Once Upon a Changeling

by V. J. Chambers

  Sometimes I forgot how lucky I am to live where I do. This place truly was paradise. And as Puck and I strolled along the beach, I was struck by just how beautiful it was. I almost never took walks on the beach, even though I lived a ten-minute drive away from the water. I just sort of took that fact for granted and rarely took advantage of it. I needed to spend more time enjoying what I had.

  I was on the lookout for pixies, but I didn’t really know what they looked like. Were they little specks of light? Were they tiny people with wings? I wanted to ask Puck, but I just felt too stupid doing it. I felt so ignorant about Fey in general, and I didn’t want to showcase it for Puck. For some reason, I wanted her to have a good opinion of me. Lately, I’d just been annoying her and getting into trouble. I wanted to show her that I could do a good job. And I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of her.

  So, I just walked with Puck and waited for her to tell me that there were pixies nearby. The sun sank lower and lower over the water, spilling orange and red light all over it. The light glittered on the water and illuminated Puck’s hair, so that it was like a glowing halo around her head. It hit me again just how pretty she was. Here we were, walking along the beach together, a guy and a girl. It was almost like a date.

  I was startled. A date? Me and Puck? That was crazy right? I mean, she was super gorgeous, and I really liked hanging out with her, and we got along pretty well, but—

  Well, there was no way she felt anything for me, was there?

  Puck reached over and grabbed my hand. Little thrills shot over my arm. I looked over at her, deep into her huge eyes.

  And Puck pointed at a group of middle school boys who were lighting firecrackers further up the beach.

  “Those guys are pixies,” she said.

  Right. Pixies. I dropped her hand as if it burned me and tried to clear my mind of any embarrassing thoughts I’d been having. I concentrated on the kids she’d pointed at.

  She had to be kidding. Those were pixies?! Bratty twelve-year-olds in backwards baseball caps? I could hardly believe it. Where were their wings? Where was Tinkerbell, for god’s sake? I didn’t even know if I wanted to buy pixie dust from these kids. I almost asked Puck if she was sure, but I thought that would sound really stupid, so I bit my tongue.

  “Now,” Puck said. “Just let me do the talking, okay?”

  In a few minutes we were close to them. Puck led me right up to them and stopped.

  They stopped planting their bottle rocket in the sand and looked up at us.

  “What do you want?” asked one of them.

  “Dust,” said Puck.

  The guys exchanged a look.

  “We ain’t got none,” said the same guy who’d spoken before. He must be their spokesperson or something.

  “Yes, you do,” said Puck. “Pixies always have dust.”

  “Ain’t for sale,” countered the kid. “We got standards, y’know.”

  “We’re not good enough for you?” Puck asked.

  “He’s not,” said the kid.

  “He’s got money,” said Puck.

  “He’s human. What’s a human want with dust?”

  “That’s not your business,” said Puck.

  “It is if it’s our dust,” said the pixie.

  Puck rolled her eyes. “Show him the money, Russ.”

  I dug a roll of cash out of my pocket. It was exactly as much as Puck had instructed me to get. The pixie’s eyes lit up. Apparently, pixies didn’t want to sell to humans, but they liked human money. Go figure.

  My parents were going out of town that weekend, and I was ungrounded as well. I knew that this would be the perfect weekend to ask Puck out on a date. But I just couldn’t decide whether or not it was a good idea. I kept worrying about everything. Not just the idea that going on a date might ruin our friendship, but the idea that Puck would say no. Maybe she wasn’t attracted to me in the same way I was attracted to her. Maybe she would laugh in my face. Maybe she would think it was ludicrous for us to date. After all, Puck wasn’t human. She was Fey. And Fey people might not necessarily date humans. Maybe I was beneath her in terms of the social ladder and whatnot.

  I knew that Puck’s mother was really old—like centuries old. When Puck said that she was an adolescent, what did that mean in Fey terms? Were adolescents teenagers like they were in human terms, or were adolescents fifty or sixty years old? Maybe I was just way too young for Puck. There were all kinds of things about dating her that could end up being problematic, and I just could hardly handle thinking about it. So I couldn’t ask. Not until I’d sorted out whether it was a good idea or not.

  Not to mention, if I did ask her out, where would we go and what would we do? How could I possibly come up with an idea for a date that would dazzle a faerie? Who knew what she’d seen in her life? Who knew how long her life had actually been? For all I knew, she’d lived like a princess in magical worlds ever since she was very small, and she would think that any idea I had was ridiculous and stupid.

  I tried to talk to Marcos about it, but he was no help at all.

  I begged Marcos. I said, “Just tell me if you think she would say yes.”

  He got fed up and told me, “Look. Ask her. Don’t ask her. But stop asking me about asking her.”

  I realized that Marcos really wasn’t the guy to be asking about girls. After all, I’d never seen him with a girl. I’d never heard of him being with a girl. For all I knew, he’d never had a girlfriend. He was clueless.

  Friday rolled around. I was unceremoniously ungrounded. My parents left on their trip. I still didn’t ask Puck. I paced my house after school. I didn’t have to work until Sunday. I had Puck’s phone number. I could call her. I thought about it and thought about it.

  I went into the kid’s room.

  He was in high spirits as usual. “Are you ever going to get the real baby back?” he demanded.

  “Do humans and Fey ever date?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “Are you crazy?”

  I left his room. What the hell did he know, anyway?

  Then again, he knew more than me. He was actually Fey. I needed to stop thinking about dating Puck. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. I had to put the whole thing out of my head. No more thinking about dating Puck.

  But I would call Puck. I’d call Puck and Marcos and we’d hang out in my house that night, because my parents weren’t here, we’d been working hard, and we deserved some rest and recuperation.

  When I called Marcos, he said, “What happened? Puck take it the wrong way and you’re trying to make it into a group thing now?”

  I told him that the changeling had told me that humans and Fey didn’t date.

  “Oh, fuck that,” said Marcos. “Ask her anyway.”

  It was too late. I’d already told Puck it was a group thing, and besides, I was over the whole idea. It was silly. I knew now that it could never work. So I wasn’t going to pursue it.

  Marcos went with it, but he told me, “Listen, if you have feelings for someone, you can’t just turn them off like a light switch, okay? They’re going to come back, no matter how wrong you think they might be.”

  Maybe I was wrong about Marcos having no experience with girls. Or maybe I wasn’t, and he was just talking out of his ass. Whatever, he said he’d bring some whiskey. I was down for that.

  I’d never been the kind of guy who got wasted on a regular basis. Sure, I drank occasionally at parties; lately, not at all, because I no longer got invited to parties, but I didn’t go overboard. It seemed to me that drinking like that only made you puke or pass out and neither thing seemed like a very good time to me. I usually just drank enough to feel good—buzzed. Then I stopped. Or slowed down, at least. Tonight, I was definitely down with getting buzzed, but I didn’t plan on getting any drunker than that.

  But I did.

  Marcos showed up. Puck got there a little later. By the time she arrived, Marcos and I were already working on whiskey and cokes, and Marcos easily c
onvinced me to take shots. Puck wouldn’t drink, claiming that liquor would make her sick. We asked her if she’d gotten sick before, and she told us that she hadn’t ever tried to drink liquor. So, of course, we asked how she knew she’d get sick if she drank liquor if she’d never tried it. She just knew.

  We couldn’t stop ragging on Puck. We said she would be fine if she drank just a little liquor, that she’d only get sick if she drank a lot of it. And she kept saying, “No, no, no, I will not drink liquor. I will not.”

  Marcos and I couldn’t let it go. It got worse the drunker we got. I felt invincible with that much liquor in me, like I could rule the world. I told Puck, “Look, just try a little whiskey. I promise if you get sick, I will take care of you.”

  “Really?” she said. “You won’t call my mom?”

  “No,” I said. “Why would I do that?”

  “Because my mom doesn’t know where I am. She doesn’t like that I’m hanging out with humans so much now.”

  It turned out that almost the entire punk population of Sarasota High was actually made of faeries. Apparently, the fact that Puck wasn’t eating lunch with them was a cause for concern.

  “I would never call your mother,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Puck. “But only a little bit.”

  I let her supervise the making of her drink. We gave her a very tiny amount. Marcos even made fun of her for it, telling her there was no way she would even feel that amount of whiskey, let alone get sick from it.

  After drinking her whiskey and coke, she agreed with us. “Nothing’s happening,” she said. We made another drink, this one with a normal amount of liquor in it. Marcos and I took a shot.

  We all sat down on the linoleum floor of my kitchen, drinks in hand. I was feeling very, very drunk. “Listen, guys,” I said. “I feel really lucky to have friends like you. You know that right?”

  “I do know that,” said Puck. “And Russ, I want to make sure that you know that I do care about helping you, not just about protesting the cruelty of faeries. I don’t want you to think I’m using you.”

  “I don’t think that,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Because I really care about you, and I want you to be happy.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Maybe I really should ask her out. “I care about you too, Puck.”

  “Russ,” said Marcos. “I really haven’t been a good friend to you.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Marcos, you’re the best,” said Puck. “You really are doing this out of the kindness of your heart, not because you want to send some political message.” Her words were starting to sound slurred. That couldn’t be. She hadn’t had that much to drink.

  “That’s just it,” said Marcos. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “You can tell me anything,” I said.

  “You can tell us anything,” said Puck, sounding like someone who’d been drinking for hours.

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you before,” said Marcos. “But it’s never really seemed like the right time. I know that’s not an excuse, but—”

  Puck fell over, her head smacking against the linoleum. The noise stopped both Marcos and I and we stared at her, frozen for a few seconds.

  Then I grabbed her, pulling her into my lap. She looked okay, except for the fact that her eyes were wide open. “Shit,” I breathed.

  “Did she pass out?” asked Marcos.

  “I don’t think so. Her eyes are wide open,” I said. “I’ve never seen someone pass out with their eyes open.”

  Marcos tentatively reached for her wrist to feel her pulse. I held my breath. He looked at me and nodded. I let my breath out. She was alive. At least.

  “She didn’t have that much to drink,” said Marcos. “She couldn’t be that drunk.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  “Christ,” said Marcos. “Should we call an ambulance?”

  “No. She’s Fey. They wouldn’t be able to help her.”

  “We have to call her mom.”

  “We promised we wouldn’t.”

  We stared at each other in dread. What were we going to do?

  “Let’s ask the changeling,” I said.

  “Good idea,” said Marcos. “I’ll go get him.”

  The changeling wouldn’t help until we gave him some whiskey. Then he told us, “You can’t give Fey liquor. It’s not good for them. She’ll come to eventually. And then she’ll need to throw up. Everything.”

  “How come you can drink liquor?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “Practice.”

  I held Puck until she woke up, which seemed like eternities, when in fact it was only an hour or so. While I was holding her, I realized that I didn’t care if Fey and humans didn’t date, because I really, really liked Puck, and I couldn’t risk not trying to get together. We might die, either of us, at any time, and I wouldn’t know if it might have worked. I was going to ask her out. I was.

  Finally, her eyes opened. But the changeling was right. She was pretty sick. So that really wasn’t the right time to ask her out. She locked herself in the bathroom and would only yell, “I’m okay,” when either Marcos or I knocked on the bathroom door.

  My younger sister Emily was disgusted by the whole business. She threatened to tell mom and dad I’d had a party. I pointed out that two people was hardly a party, but she pointed out that there was whiskey involved, so I had to pay her off with bribe money so she’d keep her mouth shut. Little sisters are a pain. A huge pain.

  Finally, Puck came out of the bathroom and declared that she needed to go home. She seemed sort of angry. We tried to apologize for encouraging her to drink liquor, but she just said, “It’s fine, okay? It’s fine.”

  Marcos went home pretty soon after that, and I went to bed. I knew that I was in love with Puck, but I’d made her really angry at me. I was no closer to finding the baby’s real father than I’d ever been. The Equinox was in a week. My life kind of sucked.

  Emily was pissed the next morning, because her underwear was missing. She stormed into my room around nine. I was not ready to be awake yet. Not at all. Also my head was pounding. I was not at all happy that my sister had awakened me or that she was in my room without knocking.

  At first, all I could do was make angry, groggy sounds. I couldn’t understand what it was that Emily was saying. She was standing over my bed, and her mouth was moving, and sounds were coming out of it, but I couldn’t understand what the sounds meant. I tried to put together words to tell her to get the hell out of my room, but that didn’t work very well either.

  Finally, the early morning sludge of sleep cleared and I began to hear what it was she was saying.

  “Somebody took my underwear,” she said.

  “All of it?” I asked.

  “No, not all of it,” she said. “Several pairs of underwear. Several pairs of slightly sexy looking underwear. It’s gone. I think your creepy friend Marcos took it.”

  That was crazy. Marcos wouldn’t—

  I looked at my sister. My sister was kind of hot. And Marcos had said last night that he wasn’t being a good friend to me. What if he meant that he was stealing my kid sister’s underwear?

  I threw off the covers. “That bastard,” I growled.

  Nobody took my kid sister’s underwear. Nobody should even be thinking about the fact that my sister wore underwear. Wait. That didn’t sound right either. Of course my sister should wear underwear—

  Oh, gross, I didn’t want to think about this kind of stuff. The important thing was that my sister was in trouble. I was her big brother. I was going to fix this. I was going to help her out.

  I dialed Marcos’ number furiously. His father answered. “Yeah,” I said. “Put Marcos on the phone.”

  “He’s asleep,” said Marcos’ father.

  “Wake him up,” I snarled.

  A few moments of silence.

  Then a groggy Marcos. “What’s this about?”

  “Marcos, it’s Russ,” I sa
id.

  “Hey, Russ,” said Marcos, friendly now. “What’s up?”

  “How could you?” I said. “You rat bastard.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Marcos.

  “Oh, don’t play dumb. You know what I’m talking about. You even tried to tell me last night. I don’t know if you thought that bringing over whiskey would make me forgive you or what, but you were severely mistaken. What you did is unforgiveable.”

  Marcos was quiet. “I thought you might feel that way. I guess saying I’m sorry won’t mean much.”

  “No, it won’t,” I said. “My sister is just a kid, and you are a fucking pervert.”

  “Wait,” said Marcos. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you stealing my sister’s underwear, you little perv.”

  “I didn’t take your sister’s underwear,” said Marcos.

  “Now, you’re trying to deny it? You were just apologizing for it a second ago.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was apologizing for something else.”

  “Don’t pretend you didn’t do it all of the sudden.”

  “I didn’t do it. Jesus, Russ, why would I want your sister’s underwear?”

  “I don’t want to know what you do with it,” I said. “I just want you to know that it has to stop and that I’m going to kick your ass.”

  “Russ,” said Marcos. “I didn’t take it.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know.” He paused. “I bet it was the changeling. He took your parents’ wine and got you grounded, didn’t he?”

  Marcos had a point.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to stay on the phone with you and search the changeling’s room. But if you’re wrong, you are in for a world of hurt.”

  “I am not interested in your sister, Russ. I wouldn’t want to date her in a million years.”

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong with Emily?”

  “God! Nothing’s wrong with her. She’s cute, but she’s too young. And she’s your sister. It would be weird. Don’t you think it would be weird?”