Liesl & Po

by Lauren Oliver

  But that was the problem with Liesl, Po realized. She seemed in that moment, as she sat there with her thin blanket bunched around her waist, to be like a glass thing on the verge of breaking. And the ghost did not want her to break.

  Bundle must have felt it too. Po saw the fuzzy animal shape grow fuzzier and then sharper, fuzzier and then sharper, as it tried unsuccessfully to merge with Liesl. This was the other problem with living ones: They were separate, always separate. They could not truly merge. They did not know how to be anyone other than themselves, and even that they did not know how to be sometimes.

  “I must take his ashes to the willow tree,” Liesl whispered suddenly, with certainty. “I must bury my father next to my mother. Then his soul will move Beyond.” She looked directly at the place where Po’s eyes should have been, if Po were not a ghost, and again Po felt the very core of its Essence shiver in response.

  “And you must help me,” Liesl finished.

  Po was unprepared for this. “Me?” it said unhappily. “Why me?”

  “Because you are my friend,” Liesl said.

  “Friend,” Po repeated. The word was unfamiliar by this point. Something tugged at the edges of Po’s memory, the faintest of faintest recollections of a bark of laughter, and the smell of thick wool, and the sting of something wet against its cheek. Snowball fight, Po thought suddenly, without knowing where the words came from: words he had not thought of in ages and ages, in so long that millions of stars had collapsed and been born in that time.

  “All right,” Po said. It had never occurred to Po that it would ever have a friend again, in all of eternity. “I’ll help you.”

  “I knew you would!” Liesl went to throw her arms around the ghost and nearly toppled over, as her arms passed through nothingness and then back on herself. Then, all at once, she seemed to collapse from within. She slumped back against the pillows. “But it’s no use,” she said despairingly. “How am I supposed to bury my father by the willow? I’m not allowed to leave the attic. I haven’t left the attic in months and months. Augusta says it’s too dangerous. I must be kept here, for my own protection. And the door is locked from the outside. It’s only ever opened twice a day, when Karen comes to bring me my tray.”

  Karen was one of the servants Augusta, Liesl’s stepmother, had hired with Liesl’s father’s money. Karen trundled up the winding stairs twice a day, sometimes with as little as a tiny strip of the smallest, toughest meat—usually the scraps from Augusta’s meal—and a thimbleful of milk.

  Augusta had not seen Liesl herself in all thirteen months that Liesl had been in the attic, and although Augusta had three servants and had her hair done every other day, she was always complaining that Liesl ate too much and they couldn’t possibly afford to feed the little Attic Rat any more than they were already giving her.

  Po was silent for a bit. “What time does she bring up your tray?” the ghost finally asked.

  “Before dawn,” Liesl said. “I’m usually asleep when she comes.”

  “Leave everything to me,” Po said, and Liesl knew then that picking Po to be her very best friend had been the right thing to do.

  Chapter Ten

  KAREN MCLAUGHLIN DID NOT LIKE TO GO TO THE attic. She disliked climbing three staircases, and then another set of tiny wooden stairs, to get from the kitchen to the door, particularly when she had to carry a tray with her. But more than that, she disliked seeing Liesl. It gave her a shivery feeling—the girl with her pale, pale face and enormous blue eyes, the girl who never cried or shouted or made a fuss about being locked in the attic but only sat there, staring, when Karen came in. It gave Karen the creeps. It was just not right.

  Even Milly, the cook, said so. “It ain’t natural,” she liked to say, as she poured a bit of hot water over a bouillon cube for Liesl’s soup, or pounded a piece of fat and gristle with a large hammer so Liesl would at least be able to get her teeth through it. “Little girls ain’t made to be locked up in attics like bats in the belfry. It’ll bring bad luck on us all, you wait and see.”

  Milly was always saying, too, that something should be done, though her declarations never went further than that. Times were hard, jobs were few, and people all over the city were starving. If the servants in Augusta Morbower’s employ had to deal with the specter of a pale, small child who lived in the attic—well, there were worse things.

  (That was the kind of world they lived in: When people were afraid, they did not always do what they knew to be right. They turned away. They closed their eyes. They said, Tomorrow. Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll do something about it. And they said that until they died.)

  Privately, Karen suspected that Liesl was a ghost, as she was very superstitious. Everyone was superstitious in those times of grayness and dark, when the sun had long ago stopped shining, and the color had slowly drained from the world.

  True, Karen did not know of any ghosts who ate, and Liesl was always cleaning her plate of whatever food was placed there, no matter how disgusting or half-rotten. And true, too, that on the few occasions when Karen had been forced to touch the girl (twice when she had caught a fever; once when some of the fish Milly had sent up had been spoiled, and the girl had been ragingly sick for a whole day), Liesl had felt solid enough. But all in all, seeing Liesl gave Karen an uncomfortable, prickly feeling she could not quite identify: a feeling that reminded her of the time she had been caught by the nuns at her school stealing a chocolate chip cookie from Valerie Kimble’s lunch basket—a feeling of being watched, and judged.

  That was why she so dreaded her twice-daily trips up the narrow attic stairs, and why, as much as possible, she tried to come only when she knew the girl would be sleeping.

  It was just after five thirty in the morning when she began making her way carefully up the stairs, balancing the tray, which today contained a bit of bread mixed with hot water to form a pasty porridge, and the usual few sips of milk. The house was even quieter than usual, and the shadows seemed to Karen particularly strange and black and huge. Suddenly she felt something brush her ankle and she jumped, nearly dropping the tray; a cat meowed in the darkness and she heard the scrabbling of paws on the wood, moving past her down the stairs. She exhaled. It was only Tuna, the mangy cat who had been informally adopted by the kitchen staff and who occasionally roamed the house at night, when Augusta wasn’t around to give him a swift kick in the belly.

  “Nothing but a kitty,” Karen muttered to herself. “A little bitty kitty.” But her heart was hammering, and she felt sweat pricking up under her arms. Something was wrong in the house this morning. She felt it; she knew it.

  It was the ashes, she realized: that pile of ashes sitting in the wooden box on the mantel. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t natural. Like having a dead person propped up in the living room. And didn’t ghosts always hover around their bodies? Even now, the master of the house could be watching her, tiptoeing up the stairs, ready to wrap his dark and ghostly fingers around her exposed neck. . . .

  Something brushed against her cheek, and she cried out. But it was just a draft, just a draft.

  “No such thing as ghosts,” she whispered out loud. “No such thing as ghosts.”

  But it was with a feeling of dread and terror that she climbed the last three steps to the attic and carefully unlocked the door with the large skeleton key she kept in her apron pocket.

  Several things happened quickly, one right after the other.

  Liesl, who was sitting up in bed, not lying down with her eyes closed as she should have been, said, “Hello.”

  Po, standing directly next to her in the darkness, concentrated with all its might on distant memories of something vast and white burning high up in the sky, and its outline began to glow like a star peeking out against the darkness: faintly at first, then clearer and clearer, the outline of a child whose body was all made of blackness and air.

  Po said, “Boo.”

  Bundle went, Grrr.

  Then:

  Karen dropped her tr
ay.

  Karen cried, “God help us!”

  Karen turned and went running down the attic stairs as quickly as she could, a little noise of utter terror bubbling from her throat.

  And:

  In her haste, Karen forgot to lock the door behind her.

  “Quickly,” Po said to Liesl. Liesl flung away her covers and stood up. She was not dressed in her thin nightshirt, but in trousers, a large, moth-eaten sweater, an old purple velvet jacket, and regular shoes. She had not worn anything but slippers in so long, she had difficulty walking at first.

  “We don’t have much time,” Po said, skating silently in front of her. The effort of appearing to the servant girl had been tiring, and Po allowed itself to ebb back to its normal shadowed state. “Hurry, hurry.” Bundle zipped back and forth, materializing in various corners, and then briefly on the ceiling, in its excitement.

  “I’m hurrying,” Liesl whispered back. She slung the small sack she had packed earlier—containing a change of clothes, her drawing supplies, and a few odds and ends from the attic—over her shoulder, and moved carefully to the door. A feeling of fear and wonder swept over her. It had been ever so long since she’d been out of the attic. She was almost afraid to leave it behind. She could no longer remember clearly what was on the other side of the door; what it felt like to stand outside, in the open air. She did not know how she would manage with no money and no clear idea of where she was going, and for a moment she thought of saying to Po, I’ve changed my mind.

  But then she thought of her father, and the willow tree, and the soft moss that grew over her mother’s grave, and instead she said, “Good-bye, attic,” and followed the ghost’s dark shape out of the door and down the stairs.

  And while Karen was babbling to Milly in the kitchen, and Milly was fussing and murmuring, “Calm down, calm down, I can’t understand a word of what you’re saying” and wondering, privately, why every single servant had to be either a drunk or completely off her rocker, a little girl and her ghostly friend and a small ghostly animal were taking from the mantel in the living room a wooden box containing the most powerful magic in the world, and afterward stealing with it out into the street.

  Part II

  Narrow Escapes & Excitable Sparrows

  Chapter Eleven

  WHEN LIESL FIRST STEPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE, she drew a sharp breath, and Po had to urge her forward.

  “Come,” the ghost said. “Before we are discovered.”

  So Liesl followed the two shadows—the larger, person-shaped shadow and the smaller, animal-shaped shadow—down the path and through the iron gates and out onto the street. But there again she had to stop, overwhelmed.

  She said, “It’s so big. Bigger than it looks from the attic. I had forgotten.” She didn’t mean just the street, of course. She meant the world—roads, intersections, lefts and rights, twists and turns, choices.

  Over the months Liesl had watched several baby sparrows hatch and grow in the little nest just outside of the attic window. She had always been particularly fascinated by the birds’ first teetering steps to the edge of the roof: awkward, ungainly, and childlike, they looked like toddling children. And then suddenly the baby sparrows would launch into the air as their parents twittered their approval.

  She had always wondered at the bravery of it. The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.

  Liesl felt a bit like a baby sparrow, standing in the cold, dark, empty street, with the city spread all around her and the world spread all around the city: as though she was perched in the bright, empty air with nothing to hold her.

  “Where to?” Po asked Liesl.

  They needed to find the train station, Liesl knew, because trains led out of the city of Dirge, to places of willow trees and lakes. Her head was full of birds. She pictured the men she had often watched from her window, striding toward the city center, their greatcoats flapping behind them like crow wings. Important men going important places, carried back and forth by great, chugging trains. She imagined them in her head; she mentally retraced their footsteps.

  “This way,” she said to Po, and pointed.

  Bundle led the way, followed by Po. When the two ghosts had already crossed the street and melted into the shadows on the other side, Liesl found that her legs still wouldn’t move. She thought, Forward! She thought, Jump! But nothing happened.

  Po, noticing that Liesl was still standing there, frozen, returned to her.

  “What are you waiting for?” the ghost asked.

  “I—” At the last second, Liesl could not tell Po she was scared. “I forgot to say thank you,” she said finally.

  Po flickered. “Thank you?” it repeated. “What is that?”

  Liesl thought. “It means, You were wonderful,” she said. “It means, I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Okay,” Po said, and began skimming away again.

  “Wait!” Liesl reached out to take the ghost’s hand and felt her fingers close on empty air. She giggled a little. “Oops.”

  “What is it now?” The ghost was barely controlling its temper.

  Liesl let out another snorting laugh and covered her mouth to stifle the sound. “I wanted your help crossing the street,” she said. “I keep forgetting you aren’t real.”

  “I’m real,” Po said, bristling. “I’m as real as you are.”

  “Don’t be mad,” Liesl pleaded, and as Po floated off, she put one foot in front of the other without even noticing it. Step, step, step. “You know what I mean.”

  “I just don’t have a body. Neither does wind or lightning, but they’re real.”

  “It’s only an expression, Po.” Liesl had crossed the street. “Sheesh.”

  “Light doesn’t have a body,” Po continued, and up ahead, Bundle yipped and skipped and turned full circles in the air. “Music doesn’t have a body, but that’s real. . . .”

  “For someone with no body, you’re very touchy, you know.”

  A lone guard, returning from a long, cold shift at the residence of the Lady Premiere, heard voices and, pausing at the entrance to his building, saw a pretty girl carrying a knapsack and a wooden box, babbling happily to herself while beside her shadows shifted and swayed.

  The guard thought, Such a shame, when madness strikes in one so young. But that’s the way of the world now. And then he stepped inside and closed the door.

  The girl and her ghost-friend continued down the street, moving toward the center of the city, arguing, while Bundle slipped and slid and floated beside them.

  They argued and walked, walked and argued, and got farther away from Highland Avenue, and #31, and the attic.

  Perhaps that was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.

  Chapter Twelve

  MO DID NOT GIVE MUCH THOUGHT TO THE PRETTY, babbling girl he had seen in the street. He was distracted.

  Even after he had climbed the stairs to his apartment, and removed his coat, and changed into his warm thermal pajamas, and released Lefty from the fabric sling he used to carry her back and forth to work, and poured her a saucer of warm milk—even then, he could not stop thinking about the small, hatless alchemist’s assistant with the chattering teeth.

  Mo often felt his brain was like a big tin can, mostly full of air. Ideas tended to bounce around aimlessly there, clattering and making a lot of noise. Causes got mixed up with effects and vice versa, and he was never quite able to puzzle things through. Often he started thinking the beginning of a sentence but got lost by the time he had to reach its end.

  Swiss cheese, his mother had always said of his brain. Full of holes where things just go dropping out.

  But every so often an idea got lodged in the cheesy, melty part of his brain—a stretch of cheese without holes—and when it st
uck, it was stuck good and permanently.

  The idea that was stuck there now was: The boy should really have a hat.

  Mo wondered whether the boy had found a nice, dry place to spend the night. He hoped so. If he had had more time, he could have told the boy about the gardening shed behind the First Boys’ Academy, and the basement of St. Jude the Divine.

  He knew all about the sneaky, hidden places in the city: cupboards and alleyways, rail stations and closets, underground tunnels and abandoned sheds. He had spent years searching the city for Bella, even after everyone had said it was hopeless—even after everyone had said to give up, move on, forget about her. His mother and father had looked for her too, until they had given up as well, each in turn, finally and forever: dying exactly a month apart of twin broken hearts.

  A nice, big hat with earflaps. That’d fix him up.

  Mo scolded himself as soon as the thought presented itself. The boy was no concern of his, as the tall, thin alchemist with the ugly dripping nose had pointed out to him. His landlady, Mrs. Elkins, always said he needed to learn to mind his own business and stop sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Curiosity killed the cat and so on and so forth.

  “You’re always trying to save everybody,” she had said, frowning at him, when he had once again been late on the rent because he had given his last ten dollars to a beggar on the corner. “Most people don’t want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they’ll never learn to paddle on their own.”

  She was very smart, that Mrs. Elkins. He was a softheaded, silly-hearted fool about people and things in trouble. Everybody had always said so. And one day it would all come to no good. Everybody had always said that, too. It was like the time he had rescued all those stray cats and dogs from the street. What had happened? They’d nearly clawed one another to death, all those wild street animals living in the same tiny two-room apartment, and in the end he’d had to give them all up to the pound when the neighbors complained. He’d had nothing to show for that experiment but a hundred pounds of half-eaten dog food, and fleas in the carpet.