Pretty Peg

by Skye Allen

  Laura peered at the wire strung above the stage. “Stars and moons, so cute.” I had to wait until she stood up straight again to get a good view of the wire. A cluster of stars hung from one end, and a model solar system made of varnished Trix cereal bobbed at the other. But the Grant family charms were not there.

  “There was other stuff here, like not even a minute ago. People. And a horse.” A deep shiver started in my belly.

  Laura shrugged and stepped around my bag into the bathroom.

  I stared at the wire. So she wasn’t the one moving stuff around on the stage. I felt my whole mental landscape shift and rearrange itself.

  AS I walked the six blocks to Fern’s, I thought about how different the house felt with Mom gone. She normally sat at the kitchen table for hours every night, shaping pots on her wheel or pounding clay, always falling into the rhythm of whatever Laura was practicing. Or she used to until the last six months, when the great battle for Mom’s soul had started to tilt in favor of Valium versus artistic expression.

  I wondered about Robert too, but he hadn’t been a real part of the family for so long, he was a ghost. My brother was Christmas cards with just a signature, ones Mom hid at the back of the counter display. Two photos, one where he was eleven and one where he was sixteen. That was the year he moved to Idaho with Dad. It was like there were two different Grant families: the one with Mom and Dad and Robert, and the one with Mom and three daughters.

  I ordered a café au lait and settled in at a rickety table next to the palm tree on the patio. The place to sit at Fern’s Bleedingheart Lounge, café by day, bar by night, was out back. You could watch the outfits coming in the door, and the passion vine-covered chain-link fence kept out the wind. I breathed in sweet steam and stacked my homework in dessert order, English last.

  “Josephine Grant.” I looked up. Leaning against my palm tree, in a David Bowie T-shirt and carpenter pants cut off at the knees, was Nicky. The girl from school. She had a halo. I looked more carefully and realized there were white Christmas lights in the tree behind her, making her curly brown hair glow.

  “Guilty. Hi again.”

  “Hi. Cool hair, by the way.”

  I’d forgotten about my hair. I touched it to remind myself what was different. Pink, that was it. “Thanks, it’s, uh, actually my natural color. I’m letting it grow in.”

  “So do I get you?” Her dark eyes crinkled.

  “Huh?” She can’t be hitting on me.

  She pointed a silver-ringed finger at my bag, where the drama club flyer was sticking out. “For senior service at the theater. Don’t tell me you got all beguiled by tutoring or something worthy since lunch.” She hooked the other chair with her foot and dropped into it.

  “Oh right. I actually am a tutor, but yeah.” I unfolded the pink flyer over my knees and discovered the paper horse from the puppet theater tucked into it. I must have put it in my bag when I left the house. Weird. I didn’t remember that.

  Nicky snatched the horse out of my lap with a gasp like she’d been stabbed with a safety pin. “So you know.” Her voice didn’t rise, but it rang out. A couple at the next table jerked their heads up from their laptops.

  “Know what?” I didn’t like how she’d just grabbed it like that. My hands went toward hers, but I stopped before I touched her. Could she tell? About me? That I liked girls?

  It didn’t matter. Out of my league. I swallowed and hoped my face wasn’t as red as it felt.

  She turned the horse over, tracing the little strip of gold tape on the base. “Pretty Peg,” she murmured. Her features were drawn inward, like she’d forgotten I was there. A ripple went through the horse’s metallic ribbon mane, and its legs stirred. I thought it was the wind, and I slapped my hand down on my papers on the cool metal table, but the air was still and heavy with the smell from the fire pit next door at Vulcan.

  She seemed to shake herself back to reality. She met my eyes. “So you know all about it. We only have a few days.” Her voice was firm, matter-of-fact.

  She must be off her meds or something. “Uh, I found this puppet theater last night in my garage. My sister made it. That’s where that horse came from. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Not the first.” She said it to her hands, still stroking the horse’s blue spine. Then to me, in a clear voice: “You really don’t? Know about the toy theater?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. This is so not graceful. Let me start at the top. You see, I already know you. Your family. I knew your sister Margaret.”

  I just stared at her. You know my whole family? Something about the calm in her voice stirred me into a panic. I dropped my hands into my lap, one hot from my coffee, one cold. I looked at her, her face pleading, dense eyebrows drawn together over brown eyes that looked bronze in the sun. Her T-shirt collar was ragged against the smooth V where her collarbones met. The skin there was darker. I averted my eyes so I couldn’t get caught staring.

  Nicky sat up straight then, nodded with her eyes locked on mine, balanced the horse upright on her palm. Blew out air through her plump lips. David Bowie rose and fell. “I barely know you, not really. I know you don’t know me. But I have to tell you something. You’re not going to believe it, but you have to believe it.”

  Margaret was in the CIA. She’s still alive in a cave somewhere in Pakistan. She was really a man.

  “Okay.” I slurped my drink and made a go-on gesture with my free hand. “Talk.”

  She began, “What you know about your sister’s life and her death, that’s not the full story. There is a—it’s hard to explain. Another world beside the one you know. There are creatures you can’t imagine, tastes that can haunt you until you’re hungry forever.” Her voice drifted off, and her long fingers drew restless circles in a patch of spilled sugar.

  “Margaret was killed in Afghanistan while she was working with Doctors Without Borders. In the spring.” Saying “in the spring” made it easier on whoever I talked to. If I said “on March 20, 2012, five months and six days ago, on the road near her office, after curfew.” I usually got a follow-up lecture about prescription medication or the five stages of grief. I was doing fine on my own. I missed Margaret, but I had my hands full taking care of Mom.

  Besides, I didn’t want to start getting deep into my own feelings. That raw egg could break at any time.

  Nicky shifted in her chair and met my eyes. She clasped her hands together on the table and said, “I’m really sorry to take you by surprise with this. Your sister was loved, you can’t imagine. But that’s not exactly what happened to her.”

  “So she was up in some kind of rave scene? Like drugs?” My heroic sister was a drug addict. It made a twisted kind of sense: look at Mom’s deep and abiding relationship with prescription painkillers.

  Nicky was laughing. “Oh, there are folk who would not be flattered by that. No.” She drew in a long breath through her wide nostrils. “Did Pretty Peg—did Margaret ever talk to you about magic?”

  “Magic. Nope.” I was annoyed. This conversation was going in a sales-pitch direction that didn’t make me comfortable. I hoped she wasn’t going to ask me to go to the Wiccan bookstore or accept Jesus into my heart.

  “Your sister was—hurt when she was a child. By someone close to her.” She looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I was pretty clear on what she was talking about. It was the big family deal, the other subject we didn’t discuss because it made Mom cry. When he was sixteen and she was twelve, Robert molested Margaret. That was why he and my dad moved out. Mom and Dad decided it was best to isolate him from the rest of us instead of putting him into the system. They weren’t technically divorced, but you couldn’t deny that our family was broken.

  Nicky went on: “She escaped into a kind of magical place—well, the whole world has magic. She escaped to our world. And the Fair Folk came to love her. Oh, I knew this would be hard to explain.”

  “Fair folk? You mean like carnies?” My mind showed me a
movie of Margaret with a trucker’s hat and a smoker’s cough, selling tickets to a rickety roller coaster. No way.

  She kept talking as if I hadn’t interrupted. “And she loved them too, but she got caught up in some trouble she never should have been part of.” Now she met my eyes with her wide round ones. “And she died.”

  I was getting angry. “Look, Margaret got killed by some random guy. He hasn’t been caught. They did think it could be an insurgent, but it could just as easily have been some psycho. They have those everywhere. A lot of people are willing to believe something like that could only happen in a place like Kabul, but there’ve been close to a hundred murders so far this year in Oakland alone, not to mention all the—”

  She cut me off. “She was killed by the Woodcutter. An enemy of the Summer Folk.” She passed a silver-ringed hand across her mouth when she looked at the confusion that must have been on my face. “My people. You would call them fairies.”

  Oh. She’s messing with me. That’s what this is. Furious tears blurred my eyes, and I tilted my head back so she wouldn’t see. I said to the palm leaves over my head, “Okay. I’m going home.” When I was sure I wasn’t going to really cry, I started pulling my books together, not looking at Nicky. I added, “So that whole drama club thing was fake?”

  “I confess I thought if I could get you to the theater, I wouldn’t have quite so much to explain. I shouldn’t have pretended. Please. Listen. I came here to help.” She held down my spiral notebook as I tried to slide it toward me.

  “Yeah, I really don’t need help.”

  “You actually do, and you don’t know you do, and that makes it worse and more dangerous. Just let me explain.” The steely note in her voice made me stop moving and watch her face.

  “I’ll buy that you knew my sister, or you know something about her, or whatever, but she’s gone. Leave her alone.” I stood up.

  “Meet me at the theater after school tomorrow, and I can show you what I’m talking about.” She held my gaze with brown dog eyes, liquid and too beautiful to be wasted on a mean crazy person.

  I looked away. “Oh, too bad. Tuesday’s actually my support group for people who believe in unicorns.”

  “You think the dolls in the toy theater are being moved by Pretty Peg.”

  My mind went swimmy as I worked that out. I hadn’t told anyone besides Laura about the puppet theater.

  But yes, that was what I secretly half suspected, even though I knew it was impossible. That my dead sister was somehow talking to me.

  “How do you know about that?” I asked.

  “Just come tomorrow. Come and I’ll show you. You do need our help.” Her voice was pleading. She stepped in closer, and I smelled cinnamon.

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not. But we can protect you.”

  “Protect me from what exactly?” I slung my bag across my chest.

  She took a breath and pierced me with a look. “Not just you. You were right about one thing. The Woodcutter was never caught. He’s looking for you and your sister Laura.”

  Chapter 2

  THE NEXT day, when the bell rang after last period, I jumped up and said “Bathroom” to Neil. I didn’t think he’d follow me all the way upstairs to the bathroom with the good lighting, but when I turned around in the doorway, there he was, sweeping his black bangs out of his eyes as he slid down the wall to the dusty linoleum tiles of the hallway. I brushed my hair, feeling the crisp pink strands crackle, and slicked on lip gloss. I ran the cold water and dabbed a wet paper towel on my eyelids. Nothing in my teeth. I twisted my bracelet until the name faced up, the Margaret bracelet I’d been wearing ever since the white file box of her stuff came back from Afghanistan. Okay. Neil was still sitting on the floor when I swung the door back out.

  “So this is a date?” he asked as we followed the stragglers down the stairs.

  “No, I’m supposed to meet that girl Nicky at the theater.”

  “Ah.”

  “Shut up. I told you, there’s something weird about her. And she was annoying, how she just ran off like that.” And she thinks Laura and I are in some kind of trouble. I hadn’t told Neil that part.

  “Ah.”

  We were at the theater door. He poked my collarbone and said, “IM me,” and walked away down the hall. Backpack over both coat-hanger shoulders. Only Neil, with his easy grace, could do that and not look like a complete loser.

  Inside, the theater was dark except for a single bulb on the stage, and the air smelled like paint. I pulled the heavy doors closed behind me and waited for my eyes to adjust. Rows of folding seats stretched out ahead of me into the void.

  “Hi.” Nicky was close. I turned to follow her voice. She appeared on my left and ahead of me, loping up the aisle between seats. A collared white shirt tucked into trousers in a color I couldn’t make out. A stud in one ear flashed under dark curls. She stopped inches from me. “You came.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This way.” She spun toward the stage, not looking back. I hitched up my bag where it bumped my thigh and tried to bury my apprehension. She’s just a weird girl. What’s the worst that can happen? She’ll probably just try to get me to buy into her magic mushroom farm or something.

  I followed her quick steps across the stage, past a grove of deep red curtains that swayed like giant seaweed. The lectern in the wings had a sign taped to it that said PICTURE THEM NAKED. I glanced at Nicky’s shoulders in the crisp shirt ahead of me and obeyed without thinking. Oh. Shit.

  I didn’t see the door. I just stumbled when she stopped walking. She was hunched over the doorknob, but she wasn’t using a key. Her hand was flat against the peeling paint of the door, and she was breathing out words with no sound.

  She looked up at me, with a feral grin that made the downturning corners of her long mouth turn up, and pushed. The battered door swung inward with none of the creaking I was braced for. She stepped through and then turned to hold the door open, arm stretched along it so I would have to brush against her and then be the first to walk into the total darkness. Two perils.

  “Not sure this is such a good idea,” I managed to get out. I didn’t move. I hated myself for being scared, for showing that I was scared, but I had to follow her. He’s looking for you and your sister Laura. She’d said it yesterday like she was remarking that the ocean was west of here: fact.

  If it turned out there was a dead body down here or something, I’d call 911. I’d run. I clenched my toes in their yellow Converse to remind myself that they moved.

  “It’s okay. But don’t do any—just follow my lead, okay?” She spoke in an offhand mumble, running a finger along the edge of the door, but she was looking at my face. My eyes slid away to her taut stomach, where one of her buttons was slipping out of its hole. I hushed the voice that told me to reach out and touch it.

  She surprised me by grasping my hand. Hers was dry and muscled, and a quick flare of chemicals burned a path through me as my fingers curled around hers.

  I shuffled straight ahead, sightless once the door blew shut, afraid to pick up my feet or let go of her hand. We walked for much longer than we should have been able to: how far did this building go? Then the floor angled down, and I felt the brush of cold air on my neck. My heart bucked.

  A faint gray light outlined a path for a few feet ahead. I took a deep breath and smelled the tang of pine. “Are we outside?” I whispered.

  Nicky pointed up. I followed her arm and saw the trees all around us. Pines, maples with tiny bloodred leaves, and directly overhead, a white-covered wild cherry framed by a sky the color of hard cider. Birdsong poured out of a tree, and branches creaked in a breeze too high up to feel. Daybreak, that was what it felt like.

  McLean High was on Broadway, one of the busiest streets in Oakland. There were no woods like this anywhere nearby. And the three thirty bell had rung ten minutes ago.

  This has to be a stage set. One with fresh air and real trees.

  The birdsong b
urst out again, and a violin picked up the same spiky notes and repeated them until they were a tune. The sound was ahead of us, where the trees thinned out into open space. I had to follow it. I needed to be where that music was, needed it so much I was already moving toward the sound. My feet raced in time with the melody as branches bounced past me. I felt my joints loosening, arms swinging above my head in rhythm. Why didn’t I always dance? Dancing felt like running through a warm waterfall. I threw my head back and felt cool air on my tongue as I grinned. Laughed. Joy coursed through my blood. I spun around and stopped just as the fiddle landed on a rough low note, my arms wide in triumph.

  “Easy, tiger.” Nicky’s voice came from behind me. I’d run ahead and was out of breath. “That fiddle’ll make you dance yourself to death, you’re not careful. Do this.” She knelt on the moss of the path and unlaced my high-tops. Just unlaced them before I knew what she was doing. She tugged at the right one until I let her slip it off, my heel suddenly aware of the sensation of her palm. Then she held my shoe in both hands with a prayerlike expression, eyes closed, and spit into it.

  “You just spit in my shoe!” I curled my toes under so the hole in my tights wouldn’t show, teetering on one foot, and inched the shoe back toward me.

  “It’s a shortcut.”

  “A shortcut to what?”

  She bit a corner of her bottom lip and looked away. “This place isn’t exactly what it seems.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting that.” I tugged my shoe back on, ignoring the chunk of gravel under my big toe. The heat in my face was not just from dancing. It was humiliation too. I was fat. Fat girls do not dance, especially not in front of thin girls. Especially not in front of thin girls who looked like Nicky. I kept my eyes on my shoes to make sure they stayed still.

  But then a cat moved across the path ahead of us, walking on two legs, as tall as me. A walking cat. I froze. Oh God, quick, what do you do when you see a mountain lion? Play dead? Its black head swiveled, and when its eyes rested on me, I saw that they were human: round and the stone blue color of Laura’s eyes. They were seeing me. I felt self-conscious and grubby under that unblinking stare. The animal stalked into the clearing, tail switching. I didn’t know what scared me most: the human eyes, the walking, or just the fact that there was a wild animal twenty feet away.