It's a good thing they were sprites, because one was so startled he fell off the beam. But he fluttered right back up to the others, one of whom responded—very cleverly, I might point out—“What?” Then, unable to leave it at that, he added, “Grubby human girl.”
I ignored the jibe, which was, after all, 100 percent accurate. “Your leader,” I repeated. To their smirky little faces I suggested, “King? Queen? President? Prime minister? Governor? Mayor?” I was running out of steam. “General? Chief ? CEO? Supervisor? Principal? Spokesperson?”
Finally, one of them took pity on me. “Brains-in-your-butt girl, we don't have any of those.”
I asked, “Who makes the laws?”
“Annoying twit of a human,” he called me, “we pretty much do what we want to do.”
Why didn't that come as a surprise?
“Okay, well...” I gave Emily a shake. “Wake up,” I told her.
“I'm up,” she mumbled.
“Sprites are here,” I said, hoping she'd remember her lines. “Tell them what you wanted to tell them.”
She patted my leg and told the sprites, “This is the best sister, ever,” which was not what I'd instructed her to say.
“Thank you,” I said, ignoring the sprites' finger-down-the-throat gagging gestures. “But I meant what you came here to say.”
She was wobbly, like her head was too heavy.
“About the gold...” I prompted.
That one word made the sprites knock off their foolishness.
“Gold,” Emily repeated. “We've got gold for you.”
Close enough.
And a good thing, because her chin dropped to her chest and she began snoring.
I finished for her, “King Rasmussem—the gypsy king?—he told us we owed you money, and we've gathered it in a cave to the north. You guys willing to act as representatives and accept it on behalf of all spritekind?”
They were all bobbing their heads and saying things like “Well, sure, pretty girl,” and “Of course, lovely lass,” and “We can distribute the gold for you, clever youngster.”
Yeah, like that’s going to happen, I thought, but I hid my skepticism. The king had said we needed to give the money to the sprites. He hadn't actually specified to all the sprites, so I hoped four construction workers would count. “Great,” I said. “Climb aboard, or follow me. Your choice.”
The construction workers put their little heads together; then one of them said, “Faster if we magically transport there. A bright young thing like you can readily see that.”
This had to be one for the record books: sprites offering to donate a magic spell.
“I don't know how to describe where it is,” I told them. Not to mention that I didn't trust them one pixie inch. Since I was already fudging with the number of sprites, I didn't want to risk that sending them to the gold was as good as giving them the gold.
We compromised by having them transport us to the northern mountains, saving us some time. As the sprites fluttered in a cluster alongside us, I whispered, just loudly enough for the carpet to hear, “Take us to—but not into—the dragon's cave. And when we're about thirty seconds out, give a little bob to let me know.”
I hoped thirty seconds would be long enough to get Emily coherent again.
We had flown for less than a minute when the carpet either bobbed or hit a speed bump. I couldn't see the distinctive crack that was the entryway, but I had a tendency to miss it till the last couple of seconds anyway. What if I was wrong, and we'd simply been jostled by an aberration of a wind current?
Sometimes you just need to trust your magic carpet. I pinched Emily.
“Ow!” she said crankily. I think she said. It was hard to tell with all the rasping and wheezing.
“Behold the gold...” I prompted.
She was trying to find a comfortable position, and groggily and grumpily asked, “What gold?”
“Behold the gold...” I repeated.
Wasn't that the crack that marked the cave up ahead?
It was, I determined, just as Emily caught on and managed to squeak out, “Behold the gold.”
But I interrupted, commanding between clenched teeth, “Louder.”
“Behold the gold,” Emily declared, even managing a theatrical wave in the general vicinity ahead of us.
Whether it was her words or that the sprites spied the crack, they sped ahead of us.
“Yours,” Emily finished grandly, “for the taking.”
She was supposed to finish “in reparation for the debt I owe you,” but she'd started coughing, and by then the sprites were already in the cavern anyway.
Once again, Emily hugged my arms while I hugged her as hard as I could.
Let it work, let it work, let it work, I thought, alarmed by the way I could feel the erratic thumping of her heart.
There was a delighted squeal from the sprites—obviously, they'd spotted the gold. This was followed by an outraged roar from the dragon, who likewise had spotted the sprites. Next came by an angry shriek from the sprites, who'd become aware of the dragon. In a moment, dragon smoke aglitter with sprite sparkle billowed out of the crack.
Emily couldn't catch her breath and was coughing so hard she sounded on the verge of gagging, and now she was bent over with her hands pressed against her chest. “Ow,” she moaned between those body-wrenching coughs.
I became aware that there were more sparkles in the air than could be attributed to the dragon-fighting sprites. The Land of the Golden Butterflies was dissolving.
But the question was: around both of us—or just around me?
Because in this world, I couldn't count on anything.
Chapter 25
End Game
MOM WAS LYING across Emily's couch sobbing, and I thought, All that for nothing.
So what that I had succeeded? I'd been about five seconds too late for Emily.
My sister was gone.
Not fair, not fair, not fair.
But I remembered someone—Mom, come to think of it—reproving me on my tenth birthday when I'd complained no fair that it was raining when we were supposed to be going to Darien Lake. Mom had snorted and said, Since when is life fair, cupcake?
Now, Mom pulled herself away from Emily's couch and flung herself on mine, and it was only then that I realized, yes, Mom was sobbing, but she was also laughing. And over her shoulder, I could see Emily, not ready to sit up yet, but awake, and smiling, and waving at me.
The first few minutes back at Rasmussem were wild.
Mom was doing her best to hug both of us, which was a stretch, seeing as how Emily and I were on different couches.
Ms. Bennett was at the console, her fingers a blur of movement—I'm guessing shutting the Land of the Golden Butterflies program down quick, just in case Emily changed her mind and tried to go back in.
I felt so drained that I needed to set my head back down on the pillow while Mom was busy telling Emily— for the fourth or fifth time—“It's okay, honey, we'll work things out, everything's going to be fine.”
It took a while before I became aware that Adam was standing beside my couch, holding Mom's phone out to me.
Without the energy to ask who it was, I took the phone and mumbled, “Hello?”
“Grace!” My dad's voice cracked. “Are you truly all right?”
“Yeah,” I said, forcing more energy into my tone so Dad wouldn't sound so worried. “Emily and I are both fine.” Then, my quick mind having already run out of anything useful to say, I added the obvious, “You finally got out of your meeting.”
Dad took that as criticism. “I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you.”
There were a few seconds of muddled conversation while we talked over each other, with me saying, “No, I didn't mean...,” and him saying, “Yeah, but I should...,” and we both said, “What?” and we both tried to repeat what we'd just said earlier; then we both stopped entirely.
After a few seconds of silence, Dad said, “The young man ther
e told me you were the hero who saved the day.”
I glanced at Adam, who had moved to help Ms. Bennett and had his back to me.
Hero? That's quite an upgrade for someone who's just come to terms with levelheaded.
“Well,” I said, “that's a bit of an exaggeration...”
“No,” Dad insisted, “he said you wouldn't give up, that you kept trying, no matter what. Grace, I'm so proud of you—and so grateful.”
Well, so that was the good part.
The okay part was when Mr. Kroll, representing Rasmussem's legal department, came in. Mr. Kroll welcomed Emily back, with all his usual warmth and sincerity; he followed that with at least a half-hour of legalese, all of which came down to: You don’t sue us and we won't sue you.
Oh, and by the way, pack up your stuff and don’t bother thinking you'll ever work for Rasmussem again.
Working for Rasmussem had been Emily's dream for, like, forever, but all right, that was to be expected.
Then came the bad part.
I don't know about Mom, Dad, and Emily, but I'd assumed that once Emily made a formal statement about how she'd fiddled with the scores of those SAT tests, and once she'd apologized and promised never to do it again, she'd be forgiven. Maybe get a good talking-to from the people who run the SATs, maybe have a fine imposed by her college or even by the other colleges, the ones her friends had gotten into under false pretexts.
I was not expecting the police to come, to arrest her for fraud, and to take her away in handcuffs.
Thus began our education in the American judicial system. Before then, my family's sole experience in legal matters was that time my father had been to traffic court to contest a speeding ticket. So it's been a crash course in bail bondsmen, grand jury indictments, and endless hearings separated by interminable delays.
Our family has a lawyer now, not Mr. Kroll, of course, but a lawyer to look out for our interests, a lawyer our parents had to hire—and pay and pay and pay for. This lawyer of ours says Emily has two things on her side: her age and her obvious remorse. By sheerest luck, Emily was a couple of weeks short of her eighteenth birthday when she hacked into the computer system, making her a minor during the actual commission of the crime. Along with her attempted suicide (now that it's all over, we can acknowledge this), her confession, and her contrition, that makes a certain amount of leniency possible. Or so says our lawyer. He asserts his doubt that Emily will actually have to serve jail time. But then he admits she might.
Meanwhile, her high school friends, the ones whose scores she padded, have each and every one of them been thrown out of the colleges they were attending. They'll need to retake the tests and apply—elsewhere, they've been told—next semester. Scholarship money had to be returned. In the case of Frank Lupiano, this was such a significant amount that his parents have had to take out a second mortgage on their house, their only option for keeping him out of jail.
Because of this, our family also got an education in hate mail and obscene phone calls. We've all had to change our e-mail accounts and phone numbers and social networking to avoid those former friends and their parents—and also to avoid people we don't even know, people who feel they lost the chance to go to the colleges they are sure they would otherwise have gotten into, if only Emily's friends hadn't wrongfully taken their places.
The first few weeks, Mom and Dad fluttered and hovered over Emily, always trying to keep a discreet watch on her, obviously worried that she would seek another way to escape her complicated life.
But actually ... Emily ... I don't know how to say this in a way that won't make those who hate my sister hate her more, but she is doing well. Sure, she's worried about her upcoming court date, about the sorrow she's caused, about how her actions have cut down so many of her options for the future. But even with all those fears and regrets, now that everything's gone public, now that she's no longer keeping secrets, it's like the worst is over. Our family has survived, and sometimes—not often, but sometimes—Emily even looks happy.
Not that I would ever wish what we went through on anybody else, but our relationship has evolved. It's not so much one of older sister/younger sister, but more one of longtime friends who have gone through a lot together. And
I like that.
Mom is calmer, Dad is home more often, and my friends aren't interested in college yet—so they all think that Emily is kind of cool and that I am the Empress of the Total Immersion Universe. Sub-teen Games division, of course.
So what I'm saying is that I, too, am generally happy.
And I felt that even before Ms. Bennett texted me—clever computer engineer that she is, she somehow tracked down my new phone number. What she said was:
You did well.
Call me in another 5 years.
Not bad for the other sister, the levelheaded one—who still hates trigonometry.
Vivian Vande Velde, Deadly Pink
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