Enid Strange

by Meghan Rose Allen

  The trespassing faerie.

  And if I had thought it was laughing with the joy of having a rainbow shower, I would have been mistaken. It wasn’t laughing at that.

  It was laughing at me.

  Everything tumbled into place.

  The water sputtered; I had gripped the hose so tightly that I’d inadvertently kinked it. The rainbow vanished, and so did the faerie.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Come back here this instant!”

  Considering I’d never heeded an adult yelling that at me, I wasn’t surprised that the faerie didn’t either. Frustrated, I threw down the hose, which uncoiled and sprayed me all over. But I didn’t care. That faerie explained everything Obviously, this rekindled relationship between my mother and Dr. Holden was nothing more than some vexatious trick that the faerie I’d let into the house had played on us.

  And Dr. Holden’s non-reaction when you told him about the faeries: he’d been bewitched, or befaeried, or whatever.

  Precisely.

  A bit of hope hopped up in my chest.

  Could this also mean that —

  No.

  Are you sure? That could also just be a consequence of whatever magic the faerie—

  No. I stopped myself again. It wasn’t. For all my wanting to write off my DNA relationship with Dr. Holden, I knew that hadn’t been magicked into being because — well, I couldn’t specify why exactly. But maybe my mother had been right; maybe my lack of surprise meant I had known already, at some level.

  Amber sure knows. That’s why she’s always so upset when you bring up Dr. Holden.

  That makes sense.

  Oh wait.

  Does everyone know except me?

  Probably.

  That bit of hope changed to a pit of lead and plummeted down to my lower intestines. If everyone in town knew except me (and they would, because in a small town everyone knows everything about everyone else), they had been laughing at me behind my back my entire life. My teachers, the vice-principal, even Mrs. Delavecchio must have known. I was a laughingstock and didn’t even know it. How utterly, completely, disturbingly mortifying.

  Hey. Stop it. You’re going to cry again.

  I know. The pre-cry quiver in my chest had begun.

  You need a distraction. So, let’s think about all the work we have ahead of us for the book.

  What?

  Enid, you just saw a faerie. An actual sighting. Not a shadow. Not a consequence. You saw a faerie. A faerie. With your eyes. Your very own eyes and your very own faerie sighting! You must realize what this means.

  I did. In all my mother’s stories, she’d never once mentioned knowing a person who had actually seen a faerie directly! I’d become a primary source, and I’d been so distracted by my mother and Dr. Holden’s love-in that I almost hadn’t realized it.

  Don’t let the two of them distract you from your life’s work, Enid.

  I’m not. Just, first, I just have to —

  No. You just have to do the faerie stuff first. You have to document everything that just happened. Where you were standing. How you were standing. What clothes you were wearing. Temperature. Altitude. Smells. Fauna. Flora. What sort of grass is this? Bermuda? Bluegrass?

  I groaned again. Breaking up my mother and Dr. Holden, that had to be my priority. But unprecedented, first-person, time-pressing faerie field research should come first. But Dr. Holden was in my house. But my book.

  Focus, Enid, and realize you can do both things at once.

  I could! I could catch the rogue faerie, force it to reverse whatever it had done to my mother, and, in doing so, gather singular, original research for my book, whose rough draft, I recalled, was still missing (I’d do a full sweep of the house that evening). But before any of that, I needed to go inside for dry clothes. Except I knew the conversation that would happen if I did:

  “Enid, I told you to remove yourself until supper.”

  “I just need dry clothes.”

  “How and why, Enid, are you wet?”

  “Well, you see, I was watering the lawn when I saw a faerie and figured out that you were bewitched, so I’m going to catch the faerie and stop this spell and —”

  I would blab that I knew faerie nefariousness was afoot. If that faerie happened to be eavesdropping right then, and it knew that I knew, who knew what other spells/charms/enchantments it would put on my mother to make it even harder for me to get our lives back to normal? I had to keep this knowledge safely unsaid in my brain where no one else could access it.

  So keep quiet, Enid, I told myself. Keep your mouth shut.

  And go to school.

  Dripping wet?

  To get your gym clothes out of your locker.

  Oh. Good thinking, me.

  hankfully, the walk to school was short. To avoid questions about my sopping state, I ducked behind cars and trees when necessary, and when no trees or cars were available, I walked tall, inviting passersby to question whether they weren’t the odd ones for wandering around in dry clothes rather than in wet ones. My plan was going swimmingly until I got to the school.

  CLOSED, the sign read, FOR RADIATOR REPAIR.

  “Odd,” I said to the empty playground. “That’s the excuse I gave Mrs. Delavecchio for being home from school yesterday.”

  I tried the door. Locked. Peering in, it was apparent no one was inside, just dust floating in the beams of sunlight that bounced off metal heating vents in the floor — metal heating vents that would be connected to a furnace that blew hot air up through the vents.

  That type of heating is forced air. You don’t need radiators if you have forced air heating.

  That’s true, I agreed with myself, puzzled.

  There was only one logical explanation.

  Faeries.

  I scanned the yard, because I just knew they had to be here somewhere. Sure enough, there, on the metal slide, sat the same faerie I’d seen earlier. No rainbow to dance in, but still laughing at me. It kicked its extremities and wiggled a little in the heat waves drifting up off the metal slide. Maybe faeries were cold-blooded, I pondered as I snuck closer, and needed to sun themselves like lizards. That would be an intriguing development.

  Two steps away, almost in my grasp, and again the faerie disappeared.

  I roared with frustration.

  At least the next step was obvious: I needed a quiet place to plan where I wouldn’t get sunburned and no one would mind that I was still somewhat damp. The optimal place would have been my room, except for that sticky issue of having been ousted from my own home. School was locked. The librarian, upon seeing my state, would tell me to come back when I no longer posed a damp threat to any of his books.

  But one option remained: the Will O’Wisp. Anyone could go into the lobby of the Will O’Wisp, which wasn’t secured the way individual wards were. The place always bustled with residents, visitors, employees, and delivery persons, and no one would bother with me. Even if my mother or Dr. Holden came on shift, they’d likely go in the staff entrance closer to their ward. If they did come in the lobby, I’d just hide behind a fern or something. So I quit the playground and kept on down the road to my parents’ (I shuddered involuntarily at the thought that I would have to start thinking like that) place of employment.

  Another plus for planning at the Will O’Wisp: the fish tank. I liked spending time with the fish. They currently had three: Elma, Josephine, and Chuck. Harvey, the black moor goldfish, must have died since my last visit, since his name was no longer on the board affixed to the side of the tank. For all I enjoyed watching them, I had always maintained that the fish should be replaced with something more long-lived, like a tortoise. But fish were cheap, and the residents enjoyed the frequent draws to name the new fish, according to my mother.

  The current trio, startled or bored or sleepy, wouldn’t come out from
their hiding places near the bottom of the tank. I squatted down to get a better view into the windows of their cavernous toy castle, only to see eyes, round and brown, non-fish, staring back at me.

  “What are you doing here?” Amber Holden scuttled around the tank to grab me so hard on the arm she left bruises.

  “I like watching the fish.”

  “Those sickly things? They aren’t taken care of properly. That’s why they’re always dying. Someone should liberate them.”

  “You could.” Amber kept her grip on my arm as I babbled on about fish. “We could. We could buy our own tank, keep it clean, buy better quality food.” The Will O’Wisp bought their fish food at the dollar store to keep costs down.

  Amber made a hacking noise from deep in her throat to demonstrate her disgust with the idea of us collaborating on anything. “Or maybe your faeries could do it.”

  “You look like a fish,” she said a minute later, when I had managed neither to reply nor to stop my mouth from opening and shutting like I was indeed a fish. “Are you just going to glub or are you going to ask how I know about your little faerie story?”

  “How?” I managed. “Did my mother tell you?”

  She unzipped her messenger bag, finally releasing her grip on my arm. “Take it.” She tossed the book at my chest. My unrealized secret skill was not catching things, and my notebook fell to the floor, sliding underneath the fish tank with only a corner pointing out.

  “I don’t understand.” I used my toe to nudge my notebook closer to me. “Why would she let you read this?” Anger, pain, devastation flooded my body. I would never, never ever trust my mother again. This betrayal was beyond anything I would have imagined: pretending she didn’t know where my notebook was when all along she’d given it to Amber Holden!

  “Hey, calm yourself,” Amber said. “Seriously, okay. I borrowed it from your house. Your mother had nothing to do with it.”

  “You’ve never been to my house,” I managed to wheeze out.

  “Then how’d I get the notebook?”

  Amber had a good point.

  “I went there last night looking for my —” she stopped herself and shuddered “— father. I thought the notebook was Margery’s,” she admitted begrudgingly. “That’s why I took it. I thought it might be your mother’s diary, and my mother could use details from it in the divorce proceedings. But it was just yours.”

  “Just mine.” I grabbed my notebook from the floor and hugged it to my chest.

  We watched the fish for a while.

  “Don’t think this is permanent,” Amber said forcefully after Josephine (or maybe Chuck) swam over in the hopes we had some food pellets. “This isn’t the first time my parents have pulled a stunt like this. Before we moved here, my mom was living with her boyfriend for six months. His name was Bruce, and they had even rescued two dogs together.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Five.”

  “And they told you all this?” I bristled that adults had discussed mature things with a kindergartner Amber while I’d had to wait until age eleven. How was that fair? I was way more mature than Amber was, at any age.

  “I lived with them, so it was kind of hard to keep it a secret,” Amber said, in her perfect teenage voice of disdain. “Then Bruce got a loan to open a dive shop in Okinawa, my mother didn’t want to go, my dad got the job out here, and my parents decided to use the move as a fresh start and try again.”

  She turned away in what I thought must be disgust. But her shoulders kept jumping up, and her hands kept dabbing at the skin just under her eyes. When she turned back to face me, I realized that all that day’s makeup (Amber always wore far too much makeup, in my opinion) hid eyes that were as poofy, cheeks that were as dried out by salty tears, as my own.

  “My parents are worse than high school kids,” she said. “Breaking up, getting back together, gossiping, cheating on each other. They act like we don’t matter. They treat their patients better than they do their kids. I hate it.” She sniffled loudly and started breathing through her mouth. “And you’re just as bad, always hinting at the affair in front of my friends.”

  “Actually,” I decided to tell Amber the truth; she looked so sad, “I never knew your parents’ relationship was so disorderly. And I only found out this morning about the, you know, actuality of the, um, my parentage DNA, paternity issue, I guess.”

  Amber tilted her head. “I don’t believe you. You’re always talking about him.”

  “I mentioned Dr. Holden once and saw how much it upset you; that’s the only reason I kept doing it. I didn’t know why it upset you so much, just that it did, although my mother says I must have known before already, at some level, because I don’t seem surprised. I was surprised, though, but not a whole lot. Maybe I did know, I don’t know. But you knew?”

  “My brothers told me. They’re older. They know everything.”

  “And your mother?”

  “I think she chose not to know.” Amber stared at me again. “You’re like the only person who didn’t know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everyone in town pretends they don’t know about you and your mother. It’s embarrassing. My whole life.” Amber stared down towards her feet.

  “Not your whole life. Just the past eleven years.”

  “The eleven years that mattered.”

  Since it was those past eleven years in which I had been on the earth, I was in agreement. “At least you still get to go to Europe in a few weeks,” I reminded her.

  “Big deal. It’s not even going to be any fun.”

  “But it’s Europe!”

  “So? First I have to visit my mother’s family in their boxy Birmingham suburb. There’s no one my age, all my cousins do is talk about football, punctuate every sentence with the word innit, or speak crazy-fast Tamil, and I can’t keep up. Then a bunch of them act like I’m defective because my mother didn’t teach me Tamil and I don’t know who Footy McFootballerson is.”

  “But you’re not spending all your time with them. You’re going to backpack around by yourself afterwards.”

  “So, I may have embellished a teensy bit.” Amber pulled on her fingers nervously. “I’m not so much as backpacking around Europe by myself as going with my mother. And I’m not so much backpacking as going to Calais, for three weeks, with my mother, while she does a training course.”

  “That still sounds —”

  “Calais is where Brits take the ferry to buy cheap booze, cigarettes, and soft cheeses. The whole town is like the fifty percent off rack in the food section of a Walmart.”

  “It’s still Europe. It isn’t as if I get to go to Europe.”

  Amber had no response to this. We returned to our silent staring into the fish tank.

  “I guess your story’s cute,” she said after a while. “Better than anything I wrote at your age. I was almost convinced to spend a few minutes last night watching for faerie shadows.”

  “We could look for some now,” I offered. The Will O’Wisp lobby was hardly the ideal place for spying on faeries, but, suddenly, unexpectedly, I wanted to share the burden of faerie knowledge with Amber.

  The corner of Amber’s mouth twisted around and up. “Fine,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Why not? This day can’t get any more surreal.”

  “Here,” I directed her. “Sit with your back to the tank. A little further right. More.”

  Amber scooted over a bit.

  “Bit more. Okay. Now stop.” I sat down beside her. “Just let your mind wander. Don’t really focus.”

  “Sure.”

  We sat.

  “There!” A slight shadow bounced along on the edge of my vision. “You see that?”

  “It’s just the light, refracted through the water and the glass of the fish tank, making shadows of the fish, Enid.”

 
“It isn’t.”

  “It is.”

  “Then let’s move over here.” I dragged two of chairs that sat in front of the decorative fireplace and pointed them towards the fish tank so that Amber couldn’t dismiss the next faerie shadow as a trick of the light. “We’ll try again. You’ll see.”

  We waited.

  “I should really,” Amber began, then stopped. A small blot of darkness blinked in and out of existence. “Huh,” Amber said. “How about that? Probably some sort of neurological trick like those games where you push your hands together and then, when you let them go, they totally feel drawn together like magnets. I’ll look through some of my parents’ medical textbooks to see if I can figure it out for you.”

  “You don’t need to figure anything out. It’s a faerie.”

  Amber gave me an I-believe-you-believe type of look as she stood up.

  “Good luck,” she said. “Maybe I’ll send you a postcard from Britain.”

  Even if only even a few hours ago I’d thought of Amber Holden as my antagonist and not my sister, the brush-off still stung.

  “Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

  Amber’s lip quivered slightly like she’d been as hurt by my feigned nonchalance as I had been by hers. “And please don’t tell anyone what I told you about my summer.”

  “I don’t have anyone to tell.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “You said so yourself yesterday, that I don’t have any friends.”

  “Oh. Well,” she said after a thought. “I don’t know your life, Enid. I’m sure you do have friends. Maybe not as many as I do, but at least some.”

  I thought of Mrs. Delavecchio, who wouldn’t care that Amber had lied to everyone about her summer plans. “I guess.”

  “See?” Amber said.

  “Okay.”

  “Well.”

  But still, even as the awkwardness mounted, Amber didn’t leave. The fish chased each other around the tank, taking turns nipping at one anothers’ tails. We watched, and so did the faerie on the other side of the tank, the very same one that had been tracking me all morning.