Enid Strange

by Meghan Rose Allen

  “Better to not have a father than be a spoiled and jealous daddy’s princess like you.”

  Amber’s mouth floundered and bobbed like a metaphorical fish eating its own bubbles, but her discombobulation didn’t last. Unfortunately. “Come on,” she said smugly to the other three girls, who had spent our conversation excessively interested in the crosswalk button. “Let’s let sweetheart Enid scamper off to school. So eager for school in the last week of June. She needs to see her teachers so she can get her socialization in before summer starts, since she has no friends.”

  “You all are going to school too,” I snapped, hoping no one would notice how I’d sidestepped Amber’s last barb.

  “We’re seniors,” one of the chorus said. “These are our last few days to spend together.”

  “Not really,” I pointed out, my smart-alecky mouth over-powering my desire to end this encounter as quickly as possible. “You have all summer to spend together. But instead you mindlessly choose to do so in school even though your university acceptances were sent out months ago, making high school, at this point, completely irrelevant. You’re all just too unimaginative to think of some other place to spend your time.”

  “I told you never to talk to her.” Amber turned on the girl who had spoken. “But Chelsey is right. They’ll hardly be able to spend time with me this summer while I’m in Europe.”

  “You’re only going for two weeks,” I reminded her. Amber’s parents had given her, as a high school graduation present, a summer trip to Europe. She’d gotten the tickets at Christmas, giving the rest of us six months of listening to Amber gloat about her fortnight’s Continental-plus-British-Isles-to-visit-Dr.-Sivaloganathan’s-family holiday.

  “Au contraire. My parents have generously reconsidered, and I am now spending the summer in Europe. Two weeks in the UK, one week with family, one without. Then the rest of the time backpacking wherever I so happen to choose. Oh, Enid, has your mother ever given you a two-month vacation?”

  No one with eyes could have missed my expression of longing accompanying Amber’s taunt, how the movie camera in my brain started showing all the sights via scenes stolen from films and old Paris Match magazines they had us read in French class: the reading room at the British Museum, Paris at dusk, the large Ferris wheel in Vienna, Prague architecture, Amsterdam-ian and Venetian canals, la Promenade des Anglais, Portuguese beaches, Greek ruins, the Hermitage Museum, the Brandenburg Gate.

  “No,” I said. “My mother hasn’t bought me a trip to Europe.” I thought the truth would deflate her, but then I foolishly added, “Not yet. You can’t tell the future.”

  “Not for everything. But for some things.” Amber patted my head. “And I can tell that this teeny town is going to be the most exotic place you’ll ever visit.”

  Then she and her friends flounced off, stopping traffic as they crossed the road even though they hadn’t pressed the crosswalk button.

  There are two types of people in this world:

  1.people who have an active relationship with the fairies; versus

  2.people who do not.

  Most of humanity falls in the latter category. But precisely how much most are we talking about? No such census has ever been undertaken.

  Also interesting to find out, how many people are there who once had an active relationship with the faeries, yet who no longer do? I can see answers to these questions placed within the context of a pie chart or scatter plot. There are some really colorful ways to present this sort of data.

  Now, an astute reader may be asking herself, What exactly constitutes an active relationship? How often must the interaction occur? How much time must pass before the relationship is deemed inactive? If once a year a human and faerie meet, is this relationship considered active, or is it considered active only on the day of their meeting and inactive for the remaining 364 (365 in the case of leap years) days of the year? Does there need to be a pattern to the timing of the rendezvous? Lunar-based like Easter or Ramadan? Or periodic? What if the period is quadratic? Fibonacci? Prime number based? What if …

  eeding my own advice, I headed home. Outside our disagreements regarding how broadly I could interpret take-home assignments, I was a nonentity at school. I sat at the back and participated in class only under duress. I was so inconsequential that I’d been erroneously marked absent three times during the past school year (including once when it was clearly untrue since I had presented my book report on Huygen and Poortvliet’s Gnomes first thing that morning). Moreover, even supposing it were opposite day and my absence was correctly noted, after the previous afternoon’s meeting with Mrs. Estabrooks, the administration would likely assume my mother had kept me home to punish the school by denying them the gift of my brilliance.

  In less time than seemed possible, I was back in our front yard, surveying two of the trees that had blown over. They had been so newly planted that their roots were still wound up in tight balls of dirt. I righted them in their holes, poured on some top soil, and jumped on the dirt, stamping them in. It sure was convenient that while faeries couldn’t uproot trees themselves, they could cause windstorms, or snowstorms, or termites, or stampedes, or rogue beavers, or any other such contrivance to knock the trees over. Plant new trees, knock them over, plant new trees, knock them over. Just imagine what I could accomplish if I didn’t have to spend all my free time dealing with faerie nuisances. I’d have probably finished my faerie manuscript by now, at least.

  Weighing the roots down would help. Mrs. Delavecchio had a large stack of bricks at the back of her yard. I grabbed three at a time to layer over the topsoil. Mrs. Delavecchio watched me from her kitchen window while I worked.

  “No school?” she called when I had finished. “I saw you go to school.”

  “We got sent home,” I lied. “There was a problem with the radiators.”

  “That school is too old. They should tear down and build a new one like in the cities.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Delavecchio.”

  “You come over for lunch then? I have soup and sausages frying.”

  “What time is lunch?” I asked.

  “One o’clock.” Mrs. Delavecchio pulled her head back in through the window. The breeze caught her orange curtains, drawing them out to flutter against the side of her house. They clashed with the brick. She should put her screens back in, I thought. Ants will get into her house. Plus faeries.

  Over on our property, I put in my key to turn the lock. It didn’t turn, because it wasn’t locked.

  “Hello?” I called out as I nudged the door open. Upon re-evaluation (my mother kept the door locked at all times), I puffed myself up and shouted, “Police!” in as deep a voice as I could manage.

  A chair scraped along the floor further inside. My heart thrummed with no pause between the beats.

  “Don’t make me shoot you. Backup is on its way. Ten-forty, copy.” I made a crackling noise in my throat that I hoped sounded convincingly like radio static. “The situation remains critical,” I said into my shoulder. Television police always seemed to have radios strapped to their shoulders. “Come out with your hands up.”

  “Oh, Enid,” my mother said wearily from the kitchen. “We all know it’s you.”

  I scurried to where she sat, on a stool in the thin space between the cupboards and the kitchen sink. “Who’s we?” I asked. But there was only my mother, flipping through photographs that lay, loose, in a box.

  “Don’t you have school?” she asked me.

  “Don’t you have work?”

  As she didn’t reply, I leaned in to look at the box. All baby photos. “Who’s that a picture of?” I asked. The photos weren’t like the glossy 4”x6” ones we sometimes printed off at the drugstore. These were all squares with rounded corners. The colored ink of the photos had faded to yellow.

  “You.”

  I scoffed. “Those photos are older t
han I am.”

  “I had an Instamatic at our old house, and I used some film I found in a box under the sink. Waste not, want not.”

  Waste not, want not? My mother believed using clichés was intellectually lazy. My mother was not intellectually lazy. “Nobody develops film anymore,” I said, testing her.

  “The community college has film classes and darkrooms you can rent. A friend developed these for me.”

  Choosing to ignore Amber, my mother didn’t have any friends other than me. “Who?”

  “So many questions, Enid.” She went back to her photographs.

  “Who?” I repeated.

  She exhaled and glared at me. “One of the nephews of a patient who died shortly after your birth.”

  “So, the patient died or the nephew?” I asked.

  “The patient, Enid. Obviously the patient,” she said, exasperated by me as always. “The nephew developed the film for me.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  This from the woman whose memory could recall pre-cise details from decades-old power bills? Curiouser and curiouser. “Really?” I asked.

  “Really, Enid.” My mother stood and brushed her hands against her pants like wiping crumbs from her fingers. She put the lid back on the shoebox of photos. She took her bag from the counter.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “As you said, I should be at work. Someone needs to bring in some money to this household.” She gave me a pointed look.

  “I’m only eleven. I can’t work.”

  “Exactly.”

  I couldn’t think of a smart reply to this, and so she left.

  f you have never had an active relationship with the faeries, despair not! At any time, an amenable faerie could take an interest in you, and an active relationship will have begun. Yet, for a variety of reasons, possibly including but not limited to age, gender, height, weather patterns, altitude, attitude, breakfast choices, percentage of blended fabrics being worn on one’s person at any given time, illnesses both physical and mental, scent, and/or numerology, an amenable faerie might never present itself.

  Of those with an active faerie relationship, almost all keep their faerie interactions to themselves to prevent mocking, ridicule, or rejection. However, I am willing to accept whatever taunting comes my way in the pursuit of educating the general public about faeries.

  I sat on the floor. The clouds that morning had burned away, and the sun shone through the kitchen window with a brightness so intense it was like being an ant under an ant-frying magnifying glass. I let my vision lose focus. I blinked. I kept my eyes shut while I counted to two hundred and forty-nine. I held them open until I started to cry.

  Nothing happened.

  I shifted position so more of my body faced away from the window.

  Still nothing.

  Since I’d started collecting data for my book, I’d never gone two days without seeing any faeries. Two days was too long a time to not see any faeries.

  It’s really only been about thirty-six hours.

  Still too long.

  Not counting the faerie you saw inside not even eight hours ago.

  Doesn’t count. I mean faeries I see out the window.

  I stood and grabbed the phone to call the Will O’Wisp. My mother would know where all the outside faeries went, and she’d be eager to make clear that she, as usual, knew more than me. Plus I’d be safe from Amber picking up. (I might be skipping school, but there was no way that Amber, Miss Goody-Goody herself, would be.)

  “Unless you’re calling to apologize, Enid, I am quite busy,” my mother said before I could say anything. I looked around as she said this, both for nanny cams and for faeries.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Call display, Enid.” Then Dr. Holden must have been walking by, because my mother’s voice took on a conciliatory tone. “What can I do that would help you today?”

  “Did you do something different?” I asked her. “I looked for faeries today and there weren’t any. I know the spells keep them out of the house —” and hopefully, I added to myself, banish any that might have snuck in “— but even so, they usually still creep around the windows outside where I can see them. I haven’t seen any today.”

  “How long have you been waiting for that particular test result?”

  “Almost two days.”

  “You probably didn’t wait long enough. Give it time. Sometimes the labs …” she trailed off. I guessed Dr. Holden had gone off to lurk somewhere else.

  “I don’t have time to give it time,” I told her. I had to go to lunch with Mrs. Delavecchio. I had to read at least three and a third library books a day to meet my goal of two hundred books read over the summer. I had to make cookies to surprise my mother. I couldn’t waste a whole day waiting around to see the faeries.

  “They are probably just busy.” Then, in a particularly graceless transition, my mother asked, “Do you think you could go to the store and get some mayonnaise?”

  “Mayonnaise?”

  “I think ours has gone off. I want to make potato salad, and I need mayonnaise.”

  “Then why don’t you buy mayonnaise on your way home from work? You go right past the store.” I turned to the window. The two trees I’d replanted before coming inside were again uprooted, my weighty bricks stacked alongside in neat rows.

  “You’re not a child anymore, Enid. More responsibility is going to fall to you now. I tried to encourage responsibility in you yesterday. Even though such encouragement failed, I am trying again today.”

  “By having me get mayonnaise?”

  “Or maybe I just want you out of the house for a bit.”

  “But I know the faeries are still around here somewhere,” I whispered, in case they were listening in. “They knocked over the knocked-over trees again.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the faeries too much. I’m sure your relationship with the faeries is, how did you put it, still active.”

  I almost dropped the phone.

  “It’s interesting,” she continued, “you having written that —”

  “It’s interesting you having read it,” I interrupted. “My private notes.”

  “You left your notebook open on the counter. In leaving your notebook open in the kitchen, private or not, you invited passersby to participate.”

  “I left a notebook open in the kitchen because I got distracted while writing and put it down.”

  “I’ve always found the act of expressing an idea in words to be fascinating. Writing as an act of creation. Writing as a way to maybe compel your ideas to veracity,” she mused. “Especially in regards to faeries. Of course, faeries and humans, being a two-way relationship, engagement on either side changes both the engager and the engagee. Faeries changing human behavior. Humans changing faerie behavior. Maybe even inverting the arrow of causation in interactions. Like in quantum observation,” she said after a moment of thought.

  “Quantum what-now?”

  “My university physics textbook is on the bookshelf.”

  “I doubt I’m going to understand a university physics textbook.”

  “There’s a scientific dictionary somewhere around too. You have the time. Figure it out.”

  “I’d rather figure out why you have no regard for my privacy. You shouldn’t have read my notes.”

  “I won’t in future, now that you’ve made it clear how much doing so upsets you. Acceptable?”

  “Wait.” My skin went clammy and my muscles tensed in panic. “Did you read anything other than the faerie parts?” Little plastic tabs divided my notebook into sections; How to See the Faeries was only one. The other sections were filled with my very own personal and private thoughts not for anyone else’s consumption. Ever. My mother would never speak to m
e again if she’d read some of the things I’d written about her. (Although she was speaking to me now. But maybe this conversation was a trap? Maybe she was just readying her massive verbal takedown of me?)

  “I only read pages you left open,” she assured me. “I never turned a page.”

  “That doesn’t change that you don’t value my privacy. I really wish —”

  “I don’t have time to disagree with you now, Enid. I have patients, as well as my requirements with Dr. Holden. He and I have been trying to have a private conversation all morning, but interruptions abound. So I’m going to hang up now, Enid.”

  “You could apologize.”

  “Yes, I intend to apologize to Dr. Holden once we finish speaking.”

  “Not to Dr. Holden,” I said, exasperated. “To me.”

  “What for?”

  “For reading my notebook!” I shouted. “Seriously! What else have we been talking about? What else could you possibly be sorry for? I can’t believe —”

  But I pulled too hard on the phone, and the cord con-necting it to the wall came loose, clattering the phone to the floor and disconnecting me from my mother. She probably thought I’d hung up on her, and nothing I could do would convince her otherwise. That would make for a pleasant face-to-face conversation the next time we were face-to-face. I kicked the telephone cord, hoping it would snap in two, so then maybe my mother would finally buy a cordless phone and we could get rid of this stupid, ancient, malfunctioning rotary.

  My hope was for naught; the cord didn’t break.

  At least I could vent into my notebook. I grabbed it from further down the counter where, likely, my mother had been reading it. It was open to the faerie section, partway through. I flipped to the last page I’d written on and readied a pencil.