Autumn

by Edwards, Maddy

  “Okay....” I still didn’t get it. “Wait, do I have to choose who to live with?” I asked, horrified. One more choice between two people I cared about the most. Only this time instead of two guys it was my mother and my father.

  “We will see your dad a lot,” my mom said. “He’s going to visit and we are going to visit him.”

  “So, are we going to get an apartment or something?” I asked, upset.

  “Actually,” she said, “after I talked to Carley this afternoon I talked to Mrs. Hightower.”

  Oh.

  “Oh?”

  “And she said it would be fine if we lived in their place this fall, and maybe beyond. We would pay rent, of course, but she offered a very reasonable rate. Basically, just utilities.”

  I was pretty sure I understood what my mother was saying, but I needed to hear her say it.

  “So, we would be living in Castleton this fall?”

  “Yes, at least for the next few months. You would have to transfer schools, which I know will be hard since Carley isn’t there, but I hear you have a friend named Nick, a boyfriend?” I heard a note of hope in her voice and shook my head even though she couldn’t see me. “And so it sounds like you won’t be totally alone.”

  Just almost totally alone. What was the point without Holt?

  “But Mom, you know that means you’ll have to live in Maine?”

  I didn’t think my mother had ever lived in such a small town before.

  “Oh, Honey, you know me. I can do my work from anywhere.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course, and if we hate it we can always go home. I’m most worried about you leaving your friends.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said. Oh, the Fairies were good. Very good. They had gotten all the way to my mother, and she didn’t even know it.

  “When will you be here?” I asked. My mind was racing, but amazingly my voice was steady.

  “I’ll be there over the weekend, just to have a night when Mrs. Hightower is still there. I don’t want to crowd the house, but of course it would be lovely if we could spend an evening together.

  So, my mother was moving to Castleton so that I could live there. The Fairies had needed me to be around, and now I would be. I hadn’t realized that their reach extended to my family far away, but I should have known that nothing was sacred with them, not when they thought I had broken the law. I flinched. I wondered what else Mrs. Cheshire had in store for me.

  Chapter Four

  I barely slept that night, just tossed and turned.

  Holt’s face constantly appeared before my closed eyes, but instead of his customary smile he looked defeated. I wondered if the image was somehow a connection between us, or just my imagination. I wished I could imagine him smiling.

  I knew Carley would leave me alone, which was a relief. I needed time, but I wondered if any amount of time would be enough.

  I glanced at my phone. I wanted to text Samuel or call him, or even to hear from Susan, but I didn’t dare. I had seen what Holt’s saving me had done to Susan, and I couldn’t imagine what Samuel was going through. We had started to be friends and I had really liked him. He had taken care of me while Holt was away and I didn’t want to think about what Mrs. Cheshire was putting her son through at this very moment.

  A sweet breeze blew into my room. My window was open even though my curtain was drawn. How could anything be blooming when Holt was locked away?

  I needed to know where he was and when I would see him.

  The Supreme Council had insisted that I learn more about what it meant to be a Fairy from the Roths while they decided what to do with Holt.

  I wondered if Mrs. Roth would decide to speak up for her son. She didn’t seem inclined to, not with Logan still missing. But maybe after the initial shock of what her two children had done she would come around? I could only hope against hope.

  For now, what I needed to do first was to know where Holt was, and really, I already did.

  No doubt he would have to stay in the basement of the Cheshires’ house until we were summoned to answer for our crimes. I didn’t know why he was being held prisoner, though, since it wasn’t like he was going anywhere.

  Sick and tired of the same dark thoughts running through my mind, I threw off my covers and got dressed as soon as it started to get light outside. I needed to see Susan. If I was lucky I would also be able to see Samuel.

  I snuck out of the house. I couldn’t let Carley see me; she would ask questions about why I looked like crap and I wouldn’t be able to answer.

  The day was clouded over and cold. I had put on jeans and a sweater and was glad of both as I walked to the Roths’ house. Luckily it was early enough in the morning that I didn’t see anyone on the way.

  I wasn’t supposed to use my Fairy magic, but I didn’t want to call at the Roths’ front door, because Mrs. Roth was likely to kill me. Each plant and flower and blade of grass I passed, I asked for Susan. I hoped she would know I was calling her and would come.

  I was in luck.

  As the house came into view I saw a girl with white jeans, a blue top, and long blond hair walking towards me. Susan, who always looked happy and warm, looked faded and withered.

  I had caused that.

  A little piece of my heart broke again.

  “Susan,” I started to say, but she held up her hand. “Let’s get coffee,” she said. “I could use it.” She eyed me as if I could as well. Of course, even in the middle of a crisis Susan looked wonderful, while I looked like I’d been riding on a boat and we’d gotten shipwrecked. In short, I was a disheveled mess. Served me right.

  Instead of going to UP UP and Away, we went to a little diner on a side street. Despite the lack of restaurants in the area this place was never full. It was probably because the plastic menus stuck together as if they were made that way. The place was too old and too greasy for comfort. When the waitress, who had probably been there since the place was built, offered us menus, we both declined.

  “Can’t mess up my manicure,” Susan murmured to me. She held up her bright pink nails.

  I just plopped into a seat in the booth, but Susan examined her place meticulously before she sat down, checking for anything that would tarnish her perfectly white jeans.

  “Do you know where Holt is?” I asked, barely giving her a chance to sit down. She let out a long sigh, sitting down heavily as if she was carrying a great weight.

  “He’s at the Cheshires’.”

  “He didn’t do anything wrong,” I started. I had to hope that at least she would believe me.

  Susan shook her head. “Yes,” she said. “He did.”

  “Caring about someone is wrong?” I demanded. “Not wanting someone you love to die is wrong?”

  “It’s more complicated than that and you know it,” she said. “All the Fairies thought this would be a passing fancy between you two.”

  “What?” I gasped. The waitress, who was standing at the counter doing nothing, looked over. I leaned forward and lowered my voice.

  I felt as if I had stepped into the twilight zone, and not in a good way. Everything I had thought was true, like the idea that the Summer Fairies supported us and Holt and I would be fine, was turning out to be a lie.

  “You are supposed to be with Samuel,” she said to me. “It was destined long before you came here. You and Holt threw everything off. That’s never happened before and it could be disastrous. It’s not like Samuel can just marry anyone.”

  “He never wanted to marry me,” I pointed out with frustration.

  “He would have come around,” said Susan, checking over her shoulder as if we might have been followed by Fairy secret agents or something.

  “Even if he would have,” I said, “no one could have planned for Logan’s trying to kill me. Why isn’t anyone concerned about that?”

  Susan shook her head. “They are concerned. Of course they are, but he’s disappeared, and to be honest, we can deal with
Logan. What we can’t deal with,” she said pointedly, glaring at me, “is having a Rose given.”

  “Right, so this is all my fault?” I demanded. Tears threatened to well up again. Under the table, I pinched the back of my hand to keep them from coming.

  “He’s at the Cheshires’,” I hissed at her, trying to make her understand. “I can’t think of a worse place they could have made him stay. Mrs. Cheshire probably won’t even feed him.”

  “He will be fed,” said Susan. “The other Supreme members wouldn’t stand for a Summer Prince’s being starved to death, even if he has broken the law.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, “now I have nothing to worry about.”

  “Look, no harm is going to come to Holt, at least not because he’s being held at the Cheshires’. It’s the only place around here where he can be held.”

  “He shouldn’t be held at all. They wouldn’t even let me see him,” I said. My lip quivered. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t.

  Susan’s shoulders slumped.

  “Just tell me it will be okay,” I said.

  Susan looked out the diner window. “It’s not up to me. As I’ve said, this situation is unprecedented.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said exasperated. “The point is that he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  Susan shook her head, sitting back in her chair. Her hands gripped her mug of coffee so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  “We have to help you learn about being a Fairy,” she said, ignoring my protests about Holt’s situation.

  “Maybe while we’re at it we can teach Mrs. Cheshire some manners,” I muttered.

  “Yeah, I’ll be right behind you on that one. Maybe behind a steel door.”

  For the rest of the morning the two of us talked. I had turned off my phone so that the million texts Carley would send me wouldn’t interrupt. Holt was more important anyway. At some point Susan asked me how strong the designs were under my skin. When I let her examine them she seemed relieved by how faint they looked.

  I noticed that Susan sent a couple of texts while we were talking, but I didn’t think much of it until we had left the diner.

  “Who were you texting?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I was texting Samuel.”

  “You what?” I sputtered. It’s a good thing I no longer had a hot drink in my hand, because I probably would have spilled it everywhere.

  “I can’t see him,” I protested, although a part of me really wanted to.

  “That’s going to be hard given that he’s going to help you learn how to be a Fairy for the sake of your future husband, who isn’t him.”

  “See,” I said, “that sounds terrible.”

  “What sounds terrible?” Samuel’s familiar voice, quiet and low, sounded behind me.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  He looked the same. I had pictured him growing to the size of an elephant or something, but he was the same blindingly attractive Winter Fairy he had always been. I had thought that once I started to become a Summer Fairy I would stop feeling any kind of pull towards Samuel. At some point my streak of being wrong had to end. At least, I hoped it would.

  Susan was staring at me. I realized that Samuel had asked a question.

  “Nothing,” I managed to answer

  “Whatever you say.”

  I continued to stare at Samuel, unsure what to say and looking for some sign that he didn’t hate me.

  “Why did you agree?” I asked finally. We were still walking. It looked like we were heading for the Castleton High School, although what was there for Fairies I couldn’t guess.

  “I saved you from the Water Sprite, didn’t I?” he asked. He hadn’t looked at me since he first walked up.

  “What does that have to do with this?” I asked. At some point it would have made sense to me if Samuel had started siding with his mother. He was her child, after all, and it must have angered her that he constantly defended me, even in the face of her intense opposition.

  “Well,” he said, “you were supposed to be my future, and what kind of person would I be if I didn’t do my best to take care of you?”

  My stomach twisted. “Supposed to be,” he had said. So he knew now that we would never be together, but he had thought, all summer, since the first time he saw me, that maybe things would change and I would at some point end up as the Queen of the Winter Fairies.

  I had pictured it. They couldn’t have a worse Queen than they did with Mrs. Cheshire, not that I would ever have said as much to Samuel. She only cared about some old way of doing things, and she had never liked me. Obviously.

  Now that I understood just how much force she exerted in the Fairy community, I was surprised that Samuel hadn’t dropped everything and tried to give me his Rose the first time he saw me. His mother probably would have liked that. Everyone staying in their proper place and doing what they were supposed to do.

  And there would never have been a chance for Holt and me to spend time together, at least not in any meaningful way.

  “What are you thinking?” Susan asked me.

  I shrugged. “Just about how complicated everything is,” I said.

  “It’s not complicated any more,” said Samuel, his voice still quiet. “You and Holt have made everything remarkably clear.” He tried to hide the hurt in his voice, but I thought I still heard it. I wanted to apologize or say something to comfort him, but I was probably the last person he wanted comfort from.

  Instead, I settled for saying, “Hurting you was the last thing I wanted.”

  “Just don’t,” he said. “I’m going to help you learn how to be a Fairy because that’s what the Supreme Council wants. There’s no other reason.”

  “Your mother wants you around me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I believed that.

  “It’s on her orders,” he said. “Do you think I would be here otherwise? I think she views it as poetic justice for me. I’ve defied her all summer, so I deserve this. At least, that’s how she sees it.”

  “You don’t want to be around me?” I asked in a small voice.

  “Leave him alone,” said Susan irritably. “He’s doing the honorable thing. His duty. Holt should have done the same.”

  I kept quiet as the pain grew inside me. Susan’s condemnation hurt more than anything, maybe because I had expected her to be happy for us. But she wasn’t. The world was not built of beautiful flowers, even in the Summer Fairy Kingdom.

  We had reached the high school: my new school. It was hard to picture myself there that fall; classes and academics would all feel so insignificant, and the other students would be walking around worrying about whether or not the football team had won. Okay, I probably wouldn’t have cared about the football team even if I hadn’t recently become a Fairy and accepted the Summer Prince’s offer of his Rose. But still.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked. “Going to give me a tour?”

  “No,” said Samuel. “They have a garden. Since school is about to start and everyone is avoiding the place, it’s private. Soon enough they will be spending all kinds of time here, but in the meantime we are going to start teaching you about being a Fairy.”

  I wanted to see Holt, and I wanted Holt to teach me about being a Fairy, not these two people who were only doing it because they had to. No matter how bad the situation was, the ache inside me would have lessened a little if I could just have seen him, with his smile and his bright green eyes lighting up when I walked in. Nothing would have reassured me like that would have.

  But I knew better than to ask Samuel about Holt. It would have been like rubbing salt in a wound, and Samuel deserved better than that.

  What I was never able to say was that I thought he deserved better than me: someone who didn’t love someone else, even a little.

  “Where do you want to start?” Susan asking, talking to Samuel as if I wasn’t there.

  “We should just show her stuff,” he said. “It’s good we’re both here, because tha
t means we can show her some of the similarities and some of the differences between Summer Fairies and Winter Fairies.”

  “Isn’t your power growing?” I asked Samuel. It might have been my imagination, but I thought he flinched a little at the sound of my voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is. My mother is happy. Once winter comes she is going to be twice the terror she’s been. If you thought summer was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  “That’s true,” said Susan, almost sounding amused. “She really takes it to a new level once winter comes.”

  I hadn’t been to the high school before, so passing the nice soccer fields, the baseball diamond, and the softball fields was all new for me. But we were heading past all of them, down a dirt path.

  “How do you know where we are going?” I asked

  “It’s an old hangout. We’ve come here a lot in other summers.”

  The path was now cutting through a wooded area. With my newly-acquired Fairy powers I could hear the sound of running water ahead of us. We were heading for a stream of cold, clear water, sprinkling over dirt and rocks. It would be a nice place to learn how to be a Fairy.

  “Lots of what we need to teach you is rules and etiquette,” said Susan. “We just aren’t starting with that because....”

  “Because I obviously don’t care about rules and etiquette?” I asked bitterly.

  I thought a small smile played across of her face.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  Next to us, Samuel was quiet.

  When the stream came into view it was just how I had seen it in my mind’s eye. I loved that I now had a picture in my head of the place I was walking to before I saw it, and the image was always beautiful. Seeing beauty in everything was one of the gifts that Fairies had. It was a gift I hoped they never lost.

  There was a small stone bridge over the stream, and we arranged ourselves on it. The stone felt cool on my legs and I shivered a little.

  “You shouldn’t be cold,” said Susan.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not that cold.”

  “No,” she said. “Really, you shouldn’t be cold. Use your Glamour to warm yourself.”