The Blue Girl

  Being awake doesn’t help.

  The shadows are still too deep in the corners, their edges moving as though I’ve got a candle burning. But I don’t have a candle and now I think I see things in the darkness. There’s more than movement. I feel the weight of something’s attention.

  I remember what Thomas said about not showing fear.

  Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

  My pulse is drumming a crazy tempo. I draw my legs up, arms wrapped around my legs, and back up against the headboard, comforter pulled to my chin like it’s somehow going to protect me. I want to scream, but I’m not so panicked that I don’t realize what that’ll do. It’ll bring Mom and Jared running in. I’ve already messed it up so that Maxine’s part of this weird curse I’ve acquired, but I’ll be damned if I drag anybody else into it.

  Now I think I see eyes in the shadows. Slanted, kind of yellowish, with deep red-black centers. Like little fires. Like hungry fires. They flicker, marking me, then they’re gone, only to reappear a moment later in another part of the shadows.

  It’s not fair. I’m awake.

  But it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? I’m on the edge now, straddling my world and Fairyland. I know ... for real, for sure ... that the fairies exist, and that knowledge makes me fair game for these things in the shadows.

  I think of the space under my bed and wish I hadn’t.

  They must be under there, too. Creeping out from below my box spring.

  “P-pelly,” I manage. “This’d be a good time to show.”

  I’ve gone through the last few years of my life with a who-cares attitude, but right now I find I care very much.

  That makes me think of Adrian, and I feel a surge of empathy for him, cut down so young. Another victim of these damn fairies.

  I can see actual shapes in the shadows now, pulling free from the darkness. Vague hairless heads with those burning eyes. Arms and torsos.

  The scream I don’t want to give in to is pushing up my throat. I almost let it go, but then I hear a faint sound of discordant music—my fairy orchestra starting up—and the closet door bangs open.

  Pelly’s there, holding a clenched fist high in the air. He bounds across the room and lands on the bed, then shakes his fist at me, opening his hand. Like in that slo-mo instant in a traffic accident, I see that he’s throwing some kind of powder at me. It glistens and sparkles. I feel like I can see every granule. Then it lands on me and I breathe it in.

  I cough, my eyes tearing.

  I hear a low moan—from under the bed, from the deep recesses of the shadows.

  A pressure I didn’t realize I was feeling is suddenly gone.

  They’re gone.

  I cough some more, clearing my throat. Relief flows in a wave over me, and I kind of collapse against the headboard. Pelly bends down closer to me.

  “Imogene,” he whispers. “Imogene?”

  “I ... I’m fine.” The words are hard to get out. But after the first couple, it gets easier. “You got here just in the nick of time. Thanks.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “No, it was a big-time rescue. Another minute and they’d have had me for sure.”

  I can feel some strength returning to me and sit up straighter. Then I realize there’s something wrong with my arm—with the skin of my arm, I mean. It doesn’t seem the right color, but it’s hard to tell with the faint light coming in through my window.

  “Watch your eyes,” I say, closing my own as I turn on my bedside light.

  When I open them again, I see that my skin’s blue. I hold up my other arm. It’s blue, too.

  I give Pelly a confused look, then get up on my knees and look at my reflection in the mirror on my dresser. Everything about me is blue—my skin, my hair ...

  “I’m sorry,” Pelly says. “I didn’t know it would have that effect.”

  “I’m blue.” I turn from my reflection to look at him. “How can I be blue?”

  “It must be from the pollen,” he says.

  “Pollen,” I repeat.

  He nods. “It comes from an herb called vervain. There’s a special strain that grows in the Otherworld. It’s a ward against the anamithim—that’s what they’re called, those creatures in the shadows. The soul-eaters.”

  “So we can fight them off.”

  He sits back on the comforter and gives me another nod. “But the warding effect is only temporary. It will wear off in a day or two.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying I’m going to be blueskinned for the next couple of days?”

  “I’m afraid so. Your hair, too.”

  “The hair I can live with. I dye it all the time. But how am I supposed to walk around with blue skin? What do I tell my mom? How can I go to school?”

  Pelly starts to get such a miserable look that I shut up about it. After all, he did just save my life.

  “I didn’t know,” he says. “They didn’t say.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I went to Hinterdale, deep in the Otherworld, to ask for advice. They have a huge library there with the answer to every question, supposedly, if you have the time to look. But those answers can take a lifetime to find.”

  “Luckily, it didn’t take you a lifetime,” I say.

  “I never looked. There were some scholars there who told me about the vervain and where to find it, but it was deeper still away. They also told me of a shop in Mabon where I could trade for some, though they warned me it would be dear because it’s very rare.”

  I’m trying to imagine libraries and shops in Fairyland— somehow I’d never considered the place to have either. “What did you trade?” I ask.

  “A week’s worth of stories.”

  I give a low whistle, because that is a lot. Back in the day, when Pelly and I played together near the commune, he told me about how in some worlds, stories were more valuable than anything. Just imagine how many stories you would have to tell to fill up a whole week.

  “Did you have that many?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “And I didn’t have time to tell the ones I knew. But the woman in the shop was very nice and allowed me the credit after I gave her a sample. I told the one about the Clock Man who stole Jared’s spare time.”

  I smile. “I told Maxine that one awhile ago.”

  “I didn’t mean to use the pollen all at once the way I did,” he says. “But when I saw so many of those shadowy creatures, closing in on you from all sides, I panicked.”

  “I was panicking, too. So I’m glad you did.”

  “Except now we have to start all over again. The woman gave me the last of the vervain pollen she had in her shop, and it’s a very long and arduous journey to get any more.”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  I look at my arm again, lift my gaze to the mirror. I feel like some cheesy extraterrestrial in a low-budget science fiction film where the best they could do was give the alien blue skin. And I really don’t know how I’m going to show my face outside my room until the blue’s all gone.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” I say, “that if magic is going to be real, it should be so malevolent.”

  “It’s not,” Pelly says. “Or not always. It’s no different from your world—there’s good and there’s bad.”

  I shrugged. “I suppose. All I know is, I never heard about these shadow creatures before. In all the stories I read as a kid, there might be some evil magician or monster that the heroes had to put down, but just being aware of Fairyland didn’t automatically make you a target for this kind of crap.”

  “It’s not,” Pelly tells me, beginning to sound like a broken record so far as I’m concerned. “You’re in this situation because someone directed the attention of the anamithim onto you.”

  I know that, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

  “Well, we’ve been busy, too,” I say. “We’ve got a whole pile of info, but it has to wait until we go over to Maxine’s. I told her we’d be over, and after what just ha
ppened here, I’m worried about her.”

  Pelly nods.

  “Wait here a sec,” I tell him.

  I grab a handful of clothes and slip out of my room, down the hall to the bathroom. Pulling my T-shirt nightie over my head, I check myself in the mirror.

  Yep. Blue all over.

  I wonder why I’m not more freaked. Something like this should be wigging me right out, but all I can think of is the inconvenience of having blue skin. Truth is, if it wasn’t for that, I’d kind of like it. It’s sort of like having a full-body tat, with the extra bonus of it keeping me safe from the creepy crawlies waiting in the shadows. Maybe I could make like the blue skin was my new fashion statement, and wouldn’t that get the Doll People going at school? Maybe I could take a bath in blue dye once this wore off.

  I grin at my reflection. My teeth gleam superwhite against the blue of my skin. I turn to look at my knotwork tat, and the red in it’s gone purple.

  Whatever.

  I get dressed and go back to my room.

  “Are you ready?” I ask, stepping over to the window.

  “I’ve a quicker way,” Pelly says.

  He motions to the closet. As soon as he does, I realize that of course there’s got to be some kind of portal or gate in there, because I never see him or the fairy orchestra when I look in. They’ve got to go somewhere when they’re not here.

  “How very The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe of you,” I say.

  “Oh, yes. Just call me Aslan.”

  “I was thinking more of Puddleglum.”

  He fakes a heavy sigh. “Always the sidekick. Except tonight, I lead the way. Coming?”

  I follow him into the closet, which is totally familiar territory. I mean, I’m in here all the time, messing with my clothes, rummaging through my storage boxes. Except tonight when we push through my clothes and step over the boxes, there’s another door that’s normally not there. I’m wondering how this works, but he just opens the other door and we’re looking at Maxine’s perfectly organized dresses and skirts. No wonder little kids think there are monsters in their closets. These are obviously such handy routes, I’m guessing the fairy folk use them all the time.

  “Can you show me how to do this?” I ask.

  Pelly nods. “I can teach you to see the doors. It’ll depend on the strength of your will whether or not they will open for you. And you have to be careful. Always keep your destination firmly in mind. If you don’t, you could end up in some unpleasant place.”

  When we cross over, pushing through the clothes, I feel this weird tingle on every inch of my body, here for a flash, then gone. A moment later we’re opening the outer door of the closet and stepping into Maxine’s room. That’s when I realize that this is a big mistake, that we should have warned her, because when Maxine looks up from where she’s reading in bed, she lets out this god-awful shriek.

  I don’t blame her. She thinks she’s alone in her room, but then the closet door opens and out comes her best friend in her new blue skin along with the fairy man who made her faint last night. Of course she’d panic.

  “Don’t freak,” I say. “It’s really just me.”

  But then we all hear her mother’s footsteps running in the hall outside the bedroom.

  Pelly and I fade back into the closet and close the door behind us just as the bedroom door opens and Maxine’s mother bursts in.

  “Maxine,” she cries. “What happened?”

  I can’t see Maxine’s face, but I’m sure it’s gone red.

  “I ... I ...” we hear her say. Then she gives a nervous laugh. “God, I feel so stupid. I caught my reflection in the mirror and for some reason I thought there was someone in the room with me.”

  Nice save, I think.

  Better yet, her mother totally buys it.

  There’s some more conversation, with her mom asking her if she’s really okay, and Maxine assuring her she is. Finally, Ms. Tattrie leaves, but Pelly and I stay in the closet. We hear Maxine get up from the bed, then the closet door opens, and we’re both blinking in the bright light that comes in.

  “Is ... is that really you?” Maxine whispers.

  I push the dresses aside again and step into the light. Maxine’s eyes go big as she takes in my new look, but she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t faint, either, when Pelly comes out behind me.

  “Yeah, it’s really me,” I tell her, keeping my own voice low. “Sorry about that. I never thought how it’d be for you when we suddenly come waltzing out of your closet.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Vervain pollen,” Pelly says. “I used too much. Though maybe the smallest amount would have had the same effect. No one told me.”

  Maxine looks at him, then back at me, her confusion still plain.

  “We had a bit of an incident with the things in the shadows,” I tell her. “This pollen Pelly s talking about drove them off and turned me blue. What do you think?” I did a little pirouette. “I kind of like it.”

  “Is it ... permanent?”

  I shake my head. “It’ll only last a couple of days.”

  “You won’t be able to go anywhere.”

  “Not even clubbing?”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “All she does is joke,” Pelly says.

  He’s sitting by her desk, staring with fascination at Maxine’s screensaver, which makes it look like you’ve got a fish tank instead of a monitor.

  “I can be serious,” I say.

  I pull Maxine down on the bed beside me, then run over my day’s research for Pelly s benefit.

  “So are you a fairy, too,” I ask him when I’m done, “or something else?”

  “Something else, though I don’t know what. I just know that none of those things you mentioned are troublesome to me.”

  I sigh. “We’re not looking for troublesome. We’re looking for something to shut them down, period, end of story.”

  “Stories never end,” Pelly says.

  “I didn’t mean it literally”

  “But you are being very fierce about it,” Maxine says. She’s been quiet for a while now. I don’t know if it’s because of my blue skin, Pelly s presence, or the fact that all of this is real and it’s finally sinking in that we really aren’t safe anymore.

  “We have to be,” I say.

  “But we’re just kids.”

  Now would be a time I could tell her a little bit more about my life in Tyson, about how being a kid didn’t mean that you couldn’t stand up for yourself. Nobody in Frankie’s gang was much older than we are now. I’d been the baby of the group and even I could hold my own.

  But I don’t want to go there.

  “You don’t have to worry,” Pelly says. “I’ve already told you, you’re safe for now.”

  “Until the pollen magic wears off,” I say. “And what about Maxine and you?”

  Pelly glances at Maxine. “I don’t think they’ve paid particular attention to Maxine yet. As for me, there are certain rules of honor that apply. They can’t do anything to me unless I swear fealty to them and then break my oath.”

  “So they don’t just automatically eat your soul?”

  “I’m like a fairy in that sense—I don’t have a soul.” Maxine nods. “I’ve read about that, how fairies don’t have souls. I always thought it was weird.”

  “Of course it’s weird,” I say. “Everybody has a soul.” I turn to Pelly. “And that means you, too.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” he says. “What does it feel like?”

  “Having a soul?” I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. “I don’t know,” I tell Pelly. “I don’t have anything to compare it to—you know, what not having a soul would feel like.”

  We all fall into a kind of awkward silence. I don’t know about the others, but I’m working on what a soul is and not coming up with a whole lot. I mean, I just always thought of it as me—what I feel like being me. But surely Pelly feels like he’s himself, so that means he’s got a soul, ri
ght? But if that’s not your soul, then what is?

  It’s weird and not something you really think about, is it?

  “So anyway,” I finally say. “That’s what we’ve got so far.” I look at Pelly. “So is there really no way we can get some more of this vervain pollen?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Okay,” I say. “So I guess we load up on all this other stuff—the oatmeal and salt and everything—and face them down.”

  Maxine and Pelly could be twins from the identical looks on their faces.

  “No, it’s too dangerous,” Pelly says.

  “Ditto,” Maxine adds.

  “I’m not hanging around until they come to me,” I tell them.

  “Who says we can’t?” Maxine asks. “Until we get an actual plan, I vote to lay low.”

  “No offense,” I say, “but that’s the same kind of thinking that lets the Doll People rag on us every day.”

  “And we don’t do anything to stop that, do we?”

  I shake my head. “But not because we can’t.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I wait a beat, then realize this is the time I have to tell her. Not everything, but enough so that she understands.

  “The only reason I don’t give as good as we get,” I say, “is because I’m trying to stay out of trouble these days. But it’s not like it’s anything I’m a stranger to.”

  “But—”

  “Back at my old school ... I didn’t just get detentions because of skipping class or mouthing off. I got them for fighting. People only ragged on me once. After that, they were either hurting too bad, or they decided they should try picking on an easier mark.”

  “How ... how did you do that?”

  I know what she’s thinking. I’m just this skinny little thing who looks like any good gust of wind could blow her over.

  “I ran with a rough crowd,” I tell her. “I carried a roll of pennies so that when I hit someone, they really felt it. I know the best ways to take somebody down, even if they’re bigger than me. I had a knife that I wasn’t afraid to use.” I sigh at the shocked look on her face. “I wasn’t a nice kid, Maxine. I wasn’t anybody you’d ever like.”

  “Except I do like you.”