Vita and the Monsters of Moorhouse

by Jillian Karger

  “Tinker Bell and I are gonna go play in Fairy Fair till one of us gets called out for lessons,” Rosie announced. “Wanna come?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got some building to do—” Wile began.

  “No, you don’t,” Jasmine interrupted. She rose into the air, crossed her arms, and looked down her nose at the boy. “You could use a break, kid.”

  Vita hoped he would insist again he had too much work, but after a moment of consideration, he shrugged. “You’re probably right, Jazz,” he said. “And you’ve really got to come up with a name for your world, Rosie-Rose.”

  Rosie sighed. “I know, I know. I’m great at nicknames, but not so good with names.”

  “So is Tinker Bell my nickname?” Vita asked, wrinkling her nose. She couldn’t think of a person who resembled an ethereal winged creature like the one on Rosie’s shoulder less than her pale, frizzy self. She worried maybe Rosie was making fun of her.

  The little girl nodded. “I’ve never seen it, but my mama says in Peter Pan they don’t use a little paper fairy or anything—Tinker Bell is just this bright light that darts around the stage. And that’s how you seem to me, just like a ray of sunlight.”

  Vita looked down, embarrassed by the kind words, and followed Rosie and Wile out of the boys’ hall.

  The group fell into an awkward silence that stretched across the Mess Hall and through to the entrance to Rosie’s Dream Chamber. The unnerving quiet continued as Wile and Vita stood waiting for Rosie to unlock the door. Vita had been looking forward to her first visit to Rosie’s Chamber even more than her visit to Grover’s. But now she wondered if she should have found some way to worm her way out of the invitation.

  Finally Rosie led them into what still seemed a hallway, only one with no ceiling and walls made of flowers. Vita stepped closer to the wall of tiger lilies and saw what she had at first thought were fairy lights were in fact actual fairies. They were even smaller than Jasmine and glowed like fireflies in the darkness.

  Vita turned back toward the entrance and found a wall of roses. But these roses weren’t just red, or even pink, white, and red—roses of every color but black, white, and gray were in attendance: forest green, royal purple, peachy orange, magenta pink, and periwinkle blue. On either side of the entrance golden lanterns stuck out of the wall.

  She looked back and forth down the outdoor hallway. All she could see in either direction was a glimpse of distant, adjacent flower walls of lavender irises and yellow tulips. “This is so cool,” she said. “It makes me think of The Secret Garden.”

  Rosie brightened. “That is my mama’s very favorite book! She used to read to me from it every night. She wanted to call me Mary, after the girl in the story, but my daddy didn’t warm to it so they named me after a flower instead.”

  The comment reminded Vita again of how young Rosie was. It seemed incomprehensible that someone who could talk and paint so well hadn’t yet learned to read.

  The little girl grabbed her hand and steered them to the right, with Wile following behind. They reached the wall of irises and made a left. Now they walked down a whole new roofless hallway with a second wall of red poppies.

  Vita looked around. It was hard to believe that these flower walls crisscrossed over Rosie’s entire Dream Chamber. She could scarcely imagine it. “So your whole world is one big labyrinth?” she asked.

  Rosie stared at her for a moment then broke into delighted laughter. “Oh, that is brilliant, Tinker Bell!” She turned toward Wile and gave him a triumphant grin. “See, I told you it’s good to share your model,” she told him. “This place has been Fairy Fair, Fairy Maze, Flower Maze, and about a hundred other equally awful things. But ‘labyrinth’. I bet I could work with that.”

  Wile merely shrugged. “It’s not bad, I guess,” he replied begrudgingly.

  Rosie led them through walls of freesia, daisies, and gardenias and into a night carnival, complete with a carousel, tilt-o-whirl, and a roller coaster. They rode rides to their heart’s content, then bought chocolate and candy from the food stalls, and the best mulled cider Vita had ever tasted. They stopped by another stall where a human-sized fairy with black skin and candy apple red hair handed out cut flowers. Rosie got a bunch of cornflowers, wove them into a crown, and put the crown on Vita’s head.

  As the sun began to rise in the sky, Vita had to admit she was having a great time, even with Wile there. He’d remained quiet throughout the carnival, for which she was grateful.

  Next Rosie led Wile and Vita back into the labyrinth, between daisy and orchid walls. They eventually emerged into a wood that seemed right out of a book of fairytales. It was where Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother would have lived, a neighbor to the local witch and her poor, long-haired charge, Rapunzel. Vita looked down at the dirt ground, half expecting to find birds pecking at Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. Cozy cottages dotted the wood and miniature versions of the cottages nestled in the branches of the trees. On the thick branch of a maple a group of tiny fairies stood in one’s front yard around a little grill. The curl of smoke that rose from the grill could have been from a cigarette.

  “Wanna see my house?” Jasmine asked Melina. “It’s on an elm—nicest one in the Wood in my humble opinion.”

  To Vita’s surprise, Melina jumped from her shoulders and followed Jasmine without a word. The girl’s nerves jangled now that she was alone with Rosie and Wile. Melina and Jasmine had filled any potentially awkward lulls in conversation back at the night carnival.

  Rosie didn’t seem to mind their imaginary friends’ absence and took a different path from Jasmine and Melina deeper into the woods. The children reached a clearing with a pond of clear blue water at the center. Enough winged horses to complete the carousel from the carnival drank from the pond, their wings folded at their sides.

  A horse with violet eyes looked up from the pond. It galloped over to Rosie with a happy neigh and the little girl patted the winged horse’s mane. “Hey there, Verbena, hey girl,” she cooed. “Did you miss me?”

  Another horse, this one with eyes of the darkest blue, approached Vita. Vita rose a hand to pet him, the way she would with a dog or cat. Soon the pegasus allowed her to pat his muzzle.

  “Aw, Sage likes you,” Rosie observed. “You’d better watch out, Coyote.”

  As if he could understand Rosie’s words, Sage moved to nuzzle Wile. Now it was three things that could crack Wile’s stony expression: Rosie, pianos, and Sage. The boy smiled and reached up to rub the horse around his ears.

  Could the horse Vita had so quickly bonded with really be the same one Wile liked best? With a small sigh Vita turned back toward the lake, hoping another winged horse would approach her. Or was she supposed to approach one herself?

  While Vita stood contemplating, Wile made a combination of whistles and clicks with his tongue. “Come on, Basil, come on, buddy,” he called in a higher voice than Vita had thought the brooding boy could muster. After only a few seconds of this, a pegasus with light green eyes trotted over obediently. Vita assumed the slighter horse was meant for her but Wile climbed up a nearby tree and hopped onto Basil’s back as soon as the horse reached them.

  Vita followed suit and managed to make it onto Sage’s back after four tries. Sage let out a neigh that sounded suspiciously like a laugh when she finally was able to get a good enough hold on the horse’s slippery mane to keep from falling. “Thanks for letting me ride him,” she told Wile. “How’d you learn to call the horses like that?”

  He shrugged. “They know me better than you. And Rosie made ’em more like dogs than real horses.”

  “Oh, did you have a dog back home?”

  At this the boy’s brows bent forward and his lips twisted into their usual scowl. He looked away from her toward Rosie. “You about ready, Rosie-Rose?” he asked her.

  Rosie mounted her horse with ease. “Yep! We’re headed to Leroy’s.” Verbena galloped across the clearing and Sage and Basil joined in at a fast pace.

  “
Hold on!” Rosie yelled to Vita just as Verbena took off into the sky.

  Sage and Basil followed and Vita had to take big, quick gulps of air in order to breathe against the rush of the wind. In the air she frowned at Wile, whose horse was the length of a mid-sized cloud ahead of hers. The boy had been acting normal, even nice for a few seconds there, and then it had switched off like a lamp.

  Soon they were hundreds of feet in the air. The blinking lights of the glowing fairies below illuminated a highly complicated maze that Vita recognized from Rosie’s map. Certain points in the floral labyrinth led to equally colorful destinations, be they forests like the one they’d just left or more carnivals and fairs.

  A village larger than any of the others lay at the center of the maze. It was mostly full of cottages like the ones in the forests but there were shops and cafes as well. Some fairies rode trotting flying horses through the streets, while other fairies walked or flew.

  Verbena, Sage, and Basil landed outside a plain brick building with a red awning. Leroy’s was written across the awning in white script. Through the front windows Vita could see red booths with Vs of white down their middles.

  Verbena nuzzled Rosie then wandered off as if she was capable of occupying herself, so Vita gave Sage a quick hug around the neck and left him to follow the other two winged horses down the cobblestone street.

  A bell rang when Rosie opened the front door of the restaurant. Across from the row of booths that lined the wall was a long Formica counter with a line of red stools in front of it. Against the remaining wall was a jukebox playing what sounded like a barbershop quartet. Rays of light shot through many windows across the black and white checkered floor, and Vita wondered if Rosie had created a new floor or simply left the original from her Dream Chamber. It was hard to believe Rosie’s vibrant world had once been a never-ending chessboard like hers. How long could it have taken this little girl to cover the span of an entire world with her creations?

  Leroy’s was deserted without even a fairy behind the counter, yet a tall soda glass stood in front of each and every seat in the restaurant. A red button and a small speaker were built right into the counter in front of each glass, like the ones people used to order food in a drive-through.

  Rosie hopped onto one of the stools, pressed the red button down, and leaned over the speaker. “I’d like … hmm, today I’ll have an orange soda float with bubblegum pineapple banana ice cream, and strawberry whipped cream on top, please!” Then the little girl spun to face Vita and Wile. “Come on, sit down and order something!”

  Vita sat beside Rosie and Wile surprised her by sitting beside her rather than going around to Rosie’s other side. Vita looked down at the red button and speaker before her, and the tall soda glass beyond them. She searched behind the counter for a menu of some sort, but there was nothing but a few vinyl records hung artfully on the cream-colored wall.

  There was a whirring noise and Vita noticed something pale pink at the bottom of Rosie’s soda glass. Once there was an inch of pink, an increasingly thick creamy yellow layer appeared below it. Then came the bright orange soda at the very bottom, and it fizzed up over the ice cream while leaving the whipped cream intact. The level of the float stopped just short of the top of the glass.

  Rosie took a straw out of a cup of them on the counter and took a long, satisfied sip. “Here, try it,” she said. She picked up the cup and Vita flinched, expecting the entire float to leak out the bottom of the cup. But instead it behaved just like a regular glass.

  Vita took a straw of her own and tried the float. It was deliciously sweet and had just the right bit of tang to it. “That’s so good!” With eyes wide as saucers, Vita pressed down her own red button. “A chocolate ice cream soda, please,” she spoke into the speaker. “Uh, thanks!”

  She put her chin in her hands and watched. With another whirring noise, her cup began filling just like Rosie’s had—first with regular white whipped cream, then a layer of chocolate ice cream, and finally the carbonated water. Chocolate syrup swirled through the soda as it poured upward from the bottom and turned the soda a chocolaty brown.

  When the glass was full, Vita picked it up carefully. She felt over the bottom of the glass as she took a sip and could feel a circular groove on the base.

  “There’s a hole in the bottom of the glass, and a little disk that slips in place once the glass is full,” Rosie explained.

  Vita stared at the little girl in wonder. “When you’re my age and smart enough to build bombs, please don’t, okay? Stick to fairies and soda machines.”

  Rosie laughed. “Deal, Tinker Bell.”

  “A chocolate egg cream,” Wile observed beside her. “Not the most exciting choice.”

  “It’s a chocolate ice cream soda, actually,” Vita replied.

  “Same difference.”

  “Nope—one has ice cream and is therefore infinitely better.” She glanced over at the boy’s soda glass. “It certainly beats a strawberry milkshake. Talk about boring.”

  “Strawberry was Robbie’s favorite,” Wile replied quietly.

  “Who’s Robbie?”

  “My little brother.”

  The sad look in Wile’s eyes as he spoke tugged hard enough at something in Vita’s chest that before she knew it, words were tumbling out of her mouth. “That’s why I like chocolate sodas so much too, I guess. There’s this place in my neighborhood where I used to go with my mom. Chocolate sodas are her favorite, and so they became my favorite too.”

  As she spoke the image of Tim’s, the diner where she’d always gone with her mother, came to mind. But while she could picture the diner’s high silver stools and paper tablecloths on which she could draw with crayons (though never well), her mother’s face wouldn’t come into focus. She could see her long, dark hair at some angles and her pale blue eyes at others, but never her face as Vita knew she was supposed to remember it. Had she really been at Moorhouse long enough to forget what her mother looked like?

  “Why’d you stop doing that?” Rosie asked after another sip of her float. “Getting ice cream sodas with your mom?”

  “What? Oh, uh, my mom got sick and has been in the hospital for kind of a while. I asked the doctors if I could bring an ice cream soda to her but they said no.”

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” Rosie said.

  “Thanks,” Vita said. She glanced over at Wile and saw that he was frowning, but it was a much softer expression than his usual scowl. She looked back at Rosie before he could notice her looking and start scowling all over again. “This place is great, Rosie. How’d you get the idea for it?”

  Rosie looked around the restaurant. “My daddy had a soda fountain a lot like this one.” She grinned at the sight of the glasses on each and every table. “When I heard the words ‘soda fountain’ when I was really little, this is what I always imagined. You know, because with a regular fountain the water comes up from the bottom.”

  Vita smiled and nodded. She glanced at Wile through the corner of her eye and found him smiling warmly as well.

  “Where is the soda fountain?” Vita asked. “Maybe I’ve been there.” Her mother had once taken her to an old-fashioned soda fountain in Park Slope when Tim’s had been closed, but the fries hadn’t been anywhere near as good.

  Some of the light went out of the little girl’s copper-flecked eyes. “The soda fountain was up in Harlem. But there were riots and our front windows got broken, and…” she trailed off. “Anyway, then Daddy got a job at the Navy Yard and we moved to Brooklyn.”

  “The Navy Yard?” Vita repeated. The Navy Yard had been shut down for ages.

  Suddenly both the front windows of Leroy’s cracked loudly in the shape of brutal spiderwebs and Vita yelped. She ducked her head and squinted through the still-functional bottoms of the windows. No one appeared to be outside—it was the same lovely spring day as earlier.

  Wile sprang off his stool and over to Rosie. He put his hands on her shoulders and met her eyes. “Rosie-Rose, you’re all
right,” he said softly. “Shh, now, you’re all right.”

  Still Rosie stared down into her lap, despondent. She was the polar opposite of the vivacious little girl Vita had gotten to know since arriving at the school.

  “Vita and I are gonna put some nice music on the jukebox, all right?” Wile said. “You stay right here and finish your float.” He walked over to the glowing jukebox and Vita followed.

  “What just happened?” she whispered as the boy clicked through pages of music options.

  He just shook his head and looked back at Rosie. “How about some Duke, Rosie-Rose? That’ll fix you right up.” His tone was light but he scratched the back of his neck nervously as he made his selection. Soft saxophone poured out of the jukebox and was slowly joined by the other horns, and finally the smooth piano. Vita took a deep breath, soothed by the tune.

  Duke Ellington unfortunately didn’t seem to be having the same effect on Rosie. The girl sat in front of her still unfinished float, staring into the skirt of her sunshine yellow dress. Though she wore a plaid winter coat on the outside in the halls and the Mess Hall, in her Dream Chamber Rosie was dressed for summer.

  The girl held her compass and turned it over and over in her hands. After about a minute of this, her stool started to spin. Rosie wasn’t using her hands or feet to make it spin as Vita had done in the computer chair in her family’s den so many times, much to her father’s chagrin.

  No, in fact, all the stools started spinning at once, slowly at first but rapidly gaining speed.

  The little girl grabbed hard onto the edges of her spinning stool with both hands, her eyes wide. “Coyote!” she cried. The windows cracked again and several smaller spiderwebs appeared beneath the first two.

  Wile ran both hands over his buzzed short black hair. “Rosie-Rose,” he said sternly, “you remember what we did last time, don’t you? You’ve just got to take a deep breath and caaaalm down.”

  Still the stools continued to spin faster and faster. It was only a matter of time until Rosie would fly right off.