Pretty Peg

by Skye Allen

  “How about Jesse Williams—thanks,” Neil said to me. He took the tray and settled it on the edge of the table. I handed him the honey bear and sat in Mom’s frayed recliner with my cup.

  “All right, guys and guysettes, time to face the music,” Nicky said, and in a flowing motion she was on her feet.

  “What?” I said. I wanted her to stay.

  “I need to get with Blossom to make sure the damage is controlled,” she explained.

  I could not begin to follow the intricacies of communication in the Summer Court. I walked her to the door and pulled it shut behind us for a real good-bye kiss in private, or at least out of sight of Neil.

  “Do you have to take off?” I asked when we finally separated.

  “I wanted to see you home safe, but yes. Can I call you later? And we can talk about what’s in the book and stuff?”

  “And stuff, yeah.” She took the driveway in a compact sprint, no sign that she’d been injured an hour ago. I held my hands on my stomach to hold in the heat of her body as long as I could as she receded and finally turned the corner and was gone.

  Neil bounced on a couch cushion when I came back into the room. “Confession time,” he announced.

  “What did you do now?”

  “Not me. You.”

  “Well, I just broke into Timothy’s place to steal my own sister’s journal.”

  “Not crimes. Passions. Wait a minute, what? Okay, never mind. Passions first.”

  I told him about last night in as little detail as I could. He pried more out of me. When the laughter trickled to a halt, he said, “Are you in love?”

  “I mean, she’s a total player, she must be. And she said she didn’t have a girlfriend, but that only means at the moment. What if she has, like, girls on tap?”

  “Oh my God, you are. How did you leave it this morning?”

  “You know. I found those leaves in my magical inbox. She was going to talk to Blossom about… you know the thing when the Queen, um, kissed me the other night at the park?”

  “Not one, but two hot women who can turn parking tickets into gold or whatever.” He pulled a pillow onto his lap and started untangling a tassel.

  “It might be a—she gave me something. Some kind of ability. Then. It helped me last night. And today.”

  “Really.”

  “Shut up, gutter boy.” He didn’t know about my time at the Winter Court last night. I hadn’t told him. How could so much have happened in less than twenty-four hours? I summarized as best I could.

  “He was going to kill you,” he said when I told him about the Winter Queen’s muscleman in the dressing room. His voice was still, a flat surface, the way it got when he was about to lose his temper.

  “I don’t think so. Not while she still needed me—the Winter Queen. But I did think he was going to—I mean, at first I thought it was him. The Woodcutter. The guy who killed Margaret.”

  “So he was going to kill you, or somebody was.” Neil yanked on a loose thread with too much force, and I heard ripping. “Just maybe not right away. And now you’ve got them pissed off.” He looked at me, stony and then soft.

  “They want the Woodcutter to do the dirty work. And I still don’t know who that is. I thought for a minute today that it could be Timothy, but Nicky says it can’t be.” My mind was spinning with speculation.

  “Josy, shut up for one second! You’re going to get killed!” he burst out. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what’s going to happen now.” His eyes were on the rope of trim he’d just pulled free.

  Neil and I were not mushy friends. I knew he cared about me from the way he snuck red velvet cupcakes into my locker on my birthday and how he would slag on Nicole Kidman for being a skinny hag to make me feel better about being fat. When his boyfriend dumped him last year, he drove straight to my house and marched into my room to pull my quilt over his head without saying a word. His voice faltered now, and I jumped in. “It’s okay, it’s all okay. Even Laura. She’s fine. She’s always with her new teacher—who is supposed to be her big magic bodyguard—or else practicing. What, are they going to break into the house? The Winter people are probably all done with us now that we burned down their poncy theater anyway. Admit defeat, evildoers.” I squashed the part of me that was still scared after last night. And the part that was thinking they really can hurt us. And I don’t know how much I can count on Hill. And next time, there might not be a rescue squad.

  “Don’t rule that out. They could break in,” Neil said.

  “Nicky did some kind of magic security. Last night when we got here I saw her walking around. She did it just now too. She says it’s like her talent, something about getting doors open or keeping them closed.”

  “Really. She got something open last night.”

  “Shut up, gutter boy.”

  “Oh yeah, speaking of hot elves with freak talents. Jerome—what did you find out?”

  “That Margaret’s diary has some kind of key in it.” I filled him in on the phone call with Jerome and the visit to Timothy’s hideout. I swung my stocking feet off the couch, where they’d been tucked under me, and felt pins and needles in my calves, and my legs remembered numbness from last night in the Winter Court theater. I was bruised too, or at least my armpits ached where the Winter Queen’s man had hauled me around, and my shin burned where I’d hit it, and I felt a raised patch on my cheek that I knew hadn’t even started changing color yet. I felt my pulse throbbing there when I stood up, as if blood were sloshing around loose in my head.

  “You okay?” Neil was halfway up and aiming his bony shoulders toward me. I must have shown some kind of painful face.

  “Just too much fun.”

  “You’re hurt, you idiot. Why didn’t I—I’m getting aspirin.”

  “Nah, I’ve been fine all day.” But he padded back from the bathroom with two. Nice boy. I swallowed them with my coffee and tried not to think about the fact that he was now part of my clan according to the Faerie Realm. Which meant I could get him killed too.

  “So that’s it?” he asked when he was settled again. He pointed his chin at the pretty little book in the middle of the coffee table. I didn’t know why I’d been hesitating to open it. Other than being afraid of what was in there. It held the answer: who the Woodcutter was, and how to stop him from killing me and Laura. That had to be what the secret was. Otherwise why had Jerome made such a fuss? Everything was going to be okay as soon as I opened it. Come on, tough girl. You’ve come this far.

  The front cover was stiff, and the first page stuck to it at one corner where something had been spilled and dried. I pried the thin paper free to see Margaret Helen Grant written in faded ink in the center of the wide-lined page. A drawing floated under her name in blue pencil, one of those complicated Celtic knots that nobody could draw freehand. “It’s a horse,” Neil said after we both stared at it for a long minute. “See the mane? I didn’t know she could draw like that.”

  Neither had I. A feeling started in the center of my body, a blunt, frustrated regret that I had barely known my oldest sister. The blue horse on the page looked like the paper one in the puppet theater. I felt a snick in my brain as a puzzle piece snapped into place. The horse was her. There was that puppet that was also her, but the horse was really her. Her spirit. It was so right, so perfectly Margaret. How could I not always have known?

  The diary entries started on the second page. The sight of Margaret’s rounded handwriting gave my heart a sudden rush, like all the blood in my body flooded my chest.

  May 22, 2008

  I do not know how Dr. Hudson got that out of me. She was drawing blood, and she just said something about moving away from Mom and Dad and Robert. She knows Robert’s gone, but I knew what she meant. Nobody can forget about that while I’m still home. They must think I haunt the place, some ghost to keep them from being a happy family.

  And then she said “So how’s your appetite?” and it all came spilling out. I wonder if she knew all along
. I haven’t taken laxatives or anything, barely even gag myself anymore. Don’t have to, mostly. She wanted to give me meds. I’m 18 now, she wouldn’t have had to talk to Mom. And she wanted me to go back to therapy. She made me promise I’d quit throwing up. No meds if I quit. She said. Can I trust her? I do NOT want another shit storm with Mom. She can’t handle it.

  I want to quit. I’ve quit before. Dr. Hudson said it’s a form of hating your body. Shit. There’s no way to be strong in this house. The way Mom looks at me. She’s guilty because of R. I mean she feels guilty. Shit. Why did I say that? I have to get out of here. Be somebody new. Be strong. I’m going to be a doctor. You can’t be a sick fuck if you’re a doctor.

  Jerome Desroches said I was a beguiling mortal. Tonight, at the fair. He’s said it before. Hm.

  I ran my thumb over the little blue drawing in the bottom right corner. It was a flowering branch with ribbons twisted around it.

  “What’s it say?” Neil said.

  I looked at him and realized I was already crying.

  Margaret was six years older than me. To me she had always been a big girl and later an adult. I had never thought of her as having doubts or complicated feelings or even being vulnerable, the way I felt vulnerable every day to little things like cheerleaders puffing up their cheeks when I walked into the bathroom at school or Mom forgetting to pick me up.

  I opened my mouth to tell Neil.

  And sang: “There were three sisters lived in a bower….”

  The words that were formed in my head were: it’s about Margaret having an eating disorder and being scared of my brother. And meeting Jerome. I tried again to say them.

  “They all went out for to pull a flower,” I sang.

  My voice felt like it was scraping my throat. I’d never heard this song before, but there it was, coming out of my mouth like there was a remote-controlled speaker in my teeth.

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Neil was half smiling, but he looked concerned. He could tell something was wrong.

  “You don’t get it”—oh, so now I can talk normally?—“Jerome said there was a spell on the book. Where you can’t talk about what’s in it. You can only read it. You can’t repeat it out loud.”

  “Try again.”

  I concentrated on the thought It’s about Margaret. I took a deep breath. “They all went out for to pull a flower down by the bonnie banks of fordie-o.”

  I tried to squash the hysterical crying-laughter that was bubbling up in my chest. I felt out of control, like someone else was operating my tongue. It was terrifying. “I can’t. If I try to talk about it, I just sing. I’m not trying to sing. I’m trying to talk. That must be how the spell works,” I said.

  “So that’s not what she wrote?” he asked. I shook my head. “Whoa. Weird. Okay. You read it, and then I’ll read it, how about. We have to finish Midsummer by Monday anyway. I’ll be right here.” He touched my knee and then swung his long legs away, and I heard him running water in the kitchen sink and then scraping a chair back at the table behind me.

  The diary lasted until March 2012, the month Margaret died. I flipped from the last page she had written and settled down to read from the beginning.

  The first several dates spanned a few months and about twenty pages, and they were mostly about Jerome. How she had never imagined feeling so clean and whole, how she finally understood why a woman would want to sleep naked or smile instead of cry when someone said she was beautiful.

  When I read that, anger and sadness bubbled up in me like the garbage disposal backing up. I pounded my fist into my thigh to stop myself from crying. Margaret. Didn’t you know you were beautiful?

  On October 19, 2008 she wrote:

  OMG I sound like an idiot. Every Top 40 song. But I can’t help it. Love love love.

  Revels end of the month. The Lady will ask all the Court to renew their vow to serve. I will be J’s date—can’t tell if this is a big deal or not. He says there’s some kind of serious hoopla. A solemn feast, is what he said. So I guess no Halloween costumes.

  I sat back against the itchy afghan and considered the fact that my sister, like me, had fallen in love with an elf. She’d known more than I did about how the fey world worked. Maybe this book would be a how-to guide for the modern human girl traveling in that weird country that was so close and so alien at the same time.

  But then, when the entries had thinned out to every few months, things started to take a strange turn.

  December 12, 2009

  I don’t know what he means. I want to be immortal. Do I? I’ll never be like them. God. All I have is him to talk to and what he wants is clear: for us to be together and never get old. It’s sweet. It’s what I should want.

  But he’s pinched when he talks about it. He can’t lie, but sometimes he just won’t answer when I ask him what it’ll be like.

  Blossom this morning. I’d spent the night in the oak with J. She wakes us up all bouncy and she has a basket of scones and a bottle of milk. And wild strawberries. Announces to J that she’s going to “lure your beloved away.”

  Sweet air, birds singing, bare skin under the petals. I’m too stupid with happiness most of the time with him to write about how good it is.

  Living forever with him beside me.

  So Blossom. We sit in her herb patch—in the sun, it’s cold out there in the World but not here in the Realm—and she lays it out for me that J is dealing with the Winters for the mix that will make me immortal. She says “He loves you, but I’ve known him for 90 years and he’s a puppy with a heart bigger than his brain.” I ask her what it means, dealing with the Winters, and she says what I already know—they’re enemies of the Lady of Light, they’ll always take something from you that turns out to be more than you can give. They deal dirty. DEALING. What’s he trading with?

  He’s smart, and very old, and this is his world. He’ll know how to keep it together.

  If I knew what I wanted, that would make it easier. This. If I have to leave him, if this is trouble, I should do it now.

  Can’t always tell what Blossom wants me to do—she’s a doll and most of the time it’s all fun and mead and new clothes with her—but there was a look in her eyes. She doesn’t think J would do it right, he wouldn’t think, he could screw things up, not between me and him but maybe for the Summer Court in general. Is he that crucial? He’s a knight. That means something. She thinks what he does has weight that he doesn’t think out.

  Politics. This is over my head. Am I the one who has to say—let’s not? If you give me this it could hurt someone else?

  “This.” I don’t even know what “this” means. It means probably never seeing Mom and the girls again. Dad. They’d notice how it changed me? I’m not going to be fey, I’m just not going to get old and die. I won’t get to where I can’t ride in a car or something because I can’t stand iron. And God, I hope I’ll still be able to lie.

  Not enough information, can’t solve this equation.

  I was amazed by my sister. I ran my fingertips over the bumpy page filled with her blue handwriting. And I felt a blur of shame and envy that made me clench my limbs in tight: I had a fey lover too, and being in the Summer Court had made me feel like I was special somehow. Beautiful, even. But no one was talking about me living forever. Margaret found a refuge, and people who loved her, and a way to be young and stay with Jerome for eternity. I had been resisting the Realm all this time, but Margaret embraced it.

  And it had ended her life, way sooner than her life would have ended if she’d stayed away from the fey. And very soon, the fey were going to end mine and Laura’s. For a second I wanted to blame Margaret, but I knew deep down that she hadn’t done anything on purpose to put us in danger. She might not even have known about the Woodcutter and his big assignment to turn all three of us into trophies.

  I read the next two entries fast, looking for clues about what happened next. By the end of the year, she and Jerome had reached a truce on the question of Margaret b
ecoming immortal. She didn’t trust that Jerome entirely knew what he was doing—Blossom had convinced her on that point—and in the very long history of Faerie, no mortal had ever before succeeded in “crossing over.” Living forever. I’d have heard of that by now, right? I wondered. And I thought about Nicky telling me that when mortals tried to mess with fey magic for their own gain, it usually backfired.

  But then, on March 9, 2011, something must have happened to change Margaret’s mind.

  I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it! This is the most important thing I could do. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. My life. My FATE! The first little tiny 22 years will be nothing but a tiny pebble memory. I can travel to every country multiple times. Watch history come and go.

  Live out other people’s entire lifetimes. Sad. Am I sad about that? What will I tell the girls? In 10 or 20 years, when they’re getting wrinkles and I’m not aging at all? Seems shallow but it’ll be a real thing.

  And I can be with J, a real marriage. Should I worry that he would not marry me otherwise? I can still die—so can he—we could get hit by a train or be shot in line at the DMV. But no sickness, no natural death. It’s all going to be all right. In 50 years I’ll be laughing at my stupid fears.

  Oh oh it’s going to be—what I needed when I came to the Realm. Magic in me. Nothing can touch me now. I’ll really, finally be one of the Court.

  The season turns in less than 2 weeks. And I will live forever.

  She did it. She actually went through with it. Why didn’t Blossom and Nicky tell me? I knew they hadn’t gotten married. Jerome told me they’d gone to Afghanistan together as a way of kicking off their new lives.

  Forever. Whatever that was supposed to mean. She only lived for one more year.

  Mayday, 2011

  I didn’t think it would be like this.

  The Lady asked J to leave on his own. It’ll solve some of the difficulties. She says.