by Anne Ursu
The next night when Iris awoke from a nightmare—vampires, this time—Lark slipped into her bed and collected the pieces of the dream and reshaped them: that swarm of vampires that menaced her were all vegetarians, no more dangerous than Bunnicula.
And when the sun came up Lark told her about all the ways an ordinary girl could defeat a vampire.
They remember Lark’s bestiary as just something that happened too. It was Lark—of course she had her own monster book.
But it didn’t just happen. Lark told Iris stories, and then at some point Lark started drawing pictures, and then she wrote out facts about each monster, and soon she was collecting them all into a book—a monster bestiary.
“We need this,” Lark had said. “We’re the girls who defeat the monsters.”
So it was Lark who named all the monsters for Iris, gave them shape and form and powers, and, most importantly, gave them weaknesses. And once you can look at a monster head-on, once you know the sound it makes, the precise threat it poses, the way it can be defeated, then you can look straight into the dark places and not be so afraid.
And at night, sometimes, your sister crawls into the top bunk with you, bringing Esmeralda, and you sleep tucked in with each other.
Sometimes that, alone, keeps the monsters away.
Chapter Nineteen
Freakenstein
So life proceeded this way through September, as the temperatures dropped and the leaves began to turn red, orange, and yellow. Iris did not go back to Treasure Hunters after Camp Awesome because she did not want to be late again, though she always looked to see if the sign had changed. (It had not.) Whoever Alice was, Mr. George Green had not found her yet.
So she was always home when Lark got home from art camp (even though Lark never again lost her key), full of talk of negative space and perspective and color theory, while Iris had no stories to tell. Iris had no color theory, no perspective. Everything remained gray and mushy. And everywhere she went she couldn’t escape the feeling that she was the wrong girl.
Class was no exception. Her pod had its own rhythm and Lark would have gotten it; Lark would have slipped into it, added to it. Iris just sat and listened. And Ms. Shonubi was nice; she read to them every day and let them pick out whatever book they wanted during independent reading time. She gave the class nonconfrontational word problems and fun science experiments and talked about history like it was an adventure. She would probably have loved making dollhouse rooms and cataloging gifts from crows if she’d had a chance.
In other words, Iris was the wrong girl for her.
Maybe she would have been fine in Mr. Hunt’s class. She didn’t mind oral reports. She liked telling people how things were. She didn’t really mind math drills—they were orderly, at least.
But Lark did.
She minded a lot. The book report went terribly—Mr. Hunt kept telling her to look up and talk louder and have confidence and work on her presentation skills and that he would call on her more to help her practice speaking in front of her peers, which he then started doing, and every time, every single thing Lark knew flew from her head like a scared bird and she could not answer.
“I have to just tell them,” Iris said, sitting on Lark’s bed one Sunday night after Lark had spent some time fretting about an oral report she’d have to give on Thursday. “Mom and Dad. The experiment failed. It’s not working.”
“Don’t,” Lark said softly.
“But I have to! I’ll tell Principal Peter. I’ll tell Mom. We said we’d try it, and we tried it, and it’s not working, and I’ll tell them that, and then they can switch you out and everything will be okay again.”
“You can’t,” Lark said.
“But—”
“Iris!”
Iris stopped.
“Iris. It’s not going to help. It never helps. They’ll just tell you that we need to try more and harder as if I’m not trying as hard I can, and I just can’t take that.”
“But that’s why I’ll do it.”
“They’ll still think it. They’ll still think I’m just not trying.”
“But—”
“Iris. No. It won’t help. They won’t listen to us.”
And Lark held her eyes and tapped out Please, and there was nothing Iris could do but nod and agree.
Because she was the one who listened to Lark.
The next afternoon Iris was in media—the one class where she didn’t feel like the wrong girl. For that one period every Monday and Friday she could sit in a chair without feeling like she didn’t quite fit in it correctly, that she was not made in the right way.
Mr. Ntaba seemed to be on a picture-book biography kick with her, specifically biographies of girls and women who were told they couldn’t do something and did it anyway. This was clearly supposed to inspire her, though she wasn’t exactly sure how. But the stories were good.
On this particular Monday, he called her to the desk and handed her a book about Alice Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, who, according to the title, was the one thing in his life the future president could not manage. Iris chose not to take Mr. Ntaba’s selection personally.
“I picked this one for you. I think you’ll like Alice.”
Alice, where are you?
Iris flipped open the book, looking at pictures of this girl running and bouncing her way through her life, Teddy Roosevelt chasing after her. She said she wanted to “eat up the world.”
“Thank you,” she said, taking the book and heading toward a beanbag, wondering what it would be like to want to eat up the world.
“Oh, hey,” Mr. Ntaba said, “tell Lark I hope she feels better.”
Iris stopped. “What do you mean?”
“She wasn’t here today when her class had media. I assumed she was home sick?”
“I—I don’t think so? We came to school together.” Iris could feel the red climb up her cheeks. It was possible that Lark had gone home sick, that her mom had come to pick her up. That had happened before, but when they were in the same class, Iris was able to watch these things happen as opposed to just hearing about it from the librarian.
Which was rather embarrassing. Part of being twins was that you knew more about what was going on with your sister on a daily basis than the school librarian did, no matter how much you liked that librarian.
This was where ESP could have come in handy. Iris could have thought, Psst, Lark, are you okay? And Lark would have thought back, I had a sore throat and Mom came to get me but I feel better now. How are you? And then no one would have had to worry.
Iris grabbed the book and paced around the library, while all around her, her classmates were happily reading and not worrying about their twin sisters. Mira and some of the other girls were grouped around a table looking at a book and whispering to one another. Jin was paging through a big book on space travel, and Oliver was, in fact, reading a dictionary for fun. Other kids were lolling in the beanbags and huddled in corners. The library clock ticked slowly on.
Iris huffed and went back to the desk. “Mr. Ntaba? I want to go find out what happened to Lark. Can I go to the office?”
This sort of thing really wasn’t done in school—students didn’t go wandering out of class, at least as far as Iris knew. There were rules, protocols.
Normally, she would have been prepared—she could have explained exactly why all those rules and protocols did not apply to this particular situation, and also why they were ridiculous in the first place and should probably be immediately stopped before they did actual harm, and didn’t Principal Peter have a pattern of making poor decisions anyway?—but she was not prepared. The words did not come. All she could do was look up at Mr. Ntaba and say, “Please?”
He frowned. “Iris, I’m sorry. I can’t let you leave class without a very good reason.”
“This is a very good reason.”
“I know that it’s a very good reason to you, but to the people I’d have to explain myself to, it’s not a
very good reason.”
“But—”
He held up his hand. “But I can call down to the office. Would you like me to do that?”
She nodded and he disappeared into his office behind the library desk.
This is what he discovered:
Yes, Lark had gone home sick. Ms. Snyder in the office had a note for Iris from her mother but hadn’t delivered it yet due to the untimely escape of a kindergarten class hedgehog.
“Did Ms. Snyder say anything else?”
“No.”
“Nothing about what’s wrong?”
“No, but Iris, if it were serious, I’m sure someone would have come and gotten you.”
“Can I go get my note, please?” she asked.
There must have been something in her voice, or something on her face, because Mr. Ntaba gazed at her and then nodded. “All right, Iris. But”—he leaned in—“no shenanigans.”
It was probably a joke, though Iris was not in the mood for jokes. Nor was she in the mood for shenanigans. Still, she flashed Mr. Ntaba a smile as if he were very funny indeed, and as if she certainly could be trusted to go to the office and come right back and the very idea of her stopping along the way and engaging in any kind of shenanigans was utterly laughable.
Which was true. Iris had one mission and one mission only—to find out what had happened to her sister. But when she got to the office, Ms. Snyder was at the front desk talking to someone on the phone about trapping small animals. Nodding at Iris, she handed her the note from her mother and waved her away. As Iris walked out, unfolding the note, Ms. Snyder’s voice trailed after her. “No, no, not like that! This is a kindergarten hedgehog! We need Mr. Prickles alive!”
Iris—
Lark has gone home sick for the day. I’ve already dropped your bike off, so you can bike home from camp as always.
Love,
Mom
P.S. No arguing.
Iris stared at the note, mentally sputtering. Love, Mom? Love, Mom? What kind of a way was that to sign off? What kind of a note was this, anyway? Notes were supposed to contain information; that was the whole point of leaving a note for someone. This had no information at all. Home sick. What kind of sick? There were so many ways to be sick. You could feel queasy, you could have a sore throat, or you could have emergency symptoms and be rushed to the hospital.
You can bike home after camp as always.
After camp! She was just supposed to go to camp, like nothing was wrong, like her twin sister wasn’t home with a queasy throat emergency.
The rational explanation was that of course Lark was fine. If her mother could breezily write you can bike home, then there was no emergency.
Unless something was wrong and they weren’t telling Iris.
They didn’t want Iris to worry. So they wouldn’t tell her and she’d just tra-la-la fiddle-dee-dee her way to Camp Awesome, because everything was awesome, and not find out until nighttime that something was really wrong.
She wasn’t even going to get started on No arguing.
In short, there was no part of the note that didn’t make Iris furious.
She glanced back into the office, but Ms. Snyder was still on the phone and didn’t look like she wanted to hurry up her conversation so Iris could call home.
Thwarted by a hedgehog.
With a huff, Iris crumpled up the note and headed back to the media center. All she wanted to do was run into someone who was in Lark’s class and could tell her what had happened.
And she did.
She ran into Tommy Whedon.
Why Tommy was wandering the halls by himself when there was protocol, she did not know. Iris didn’t want to acknowledge he existed. Still, Lark had said he hadn’t been bad this year, and right now he was her only option. So maybe she could just ask—
And then Tommy stopped, his face twisting. “What?” he snapped.
Iris stiffened. “Nothing,” she said icily. Apparently her decision had been made for her.
“You’re a psycho, you know that?”
Iris crossed her arms. “Excuse me?”
“You are. I think you have anger issues.”
“You’re a troll, Tommy. The most ridiculous kind. You just sit in caves and burp and bother people.”
“I thought I was a mole rat.”
“You are. You’re a troll, a mole rat, and a blowfish.”
His eyes narrowed. “Psycho and Freakenstein. You guys make a great team.”
“What did you call my sister?”
“Freakenstein! She’s a huge freak. She’s, like, possessed or something.”
Iris went cold. “What do you mean?”
“She puked in class today. It was so dis-gust-ing. Just puke, everywhere. I don’t know what projectile vomiting is, but if it’s a real thing, that’s what she did.”
Iris exhaled. Vomit was not good, but it was the sort of thing that happened to you and you got better. It did not require a trip to the emergency room, unless you vomited for more than twenty-four hours or ran a high fever.
The questions tickled at her throat. Was Lark running a high fever? Any other symptoms? But she was not going to seek comfort in the cold blowfish eyes of Tommy Whedon.
Just then, he puffed out his cheeks and started making gagging noises. And for one half of a millisecond Iris thought he might be sick, might actually vomit.
But then he leaned over and pretend puked on the floor.
Iris whirled around and stomped away.
Shenanigans.
Chapter Twenty
Superpowers
On the bus, Iris perched herself next to Natalie and Jenny, two of Lark’s classmates, and got the full story. Apparently, while Iris’s class was doing free reading time, Mr. Hunt’s class was dissecting owl pellets.
Iris knew what owl pellets were, but apparently Lark had not known. Lark probably thought they were special owl food you bought at the store to convince owls to be your friends.
Owl pellets are not special owl food from the store. Owls do not eat pellets from the store, or anything else from a store. They are predators and eat small prey animals. In fact, they swallow these small animals whole, and then regurgitate the undigestible parts.In the form of a pellet.
The class assignment was to pick the bones of the prey out of the pellet and reconstruct the skeleton of the animal it once was. Which is a thing you can do with owl pellets. Natalie and Jenny said that Mr. Hunt seemed really excited about the whole thing, which of course he was. Ogres are notoriously excited by things involving digestion.
To Mr. Hunt, this was probably a cool hands-on exploration of nature. To Lark, it was a horror show. Not only did Lark not like the food chain, but she did not like anything involving bodies, especially things coming out of bodies. And she especially especially did not like anything involving bodies or things coming out of bodies at school. It had taken her until third grade to be able to go to the bathroom at all during the school day. Once in fourth grade Mackenzie Bradford vomited in class, and Lark cried out of sympathetic embarrassment.
And now it was Lark who had thrown up.
“It was pretty gross,” Jenny said.
“Like, grosser than owl pellets,” Natalie said.
“Which are really gross,” Jenny said.
“Maybe she vomited up her prey,” Natalie said.
Jenny giggled. “We could reconstruct her breakfast!”
The girls moved on to reconstructing their own adventures with owl pellets, and Iris sat back against the cold bus seat. Now that she wasn’t worried about Lark being rushed to the hospital, now that she could picture the whole scene, now that the girls were telling her how utterly gross Lark throwing up had been, Iris understood the real consequences of Lark getting sick today.
She would be mortified.
Iris was aware that the owl-pellet activity was designed for educational purposes and not specifically to traumatize her sister, and yet if you went to an ogre meeting and the agenda were Find a Way
to Torment Lark Maguire, you might come out of it with something much like this project.
The last thing Iris wanted to do was go to Camp Awesome today. She wanted to go home and talk to Lark and try to save her from the ocean of embarrassment she was probably drowning in right now. But her mom had told her to go, and as much as she wanted to go home, her mom would be mad if she did, and Lark did not like it when their parents were mad at Iris.
So she went.
Camp Awesome had continued to be an intense experiment in making Iris feel less than awesome. She understood how the activities might make some girls feel awesome, and indeed the rest of her campmates seemed to really enjoy everything they did. Collages, duct-tape art, collages with duct-tape art. Glitter glue and fabric paint, pom-poms and google eyes. Macramé and mobiles, stickers and slime. Beading. Journaling. Icebreakers and warm-ups. Get-to-know-you games. Get-to-know-you-better games!
She still couldn’t seem to find her way in at Awesome, or figure out what to say to all the other girls. At some point she’d written down all their names in her journal and then made a chart with everything she’d learned about them.
For instance:
Amma:
5th grade
Truths: fencing and gymnastics.
Lie: had a frog, but it died
Journal cover: circle of eyes
Favorite color: purple
Favorite food: cupcakes
Adjective: amazing
Favorite book: Rise of the Jumbies
Favorite movie: MOANA
It would seem like if you did this long enough you would figure out how to act in front of someone.
It would seem like it.
Today when they walked in they found that Abigail had hung pictures of female superheroes all around the room. There was Batgirl, Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, the girl and the mom from The Incredibles, the green lady from Guardians of the Galaxy, the Powerpuff Girls. They all looked ready to fight crime, conquer evil, and be as awesome as possible.
“Who’s your favorite?” Novalie whispered to Iris.
