How to Ditch Your Fairy

by Justine Larbalestier

  “What?” I began. “It’s not like that.”

  “It’s malodorous,” Heather said. “I used to like you. I thought you were funny. I had no idea what you were really like. It’s not just Freedom. It’s all the boys. At least Fiorenze didn’t enjoy her fairy.”

  “I don’t enjoy it,” I protested even though I did. “I just wanted to get rid of my parking fairy. Swapping was the only way.”

  “She seems to be under the misapprehension that we’re talking to her,” Heather said, turning her back on me. Tracy and Alicia did the same. “Where could she have gotten that idea from? She wanted the boys, didn’t she? Well, now they’re all she’s got, ’cause no one else is going to talk to her.

  “Absolutely no one.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Love and Hatred

  Demerits: 0

  Conversations with Steffi: billions

  Game suspensions: 2

  Public service hours: 28

  Boys who like me: all of them

  Girls who hate me: Heather, Alicia, Tracy,

  and all their friends

  Life with a boy- attracting fairy was a vast improvement. After two days my demerits were down to zero and the game suspension (fencing) I served on Saturday meant that I’d caught up on all my homework. By Sunday night I’d even managed to study ahead of time and review a week’s worth of tennis and cricket training videos as well as two days of fencing.

  I hadn’t seen much of Steffi, though. He was great at school—all kisses and compliments—but I didn’t see him outside it. Not that there was much time for that, what with all my demerit erasing, not to mention catching up with homework. He was probably as busy as me.

  It was true that—except for Rochelle, Sandra, and Fiorenze—the rest of the girls were barely talking to me, but I figured they’d get over it eventually. Fiorenze had gone out of her way to stop the rumor that I’d stolen her fairy. Plus we were hanging out together, which seemed to be proof enough for some people, though not Heather or any of her minions.

  There was still no rule protecting me like the one Fiorenze had had but maybe on Monday. Mr. Kurimoto and Coach Van Dyck were pleading my case. Kurimoto had believed me right away (how could he not with both Irwin Daniels and Freedom Hazal in his class?) and Van Dyck had finally come around. Still, even if the rule didn’t come in, I was better at managing the boys than Fiorenze had been. As long as I avoided Daniels and Hazal, I’d be fine.

  Monday—my first demerit- free day—was going to rule. The whole week would be fabulous. I could feel it.

  It wasn’t. By lunch I’d earned a demerit for fending off Irwin Daniels and another one for yelling at Freedom Hazal. I’d hung out with Steffi on my breaks, but it was hard with all those other boys around, and, well, I had to admit that he wasn’t quite the Steffi he’d been before. Like, the first thing he told me when we all sat down at lunch was how beautiful and soft my skin was, how gorgeous the color.

  Sandra coughed. A mocking cough. She’d been doing that a lot since the swap.

  “Have you done something new with your hair? It’s so shiny,” Steffi said. My hair was not shiny. He’d never said anything like that to me before the fairy. Now it was pretty much all he said.

  “Go away!” Fiorenze hissed at the rugger boy who tried to sit down between her and me. The five of us—me, Steffi, Fiorenze, Rochelle, and Sandra—were squeezed around a two- person round table. Easier to keep anyone from joining us.

  “You need to lose the fairy,” Sandra said, glaring at me. “You may love it, but we hate it.”

  No one said anything. Not even Steffi. Them not being happy for me made my own new- fairy happiness smaller. They almost made me wish I’d gotten some other kind of fairy. One they’d approve of.

  By Wednesday things were much worse. Even though I was getting rid of most of the demerits I earned during the day at public service, it kept cutting into homework time.

  Then Irwin Daniels tried to drag me into a broom closet. Two rugger boys rescued me, ripping the sleeve of my jacket in the process. Then they got into a fight over who was going to escort me to my class, while Heather Sandol and her minions hissed abuse. Apparently hissing didn’t count as talking to me.

  I ran. The entire D-, C-, and most of B-stream rugby ran after me.

  Rochelle found me cowering in one of the stalls of the tennis changing rooms. She banged on the door. “Charlie? Charlie? I know you’re in there!”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am in here.” I’d put the lid down and was sitting on it, hugging my bag tight, and wishing for the first time that I had listened to Fiorenze.

  “What are you doing?” Rochelle asked. “Why weren’t you in Bio? Where were you at first recess?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t what, Charlie? Come out of there.” She banged on the door again. “Stop being ridiculous!”

  Maybe I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t go out there again.

  “Charlie?”

  “They tore my jacket off ! My shirt is torn too!”

  “Class just started. There’s no one out there.”

  But it was a lot better in here—despite the small space, the chewing gum stuck to the walls making the graffiti hard to read, and the smell—than it was out there.

  “And there’s no one in here but me, Charlie. No Heather or any of her Heather- ettes for you to hide from.”

  “I’m not scared of Heather Sandol!” I wasn’t scared of her, it was just less than doos being around her and her Heather- ettes, which seemed to be every girl in school.

  “Of course not. You’ve just set up camp in there for your health.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “Are not.”

  “How do you know I’m not?” I asked.

  I heard her sigh. A vastly impatient sigh. “You’ll have to come out sometime, Charlie. Why not now?”

  I shifted my legs only to discover that my left had gone to sleep. I grunted. “Okay, I’m coming out.” I stood up, slipped my bag over my shoulder, and opened the door. “But you’re not allowed to say I told you so.”

  Rochelle patted my shoulder. “So you’ve realized that having a boy fairy is not the most fabulous thing in the whole world?”

  I nodded. “It was a malodorous mistake. Why didn’t I believe Fiorenze?! She told me. I just didn’t think every boy being in love with me would be a problem. And it wasn’t at first.” I’d thought I could handle it, that Fiorenze’s problem wasn’t the fairy but her not being able to cope with it. Yet I wasn’t any better at it than she was.

  “Well, not every boy. You’re safe from seniors.”

  “There’s that.”

  “I don’t think any of us realized how bad it was for her,” Rochelle said. “She’s had rules protecting her. Which you will have too any minute now.”

  “At least Kurimoto and Van Dyck believe me.”

  “Them plus overwhelming evidence,” Rochelle said. “I’m sure the rule will cover you by the end of the week. Why don’t we both get to class now?”

  “You’ll run interference?”

  “Of course. It’s not all bad, Charlie. Now you know Stefan likes you better than Fiorenze—he’s barely talked to her since you two swapped.”

  “Well, yes, but that also means he’s only with me because of the boy fairy. Don’t get me wrong. I like being with him, but, well . . .” I didn’t want to admit out loud that I’d turned Steffi into a love-zombie just like Heather Sandol said. I didn’t want him liking me because of a fairy. I wanted him to like me because of me.

  “He’s not been the same, has he?” Rochelle said.

  “No, he hasn’t.” I wondered if it meant Steffi didn’t like me after all. Or maybe he had, but the fairy making him like me had killed off any real liking for me.

  Fiorenze came running into the bathroom. “Charlie! There you are!”

  We both turned to her. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Danders Anders.”

 
I would have been tempted to say I told you so, except that her I told you so was vastly bigger than mine. “Oh,” I said instead.

  “He grabbed me in the corridor and told me like a hundred times he could give me lots of money if I’d be his parking fairy girl.”

  “But he told me he doesn’t have any money.”

  “When I said no, he picked me up as if I were a cat! He would have taken me out to his car then and there, but Coach Mbeki intervened. She gave him a demerit. I know he’s going to come searching for me again as soon as he can. Wherever Danders wants to go, he wants to go there right this minute; he won’t take no for an answer.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “He never does.”

  “Hasn’t he heard of taxis?” Rochelle asked. “You don’t need a parking spot if you go in a cab.”

  “Danders loves his car,” I said. “Loves it.”

  “What are we going to do?” Fiorenze asked. “I can’t spend all day hiding from him!”

  “How did he even know you have the parking fairy now?” Rochelle asked.

  “Bluey told him.”

  “Bluey talks too much,” I said. First he’d betrayed me and now Fio.

  “He thought he was helping you,” Fiorenze said. “Getting Danders off your back.”

  “Hmmph,” I said.

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Can’t you swap your fairies back?” Rochelle asked.

  “No!” we both yelled. The thought of my parking fairy returning made me want to scream, tear my hair out, and give up sports for macramé, interpretive dance, and making up injured stories in the front row of some torpid Arts school. Over my dead body.

  “Okay, okay,” Rochelle said, holding up her hands. “It was just an idea.”

  “Bleaching?” Fiorenze asked.

  “Where are we going to get bleach at school?” I asked, though I was desperate enough to try it. “Not to mention no bath tubs. Do you even remember what the proportions are meant to be?”

  “Nine to one? Ten to one?” Fiorenze shook her head. “I can’t be sure.”

  “Nearly dying, then,” I said. “It’s gotta be the near- death thing.”

  “I am not jumping off the roof of this building!” Fiorenze exclaimed.

  “We could pull out the mats from gymnastics. Land on them.”

  “Don’t you think the gymnastics squads will notice?” Fiorenze pointed out. “Plus they’re not rated for people jumping off the roof. It’s a long fall.”

  “What about jumping from the high board?” I asked.

  “Would a fairy believe that would kill us?”

  How was I supposed to know what a fairy would think? “We could call your mother and ask.”

  Fiorenze looked at me with a most unkind expression.

  “Fio, we have to think of something. I’m not going through another second with this poxy fairy. I’m so over injured fairies I can’t even tell you.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Rochelle asked.

  “Nearly dying,” Fiorenze explained.“It gets rid of fairies.”

  “Isn’t that a bit drastic? I imagine that in the attempt to nearly die some people actually die.”

  “It’s not that kind of nearly dying,” I said. “You just have to do something the fairy thinks will kill you. Like jumping off a building.”

  “Last I heard,” Rochelle said,“that really can kill you.”

  “Not if you land on big padded mats.”

  “Hey,” Rochelle said. “What about luge?”

  “Luge?” I said. “That’s the sled sport, right?” There was a luge stream, like there was a skiing stream, an ice hockey stream, etc., but us summer sports streamers didn’t have much to do with the winter sports types.

  It doesn’t snow in New Avalon, or anywhere on the East Coast, but we’re New Avaloners, so we have to be the best at everything. Which is why New Avalon Sports High has a vastly big Luge Hall, as well as a Skiing Hall and an ice rink. That doesn’t stop winter sports being weird and the people who do them weirder. Why would you be into snowboarding when you’ve never seen real snow?

  “Don’t you remember?” Rochelle asked. “Last year Teddy Rourke snuck into our school on a dare and broke like a billion bones when he got onto a luge track. He’d never done it before, and he went zooming down faster than light, then flew off the track at the very first turn and—”

  “See, Ro, that sounds actually dangerous.”

  “But not fatal. Anyway, when he got out of the hospital he didn’t have his fairy anymore.”

  “That’s right,” I said. Teddy Rourke was at Nettles’s school. She said he was crazy. He’d also been given a quokka as a get-well present. Nettles went on about how he’d gotten one when he was much less responsible than she was. “It was a sleep fairy. No matter how much sleep he got, he felt great, even no sleep didn’t affect him, but ever since the accident he has to get the same amount of sleep as everyone else.”

  Rochelle nodded. “If you two get onto the luge track and go zooming down it, your fairies are guaranteed to think you’re going to die. Neither of you has ever done luge before, have you, Fio?”

  She shook her head. “But how come the people in the luge streams have fairies?”

  “Their fairies mustn’t think they’re going to die because it’s something they do all the time,” I answered. “Same as for skydivers and racing car drivers. Plus your mom says that people with dangerous jobs do have fewer fairies than regular people. I think the luge thing might work.”

  “But I don’t want to break billions of bones!”

  “We might not break any.”

  “You’re both vastly more coordinated than Teddy Rourke,” Rochelle said. “He’s at an Arts school! You probably won’t break more than a couple of bones. But you’ll both most likely be busted if you do it. That would be a whole lot of demerits!”

  “That’s why you’re going to go get Steffi for us,” I said.

  “Brilliant idea!” Fiorenze said.

  “Not bad,” Rochelle said. “Stefan will shield you from demerits.”

  “You know about his fairy too?”

  “Please! Who doesn’t?”

  “So you’ll do it for us?” I asked, showing her my pleadingest face.

  Rochelle looked at me and then at Fiorenze.

  “Please, Ro? I can’t go out there ’cause of you know why, and Fiorenze can’t ’cause of Danders. We have to get rid of our fairies.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’d better hurry,” Fiorenze said. “If we do it now before lunch starts, no one will see us.”

  “If there’s no training going on in the Luge Hall now or at lunchtime.”

  Fiorenze’s face fell. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “It’s okay, Fio, I said I’d do it. But remember you both owe me for the demerits I’ll rack up.”

  I kissed Rochelle on the cheek. “Vastly. We’ll be your slaves.”

  Fiorenze nodded. “If we aren’t dead, that is.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Crossing the Field

  Demerits: 4

  Conversations with Steffi: billions

  Game suspensions: 2

  Public service hours: 35

  Boys who like me: all of them

  Girls who hate me: almost all of them

  I peeked out of the changing room doorway and, seeing no coaches or teachers, I slipped out into the corridor. Fiorenze followed. We headed left down the corridor. The teachers’ lounge room was down at the other end, which made it way too risky, even though that would lead us to the Luge Hall quicker. We scurried along as fast as we could.

  “So, Fio?” I whispered to her. “Thanks for not saying I told you so.”

  “Thank you for not saying the same.”

  “Your I told you so is much more justified than mine,” I whispered, turning the corner. The unmistakable silhouette of Danders Anders loomed, coming toward us. “Pox!” I grabbed Fiorenze and pulled her back.

&n
bsp; “What?”

  “Danders, heading this way.”

  “Let’s just make a run for it, then,” Fiorenze said, gesturing to the steps and beyond the field, the Luge Hall. “Go direct.”

  “Go visible, you mean. The Rugby A’s are out there. We’ll be busted for sure.”

  Fiorenze pulled me down the steps and out the door. “Not if we walk with a purpose, like we’re meant to be going there.”

  “Have you tried that?”

  Fiorenze nodded.

  “Does it work?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Whatever,” I said.

  Fiorenze straightened and walked down the steps onto the paddock. I did the same, keeping my eyes locked on the Luge Hall in the distance.

  We walked past the thick-necked rugby majors attacking large padded tackle dummies. Their head coach blew her whistle a lot, leaving the actual yelling to her two assistants.

  “Stupid game,” Fiorenze said under her breath.

  “I cannot argue.”

  Only a few of the boys turned to look at me longingly. “Just as well your ex- fairy only works on boys your age.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Quite the relief.”

  Up ahead I could see that the main doors to the Luge Hall were closed. “Is that a bad sign?” I asked Fio.

  “I think they’re always closed. They have to keep the cold in so the ice doesn’t melt.”

  We walked past the main doors. It was a relief to be out of everyone’s sight.

  “I’m not sure I’ve seen a luge before,” Fiorenze said. “Do you say that you go ‘on a luge’ or ‘in a luge’?”

  “Um,” I said. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know anything about snow.” I nudged her. “Our fairies will definitely be convinced we’re going to die.”

  “They might be right,” Fiorenze muttered.

  “Don’t jinx us, Fio!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Whatever happens—if the fairies are gone it’ll be worth it, right?”

  “Absolutely. Worth several broken bones—”

  “Shush!”

  We walked past Luge Hall’s growling array of air conditioners, spitting hot air at us. The solar panels on the roof would be completely bathed in sunshine. It hadn’t rained in days.