The Lost Girl

by Anne Ursu

  Amma whispered, “Nobody thinks the Grimm brothers had anything to do with Somalian folktales.”

  Abigail did not hear. “I’m going to hand out books in a second, but first I want you guys to think about what fairy-tale character you identify with the most, and when you’re ready, we’ll go around the room, okay? Who wants to start?”

  “What do you mean?”

  It was Iris who had spoken, and she seemed just as surprised by it as anyone else.

  “Iris!” Abigail looked like it was Iris’s first word ever and she was delighted to be the one there to witness it. “What fairy-tale character do you identify with?”

  She shook her head.

  “Identify with! Feel is the most like you? Like maybe you really feel like you’re a lot like Cinderella or Rapunzel or . . .”

  Iris glanced around the room. All the girls were looking at her.

  It was not exactly what she wanted to ask. She wanted to ask Abigail, what happens if you stomp and no one pays any attention? What do you do then? But she couldn’t ask that, at least not without dissolving. So instead she said:

  “But . . . that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “How so?”

  “How are we supposed to identify with fairy tales? Our lives aren’t like fairy tales. Fairy tales have witches and curses and stuff.”

  Abigail grinned, as if Iris had said something delightful—though Iris was pretty sure she had not. “Well, that’s where the imagination part comes in. Think about the biggest problem in your life right now. Go ahead. You don’t have to tell me; just think in your head: What’s your biggest problem at this very moment?”

  You, Iris thought.

  It wasn’t true, but it felt good to think it.

  “Now, take that problem and tell it in the language of magic!” She said that like it was a real thing, like that was a language one could speak. Oh yes, I take French and Chinese and also I can ask how to get to the bathroom and the library in Magic.

  “I mean it,” Abigail exclaimed. “Maybe the problem is a curse, like Sleeping Beauty had. Or a monster!”

  An ogre. Lark would understand, but Iris just shook her head helplessly. All her monsters were Lark’s. She could feel the other girls looking at her, and part of her brain was whispering, Shut up and act normal! But the rest of her just didn’t care anymore. She wasn’t normal. It was time to stop pretending.

  Abigail tried again. “What do you like about fairy tales?”

  Her cheeks flushed. “I . . . I don’t like fairy tales.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . because girls in fairy tales are boring. Because stuff just happens to them. They don’t do anything.”

  Abigail frowned. “I think—”

  “You know, she’s right,” Morgan said. “They really don’t. It’s all bad things happening to them.”

  “Yeah,” Preeti chimed in. “And they always get saved by men. What’s up with that?”

  Abigail blinked rapidly. “Well, Cinderella did something. She went to the ball.”

  “Her fairy godmother just showed up!” Morgan said. “Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Cinderella didn’t do anything.”

  “Cinderella,” agreed Preeti, “is not awesome.”

  Amma added, “If you’d brought Somalian folktales, I could show you some where the girls aren’t boring.”

  Iris looked around. The other girls were all nodding thoughtfully, as if they agreed with her, as if Iris had finally said something interesting.

  No, she didn’t like fairy tales. She’d never liked them. Either the Pied Piper was punishing kids for the grown-ups’ sins, or some girl was stuck in a tower because her parents took some cabbages. What was to like?

  “Yeah,” burst out Novalie. “Like any day you could find yourself in a glass coffin with weird dwarves staring at you, or trapped in a castle with this huge wall of thorns.”

  “And you’re waiting for some guy to crawl up your hair,” said Preeti. “That’s, like, your only hope.”

  “Or kiss you,” said Morgan, shuddering.

  “It’s basically a horror movie,” added Gabrielle, with the authority of someone who knew these sorts of things. “Like you’re just going along minding your own business and some witch hates you because you’re pretty or some fairy is all ticked because your parents didn’t invite her to your christening and then suddenly you’ve got witches after you.”

  Iris swallowed. This was exactly what it was like. Suddenly she felt like she was in a glass coffin, dwarves pointing and staring and whispering to one another, and she was helpless to do anything. She was trapped in a tower and someone was pulling on her hair and it hurt so badly. She was all alone in a dark castle dreaming of monsters and she tried and tried but she couldn’t wake up, and there was no Lark to crawl into bed with her and tell her it was going to be okay.

  All day she had not cried, and now, suddenly, the tears came to her eyes, stinging like poison. She pressed her lips together hard, trying to keep them from spilling out—she did not want to cry here, of all places—and out of the corner of her eyes she saw Hannah looking at her like maybe she wasn’t the worst person in the whole world, like maybe Hannah knew just how she felt, and then the tears fell.

  The other girls knew how she felt.

  The other girls knew how she felt.

  They felt the same way.

  They felt the same way.

  Edging her chair closer, Hannah slipped Iris a Kleenex. “I have lots,” she said, “you can have as many as you want,” and that did not help Iris’s crying at all. Then a hand on her back—Amma, who had gotten up from her chair just to comfort Iris, and then Emily was on the other side of her squeezing her knee, and Hannah kept giving her Kleenex, one after another.

  Then, a large sniff from the front of the class. Abigail, standing, watching the gathering group. “You girls . . . ,” she said, eyes full. “You’re . . . awesome.”

  Iris looked up and all of the Awesome girls were looking at her like they would be around her too if only she had any more sides. Preeti was rubbing her own eyes, and Iris wanted to say something, she wanted to tell the girls that she knew how they felt, that she felt the same way, that they could feel the same way together and that was better than feeling it alone. But she had finally gotten her crying under control and if she said that she might never stop.

  And then Abigail exclaimed, “Gretel!” far more loudly than strictly was called for, and all the girls exchanged glances.

  “Pardon me?” Gabrielle asked.

  “In ‘Hansel and Gretel’!” Abigail exclaimed. “Gretel’s not boring. She kills the witch!”

  Now, the other girls were looking to Iris to respond. To Iris! As if she was the expert on fairy-tale heroines and the relative boringness of the characters therein, as opposed to the one with the chapped cheeks and red stinging eyes

  So she nodded. And wiped her face. And took a big breath.

  And the other girls nodded too.

  “Yes!” Abigail exclaimed. “Hansel goes in the cage, and the witch tries to get Gretel to turn on the oven so she can cook her! And so Gretel tricks the witch and says she can’t figure out how. And so the witch finally leans into the oven to show her, then Gretel pushes her! A very clever plan. I might even say”—she raised her eyebrows—“an awesome one.”

  Everyone settled back in their seats then. Iris looked around the room, regarding her campmates. It felt like her chair had been at the edge of the room this whole time, and now that she’d pulled it into the circle, she could see what they really looked like. Gabrielle shot her a look that clearly said I hope you’re okay and Iris felt herself smile a little at her.

  “I like Cinderella,” Emily whispered to Iris.

  “That’s okay,” Iris said quickly, sniffing a little. “My sister loves Cinderella.”

  “Sometimes you want a fairy godmother, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Iris whispered back. “Yeah, I do.”

  Chapter Thirty
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  Puzzles

  Iris might not have understood what Abigail was asking, but I did not have any problem understanding it at all. And I do like fairy tales.

  Iris had misunderstood the question. Abigail was not asking the girls whom they admired. She asked whom they identified with, a much different question.

  I identify with all the Grimm fairy-tale girls, every single one. I always have. Those were the only stories I understood, and the only stories I knew how to tell. I did not know there were other possibilities.

  And Iris identified with them too though she would never have phrased it that way.

  Iris was in a glass coffin, trapped in a tower, alone in a castle fast asleep.

  She dreamed that she’d undone the spell, that now she was fighting the monsters who had trapped her. She thought she was awake and yelling and stomping and people could finally hear her. But no. No one could hear her, and she couldn’t make a sound. She was still trapped.

  And she did not have a fairy godmother.

  But it is something to know that all those other girls are in the room with you. Even if you are all in glass coffins. At least you aren’t alone.

  It is a terrible thing, to feel alone.

  Now that September was at its end it was cold enough for fall to begin its spread through the trees. Some trees were still green and full, others bright red or orange or yellow, and a few were already bare.

  One of the big maples in front of the library had lost its leaves already and was now a tangle of limbs and branches. As Iris walked out of the library, she saw that this tree was covered in crows.

  There were dozens of them in that one tree, covering the branches as if the crows themselves were that tree’s peculiar fruit.

  And they weren’t just in that tree. There were crows everywhere—along the phone lines, in the other trees, perched on the roofs of the other shops. They were everywhere except in the immediate vicinity of Treasure Hunters.

  So Iris darted across the street into the store.

  “Are you quite all right?” Mr. Green asked when she walked in.

  Iris shook her head. There was no point. Her face tended to hold on to the stain of tears for as long as it could.

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  Yes. No. Yes.

  She’d come here for a reason, though. Even if she wasn’t quite sure what that reason was.

  “My sister . . . Lark . . . she had a bad day at school. And I can’t help her. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “You feel powerless,” he said.

  She looked up at him and nodded.

  “It is a terrible feeling.”

  “Everything’s just so out of control,” she said. “And there’s nothing I can do about any of it. Nobody’s listening to me. And maybe they shouldn’t—I don’t know. What happened today . . . it was my fault.” She swallowed and glanced to the floor. “Maybe I’m bad for Lark.”

  There. The words were out now.

  When you are trapped in a glass coffin, you have a lot of time to think. All these pieces had been floating around in the air just waiting for Iris to put them together. And now she had.

  All day long this roiling goo of emotions had been churning inside her, morphing from one terrible beast to another, but now all of that had settled. Now the goo just sat there, heavy.

  Her parents had told the school to separate them. At first her reaction had just been fury, but now the cold fact of it stared at her and she could not look away.

  It used to be that they had better outcomes when they were together. Everyone knew it. That was the story. But somewhere along the line the story changed, and now, apparently, they were better off apart. Their parents believed it. Not just that: they believed that Iris was bad for Lark. That without her Lark would find herself. Which meant that with her, Lark was lost.

  There was a time that this idea would have infuriated her. She would have run into Lark’s room and spilled words everywhere, so many words they would fill the room and threaten to flood it. Can you believe it? How absurd! How ridiculous. How dare they? How could they?

  But now she found herself wondering if it was true.

  “Do you really believe that you’re bad for your sister?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.” He had said Alice’s fate wouldn’t be Lark’s, but then, he also thought Iris was sensible. He could be wrong about anything.

  He frowned. “I don’t understand why people aren’t listening to you. You are not some silly girl. They should listen.”

  “Well, they don’t.”

  “Sometimes it can be easy to feel powerless in the face of other people’s problems. Alice was a very unhappy girl, but it was important for me to remember I was not responsible for her emotions. I could not make her listen to me, alas. But I have been alive a long time, and I have learned something very important.”

  “What?”

  “Power is yours for the taking. And once you have it, you never give it up.”

  Iris tried not to make a face. It was easy for him to say. He probably believed in stomping, too.

  “Do you think your sister thinks you’re bad for her?” he asked after a moment.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alice . . . did not always appreciate me, I fear. She told herself stories. She kept secrets.”

  “Lark doesn’t keep secrets from me.”

  “And you? Do you keep secrets from Lark?”

  “I . . .”

  “Sometimes you must keep secrets. To protect someone. You understand that, right?”

  Iris nodded slowly.

  “We must protect our sisters, you and I. There are many monsters in the world, Miss Maguire. And they are happy to prey on the vulnerable.”

  She did not want to talk about monsters. She wanted the Child’s Guide to Our World and its bright illustrated pages. She wanted to draw wings on dinosaurs herself. She understood, suddenly, why someone would do that: you could make a world as strange as you want, as long as you had control of it.

  “I should go home. Lark is home. I need to talk to her. Tell her I’m sorry. I don’t want her to worry.”

  He eyed her. “Will she worry? Doesn’t she know where you are?”

  “Not . . . not really.”

  “Ah.” He studied her for a moment. “I like you, Miss Maguire. You are a most unusual girl. Listen to me.” He leaned in. “You do not need to feel powerless.”

  Mr. George Green seemed different now. Less silly, less ineffectual. Less mustardy and less like a mole man.

  “Do you still have that encyclopedia? Alice’s?”

  “I do. It is upstairs.”

  “Could I look at it again sometime?”

  He nodded slowly, studying her.

  “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “I have many things I would like to show you.”

  Iris biked home, the air biting at her cheeks, her thoughts biting at her mind.

  Do you think your sister thinks you’re bad for her?

  Before today, Iris would have said no, of course not. Lark would never think that. But that was before Lark looked at her like Iris had personally forced her to dissect seventeen owl pellets.

  Maybe Lark did think so now. But Iris could apologize. She could do that. She could explain how weird this year had been, and how she felt like she’d been unraveled and then put back together wrong. She could tell Lark she just didn’t know how to be a good sister anymore. She could tell her she missed her during the day.

  She could try.

  But when Iris got home, her mom was in the kitchen, alone.

  “Your sister’s asleep,” she said

  “Okay,” Iris said. “Maybe I should go up?”

  “No. She needs sleep. I don’t want you to wake her. She had a hard day.”

  “I know!” It came out a little more forcefully than Iris had intended. But she did know. If there was one thing in the world she knew to be true, it was that Lark had had a hard day. And it was
her fault.

  Her mom’s eyebrows went up. “Yes, I know you know. And I know you know you are not to be rude to teachers. And yet, here we are.”

  “I’m sorry. I am. I was mad—”

  “I know that. Iris, you need to get your anger under control. You’re too emotional—”

  “That’s not true!” She was not the emotional one.

  “Oh, I think it is. I know you’re upset that we separated you guys, but if you want to be involved in these decisions, you need to start acting more mature.” She shook her head. “Do you think that helps your sister? Yelling at teachers, calling students names, running into the principal’s office? Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that it’s hard on Lark when you do things like that?”

  No. It hadn’t occurred to her. If it had occurred to her, she wouldn’t have done it. But it was occurring to her now.

  Had it occurred to Lark?

  “Is that why you separated us?” she whispered.

  “Part of the reason, yes. There are many reasons. But the only reason you need to know is that you two girls are our solemn responsibility and sometimes we need to make hard choices to help you.”

  How could she explain that that wasn’t true? That she needed to know so much more than that?

  “Listen,” her mom continued, “we’re going to take care of your sister. I’m going to let her stay home for another couple of days while we put a plan in place; I’m scheduling a meeting with Principal Peter and Mr. Hunt and the school counselor. We’re going to help her—we have this, okay?”

  Iris nodded.

  “Mr. Hunt has a lot of good ideas about helping Lark manage. He called me after school and we talked for a long time. And”—she peered over her glasses meaningfully—“he told me not to be too hard on you, that you were just worried about your sister.”

  “He did?” She looked at the floor. Maybe her mom should be harder on her. “I need to go check on Lark.”

  “I told you—”

  “I won’t wake her. I just want to see that she’s okay.”

  Her mom gazed at her in that mom way she had, the way that felt like it was tugging at all her secrets.