Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

“No.”

  Mel narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “Me neither, and I’m not sure why. We should think about that. I think there are bits of the story we don’t know.”

  Her doubts had come through, then. “Yeah, probably.”

  “We have to ask Roland,” said Mel.

  “No!” Freddy hadn’t meant the word to emerge so violently. She saw her sister jerk away. “No,” she repeated more quietly. “I don’t want him to see…”

  Mel regarded her for a moment. “Wait here.” She levered herself up off the bed and waddled out into the corridor. Freddy stared after her, not knowing what to do. Mel’s reaction was … useful … but it had knocked her off balance. Mel was telling her she did still fit.

  Mel reappeared in the doorway, Roland behind her.

  “No. No,” said Freddy, scrunching down onto the bed. It seemed unbearable that he should see her like this. Roland scowled across the room at her. She’d forgotten how angry he had been with her today. They had really been screaming at each other only about half an hour before.

  “Stand up, Freddy,” said Mel.

  “Get him out of here,” she whispered, scrabbling in her pocket for her key.

  “Rip off the Band-Aid. Stand up.”

  There was no way out of the room except through the window, and she didn’t feel like breaking both her legs. “Traitor,” said Freddy.

  Mel said, “You’re being unreasonable. It’s not as bad as you think. Stand up or I’ll come over there and make you stand up.”

  “Fine,” said Freddy. Everything was hopeless anyway. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and rose.

  As Mel had done earlier, Roland started at her feet and moved up to her head. Freddy saw the colour drain from his face. Then the red flooded back. He turned and ran from the room.

  Freddy said, “What…?”

  “We need to catch him,” said Mel. She headed down the hall after him. Not understanding, Freddy followed.

  They chased Roland into the kitchen and out the door and into the lane and back to the house on Grosvenor Street, which Freddy hadn’t expected to see again so soon. They only caught up with him when he was pounding on the door. “Look,” said Mel, “this isn’t a good—”

  The door opened. Josiah and Cuerva Lachance stood together in the doorway, looking surprised.

  “I told you to stay away from them,” snarled Roland. “Look what you did!”

  “Roland,” said Freddy, “you need to listen.” But he was turned away from her and couldn’t see her talking.

  “She didn’t have any idea. You did that to her, and you didn’t even warn her,” said Roland. “She didn’t know what you were. You’re playing games with us, and all because you’re trying to get me to—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Mel loudly, ramming into him hard enough to knock him aside. “I told you not to cover for me. I’m not a helpless flower.”

  Roland glared at her in what looked like genuine bewilderment. “What are you—”

  “It’s me,” said Mel to Cuerva Lachance and Josiah. “I’m the one you’re looking for.”

  “Stop. You have no idea. It’s me,” said Roland. “I—”

  “Come on,” said Freddy, moving into his line of sight. “They obviously know by now that it’s me.”

  She’d caught on late, but she thought she could see what Mel was doing now. If Roland had been thinking straight, he would have seen, too.

  “It’s not you,” said Roland. “It’s me.”

  “You don’t have to be so self-sacrificing,” said Mel. “It’s me.”

  “Cut it out, both of you. I already told you it was me,” said Freddy.

  “You don’t understand,” said Roland.

  “No, you don’t understand,” said Mel, “literally. Stop talking.”

  “I don’t think anybody understands,” said Freddy.

  Cuerva Lachance and Josiah looked from one of them to the other. They exchanged glances. Josiah quietly shut the door.

  Freddy and Mel grasped Roland by the arms. Together, they towed him off the porch and through the yard and into the lane and back to their own house. When they reached the kitchen, Freddy shoved him down into a chair, and Mel stood in front of the back door so he couldn’t escape and yell at the dangerous magical neighbours some more.

  “You’re crazy,” said Freddy. “You can’t go telling them you’re Three!”

  Roland’s eyebrows were knotted up in a vicious scowl. To her shock, she saw tears in his eyes as well. “I don’t know what that is,” he said, his voice wobbling.

  He was still mad at her, but there was something else wrong, too. Freddy sighed. “Roland, can we please just not be fighting any more? I haven’t been mad at you for over a year. I know that’s hard to understand—”

  “You travelled in time,” said Roland. “So?”

  Freddy said, “Why is everyone having such an easy time accepting this?”

  “Because I know about them,” said Roland, and everything just seemed to spill out of him. Tears whisked down his cheeks. “I knew them when they moved in. I’ve dreamed about them my whole life. I mean … I had actual dreams about them. They weren’t always the same. I wasn’t always the same. I was lots of different people, and I could hear. When I woke up, I forgot what it was like. But I remembered doing it.”

  He wiped furiously at his eyes. “I know impossible things happen around them. I can accept that. But in the dreams … I always felt trapped. I always felt hemmed in and trapped and angry. There’s some sort of choice, isn’t there? Both the options are wrong. They’re going to try to make me pick one, and I shouldn’t have to.”

  Freddy said, “They want you to choose between them … an order-versus-chaos thing. I think they’re pretty powerful. It seems to have some kind of effect on … I don’t know. The way the world works? It’s subtle, whatever it is. But—”

  “And you just go and play into their hands,” he spat at her. “I warned you, and you didn’t listen to me! You—”

  “Shut up!” said Freddy. She leaned in towards him; he pressed himself back in his chair, eyes wide. “The next time you want to warn somebody about something, include details!”

  “I thought it would’ve sounded stupid,” said Roland. To his credit, he had stopped snarling.

  Freddy looked briefly at Mel, who shrugged. “Okay,” Freddy admitted, “maybe it would’ve. But you weren’t warning me. You were trying to get me to do what you wanted without telling me why.”

  Mel moved around so Roland could see her. “You were both being unreasonable imbeciles,” she said, and signed, helpfully.

  Roland said, “You don’t understand—”

  “By this point, I understand better than you do,” said Freddy. “You can stop panicking. They don’t know which one of us it is.”

  He blinked at her. “How can they not know that?”

  “They’re not all-powerful,” said Freddy. “They’ve been trying to reason it out, but you haven’t given them the usual clues. Of course, now that you’ve stormed right up to their door and shouted it in their faces…”

  “I thought they knew,” said Roland. He was gradually going pale again. “I thought they were playing games with me.”

  “I hope we fooled them with our Spartacus act,” said Mel, “but we can’t be sure.”

  Freddy had no idea what a Spartacus act was. It didn’t seem the time to ask. “You need to calm down until we can decide what’s really going on,” she said.

  “I thought you said you knew,” said Roland. The tears were starting again.

  “I know some,” said Freddy. “I can tell you if you—”

  “No.”

  She opened her mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “What?”

  “I said no!” Roland leapt to his feet, sending his chair crashing back against the kitchen cabinets. “I don’t want anything to do with them. I keep telling you to stay away from them! There’s nothing we can do about this but have as little to do with it
as possible.”

  “You mean run away,” said Freddy.

  “If that’s what it takes,” said Roland.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” said Mel. “Cuerva Lachance—”

  “Don’t talk about her. Don’t talk about either of them.” He was still crying, but the anger was there, too. “I don’t like it that they can get into my dreams. I don’t want to give them a chance to force me to do anything. If you’d listened to me in the first place, I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  Freddy said, “Excuse me? How do you—”

  “Just leave. Me. Alone,” said Roland. He blundered out into the hall, knocking things over as he went. A moment later, they heard a door slam upstairs.

  * * *

  He wouldn’t come out of his room. Unlike Freddy, he’d remembered to drag furniture in front of the door. They couldn’t get in, and he couldn’t hear them knocking and calling. “Serve him right if the house catches on fire,” said Mel. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I think he’s panicking,” said Freddy. Strangely enough, she could sympathise. She hadn’t been any more reasonable when she and Josiah had fallen through time. It was funny, though, how … well, how young Roland was acting. She was having to struggle not to think of him as Mel’s age. In the past, he’d always seemed older than her, even though he was really several months younger.

  They left him alone because they had to, but they returned to the room at intervals to see if the furniture was gone yet. It never was. In the meantime, Mel picked up the Coleridge book, which Freddy had put back on the chair in the kitchen. “I want to study the poem you interrupted,” she said. “Maybe there’s a clue in it.” Freddy could have told her there wasn’t, but there was no harm in Mel reading the poem. She couldn’t seem to do anything herself but pace. Everything was ordinary and strange all at once. She walked all around the house, aimlessly, as Mel set about dissecting “Kubla Khan.”

  While they were up at Roland’s room for the fourth time, they heard a door open and close downstairs.

  Mel and Freddy looked at each other. “Who’s that?” said Mel.

  From downstairs, a voice called, “Kids? Pizza for dinner!”

  Mel’s mouth dropped open in horror. Freddy scrambled to remember the last time she had eaten dinner with Mum and Jordan. It didn’t help that she had lived an extra eighteen months in the interim.

  “I was defrosting some chicken,” said Mel. “We’ll have to cook it later. Why do they want to eat dinner with us now?”

  They tiptoed cautiously downstairs. Jordan was setting the table; Mum had opened the two pizza boxes. She glanced at Freddy and Mel. “Hi, guys,” she said. “Hungry?”

  “Uh,” said Freddy, standing in full view, feeling huge and exposed.

  “We’ve got pepperoni and Hawaiian,” said Jordan. “Take your pick.” Mum smiled and helped herself to a slice.

  Freddy moved into the room. Jordan looked at her, then back at his plate. “Good day?” he said.

  “Uh,” said Freddy again.

  “Yeah. Absolutely. Good day. How was yours?” said Mel in a chirpy, breathless voice that should have made Mum and Jordan instantly suspicious.

  “Not bad,” said Jordan. “Where’s Roland?”

  “Barricaded in his room,” said Mel. “He can’t hear us when we knock, obviously.”

  “He’ll come down when he’s hungry,” said Mum. “Did you have fun in school today, Freddy?”

  “I got beat up in gym class, then again after school,” said Freddy.

  Both Jordan and Mum turned to look at her properly. “You don’t look as if you’ve been beat up,” said Jordan.

  “Uh,” said Freddy for the third time. Something inside her seemed to be getting more and more clenched.

  “You do look a little different,” said Mum. “Did you change your hair?”

  “Did I what?” said Freddy.

  “You haven’t dyed it, have you?” said Mum. “You know we don’t want you girls doing that.”

  “No,” said Freddy.

  “Oh, good,” said Mum, biting into her pizza.

  “I mean no, I didn’t know that. You didn’t tell us.”

  “Didn’t we? Jordan, I’ve been meaning to ask you—”

  “No,” said Freddy, much more forcefully.

  “What’s wrong with you, Freddy?” said Jordan. “Aren’t you going to have any pizza?”

  They were both looking at her with concerned expressions. She thought they were just expressions; there was nothing behind them. Mum and Jordan were sitting there staring straight at her, and neither one had noticed she had gained a year and a half in age.

  She opened her mouth to say, What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you really see us? You don’t, do you? You’ve taken yourselves off into your own little lives, whatever those are, and we’re just these … extras you happen to have at home. You don’t think you think of us like that. You think you’re ordinary parents who love us and look after us. You’ve written this little story inside your heads about how we fit into your lives. And so when you come home unexpectedly with pizza, it seems normal to you, even though we’re standing here watching you as if you’re aliens because we haven’t all sat down to dinner together in forever. And the best part of the whole thing is that you’re really seeing me right now—I mean, really looking at me and seeing me—but because you haven’t really seen me for months or even years before this, you can’t tell that anything’s different. You need to start treating us like real people. You need to get mad at us when we do stupid things like barricade ourselves in our rooms instead of coming down to dinner. I mean, it’s not as if any of us has ever done anything really bad, but our rooms could be overflowing with drugs and pornography, and you wouldn’t even notice. You don’t even know who we are. You’re terrible parents. You didn’t have a right to move on from us when you got divorced. I’m sure you’re very busy, but you need to grow up.

  What came out was, “Yeah, okay.”

  Mel caught her eye. Freddy looked away.

  The pizza was surprisingly good.

  20

  “So,” said Josiah the next morning on the way to school, “how’d it go?”

  She didn’t want to have to deal with Josiah right now. Her stomach muscles had cramped up when she’d seen him waiting for her on the verge of the park. They had all but told him yesterday that they knew who Three was. Something’s going to happen today, thought Freddy. It wasn’t going to be a good something. She had to talk to Roland, who had avoided her all morning; he had either left extremely early or hidden in his room until she was gone.

  Josiah was still waiting, not very patiently. “You saw,” she said, keeping her voice casual.

  “Yes,” said Josiah, “I saw you all standing on our back stoop, claiming you were Three. What did you tell them?”

  “The truth.”

  He glanced at her sidelong. “I get a funny feeling you know who Three is and have decided not to tell me. Care to elaborate?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, this should be fun,” said Josiah drily. “You’ve got the wrong idea, you know. There’s nothing bad about being Three. It’s just one little choice.”

  “Sure.”

  “Have it your way.” His eyes moved down to her legs. “Nice pants.”

  Despite the knot in her insides, Freddy felt her lips quirk. She had put her borrowed clothes in the wash, then belatedly discovered she had nothing to wear but her old stuff, which no longer fit her at all. She was wearing her largest pair of jeans. They barely closed at the waist, hugged her hips and thighs so tightly she could hardly sit down, and extended about halfway down her calves. Tight pants were in right now, but not short tight pants. She’d briefly considered borrowing something from Mel, but that would have been worse. In a pair of Mel’s pants, she would have appeared to be wearing baggy knickerbockers.

  “I need to go shopping,” Freddy conceded.

  She kept an eye out for Roland, b
ut wherever he was, he was doing a good job of staying out of her sight. He doesn’t understand, she thought as she and Josiah approached the front doors of the school. He only thinks he does. He’s going to give himself away. We have to figure out the Three thing, and then we’ll help him with it, but he needs to let us. She was mildly disgusted when she thought back to what was technically the day before and remembered how furious she had been with Roland. It all seemed kind of overblown now. Okay, he would never be her favourite person, but it wasn’t his fault his dad had married her mum. He was just as uncomfortable with her as she was with him, and he’d had just as little say in the situation. It was also disconcerting to think of growing up with Cuerva Lachance and Josiah in your dreams. That would make anybody hard to get along with.

  And … he had been crying yesterday. She felt strange when she thought about that.

  She and Josiah separated to go to their lockers. As she walked down the hallway, Freddy saw heads turning to follow her progress. She didn’t think it was her imagination that people often started whispering when she drew near. Impatiently, she looked around for Roland, but he didn’t seem to be anywhere.

  The first bell rang. She’d forgotten which classes she was taking when. She vaguely remembered having English and PE first period, but she wasn’t sure which one she was supposed to go to today. Wait … she’d been thumped by Keith in PE yesterday. English, then. She’d forgotten which room it was in. She would have checked her schedule, which was somewhere at the back of her locker, but she’d forgotten her locker combination. I should have prepared for this, thought Freddy, standing helplessly in front of her locker. She wasn’t entirely sure it was her locker. She’d been stupid to think she could just pick up her life where it had left off.

  She ended up in the office just as the second bell rang. “I forgot my classroom,” she explained to the secretary. “Could I get a printout of my schedule?”

  The secretary said, “Couldn’t you go to the computer lab?”

  “I forgot my password, too,” Freddy admitted.

  When the blank stare got to be a bit much, Freddy said, “I hit my head really hard yesterday. Ask Mr. Daniels. I went to the doctor, and she said I had a concussion and some memory loss.”