Between the Lines

  “Saving your life!”

  “It was working!”

  “Oliver, you started to show up in my room. But you started to show up flat as a pancake. Did you really want to live in my world that way?”

  “Maybe I just looked like that because I wasn’t finished yet,” he says. “Maybe I’d puff up like a pastry at the very end.”

  “Even so—how would you be able to finish painting yourself out of the story? At the very least, your arm or fingers or hand would have to stay behind to put those last brushstrokes on the canvas.”

  He sinks down to the ground. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I know,” I say sadly. “I’m really sorry.”

  Oliver is sitting with his knees drawn, his head bent. I wish I could tell him everything will work out in the end, but that’s only true in fairy tales—the very place he’s trying to escape.

  “Maybe we should call it a night,” I whisper. I set the book, still open to page 43, on my nightstand and crawl into bed.

  “Delilah?” Oliver’s voice drifts to me. “Do me a favor?”

  I sit up again. “Anything.”

  “Can you close the book, please?” He looks away. “I kind of want to be alone right now.”

  These are the very words I just said to my mother. The same ones she insisted were signs of depression. I wish I knew how to help Oliver. I wonder if my mother feels this way about me.

  But instead, I just nod and, as gently as I can, do what he’s asked.

  page 32

  Oliver eased his way inside the tiny cottage. There were piles of books and jumbles of glass bottles in all shapes and sizes. The old wizard led him to an adjoining room whose rafters were thick with dried herbs and flowers. He stuck a bony finger between his chapped lips and wet it with the tip of his tongue, then pressed it against the dusty page of a large leather book and flipped through it, scanning the spells. Finally he smiled, and his face creased into a hundred more wrinkles. “Ah,” said Orville. “Pass me that Rubicon flower, will you, my boy?”

  Oliver had no idea what that was, but he pointed to a dried, crusted orange button on the stone worktable before him. When Orville nodded, Oliver handed it to the wizard, who rubbed the bud between his palms before letting the petals settle in a big wooden bowl.

  “And the three bottles to your left?” Orville continued to mix and stir, to taste and test. “And the vial to your right—no, be careful with that!” Orville warned as Oliver realized how hot the glass was to the touch. He glanced down to find his fingerprint burned into a whorl pattern on its side.

  Orville took an eyedropper and dipped it in the vial, then counted out three sizzling drops into the wooden bowl. They vanished with a hiss and a puff, creating a wall of orange flame. Orville squinted into the heart of the fire as the hottest bits, the blue center, began to form into silhouettes.

  Oliver could see a tower, and a dragon beside it blowing fire. But where was the tower? There had to be a hundred like it in this kingdom alone. The flames dipped and spread, and then Oliver could see it—the cliff that rose from the edge of the ocean. The jagged rocks below, the pounding surf. Timble Tower was a former battlement, long abandoned—and the only tower Oliver had ever seen perched on a cliff. He knew exactly where it was.

  “Thank you!” Oliver cried, rushing out the door.

  A moment later the frantic pounding of hoofbeats sounded as Oliver galloped away. Orville turned back to the flames, which were reshaping and re-forming themselves. This time, the old wizard could see black hair falling over one evil eye, a scar that wound its way from brow to cheek, a wicked grin. He doused the fire with cornstarch and raced out the front door of the cottage, but by that time it was too late.

  Prince Oliver was gone. He’d have to find out for himself that this princess of his was not alone.

  OLIVER

  “YOU MUST BE KIDDING,” RAPSCULLIO SAYS WHEN he sees me for the third time. “What do you need now?”

  I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere in this stupid fairy tale. I am back to square one, actually. Although I’d believed that maybe I had found a way out of this prison, Delilah is right. I can’t be the one who paints myself free, and I can’t trust anyone else to do it for me, which means I’m going nowhere fast.

  I’d wanted to talk to Delilah, but she was fast asleep—my own fault since I was the one who asked her to close the book. After she left, I felt so completely defeated, as if nothing I could ever do would change my circumstances. Nothing I usually did in my off time—chess, a long walk, a bracing swim in the ocean—could take me away from my thoughts. And then I remembered Delilah.

  When she wanted to escape her life, she read books. Like this one.

  Queen Maureen had mentioned an entire library at Rapscullio’s cave—a room that I’d never actually reached, because I got so distracted by his magic canvas instead. But if Delilah could use stories for distraction, maybe they would work on me too.

  “I’m looking for a good read,” I tell Rapscullio. “I hear you’ve got quite a large selection?”

  Rapscullio brightens. “Oh, yes, indeed I do. I’m particularly fond of troubadour ballads and folktales, but my shelves seem to have a bit of everything: romances, horror, comedy. Even some plays by a fellow called Shakespeare. He’s not half bad.”

  “Maybe I could browse?” I ask. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”

  “Be my guest,” Rapscullio says, extending one emaciated arm toward a tunnel in the rear of the lair. “You go have a look around, and I’ll make us some tea. Chamomile. You seem a little… high-strung these days.”

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble—”

  “No trouble at all.” He elbows me and grins with half his mouth; the scar immobilizes the other half of his face. “Maybe you’ll even tell me more about that girl of yours.”

  “Girl?” I can’t tell him about Delilah. I feel like she’s my own personal secret. Like if I tried to explain her to anyone inside here, it would be giving a piece of her away.

  “The one you had me paint the picture for—”

  “Right.” The girl I made up, as an excuse. I wait for Rapscullio to unearth his teapot from under a moldering flutter of old maps on a broad table, and I turn and duck through the narrow passageway into another part of the lair.

  The small room is musty and slightly damp, with floor-to-ceiling shelves carved out of gnarled walnut. Books are stacked and tucked and jumbled in piles. There are astronomy tomes and volumes about insect species and a whole shelf about Renaissance painters. I read some of the spines. An Herbologist’s History of the World. War and Peace. A Tale of Two Cities.

  Rapscullio’s teakettle begins to whistle. Any minute now he’s going to come back here and expect me to rhapsodize about a make-believe maiden who lives somewhere in this kingdom. I pluck a book off the shelf. Maybe one of these stories will inspire me to come up with a good lie that he’ll believe.

  When I pull the book free, though, another one tumbles to the dirt floor, having been jammed behind the first on the shelf. I pick it up and dust it off, about to replace it more carefully, when I realize I’ve seen this one before.

  It’s purple leather, with gold lettering.

  BETWEEN THE LINES, I read on the cover. I flip it open and see a picture of myself on the very first page, as if I am staring into a mirror. “Once upon a time,” I murmur aloud.

  Maybe one of these stories will inspire me.

  “Milk or sugar?” I hear Rapscullio’s footsteps in the narrow corridor, so I slip the book beneath my tunic and hastily reach for another one, which I pretend to be thumbing through when my host arrives with the tea.

  My whole connection to Delilah started with words—a message etched onto the cliff wall. Why couldn’t it end the same way?

  I may not be able to paint myself into another world, but perhaps I can edit myself out of this one.

  Delilah

  MY MOTHER IS THE REASON I’
M HOOKED ON fairy tales.

  After my father left, my mom and I got hooked on Disney movies, the ones adapted from darker, creepier fairy tales. In the Disney version, the Little Mermaid doesn’t commit suicide and become foam—she winds up having a gorgeous wedding on a boat and sails away forever with her prince. The original Cinderella had stepsisters slicing off parts of their feet to try to fit into the glass slipper. My mother and I needed the whitewash that Disney provided. We’d sit with a big bowl of popcorn, wrapped together in a queen-size blanket, and would escape to a place where magic was ours for the taking, where men rescued the people they loved, instead of abandoning them. A place where, no matter how bad things looked at that moment, there would always be a happy ending.

  It’s silly, I know, but I sort of imagined my mother as the Disney Cinderella. She cleaned houses all day long and then came home and helped me with my school-work or cooked dinner or did our laundry. When I was younger, every time the doorbell rang and a UPS truck driver or the mailman or the pizza delivery guy was standing on the other side, I’d wonder if this was the prince who’d sweep her off her feet and give her a completely different life.

  It never happened.

  I don’t think often about my father. He lives in Australia now with his new wife and two twin girls, who look like little princesses, with yellow curls and baby-blue eyes. It’s as if he started his own fairy tale, half a world away, without me in it. Although my mother swears I had nothing to do with my father leaving, I have my doubts. I wonder if I wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, just… enough to be the daughter he wanted.

  Once or twice a year, though, I dream about him. It’s always the same dream, where he’s teaching me to ice-skate. He’s holding on to my outstretched hands, skating backward in front of me so I can balance. You’ve got it, Lila, he says, because that’s what he always called me. He lets go of my hands, and to my surprise, I don’t fall. I just glide forward, one foot in front of the other, as if I’m flying. Look, I cry out, I’m doing it! But when I look up, he’s gone; I’m all by myself in the freezing cold.

  When I have this dream, I always wake up shivering, and lonely.

  This time, when it happens, I stare at the ceiling for a moment, and then I roll onto my side and pick up the book where I left it last night. I open it to page 43.

  “Thank goodness!” Oliver shouts. “Where have you been?”

  “Sleeping,” I say.

  He looks up, doing a double take when he sees my face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I seem to be saying that a lot lately.

  “Then how come you’re crying?”

  Surprised, I touch my cheeks and realize they’re wet. I must have been crying while I was asleep. “I was dreaming about my dad.”

  Oliver tilts his head. “What’s he like?”

  “I haven’t seen him in five years. He’s someone else now, with a whole new family. A whole new story.” I shake my head. “It’s sort of stupid. The reason your book even appealed to me was that one line in the beginning, about you growing up without a father. But Maurice wasn’t really ever your father, I guess. He’s just another actor.”

  “I still know what it feels like,” Oliver says quietly. “To be overlooked. You have no idea how many times I shouted, in my mind, trying to get a Reader to see me for more than just what she needed me to be: some stupid character in a book.”

  “Until me,” I say.

  He nods. “Yes, Delilah. Until you.” Even my name on his lips sounds softer than it does on anyone else’s. “I do understand you,” Oliver says. “If I didn’t, you never would have heard me.”

  “Well, nobody else does. My father ditched me, and now my mother thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because instead of joining the debate club or going out on Friday nights with guys who watch Lord of the Rings marathons and speak Elvish, I spend all my time lost in a book that isn’t age-appropriate for me.”

  “Well, I’m not crazy, and I spend all my time lost in a book that isn’t age-appropriate for me….”

  I smile at that. “Maybe we can be crazy together.”

  “Maybe we can,” Oliver says, grinning widely. “I found another way out.”

  My eyes widen. “What are you talking about?” I whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

  “Because you were crying,” he says, truly surprised. “That mattered more.”

  Zach, the vegan lab partner I was recently crushing on, couldn’t even remember to hold the door open for me when we were heading into class. This chivalry thing Oliver’s got going on—I could get used to it.

  Oliver reaches beneath his tunic and pulls out a leather-bound book with gold lettering—an exact replica of the one I’m reading. “I found this on Rapscullio’s shelves. The author painted it into the illustration of his lair, along with hundreds of other book titles. You don’t even notice them when you’re paying attention to the story—but they’re there. And they stay there when the book is closed. And look”—he leafs through it so I can see—“it’s exactly the same, isn’t it?”

  It seems that way. As Oliver flips the pages, I see Pyro breathing fireballs and Frump trotting through the Enchanted Forest as fairies dance in circles around him. I see a tiny illustration of Oliver too, standing at the helm of Captain Crabbe’s ship as the wind ruffles his hair.

  I wonder if that very small fictional prince is, at that moment, wishing for someone to notice him and get him out of his own story.

  “It makes perfect sense that I couldn’t paint myself out of this story—because a book isn’t a painting. But you’ve already noticed things that I’ve drawn or written before on the pages—like that chessboard, and the message on the cliff. Perhaps rewriting the story in my copy will rewrite the story in yours as well.”

  “I guess it’s worth a try,” I say.

  “What’s worth a try?”

  My mother’s voice sinks through the blanket I’m hiding beneath. I emerge from under the covers. “Nothing!” I say.

  “What’s under there?”

  I blush. “Nothing, Mom. Seriously!”

  “Delilah,” my mother says, her face settling grimly. “Are you doing drugs?”

  “What?” I yelp. “No!”

  She rips aside the covers and sees the fairy tale. “Why are you hiding this?”

  “I’m not hiding it.”

  “You were reading under the covers… even though there’s nobody in your room.”

  I shrug. “I guess I just like my privacy.”

  “Delilah.” My mother’s hands settle on her hips. “You’re fifteen. You’re way too old to be addicted to a fairy tale.”

  I give her a weak smile. “Well… isn’t that better than drugs?”

  She shakes her head sadly. “Come down for breakfast when you’re ready,” she murmurs.

  “Delilah—” Oliver begins as soon as the door closes behind my mother.

  “We’ll figure it all out later,” I promise. I shut the book and bury it inside my backpack, get dressed, and yank my hair into a ponytail. Downstairs, in the kitchen, my mother is cooking eggs. “I’m not really hungry,” I mutter.

  “Then maybe you’d like this instead,” she says, and she passes me a plate that has no food on it—just a single young adult novel. “I haven’t read it, but the librarian says it’s all the rage with girls in your grade. Apparently, there’s a werewolf who falls in love with a mermaid. It’s supposed to be the new Twilight.”

  I push it away. “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”

  My mother sits down across from me. “Delilah, if I suddenly started eating baby food or watching Sesame Street, wouldn’t you think there was something wrong with me?”

  “This isn’t Goodnight Moon,” I argue. “It’s… it’s…” But there’s nothing I can say without making things worse.

  Her mouth flattens, and the light goes out of her eyes. “I know why you’re obsessed with a fairy tale,
honey, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself. But here’s the truth: no matter how much you might wish for it, princes don’t come around every day, and happy endings don’t grow on trees. Take it from me: the sooner you grow up, the less you’ll be disappointed.”

  Her words might as well be a slap in the face. She slides the eggs onto a plate and sets them in front of me before leaving the kitchen.

  Sunny side up? Yeah, right.

  No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?

  * * *

  I usually say I hate Biology, but it’s possible we just got off on the wrong foot. My teacher, Mrs. Brown, completely lives up to her name: she is addicted to self-tanner and Crest Whitestrips, and spends a lot of time talking about her favorite spots in the Caribbean instead of helping us prepare for the next day’s lab. I think it’s fair to say I’ll be teaching myself about cell division, but I’m totally set if I need to plan a vacation to the Bahamas.

  I spent Sunday in my room, plotting Oliver’s escape with him. Sometimes we forgot the task at hand because we went off on a tangent. I told Oliver things I’ve never been brave enough to tell anyone else: how I worry about my mom; how I panic when someone asks me what I want to be when I grow up; how I secretly wonder what it would be like, for an hour, to be popular. In return, Oliver confided his biggest fear: that he will pass through his lifetime—whatever that may be—without making a difference in the world. That he will be ordinary, instead of extraordinary.

  I told him that—as far as I was concerned—he’s already been successful at that.

  I told him I’d rather die than go to school on Monday and face Allie McAndrews. But here it is, third period, and she’s absent.