How to Ditch Your Fairy

by Justine Larbalestier

  Danders Anders needed to park all over the city. Fourteen parking spots and with each one I felt my fairy getting fatter. The proto- fairy was never going to take over.

  If I could have killed Danders I would have. Or broken a few of his bones. Or at least given him some nasty bruises.

  He returned to his car for the last time after eleven. I’d almost fallen asleep over my Statistics homework. How was I going to stay awake to concentrate on The Ultimate Fairy Book? Poxy Danders Anders.

  “You have to drive me someplace,” I announced as Danders crammed himself back into the driver’s seat. “You owe me.” He owed me my life back. He owed me everything. I wished him a blighted life and future.

  He grunted and turned the engine on. If he were an actual human being with feelings and facial expressions I would have said that he was sad. But he was Danders Anders, so for all I knew he was in ecstasy brought on by a twenty- minute rendezvous with his secret lover. Though given how many stops we’d made, that would be fourteen secret lovers.

  Horns sounded.

  “You’re supposed to look when you drive! Not get us killed!”

  Danders said nothing.

  “Don’t turn right, turn left. You’re taking me to Fiorenze Burnham-Stone’s house. Cliffside Drive.”

  “Cliffside Drive,” Danders repeated.

  I followed Fiorenze’s directions to get to her bedroom. I put my ear to the door, but heard nothing. I knocked gently, hoping this wasn’t all an elaborate payback joke on Fiorenze’s part and I was about to wake up her mother, who would punish me by making sure the parking fairy never went away.

  Nothing. Just me breathing a little too loud.

  I knocked again. What if this really was her mother’s room? I counted to twenty and then tried the handle. It turned. I opened the door.

  It looked like a library. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Except for where there was a large window. Under it was a desk where Fiorenze was asleep, drooling on her homework. I walked across the huge room and whispered her name, then when she didn’t stir, nudged her awake.

  Fiorenze blinked at me, pushed her hair back, rubbed at her eyes and mouth, then blinked some more. “You came,” she said at last.

  I grunted. “Said I would, didn’t I?”

  She patted her pocket. “Come on, then.”

  I followed her out of her room and along the corridor and into another, then down some stairs, and up some others, and along yet another corridor.

  “It’s like a crazy house,” I whispered.

  “What?” Fiorenze whispered in turn.

  “So many doors and corridors and staircases. It’s like a fun house. It just needs lots of weird mirrors.” It was so quiet. At my house there was always some kind of sound: Nettles’s weirdo music, my parents laughing or fighting, the dogs next door.

  “Oh,” she said. “We have those too. In Tamsin’s study.”

  “I’ve seen them. Vastly peculiar.”

  “They work, though.”

  “I know,” I said, remembering the fading white aura of my parking fairy. I feared it would be a lot less faded this time.

  “How can your family afford all this?”

  “We’re rich.”

  I sucked my teeth. “I know that. But this is big even for rich people. Why are you rich? Did your grandfather really have a gold- finding fairy?”

  Fiorenze shook her head. “No. It was my grandmother and she had a stealing fairy. No matter what she stole, and no matter how blatantly, she never got caught. All our wealth is stolen. That’s why my parents give so much to charity. They’re vastly guilty about it. Tamsin doesn’t like to talk about her mother.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you ready to see the mirrors again?” Fiorenze opened the door. And there were me and Fiorenze staring back at ourselves. Automatically I straightened my shoulders and pulled in my core muscles. Fiorenze did the same. I could see the white aura of my parking fairy all right. Brilliant white. It shone. The blue of my proto- fairy was barely there.

  “I never get used to that,” she said. “Seeing myself from the outside.” Her fairy had a red aura. Not quite as brilliant as mine, but plenty bright. It wasn’t going to fade away any time soon. “I never look the way I think I will.”

  “Huh,” I said, not entirely sure what she meant. “It’s weird seeing fairy auras, isn’t it?”

  “You get used to them.” She walked over to the metal box. I shut the door behind me and crouched down next to her. She pulled the key out of her pocket and looked at it and then at the box.

  “It’s really big,” I said. “Much bigger than you’d need for a book.”

  “It’s a really big book.” Fiorenze knelt in front of it and laid her hand on top. The box made her hand seem small; Fiorenze’s hands are not small.

  “Are you sure your dad’s not going to burst in on us?” I asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Shouldn’t we start looking through it then? It’s after midnight.”

  Fiorenze nodded, but made no move toward opening it.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “I’m nervous.” She pulled her hand back and put it in her lap.

  “But you said your dad won’t disturb us. And your mother’s on the West Coast, right?” I wondered if she was going to Ravenna. It occurred to me that I had no idea what Steffi’s city looked like.

  Fiorenze didn’t say anything.

  “What’s up?” The tiles underneath my feet radiated coldness. I pulled a cushion under my butt and crossed my legs.

  “I’ve never seen Tamsin’s book before. I don’t think anyone but her has in years. What if it’s not so great? Tamsin could have lost perspective.”

  “Now you say! You do know your mom’s a bit nuts, right?”

  Fiorenze’s eyebrows pulled together and her mouth went down. “Waverly’s worse.”

  “That’s reassuring. You’re really sure he’s not coming in here? With, say, an axe?” My voice didn’t come out as jokey as it sounded in my head.

  “He’s not coming in here with anything,” Fiorenze said. “He’s too superstitious.” She still hadn’t touched the box.

  “Do you want me to open it?” I asked. Fiorenze was squatting, like she was ready to jump up and away as quick as possible. “You don’t think it’s booby-trapped or anything, do you?”

  “Of course not.” She put the key in the lock and turned it. The lid popped up immediately. I half expected a hideous siren to go off, or the box to explode, but the only sound it made was a slight creak from the hinges.

  We both stared.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Ultimate Fairy

  Book

  Demerits: 6

  Conversations with Steffi: 9

  Game suspensions: 1

  Public service hours: 19

  Hours spent enduring Fiorenze

  Stupid-Name’s company: 3.75

  Number of Steffi kisses: 2

  Days Steffi not talking to me: 2

  Parking spots for Danders Anders: 16

  Vows to kill Danders Anders: 31

  Well,” I said at last. “That’s a vast amount of paper. How are we going to read it all before your mom comes back?”

  The box was almost a meter high. Inside it were four tightly jammed together stacks secured with colored ribbons. The first stack was labeled Origins, the second Earliest Research, the third Taxonomies, and the fourth Ethics. It was an insane amount of paper. Reading through it all would take weeks and weeks and weeks. I stared at it in despair. Buried in there might be a way to get rid of the parking fairy that danced white in the mirror. But finding the magical fairy destroyer suddenly looked even harder than it had.

  “Wow,” Fiorenze said.

  “Vastly wow. Where do we start? She must have written down everything ever known about fairies ever.”

  Fiorenze nodded. “It must be the biggest book in the universe.”

  “
Well, she calls it The Ultimate Fairy Book, doesn’t she?” The name seemed much less boastful now.

  Fiorenze giggled. “No, that’s what I call it. It’s sort of a joke. But maybe it isn’t.” She grabbed a pillow to sit on and shifted into crossed legs.

  “So where do we start?” I asked. “We have to start somewhere.”

  “With the first one? Origins? Or how about Taxonomies? Do you think there’s anything in those about getting rid of fairies?”

  “Dunno. What does ‘Taxonomies’ even mean?”

  “Something to do with paying tax?” Fiorenze touched the yellow ribbon around it. Origins and Earliest Research had red ribbons around them and Ethics a green.

  “Is the ribbon around the whole stack?”

  Fiorenze squeezed her fingers around the edges of Origins and eased it out of the box. It was about four centimeters thick. “Wow, it’s heavy!” She put it down between us. “The one underneath it is called Eschatologies.”

  “What does ‘Eschatologies’ mean?” I asked. What if we found instructions on getting rid of our fairies but couldn’t understand all the fancy words Dr. Burnham- Stone used?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Could it be about getting rid of fairies? Should we check?”

  “Maybe come back to it?” Fiorenze suggested. “It and Taxonomies. There might be one that’s more like what we want.”

  I nodded.

  “We have to make sure the book looks exactly the same when we’re finished. Tamsin can’t have any idea that we’ve touched it.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Let’s look through all the bundles, maybe we’ll find one that says, ‘Fairies, Destruction of ’?”

  Fiorenze smiled. “Sounds like a plan. One stack at a time and we make sure we put each bundle back exactly as is.”

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure what the wrath of Dr. Burnham-Stone would look like, but I was not anxious to find out.

  We went through the rest of the stack, but nothing was labeled with anything promising like Fairies, Extrication of, though I put aside one called “Proto- Fairies.” We put the stack back exactly as it was and turned to the next, but didn’t hit pay dirt until the middle of the last stack. “Removal and Swapping,” wrapped in a faded blue ribbon that had clearly been tied and retied many times.

  “It’s very thick,” Fiorenze said, handing it to me. “That’s at least ten centimeters.”

  I balanced it on my palm. “More like fifteen. Heavy too,” I said, placing it between us. The answers to all my problems could be in this bulging stack of papers.

  “Do you want to undo the ribbon or shall I?” Fiorenze asked.

  “You,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m a bit nervous,” Fiorenze said, looking down at the bulky bundle.

  “You and me both. Make sure you remember how it was tied. We have to retie it exactly the same. And don’t wrinkle any of the pages.”

  “You’re right. I’ll be careful. But what if—”

  “Just open it, Fio.” I didn’t want to hear what-ifs. It was bad enough thinking them.

  She nodded, undid the ribbon, and put the title page aside. The second page was a contents page. There were lots of crossing outs, and scribbles, and words on top of words.

  “Thwarting, Stain—”

  “Doesn’t that say ‘starving,’ not ‘staining’?” I peered closer. It was hard to tell. It was written over words that had been written and crossed out several times.

  “What’s the difference between thwarting and starving a fairy?”

  “What do you reckon bleaching a fairy involves?”

  “Or ‘Near Dying.’ Huh? And I never heard of ‘Flensing.’ ”

  “Is that what it really says? And why has she crossed out ‘teasing’?”

  “And what’s ‘grunching’?”

  “I reckon she’s making them up.” Each unfamiliar word made me more nervous. Would any of it make sense?

  “Shall we look?” Fiorenze asked.

  “Well, duh! If we don’t get started soon it’ll be time for school before we’ve read anything.”

  “How about I take Grunching and you take Bleaching?”

  “No way. How interesting is Bleaching going to be? I want Grunching. That has to be something wholly doos.”

  “Fine,” Fiorenze said. “I’ll take Near Dying, then.”

  “But that could be doos too.”

  “Okay, then. How about we split it in half? You take the front section, I’ll take the back.”

  “Done.”

  Fiorenze handed me the first half. I held the pages firmly, afraid of dropping them. I caught a glimpse of my reflection. The blue aura looked anemic, but the white was dazzling. It was hard to imagine ever getting rid of it.

  CHAPTER 26

  Bleaching, Starving, and

  Flensing

  Demerits: 6

  Conversations with Steffi: 9

  Game suspensions: 1

  Public service hours: 19

  Hours spent enduring Fiorenze

  Stupid- Name’s company: 4.75

  Number of Steffi kisses: 2

  Days Steffi not talking to me: 2

  Parking spots for Danders Anders: 16

  Vows to kill Danders Anders: 31

  I put the heavy pile of papers on the floor in front of me and turned the contents page over, carefully placing it on the floor on top of the title page. “Introductory Notes,” it read. I wondered if it would be safe to skip it and glanced at Fiorenze, who was frowning, but seemed to be reading every single word.

  The first few pages referred to gazillions of other books on fairies, quoting from them and then (mostly) disagreeing with them. The other weird thing was that she kept referring to other things she’d written and calling herself “Burnham-Stone.” Strange. Especially when she started disagreeing with herself.

  Like she said that despite Burnham-Stone’s argument that “if one’s belief system did not encompass the existence of fairies, said fairies would generally be less productive than they were for those whose belief systems were more accommodating,” there was plenty of evidence that “fairy productivity had no correlation with the host’s belief systems,” which I figured meant that she used to think you had to believe in fairies for them to work but now she didn’t. That explained Steffi and his fairy.

  Then I realized that the first Burnham-Stone had the initial “W” and the second one the initial “T.” She wasn’t disagreeing with herself. She was disagreeing with her husband.

  I also found it creepy that she used the word “host” to refer to the person who had the fairy. Did that mean fairies were like parasites?

  One section worried about whether getting rid of your fairy and getting a new one was ethical. There were lots of quotes from various experts on how you were probably meant to have whatever fairy you wound up with and if everyone changed their fairies it could lead to all sorts of terrible consequences. There were no quotes saying what those consequences were. Obviously none of these experts had ever been stuck with a parking fairy.

  She also said that there was no evidence to support the theory that fairies were attracted to “good” people and repelled by “bad” people—“the behaviors of hosts appear to have no effect on their fairies whatsoever.” I couldn’t wait to tell Rochelle.

  The pages were littered with tons of impossible- to-read footnotes. All of it scrawled in her not- the- most- legible-in- the- world handwriting. While there weren’t as many crossing outs as on the contents page, there were still many.

  I skipped to the first proper section,“Thwarting.”

  It was exactly what I thought: don’t do any of the things that are remotely within your fairy’s bailiwick. Thwart the fairy! Only it took Burnham-Stone twenty pages to say so on account of having to list example after example after example and quote everyone who’d ever written about fairies ever. Vastly boring! She concluded by saying that while it was one of the
most effective fairy removal methods, it was by far the slowest.

  I could vouch for that! It took Burnham-Stone four months to get rid of her loose-change fairy. Though she wrote about one case that took two years. I shuddered at the thought of it.

  Starving fairies turned out to be the vegetarian option. Sort of. Only it wasn’t all vegetables, just carrots. According to Burnham-Stone, if you stuck to that diet, after two weeks your fairy would be long gone. When she used it to get rid of her good- hair fairy it was gone in twelve days.

  She didn’t mention how that left her. Twelve days of nothing but carrots? Wouldn’t you be gone too? And according to her you could drink only water; anything else delayed the fairy disappearing, or stopped it from working altogether.

  In her conclusion Burnham-Stone noted that the diet was dangerous and should not be continued for more than three weeks. On the other hand, the starvation method was as successful as the thwarting method, just quicker.

  For me and Fiorenze it was out of the question. Although carrots were one of the few vegetables I liked, all our food was measured and weighed. If we were consuming that few calories a day with so little good fat or minerals or vitamins or protein, we’d be reported to the doctors before the end of the day.

  “You got anything yet, Fio?”

  She shook her head. “Impossible or too dangerous so far. Though the section I’m reading now is a possibility. Bleaching. You have to lie in a bath of bleach. The trick is to get the bleach to water ratio exactly right. Plus you have to keep it out of all your bits that will sting.”

  “Hmm.” That didn’t sound like much fun.

  “If you get it right the fairy goes away instantly.”

  “What happens if you get it wrong?”

  “You wind up with third-degree burns, or go blind, or damage your hearing. Or all three. Oh.”

  “What?” The expression on her face was dire.

  “If you really frag it up you die.”

  “What larks,” I said. “I guess if nothing else works we could try that. But we’re not that desperate yet, are we?” I felt desperate.

  “Not yet.” Fiorenze smiled. “Moving along.”