by Iva Viddal
“My name is Nerma,” Nerma said. “And this is my real family. It’s how we really look.”
She had worked hard to bring her family to life on the page. Since there were no black crayons, she had used her regular No. 2 pencil to draw her mother’s wild curls, which sprang forth from the paper. She’d captured Julian’s lopsided grin, her own hopelessly messy hair, and her father’s kind demeanor. Perched upon Mr. Lee’s shoulders was Benny, his hand raised in the air and his sweet grin warming the page.
Miss Pleasant giggled uncomfortably and handed Nerma a clean white sheet of paper. “Look at Madeline’s drawing, Norma. See how lovely it is?”
The girl to her left, Nerma saw, had drawn a family of four: two smiling parents and two smiling children, all holding hands and staring out from the page with blank expressions. The boy to Nerma’s right had drawn the exact same image, identical down to the seven buttons on the father’s shirt, the mother’s yellow updo, and the big round sun shining down on Harmony Hill.
Nerma sighed and picked up her yellow crayon. Everything was the same on Harmony Hill, she thought—everything except for her and her family.
At home that night, she noticed the thickness of her dad’s glasses for the first time and how extraordinarily hairy his ankles were. Suddenly, her mom’s pretty floral dresses seemed far too busy and her lipstick too bright. And while Julian had always been loud, it was now crystal clear that he wasn’t only loud but, well, too loud—too embarrassing.
But the worst thing of all was that she started to see how other people looked at Benny. Everywhere the Lee family went—Happy Harmony Park, the Harmony Hill Grocer, the post office—people seemed to stare at him. Nerma loved him more than anything in the world, but worry began to gnaw at her. How could a boy like Benny ever fit in on Harmony Hill?
“Ne-Ne?” He said to Nerma after their first week at Number 77 Splendid Street. His grubby face beamed up at her.
“Oh, Ben-Ben,” she sighed. “I wish we’d never moved here.”
When he threw his chubby arm around her neck, Nerma squeezed her eyes shut and wished with all her might that he could be like every other two-year-old on Harmony Hill. But she knew that he would never be normal. Benny was born different, and there was no way to hide it.
After her first week of school, Nerma begged her mother to take her shopping for the same ugly blouses and shapeless pants the other girls wore. She pleaded with her dad to let her trade in her orange-and-green checkered backpack for a plain canvas one. She willed her hair to grow long and tugged at its roots. When she asked her mother if she could bleach it blond, Mrs. Lee laughed and patted her on the head.
“You’re beautiful just as you are, my little Nermy-wormy,” she said.
Nerma glowered.
During her second week on Harmony Hill, Nerma stopped reading the adventure novels she loved so much and forced herself to sit before the TV for episode after episode of McKnickers Valley High. Every sixth grader on Harmony Hill watched it, and no one read novels for fun. Yet, every time she tried to follow the ridiculous on-screen dramas of Cookie Coolette and Miles Manchild, her eyes glazed over, and her thoughts drifted to faraway lands where wicked queens wielded croquet mallets and centipedes wore boots.
One beautiful Monday (for all Mondays were beautiful on Harmony Hill), Nerma folded up her T-Rex dress and crammed it deep into the darkest corner beneath her bed, where her novels had already begun to gather dust.
On Tuesday (which was possibly even more beautiful than Monday had been), she stopped hunting for grasshoppers at recess and ate a turkey-and-lettuce sandwich at lunch like all the other kids.
On Wednesday, she refused to sit beside Julian on the bus and ignored him, even when he shouted his punchlines down the center aisle.
On Thursday, she snapped her drawing pencils in half and threw them in the garbage can alongside last night’s smelly fish bones so she wouldn’t be able to retrieve them later.
On Friday, she told Benny that she would no longer be taking him out for their afternoon explorations—the walks he loved so much because he got to count roly-polies and ladybugs with “Ne-Ne.” Nerma buried her head beneath a pillow to drown out Benny’s pleading.
On Saturday, Nerma woke up determined to fit in once and for all on Harmony Hill. At breakfast, she ignored Julian when he asked her to play video games. She scraped her eggs in the trash, jammed her feet into a pair of flip flops, and hurried past Benny when he held a picture book up to her.
“Ne-Ne?” he called after her.
She grabbed the jump rope she’d hidden in her backpack, shouted to her parents that she was going outside, and stepped out onto the front stoop.
Because Number 77 sat squarely atop Harmony Hill’s high peak, Nerma could see the entire neighborhood from the top of its driveway. Splendid Street spiraled smoothly downward, its little houses shining like Easter eggs under the yellow sun. Just down the road that morning, a group of women in matching aqua leotards jogged shoulder-to-shoulder, their footsteps in perfect sync. Beyond them, a group of kids about Nerma’s age rode their bicycles in circles. Around and around and around they rode, like planets in orbit. And not far past them, Mr. Green wielded his ruler on his weekend rounds.
Nerma frowned. It was a terrible view.
If she turned to her left, however, she could see nothing but the smooth pine fence that divided her family’s property from the back of Mr. and Mrs. Vicar’s yard. This fence was tall and stretched in one clean, uninterrupted line from the front corner of Nerma’s driveway to the far corner of her backyard. It was to the hidden space between Number 77 and this fence that she now went. Tucked away there, no one on Splendid Street could see her. No one could watch her, or point, or laugh, or lecture about the oh-so-important rules on Harmony Hill.
Nerma took a deep breath and gripped the plastic handles of the jump rope tightly in her fists. She had borrowed it from the P.E. equipment closet at school when no one was looking and was determined to learn to jump rope. She just had to fit in.
She swung the rope—tentatively at first, and then with more force—but no matter how hard she tried, the rope behaved like a limp strand of spaghetti in her hands.
Bursts of laughter trickled up the hillside and bounced off the fence like stones. She frowned. How could riding a bike in circles be so fun? It was so mechanical, just the same movement again and again. Just like jumping rope.
She furrowed her brow, took another deep breath, swung the rope—and jumped. The rope whizzed through the air beneath her feet.
“I did it!” she gasped. “I’m doing it!”
Once, twice, three times, four times, five—she jumped until she lost count. It felt like she was flying. Again and again, she swung the rope, and again and again her feet cleared it.
Nerma imagined she was jumping rope alongside the girls at school, her hair bouncing in a golden ponytail. Imagine the looks on their faces! They would see that she was no different from them, and then they would invite her to—
The rope caught on one of her flip flops, and the next thing she knew, she was lying face-down on the ground, the rope coiled around her legs like a boa constrictor.
She grimaced. Her hands stung against the rough cement, but what hurt ever more was failure. She was never, ever going to fit in on Harmony Hill. She blinked back tears, but it was no use. They trickled down her nose and spotted the chalky pavement.
She sniffled once, then again more loudly, then looked around to make sure no had seen her fall. Not a soul was in sight, and yet the hairs on the back of her neck had begun to prickle the way they do when another person was watching her.
Something seemed . . . different.
She wiped her eyes on the backs of her hands and sat up. The morning was as sunny as ever, but the air had changed, as though it had been charged with electricity. The world seemed to hum.
It was then that Nerma discovered the gap at the bottom of the fence. It wasn’t an ordinary gap between planks, caused by
years of decay or the claws of an animal. This one was a perfect half-circle about three feet across, right where the lower edge of the fence should have met the lawn.
Nerma wiped her nose and crawled forward. She knew—with a certainty that made her scalp tingle even more—that the hole hadn’t been there a moment before. The fence had been as unblemished as everything else on Harmony Hill. She was sure of it.
Tentatively, she stuck her hand through the hole. Perhaps, she marveled, ducking down, not everything on Harmony Hill was always the same.
3
Wishers Warsh
Through the gap in the fence, Nerma could see only shadow. She crept closer on her hands and knees and peered through it. Where Mr. and Mrs. Vicar’s house should have been, she saw only trees.
She poked her head in and let her eyes adjust to the dimmer lighting. She saw nothing dangerous—and certainly nothing as scary as other children—so she wiggled her body through the hole awkwardly, like a worm on dry ground. She stood and looked around.
She had emerged onto a shady path, lined by worn gray cobblestones. Slivers of sunlight pierced a canopy of thick foliage above her head and sent little dots of radiance dancing across the stones. Ahead, the pathway curved gently downward and disappeared behind the pale trunks of the trees.
Curious to see what might be ahead, Nerma followed the path. The loosely packed stones clacked softly against each other beneath her feet. When she reached the bend, the path simply continued its downward slope and rounded another curve.
Nerma saw no danger in going a bit further. She could always follow the trail back home when she wanted to. The trail meandered downhill slowly, and every now and then a vibrant purple or blue butterfly fluttered out from between the trees. Songbirds called out over her head, and once, a squirrel went scuttling across the stones just beyond Nerma’s sandals.
The farther she went, the more littered the path became with the detritus of neglect: broken tree limbs and long-dead leaves clustered where the path changed directions, and milky lichen bloomed in the shadows. A crow’s caw startled her, and she realized that the songbirds had gone silent. At the bottom of the hill, she found that a fallen tree blockaded the path, and she decided to turn back rather than climb over it. She had gone too far, anyway.
As she turned back and began to climb the hill, Nerma thought about the impossibility of fitting in with the other kids on Harmony Hill. She would never learn to jump rope, never be tall enough, never know the right thing to say at the right time.
She stopped. The pathway, she realized, no longer sloped upward. She must have gotten turned around somehow. Again, she changed direction, but again, she found that after a few minutes of walking, the pathway once again sloped downward.
“Weird,” she whispered to the trees.
Nerma hesitated. She looked forward, and she looked backward. One way was clearly down, and the other was clearly up.
Nerma chose to go up. Toward home.
Downward the path sloped.
This time, it led her back to the fallen tree, but now Nerma noticed something new: the sound of rushing water beyond it. Hiking a leg over the tree’s wide trunk, she climbed over it, and there, just around another bend, was a little stream with a little stone bridge.
A wooden sign beside the bridge read:
Wishers Warsh
Travelers who wish a wish of yearning,
Throw ye a stone into the warsh’s churning,
And what ye seek with solemn burning
May wait within the hour’s turning.
Nerma read the sign aloud three times. Each time, its meaning evaded her grasp, but she understood that this bridge must be a place meant for making wishes.
At its entrance, a small pile of smooth stones waited. Nerma chose one, a pale gray stone with a line of black running through it, and thought for a moment.
“I wish to be normal,” she said.
She pulled her slender arm back and catapulted the stone into the water below. It disappeared with a fizz, and where it had disappeared into the moving current, the water glowed blue. It was only for a second, but it was impossible to miss.
Nerma picked up another stone. This one had a reddish hue and small flecks of iridescence. She held it in her palm, and she whispered to it, “I wish for Benny to be normal.”
She threw the rock into the water, and this time the fizzing was followed by an orange glow that lingered a moment beneath the water’s surface.
“So strange,” she murmured, wondering if this was, perhaps, an out-of-the-way tourist attraction with electric lights below the surface, like the illuminated fountain her grandmother used to take her to. She would ask her parents if they knew anything about it, but first she needed to get back home. She eyed the unreliable path behind her. It couldn’t hurt to go just a bit farther, just to see where the path led beyond the little bridge. And then she would go home.
But Nerma would not go home that night, nor the next, nor even the next.
4
Shadows and Lights
When Nerma crossed the stone bridge at Wishers Warsh, the air changed. It grew thinner, and tendrils of iciness seeped from the gaps in the cobblestones to coil around her bare arms and legs.
She shivered.
The sun had already fallen behind the tall trees, which were becoming increasingly bare, and it felt much later in the day than it should have. Far above her head and beyond the dark branches, the sky had turned the orangish gray of dusk, and Nerma wondered how she had lost track of so much time.
As the path curved around a monstrous tree trunk, a building materialized ahead, and for the briefest of moments Nerma thought she was back on Harmony Hill. As she drew closer, though, she realized with a sense of mild dread that there were no houses like this on Harmony Hill.
This house looked as though it had been dipped in shades of gray and ash. It leaned at an alarming angle, and a deeply pitched roof jutted into the bare tree branches above. Round windows peered like cloudy eyes from chipped gray frames, and above a murky front porch hovered a cringing gargoyle. His eyes seemed to follow Nerma’s approach. The soft tinkling of piano music came from the house, a sign that the house held more life than its deathly pallor suggested.
Nerma’s flip flops clapped up the front steps. Twice, she reached for the black knocker and lost her nerve before finally lifting it. It fell against the door with a metallic clunk.
The music halted, and the thump of heavy shoes drew near. The door opened to reveal a stick-thin woman in a long charcoal dress. A mountainous knot of dark hair cast her long face in shadow.
A sharp chin beetled forward. “Yes?” The woman’s voice was like chalk against metal.
Nerma stumbled backward and nearly slipped upon the top step.
“Yes?” The woman’s creased lips puckered, and above them, three hazel eyes watched Nerma from beneath heavy lids.
The three eyes blinked—first the two on either side of her face, then the third watchful eye, which was located exactly where a nose should have been.
Nerma had never seen a three-eyed woman before, and a sound emerged from her throat, a gurgled whine like the sound a frog makes before a thunderstorm.
The woman blinked again—one-two and three—and then she simply shut the door.
A moment passed before Nerma could move, and then, shaken, she stumbled her way back to the path, never taking her eyes from the woman’s house. Which direction had she come from? Nerma was sure she had come from the left, but when she walked that way, the path disappeared into a wall of tree branches, and she was forced to make her way back to the clearing with the little gray house.
The gargoyle watched from its perch, and Nerma would have sworn that it too blinked—first with its left eye, then with its right.
She hurried in the other direction, tripping over the cobblestones, and when the house was finally out of sight, she raised a quivering hand to her nose, imagining a third eyeball in its place. She shuddered.
Nerma slowed. Perhaps she should turn around and try the other way again. But the light was waning, and a chill was in the air. Certainly, someone here would allow her to use a phone and call her parents. She passed beneath the iron arch and continued along the road, which twisted and coiled between houses that were as different in shape as they were similar in color. Some towered precariously above the road like wizened and stooped old men, and others squatted, short and stout, like toadstools crafted from stone and wood.
The farther from Harmony Hill Nerma ventured, the colder the air grew, and goosebumps erupted from her skin while her toes began to grow numb. She came to a fork in the road, and upon a post hung two signs shaped like birds’ heads. The beak of one pointed leftward toward a place called “Barber ‘n’ Bones,” and the beak of the other pointed to the right, toward “Grackleswot Abbey.” Nerma considered, stamping her feet against the stones and blowing warm air onto her fingers.
Not liking the sound of Barber ‘n’ Bones, she chose to head toward Grackleswot Abbey, and she followed the road that wound to the right. Here, the houses crowded together, so greedy for space that they nearly overtook the narrow road. The sky above all but disappeared as the gray clapboard and timber walls stretched closer together, almost touching but never meeting, like tragic lovers buried inches apart.
Nerma’s pace quickened. She was no longer sure if her goosebumps were caused by the cold air or the sense of unease that gripped her. The narrower the passage became, the icier the air, and sounds seemed to take on a life of their own. The echoing shuffle-clap of her flip flops sounded like whispers and muffled coughs, and her breath sounded like the beating of wings.
