“If only his heart was not as cold as he is fair,” said Serene, waving her letter. “He returned my own letter to me again, I can feel it rustling in the envelope! I don’t want to know what he’s written on it.”
She was apparently lying, because she immediately opened it, and then stared.
“Elliot,” she whispered, and Elliot looked up from his troll history. “That letter you told me to write—Golden, he wrote back! He wrote me a letter!”
Elliot glanced at the page. “I’m not sure ‘That’s more like it’ counts as a letter.”
Serene and Luke high-fived.
“Um,” said Luke. “I mean, if your advice for Serene worked—do you have any good advice for me?”
“I do. I’m glad you asked,” Elliot said seriously. “Let me tell you a secret that gets people to go out with you. Lean in. A little closer.”
Luke leaned in, his face anxious, and hopeful, and limned with gold. Elliot looked deep into his eyes.
“Ask him out,” said Elliot, and slapped Luke upside the head.
“Hey!” said Luke, not quite grinning. “Hey! You’re supposed to be a pacifist!”
“I am a stone-cold pacifist,” Elliot claimed. “That was a verbal reprimand . . . that got out of hand.”
“Do not have a catfight, boys, even if it is that time of the month,” said Serene, and when she saw them staring at her, she explained: “You know—women shed their dark feelings with their menses every month? But men, robbed of that outlet, have strange moodswings and become hysterical at a certain phase of the moon?”
There was the familiar pause of Luke and Elliot deciding to let that one go and change the subject.
“You don’t understand,” Luke told Elliot. “You don’t know what it’s like to feel about someone the way Serene and I do.”
“Does feeling have any correlation with how you’re acting?” Elliot snapped. “Because you’re both acting like idiots, and I don’t want to be an idiot like you.”
Elliot left his own damn cabin and went to the library instead of saying he knew what first love felt like. Because Luke was right: his hadn’t been fairy-tale love, storybook love. Unlike him, Serene and Luke were going to be loved back.
On the last Trigon game of the year, Elliot watched more of it than usual, because it might be his last time. It did not justify his attention, since Luke tediously won and Serene tediously cheered as usual.
Then Luke pulled his shirt off before going into the changing rooms, and Elliot jumped up and ran in after him. He found Luke already changed back into his cadet uniform.
“Take off your shirt,” Elliot ordered, clicking his fingers.
“Uh,” Luke said. “No!”
“There’s something wrong with your shoulders!”
Elliot had only seen them for a moment—he had not been looking all that much—but he knew what shoulders were supposed to look like, and it was not like that. Elliot had felt jarred seeing the shape of Luke’s shoulders change somehow, as if heat was blurring his vision, but what was blurring was not vision but flesh.
“I just strained them or something!” Luke shouted back. “They’ll stop hurting in a few days. It’s nothing to make a fuss about.”
The rest of the dressing room was staring at them. Dale had his shirt off, which was nice but not helpful. Elliot tried to think of a way to drag Luke down to the infirmary which did not involve Elliot himself going to the infirmary, where the medics were.
He couldn’t do it. Luke was probably right: Luke was probably fine. Luke was always fine.
“Luke,” said Elliot. “If they don’t. Promise me you’ll go to the infirmary over the summer.”
Luke looked convinced this was all some plot to humiliate him, but he muttered: “I promise.”
It was the best Elliot could do, when he could not ask Luke or Serene to take care of themselves in future. They had never made a fuss saying good-bye to each other: Luke and Serene were going home to their families and were always sure they would see each other again soon, and Elliot always wanted to pretend he was as secure as they were.
Elliot knew he could count on Luke to keep his word, so that was that: Luke would be taken care of, Luke and Serene were both on the path to finding love, and there was peace in the Borderlands, at least for now. Everything was settled, as much as it could be.
Time to go home.
Maybe time to stay. If he was ever going to stay, it had to be now.
His dad had always hired someone to come in and cook and clean. They never stayed long. Elliot had learned to stay out of their way, after he heard one on the phone, complaining about needy brats who gave her the creeps.
When he got home for the last summer, though, Elliot found a woman called Gemma who seemed pleased to have company. He supposed he wasn’t a potential burden anymore.
“Are you going inter-railing round Europe with those kids down the road?” she asked. “Wait, no, silly me, of course not. They’re going today, aren’t they?”
“Is it that time already?” Elliot asked, and checked his watch. “Would you excuse me for one moment?”
He dashed up the steps from the kitchen into the hall, where he found his father walking in the door, briefcase in hand.
“Would you like to get rid of me all summer?” Elliot demanded. “Then give me some money now.”
His father looked at him, then fished inside his suit jacket for his wallet.
So it was that when Tom and Susan Whatevertheirsurnamewas, who had occasionally been set up on awkward you-live-on-the-same-road playdates with Elliot between the ages of five and twelve, arrived at the platform for the train for London, Elliot was waiting for them.
“Great news!” Elliot declared. He looked them over: Tom’s glasses didn’t suit him, Susan’s hairband matched her shirt, and he felt he was caught up on them. “My dad says I can come inter-railing with you.”
“But we didn’t—” began Tom.
“But we haven’t seen you in y—” began Susan.
Elliot fixed them with a brilliant expectant gaze. He’d found that usually burned away all but the words people were absolutely certain they wanted to say.
Tom and Susan sagged, clearly not having enough conviction to follow through.
Elliot beamed. “We’re going to have so much fun, guys.”
V
Elliot, Age Seventeen
Inter-railing was fun: they soon formed a group of people the same age as they were, the group losing and finding new members at every train station but with a few people there for the long haul. Tom and Susan were still wary of Elliot on account of thinking he was pure mental, but herd mentality kicked in: they did not want to be left out. Elliot’s favorite member of the group, though, was a Greek girl called Pinelopi who was traveling on her own because she loved adventure.
In a nightclub they found in one of the back alleys in Prague, with a sword stuck in the stone floor of the lowest level, Elliot tried to kiss her.
She leaned away and laughed. “I thought you were gay.”
Something about her easy casual laugh made Elliot laugh too. “And what gave you that idea?”
“Well, the way you were looking at the half-naked guy juggling fire upstairs was one clue.”
Prague did have quality entertainment.
“I’m bisexual,” Elliot told her, and leaned in again slightly: not touching her, but silently asking her permission to do so.
“Well, the thing is . . .,” said Pinelopi, and Elliot’s heart sank as he saw her searching for words, waiting for something like ‘“ don’t think I could ever really trust a guy who” or “too weird for me, thanks” and felt his heart sink because more than hoping for anything else, he’d liked her. “I have a boyfriend,” Pinelopi finished.
“Oh,” said Elliot. “You never said.”
Pinelopi shook her head. “No. This trip for me is about deciding a lot of things—whether I want to go or stay somewhere, who I want to be. I didn’t want to close any
doors on myself. But I—love him, and more than anything else, I don’t want to close the door on that.”
“Oh,” said Elliot, in a different tone, and smiled. “Understood.”
They walked out to see the sights, the next day: the spun-glass frosted fairytale that was the old city in Prague, as if you could cross the fragile arch of a bridge and enter into a world that was all fretwork and ice. From then on, they usually went out together during the day, and met up with the others in the evening and for train rides. There was the stop in Luxembourg and its shimmering gray caves, and the restaurant where nobody could read the menu. There was Florence and the Duomo, a shell-pink building that rose unexpectedly before them out of the night and a shower of summer rain, as if it had risen from the sea.
Elliot went out on his own in Paris, though. He bought gingerbread ice-cream in the early morning and ate it standing on one of the many bridges spanning the Seine. He went from one side to the other, looked at the wiry spike of the Eiffel Tower and the gold-inscribed dome lurking behind it, then from the other side the closer gilt-and-glass bulk of the Louvre. Paris as the morning light washed over it, in glowing pearl and gray.
This was a whole world, the world he’d been born into, and there was so much of it he had not seen. Instead he was going to see seas with mermaids, harpies in the trees, trolls in the mountains. In five years or even ten, when the wars came, he would be there. He could have done something in this world, and he was not going to do it. He was going to do something else, and in choosing one path, another was lost. He spared a moment to feel something almost like grief.
He thought of Pinelopi, and what she had said about not wanting to close the door on love. He thought: as his mother had, as his father had, in their different ways.
If he’d really meant to stay, he would have told Luke and Serene. He would have worked out a way to say good-bye properly. He would have made and kept promises to return another time.
Elliot had thought about staying, but he’d never meant to. And he wasn’t going to.
Elliot threw what remained of his cone off the bridge and walked away. The dark rippling river flowed on, without him watching.
When Tom and Susan got off in London, Elliot kissed Pinelopi good-bye and went too. They took the train down together, and early onset nostalgia made Tom and Susan share all their pictures with Elliot and urge him to come by in a couple of days.
“Keep in touch this time, right, mate,” said Tom, punching him in the shoulder.
“Light blows as a male substitute for physical affection is a remnant from a brutal warrior culture, trust me on this,” Elliot told him, and left the platform.
Gemma was in the kitchen, making dinner before she went home. The house was otherwise gray and still, utterly unchanged. Elliot sat at the kitchen counter and talked to her lightly about his summer, showed her a picture of Pinelopi and a picture of the castle complex in Prague.
“I expect you’ll be back to school soon,” said Gemma.
“I expect I will.”
She hesitated, wiping her hands off on her apron. “I’m not sure if I’ll be here when you get back. This place is a little—it’s a little much for me.”
She didn’t have to tell him how it was. He had lived here for years, in a house that wanted to be silent until the silence was broken by a certain step and a certain voice, in a house holding its breath for someone’s return. If anyone held their breath long enough, they were dead.
“Who says I’m coming back?” asked Elliot.
He helped her get some glasses down from the top shelf: he was tall enough to reach it, now.
Then he had dinner with his father. It was quiet as usual, but not quiet like usual: this was a watchful quiet. Elliot waited, throughout the whole meal, and watched his father for even a glimmer of desire to speak.
He was not terribly surprised when it did not come.
He followed his father into the other room, and waited again in the quiet, in their last silence, broken only by the clink of his father pouring himself his first drink of the evening.
Then his father sat down, and Elliot spoke.
“You know what day it is. You know what’s coming.”
“I know that you’re going,” said his father, his voice tired, as if Elliot had been annoying him for years, as if he was incredibly difficult to bear with.
Elliot stood at the window with the light coming in and tried not to let the heaviness of that look weigh him down.
“Do you know something else? If you’d loved me, I would’ve stayed,” said Elliot. “If you loved me, I would never have gone.”
“What do you want me to say?” his father asked. “I never felt it. I don’t have it in me.”
“I don’t want you to say anything. Not anymore. I wanted to say something.”
Elliot got up and opened the door, stepped outside the room and looked back, at his father waiting in his chair, drink in his hand, even the light coming in the windows full of dust. Even if his mother came back, Elliot thought, his father wouldn’t know what to do or how to feel. What is not used becomes atrophied. He didn’t have it in him. And if she returned, Elliot would not be here.
“Your loss,” Elliot said to both of them, and shut the door.
That was love: Elliot couldn’t command it, couldn’t demand it. He could only leave the chill echoing place where it was not.
There was one more thing that Elliot had to do before he left. Carving his name onto a wall that most people would not see, symbolically leaving his name behind, was not really his style. So he bought some spray paint and a ladder.
All over the gray façade of his father’s house in scarlet letters he wrote: ELLIOT SCHAFER. He almost added: “was here” but did not, partly because it was a little too clichéd vandal for him, and partly because it did not encompass all he wanted to say: was here, is no longer here, is somewhere almost unimaginably different, is all right.
He washed the red off his hands, whistling, and went to check on his pack. He’d packed everything he could think of, including an iPod loaded up with every favorite song old Joe had ever played for him. It would probably all go up in flames, but he was taking a chance.
He climbed the steps up to the clouds. He walked down to the Borderlands. He did not leave his name behind him, but carried it with him, along with his bag.
“Give it to me,” said Luke, sounding weary but also determined to stop Elliot hurting himself. “Whatever contraband you have, hand it over right now.”
Elliot did not, of course, but he appreciated the concern.
“WHOO! Go Luke!” Rachel and Serene stood up and yelled, their voices rising over the chaos of the year’s first Trigon match.
Under his breath and the sound of cheering, Elliot muttered: “Whoo.”
Once the excitement had settled slightly, Rachel lowered herself back down to the bench with a jingle of gold necklaces and reached out for one of Serene’s hands and one of Elliot’s.
“Luke asked me not to tell you guys,” said Rachel. “Well, he asked me not to tell Elliot. I think he thought you would tease him, because this is a little embarrassing.”
“High five because the teasing continues to get to him,” said Elliot. “You’d think he’d have built up an immunity over the years. Our sensitive flower.”
Serene gave him the dead-eyed stare that he loved.
“Self high five,” Elliot decided. “Nice to know he still cares.”
“But the secret isn’t just embarrassing,” said Rachel. “It’s—it has the potential to be dangerous for him, and scary. He’s going to need his friends. And I know you two love him and will support him.”
If he hadn’t come back, Elliot thought, he wouldn’t have been there to support Luke, and he was glad all over again, even if he was a little worried. But Rachel looked calm, and she loved Luke: she would not have been calm if she did not think Luke was going to be okay.
“Though I am honored by your confidence, I am unsure a
bout learning something about my swordsister which he would rather I not know.” Serene bit her lip. “On the other hand, if you truly believe my knowing would be to his benefit . . .”
Serene’s decision made, Rachel looked to Elliot, and the soft rays of sunlight caught the glitter of her chains and rings, the gleam of her hair, but above all the glow in her eyes, loving Luke and asking for help. It was a look that expected to be answered, a loving, demanding look confident there would be a similar look returned. The turn of summer into autumn would be easy this year, golden and sweet, and Elliot could not help believing they were all going to be all right.
“Sure,” said Elliot, laughing. “Please tell me an embarrassing secret about Luke. I would love that.”
The news that Luke’s biological father was not Michael Sunborn but, in fact, a harpy, was received with stunned silence.
For about ten seconds.
“A harpy?” Elliot asked, staring at Rachel. “So you know all about harpy customs, and their language, and how their matriarchy differs from that of the elves—though I suspect most of the differences arise because in the case of the harpies there are many more women than men, whereas in the case of the elves the numbers are far more equitable—”
“Elliot,” Serene interrupted. “Your thirst for knowledge and interest in other species is both praiseworthy and endearing, but—not right now.”
Elliot looked at her. Then he looked at the Trigon pitch.
“Oh, right,” he said. “Of course.”
He squinted over at Luke’s golden head, shining amid the dusty hollows of the pitch. He remembered Luke jumping from impossible heights, seeing impossibly distant things. Everything made sense now. They had not been the superlative attributes given to a fairy-tale hero, after all.
“And he’s really going to grow wings?”