by Anne Ursu
But now Iris had to wonder if they’d been talking like that to distract the girls, like waving something shiny in front of their faces so they’d miss the monster crawling toward them. Grown-ups pretend that if they don’t talk about things, kids won’t know they’re there. But you do know, at least you know something is there: you can see the weird blank space where the things they aren’t talking about are supposed to be and you can see that something is lurking just behind it but you know you are supposed to pretend you haven’t noticed anything.
“My dad’s coming back,” Iris said definitively.
Jin gasped. “You had a premonition!”
“No. Not a premonition. His assignment ends in December.”
Oliver turned to Jin. “I think it was a premonition too,” he whispered.
“I heard that!”
“Can we just do the assignment?” Mira squeaked.
That afternoon, Iris didn’t see Lark before getting on the bus to the library, though she wasn’t sure what she would say if she did. Part of her wanted to tell her everything Jin had said and watch her sister for any sign that she believed it was the truth—but she couldn’t do that to Lark. Why plant a seed like that in her sister, who had enough to worry about as it was? Especially since the seed had already sprouted into something tangled and awful inside Iris’s brain.
So when she walked into Camp Awesome, the thing was with her—no longer growing but still twisting into something more and more menacing. But it was her secret; no one noticed a thing. Abigail beamed at her as if seeing Iris was the best thing that had happened to her all day.
Which could not possibly be true.
Hannah and Morgan both greeted her cheerfully, and she tried to look cheerful back. This took some thinking. What sort of thing did cheerful people do? Well, they smiled, so Iris tried that. They said hi, so Iris tried that, too. They asked friendly questions like How are you? and made nice comments like I like your journal cover and That’s a cool Twins shirt. But Iris couldn’t quite make those words come out, as there were so many of them and there was a thing in her brain and it seemed likely she might put the words in the wrong order.
Today’s game was another get-to-know-you exercise. Abigail told them to circle up, and informed them she was in possession of a magical invisible ball—and here she held her hands out at beach-ball width, and shouted, “Catch!” and thrust her hands toward Emily. Emily just stared at her.
“Oh! Let me get my ball!” And Abigail ran behind Emily and mimed picking up her beach ball, then shouted, “Catch!” again, and threw it at Gabrielle.
Gabrielle did catch the ball, and Emily said, “Oh!” so Gabrielle tossed the invisible ball to her. Iris didn’t blame Emily for being confused; why they couldn’t use a real ball was beyond her, unless Abigail had spent all her budget on glitter glue.
The game was that they would toss the “ball” around, and when someone threw the ball at you, you introduced yourself with your name and an adjective that started with the same letter as your name.
At that very moment, a whole alphabet’s worth of adjectives popped in Iris’s head, from Admirable Annalise to Zesty Zinnia—every letter but the one she needed, I.
Iris’s brain stopped. The ball went around. One girl caught it, said her name, and then threw it, and the other girl repeated that name and said her own.
“I am Awesome Abigail!” (Throw.)
“Awesome Abigail . . . Amazing Amma!”
“Amazing Amma . . . Playful Preeti!”
Slowly, she regained the power of thought, and slowly some I adjectives popped to the front of her mind, all of them unacceptable. She wasn’t going to say intelligent, because that’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to say about yourself. There was invisible, but that was ridiculous, as Iris was standing right there and everyone could see her. Same with imaginary. And she did not wish to be icy or icky. Everyone had a name—Genuine Gabrielle, Maleficent Morgan, Haunting Hannah (here she made a ghost noise)—and then Nice Novalie hurled the invisible ball at her and her mouth opened and her mind turned to fuzz and what came out was:
“Indecisive Iris.”
Silence. Iris’s insides turned to slime.
To make it worse, she’d done it wrong. She hadn’t followed the rules. She was supposed to repeat Nice Novalie, but she’d gotten so fuzzy she’d forgotten. Games have rules and you are supposed to follow the rules—that’s how games work. And Novalie, Novalie was so nice that she just whispered, “Repeat my name” at Iris super quietly. But Iris was already hurling the invisible ball at Abigail again and it was all much, much too late.
Then, of course, Abigail wanted them to use the game to learn one another’s names, so she pronounced “Energetic Emily!” and then threw the ball to Emily, who this time caught on and said, “Maleficent Morgan,” giggling a little bit, and Morgan said, “Haunting Hannah,” who then announced, “Indecisive Iris!” and this went on for a full five minutes.
When camp was over, Iris ducked out ahead of everyone else and went to the library computers and searched for I adjectives, intending to write them down in her journal in case this sort of thing ever happened to her again. Instead she ended up with a list of adjectives she could not use.
She was neither illogical nor imaginative; she did not wish to be inexperienced or irresponsible, immature or infantile; she did not feel impressive, important, or impulsive; and she really hoped she wasn’t immoral or irksome. She certainly was a little impatient and maybe irritable, but they didn’t sound like things she should advertise. And sometimes impassioned, but that hardly characterized her. Igneous was a kind of rock. Mostly the adjective that best described her was itchy.
She had been doomed from the beginning. Even the dictionary knew it.
Iris picked up her backpack, which now felt much heavier than before, like someone had snuck in a bunch of reference books while she wasn’t looking, and wandered out of the library.
Chapter Seventeen
Mr. George Green
I wonder what would have happened had Iris just biked home after Camp Awesome that day. Maybe she never would have gone back to Treasure Hunters again, and this story would have had a different ending. But there was something twisted in Iris’s mind, and her brain was still focused on producing adjectives at random. Lark would ask her about her day and she would only be able to say, Inane! Illogical! Isolating! She had no stories for Lark; all she had were these useless adjectives and that poisonous seed from her discussion with her pod, desperate to spread.
And there was still the sign in front of the store:
ALICE,
WHERE
ARE
YOU?
So, again, she crossed the street to Treasure Hunters.
She stopped in front of the sign and studied the words, as if there might be some sense in them if she looked at them long enough, as if Alice herself might pop out and reassure Iris that she was all right, that nothing bad had happened to her, that girls did not ever walk off the edge of the earth never to be found again.
Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of black right above. A large crow had settled on the tree branch and was fluffing its wings and strutting and cawing loudly.
“What?” Iris said, craning her neck. She was in no mood.
The crow fluffed its wings some more and cawed again. Whatever it was saying, it did not sound like a compliment.
“You’re loud and rude,” Iris said.
She turned and was about to head into the shop when something small hit her on the head. As the big crow pranced around the tree branch, the acorn it had dropped on her bounced onto the sidewalk and rolled away.
“Hey!” Iris yelled.
The crow let out a weird croak and picked up another acorn, so Iris glared at it and then escaped into the shop.
She really, really disliked crows.
As the bells on the front door chimed above her, Iris took in the shop. Today, she was aware of the way the sun touche
d the dust as it danced in the air. She was aware that the shop was darker than any other she’d been to, as if it had opted out of the light available to it. She was aware of the smell—of old things and something else, something earthy. And she was aware of the clutter of things everywhere, all of them with their own histories and stories to tell.
She was so aware of all these things that she was only dimly aware that the thing in her brain was untwisting, that her mind had stopped burping out adjectives fruitlessly, that she didn’t feel itchy or uncomfortable or even indecisive.
So she began to look around. The shopkeeper emerged from the back room, today wearing a rust-orange crew-neck sweater with a yellow-and-orange plaid shirt underneath and brown corduroy pants.
He stopped when he saw her. “Oh, it’s you again.”
“Nice to see you, too!” she said brightly. “You don’t like kids very much, do you?”
“On the contrary, I adore children. As long as they stay very still and don’t touch anything.”
In a way, Iris empathized with him, as she did not particularly like people touching her things either. Still, on principle, she ran her finger along one of the vases.
The not-compass was gone from the counter, replaced by a large brown Idaho potato perched on some kind of stand with wires coming out of either side, like a tuberous Frankenstein. The wires fed into something that looked like an ancient typewriter, and as Iris watched, one of the keys depressed and typed an s. And then the typewriter was still.
“Is that magic too?” she asked drily.
Again he fixed her with a meaningful look, as if daring her to react. “Yes, of course. What does it look like?”
“It’s a potato battery.” She had done that experiment too.
“I see. Yes, it is a”—he made quotes with his fingers—“potato battery.”
Just then, another key pressed on the typewriter: d.
“There’s no need to be rude,” Iris said. “You’re the one telling me it’s magic.”
“And you, young lady, are telling me it’s a battery made out of a potato.” He gazed at her as if she were the most ridiculous person to have ever walked the earth.
Her parents would have been horrified by the way she was talking to this adult, but he did not seem to mind particularly. And there were so many adults in her life whom she couldn’t tell how ridiculous they were acting; it was refreshing to have one for whom she could. “Is that what it’s supposed to do?” she asked as another key was pressed: x. The piece of paper under the roller showed that, so far, the typewriter had produced nothing but lines and lines of random letters.
“Not at all,” he said. “But I am ever optimistic. Now, what may I help you with? Perhaps you’d like directions to a hardware store where they sell real batteries?”
Before Iris could say something sarcastic back, she caught some slippery movement in the shadows and started slightly. She did not believe in ghosts, of course, but if they did exist, this would seem like the exact kind of place they’d want to hang out.
But it was not a ghost at all. Back in the corner by the old clocks sat a long-haired calico cat, blinking impassively at Iris.
The cat was beautiful—she had a bright white belly and soft orange and gray spots with little tabby stripes rippling through them, wide green eyes, and big white whiskers that stuck out on either side of her face grandly. She looked as if she had many important things to say and that if you paid proper attention she just might say them to you.
“You have a cat?” Iris asked.
“Oh,” he said. “Sometimes. Is she here?”
“She’s”—Iris looked over at the grandfather clocks; the cat was batting at the minute hand on one of them—“yes.” She glanced back at the shopkeeper to see whether or not he noticed what the cat was doing. It did not seem the sort of thing he would be happy about.
“That’s Duchess. There’s nothing I can do about her, I’m afraid. Cats cannot be controlled.” He said this as if it were the worst possible thing he could say about any creature.
“Well, she—” Iris looked back again. The cat was gone. “Wait, she was just there.”
“Pay no attention to her comings and goings.” He leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “That’s what she wants you to do.”
“. . . Okay.” She glanced back into the shadows for some last sign of the cat, but it was just gone.
“Now, may I help you with something?”
This would be the time to say, No, thank you, and go home. But in here it felt like all the clocks in her own life had stopped, and she really did not want them to start again.
“I just wanted to . . . look at the books?” she said, motioning to the bookshelves.
“Hmmm.” He studied her carefully. “That seems reasonable. I’ll tell you what; I will even let you touch some of them. The ones on”—he pointed—“those shelves. None of the rest of them. I imagine that pleases you, Miss . . . ?”
“Um, Iris. Maguire.”
“A pleasure, Miss Maguire. I am Mr. George Green. You may browse.” He smiled magnanimously, then added, “That bookshelf.”
As Mr. George Green turned his attention to the typewriter, Iris wandered over to the wall he had indicated, gently laying a finger on various antiques along the way. When you got over the creepiness of the whole place, there were interesting things in there: a display case of swords, another of ornate pocket watches, a box of magazines with browning pages. But it was the books that called to her. They were leather-bound and gilt-edged with golden letters pressed on the spines, and they looked as if they contained real truths.
Mr. George Green did not seem to have much knowledge of actual kids and the things they might be interested in, so she wouldn’t have been surprised if the bookshelf he’d given her permission to look at was full of early-twentieth-century philosophy textbooks or gardening treatises. But oddly enough he’d sent her to some rows of actual kids’ books. Among them was a colorful atlas-sized hardback called A Child’s Guide to Our World.
Iris opened it, turning the yellowed pages carefully. The copyright page told her it was from 1947. It could have belonged to her great-grandparents.
The book was like the shop, dusty and enticing, filled with entries about LUMBERING and THE DARK AGES and WONDERS OF THE SKY and of course MAN (by which it meant PEOPLE). It speculated that Mars might have plants, said that the universe had no beginning and no end, counted ninety-eight elements, and promised that a plan for world government was on the way. There were only four kingdoms of life, and it informed readers that it was hard to say what exactly “light” was.
Iris studied flags for countries that no longer existed, maps missing countries that existed now, dinosaurs that never existed even though people at the time thought they did. She knew, intellectually, that knowledge evolved and sometimes people believed the wrong thing. People had once thought the sun revolved around the earth.
Still. It was one thing to know that and another to look at a book from more than seventy years ago and read the contemporary equivalent of someone saying the earth was flat.
She wanted to run to Mr. Ntaba and show him the book, have him give her assurance that everything she’d learned the past few years was an actual fact, that some girl seventy years from now wouldn’t be reading the books he’d given her, mesmerized by how wrong they were.
Whatever child had owned the book in 1947 had written notes in pencil here and there, circled entries, made little stars, even doodled. There was a sheet of lined paper pressed into the pages where the girl (Iris was sure it was a girl) had written Nevermore and drawn ravens all around. Occasionally she’d doodled on the pictures themselves—the Tyrannosaur was given angel wings, and George Washington now wore a big flowered hat as he crossed the icy Delaware River.
How long had Iris been there when Mr. Green cleared his throat and announced the store was closing? She had no idea—it really had felt like time had stopped, like the store was the sort of place where th
at could happen.
She popped up, and his eyes caught on the book she was reading.
“You like the real world, then?”
She nodded.
“You are a very practical girl, aren’t you, Iris?”
She straightened. “Well . . . yes. I am.”
“You don’t often meet girls who are so practical. Most of them are so”—he searched for the word—“impractical.”
“Well, I don’t know if—”
“Yes, it is nice to meet such a sensible girl. You can come look at books anytime you wish, sensible girl.”
“Thank you?”
“Just that shelf, though.”
“Okay.”
Iris flipped through the book one more time. There was so much she hadn’t read, so many facts from the strange and dusty world of the last century. And the girl who had owned it—was she a grandmother now? Did she know that light had properties of both a particle and a wave, and that Jupiter had dozens of moons?
And there—on the inside cover, that girl had written her name.
THIS BOOK BELONGS TO ALICE.
Iris stared at the letters until she felt Mr. Green’s eyes on her. Pretending like it was nothing at all, she closed the book and put it back on the shelf.
When Iris finally got home, she discovered that her sister was sitting on the step outside the back door, hugging her knees to her chest, eyes red.
“What’s wrong?” Iris asked, running to her. “What are you doing out here?
“I lost my key,” Lark said. “I’m locked out.”
Iris’s face went hot. “Oh, no.”
“I don’t understand where my key is,” Lark said. “I checked my backpack this morning and it was there. How could I have lost it?”
“Maybe it’s on the counter? Or it fell on the floor?”
“No! No, it’s not.” She looked up at her sister. “I said I checked my backpack this morning and saw it.” Lark’s eyes were flashing.
“I . . . uh . . . I know. I just thought, maybe—”
“You thought maybe I’m not remembering right? Maybe I don’t even know what day it is? How come when you lose something it’s completely impossible, but when I do I probably left it on the counter?” Lark’s jaw was set now, and that was trouble.
