The Fandom

by Anna Day

  Saskia hands us some pristine white gloves. I inch my fingers into them and begin straightening the loaves, so fresh their crusts fracture beneath my touch. Nate picks up a baguette and grins, and I suspect he remembers the hard g, too.

  I’m wrapping a loaf in a sheet of waxed paper when I spot Ash on a nearby apple cart. He sees me and raises a dark eyebrow. He walks over, his limbs fluid and natural, and presents me with an apple, scarlet against the white of his gloves.

  “Push off, Squirrel,” Saskia says.

  “I just wanted to talk to Violet. I’ll keep it brief, promise.”

  A guard loiters nearby and Saskia obviously doesn’t want a scene, so she returns to counting out the coins and mutters, “Five minutes.”

  He helps me wrap another loaf, but remains silent.

  “I thought you’d be back with your ma,” I finally say.

  “I wanted to check you were OK after … you know.” He lowers his voice so Nate and Saskia can’t hear. “I think I made a mistake showing you those things.”

  “I wanted to know the truth,” I whisper back.

  Our fingers connect momentarily as we reach for the same loaf, the material of our gloves bunching together. He glances up and smiles.

  A voice cuts through the air. “Where are your gloves, Imp?”

  The guard looks straight at us. My heart leaps into my mouth. I glance down and see the white cotton of our hands. Which means he’s either talking to Saskia … or Nate.

  I spin around, my worst fear confirmed, the peach of Nate’s uncovered hands peering through a light dusting of flour.

  I watch the terror cross his face as he realizes the guard is addressing him.

  “I—I—” His words knot together. “My hands were … hot.”

  The guard narrows his emerald eyes. “Your hands were … hot?”

  Nate’s body seems to shut down—chest stops rising, eyes stop blinking, fingers dig into the edge of the counter. I feel an overwhelming urge to rush to him, to scoop him up and protect him. But Ash whispers, “Don’t,” and the fear of making things worse stills me.

  The guard tightens his grip on his rifle. “Have you been putting your grubby Imp hands all over our Gem food?”

  Nate tries to shake his head, but instead just moves his eyes from side to side.

  The guard scowls, his face pinched, like he’s just yanked a drawstring that connects all his features together. “Cat got your tongue and your gloves?”

  Saskia steps forward, eyes lowered, palms up like she’s surrendering. “I’m so sorry, officer. I will see that he’s suitably punished. I will cane him myself when we return to our estate.”

  I’ve never heard her sound so obliging. I guess she’s trying to save him from a worse fate than caning. Sweat pricks the back of my neck and I can feel my thighs beginning to shake.

  The guard dismisses her with a wave of the hand. “Shut it, slave. Unless you want to lose your hands, too.”

  “NO!” It bursts from my mouth without permission.

  The guard swivels. “Who said that?”

  I open my mouth to reply, but the world looks kind of fuzzy and I forget where I am for a second.

  “I did,” Ash says.

  The guard laughs. “That’s a remarkably feminine voice you’ve got there, Imp.” He glares at him. “Seems like we could do with a good amputation, just to keep you all in line.”

  He hauls Nate from behind the stall.

  The reality of the situation smashes into me and it feels like my body plunges into a vat of lava. Hot and brimming with outrage. “NO!” I scream again. I lunge forward, but Ash and Saskia hold me back. I kick and punch, trying to break free, but they’re too strong and I bounce between them like a pinball. Several guards arrive, pointing and laughing at my outburst.

  “They’re going to chop off his hands,” I scream, trying to fish the sense from the words. The image of that Duplicate appears in my consciousness—half-formed, half-dead. Not Nate, not Nate. They can’t do that to Nate.

  Ash smothers my mouth. “Violet, they’ll kill him if you carry on like this.”

  But I can’t stop thrashing, just hoping that if I can somehow get to Nate, they’ll let me take his place.

  They drag Nate over to a corner in the square, their giant bodies swamping him. Quite a crowd gathers, but even from this distance, peering through the spectators, I imagine I can see the smooth, adolescent skin of each finger stretching toward his nail beds. The white of his palms. The map of veins hovering just beneath the surface of his narrow wrists. Vomit rises in my throat and I begin to cough.

  They shove him to his knees and twist a plastic tourniquet around his forearms. This can’t be happening. I suddenly feel strangely disconnected from my body; I don’t even know if it still fights, or just flops like a doll. I watch his sandy head bent low, tears plopping on the ground before him. I remember us high-fiving when he wasn’t even a year old, and then, when he was two, banging our fists together and shouting, “Yo!” I remember his first piano lesson, his little fingers barely able to span a fifth. I feel something wet and hot leaking down my cheeks and onto my tongue. It tastes like brine.

  The crowd falls silent and the guard raises a great curved knife above his head. It hovers in the air, a glowing crescent in the midday sun.

  “GUARDS!” A female Gem pushes through the crowd, beautiful yet clearly riled, followed closely by an equally beautiful male Gem. I recognize them even through a gauze of tears and horror: Alice and Willow.

  “WAIT.” Alice throws herself over Nate so that the guard would have to first slice through her. But Willow hangs back, uncertainty flickering across his face.

  “I demand that this stop immediately,” Alice shouts, her crimson dress fluttering in the breeze.

  Saskia gasps. “Isn’t that … ?”

  The guard shifts his weight, the knife still poised. “What is the meaning of this?”

  Alice turns her head but doesn’t budge. “I know this Imp, he works for my father. If he loses his hands, Papa will be furious.”

  Another guard steps forward. “Miss, with all due respect, there are so many Imps out there. Just find another one.”

  Alice smiles. “Oh no, this one’s irreplaceable.”

  “This is quite unorthodox, Miss …” The guard with the knife searches for a surname, his suspicions clearly roused.

  Willow finally steps forward. “Alice, her name’s Alice. And if you hadn’t noticed, she’s with me.”

  The guards see him for the first time, their faces stripped of any pride. “Master Harper, I am so sorry.” They tip their cloth caps.

  The blood starts moving around my body again, the world falls back into place. I feel Ash loosen his grip.

  Willow clears his throat, clearly a little embarrassed. “If Miss Alice says this Imp should be spared, then I back her unquestionably.”

  The guards do this groveling little bow, followed by a chorus of, “Yes, of course, Master Harper.”

  Alice stands and the guards dash to release the tourniquet. Something goes off in my head like a starting pistol and I streak across the market square, Ash’s feet pounding behind me, slightly out of sync with my own. I gather Nate up in my arms and bury my head in that soft curve between his shoulder and his neck. He just kind of slumps into me, all limp and heavy. I choke back the tears and smooth his hair from his face. “Jonathan, Jonathan,” I whisper, guiding him back to the stall. I use his given name, the name Mum and Dad use. I’m the closest thing to a parent he’s got right now. His body trembles and his hands are this strange blue color.

  “Are you OK?” Ash says, wrapping a protective arm around us both.

  Nate sobs. “They were going to do it. They were going to cut off my hands just because I took off my gloves.”

  “They’re monsters.” Ash shoots me a meaningful look.

  The crowd disperses and the guards move back to their posts. If it weren’t for my pulse drumming in my head and the ashen look on Nate’s
face, you would think nothing had just happened, like it’s completely normal for the Gems to hack off a fourteen-year-old boy’s hands.

  Willow eventually notices me—huddled around Nate and crying. A look of shock and guilt disturbs his perfect face. I stare back at him, shamelessly, refusing to look away. We both know he wouldn’t have spoken out, wouldn’t have stopped the amputation had Alice not been there. I remember his words from the orchard just the other night: It’s just the way it’s always been. I think of the nine loops of rope, that crumpled paper chain, the no-ape signs, the truncated, floating boy, and I feel anger inflate my entire body, making me twenty, thirty, forty feet tall. I don’t want to tell him I love him, I want to throttle him. And judging from his face, he can tell.

  Alice gently tugs his arm. Just before they walk away, she looks over her shoulder.

  “Thank you,” I mouth at her.

  She smiles her beautiful smile and winks.

  MY DAD ONCE told me something really cool about frogs:

  “If you drop a frog in a pan of boiling water, it hops out immediately, clutching his burned froggy arse with his flippers. But you stick that same frog in a pan of cold water and slowly turn up the heat, the daft bugger just sits there. He sweats off his little froggy balls until, eventually, the water boils and he croaks. Literally.” (He’s funny, my dad. And he knows a lot of random crap. I guess that’s where Nate gets it from.)

  Well, I feel like that first frog. Like I’ve been shoved into a pan of boiling water and my arse is on fire. But the other Imps, they’re like the second frog. They’ve sat in that pan so long, they’ve grown used to the heat. A boy nearly gets his hands chopped off and it’s business as normal. You get called an ape, carry on as always. You get sexually assaulted, maybe even shot by a guard—just another day in The Gallows Dance.

  But unlike the first frog, I’ve got nowhere to jump to. I’m stuck in that bastard pan, just counting down the days until I hang.

  As soon as we return to the manor, Nate crawls into his bunk. Even Saskia seems concerned, making sure he eats an extra hunk of bread and tucking the covers up around his chin. Dusk falls and I know I must head to the orchard to wait for Willow one last time, but before I go I kiss Nate on the head, inhaling his scent. He stirs in his sleep and I kiss him again, just for good measure.

  As I leave, Saskia catches me by the arm. “Remember. You’re just pretending to fancy him.”

  “It’s OK, Saskia. You saw what happened at the market.” And he keeps his truncated brother floating in a tank, I think to myself.

  She smiles like she knows everything and I know nothing. “Imp or Gem, men are all a bunch of scumbags.”

  I manage a weak laugh and shuffle to the orchard, still numbed by shock and immune to the chill, trying to rehearse my lines in my head. I know this is the most important scene yet—the midway twist, the scene that ultimately results in Willow following Rose to the city. But the lines stick together and I can’t quite separate them, because I don’t want to tell Willow I love him, I want to tell him he’s a massive turd.

  As I walk beside the lake, I notice the moon, a perfect sphere in the water. I smile in spite of myself—funny how the reflection, the echo, can look as real as the thing it reflects. I reach down and fumble with a stone. Then I lob it so it smashes the sphere into a thousand silver pieces.

  “Violet.”

  I turn and see Ash approaching. He tilts his head to the side and something reaches inside my gut and starts to pull.

  “What’s going on with you?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I recognized that Gem, the girl from the market.”

  I must look confused because he sighs, a little irritated. “Let me give you a clue: massive man feet.”

  I don’t know how to explain it, and I don’t really have time. I have to meet Willow in a few minutes. “Look, it’s really complicated.”

  “You told me she’s not a Gem.” He sounds a little hurt, betrayed even.

  “She isn’t.”

  “So she really is a spy?”

  My hand connects with his. “One day I’ll explain, I promise.”

  “You’re keeping secrets from me, after I showed you …” He tails off. We both know what he means, and I’m not surprised he’s pissed.

  “I’ll tell you, I promise … just not now. I have to meet someone.”

  He examines me with big, searching eyes. “You’re not seriously going to meet him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t really like him, not after you saw those Dupes, not after he was going to let those guards cut off Nate’s hands.”

  “I know.”

  “And you know he’s never going to be with you, not properly, the law forbids it. You’ll end up dancing on those gallows.”

  “Ash, I know.”

  “So why are you doing this?”

  I want to tell him everything, starting at Comic-Con and ending right here at the lake, I want to tear down that wall of secrets and lies and I want him to see me for who I really am, but most of all, I want to throw my arms around him and lay my head on his shoulder, knowing that we will fit together perfectly. But I know I can do none of those things. There’s just too much at stake. My body feels like a selection of interlocking parts. I’ve lost all sense of wholeness, of completeness, as though I’m some strange, corrugated puppet held together by pegs.

  He sighs—his breath hangs between us like mist. “Do you have real feelings for him?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Because you shouldn’t want someone just because”—his mouth twists a little—“because they have a perfect chest-to-waist ratio, or the perfect cheekbones, or the glossiest hair. You should want someone because they’re … I don’t know … real, true.”

  I can’t help but glance at the water, tiny fragments of moon still dancing across its surface. I look back at Ash, his slightly proud nose, his unthinkably pale-blue eyes, and the mouth that I know has the ability to completely overshadow the rest of his features when it cracks a smile. Then I think of Nate and Alice and Katie and home. I have to carry on with the canon. I have to make those two pieces of thread weave together again. I used to cling to the script, to predictability, but now it feels like someone’s ripping me down the middle. “I know, I know.”

  “I mean, he doesn’t even know your real name, and it’s such a pretty name, so much better—”

  But he never gets to finish his sentence because I’ve already leaned forward and started to kiss him. He returns my kiss, his lips warm and soft, his breath filling my nostrils, and I’m spinning and floating like a maple seed, filled with joy and launching into the sky. He weaves his fingers along my spine, an elaborate pattern, and I get this feeling like I can’t inhale any deeper, like my lungs will burst. I pull him closer so his body presses against mine—we really do fit together perfectly.

  But my head fills with Alice and Katie and Nate, and that awful ripping feeling returns.

  The damned canon.

  That bastard butterfly.

  I pull away. “I’m sorry.”

  He studies my face. “You—you just want him?”

  The lie sticks in my throat like something barbed and sharp. And for some reason, I think of the quote from Katie’s letter. All the world’s a stage. I swallow hard and push the words out one by one. “Yes. I just want Willow.”

  And without saying anything, he turns and walks away.

  I REACH THE ORCHARD, firmly blinking the tears from my eyes and wiping the kiss from my mouth. I’m such a mess, kissing the wrong character, falling for the wrong guy. Maybe Sally King was right, maybe you can fall in love in just a few days, if the person’s right, if you and they just fit together. For God’s sake, Violet, I tell myself, he’s from another reality, another universe, and you’re going home. The image of my body falling heavily against a rope flashes into my mind—in two days, I will hang. I push it away, blinking hard.

  I turn the
se thoughts in my head again and again, briefly recalling the times when my worst fears were failing an exam or choking on another olive. I almost don’t notice how cold I’ve grown, how dark it’s become. Eventually, the clock chimes midnight.

  The bottom of my stomach falls away.

  Willow isn’t coming.

  The most important scene yet, and Willow’s stood me up. It feels like my skin is missing. I’ve failed. For whatever reason, he doesn’t want me. Nate was right. I should have stuck to the script. I run through it all in my mind, the Gallows Ball, the kiss, the market.

  Something clicks. The market. He’s embarrassed, of course. He failed to stand up for an Imp, an Imp clearly important to me. He let me down, and he knows it. I feel my heart rate slow. I just need to go to him, show him that it’s OK and get the canon back on track.

  I push aside thoughts of Ash, thoughts of the noose tightening around my throat, thoughts of that truncated, floating body, and I feel a renewed sense of purpose. I take a huge mouthful of apple-scented air.

  I run to the manor, loop around the back, and stare up the oak. Light spills from Willow’s window. He’s awake. I try chucking a few stones up, but the branches get in the way and I fail to draw his attention. There’s only one thing to do: I have to climb that stupid tree.

  I recall Ash’s advice and slowly, steadily inch up the branches, never freeing more than one limb at a time, testing the boughs before I put my weight on them. I get numerous twigs in my face, leaves in my hair, and I graze my hand a couple of times on hidden shards of bark, but I make pretty good progress.

  I near the top, never looking down, always looking up, anticipating the break in the leaves and the view of the stars, enjoying the wind in my face as the branches thin. And as I near Willow’s window, ready to reach out a trembling fist to rap on the pane, I actually have a massive grin plastered across my face. Me—Violet—climbing a monstrous tree, making a Gem fall in love with her. I feel invincible. I shimmy across a bough, fortunately strong enough to take my weight, and a little giggle escapes my mouth. The light from his window illuminates my hands as they splay before me. And finally, I pull my body upward so I look straight into his room.