She knew the fat hill of a shadow in the corner was her backpack, topped with the textbooks and binders that wouldn’t fit into the already stuffed canvas.
She knew the sharp lines on the walls, the places where the darkness fell over on itself, were the posters, the newspaper clippings, the paper relics of a life spent loving and chasing and believing.
She knew the shadow spiking from her dresser was her music box, the one her mother had bought her years ago when they stopped for gas in Montana. The convenience store had been plastered in souvenirs flaunting the Flathead Lake Monster, an eel-like creature who had only a week earlier humped out of the water’s surface right in front of a family of waders and swimmers. A popular beast.
But Miranda had chosen the music box, a tidy cream porcelain box with a pair of fairies (of course) with crowns of spring blossoms painted on its top. Even as recently as last week, she would crank it up, open its lid, and listen to its high, tin-bell tune and remember how Kat had scrounged for quarters in her pocket to pay for it. Its very existence in her room had seemed, to Miranda, to be magical.
When she flipped on the light, it was with an almost violent motion.
So this was how Emma saw it, she thought. This is how it had looked to her yesterday when she came over and then left just as suddenly.
Her mother was away at the library, putting the finishing touches on a new presentation for an upcoming cryptozoology convention.
Miranda was all alone.
She had a handful of empty trash bags.
She had a memory and a new craving for fire.
And she stepped into the room and tore it apart.
Everything went. Posters ripped from walls with little care about the delicate corners, about their histories on her wall over the years; those posters had been there longer than some of the hairs on her body. The shadow box of fur bits and backbones — why had she never noticed how creepy it was that she had such a thing?— required a screwdriver. And so instead of yanking that down, instead of wrestling it, she had to fiddle, to unwind, slowly, meticulously, as if she were loosening an old, outgrown heart of hers.
And it was still satisfying.
As satisfying as taking up that music box and letting it fall, deep into the trash bag, knowing she would never see it or hear it or think of it again.
She worked up a sweat, a fever; she didn’t turn on loud music, didn’t make a ritual of it — this wasn’t a cleaning, or a reorganizing.
This was a purging.
The fairy figurines — these made her pause. She stared at them, and they stared back at her, and for a moment she thought, What if I keep these? What if these are the things I save, out of all of this?
But an image guided her — that of Emma, the surprise on her face when she had surveyed Miranda’s room. Miranda never wanted to feel that way again, that shame, that curdling . . .
“No,” she whispered and into the bag they went, and that was that. She didn’t peruse their faces one last time, take a photograph with her memory — she shoved them into the bag and pretended like it didn’t hurt when she heard one of them crunch against a hard edge of a picture frame.
For every time I waited next to the window with my dish of milk, she thought, and saw nothing.
For every time I chased after a shadow in the green and caught nothing.
For every hollow footprint.
Every time we found nothing. For every nothing.
And when she finished, she looked around the room — clean and white and devastatingly empty. Nothing on walls, or shelves, just bare. A bare bookshelf, even, free from the titles of the things she had fed on as a young girl.
She looked at her new habitat, and she felt . . . different. A new her.
A new skin, a new heart.
Later that evening, when the crickets sang to the stars and the sound of the Critter Mobile playing bumper cars with the curb echoed down the road, her mother peeked in to tell her good night and said, almost wounded, “Bean . . . what did you do?”
Miranda glanced at the blank spaces, where only hours earlier the walls had been coated in dreams — someone else’s dreams. Not hers.
“Just thought it was time for a change,” she said, and after looking at the bare walls one more time, her mother pulled the door closed, and Miranda was alone in her blank room.
Across the street, a bedroom had gone dark. Emma’s bedroom.
Shining through the Roman blinds, the pane of glass, and the ten yards of moonlight between them, was Emma’s night-light, rosy pink, the color of dawn and beginnings and hope.
But something had changed between Miranda and Emma the day of the incident with the poop. There had been a brief conversation this morning at Emma’s locker, where both girls avoided discussing the incident with a graceless silence — and then, when Emma invited Miranda over after school, Miranda said she was busy.
When Emma asked her for help with history the next day, Miranda said she was busy.
And soon after, Emma didn’t ask.
And soon after, Emma didn’t stop by Miranda’s locker.
And soon after, Miranda could breathe again.
And soon after, Miranda took the plunge and ran for student council president — an ambitious move for a seventh-grader, but friends were not for her. Not while she lived in this house, with this mother. Not with Bigfoot.
But student government. Her extracurriculars. Her perfect grades — those things she could have. Those things could sustain her.
She had lost Emma. She couldn’t have her — not in the way she wanted.
But she could maybe, maybe still have him. If she kept trying. Kept putting out tentacles.
And one of these days, he would write back.
And then maybe things could be normal.
Miranda! Miranda, where are you?” The sound of Kat’s frantic voice pulled Miranda up and out of the deepest, most drowsy sleep of her life — a hibernation, really.
She blinked, expecting the dawn’s light to burst through and jolt her to alertness. But it was still mostly dark, only the breaking of sunrise, a splintering of faint colors and a canopy of gray clouds above the foliage of the forest.
“Miranda, wake up.” Kat shook her shoulders. Miranda tried to keep her eyes open, tried to push away the leaves serving as her blanket. But her makeshift bed was so cozy, and she hadn’t slept past dawn since before sixth grade.
“Miranda. You’re in a patch of poison oak.” Her mother’s voice floated above her; Miranda’s arms were too heavy, otherwise she would have tried to catch it, catch the sound of her mother saying her name, catch it so she could hold it tight.
“Five more minutes,” Miranda murmured.
Kat placed her hand on her daughter’s forehead. “You’re burning up.” She lifted Miranda like a baby, and Miranda clutched at the leaves. No, no, I don’t want to leave the lights!
Did she say this out loud? Or think it?
Or scream it?
“The moss!” she cried now. “The moss will eat us — don’t fall asleep, Mom.”
Moss on the forest floor, moss along the nurse logs, moss on the branches and on the boughs and on the birds. Moss growing between the leaves and between the crowns of the trees and then there was no sky and no stars, there was only moss.
A dream or a memory?
Or a story?
Had her mother told her this monster already? A story of moss, like a fairy tale of a sleeping princess and a curse and a monster of moss that covered the kingdom in its tiny colonies.
“If we close our eyes, it’ll take over. It’s taking over everything —” She thrashed once, and as her eyes fell open she saw the green, the green, the green . . .
She was dimly aware of arms lifting her, arms holding her close, arms carrying her through the forest, back to the campfire, where she was nestled into the lean-to shelter and covered in pine boughs, and then Miranda could feel her mother fitfully sleep next to her through the last dregs of morning.
“He’s really gone,” Miranda murmured.
“Shh.” Kat pet Miranda’s back, shushed her when she groaned.
Somehow Miranda nestled into the pine needles, breathing in the faded scent of her mother’s cotton-candy lotion, and found a true sleep.
When Miranda woke, it was measurably chillier than the day before.
She yawned, shaking the pine boughs off her legs. Her skin tingled, burned in between her fingers, around her neck, down her back.
Kat was kicking dirt into the fire pit, which brought a gloomy disappointment to Miranda’s bones — with every last ember extinguished, the woods were once again unfriendly.
The morning was dark, the sky accented by rain clouds folding over on themselves like bundled wool. The air was muggy, thick enough to drink. Miranda offered a raw “Hey,” to Kat, a greeting and an apology, to test the waters.
Kat kept working, pulling a row of pine nuts from the fire pit, where they had been roasting. “How’s the itching?”
Miranda’s fingernails were digging into the dry spots on her elbows. “Horrible. What is it?”
“Poison oak. I tried to scrub off most of the oils last night,” Kat said, “but in another couple of hours you’ll really start to feel it.”
Miranda didn’t need a couple hours — her skin demanded attention now. “What happened last night?” she asked.
Kat looked Miranda up and down with an expression on her face Miranda had never seen. “You took off. Don’t you remember?”
Miranda rubbed the last of the sleep from her eyes. A group of strange fireflies. A hollow tree. Cold so biting, it made her ears ache and her toes numb.
“It’s a blur.”
“I was worried sick, Miranda.”
Miranda. Not Bean.
“I’m sorry,” Miranda said with sincerity. “I needed a moment — alone — and then I couldn’t find my way, and then —”
Then I followed the lights, she almost said, and suddenly she remembered.
Not lights.
Fairies.
Floating with fairies, riding along in their parade as they flitted through the forest and changed the seasons. She stole a glance at the woods around them — there were new hints that autumn was in full stride, a new crispness in the air. Early morning frost on the tips of the brown branches, dew on the bluebells, moist and cakey soil, highlights of yellow in the berry bushes, like a painter had pressed a brushful of cadmium into the leaves.
“And then?” Kat prompted. “And then what?” She barely moved her mouth as she spoke, and her eyes were distant and puffy.
Had she been crying?
Miranda’s heart jumped into her throat. “And then I guess I fell asleep.” A dream — that was all it had been — a dream. The kind of dreams only the daughter of a cryptozoologist would have — fairy flights and legends. “My head hurts.”
“Probably dehydration.” Kat passed over the orange soda bottle and the purification straw. “We’ll drink our fill at the stream before we leave.”
It was like Miranda’s entire head was stuffed with cotton — like she was still in a dream, still half asleep.
She sipped the water. “How long to the road?”
Kat gave her a handful of pine nuts and a bird’s egg, fried in the fire and now lukewarm and rubbery. “We’ll get there before dark, if we hustle.”
She watched her mother untie the string from the shelter. Something was different about Kat. She was acting like . . . like Miranda. Like how Miranda had been for months now, pushing away, rolling her eyes, scoffing at every word or else zoning out, jetting miles away in her mind just to escape.
Then Miranda remembered the other thing that had happened last night.
Their fight.
Kat’s words churned in her brain — about her dad, about how he left, about how he never planned to come back.
The things Miranda had said to her mom . . .
Her fingers were busy itching her skin; if she had another hand, she would have used it to yank out hairs until her eyes stung. She needed it.
“It was a full moon last night,” Kat said.
It was so far off topic, Miranda couldn’t respond. Kat waited, storing the last of the pine nuts in an old baggie from her cat bag.
“A special full moon,” she said. “A harvest moon.”
“Oh,” Miranda said.
“Strange things happen during a harvest moon.” Kat stood in front of Miranda, star-eyes penetrating her to the core. “Did you see anything strange? Moon dogs? Unicorns? Mud monsters? Fairies?”
Miranda froze, but said flatly, “Nope.” The sky above them crackled, the air thin.
A jarring smile from Kat. “You remember that fairy encyclopedia you had when you were little?”
A drop of rain fell onto Miranda’s nose. “Yes.” Every part of her whispered: be careful, be aware, predators abound.
“Of course you remember it. You looked at that thing until its spine fell apart.” She tilted her head. “You remember the folktales that were in there? Fairies who drowned human men. Fairies who stole babies and replaced them with goblins.” The corners of her mouth were pulled up, but her eyes stayed steely.
Miranda had never seen her mother like this before, and to hear her talk of fairies swapping humans out for other creatures had Miranda missing their fire even more — its heat, its safety.
She nodded. She could recite those stories like they were the alphabet — but now was not the time, not when the rain fell in a gentle pitter-patter on their heads.
“There’s another folktale about fairies,” Kat went on. “I don’t know if you’ve heard it; it wasn’t in your book. But there are some fairies who change the seasons.”
Miranda’s heart gave a pound so loud, she was certain Kat could hear it from where she stood.
“They paint the leaves — pink in the spring, green in the summer, red and orange in the fall, black in the winter. They call forth the sun, and bring the first freeze, and the wind, and summon the fall storms and make the moss soft and green or crunchy and gold.” She ran a hand through her hair. “During harvest season there were always humans in the forest — gathering berries to can for winter, hunting game — so there’d always be someone who spotted a fairy, and when they did, everyone around them knew. People could tell.”
I hallucinated them, Miranda told herself over and over. I dreamed them up. They weren’t real.
“We should get walking,” she said.
Kat leaned even closer, and Miranda counted the elusive red freckles on her mother’s nose, darkened to visible from the last two days outside. “In the stories,” Kat nearly whispered, “someone would come home, and their eyes would be glowing like lamps. Or they would get a glittery patch of skin somewhere — on their cheeks, maybe, or the backs of their hands. But those rare stories where a person is lucky enough to see an entire fairy, the person’s hair changes color.”
Miranda could feel her mother waiting for her to say something, in that way that only mothers could — the space between them filling up with expectations, each one tangible as a soap bubble, Kat’s eyes hooked and waiting.
Such a silence was always a trap.
“Huh. That’s . . . good to know,” Miranda offered.
Stand your ground.
Kat nodded, as if Miranda had confirmed something. Without a word, she headed to the stream.
As Miranda followed through the soft rain, her hand left her elbow to its own misery for a moment and pulled out a strand from her head, and as she cast the hair to the ground, it caught
a weak ray of sunlight and gleamed gold.
Gold.
The strand was gold.
Miranda plucked another hair — it, too, was gold, the color of an afternoon pond, of a lioness’s coat, of flax. So gold, it gleamed, nearly white. The color of fairy wings.
Miranda breathed in.
Not real.
Then why did she gather her hair in her hands, bringing it forward so she could see?
Gold. Every strand of it, gold.
Why did she run past Kat, who dipped the empty bottle into the stream, and nearly tumble headfirst into the water to see her reflection?
Gold.
Her hair shined in the drab mist, a beacon. Every color she’d seen last night — the pinks, the greens, the blues, the peaches of the fairy lights — was embedded in the strands. When her hair moved, the colors shifted — a moving, living golden campfire.
“If you remember from that encyclopedia,” Kat’s voice was crackly with emotion behind her daughter, “most people never see a real fairy. They catch a glimpse of a light they can’t explain, or a shadow darting across their windowpane.” She sucked up water through her straw. “The more a person sees, the more they change. If someone sees a fairy shadow, they might get a new little twinkle in their eye. One that’s visible even in total darkness. But if someone sees a whole fairy”— she touched the side of Miranda’s hair, running her fingers through the golden locks —“she might wake up and find that she’s grown an entirely new head of hair.”
“Fairies aren’t —”
“Don’t, Bean. Don’t do it.” Kat shook a finger at Miranda; most of her blue polish had been chewed off. “Don’t you dare tell me another lie when the evidence is right there.”
Not real. Not real. Not real.
“Mom, it was just a dream —”
“You know, you weren’t the only little girl who used to stay up waiting for fairies to come visit her window.” The rain cascaded down Kat’s face like her cheeks were windows, and suddenly she looked just like Grandma Hai: brokenhearted, disappointed. And so very, very tired. “You’ll notice all my hair is still black.”
The Bigfoot Files Page 20
