by Liz Kessler
“It’s for you,” Charlotte said, holding her daisy chain out toward me.
“Mine’s for you!” I said, smiling as I held it out to her.
Charlotte smiled back. “Let’s make sure we keep them forever,” she said.
“Forever and ever!”
I slipped my new necklace over my head, trying to tell myself that the daisies wouldn’t wither and die, and that our friendship wouldn’t either.
“Come on, I’ve got another present for you,” I said. “It’s in the house.”
Charlotte followed me, and we chatted about lunch, presents, the weather, flowers, parties — everything we could think of, except the thing that was bigger than all the others put together: the fact that she was leaving tomorrow.
I went to bed early. Mom and Dad always let me stay up late on Saturdays, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to watch them come back all giddy and excited, like they usually do after they’ve done a party. I think it’s all the sweets they eat. They play music really loud and dance around in the kitchen. Mom sometimes plays her fiddle, and Dad does a silly jig.
I used to dance with them. Occasionally, I still do — when they won’t take no for an answer — but to be honest, I never feel comfortable dancing around in the kitchen. Sometimes I try to get out of it by saying that I need to do my homework. That makes Mom hoot with laughter. Homework is way down on her list of priorities, compared with such important things as dancing and laughing.
They didn’t push me tonight, though. Maybe they could see I was too miserable. Charlotte was leaving in the morning. She wanted me to see her off, but I couldn’t face the thought of watching her drive out of my life.
I checked the clock radio on my nightstand. Ten minutes to nine. This time tomorrow she’d be in her new home.
Then I remembered something else: the daisy! I almost laughed out loud as I remembered thinking that it was going to turn into a fairy. That’s what having a mom like mine does for you: it gives you strange ideas! Fairies — as if!
But there was still a bit of me that wondered if perhaps it could be possible. My head filled with questions. I mean, what if it was true? What if it really was going to turn into a fairy?
What would she be like? Would she like the tin I’d made for her? What if she grew out of it?
Maybe she’d have a wand that sparkled, and a bright white dress, and a tiara in her hair — she’d look like all the fairies you read about in stories. Stories I used to read ages ago, that is. I don’t read those kinds of stories anymore — of course!
I laughed to myself. I couldn’t persuade myself I was going to have a real, live fairy in my yard!
I picked up a new magic book that Dad had bought me last week: The Magician’s Handbook. I opened it to a new trick: “How to Make Paper Clips Link Themselves.”
But after staring at the words for ten minutes, I realized I hadn’t turned the page. In fact, I hadn’t even read a line. I couldn’t get the daisy out of my mind.
What if . . . ? What if . . . ?
I couldn’t stop wondering. Maybe I just wanted to believe it to take my mind off of everything else. I don’t know. All I knew was that the thought wouldn’t go away — and the certainty was getting stronger and stronger.
I was getting jittery. Should I go down to the tree house and look at the tin, see if anything had happened yet? Would I disturb the fairy if I did? How did it work, anyway — the process of a daisy turning into a fairy?
I tried to go back to my book but still couldn’t concentrate on it. That was a first. Reading about a new trick usually got my thoughts away from everything, whether it was thinking about Mom and Dad embarrassing me in front of my friends, or girls like Trisha Miles at school picking on me and making me look stupid in front of the class. Or even the thought of Charlotte going away. Magic tricks could usually take my mind off of anything. Not this, though. Maybe fairy magic was even more powerful than human magic.
I got out of bed and wandered around my bedroom, feeling clumsy and heavy. What could I do? How was I going to get through the next three hours? Should I go to the tree house? Should I just check?
I thought about the tin on the ledge, the darkness starting to grow around it. What if she was lonely or scared? My fairy, all alone, waiting in her little tin box on the window ledge. What if she came early? What if she’d left by the time I went to see her? What if she woke up — or came to, or whatever it is they do — before she was meant to? She might not be fully formed.
A shiver snatched the back of my neck, twisting hairs into spikes and tiptoeing down my spine.
Don’t think about it.
I looked at the clock again. It was nearly ten. Only two hours. I got back into bed, grabbed The Magician’s Handbook, and tried to read, wondering if the next two hours would ever pass.
Eventually, I drifted into a restless sleep.
I was being chased by a monster. It had short, thick legs like tree stumps, and branches sticking out of its head. It was coming after me with a bunch of daisies, shouting angrily as it ran: “You should have left them alone, you stupid child. Now look what you’ve done!”
I hid behind an oak tree. Could I climb it? It was surrounded by a beautiful daisy chain, but when I reached out, the chain turned to barbed wire. I was trapped, the monster was closing in on me —
“N-o-o-o!”
I jerked up in bed, sweating and shaking and even more convinced about the daisy. The dream — it had felt so real.
I blinked and squinted in the semidarkness. The light from the moon was shining through the curtains. It threw a menacing line of light onto the wall and carpet. I switched on the lamp and sent the moon away.
Twenty to twelve.
My mind was suddenly racing with questions again, like a carousel that wouldn’t stop. What if she was a bad fairy? What if she didn’t want to be in my tree house?
Maybe it was mean to put her in a tin.
Maybe she’d be mad at me already.
I got out of bed and pulled on my robe. I drew it around me, but I still couldn’t stop shaking. Ten to twelve. Think. What should I do?
Eight minutes to twelve. Seven, six.
I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want it to happen.
I didn’t want fairy magic. Why was this happening to me? Why did I have to make that stupid daisy chain? The shaking turned into a full body rattle as I realized I had to get rid of the daisy.
I darted out of my room and ran downstairs, making sure to avoid all the creaky floorboards near Mom and Dad’s room. Gently turning the key in the back door, I ran as fast as I could down to the tree house, my feet damp from dewy grass.
Breathless, I clambered up the ladder, into the tree house, and across to the ledge.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, picking up the tin. “I’m really sorry.”
I carried it to the opposite window, the one that looked down on bushes and shrubs. I opened the tin and then, leaning out the window, I scrunched the daisy tightly in my palm and threw it out, out into the bushes, away from the tree house, out of my hands, out of my life.
Moments later, I sagged with relief as I heard the distant church bell chime twelve times. Hands shaking, I stared at the empty tin.
As an afterthought, I threw that out into the bushes, too, before climbing back down the ladder and shutting the trapdoor behind me. Without turning to look at the bushes, I ran up the lawn, back in the house, and straight back to bed.
Pulling the duvet up to my chin, I turned to the wall and somehow drifted off into a peaceful sleep.
The first thing I noticed when I came around was the taste in my mouth. What was it?
Something gritty, unpleasant. I reached up to feel my mouth. It was all over my lips. Soil! Ugh!
I spat it out and wiped my mouth with both hands. Argh! My right arm! It was scratched and bleeding all the way down — and it hurt like mad. Was it broken?
I tried to move but couldn’t put the weight down on my right leg. My ankle had swollen up. I
could hardly see anything in the pitch blackness. Where was I? My head was fuzzy with confusion and unanswered questions.
I dragged myself out of the bush, scratching my back on thistles and prickles on the way. Glancing around to check that no one had seen me, I scurried over the fence into the woods. I washed the blood and soil off myself in a stream, smarting from the cold against my raw skin. What had happened? Was it always like this?
I sat on the bank and waited for morning to come.
Bright daylight crept into my bedroom, searching out the gap in the curtains and seeping through it to aim straight at my face as if it were a target.
I rubbed my eyes and pulled the duvet over my face. Surely it couldn’t be morning yet?
Lying under the covers as my brain gradually surfaced from the fog of sleep, for a moment it felt like any other morning. Then one by one, memories of the previous day entered my mind, each one weighing down heavier than the last.
Charlotte’s moving today. That was the first. That was bad enough. I tore my mind away from the thought, and it instantly grabbed another one.
The daisy.
My heart hurt as though it had a giant snake wrapped around it, squeezing it tightly. My daisy. What had I done? My one and only chance to have a fairy of my own, and I’d thrown it away.
I dragged myself out of bed. The daisy chain Charlotte had given me lay on my dresser. It was starting to wilt already, and one of the daisies had come loose.
“I’m not going to lose you on top of everything else,” I said, glancing around for something to put it in. This daisy chain represented my friendship with Charlotte. I wasn’t about to let it die before she’d even left!
I scrabbled around in the cupboard under my dresser and found a small eggcup with a swirly green pattern around the top, and purple and blue spots all around the sides. I’d won it in the egg-and-spoon race at Easter. That would do. I filled it with water from the glass on my bedside table and put the stray daisy in it. It seemed to perk up right away. “That’s better,” I said, and went downstairs.
Mom was in the kitchen, sewing up a hole in a child-size policeman’s outfit while she drank a cup of coffee. Mom works in a costume shop in the afternoons, as well as running the business with Dad, so seeing her fixing a policeman’s outfit over coffee wasn’t as unusual as it might sound.
“How come you’re up?” I asked. Mom and Dad don’t normally get up before me. I’m nearly always awake first, followed by Mom, who usually gets up while I’m fixing myself some breakfast — or what passes for breakfast in our house. Sugar-free, additive-free, taste-free muesli that most people would give to their pet rabbit, or organic rye toast that’s a bit like eating thinly sliced bricks.
Mom gets all our food from this shop called Leaven Heaven, where everything is organic and fair trade — and generally lacking in taste, flavor, and chewability. Breakfast at our house is not the most exciting event in the world.
Mom spends most of the morning drinking coffee and shuffling around in her nightgown. Dad gets up and throws some clothes on just in time to bundle himself into the van and drive me to school. You wouldn’t exactly call either of them morning people.
“Had to fix this outfit. We’ve got a little boy coming in to pick it up today for a birthday party,” Mom said. “Anyway, I couldn’t sleep,” she added, draining her cup and getting up to refill it.
“How come?”
“Oh, one thing and another. Your dad woke me in the middle of the night, saying he heard noises.”
“Noises?” Had he heard me creeping out of the house in the night? Was I going to be in trouble? Not that Mom and Dad are big on punishments. Or discipline. Or school. My parents are what you could call free spirits. They go with the flow and don’t get too bothered by the kinds of things most people’s parents get worked up about.
I hardly ever get into trouble anyway; it’s not really my thing. But on the odd occasions when I accidentally do something I shouldn’t have, all that happens is that we sit around the kitchen table and talk about it. Sometimes that makes me want to do something really bad, just to find out how they’d react.
“I think he’s finally losing his marbles — what he’s got left of them,” Mom said with a laugh. “Said he thought he heard things going on in the backyard.”
“Really?” I said quickly, crossing the kitchen and opening the fridge so I could hide my burning face. “What time?”
“Well, the first time he woke up was at midnight.”
“Mm-hm,” I said as casually as I could. Here we go. We’ll be having one of those discussions later. I’ll have to look them both in the eye and explain why I left the house in the middle of the night, and they’ll look at me with those sorrowful expressions that say, Where did we go wrong? Honestly, why can’t they just ground me like normal parents?
“But it went on much later than that. At least for an hour, he said.”
“Huh?” But I was back in bed by ten past midnight!
“Yes, he said he heard this noise out back. Not that I heard anything. Mind you, I could sleep through a bomb going off. Remember that time in —”
“What did he hear, Mom?” I burst in before she was off on one of her tangents. Honestly, Mom takes forever to tell a story. She gets sidetracked so many times that she usually forgets where she started.
“Now, don’t say anything, because it might have been the wine he had before we went to bed. You know he’s not a big drinker, but the party yesterday went so well, and —”
“Mom!”
“Sorry. Well, he said he saw bright lights, and there was a kind of crackling noise. A bit like static electricity, he said, or lightning. He got out of bed to see what it was, and the strange thing was, he said it looked as though it was coming from our yard! Bright lights and crackling, popping sounds.”
“What did he do?”
“He woke me up and dragged me over to the window, but it had stopped by the time I was awake enough to open my eyes. I said it was probably the Hendersons next door.”
“Maybe they were having a fireworks display,” I said, relieved that that was all it was, and not that they’d seen me running around in the middle of the night. It wouldn’t exactly be easy to explain.
“That’s what I said. He wasn’t convinced, though. He was positive it was in our yard, or in the woods out back. I’m sure he’ll agree with us once he gets up, though. Things make much more sense in the morning, don’t they?”
Do they? Did things make more sense to me this morning than they had last night? As far as I could see, things made less sense today than they’d ever made before in my life. I’d thrown away an opportunity to have real magic, and my best friend was leaving. What made sense about that?
I stared at the cereal box as I ate, reading the words on the side till I couldn’t see them anymore through my blurry eyes.
I arrived at Charlotte’s panting and hot, my pulse racing.
Charlotte was just coming out of the house with a huge box in her hands. “You came!” she said. “I thought you weren’t going to!”
I grinned. “How could I not?”
Charlotte’s dad stepped down from the cabin of the enormous moving van parked in the road. It was the length of two houses. Big, white, and solid, it held their whole lives inside it.
“Come to help?” Mr. Simmons said with a smile.
“Um, I can if you want. I was just going to say good-bye.”
“Only teasing, don’t worry. We’re all done now, anyway.”
Charlotte put the box inside the van and came back to me. “I’m just going to check my bedroom one last time,” she said. “Want to come with me?”
“Sure.”
Charlotte’s bedroom looked to me like the skin of an animal that used to be full of life but was now empty and hollow. I didn’t like it. We’d shared almost as many secrets in here as we’d shared in the tree house.
There was one last secret I had to share.
“Charlotte, som
ething amazing happened last night,” I said. “And something awful.”
I told her about finding the daisy, about how I was so convinced of what it was, about what I did at midnight, and about how I felt this morning when I realized what I’d thrown away.
When I finished talking, Charlotte stared at me. Then she burst out laughing.
“What?” I asked, trying to smile with her. Had I missed something? What was the joke?
“You. You’re so funny,” Charlotte said. “I’m going to miss you so much!”
“I’m not being funny! I’m not joking. Charlotte, it’s real. It’s terrible!”
Charlotte peered into my eyes, then laughed again. “Come on, Philippa, you know it can’t be real. It’s not logical; it’s not scientific. It’s the kind of thing we used to make up years ago, maybe. No one believes in fairies anymore!”
I met Charlotte’s eyes, and as I did, my certainty about the fairy began to slip away. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt stupid and ashamed. I mean, how old was I? What was I thinking? Charlotte was right. The daisy was just a daisy. There were no such things as fairies! I’d just wanted to convince myself that something special might happen to take my mind off what was really going on this weekend.
“It was nice of you, though,” Charlotte said.
“What?”
“Making up a story like that, just for me. To make me laugh, keep me from feeling sad. You always think of others. That’s why you’re so great!”
I swallowed down my silly shame. Charlotte didn’t need to know that I’d believed it. I mean, I hadn’t really believed it, anyway. Not really. Only for a few minutes, maybe.
“Anything for my best friend,” I said in as cheery a voice as I could muster.
“Charlotte, we’re off!” Mrs. Simmons called up to us.
“We’d better go,” Charlotte said, looking around her empty room one last time before closing the door behind us.
“Thanks for coming,” Charlotte said. Then she hugged me and stepped up into the van. The three of them sat in the front together, Mr. Simmons driving, Mrs. Simmons with two big maps on her knee.
