Thomas is six years old! I haven’t the faintest idea where he gets these notions, and I certainly am not a cruel enough teacher to have put such words as bereft and carbuncle on the spelling tests of first graders. He simply cannot answer a straight question—yet he blurts out his ridiculous troll trivia without so much as raising his hand.
More important, the level of influence Thomas has among his classmates is highly disturbing. On his first day, I made the mistake of assigning him to a desk which had a spot of vandalism on it. Nothing profane, I assure you; boys will be boys and school boards will be school boards and school boards never replace anything that can still be held together with a rusty nail and a prayer. Well, children miss nothing—they caught him straightaway whispering to his desk, calling it Humphrey, being generally peculiar, and sticking out, which is a hard suit of clothes to wear on your first day, as I’m sure you know.
Now, I felt for the boy. There is always some sensitive soul in every class who is too imaginative and gentle for his own good, and I thought little Tommy was this year’s poor lost lamb.
But not a bit of it! By the next week all the children had found some way to carve a name into their desk—and not a one their own! I’ve a classroom full of desks called Genevieve and Victor and Frankincense and Secretariat, and I’ll be an old maid in Heaven if I didn’t catch Annabelle Bosch whispering to hers during Quiet Reading! What’s more, they’ve all started addressing me as Queen Wilkinson, and I can’t say as I like it. Additionally, he is destructive toward school materials when frustrated (please see enclosed bill for the classroom planetarium) and insolent toward his teachers.
Mr. and Mrs. Rood, I think you can agree this is not normal behavior for a little boy. We don’t like to use words like “deranged,” but what is one to say when a child of six insists that the library is alive? When he convinces other, well-behaved children that the wind is red—Mr. and Mrs. Rood, they believe it so wholeheartedly that when they come in from any stormy recess, all sopping wet and filthy, the whole class babbles on about how “red” they are. Should this behavior persist, I would recommend special schooling for Thomas, as his presence is impeding the progress of other students, who are currently more adept at reciting the genealogy of King Goldmouth the Clurichaun than geometry.
I am trying to run a classroom, and it is quickly becoming a little Bedlam. Please see to your child!
Mrs. May Wilkinson
1st Grade
CHAPTER VI
TAMBURLAINE
In Which a Baseball Makes a Fateful Decision, a Boy Makes a Perfect Pitch, a Girl Breaks Her Leg, and Thomas Sees Something He Should
In the end, everything that happened happened because of a baseball and a pencil. If not for the pair of them, you and I should be having a lovely chat about old Mr. Rood who lives in the brownstone next door and how his grandchildren are just the noisiest things living but his geraniums are prettier than three sunrises and a baby parakeet.
Whether we ought to thank the baseball and the pencil or scold them remains to be seen.
Come along, then! We must run a little faster to catch up with our boy. We must chase him down through second and third and fourth grade, past fifth and sixth, all the quick years of primary school, which do not obey the usual rules of time and space, as any mother could tell you. School-time runs separately from usual time, like a certain country on the other side of the Equator, or the other side of a dream. School-time spins up and sputters and whirlwinds, all hopped up and in a hurry. Only once Summer comes round again, with its bindle full of adventures and bendings of rules and unwatched, unfettered, unending days in the sun does time return to its favorite pace, slow and golden and warm. But with the seasons, Summer disappears, off on its own wanderings and exploits and love affairs with the Equinoxes.
Let us run, run far and fast over the Summers and Autumns and inches grown until we can catch Thomas Rood at being twelve years old.
Thomas had not yet grown up particularly big or strong. He was thin and dark and looked all the time as though he had just received some secret, grievous wound—unless he smiled, and then he looked like everything in the world turning out all right at once. But he didn’t smile often. When you have a smile like that in your back pocket, you learn to use it like a little knife: at just the right moments, when it can do sudden, mortal work.
Thomas walked tall down the halls of the Kingdom of School, still in his Troll’s Mantle, which nearly fit him now. But it did not look much as it did when our boy wore it through the iron gates for the first time. By begging and pleading and offering every chore he could think of, Thomas had wheedled dozens of old necklaces and bracelets and earrings out of his mother, old, tarnished, broken things she did want any longer, broken clasps, broken pendants, broken chains. And with his book of trolls open before him, now split and torn and barely keeping spine and page together, he sewed them onto the shoulders of the beaten leather jacket until the golden chains and jewels and cameos and hoops and empty settings like little sharp crowns hung down his arms and back like a real, proper troll, like Carbuncle and Tufa and Jargoon and Porphyra and all the other legendary troll-lords in his books.
When he walked down the halls of the Kingdom of School, Thomas did not walk alone. There were no more Other Children, only Max and Frieda and Olive and Ronald and Polly and William and Franco and Susan.
And Tamburlaine.
Mostly Tamburlaine.
When he was eight, they’d crowned him Thomas, King of the Jungle Gym, and put a tiara made out of a jump rope on his head. The Rule he read to them upon the occasion of his coronation was: The Kingdom of School is like Sherwood Forest and in Sherwood Forest it is better to be a bandit than an unjust substitute-king like Mr. Wolcott, who stole the throne from Mrs. McDermott when she went on Crusade and rules wickedly while she languishes in the Maternity Ward. Prince Wolcott takes everything good and makes it horrid or boring! We must sneak and pounce and win every scrap of wonderful poetry or tidy geometry proofs or volcanoes made of baking soda and vinegar!
How they cheered! How they pretended to struggle through Peter Rabbit when Bad Prince Wolcott was looking on, and how they gloried in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the woods behind the school! The Big Kids smoked cigarettes behind the gym—Thomas’s kids called each other Mustardseed and Cobweb and snuck glances at The Faerie Queene, which Tamburlaine had smuggled to them from her house. She revealed it the way an older girl might open her satchel to show a stolen bottle of gin out of her father’s cabinet. Sighs of longing sang up among the children at the sight of its gilt cover. Tamburlaine let them all touch it, one by one, cradling the book like a kitten they could all play with, if only they were very careful not to spook the poor thing.
Thomas had once tried to call her Tammy. It was the only time since that first day with Max that Thomas thought he might be in for a punch in the chin.
“Tam, then,” he tried again.
A strange and shadowed look came over her face. She shook her head harshly.
“Not Tam, either. And certainly not Tammy. My name is not Tammy. It’s Tamburlaine. Use the whole thing or don’t use it at all. Shortening things just makes them less interesting.”
But until the day of the baseball, which ought to be called fateful, not because it was fated to happen, for it was not, but because it caused a number of things to fall into fate’s filing system that otherwise would have remained stuck under a cup of old coffee, Tamburlaine never said a word to Thomas that did not concern their Teachers, Oberon, or Mr. Spenser.
Thomas always played outfield, because that was the best place to be if you didn’t really want to play at all. He stood far, far left field while the rest of his class went up at bat and pitched and stole third. He liked to see how long he could look at the sun, or how many fairy Kings he could list in his head, or practice his Stances. This last he went through in the field-grass like calisthenics: A Bold Stance, a Fighting Stance, a Heroic Stance, a Pleading Stance, a Humble Stance
, a Dueling Stance, a Fearful Stance, a Lover’s Stance, every one he had read about and a few he had made up on his own. Tamburlaine also preferred outfield, experimenting with how far “out” she could field until Mr. Granberry hollered at her. Quit inching, Miss Wheel! None of you could hit that far if you were batting bluebirds! And you, too, Rood! Stop flailing around out there like a showgirl! And they would wink at each other and take a couple of sullen steps infield before starting up their private games of avoiding sports again.
It was Spring that day, one of the very first warm days, when the sun seems to be trying on Summer for size, turning this way and that, blushing and hemming and hawing and opening its top button, just to be daring. The grass shone with dew and damp. The trees all round had just let a few green buds out to survey the situation before any real leaves risked their necks. It was fine, and Thomas felt fine, his bones remembering heat and life and the fun of moving, all those things they had found too depressing to think about while the snow was throwing its weight around and feeling big in the chest.
Now, though the class had a perfectly good baseball to beat about during physical education, Thomas was carrying his own in his pocket. He often did. He didn’t know why. He just liked having it near him, knowing it was there. He felt better with its sure weight resting in his coat or his pants’ pocket. He liked to run his fingers over the thick red stitching in class, or walking home, or before he fell asleep at night. He would count the stitches over and over, for no particular reason at all, one through one hundred and thirty-six, and by the time he got to one hundred and thirty-six, he always felt quite calm and pleased with himself.
If Thomas had ever done his counting with the school ball, the one just now being cocked back in Max Barrie’s hand, ready to fly over home base, he would have noticed that it had only one hundred and eight stitches. But he had not, and so he did not. Such little, unimportant things are so easy to miss, you know.
Max threw his pitch, the best pitch he would ever throw in his life. It was, in fact, the best pitch anyone would throw on any field until the end of time and outdoor sports. His form turned suddenly, wonderfully, completely perfect, his follow-through as graceful as a ballerina, the speed of the ball shattering records that had not yet been set. A certain portly gentleman taking the field in Boston at just that moment shuddered from head to toe, for some tiny part of him knew that he had just been bested by a twelve-year-old boy in Chicago who hadn’t done so well on his last math quiz.
The ball left Max’s grip like a shout, hurtling toward an alarmed Franco Moretti, who had no idea what was happening to him. He shut his eyes in a panic and swung wild, hoping only to avoid taking that perfect throw between the eyes. Max sagged—he didn’t know where that pitch had come from, how it had found him, or what he’d done to make friends with it.
Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.
Franco’s pinwheeling swing connected with the fantastically satisfying sound that happens when a piece of wood and a piece of leather conspire to make a lump of cork fly. The ball soared high, higher, into the startled sun, invisible for a moment, and then plummeting down, down, down toward Tamburlaine, who raised her glove hesitantly and rather hopelessly. Arm outstretched, she stepped backward, stumbled backward, careened backward, trying to get underneath Max’s juggernaut.
Just then, the baseball in Thomas’s pocket tumbled out onto the grass as though it had had quite enough of being left out of the game for which it had been made. It rolled toward Tamburlaine with a deliberate gait, if a ball can be said to have a gait. The new, wet grass striped its white leather with green as it trundled on, as determined as a dog in sight of its mistress. The baseball came to rest just behind her, very self-satisfied indeed. Tamburlaine stepped backward once more as Franco’s home run finished its daredevil act—and her heel landed crunchingly on Thomas’s ball. She fell over her suddenly tangled, cartwheeling legs, hitting the earth heavily, awkwardly, and with a hideous thick snap.
“Tamburlaine!” Thomas screamed, and ran for her, his legs moving before her silly long name had even gotten all the way out of his mouth.
The infielders had seen her fall, though all they wanted to know was whether she’d fallen with the ball in hand or not. Thomas fell to his knees beside her. Tamburlaine’s wide brown eyes shone with fear. She breathed hard, staring up at him in what was plainly, obviously, a Pleading Stance.
Mr. Granberry was already striding across the field toward them. “Rood! She okay? She need the nurse? Tammy, honey, walk it off, there’s a girl.”
“Tom,” she whispered, “Tom. I’m fine. Say I’m fine. Tell him I’m fine. Don’t look. Just tell him I’m fine.”
But he did look. He couldn’t help it. Once a body tells you not to look, you just have to.
Tamburlaine’s leg was broken. It was broken almost in half. But there was no blood, no bone peeking through, no horrible mash of ruined girl. There wasn’t even a leg, not really. Under her skin there was sap, running freely, like awful water. There was bark, sheared and torn up. There was a straight, long branch, with only one or two knots and a little green moss on it, cracked nearly in two.
Under her skin, Tamburlaine was nothing but wood.
“You are not fine!” Thomas hissed. “What is that? What’s wrong with you? What? What?” Thomas’s head refused to speak to what it saw. That, that makes no sense and it can not come in, his head insisted. It’ll track bunkum all over the carpet. But his heart began to beat very fast, and with a terrible bright joy.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Tamburlaine had never snarled at him before. Her gentle mouth was twisted up into a grimace. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.”
The girl who had once given him back his Golden Galosh put her hands over her wounded shin. Amber sap oozed between her fingers. She tugged on the ragged wooden ends of her bones until they matched up again, like puzzle pieces. She drew up the frayed edge of her skin like a blanket in the wintertime and tucked it in under her kneecap. She did it as fast as slapping a mosquito, but when her fingers came away her leg was utterly whole once more, with only a new little thin line, like all the many others Thomas had noticed on her body the first time he saw her, across her knee.
She fixed him with a stare like iron chains. “I am fine. See? I am. I’m just fragile. That’s all. Come on, Thomas. You’re my friend. Friends keep secrets for each other. I’ve kept yours. So you owe me. Holler at Mr. Granberry so he goes back to the dugout. Don’t let him see. Please, Thomas. Please don’t let him see me.”
Thomas found his voice.
“It’s…uh…it’s okay!” he yelled downfield. His eyes did not move from the shattered wood of her leg. “She’s fine! She caught it!” He grabbed the ball, which had landed in the grass near them, and hoisted the victorious catch in the air. Their teammates cheered. Tamburlaine popped up on both legs, grinning and jumping up and down as though nothing could be the matter. What did she mean she’d kept his secret?
While Thomas sat on the grass, stunned, his heart giggled madly and turned somersaults over and over in his chest, for no reason he could tell. His baseball rolled quietly back into his pocket with the warm sense of a job well done in its secret guts.
CHAPTER VII
THE MONSTER ON TOP OF THE BED
In Which Thomas Finds Himself Alone with a Girl, Sees Her Without Her Clothes on, Obeys Vampire Law, Comes Face-to-Face with a Gramophone, and Says a Very Important Word
Tamburlaine’s house stood dark and quiet. Thomas raised his hand to knock. He hesitated. It looked as though no one was home. He clutched her note in his hand like a gentleman’s calling card, though that seemed silly now that he was here. It’s not like she would demand proof before she let him in. She’d written: Meet me at my house After School. 5 Ginger Road. She wanted him to come. She wasn’t angry, or she wouldn’t have used capitals: After Sc
hool. They always did that, all of them, when they wrote notes in class, to show that they were part of the secret elite who knew the truth about the world. All Countries are proper nouns; they get to wear the big letters like medals on their chests.
Tamburlaine asked him to come. He was supposed to be here. But the house was tall and thin and it seemed to be holding its breath, one birch tree in a long row of other birch trees just like it, only this one had a squirrel in it he desperately needed to talk to.
Thomas Rood held his breath, too. Something Awfully Big was about to happen. He felt it like an old fisherman feels tomorrow’s storm in his knee. He knocked.
The door creaked open and Tamburlaine was there. Her big eyes, her long hair, her nervous way of standing—the Fleeing Stance. He could hear music far within the house. He knew the record; his parents had it, too. It had a lady in a lime-green dress and lime-green diamonds on the cover, singing to a bluebird she held in her hand. That lime-green lady sure loved her old ragtime-y songs. Just then, in the snuggling depths of warm, brown-gold house-shadows, she was singing about apple blossoms.
“Hi,” Thomas said.
“Hi,” she answered.
She reached out her hand and drew him inside, quick as a hiccup. Was she afraid someone might see him there? Would her parents be mad if they caught her alone with a boy?
The shadows of the house closed on them. Tamburlaine had all the lights shut off, but the late-afternoon sun danced with the dust below the windows. It smelled nice in her house. Like paper and new milk and trees growing close together. As his irises opened up to let all that dusky softness in, Thomas saw that Tamburlaine’s house was a house of books.
It was not the house of someone who liked books. It did not have a well-stocked library. It was not even stuffed with books. Thomas could not see any part of the house that was not mostly book. Books rose from the floor to the ceiling in unruly, tottering towers. Books held up tables and chairs—and sat in the chairs, at the tables, as though quite ready for supper to be served, so long as supper was more books. They sprawled over the dining table like a feast of many colors. Books climbed the stairs, ran up and down the hallways, curled up before the fireplace, were wedged into the cabinets beside cups and saucers, held open doors and locked them shut. They left no room on the sofa to sit, nor in the kitchen to stand, nor on the floor to lie down. Books had already taken every territory and occupied it. Where the books were content to rest on shelves, like other, less ambitious of their cousins, they had been squashed in so tight their spines bulged, and then bowed under the weight of the books stacked up on top of their sagging rows. Brick and wood only peeked through in a few places, and where they did they looked positively embarrassed, apologetic. It’s only that someone is borrowing The Picture of Dorian Gray at the moment, you see. The Thousand and One Nights has had an accident involving grape juice and has gone on a little trip to the binder’s; please don’t think anyone left this space empty on purpose, goodness no!