by Julie Berry
“I can hardly guess.” I gestured for her to speak more softly. “But he’s there. Right in there. And he’s going to grant me three wishes. Think of it, Alice! Any three wishes my heart desires! I only wonder what to choose. I could travel to Florence, to Venice, to Jerusalem, and Constantinople. Or Cairo, and Giza—to see the pyramids! I could ride up the Congo, perhaps, and go on a safari…”
Alice finished her braids and drifted back to her own bed.
“A djinni, in London, today,” she mused. “In a sardine tin.” She lay down, then sat back bolt upright again. “And you say the orphan boy next door saw him?”
I nodded. “Why would he leave me a note, if he hadn’t?”
“‘I saw your green man,’” she repeated to herself. “‘Your green man.’”
I could tell she was beginning to believe me, though it irritated me that she was more swayed by the orphan boy’s note than what I told her with my own lips. I might have been somewhat prone to exaggeration here and there—merely for the sake of a good story—but I was a truthful person. Essentially. Except to people who didn’t deserve the truth, like Theresa.
“Won’t he try to break in here again, then, and steal your djinni?” Alice asked.
I slapped myself on the forehead. Good, sensible-thinking Alice! “’Course he will!” I said. “We need to get ready for him.”
“How?”
I considered this. “Oh, if only I had my cricket bat,” I said, “but that’s hidden at home where Mother and Dad will never find it.” My gaze fell upon the washbasin. “A jugful of water would be a decent weapon, for starters,” I said. “I’ll run to the washroom and fill it up.”
I seized the pitcher from the washstand, pulled my dressing gown over my shoulders, and opened our bedroom door. In the dim hallway, I noticed two girls in their nightgowns, whispering to each other from their bedroom doorways. They were Theresa Treazleton and Honoria Brisbane. At the sight of me, both of them quickly shut their doors. I heard giggling from the passageway. The little minxes! Did they think I cared about their nasty secrets?
I charged along the corridor. Then, just as I passed their bedroom doors, my foot caught something. Down I went with a terrific crash, landing splayed out in the hallway. My forehead met the floor with a painful crack, and the hand I’d tried to catch myself with socked me in my own left eye. My pitcher shattered into a thousand fragments. And the sardine can in my pocket landed right underneath my hip bone, where I was sure I’d wear a hideous bruise for days to come.
Through my spinning senses I heard a sound. Muffled hysterical laughter, coming from the bedroom doors on either side. I craned my neck back and saw the length of twine wedged tightly between two bedroom doors.
A trap! They’d tripped me on purpose as punishment for sassing Theresa earlier. And there they were behind their doors, gloating.
My head spun with pain. One hand was peppered with small cuts from the shards of the broken pitcher. My hip throbbed, and if that wasn’t a goose egg forming above my left eye socket, then I was a leprechaun.
In the dark hallway gloom, I saw red. I pushed myself up to my knees, pulled the sardine tin from my pocket, and fumbled for the key with my bloody fingers to open the lid.
The reek of sulfurous fumes filled the hall.
“Not you again,” Mermeros moaned. “I prayed from my prison that a war chieftain would capture your tribe and discover me among the booty.”
“No such luck,” I said. “No war chieftains in this neighborhood.”
“Why are you groveling on the ground like a worm? You dropped the weight of the pyramids on me.”
Theresa Treazleton opened her bedroom door. She looked ghostly in the dim light, with her pale face and her long white nightgown, and her chestnut braids pulled far back behind her head.
“Maeve, dear!” Theresa began in a syrupy-sweet, lying voice of pretend concern. “Did you fall? How clumsy of…you…”
Her jaw dropped.
She saw him.
Would the djinni murder her for me?
My left eye was so swollen, I couldn’t open it.
A giggling Honoria Brisbane opened her bedroom door. Her braids swung over her shoulders.
Not murder. Just revenge. This was worth a thousand wishes. So I’d better do it right. I didn’t really want to injure them. Not seriously. I’m not a monster. I decided to attack their vanity. That would serve them.
Your green man.
Braids.
I confess, I wasn’t really thinking straight. I had, after all, just hit my head.
“Dye their braids green,” I whispered to Mermeros, “with a stain no human dye can undo.”
“The girl hatchling is a mistress of ruthless cunning,” Mermeros said with a sneer. He pressed his hands together and bowed in mock reverence. “Never in all the history of the world has a wish been so boldly spent.”
There was a flash of light behind each of my tormentor’s scalps, like halos around the darling angels, enough to show my one good eye that Mermeros had done it. He’d turned both girls’ braids a pulsing, luminous poison green. Then he slithered back into his sardine can and sealed his own lid shut.
They looked ridiculous. The hair lying along their scalps hadn’t changed. Honoria’s blond head, and Theresa’s chestnut one, were just the same. But their braids looked like poisonous snakes from the Amazon rain forest.
Honoria Brisbane’s giggles died away. Whether it was the vague green form of a man in a cloud of noxious smoke, or the flash of light, or the sight of Theresa Treazleton’s famous chestnut braids turned green, I can only guess, but she fainted dead away, landing on top of me like a sack of carrots in a grocer’s crate. She squashed me flat on the floor once more by fainting just as any well-raised young English lady ought to do at a time like this. Miss Salamanca would have been proud to see it.
Approaching footfalls sounded in the stairwell.
Then Theresa Treazleton did something that would almost have made me admire her, if it didn’t make me wish I had gone straight for murder. From her sewing basket, she snatched a pair of scissors. Seizing Honoria’s braids, she hacked them both off in two vicious, sawing strokes, leaving the short remainder of her brutally mangled—but naturally colored—hair.
“What are you doing?” I gasped.
She glanced in a mirror, then, twisting her arms behind her own head, she favored herself with the same treatment. She gathered up the fallen green braids and stuffed them underneath her bed pillow, then tossed the scissors down in the shards of smashed water jug, beside where I still knelt, stupefied with pain.
Miss Salamanca appeared around the corner. She placed her hands on her hips and surveyed the scene. I had to crane my neck to see her. Honoria Brisbane still lay in a heap, draped over my fallen body.
“Maeve Merritt,” she said, with her disdainful, pinching nose showing off her lovely buckteeth. “Why am I not surprised? And what have you done to Miss Brisbane?”
Covered in blood and bruises, with Honoria Brisbane pinning me down, I was the guilty party? The bitter injustice would have stung more if I weren’t so accustomed to it.
Theresa appeared beside me, her cheeks now streaked with convincing tears. “She attacked us with scissors, Miss Salamanca!” Theresa sobbed. “I had to throw my water jug at her in self-defense!”
Miss Salamanca’s lips pressed together so tightly, she looked like a long-legged prune. I struggled to my feet, not caring what happened to Honoria. But my movements startled her into wakefulness.
“The green man…” she said faintly. “Dreadful!”
Old Sally’s sharp ears missed nothing. “What’s that she said?” she said. “‘Green man,’ did she say?” Her tone of voice suggested, not for the first time, that men were creatures for whom she could not comprehend the Almighty’s purposes.
Theresa helped Honor
ia to her feet, treading deliberately on my legs as she did so. “It’s nothing.” She gasped under Honoria’s limp weight. “She’s always having…daydreams and things. Talking frogs, violet cats, green men… I’ll just help her to bed.”
Miss Salamanca sighed. “Such a thoughtful girl. So mindful of her friends.” Then she paused, as if a terrifying thought had just occurred to her. “What will I tell her father about her hair?”
She turned her most fearsome glare my way. “When you’ve quite finished cleaning up the mess you’ve made here, Miss Merritt, you will accompany me. No soft pillows, and no cozy dormitory gossip for you tonight.”
Chapter 5
Next morning before dawn, I limped into my bedroom, covered in coal dust. Miss Salamanca had sentenced me to a night’s sleep, or lack thereof, in the coal closet. Now she’d set me loose to get changed, with orders to hurry back and resume my punishment.
The coal closet was right off the kitchen, adjacent to Mrs. Gruboil’s bedroom, so I didn’t dare open Mermeros’s tin during the night. He wouldn’t fit in the tiny closet anyway, though come to think of it, he fit in a fish tin, so perhaps he could have managed it. But I was too angry with myself for squandering a wish and, worse, allowing Theresa Treazleton to see Mermeros, to even think of venturing another wish just yet. I needed to think more carefully. When I made my next wish, I’d be good and ready to make the most of it.
Braids? I had all night long to writhe in my own stupidity. I’d wished for green braids and not their entire heads of hair? Braids alone gave Theresa the chance to chop them off and hide the evidence. I should’ve turned both girls green from head to toe. Maeve Merritt, I heard my mother’s scolding voice in my ear say, when will you ever learn to think?
A younger student, Winnifred Herzig, came out her door just as I passed by her room. Her mouth fell open at the sight of my coal-dust-covered face and clothes.
“Run along, Winnie,” I told her. “Mind your business.”
“You needn’t be so mean, Maeve,” she told my retreating back. “I’ve got as much right to be here as you.”
I wasn’t mean, I told myself. Just in no mood for tiny Winnie’s gaping stare and thousand questions. She wasn’t nasty like Theresa and her set, but she was one of the sort who tagged along everywhere and spread gossip like the plague. Winnifred loved having tales to tell.
When I entered our bedroom, Alice greeted me from her bed with a cry of concern. “You’re filthy,” she said, “and bruised like a boxer. And after your lovely bath, too.”
I peeled off my dressing gown and dropped it on the floor. Then I remembered the sardine can was still in the pocket. I pulled it out.
“Miss Salamanca has me doing hard chores for another two days,” I said. “What shall I do with this? If she should find it on me, all is lost!”
“Leave that to me,” Alice said, reaching for the can. “I’ll hide it where no one can find it. Oh, Maeve! I saw everything last night. The djinni, and what Theresa did. Heavens, what a fright that creature gave me!” She bit her lip. “I do think you were perhaps a bit hasty, Maeve.”
I reached for the wash jug to pour some water for my face, then realized it was smashed into smithereens.
“What will people say when they see Theresa and Honoria?” she mused. “Hair chopped short like a boy… I shudder to think.”
“Don’t tell them it was my djinni,” I pleaded. “We might as well let Theresa’s lie stand.”
“Miss Merritt!” Miss Salamanca’s voice found me from downstairs. “No lollygagging! I want all the girls’ boots polished before breakfast.”
I spent another two days under Mrs. Gruboil’s wrathful and bloodshot eyes, shoveling coal, filling wooden bins, peeling potatoes, and washing windows. Even though I was officially never with the other girls, I overheard enough to know that word of my “attack” on the precious braids had spread like smallpox through the school. Most girls took great delight in wondering what my final punishment would be—a slow roasting on a spit, perhaps? A few of the younger girls, though, seemed genuinely frightened of me, as though I were a scissor-wielding menace who might pounce upon their braids at a moment’s notice.
I felt badly about that. My battered appearance only made me look more dangerous. Winnifred Herzig ducked through doorways, clutching her own plaits, whenever she saw me. Which was often. She was the kind of girl who was always there. Some people just have that gift.
A letter had been sent to my father and mother in strictest tones of warning. Let Old Sally expel me, let my father withdraw me. What did I care?
More than once when I went to dump rubbish, the ginger-haired boy across the alley took a halting step toward me, but I fixed him with a look of such malice that he hesitated and looked away.
Good. If he hadn’t spied on my djinni and climbed into my room, none of this would have happened. Maybe it was the sight of my bruises that made him lose his nerve.
Two days passed, and when Sunday rolled around, even reprobates like me were forced to observe the Sabbath. I sat in church, wedged between Alice and the hard end of the pew, staring ahead at the napes of Theresa and Honoria’s necks, where their short, bristly normal-colored hair poked out from under their straw bonnets. At least no green could be seen. Miss Salamanca had festooned their hats with dangling black ribbons to hide their lack of hair. It made them look like pallbearers.
On and on droned the rector’s sermon, while the cold air in the drafty chapel prevented me from napping. Across the aisle, the greengrocer’s two young children gaped at the green remnants of my black eye until their mother pinched them. I made droll faces back at them until they giggled, and Miss Guntherson, our thick-jawed French instructor who was not the least bit French, grimaced a warning at me. Faces, it seemed, should not be made in church. Unless you were a French instructor.
“…your things yesterday,” Alice breathed in the faintest whisper imaginable. I turned to read her lips.
“What?”
“Shh,” she hissed. She nodded toward the pew before us. “Theresa,” she mouthed. “Found her poking through your things.”
We rose for the hymn. “She didn’t find anything, did she?” I asked Alice.
My roommate smiled slightly. I wondered whether it would be worth another wish to punish Theresa Treazleton properly. No, it wouldn’t, but oh, if only…
The hymn began, and we all rose. Alice sang the hymn, and I admit she has a lovely voice, though I have little appetite for music. She met with a private voice instructor who came to the school each week. Theresa also had musical aspirations, but her voice couldn’t touch Alice’s, which pleased me to no end.
“‘What can I do for England, that does so much for me?’” She sang out the final refrain. “‘One of her faithful children I can and I will be.’”
That hymn always made me want to sneeze. I didn’t see what it had to do with religion in the least. Nor could I think of what England had done for me of late. And they made us sing it so often.
When the service was over, we filed down the aisle and out the great doors, passing by the pews of orphan boys. The red-haired boy glowered at me. I walked by with my nose held high, as though I hadn’t even seen him there, the wretched thief.
Back at school, after a Sunday lunch of cold beef with mustard and buttered bread, Miss Salamanca announced visiting hours. I rose to clear dishes off the table, but Miss Salamanca stopped me.
“Your mother has written to inform me that she will be visiting you this afternoon,” she said, in icy tones. “She wishes to speak with you about your recent unladylike behavior.”
I sighed. I was in little mood for another lecture.
“Mr. Alfred Treazleton, our great patron, will also be here this afternoon, visiting his daughter,” Miss Salamanca said. Her face looked especially gray. “I need hardly remind you that you are to demonstrate the utmost propriety in the
parlor. If Mr. Treazleton addresses you, as I do not doubt he may, following your vicious attack on his daughter, you will submit to his displeasure meekly. Am I fully understood?”
I nodded. Sometimes it was impossible not to just stare at her bewildering teeth.
Miss Salamanca pressed her lips together and hid them. “If your mother hadn’t chosen this particular week to call, I never would have let you near the parlor on a visiting afternoon. But it can’t be helped.”
We all went upstairs to remove our pinafores and tidy ourselves up for our relatives’ arrivals. Alice nearly burst out of her skin with excitement. Visits from home were water in the desert to her. And for most girls. Visiting day was normally a great treat. Families brought shop-bought sweets and home-cooked tarts and little bunches of flowers and new stockings for growing girls. I knew there’d be no little presents for me. Not today. Not unless Polydora came.
The bell rang announcing the first of the visitors. We filed out into the courtyard to line up for inspection and await our guests. Miss Salamanca seemed to think we were seen to our best advantage lined up in ruler-straight rows, with our cheeks and noses pinched by cold.
Alice’s grandmother, Mrs. Bromley, arrived first, escorted out of her carriage by a valet nearly as ancient and tottering as she was. She made her way across the gravel to where Alice stood, and Alice threw her arms around her, kissed her wrinkled cheek, and led her in out of the cold. I smiled. Seeing Alice with her grandmother always made me glad. Heaven knew how frail Mrs. Bromley managed not be crushed by Alice’s eager hugs.
One by one, other girls led their relatives indoors to the parlor while the rest of us waited. A cabdriver pulled his horse up in the stable yard, jumped down, and helped my mother disembark. She climbed out, clinging anxiously to the driver’s arm and leaving Deborah to fend for herself. Deborah called loudly for assistance until the cabbie left my mother and assisted her, too, leaving Polydora to climb down by herself. With her too-tall, too-thin frame, and her wire spectacles, such was often her fate. Helpful gentlemen were anywhere but at her side offering assistance. Fortunately, my sensible eldest sister needed nobody’s help to find her way to the ground.
