Off the Page

  She created this adventure for me, years ago, when I was afraid of death. This time, I’m going to do the same for her.

  “Come on,” I say, taking my mom’s hand. “There’s a lot to see.”

  I can tell she still thinks she’s going to wake up at any moment. I can tell she doesn’t trust what’s in front of her eyes. Maybe it’s just going to take time.

  At that thought, I can’t help but grin. Because here, that’s exactly what we have.

  The castle is just the way I remember it: dazzling, grand, ornate. I watch my mother walk into the great hall, staring at the vaulted ceilings and intricate tapestries, occasionally reaching out to touch a marble statue or sword mounted on the wall. I take her into one of the towers, to Queen Maureen’s chamber, and open the double doors, revealing a round room with a high carved canopy bed, a massive fireplace, and a gigantic armoire containing the finest silk and satin gowns, embroidered with golden thread.

  “So?” I ask shyly. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s lovely,” my mother says. “I can’t wait to tell you all about it when I wake up.”

  I sigh. “You’re not dreaming, Mom. You’re here. We’re here. For good.”

  The clock on the mantel chimes. It is made of bone china and gold, covered in rubies and emeralds and sapphires. My mother’s eyes fly to its face, and she begins to reach into the pocket of the scrubs she is still wearing. “I have to take my medication,” she says, but of course, the pills aren’t there. They’ve already disappeared in the transition.

  My mother pats down all the pockets. “They must have fallen out on that beach,” she says. “We have to go back.”

  “No we don’t. You don’t need those pills here. You don’t need them anymore at all.”

  “Edgar, you have to accept the fact that I’m sick. It’s not what you want, and it’s not what I want, but it’s what we have to deal with. And it’s going to be a lot easier to handle if I don’t keep having seizures.”

  Frustrated, desperate to prove to her that she’s going to be healed here, I grab the clock from the mantel and smash it as hard as I can against the stone wall. It shatters into hundreds of pieces: gears and springs and gems scatter across the parquet floor.

  “What have you done?” my mother cries. She immediately falls to her knees, trying to gather the pieces, but they begin to tremble in her hands. They pop out of her palm, quivering, gears finding each other and notching into place, golden joints fusing together, until the clock—whole and restored—rests on the floor in front of her.

  I pick it up and set it gently on the mantel. “This is what I’m trying to tell you,” I say. “You can’t be broken here. The book will fix you.”

  My mother stands and, with a shaking hand, reaches toward the clock to touch it. “Of course,” she murmurs. “I understand.”

  “You…you do?”

  “You never die in your dreams.”

  I close my eyes. No matter what I do to convince my mother of the book’s magic—whether that’s cutting myself with a sword and letting the wound heal, or jumping off a cliff and landing safely on my feet—she’s going to think this is a dream, and it might as well be. After all, this entire story came from her imagination.

  Suddenly I realize exactly where I have to take her.

  The copyright page is a sea of white ice, as far as the eye can see. My shoes slip as I pull my mother behind me, teetering, trying to balance in the slant of the italics. The copyright symbol is a tiny divot that grows as we get closer—the only marker to let me know we’re getting anywhere at all as we walk. Overhead, text hangs so low that I keep smacking my forehead against the tails of the y’s and g’s and p’s.

  The closer we get to the copyright symbol, the more the ground seems to slope. I’ve been to this page since Seraphima was sucked out of the book—but the vortex was sealed shut. I still don’t really know what made it open that first time. I only know I’m going to do my best to make it happen again.

  It’s an optical illusion, but the whole page is shaped like a cone, with the copyright circle at the very bottom. Because of this, by the time we reach the bottom, my mother is struggling to keep from falling forward on top of me. “Grab hold,” I tell her, reaching down to grasp one edge of the letter c. She follows my lead, and immediately the circle shifts to the left.

  “I think we have to turn it,” I say, and I put all my weight into pulling clockwise. Inch by inch, with a screech, the wheel unlocks and finally pops open like the hatch of a submarine. I look at my mother. “Jump,” I tell her, and I disappear through the hole.

  She lands lightly in a crouch beside me and slowly stands, in awe of what she sees. There are shelves of bound papers and thrones draped with cobwebs, a giant man-sized birdcage. There are baskets full of broken glass hearts and corked bottles stuffed with rolled-up notes. There’s a dragon’s tooth the size of my head propped against the wall, and a wagon wheel. In the corner, a cello is playing itself.

  “Welcome to your imagination,” I say.

  I don’t think my mother hears me. She is walking through the obstacle course of assorted objects, lightly touching them as she passes. Her hand stills on the statue of a leopard cast in gold. “It was a jealous leopard,” she murmurs, “who begged a witch to make him the most prized animal in the kingdom. Because of his selfishness, she turned him into precisely that: a golden statue.” She walks up to the birdcage. “Mad science experiment gone wrong: the bird became the master.” Then she runs her hands through the basket of bottles. “A man goes off to war. He marches upriver with the army and sends a love letter in a bottle every day to his wife, who lives at the mouth of the stream.” She touches the cello that still plays. “A human boy falls for a muse, but the only way he can impress her is with a magic cello created by the gods that never ceases to play. The muse adores his music…and eventually the musician himself…but he can never let go of the cello’s bow in order to hold her, because she will realize he is a fake.” Finally she reaches for the portrait I saw the last time I was here: King Maurice, holding a baby. It might as well be a photo of my dad and me, dressed up in costume. My mother turns, her face filled with wonder. “These were all my stories,” she murmurs. “The ones I never wrote down.”

  “You used to believe in the impossible,” I say. “Couldn’t you do it again?”

  I shove aside a feather boa and a bearskin rug to reveal a pristine ivory desk with a quill pen and an endless curl of parchment. I pull one of the empty thrones closer to the desk, holding it out so my mother can sit.

  Gingerly she picks up the quill and, for the first time in years, begins to write again.

  Leaving my mother behind on the copyright page, I begin to wander through the book. It’s like I’m seeing the scenery with new eyes. Suddenly the borders of the book don’t feel confining; my tights don’t even chafe. Everything’s possible, just because I’ve managed to get my mom inside here.

  I don’t realize how far I’ve walked until my feet sink into the sand of Everafter Beach. For a moment, I just stand at the shore, watching the sun paint the clouds pink and splatter the sky with orange and red.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  Turning around, I realize I’m not alone. Seraphima sits a distance away, her knees hugged to her chest.

  “Yeah,” I reply.

  “It’s my favorite time of the day,” Seraphima says.

  “Sunset?”

  “No,” she answers. “Night.”

  Darkness settles, and the stars come out, as if the sun has shattered into thousands of pieces. Seraphima’s face tilts toward the sky. “Before Ollie left, he showed me something,” she confesses. She points to a bright, twinkling star. “That one’s Frump.”

  I open my mouth to tell her that Frump hasn’t turned into a ball of gas but then think otherwise. I mean, if it makes her happy…

  “I miss him,” Seraphima whispers. “I really, really miss him.”

  In the moonlight, I can see that she??
?s been crying.

  I don’t really know what to do with a crying girl. I pat her back awkwardly, trying to make her feel better. The distance between Seraphima and Frump is pretty insurmountable, just like the distance between me and Jules.

  Jules.

  “I have an idea,” I tell Seraphima, holding out my hand to help her up. “Do you trust me?”

  She hesitates, but only for a second. I lead her off the beach, past Timble Tower and the Enchanted Forest and Orville’s cottage, around the outskirts of the castle, and over a rocky ledge to Pyro’s cave. “Stay here,” I tell her, and I lean into the gaping entrance and whistle. There is a puff of smoke and my eyes tear. The ground shakes as Pyro wriggles his way onto the ledge of the cavern.

  His red eyes glow in the night; his scaled skin ripples with every breath. When he sees me, his lips draw back, baring razor-sharp teeth. “Who’s a good boy?” I say, patting his neck. I grab onto his mane and swing myself over the bridge of his neck. Then I lean down so I can help pull Seraphima up behind me.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” she asks. “He isn’t trained.”

  “Worse comes to worst, you fall off…and gently land on the ground.” I grin at her. “Aren’t you the one who taught me how to jump out a window?”

  She smiles and wraps her arms around my waist, screaming with delight as I kick a heel into Pyro’s side and he shoots into the sky.

  We climb at a crazy speed, wind rushing past my ears. Squinting, I search for the words at the top edge of the page. ONCE UPON A TIME. I lean down over Pyro’s neck, guiding him like an arrow through the O.

  The O catches around Pyro’s middle, like an inner tube, and then shatters, dusting us with black powder. Suddenly we are among the stars. They hang in front of us, brush our shoulders, tangle in our hair as Pyro swoops and dives in figure eights. Delighted, Seraphima giggles behind me.

  I steer Pyro toward the constellation Seraphima pointed out from the beach. Holding the dragon steady, we pull up beside the brightest star. Seraphima reaches out, brushing it with her hand. The star tinkles, making a chime that sounds just like the tags on Frump’s collar.

  She lets the weight of the star rest in her palm, where it glows so brightly it’s hard to look at. Then she snatches her hand away, wincing. She examines her palm. The outline of a heart is burned onto her skin.

  Seraphima closes her fingers around it, like it’s something she could hold on to forever. “Thank you, Edgar,” she says. She’s crying again, but this time it’s different. This time, she’s happy.

  Pyro gently rides a downdraft back to Timble Tower so we can drop Seraphima off at her window. She climbs gingerly onto the ledge. “Maybe we can go again sometime,” she suggests.

  “That would be great,” I say, smiling. I wave goodbye, about to turn Pyro toward the castle, but Seraphima calls me back.

  She’s silhouetted in the window, her silver hair as bright as the moon. “Edgar,” she says. “It’s good to have a friend in here.”

  It isn’t until the middle of the night, after Pyro’s back in his cave and my mother’s been settled in her chambers, her hands still dotted with ink, that I let myself think of Jules.

  In the minutes before I left, I pulled her into the tiny mudroom in Delilah’s house. It was pitch-black, because no candles had been set there, but I didn’t need to see Jules’s face to know what she was thinking, what she was feeling.

  “Jules,” I started, but she cut me off, putting her fingers against my mouth. It was everything I could do not to kiss them.

  “Don’t talk,” she interrupted. “I have to tell you something. Remember when I said it wasn’t real? Everything that happened between us in the book? I was lying to you. I had to, because I was lying to myself too. It just seemed so Disney to finally find a guy who didn’t go running for the hills when I said that a human head stays conscious for fifteen seconds after it’s cut off.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure our relationship is the plot of the next Pixar short,” I told her.

  Jules had laughed. “Jeez. Just my luck. What’s that saying? All the good guys are either taken, gay, or stuck in a children’s fairy tale.”

  I knew she’d told me not to, but I framed her face with my hands and kissed her. Like, really kissed her. In this world, at a high school party, I made out with the hottest girl. It was a good note to leave on.

  Jules leaned her forehead against mine. “You just had to make me love you, didn’t you?”

  “You crash-landed in my story. What else was I supposed to do?”

  In the dark, I saw the shine of her eyes. I thought she might have been crying, but she never would have admitted it. “Don’t forget me.”

  “Jules, you’re pretty unforgettable.”

  “Well,” she said, “forever’s damn long.”

  There was so much I wanted to say to her. There was so much more about her I wanted to know. But then, from the other room, we heard Delilah’s voice: Where’s the birthday boy?

  And just like that, I ran out of time.

  I toss and turn for so long that night I’m pretty sure I never fall asleep, but that can’t be true, because I wake up to find Queen Maureen sitting on the edge of my bed.

  I bolt upright, panicked.

  But then my vision focuses and I realize that it’s my mother, her red hair twisted in a tight bun beneath a jeweled crown. She’s wearing one of Maureen’s gowns. Tears stream down her face.

  “Mom, are you all right?” I ask.

  “I’m all right,” she sobs. “I’m better than all right.” Her eyes meet mine. “Edgar,” my mother marvels, “my headache is gone.”

  DELILAH

  This must be what it feels like to be superhuman.

  Every sense is firing at once. Even with my eyes closed, I can see each color in the rainbow. I feel the change in heat in my body as Oliver’s arms close around me. I run my fingertips along the velvet of his tunic, marking every stitch.

  I am soaring through the universe, rootless, groundless, spinning.

  I’m glowing, like I’ve swallowed a star.

  And when I finally fall back to Earth, it’s a safe landing, because I know he’ll catch me.

  “So,” Oliver whispers, brushing my hair back. “I heard it’s going to rain tomorrow.”

  I expected a profession of love, or at least a hello. Not a weather report. “What?”

  He grins. “I just want the first words I say to you, here, to be totally ordinary. Something I might say to you if I were going to see you tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.”

  Suddenly I’m smiling. It’s what I told him when we said goodbye, but with one critical change: I am going to see him tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

  Joy bubbles inside me; it feels like champagne in my veins. “Perhaps,” I reply, parroting what Oliver once said to me, “it will be sunny on Wednesday.” And I kiss him again.

  Gradually I become aware of the rest of the world: the sound of conversation picking up, the clatter of plates and forks as cake is passed around, the smell of burned wax from the birthday candles.

  Oliver won’t let go of me. He glances from my tiara to the hem of my gown and smiles broadly. “Brilliant dress.”

  “I thought you might like it….”

  Suddenly Jules grabs my shoulder. “Um, if you lovebirds can spare a minute, there’s a queen we have to hide.”

  Breaking away, I glance at my mother to make sure she’s occupied—and see her serving cake. I grab Oliver’s hand and drag him behind me as I follow Jules to the bathroom. She knocks softly, and the door opens.

  Queen Maureen has turned on the faucet in the sink and is flushing the toilet. “Have you seen this, Oliver?” she asks, delighted. “Where does the water come from?”

  “It worked,” I breathe. “They’re both gone.”

  Jules looks away. “Yeah.”

  “We must get you dressed,” Oliver says. “Remember?”

  Queen Maur
een nods. She too has been informed of the plan. She will dress in the spare set of scrubs Jules brought for her and then Jules will drive her home.

  “My dear,” she says to me, “would you mind unlacing my stays?”

  I take the scrubs from Jules and disappear into the bathroom with Queen Maureen. She turns around and I pull at the bows on her gown, loosening it. She steps out of the dress, and I help her pull the scrubs top on. “Now that Oliver’s not here,” she whispers, hiking up the baggy pants and tying them at her waist, “might I ask you something?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Seraphima told me of this magical place you took her. Might we go to this…mall?”

  I laugh, twisting her braids into the surgical cap so that the color—darker than Jessamyn’s—is hidden. I make a mental note to buy her some hair dye. “Absolutely,” I promise. “We have all the time in the world.”

  When we step outside (after a few flicks of the light switch so Maureen can experience the miracle of electricity), I find Jules sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, and Oliver missing. I tamp down the immediate panic that swells in me. I have to be able to let him out of my sight without freaking out every single time and assuming he’s been sucked into the story again.

  Jules looks up at me. “Relax. I sent him back downstairs to say goodbye to the people who are leaving. It’s weird if the birthday boy isn’t even at his own party.” Then she turns to Maureen, surveying her critically. “I think you’ll pass. But we’d better get out of here quickly so we’re not tempting fate.”

  I turn to Maureen. “Can you give us a minute?” Rummaging in the folds of my princess gown, I pull out my phone and thrust it toward her. “Here,” I say. “Knock yourself out.”

  I leave Maureen pushing buttons and gasping in surprise as music begins to pour out of the tiny speakers. Taking Jules’s arm, I drag her toward my room and close the door behind us.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Jules jokes. “She’ll probably hack your Facebook.”