; I could stick with my steadfast approach for riling up Amber. “Your dad spends just as much time with me as you do with my mother. And we don’t work together, so he has to go out of his way to find me.” This was so much of an exaggeration that it should more accurately be called a lie. As I mentioned previously, Dr. Holden did nothing more than give me a fake, distant smile and a fake, distant wave whenever we met. “What do you think of that?” I asked, already knowing. For reasons unclear, putting myself in her father’s orbit made Amber furious.

  Sure enough, the corners of Amber’s eyes narrowed. “You little worm,” she said, not yelling, not hissing, not shouting nor spitting. Just cold and flat like I wasn’t even worth her time. “You are nothing more than an inconsequential collection of atoms. A cockroach is worth more than you. A weak virus is worth a thousand Enids. Don’t you ever speak of my father again. You have no right. You don’t even have a father.”