Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  “I’m okay with that,” I say. My voice is small and scared in my ears. I wonder if Nolan can hear the nerves I won’t admit to. What if the world doesn’t spread and rise around me? What if reading is dead to me forever?

  The whales come, and I let them. If this doesn’t work, they can take me out to sea, where nothing—not even the lack of books—can touch me.

  I can hear Nolan’s purposeful turning, the sound of a reader—a writer—delving into a mountain range of words in search of one stray sheep. He has something specific in mind, and my curiosity is burning away the anxiety.

  “This is my favorite part,” he whispers, so quietly that I wonder if he meant to say it aloud. He begins to read.

  They were, in fact, lost. Emmeline found this terrifying. Ainsley had never been more excited about anything in her life.

  “Come on,” Ainsley groaned. “It’s an adventure.”

  “It’s suicide is what it is,” Emmeline said, extracting her foot from a particularly goopy swamp of mud.

  “And so what if it is? We don’t even know if we can be hurt here. We’re probably sleeping, have you thought of that?”

  Emmeline reached across and pinched her sister’s arm, hard.

  “Ouch! What is wrong with you?!” Ainsley, always melodramatic, rubbed her arm ferociously, as if she could rub the pain right out.

  “Not a dream,” Emmeline said, and in a movement that would confound her sister until her dying day, Emmeline—the girl who refused to watch princess movies because princesses were always saved from dragons and dragons often meant blood—grabbed a sharp rock and slit her palm in a slow, deliberate motion, three perfect drops of blood falling wetly to the ground. “And not safe. We could die, Ainsley.”

  Nolan’s voice has dropped to a rough whisper. My eyes have fluttered closed, the story playing out against my eyelids, my heart quickening, every bone in my body wanting to drop to the forest floor of Orman and have a look at the blood that started it all.

  Slowly, I open my eyes to steal a glance. He reads on, and if I let my eyes blur out of focus and watch the corner of his lips—the only part of him I can see around the cover of the book—I can believe he is weaving an incantation around us.

  Nolan notices my distraction and says, “Do you want me to stop?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The words come swirling back to me in a flood more powerful than any vortex. The characters I’ve missed running forth, arms outstretched, as I drift on a lazy river of words and stories and feelings, propelled along by Nolan’s gentle and deep voice. I’m stuck between life and dream. I could be anyone.

  The girls were much too preoccupied to see the knights, though if they had taken notice, they would have been hard-pressed to find words to describe them.

  Nolan’s voice flickers in and out of my consciousness as I lie sprawled on the floor, the world breaking and re-forming itself around me.

  Tree knights, they were called, mostly human, but with an ounce of tree magic in their veins. They had the ability to become nearly indistinguishable from foliage to human eyes. They were known to be tall, stoic women—they were, almost without exception, all women—with very little in the way of humor or wit. They were the guardians of the forest, the keepers of the outside realms, and they were, in a word, terrible.

  Ainsley was the first to spot one, gasping and whirling her sister around excitedly to point with a shaking finger.

  “Look, Em! Do you see? Do you?”

  The strange moment when she cut her palm forgotten, Emmeline found herself shaking for a reason entirely different from excitement.

  “Wh-what are th-they?”

  When she spoke, it was as if the forest came alive. Dozens of women pulled themselves from the trees to stand tall and proud, encircling Ainsley and Emmeline. The tallest of the knights leaned forward, bowing before Emmeline.

  “Your Highness.” Her voice was the sound of a thousand tempests ransacking a thousand forests, hard and enchanting. “We have been waiting for you.”

  Ainsley loosened her arms from around Emmeline and stepped forward, her chest puffed out toward the sky. “My sister and I are honored to make your acquaintance.”

  There was a pause before the knight said, “It is your sister, lady, of whom we speak. Your presence was not foretold here.”

  And, like that, the stories have come back to me. They are sitting in my throat, working their way into my bones, my blood, the tips of my hair. They are altered, like me. Parts I skimmed before now seem desperately important, and parts I thought were vital, less so.

  I am different, but like the stories, I will hold up to more readings, even if those readings are drastically changed in my after.

  I reach over to touch Nolan’s arm.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  He pauses. I watch as indecision flickers across his features before he drops a hand to my hair, gently smoothing it away from my face in a touch so tender I feel like everything inside me might break. His hand shakes as he pushes hair behind my ear, and I reach up to hold it against my face and still his tremors.

  Being here with Nolan is like listening to every good and bad part of music at once, ingesting all the happiest of endings with the most grueling of in-betweens.

  He returns to his reading, and I lose myself in his voice.

  chapter eleven

  When I wake, before I remember who I am and what pinky promises I have made, I am a photographer. I can feel the weight of the camera between my hands, see the frame my lens makes, without looking through the viewer. It doesn’t matter what I am photographing. It just matters that I am.

  But I come back to myself. My heart slowly pumping into wakefulness, ticking down the minutes until I’m back on the plane headed to Texas, to the Williamses’ open arms and their plans.

  I wake with my head in Nolan’s lap and his hand resting uncomfortably atop my eye. The first Orman book is wedged between us, poking at my neck, and Valerie’s borrowed dress has bunched into a gauzy blue lump under my knees. Nolan groans and cracks his neck, equally unhappy about our sleeping arrangements.

  “We fell asleep?” I ask, a stupid question.

  “I guess,” Nolan says, a stupid answer. He has spent the night slumped against the side of a bookcase.

  “Geniuses, the both of you,” a deep voice adds. I startle, jerking from the floor and crushing Nolan’s nose in the process. The room has suddenly shrunk to the size of my rental car and we are all crammed into too few seats.

  “Walter, heel. Wally, stop. Wally! That’s enough!” Nolan helplessly tries to bat the overeager mutt away while I pull on his collar, with no luck.

  Mr. Larson, seemingly unperturbed by the commotion that is partly his responsibility, steps around the mass of fur and tangled body parts and sets a tray of steaming coffee mugs on the low reading table.

  “Val said to send this up. Make yourselves presentable and then she wants to see you both in her office. One of those mugs is for Walter, so don’t go gettin’ greedy, understand?”

  Nolan half glares at Mr. Larson over his cupped hands, trying to contain the trickle of blood coming from his nose. I grab a napkin from the tray and shove it at him, panicked.

  “Are we in trouble?” I ask.

  “I sure hope so,” Alex says, appearing behind Mr. Larson’s shoulder with a wicked grin. The room shrinks another two sizes as his smile fills the space. “I mean, seeing as how you spent the night together under Mom’s roof and all.”

  “Good morning, Alexander,” Nolan says drily. “You appear to have slept well.”

  Alex’s grin widens. “I did indeed. But clearly not as well as you.”

  “Don’t you have to attend to the bazaar or something?” Nolan asks, swapping out the bloodied napkin for a tissue that Alex pulls from his messenger bag. Is it possible to die of blood loss through the nose?

  “Only the one meeting. Christ, that’s a lot of blood. Amelia, if you wanted to kill him you could have just as
ked for my help. We could have spiked his cereal or something.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I say. “Do you know where Valerie is?”

  And because I’m pretty sure this bookstore is enchanted, my question is a summons. Valerie stands at the door, hands on hips.

  “Mr. Larson. Alexander. Would you give us a moment?”

  They scatter, Mr. Larson grabbing his tray, Alex hurriedly rambling about final bazaar preparations and being back later while still managing to get in a suggestive eyebrow wiggle at Nolan and me, with drank-all-three-cups-of-coffee Wally jittering his way out of the room as if possessed by an evil caffeinated spirit.

  Once it’s only the three of us, Nolan glances at me over the wad of tissues and shrugs, but I’m much too nervous to be so cavalier.

  “It was an accident,” I tell Valerie’s stern face. “Sleeping together, I mean.” I feel myself redden and quickly amend, “Sleeping in the same room together, not together, together. We didn’t, um…”

  “Nolan Endsley.” Valerie spares me. “What have you been up to?”

  Nolan takes the tissue from his nose long enough to say, “I expect you know exactly what we’ve been up to, seeing as how you’re the one that sent her down in her Sunday best to disturb my work.”

  “Work?” I gape at him, turning to Valerie. “He was sleeping when I came down here!”

  “Traitor,” Nolan says under his breath.

  “I know very well what you were doing,” Valerie says. “And you have spent entirely too much time alone together in this store, and I won’t have any more of it.”

  An irrational part of me wonders if she knows Mark’s and Trisha’s numbers and is going to call them so they can ground me.

  “Go spend time alone together out there.” She points a long finger at the window. “Preferably not by the lighthouse, though the lake is significantly calmer today. Go. Have fun. Maybe catch the remote control boat races down by the pier.”

  Nolan surprises us both when he says, “I’m showing her Orman today.”

  Valerie looks at Nolan like he just revealed he has seven extra toes and they’re all behind his right ear.

  The thread between Nolan and me pulses, glows.

  He shrugs at Valerie’s gaping and doesn’t look at me when he says, “She has to know.”

  Eight toes. Twenty toes. An entire extra head. Valerie looks caught between astonishment and uncertainty.

  “You’re sure?” Valerie says.

  Nolan gives one deep nod and looks at me, a half-smile playing on his lips.

  “If she says anything to anybody, I’ll sic Wally on her.”

  “A fate worse than death,” I deadpan.

  I feel a bubble of satisfaction trail along the invisible thread between us. It’s more like a thick yarn than twine today. Malleable but strong. I brush my fingertips against Nolan’s knee, my whole body warming at the shy touch.

  Valerie is looking between us, her expression easing into motherly affection.

  “Well, off you go,” she says. “And for God’s sake, comb your hair, the both of you. You look like you slept on the floor of a bookstore.”

  * * *

  We’re going to the fort first. Nolan has to tell me three times that Orman isn’t in the boathouse before I believe him. With Wally following dutifully at our heels, we make our way through a rain-soaked Lochbrook to the gate held open by rocks.

  Nolan keeps his head down, his hands tucked into the pockets of his sweatshirt like he is trying to make himself smaller and smaller until he becomes invisible.

  Lochbrookians and tourists wander in and around the tiny shops, brightly colored shopping bags and beach totes tucked under their arms. Kids in bathing suits and flip-flops sit on the curb outside an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, licking hot-pink ice cream droplets that slide down their cones. From the crest of the hill, I can see a group of boys shoving and wrestling like puppies on the peninsula that leads to the lighthouse. Adventurous adults bob in and out of the rough waves left over from yesterday’s storm.

  “You okay?” I ask Nolan when he jerks his head to face me. A group of girls our age passes us on the narrow sidewalk.

  “Fine,” he mumbles.

  I don’t press him.

  When we reach the private beach on which the fort sits, Nolan lets out a half groan, half yell and drags his hand down his face.

  “I hate it,” he admits.

  “Hate what?”

  “Walking through town. I’m always worried a tourist will recognize me and send out their internet Bat-Signal and that will be the end of my privacy.”

  “Wasn’t it worse in New York?” I ask.

  “Much. That’s why I decided to come back here.” He gestures at the fort.

  His keys jingle as he unlocks the door and stomps his feet to clear them of sand.

  Our beanbags are exactly as we left them.

  I take a seat, expecting Nolan to follow, but he goes to his writing desk. Wally happily bounds over to me and sits on my lap, his gargantuan furry body blocking my view of anything else. I can hear Nolan opening a drawer, the rustle of paper, the clattering of pens.

  Wally is more than happy to leave my lap when Nolan sits back in his beanbag. Nolan is so fully concentrating on the spiral notebooks he’s brought over that he doesn’t even notice when Wally knocks the hat from his head. He flips through the pages of one and hands me a standard college-ruled red number and some plain black pens. I guess this answers the question of the expensive journal and pen collection.

  “Can you draw?” Nolan asks.

  “No,” I say. “I mean, stick figures and stuff.”

  “Good enough,” he replies, businesslike. He pokes a finger at my spiral. “Draw stick figures of thirteen-year-old you and thirteen-year-old me.”

  “What? But you’re a year older than me.”

  Nolan rolls his eyes. “Fine. Draw twelve-year-old you and thirteen-year-old me.”

  “But why?”

  “It’s for a project. Friends work on projects together, right?”

  Still too confused to process his use of the word friend, I ask, “And what are you going to be drawing?”

  “I…” Nolan pauses for dramatic effect. “I will be writing.”

  “Writing what?”

  Nolan picks his cap off the ground and puts it back on his head, a bit smug.

  “We will be creating the fictionalized shared history of Nolan and Amelia. We started in the middle, remember? We have to fill in the beginning.”

  And like that, the absurd boy from the Orman room, the one with the flip phone, the one who reads to distressed girls until they fall asleep, has returned and stuffed the angsty famous author who is afraid of being seen into a car trunk. In the gleam of his eyes, I can almost see the boy that imagined Orman into being peeking out from the darkness of too-sad and too-happy music.

  While I doodle pictures of stick figures frolicking through meadows of poorly drawn flowers and swimming in a sloppy square marked “public pool,” Nolan asks me questions and writes the answers down in his spiral.

  “Favorite movie we saw together?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. What movies did you like when you were a kid?”

  “It has to be a made-up movie, Amelia. This is all made up. The movie has to be one we create.” He says this like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, fake fiction to accompany our fake history.

  “Unicorns Rule and Werewolves Drool?” I suggest, and feel silly.

  Nolan pauses. “Good. But what’s the plot?”

  “Unicorns rule the world, and werewolves—with their poisonous drool—try to destroy it.” I try to make this sound as natural as his reasoning, and I must succeed, because he writes it down.

  “Animated?” he asks.

  I stare at him over the top of my spiral and desperately wish I could raise one eyebrow like he can. “No, Nolan. It’s live action, with real unicorns and werewolves,” I say, deadpan.

  He throw
s a pen at me, which bounces ineffectively off my shoulder. “It could have been one of those cheesy B movies with live actors and CGI animals,” he protests. “Do you buy candy at the theater?”

  “I sneak candy in my purse,” I say. “You?”

  “Popcorn with enough butter to make it soggy.”

  “That’s gross,” I say. I throw a colored pencil back at him for good measure.

  Nolan looks at me sadly and writes something, shaking his head.

  “What are you writing?”

  “That you clearly have no taste for culinary delights and are showing signs of violence. Unfortunate.”

  “If by ‘violence’ you mean retaliation, I’m okay with that.” I laugh.

  We spend the afternoon this way, creating a golden childhood for two fictional creatures that happen to share our names. Nolan manages to extricate real facts to apply to my fictionalized persona—the names of my parents, the kind of house I grew up in, favorite and not-so-favorite childhood memories—but I only learn the barest facts about him. He likes popcorn at the theater, enjoys listening to classical music when he writes, and his favorite thing to do is walk.

  “Do you listen to music when you walk?” I ask.

  “Nope. I just walk. It helps me think when I want to think and helps me not think when I don’t.”

  “That’s nice,” I say dreamily. I’ve given up drawing caricatures of our invented friendship and am lounged sideways in the beanbag, oddly comfortable sitting in such an unflattering position. Nolan scribbles away.

  “Tell me something else,” I say to the ceiling. “Something about you.”

  The scratching stops, and I crane my neck to watch him as he thinks.

  I tug on the line between us.

  “Come on,” I tease. “It doesn’t have to be anything major.”

  He’s quiet for a long moment.

  “How does this story end?” Nolan asks.

  “What?”

  “This.” He raises his notes and gestures to my drawings. “How do we end?”

  The line between us is so taut it could be plucked like a guitar string. I don’t know if it’s going to hold or break.