Once Upon a Changeling

by V. J. Chambers

  But it wasn’t just smoke that was in the air, as I stepped into the room. It was something else. Power. Like an electric charge. Like a drug. Like a thousand whispers all around my head. I shivered, wondering why all my previous bravery had drained out of me like a sieve. Swallowing hard, I gathered up what little courage I had left and forced myself to move through the room, and to begin asking its inhabitants—its strange, dark, and beautiful inhabitants—if they could direct me to Robin.

  They sized me up as I spoke to them. Looked at me under elegantly plucked eyebrows or over ornately designed sunglasses. They curled their lips as they replied.

  “Who’s Robin?”

  “It’s okay if you call me Robin, doll.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Robbin’ the cradle’s more like it. That’s what I’d like to be doing anyway. How old are you?”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  But I didn’t have any luck. No one seemed to even have heard of Robin. I went all the way around the room, starting at the door and ending up there. And I came up with nothing. I stood there, surveying the room, trying to force my brain to think clearly. My thoughts were sluggish. They tried to tread through the smoky air, but they were weighted down with lead. If I couldn’t find Robin, I guess I needed to go. I just needed to open the door behind me, tumble out, and drive back to my house. Go home. Come back another time.

  It seemed like a reasonable plan. But for some reason, I just didn’t. I didn’t really want to. Instead, I wanted to stay in the lounge with these pretty people. They liked me. I could tell. And I didn’t really see any reason not to stay. After all, I’d gone to a lot of trouble to get out of my house and get here.

  Some part of my brain was begging me to leave. I didn’t know why, though. Why leave? Why not stay? If I stayed, I could watch them. I could talk to them. I could breathe the air. But I thought that I should go home. So I stood there, with my hand on the doorknob, unsure of whether to stay or go. All the while, it seemed my thoughts moved slower and slower and slower.

  I just couldn’t decide.

  Abruptly, behind me, the door opened, and a gust of air from the outside swept in, clearing my head. Of course I wanted to get the hell out of here! I hurried out the door, gulping at the air outside the room. It was smoky and smelled like stale alcohol, but to me it was so sweet. With each breath, I felt more and more normal. And more and more tired.

  When I got in my car, the clock said 5:22 a.m. My first thought was that the clock was broken, so I checked my watch. It was right. I’d stood at that door for nearly five hours. It hadn’t seemed that long. What was worse, I had to be in school in less than two hours. And I had to work after school. It was going to be a long day.

  “I told you, there is no way I’m talking to either of you.” Leesa Rollins snapped her head back down to her Salisbury steak and canned peas, which she was pushing around with her fork.

  “Leesa,” said Marcos. “Everybody knows that if something’s going on in school, you’re the girl to talk to about it.” It was lunchtime and Marcos and I were talking—or trying to talk—to Leesa Rollins. Leesa was the school gossip. She knew everything about everybody, and made it her business to blab it to whoever would listen.

  Leesa looked back up. “I have standards. You don’t measure up. Either of you. Sorry.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. “Kara Reese talked to us the other day during lunch.” Marcos and I figured that if anyone in school knew about Cindi’s extra-curricular activities, it would be Leesa. Her only joy in life was knowing this kind of stuff. If we could get her to talk to us, we might be able to find out who the real father of the baby was. I might not have been successful at finding Robin yet, but we did know that we were going to need the real baby’s father in order to reverse the changeling mess.

  “Really?” said Leesa. “Kara Reese?”

  “Really,” said Marcos.

  She went back to her lunch tray. “You’re lying.”

  “Ask her,” I said.

  “I will,” she retorted, looking up again. “Okay, fine. But make it quick. If too many people see us talking, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do. You do realize that.”

  “Of course,” I said, shooting Marcos a look. He did his best not to laugh.

  “So what is it you want to know?” Leesa asked.

  “We’re wondering about Cindi, actually,” said Marcos. “Now, we all know that Cindi was no girl scout when it came to … let’s call it dating.”

  It still burned me up inside to think of Cindi sleeping around. I wasn’t sure what bugged me more: Cindi’s disregard for her body and her willingness to put herself in danger or the fact that everyone else had known and no one had told me. They were both pretty goddamned horrible. Last year, I’d been blissfully ignorant. This year was no cake walk, but at least I knew what was what. I’d rather know the truth, even if it hurt.

  Leesa nodded. “Cindi was a slut,” she said.

  I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from reacting.

  “You could put it that way,” said Marcos, “but what I—”

  “Could put it that way?” said Leesa. “There’s no other way to put it. It’s the truth. That girl couldn’t keep her legs closed if you paid her.”

  “Did you know who she was sleeping with while she was dating me?” I asked.

  “Of course I did. And, God, Russell, no offense, but you were so dumb. I mean, like blind, really blind, because everybody knew. Like everybody. Except—”

  “Me, yes, I’m aware of that. Now,” I said, “can we, um, move on past my idiocy?”

  “I said no offense.”

  “Leesa,” said Marcos. “What about last September? Do you know who she was sleeping with then?”

  “When Dave was injured and Luke was out of the country with the Italian exchange and Mike Schultz was with Laura?”

  “Mike Schultz slept with Cindi?!” I demanded. Mike Schultz was on the team with me. He was one of my best buddies. That fucking bastard.

  Marcos cleared his throat pointedly.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Marcos. “About then.”

  “Nobody,” said Leesa. “Except Russ, of course.” She paused. “Funny. That would be about when she got pregnant, wouldn’t it?”

  Neither Marcos nor I said anything.

  “You don’t think the baby was yours?” Leesa asked. “How come, Russ? Does he have freckles or black hair or something?”

  “I think it’s mine, Leesa,” I said. “Just forget about it okay?”

  “No way,” she said. “This is huge. You have to tell me why you’re—”

  “I wanted,” I said, “to make sure. That he was mine.”

  Leesa nodded. Apparently, that made sense to her. “Oh,” she said. “Okay, well then, is that it? Why are you guys still here?”

  Marcos and I went back to our lunch table.

  Puck was waiting for us. She was also pushing her peas around on her plate with her fork. She didn’t look up when we sat down. “Any luck?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “According to Leesa, Cindi wasn’t sleeping with anyone in September.”

  Puck put her fork down. “I think I know why you guys aren’t finding anything out.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “You don’t have pixie dust,” she said.

  She had a point.

  We had to explain to Marcos what pixie dust was. He didn’t want to believe that it was actually real. “Next you’ll be telling me all I need is a happy thought, and I can fly.”

  But Puck explained that pixie dust was just magical dust that pixies made. It had the effect of convincing humans to do whatever it was the Fey who had the pixie dust wanted them to do. All Puck had to do was blow it on someone. If she wanted them to talk, they’d have to tell her what happened, and we’d find out who the baby’s father was in no time.

  I thought it was an excellent idea. I was getting sick of inte
rviewing people at lunch anyway. Marcos agreed.

  “You go for it, girl,” he said. “I won’t need to come to school at lunch anymore.”

  “Good,” said Puck. “I’m tired of eating lunch alone.”

  No Puck. No Marcos. I guess I’d be eating alone again. That was okay. I was used to it.

  Puck had forbidden me to go back to the vampire bar without her. She said it was too dangerous. She explained to me that Fey often could bend time for humans. The reason was that time worked differently in Faerie than it did in the physical, human world. That was why Fey lived so much longer than humans did and why there were stories like Rip Van Winkle. I’d heard that story, right?

  It freaked me out. If the door hadn’t opened, I might have stayed in the room for longer than five hours. Puck said that if the situation was right, the Fey could hold a human captive his entire life.

  “Why do they do it?” I asked her.

  “Same reason they sacrifice babies,” she said. “They’re old; they’re heartless; they’re cruel. I want to change all of that.”

  Puck was the crusading Fey, all right. I took what she said to heart. I wouldn’t go back to the bar alone. It was weird, because a year ago, I never would have believed that I would need a girl to protect me. I would have laughed. Said that I could take care of myself. Said that I took care of girls. But here I was, admitting that I needed Puck, or I was in danger. And it didn’t feel weird or even wrong. It just proved to me how much I’d changed since last year. I was a completely different person. And I kind of liked the person that I was now better than the person I was last year. Sure life was easier then. But now, if I met the guy I was last year, I don’t think I’d even want to be friends with him, let alone want to be him.

  So, since I believed and trusted Puck, I wasn’t going to go back to the bar by myself. I was going to wait for her. Still, I didn’t like the way things stood. The changeling was cranky. He hated pretending to be a baby, and it showed. My parents kept commenting on the difference in him disposition-wise. He still didn’t make any noise, but now he twisted his face up into the most horrible expressions. He also rolled all over in his crib, mussing the covers. And he’d started to spit up milk on a regular basis. When I tried to talk to him about it, he just said, “You drink that shit.”

  I tasted it. He had a point. It was gross.

  But I couldn’t keep putting my parents through this crap. I had to get rid of the changeling. He wasn’t a baby, and he was a pretty poor substitute for one. I was also worried about Cindi’s baby. Where was he? Were they feeding him? Were they keeping him warm? Did it need to be a healthy sacrifice or would any scrawny, sick kid do? And what if we did get him back, but his psyche was forever scarred by the experience he’d had as a baby in the Korrigan Queen’s court? Certainly the sooner we could get him back the better it would be for everyone.

  But I felt as though my hands were tied. Puck had convinced me not to go looking for Robin without her, and we couldn’t coordinate our schedules to find a time to go together for quite some time. I also wasn’t interviewing people at school, because Puck had taken that away from me too. I appreciated Puck’s help, and I appreciated her passion for her crusade to change the face of Faerie, but I’d been cut off at the knees here. I felt as if I couldn’t do anything.

  I sat at home, watching TV, working on homework, yelling at my sister, yelling at the changeling, yelling at my parents … . Until everyone got sick of my yelling at them and asked me to leave. Some of them were nicer about it than others. Then, I went to my room and stared at the wall. I hated feeling helpless. I hated it. I thought about going back to see Cindi and trying to get her to answer my question today. Maybe she was lucid. Maybe they’d messed with her meds again and she wouldn’t be so loopy. Maybe if I could make her see how important this was, she would tell me who the father of the baby was. If I could just get that information, I knew that would help us. I knew we needed the baby’s real parent.

  I started to get ready to go, but then I remembered that it was Wednesday, and that Cindi’s parents always visited every Wednesday. I didn’t want to run into them at the facility. That would just create major problems and issues. They hated me.

  So, I couldn’t go see Cindi. No way could I do that. I stopped getting ready. I sat back down on my bed and stared at the wall. Cindi probably wouldn’t tell me anything else anyway. She hadn’t been very cooperative last time. There was no reason to assume that she’d be cooperative this time. I’d just be rehashing the past. No way. It was better if I didn’t go. It was better if I did nothing.

  But I couldn’t handle doing nothing! I needed to try to help to fix this problem. No one but Cindi had the answer this problem, and Cindi didn’t talk to anyone besides other kids at school about her love life. She didn’t have a shrink whose files I could raid after I broke into his office or anything.

  Wait. Breaking in … .

  Cindi’s parents weren’t home. And she was a teenage girl. What were the odds that she didn’t have a diary or a stack of letters or something like that stashed in her bedroom?

  Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. I had to break into Cindi’s bedroom. I asked my parents if it would be okay if I went to the library to look for books for my book report for English, and they said yes, even though I was grounded. Then I drove to Cindi’s house instead. Cindi’s parents owned a house on Bird Key because they were loaded. The house was enormous, but it was crammed against other enormous houses and there wasn’t a lot of privacy. Of course, a lot of the people who lived on Bird Key just had vacation homes there. Cindi’s dad worked with a company based in Sarasota, so they lived here year round. This time of year practically all of the homes were vacant. People tended to come to Florida in the winter or in the summer, but no one came in the fall.

  The fact that the neighborhood was practically empty worked in my favor. There was no one to be suspicious when I parked in Cindi’s driveway and walked up to her front door. I’d seen Cindi get locked out of the house once before, so I knew they kept a spare key in a hollow rock next to the front door. Sure enough, it was right there, and sticking out like a sore thumb. I don’t care how hard people try. Those hollow rocks never look like real rocks. Cindi had also shared the security code for the alarm with me. I just hoped that her parents hadn’t changed it in the past few months.

  I put the key in the lock and swung the door open. The keypad on the wall next to the door beeped. Holding my breath, I keyed in the security code sequence that Cindi had taught me. It went through. I shut the door behind me.

  Cindi’s house looked the same. Immaculate. Beautifully decorated. Pristine. Cindi used to say that she hated living in the house. That the white tile floors and ivory walls screamed out at her to mess them up. She had fantasies about taking a red crayon to her mother’s foyer. But she never did. She said that she had to keep appearances up for her parents. They had to think she was the way that they wanted her to be, but underneath the surface show she put on, she wanted nothing to do with the person they wanted her to be.

  I chuckled softly. Cindi was a rebel in some ways.

  Then it hit me, like a knife in the gut. Cindi had used me to keep up appearances. I had been her surface boyfriend. The boy for the parents. The other guys had been her deeper boyfriends. Her true loves. I was nothing more than a cover for Cindi. No wonder she’d cheated on me. She’d never taken me seriously at all.

  Suddenly, I wanted to cry. I didn’t. I wanted to, though. Standing here in Cindi’s house, it seemed to hurt more than it would anywhere else.

  But I didn’t have much time, and I needed to get to Cindi’s room and see what I could find. I headed up the steps, hoping that Cindi’s parents weren’t the type to box up all her stuff and put it in storage considering she’d been institutionalized. Hopefully, they’d left her room just the way she’d left it the night of the prom. I walked down the hall and to her room. The door was closed. I turned the knob and eased the door open. I breathed a sigh
of relief. Cindi’s parents hadn’t touched her room. Hell, they hadn’t even cleaned it (or had it cleaned, rather. Cindi’s parents weren’t the type to get their hands dirty). Cindi’s underwear was still lying on the floor in a heap. Her drawers were half-open, clothes spilling out over the tops. Her bed wasn’t made. Her makeup was cluttering her vanity.

  I stepped into the room. This was a little weird. After all, it was Cindi’s room, exactly the way she’d left it. Her room was just waiting for Cindi to come home, flounce onto her unmade bed, pick up the phone and call a girlfriend to tell her how totally awesome the prom was. But that was never going to happen. The prom hadn’t been awesome. It had been awful. Gazing about Cindi’s messy room, I remembered what she’d said to me the last time I’d visited her. That she hadn’t known she was pregnant. Could that really have been true? Had she been as surprised as me?

  None of this was important, though. I needed to be searching for a diary or a stack of love letters or something. Where would she have kept that kind of stuff? I tried to remember any stupid girl movie my sister had made me watch. Girls kept their diaries … under their mattresses. I lifted Cindi’s mattress. No diary. Maybe she kept it in her underwear drawer. I started pulling things out of her drawers. Nothing. I shoved all her clothes back in. Maybe … .

  On her bookshelf?

  Right there. On her bookshelf. A leather-bound book labeled Diary. Why would she leave her diary out in plain sight like that? Of course, her parents never spent much time in her bedroom … .

  I pulled it off the shelf and opened it in the middle of the book. Blank page. Great. It was a blank diary. I paged forward. I found some handwriting.

  “May 10

  “Dearest Diary,

  “Finally found my prom dress. R hasn’t seen it yet, but he’ll like it. Even though R is still pushing me to do the nasty after prom, and I don’t want to get that intimate with him. R is nice—too nice. He’s doormat boy. I’d much rather spend the evening with D or L, but neither of them have been speaking to me lately.”