Off the Page

  I look up at Edgar. “Your mother talked to me. But did she believe you when you told her you lived inside this book for four months?”

  “I don’t think so,” Edgar admits. “She thought I was making it all up. She thought you were a hallucination.”

  “If she could be convinced, then from what Orville’s saying, all it would take for us to swap places would be for you, me, your mother, and Queen Maureen to want it desperately.”

  Edgar shakes his head. “That’s not going to happen. She already thinks her mind is playing tricks on her.”

  “Then you must find another one of your special tricks,” Orville says.

  We all fall silent, because we know how much harder that is than it seems. I glance up at Edgar and see the defeat written across his features. I think of Frump and how many times each day I wish he were still here: to laugh with me when Socks gets stuck in a mud bog, to marvel as the sunset paints the beach, to help me finish off one of Queen Maureen’s lemon tarts. Edgar has already given up, I realize. He has already started to say goodbye.

  “Right,” I say briskly, stiffening my spine. “We’d best get moving, then. We have a lot of pages to cover if we’re going to find something that will work to save Jessamyn.”

  Edgar shakes his head. “It’s useless.”

  “No it’s not. Even if she’s doubtful, as long as three of us are wishing for the trade, and we have a boost of magic like Seraphima and Frump and Socks had before, when they made a wish, it might work.”

  “But we don’t have time to find that boost of magic,” Edgar says. “Believe me. Jules and I scoured every inch of this narrative.”

  Suddenly it hits me: what if we’re looking not for a what…but rather a when?

  “Delilah,” I begin. “When does magic happen in your world?”

  “When you use Photoshop?” she answers.

  “No. I mean, you make wishes all the time. You wished on stars, and on eyelashes, and even once on that strangely shaped bone in the chicken your mother cooked. Does one of those feel a little more lucky than the others?”

  Jules and Delilah glance at each other. “Birthday,” they say simultaneously.

  “When you blow out your candle,” Delilah tells me, “that’s the one wish people believe will come true. There’s this huge buildup, because everyone’s watching you make your wish, and you keep it hidden inside and never say it out loud. Eyelashes and shooting stars are for the little things—the wishes that don’t really matter. Like when you yell out, ‘Wish me good luck!’ You know it won’t make a difference, but you say it anyway. Your birthday wish, though—that’s the one you think actually might happen.”

  “What did you wish for on your last birthday?” I ask.

  Delilah blushes. “A prince, to sweep me off my feet.”

  “Wow,” Socks breathes, impressed. “That’s pretty close.”

  “It’s my birthday next week,” I announce.

  “It was my birthday first,” Edgar mutters.

  “I may be eternally sixteen, chronologically younger than Edgar, but I still celebrate the occasion. We all do, in here. We just never grow older.

  “Don’t you see?” I tell him. “It’s perfect. If we both ask at the same time, on the same birthday, for the same thing, surely that will be a big enough wish to bring both you and Jessamyn here.”

  I’m quite chuffed to have figured this out—in the presence of a wizard, no less—but Edgar doesn’t seem enthusiastic.

  “And if it isn’t,” he says quietly, “it will be the last birthday I have with my mom.”

  I straighten, looking Edgar in the eye. “Then we’d best make sure it works,” I tell him.

  Queen Maureen is pruning the roses in the royal garden when I find her. I snap a rose from its stem and hand it to her gallantly. “A beauty for a beauty,” I say, turning on the full force of my charm.

  If I’m going to convince this woman to give up everything she’s ever known, I’d better be at the top of my game.

  “Let me guess,” Maureen says. “You broke another dish?”

  “Do you truly think that’s the only reason I might come to see your lovely face today? It might be a surprise for you to hear, but I actually enjoy being in your company.”

  She smirks. “I’m betting on the broken plate.”

  I sink down on a marble bench. “Then you’ll lose your wager,” I say. “Although I do want to talk to you about something.”

  “Ah, you see,” she replies, snipping a dead branch. “I knew it. Mother’s intuition.”

  “About that…” I take a deep breath. “You’ve said you consider me to be a son. And I’ve always thought of you as my mother. I don’t think family has to be related by blood, do you? Don’t you think family is the people who love you the most?”

  “Of course,” Maureen says.

  “And…well…if your son was going to move away, you’d want to go with him, wouldn’t you?”

  Maureen rolls her eyes. “I’ve told you before, you can’t live above the cobbler’s shop on page three. It’s not seemly for a prince, and it doesn’t make sense to haul a bed out there when you have a perfectly grand one in the castle.”

  “I don’t want to move to page three. I want to live in the real world.” I pause. “With you.”

  “Me? In the real world?” Queen Maureen chokes on a laugh. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to live there.”

  “That’s why you’ll have me.”

  Her eyes find mine. “Is this about your Delilah?”

  “Not this time,” I confess. “It’s about a boy who’s going to lose his mother. And if we switch with them, well, I believe he won’t have to.”

  “That’s tragic,” Maureen says. She sinks down beside me on the marble bench. “But why would you think that some ordinary woman and her son might be able to come inside here? You’ve seen how the other strangers were forced out.”

  “This isn’t an ordinary woman,” I explain. “This is Jessamyn Jacobs. She wrote this story.”

  Queen Maureen is silent for a moment. She plucks the petals from the rose in her hand, one by one, letting them float to the ground. She stops before she picks the final petal, and places the stem between us. “She gave me life,” Maureen says softly. “It’s the least I can do for her.”

  So much has happened today that I’m not sure I will get a chance to speak to Delilah alone tonight. But then, shortly after the last star appears in the sky, there is a seam of light along the spine of the book and I feel myself being drawn toward our usual page.

  “Hi,” she says softly.

  “Hello.” I can’t stop smiling at her. It’s as if all the awful truth I’ve learned today has only served to remind me of how lucky I am to have found her. “So, you’d best have a spectacular birthday gift for me.”

  “You don’t know it’s going to work,” Delilah says.

  “You don’t know it’s not,” I point out. “I’m thinking…we go out to supper first, and then you give me my present. And to be perfectly honest, I am expecting a cake. Preferably chocolate, but I won’t quibble.”

  “I can’t let myself hope this is going to happen,” Delilah says, “because the stakes are so high if it doesn’t. Not just for us this time either. For Edgar.”

  I look at her, sobering. “I know.”

  “I came home from the hospital today and I hugged my mother so tight she probably thought I was insane. I couldn’t tell her about Jessamyn dying—because what if Queen Maureen winds up here, perfectly healthy? So instead I just said I had a really bad day and I needed my mother. But I can’t stop thinking, thank God it’s not my mom. And that’s awful, right?”

  “It’s human nature, I suppose,” I reply.

  “Is this our fault?” Delilah whispers. “When Jessamyn fainted the first time, shouldn’t we have tried to get Edgar back here immediately?”

  “She swore to me that she wasn’t ill,” I say.

  “She lied to you because she didn
’t want to worry you, the way we didn’t want to worry Edgar.” Delilah shakes her head. “We lost weeks he could have had with her.”

  Her eyes are full of storms. “We can’t turn back time,” I say. “The only thing we can do is try to ensure that Edgar and Jessamyn have more of it.”

  Delilah bites her lower lip. “I know you look like Edgar…but do you really think Maureen can pass for Jessamyn?”

  “Close enough. From what I saw of family photographs when I was in her house, Maureen looks much like Jessamyn did when she got married—although, oddly, her hair color seems to have changed from brown to red. For that matter, King Maurice is the spitting image of Edgar’s late father.” I tilt my head, considering. “We should only hope we’re lucky enough to have to disguise Queen Maureen to make her look exactly like Jessamyn.”

  “What will happen to Edgar if…the book doesn’t let Jessamyn in? I mean, things out here aren’t like they are in there. Food doesn’t magically appear. You have to make money to buy it. You have to be able to pay your own mortgage. Edgar’s only seventeen. He shouldn’t have to grow up that fast.”

  “He won’t have to. In fact, he’ll never grow up,” I say.

  Delilah raises a brow, still dubious.

  “If this has any chance of working,” I tell her, “I must believe one hundred percent—and to do that, I need you to believe too.”

  She lowers her lashes so that they cast shadows on her cheeks. For a moment I think perhaps I’ve made her cry. When she looks at me again, I realize that desperation and hope are twins, merely altered versions of each other. “What kind of frosting?” she asks.

  “Buttercream,” I say softly.

  Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it’s stopped raining.

  Hope is what makes you believe he’ll text you back.

  Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight.

  Hope is why you put a spoon under your pillow and wear your pajamas inside out when you hear there could be a snow day.

  Hope is why you get out of bed in the morning, and why you dream at night.

  Hope is what makes us believe that things can only get better.

  Hope is what keeps us going.

  DELILAH

  Just when I think things couldn’t possibly get more complicated, Harvey happens.

  On the day I’m hosting a schoolwide Halloween/birthday party—something I never thought I’d do in my lifetime—a hurricane that’s supposed to blow out to sea in the Carolinas takes an abrupt and unexpected turn and makes its way up the Eastern Seaboard. Hurricane Harvey goes from a trickle of rain to a hammering on the roof, and the lights flicker as Jules and I sit in my bedroom, crossing off details on a checklist.

  “I’ve got a bunch of six-packs of Coke and twelve bags of potato chips,” I say. “And I talked my mom out of bobbing for apples, but she’s still insisting on making vegetables in the shape of a skeleton with dip.”

  “This is going to be the worst party in the history of parties,” Jules mutters.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do?” I argue. “My mother and Edgar’s mother are going to be there. I didn’t think beer pong would be a viable option.”

  It’s totally lame to throw a party at my house for Edgar’s birthday with his own mother there as a guest—but this is the only way our plan is going to succeed. Besides, it doesn’t matter if my reputation tanks because of this, since if it works, Oliver will be here, and he’s the only one whose opinion matters to me.

  It’s been a week since Jessamyn was released from the hospital, a week that we’ve spent plotting with Oliver and the characters in the book, to make sure that this swap is flawless. Edgar has been mostly out of the loop, consumed with taking care of his mom. He says the hardest part is how normal Jessamyn seems. With the exception of the antiseizure medication she has to take every day, and a headache that won’t go away, she might as well just be fighting the common cold.

  “Has Edgar told Jessamyn why we’re really throwing this party?” I ask. “Does she even know that we’re trying to get her inside the book?”

  “No. She still doesn’t believe any of this is real. Edgar thought it would be better if she didn’t know what we’re planning. That way she’s more likely to agree to be here.”

  It makes sense. Jessamyn totally didn’t buy Edgar’s secret-portal theory; even seeing Oliver alive and talking was something she managed to dismiss as a hallucination caused by medication. Since this all hinges on a wish, it won’t do any good for Jessamyn to actively doubt the process. For all we know, that could be the one thing that makes this go wrong.

  Hanging on the back of my closet door is the costume I borrowed from Ms. Pingree and the drama department. Jules is going as Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. She was the one who made the astute observation that if this switch actually did pan out, we were going to end up with a guy in a prince costume in the middle of a high school party. Since it is only a week away from Halloween, it made perfect sense to dress everyone up—so that if Oliver and Maureen do arrive in the present day, nobody will blink an eye.

  “So,” Jules asks, her gaze sliding away from me. “Did you hear from Chris? Is he coming?”

  I look up at her. “I had to invite him. He’s Edgar’s best friend. Well, Oliver’s. You know what I mean.”

  “It’s going to be so awkward,” Jules says. “I haven’t talked to him…since I ended things. And I didn’t exactly give him a reason.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay with all this? With Edgar leaving?”

  “I kind of have to be, right?” She meets my gaze. “Let’s be real. He wouldn’t stay out here with me if the cost is losing his mom.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I tell her, “he really did like you. He’s just got much bigger problems to think about right now.”

  She forces a smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’m tougher than I look.”

  I laugh, glancing at Jules’s ripped black tights, the studded leather cuffs on her wrists, the safety pin she’s wearing as an earring, the thick black eyeliner. “That’s terrifying,” I say. “Remind me to never get in a fight with you.”

  Suddenly there’s a crash of thunder, and the lights dim and then buzz back to life. “I cannot believe this,” I mutter. “What if no one shows up?”

  “Does it even matter? The only people who have to show up, will. Besides, there’s nothing like a little natural disaster to spice up a party.” Jules glances at her phone. “I have to go home and change. I told Edgar I’d pick him and his mom up at seven, and my face paint alone takes half an hour.” We both stand up, and impulsively she hugs me. “It’s gonna work.”

  “It has to,” I say.

  As soon as I hear Jules’s car pull away, I realize I’ve done all the checks for this party, but I haven’t thought about the preparations on the other side. And if Oliver needs my help, or if something’s going wrong, there’s no way he can even tell me until I open the book.

  It’s not on my nightstand, where it usually rests.

  Getting on my knees, I scan underneath the bed. I pull back the covers and sheets, searching. I dump the contents of my backpack. I tear my whole room apart, rummaging through every drawer and yanking every book off my shelves, but I can’t find it.

  Did I leave it at school? At Edgar’s? Where was I the last time I talked to Oliver?

  Last night. Under the covers. Before I went to sleep. And this morning I left the book on my nightstand.

  I know I did. But then why isn’t it there?

  How could I possibly lose my own boyfriend?

  And how could I possibly misplace the book on the one day I need it most?

  I fling open the door to my room and run downstairs. “Mom!” I yell, teetering on the edge between shouting and sobbing. “Have you seen my book?”

  She turns, in the middle of wiping down the counter. “What book?”

  “You know what book. Between the Lines…” I pull open rando
m kitchen drawers, rummaging. “I need it. Right now.”

  “Delilah, calm down,” my mother says. “I put it on the bookshelf with the photo albums.”

  “Why?” I ask, running into the living room and tracing the spines of the books until I find the one with the gold lettering. I grab it and clutch it to my chest, feeling my heart pound against the cover.

  My mother walks up to me, surprised at my outburst. She reaches out to pull the fairy tale from my arms, but I twist away from her, shielding it with my body.

  “Delilah,” she asks gently, “what is it about this book? Why are you so attached to it?”

  “You wouldn’t get it.”

  “Try me. Talk to me. I thought it was just a phase—one that you grew out of when you started dating and making more friends. But now, all of a sudden, you’re right back where you used to be—obsessed with a children’s fairy tale. What happened?”

  My throat is jammed with a hundred responses, none of which she would understand. “Stay out of my stuff!” I yell, and I run back upstairs.

  When I reach my room, I slam the door and open to page 43. Oliver is still shimmying into position on the rock wall, clutching at his chest. When he sees me, he lets go of his tunic, and several rolls of bright-colored streamers fall from the folds of velvet, unrolling to the edges of the page. “Why are you interrupting me?” he asks. “I’m in the middle of planning my own birthday party.”

  “I know,” I tell him. “I just wanted to make sure everything was going all right.”

  “Well, it rather was. Until you interrupted me.” He smiles as he’s saying this, though, so I know he’s not really upset to see me. “And your preparations?”

  “They were going fine until I temporarily lost you,” I say. “My mother moved the book.”

  “Ah, right. I forgot to tell you, with all that’s been happening and Jessamyn’s illness—but your mother, she read us the other day.”

  “She what?”

  “It was when you were at school, presumably. I thought it was you, opening the book as usual—except it wasn’t.”