Between the Lines

  Maybe Oliver’s right; wishes can come true.

  “Does everyone have a frog?” Mrs. Brown says. I glance down at the poor, dead amphibian in front of me. Usually my lab partner is Zach, but he’s taken a conscientious objector position on this lab, due to his veganism, and instead of doing a dissection he is writing an independent paper on growth hormones in dairy cows.

  The door opens, and in walks Allie McAndrews, with two black eyes. She looks like a raccoon, and has a crisscrossed strip of tape over the bridge of her nose too. She hands Mrs. Brown a hall pass. “Sorry I’m late,” she says.

  “Better late than never,” the teacher says. “Allie, why don’t you pair up with Delilah?”

  Allie shoots me the look of death as she takes the stool beside me. “Touch me,” she whispers, “and I will make your life miserable.”

  “Now, class, pick up your frog. I want you to measure the posterior appendages…”

  I turn to Allie. “Do you… want to go first?”

  She glares at me. “I’d rather join Chess Club.”

  I joined Chess Club last year. “Okay, then,” I say. Sorry, buddy, I think as I lift the frog into my palm and pick up a ruler.

  Allie’s boyfriend, Ryan, drags his stool toward our lab table, even though he is supposed to be working with someone else. “Hey, gorgeous,” he says, grinning at her. “So what do you say you and I get some takeout and download a movie and not watch it tonight?”

  “I’m not in the mood,” she says, glancing at me. “I have to go home and ice.”

  “It was an accident,” I tell her. “I didn’t purposely cross five lanes of the pool just to smack you in the face.” Although, I admit, I might have daydreamed about doing just that.

  “You’re the only girl in the school who could make two black eyes look hot,” Ryan says.

  Allie twines her fingers with his. “You’re just saying that.”

  “Cross my heart,” Ryan answers.

  “I love you, babe,” Allie says.

  Ryan grins. “Love you more.”

  I thought there was a good chance I would feel like throwing up during a dissection lab, but I figured it would be because of the frog, not the conversation.

  Mrs. Brown winds past our lab table. If she notices that Ryan is now our third partner, she doesn’t comment. “Now, class, I want you to examine the chest area…. What skeletal feature is missing?”

  I wait for Allie to pick up the frog to examine it. “You, um, want a turn?” I ask her.

  “To smack you in the face? Break your knee?”

  “Right, then,” I say, poking at the frog again.

  “What kind of takeout should I get?” Ryan asks. “Chinese? Indian? Italian?”

  “Ribs,” I announce.

  They both look at me with disgust. “Who asked you?” Allie says.

  “No… the frog. The skeletal part it’s missing… is ribs.”

  She tosses her hair. “Who cares?”

  “Gently,” Mrs. Brown warns a boy to my right, who is squeezing his amphibian so tightly that its head is swelling. “Dissection is both an art and a science. Show your frog a little love.”

  Suddenly, Ryan grabs the frog off our lab table in one hammy fist. “Yeah… show your frog a little love.” He shoves it so close to my face that I can breathe in the scent of chemicals and death. With all my might I push away from him, knocking over the lab stool and causing enough of a commotion that the entire class stops to watch.

  “My bad,” Ryan says. “I thought it said it was a prince….”

  The class bursts into laughter. I turn seven shades of red.

  “That’s enough!” Mrs. Brown says. “Ryan, go to the principal’s office; you and I will be seeing each other at detention this afternoon. Delilah, take the bathroom pass and go clean yourself up.”

  As I grab my backpack and stumble out of the classroom, the students are silent. And then, just before I cross the threshold, I hear it: “Ribbit. Ribbit.” It’s one of the kids in the back, and suddenly everyone is snickering and Mrs. Brown is trying (and failing) to get them to quiet down.

  The girls’ bathroom is empty. I scrub my hands and face and blot them dry with paper towels. Jules used to be my go-to girl whenever something horrendous happened—the person I could count on to make me feel better. But now I find myself searching through my backpack. Just like after my dream, the only person I really want to talk to right now is Oliver.

  I rummage in my backpack, past my Biology textbook and my English binder and my lunch, but the book is missing.

  “No,” I mutter, and I pull the textbooks out of the bag. All that’s left now is crumpled paper, nubby pencils, bits of crushed granola bars, and forty-two cents.

  The fairy tale—which I had put in my backpack that morning with my own two hands—is gone.

  It doesn’t take me long to decide that I’m not going back to Biology class. I’ll just tell Mrs. Brown I was so traumatized I was in desperate need of a guidance counselor. Instead, I hurry to the library, where I find Ms. Winx pasting bar codes into new books. “Ms. Winx,” I ask, “has anyone returned Between the Lines?”

  “Aren’t you the one who has it checked out?”

  “I’m pretty sure I left it by accident in the cafeteria before homeroom….”

  “Well, if anyone turns it in, I’ll let you know.”

  As I leave the library, in the pit of my stomach is a stone. What if I can’t find the book? What if it’s gone forever?

  What will I do without him?

  I’ve never been in love, but I’ve always imagined it—weirdly—like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. Love, the host will say, makes life a little brighter.

  When I’m talking to Oliver, I feel like there’s nobody in the world but the two of us.

  When I’m talking to Oliver, I want to keep talking forever. I want to know how old he was when he learned to ride a horse, and what his favorite color is, and what pops into his mind just before he falls asleep.

  When I’m talking to Oliver, I wonder what it would be like if he held my hand.

  In spite of what Ryan and my mother think about me and fairy tales—it’s not that I’ve been looking for a prince.

  It’s that, without even trying, Oliver makes me feel like a princess.

  * * *

  Seventh period Jules and I have Driver’s Ed, the only class we share this semester. The third kid in our car, Louis Lamotte, who always smells like soup, is at the wheel. Which means that Jules and I are stuck in the back while Mr. Barnaby tries to keep Louis on the right side of the road.

  “So are you going to tell me why you’re pissed off at me, or do I have to play Twenty Questions?” Jules says.

  “I’m not mad at you!”

  “Yeah, right. You don’t answer my texts all weekend, you don’t wait for me after school, and today at lunch when you were totally ignoring me and I told you I had an asteroid growing out of my butt, you said, That’s nice.”

  “I’m just a little distracted,” I tell her. “Really, I’m not angry.”

  “Girls,” Mr. Barnaby says, “you’re supposed to be observing.”

  Jules totally ignores him. “When you accidentally tripped Allie McAndrews last year during the hundred-meter dash at Field Day and she broke her knee, I was the first one to know. You called me up hysterical and told me I had to run off to Mexico with you because you weren’t coming back to school. Today, I found out that you broke Allie’s nose from that kid who chews gum too loud in the library.” She looks at me. “I don’t even know that kid’s name and he knew something about my best friend that I didn’t.”

  “Look,” I tell Jules. “I’m not hiding anything from you. And you’re still my best friend. Th
ings at home are just… crazy right now. My mother wants to take me to a shrink.”

  Jules shrugs. “Big deal. My parents take me two or three times a year. Just tell them you have deep-seated issues with your father and they’ll say you’re cured.”

  “Girls!” Mr. Barnaby says, over his shoulder. “Louis needs to focus.”

  “Louis needs a lot of things,” Jules says under her breath. “Starting with a shower.”

  I can’t help it; I stifle a laugh. Jules glances at me sideways and bumps shoulders with me. “Don’t shut me out, okay?” And just like that, I’m forgiven.

  * * *

  I felt like I was in a sort of frantic fog, mentally retracing my morning steps to figure out where I could have misplaced the book. By the end of school, it still hasn’t turned up. I shuffle to the curb where cars are lined up to retrieve kids, and find my mother’s van.

  “So,” she says as I open the door, “how was your day?”

  I shrug. “The same as usual.”

  “Oh, really? I thought you might have missed this.” She reaches beside her and pulls out Between the Lines.

  “Where did you find that?” I shout, grabbing it out of her hands. I know it will send Oliver and Company into a tizzy, but I open the book quickly and flutter through the pages without reading it. Then I hug it to my chest. “Thank God! I thought I lost it!”

  My mother shakes her head. “That’s exactly why we’re going to Dr. Ducharme, Delilah.”

  “Now?” I thought at least it would take my mother a few months to get an appointment. And by then, she might have totally forgotten about the psychiatrist, and we could just not show up.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. He’s only going to chat with you for a little while. Help you get in touch with what’s making you sad.”

  Angry tears spring to my eyes. I’m not sad; I’m tired of being told by someone else what I’m allegedly feeling. “You’re one to talk,” I say. “You’re taking me to a psychiatrist when you haven’t opened up for five years! I guess it’s perfectly normal to just work yourself to the bone, because then you don’t have time to realize how depressing your life is!”

  My mother reels back as if I’ve slapped her. “You have no idea what my life has been like, Delilah. I had a daughter to raise on my own, with no income. I can barely cover the payments on my mortgage. Somehow, I have to find the money to send you to college. Someone has to be the grown-up here, and that means knowing the difference between what’s real and what’s make-believe.”

  “I know the difference between reality and make-believe!” I cry out. But even as I’m saying it, I wonder if that’s a lie. If it makes a difference, when you keep wishing they were one and the same.

  page 37

  Oliver had lost count of how long it had been since Scuttle and Walleye locked him in the brig. The ship pitched and dove in the storm; every now and then, Oliver felt the timbers shake with the force of the lightning and thunder.

  Whatever rescuing a princess entailed, he was pretty sure that becoming a pirate captain’s sacrificial slave was not part of the deal.

  He tugged at his chains, but they held fast. On the floor was the dinner tray he’d refused—the one with crackers that were moving. Or rather, the crackers weren’t moving. Just the worms baked into them.

  He wondered why they would bother to feed a prisoner who was ultimately being transported as a gourmet peace offering for a very cranky, very hungry dragon. The same one that Rapscullio had conjured sixteen years earlier—the one that had killed Oliver’s father—now nested on the Cape of Passing Tides, preventing the ship from continuing its journey. Maybe Oliver had to put on some weight in order to qualify as a tasty morsel.

  He wondered what had become of Socks and Frump, whom he’d last seen on the shoreline as the shipmates dragged him into the brig. He wondered how long it would be before Captain Crabbe himself showed up to bring his prisoner abovedecks, to make Oliver walk the plank onto the waiting fiery tongue of the dragon.

  There was a strafing of metal against metal as the door to his cell slid open. The pirate captain stepped inside and narrowed his eyes. “My boys tell me ye aren’t cooperatin’,” Captain Crabbe said. “Ye know what we do to slaves who don’t cooperate?”

  He crossed to the table that was bolted to the floor so that it wouldn’t overturn as the boat pitched and tossed. From his spot chained to the wall, Oliver watched the captain take out a velvet roll. He untied it, spreading the fabric open to reveal pockets full of gleaming instruments of torture.

  Except they weren’t daggers and thumbscrews and knives.

  Last year, Queen Maureen’s tiara had fallen off while she was horseback riding through the unicorn meadow. Although it was retrieved, it was badly dented and in need of fixing. She put out a call for crown repair, and the man who came to the castle, to everyone’s surprise, asked her to take a seat in her throne and open her mouth wide.

  Apparently, there were the sorts of crowns one wore on one’s royal head… and then there were the sorts of crowns that sat on one’s teeth when one had severe dental problems.

  In Captain Crabbe’s velvet pouches were explorers, extractors, probes, and mirrors.

  “You’re… you’re a dentist?” Oliver asked.

  At first Captain Crabbe’s eyes bugged out, surprised. Then just as quickly he recovered. “Nay. I’m a fearsome pirate, and you, my lad, are an appetizer.”

  “Maybe,” Oliver said, “but you’re also a dentist.”

  Captain Crabbe gasped and rushed over to Oliver, clapping a hand across his mouth. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? I have a reputation on the high seas to uphold!”

  “That depends on whether you let me go,” Oliver said.

  “I can’t,” the captain said, shaking his head. “If I don’t feed you to Pyro, I’m likely to wind up as a meal myself.”

  Oliver considered this. “What if,” he suggested, “I told you there was a way to get you around the Cape of Passing Tides… and at the same time, to find you the best dental patient you’ll ever have in your life?”

  OLIVER

  I’VE BEEN WAITING PATIENTLY ALL DAY FOR Delilah to get out of school and come back to me. I want to talk to her more about the fairy tale I found at Rapscullio’s. I want to know if she thinks this new plan will work better so that I won’t wind up as a flat blue stick figure in her world. I want to ask her opinion on what I should write in the book and where, since she seems to have great experience as a reader. I want to form a plan about what we’ll do if—when—I get out of here.

  Who am I kidding? What I want is simply to spend time, more time, with Delilah.

  I think that when you live in a world with limits, as I have—when you’ve met everyone and seen everything you’re ever going to see—you lose the hope that something extraordinary will happen in your life. Your actions and interactions will always be shades of the same old routine. But with Delilah, everything is new and fascinating. Who knew, for example, that there is a huffing sort of air gun to make wet hair dry, so that the ends don’t freeze when you’re riding on a cold morning? Who knew that there are devices that have just a single page, but with the click of a button fill that screen with new text over and over? For every question I ask Delilah, she has one for me: Are other books like this one, and do all characters exist when we’re not reading? (I have to beg off answering that, because all I know is my own experience.) When did I first become aware that I was trapped inside a story, instead of just assuming that I was living my life? (Again, hard to answer, as I have always been and always will be sixteen in here.) And then there are the questions she asks me in a whisper, when night falls and it is just the two of us in the dark: Who would you be, if you could be anyone? Where would you go?

  I don’t always have a ready reply. But the mere fact that Delilah is asking is magical to me. Never before has anyone ever thought I might be anything other than what I appear to be on the page. No Reader has assumed that there are though
ts in my head other than the ones put there by an author.

  Last night, Delilah asked me if I believe in Fate.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Since I just can’t accept that my destiny is to play a role in someone else’s story.”

  “But what if that isn’t the case?” Delilah whispered. It was late, after midnight, and the moon had silvered half of her face. It made her look otherworldly, magical. Like someone who’d belong in a fairy tale.

  “I’m not following you….”

  “What if you and I were meant to be together?” she said. “What if the reason Jessamyn Jacobs wrote this story in the first place was because some higher power—Fate, Destiny, whatever—compelled her to do it, since it was the only way for us to meet?”

  I liked that idea. I liked thinking that whatever Delilah and I had between us was so strong that there was no boundary between the true and the imagined, the book and the Reader. I liked the idea that although I started my life as a figment of someone’s imagination, that didn’t make me any less real.

  Today, while Delilah is in classes, I’m sitting on a crooked, twisting branch in the Enchanted Forest. The fairies flutter around me, chattering. Although they do like gossip, unlike the characters they play they’re actually not nasty little creatures at all. They’re always happy to be pawns when Frump and I play chess, and they are good sports about shimmying down cracks and crevices too tight for the rest of us to pick up a dropped penny or a lost button. They’re also the strongest creatures in the story, with more strength than even the thuggish trolls, and they don’t mind helping Queen Maureen redecorate by hauling furniture up and down the castle steps. I’ve seen a single fairy roll aside a boulder that had blocked the road to the castle without even breaking a sweat.

  “Glint, can I borrow your poisonberry lip gloss?” asks Sparks.