by Skye Allen
“Heart of Gold” rang out from my bedroom. Neil’s ringtone. I knew he’d expect an account of last night, and I didn’t want to give him one while Nicky was here, but I owed it to him to tell him I was all right. I ducked into my room. Our deal was one ring, then the other person texted. I found my phone under the mattress and typed see you in class. Then I scrolled to Laura’s name and texted her too: everything good?
Back at the kitchen table, Nicky was drawing with a spoon handle in a puddle of milk on the upturned bottom of a mason jar. She looked up and grinned when she saw me staring. “Telling Blossom I need to see her,” she said.
“You guys don’t have phones?”
“This has worked for centuries.” She added a flourish and in one fluid movement stood and slung her jacket on.
“When I see you again, and I’m planning to see you again, I’m going to need some answers. Like how old you really are.” I tried for confident, but what came out was bossy and too fast. I opened the front door, since she was standing in front of it.
“Oh, I won’t be without you for long,” she said, stepping out into the sunlight. Emphasis on the you. A full-body shiver started before I knew it was happening, and I felt my skin hum.
I thought of something, and before I could stop myself, I was saying it out loud. “Am I—not that it’s my business—but do you have another sweetheart?”
“Josy. No. I do not.”
“It’s just Timothy said that, and I know you guys can’t tell lies.”
“That’s true, but we will twist the truth if it suits us. Oh, not that—oak and ash, I am botching this. Timothy wanted you to believe something, and he chose his words to make you think a lie was the truth. He said I have a friend back home, and it is true that I have friends, many. Not other lovers.”
She took my hand, closing the distance between us, and I said, “Me neither,” but I wasn’t sure she heard me, because we were kissing by then.
When I let her go, Nicky loped away toward 65th Street. Mr. Hegel, across the street, jogged backward right into his mailbox when I waved at him.
And then Laura pulled up in the rust-and-blue Grant family Volvo. She climbed out of the driver’s seat, glanced at me, and looked down at the phone in her hand. “Don’t you have SAT prep or whatever?”
“Crap!” I punched my knuckles into my thigh. Friday mornings, seven thirty to eight thirty, I was a tutor for the English learners. Two ninth graders were waiting for me in the library right now. They were sisters from Afghanistan, one fifteen and one sixteen but both in their first year of American high school, and when I’d signed on to tutor for senior service this year, I’d picked them because that’s where they were from. Margaret had wanted to help people who needed her, and I suppose what I wanted was to be like Margaret, for now, until I could find my own way. Youmina brought homemade almond cookies every Friday. She’d be sitting there now, looking at the clock. “Can you give me a ride?” I asked Laura.
“Not really. Chamber was cancelled, but I have study group instead in, like, an hour, in the city. I just came home to change.” She pushed past me into the house in a cloud of Miss Violet’s Body Powder.
I should talk to her. Now, before anything else dangerous happened. I knew she was supposed to be under the wing of her piano teacher, and Nicky said she’d get the Lady’s guards on the job. And I knew she’d been glamoured to go all dreamy whenever I mentioned the fey. But I had to try. “So, Lor?” I called after her.
“I’m in the bathroom!”
I went back inside and stood beside the peeling white bathroom door. “Something weird happened.”
“What? I’m peeing.”
“I’m kind of worried. You know the elves and stuff?”
She sighed happily. “And Professor Hill? And Pretty Peg? He told me she used to dance there. I’m going to a revel.”
“Wait a minute, so you know about Margaret being all up with the fey? And Jerome being an elf and all?”
“They’re pretty.”
“Yeah. I know Professor Hill is supposed to keep an eye on you, but now I’m not so sure he’s up to it.” What could I tell her that would sink in? She was under that glamour spell. “Some other people are going to watch out for you too, okay? And me. You’ll meet Nicky.” I didn’t know if Nicky was acting as my bodyguard or not, now that I thought about it. I didn’t understand the first thing about the protection that was supposedly on our house now. What would happen when I went to school? Did drinking from the Lady’s cup mean there was a force field around me? And for how long…? Oh right. Until the fall equinox. That was coming on Sunday. Was that the revel Laura kept talking about? “And be extra careful this weekend. Stick close to Professor Hill, yeah?”
“So bossy.” She still sounded dosed, a pleasant TV sister instead of my real, bitchy one.
She’s all right. She’ll live to annoy you for years. I packed up my things for school, thought a sharp prayer that Laura would make it to study group and the protection would hold, and headed out the door.
A block from the bus stop, I realized that what I was kicking at on the sidewalk was a cluster of red leaves. I looked up to see telephone poles and the mottled canopy of sycamore leaves just starting to go brown. There was no tree these leaves could have blown from.
I swung onto the half-full AC Transit number eighteen and slid bag-first into my favorite seat, behind the rear door. A star-shaped leaf was stuck between the sliding windowpanes. I looked at the veiny red flesh, so thin I could see shadows through it. Okay. Someone is trying to tell me something. Or there’s a bunch of invisible red trees on 62nd all of a sudden.
It wasn’t until English, second period, that I figured it out. And it wasn’t me, it was Neil. He saw the leaf sticking out of my copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, bigger than the book, so its red points jutted out like starfish arms. I hadn’t put it there.
He slid it out. “Nice bookmark.”
“I keep seeing them today. It’s weird.” We were whispering, and pretty soon we were going to get caught. Mr. Collier was already pointing his beard in our direction while he kept his aviator glasses trained on the page he was reading aloud from. We always sat in the back, but that never did any good. I knew he could hear us talking. Most of the time he didn’t bust us because we were good students, but I didn’t want a trip to the office today.
“Maple leaf. It’s so shiny.” He stroked it with a long fingertip.
“Are you stoned?”
“Jerome Desroches had them in his office in a vase. It was pretty.”
“Oh shit. This is Jerome.” I said it loud enough that giggles erupted from rows far ahead of us. I didn’t remember Jerome having maple leaves on display, but it was possible Neil had seen something I didn’t.
“Miss Grant, Mr. Hernandez, care to share?” Mr. Collier was striding between desks toward us in his midlife-crisis cowboy boots, pudgy hand outstretched.
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.” I did not know why teachers fell for that subservient military thing every time Neil busted it out. It must have been his big-eyed saint look. The boots clipped back up front to the whiteboard.
I plucked the leaf back from Neil and examined it. No writing. No recognizable message. Nothing convenient like that. It smelled just like any green plant, not like the fresh-cut wood smell I remembered from Jerome’s office. The veins were stiff, and the leaf was slightly asymmetrical, the way real leaves were. It didn’t look like anything magical.
I knew Mr. Collier couldn’t see clearly all the way to the back of the classroom. I fingertipped my phone up from its pocket in my bag and held it on my lap, praying Neil’s ringer was off.
jerome trying to send me message, I typed.
Neil made a motion that in a less suave boy would look like he was adjusting his underwear. He hunched over the open binder on his desk. should we go see him again?
omg u have the hots 4 doc. no. will call like normal person.
Neil’s large ears went red. notice no im
last nite.
I hadn’t even turned my computer on since I’d gotten home with Nicky last night. I’d forgotten all about instant messaging with Neil. sorry. spaced.
were u w/ saucy wench?
“How did you know?” I burst out. Mr. Collier stamped toward us, still chattering about sheep in his falsetto Titania voice, and held out his hand again. I sighed, and we both dropped our phones into it. They disappeared into his vest pocket. “Miss Grant, have you been kidnapped by pod people? You don’t show up for tutoring and you talk in class?”
Neil zoomed huge eyes at me, but I couldn’t get kicked out of Honors English. I stayed quiet and let the shame of being exposed as a tutoring slacker boil me. I thought about what Blossom had told me about the Folk protecting people’s farms, while I traced around the sawtooth edges of the maple leaf on a sheet of blurry college-ruled paper with my good rollerball. Magic people pushing back the tide of bad luck and sickness and grief, a whole other force like gravity that we never knew about. They were fighting off the Winter Folk for, among other things, the right to keep on doing that. Helping normal mortals just live their lives. I still didn’t totally understand. But I knew I didn’t want anything to happen to Laura or Blossom or even pathetic Jerome.
Or Nicky. My hand went to my fringed hem, midway down my thigh. Her hands had been there. I let my body relive last night and felt a joyful all-over flush.
The bell finally rang, and Neil shouted over it, “You were?” I nodded, feeling a massive grin spread across my face that I could not stop. There was no time to go into detail. “Girl!” He fist-bumped me. “Are you, like, girlfriends now? And look what you’re wearing! You must be feeling super fine.” He indicated the Frankengown, one I’d cut down from a vintage cocktail dress. I had worn it to one of Laura’s concerts, but never to school.
I didn’t know if Nicky was my girlfriend now. I still wasn’t sure why a girl like her would want to be with a girl like me, and I’d been too shy or scared to ask her. “I do like her,” I admitted.
“Believe it or not, young miss, I actually worked that out. You calling Jerome?” he asked as he slid his pristine blue binder into his backpack. His copy of the text was unmarred by dog-ears or graffiti, and I knew his was secondhand.
“Yeah, if I can find his number again.” I wedged the rollerball into my overcrowded Betty Boop pencil case, the one I’d inherited from Margaret, and stuck the maple leaf back into my doodle-covered Shakespeare.
I retrieved my phone from Mr. Collier and took the back staircase to the exit by the gym, where there was a corner in the lee of the basketball court bordered by a strip of tall hedges that muffled most of the traffic noise.
A couple of false leads with the 411 service, and I was connected. I fumbled my way through introductions in my hola como esta-level Spanish, until I’d said Jerome’s name clearly enough times that the drill sergeant who’d answered the phone switched to English and said “Wait.” I pictured her in her kitten-print scrubs scowling out at that packed waiting room. Hold music, the bland greatest-hits-from-the-’80s-’90s-and-today kind. I stood in the warm breeze on my patch of weedy white pebbles and kicked Nicky’s initials in the soft dirt all the way through “Voices Carry” before a rushed male voice snapped “Dr. Desroches.”
I told him who I was, and his voice dipped into confidentiality. “Give me a moment, will you please? No, the thirty-five, not the fifty. Patient is Garcia, M. Okay. Josephine Grant. My apologies.”
“I got your message. The, uh, leaf mail.” I felt a flutter of confusion, too late: the message was from him, wasn’t it?
“Yes. I didn’t know how else to reach you, since the number you left led me to an Indian restaurant. You and your friend are well?”
I thought about Neil, the impossible healing of his broken hand. I owed Jerome for that, no matter what else happened with the fey. “Yeah, we’re good. So what’s up with the leaf thing?”
“A message through the entryway.” His tone said I should know what he was talking about.
“Entryway? What entryway?”
“The—but you don’t know. I thought, since you are the Lady’s favorite and Pretty Peg’s sister, that you would have an explanation.”
“You mean the puppet theater? You’d be surprised what I don’t know.” Through the echo in my cell phone, my voice came back flat. Was Jerome going to be able to explain it to me, since Nicky couldn’t, not really?
“That was the way Peg came to us. She called it the toy house. An entryway is a… think of it as a passage between worlds. The mortal world and the realm of the Folk.”
“Yeah, we’re talking about an old detergent box with construction paper stapled to it. So you sent me a message through there—wait a minute, that’s how she got through? It’s some kind of magic doorway?” I hunched my shoulders against the sudden chill in the breeze.
“Oh no, it’s too small for that,” he said. There’s that “silly mortal” voice again. “Entryways are for messages. Usually from your people to mine, but they can travel the other way just as easily. If a mortal asks the Folk for something—sanctuary, or a favor—if they need a way to reach us, they could create one, and it would draw us in. It would be like the entryway was a light and one of the Folk were a moth. They’re most appealing if they have something to do with children’s toys, or with illusion. The toy theater was irresistible. My people are playful, even though our play can be deadly.” He sounded old then, and sad.
Margaret died because of your games, little doctor. You might have meant well, but look at the mess you left. “So that’s how she found you.”
“And how you were found.”
It dawned on me, fully and with a sick feeling of being spied on, that Jerome must have been the one moving the puppets around in the theater from the beginning. I’d still been secretly letting myself believe it was Margaret. Even though I knew, knew that was impossible. But Jerome would fit. Nicky said it would be someone who couldn’t talk to me face-to-face, and Jerome was not allowed to come to the Summer Realm, and for all I knew that meant he wasn’t even allowed into Alameda County. “So you were the one who sent all the messages? In the puppet theater?”
“I knew the Summer People would want to reach out to you. I wanted to nudge you in their direction. Maybe that was wrong.”
His voice said he wanted me to contradict him, to say, “Sure, I’ve been loving this wacky adventure where me and my sister almost get killed every day all week!” I didn’t say anything. The Winter guys got me through the puppet theater too. Should I tell him about the evil snow globe? But then he’d know there were spies, and how much can I actually trust this guy? I know he’s not the real bad guy, but he did make a deal with them. Maybe that wasn’t the only time. I drew a knuckle across the rough surface of the stucco gym wall. It left a clean cream line in the grime.
But something didn’t sit right. “You sent all the messages? I got one with an oak leaf, telling me to go to Tilden Park. A couple days ago.”
“Oh, my sweet Lady.” He said it as if I wasn’t there.
“Uh, so you think she sent that message? Your Lady? The Summer Queen?”
“I cannot know who sent you an invitation, but I know I did not. Now listen. I needed to reach you because there is something of Peg’s that may help you. That you need. I should have thought to tell you about it during your visit, but I was… taken by surprise. Surprised and very sad. I remembered later, when I was myself again,” Jerome said.
“What is it?”
“You see, I didn’t realize fully…. Forgive me. I am nothing more than a lonely old man. I should never have let it out of my sight, but it was something of hers, and I suppose I was just too weak.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Peg kept a diary in Kabul. It has a key to….” His voice sounded choked. “But you will see why I’m hesitating.”
Margaret’s diary? What if there’s stuff about me in there? Oh God, she hated me. Fat tagalong little s
ister. “Shouldn’t that have gone to the police? Or maybe back with her ashes? To us?” I hated the way I sounded: prissy, self-important. She’d been planning to marry Jerome. He was hugely important to her. I should give him a chance, even if he had opened up the floodgates and let in whatever got her killed.
But a diary was private business. Mine was password-protected in a folder on my hard drive labeled “1884 California Shipping Term Paper.” Not that Mom or Laura would be interested. Would I even read Margaret’s? She might have had secrets she would want to keep—well, beyond the grave.
Except that it contained a key.
“You can’t know what it was like. We were all so shattered, the other Médecins Sans Frontières workers and I. When I returned home I was… not myself.” He pronounced the French the real French way, not the way a normal self-conscious American would. But he was Canadian, from the French-speaking part of Canada, if I remembered right.
Canadian and fey. And Margaret’s fiancé. I should try to make this easier on him for her sake.
“So you kept her journal, and there’s a key in it? What is it? Can you give me a hint?” I pictured him sitting in a rocking chair, old in everything but body, nursing a glass of brandy or whatever old people drank and cherishing a cheap spiral notebook crammed with my sister’s bubble handwriting.
“That is… it is impossible to speak of.”
“Well, can I speak of it? Is it about how she died? Is it about”—it occurred to me as I was speaking—“who the Woodcutter is?”
Silence.
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Believe me when I say I quite truly cannot answer that question. And as I said, I no longer have the book.” I heard regret in his stiff voice.
“Nothing’s easy with you people. So where is it?” I was losing patience.
“I told you that I came home again after Peg was taken from us. That I was tried by the Summer Lady’s Court and, as they put it, relieved of my honor.” Through the cheap little cell phone speaker I heard him swallow. I waited until he took in a breath and spoke again. “I had other things that belonged to Peg. They were all taken. The diary is in the keep of my brother now.”
