Afternoon of the Elves

Table of Contents

 

Hillary sighed. She glanced a last time at the elves' banquet to see that all was in order. She shivered. The wind had stopped coming in puffs and now blew in one long, cold stream.

All of a sudden, one of the leaf roofs came detached at one side and was blown up straight by the wind. It was a deep red color and had the curious look of a hand, fingers and thumb outstretched, waving at her. It appeared so real that Hillary wondered for a second if the elves were behind it, playing a game with her.

She smiled at this thought, and had bent down to fix the leaf when another flutter caused her to straighten up quickly and look toward Sara-Kate's house.

She saw right away what it was. A shade in one of the upstairs windows had been flicked up, and now, as she watched, a thin face rose where the shade had been and stared down at her with wide eyes. For a moment, Hillary stared back. Then she stepped away and ran.

“This enchanting story reveals the beauty, wonder and mystery that lies within the imagination.... Ultimately, the book suggests that friendship is as eternal as magic.”

A Newbery Honor Book
An ALA Notable Book
A
School Library journal
Best Book of the Year
A
Booklist
Editors' Choice
A
Horn Book
Fanfare Title
Winner of the Parents' Choice Award

PUFFIN BOOKS

 

Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group,

345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

First published in the United States of America by Orchard Books, 1989
Published by PaperStar, The Putnam Berkley Group, Inc.,
Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1999
Published by Puffin Books, a division of

Penguin Young Readers Group, 2003

Copyright © Janet Taylor Lisle, 1989 All rights reserved

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lisle, Janet Taylor.
Afternoon of the Elves / Janet Taylor Lisle.
p. cm.

Summary: As Hillary works in the miniature village, allegedly built by elves, in
Sara-Kate's backyard, she becomes more and more curious about Sara-Kate's
real life inside her big, gloomy house with her mysterious, silent mother.

I. Title.

PZ7.L692Af 1989 [Fic]—dc19 88-35099 CIP AC

eISBN : 978-1-101-07578-4

 

 

The afternoon Hillary first saw the elf village, she couldn't believe her eyes.

“Are you sure it isn't mice?” she asked Sara-Kate, who stood beside her, thin and nervous. “The houses are small enough for mice.”

“No, it isn't,” Sara-Kate said. “Mice don't make villages in people's backyards.”

Hillary got down on her hands and knees to look more closely. She counted the tiny houses. There were nine, each made of sticks bound delicately together with bits of string and wire.

“And there's a well,” she whispered, “with a bucket that winds down on a string to pull the water out.”

“Not a bucket. A bottlecap!” snorted Sara-Kate, twitching her long, shaggy hair away from her face. She was eleven, two years older than Hillary, and she had never spoken to the younger girl before. She had hardly looked at her before.

“Can I try drawing some water?” Hillary asked.

Sara-Kate said, “No.”

The roofs of the houses were maple leaves attached to the sticks at jaunty angles. And because it was autumn, the leaves were lovely colors, orange-red, reddish-orange, deep yellow. Each house had a small yard in front neatly bordered with stones that appeared to have come from the driveway.

“They used the leaves dropping off those trees over there,” Hillary said.

Sara-Kate shrugged. “Why not? The leaves make the houses pretty.”

“How did they get these stones all the way over here?” Hillary asked.

“Elves are strong,” Sara-Kate said. “And magic.”

Hillary looked at her suspiciously then. It wasn't that she didn't believe so much as that she couldn't right away put Sara-Kate on the side of magic. There never had been one pretty thing about her. Nothing soft or mysterious. Her face was narrow and ended in a sharp chin, and her eyes were small and hard as bullets. They were such little eyes, and set so deeply in her head, that the impression she gave was of a gaunt, fierce bird, a rather untidy bird if one took her clothes into consideration. They hung on her frame, an assortment of ill-fitting, wrinkly garments. (“Doesn't she care how she looks?” a new girl at school had inquired just this fall, giving every child within earshot the chance to whirl around and shout, “No!”)

Least magical of all, Sara-Kate Connolly wore boots that were exactly like the work boots worn by men in gas stations.

“Black and greasy,” Hillary's friend Jane Webster said.

“She found them at the dump,” Alison Mancini whispered.

“No she didn't. Alison, that's terrible!” Normally, fourth graders were too shy to risk comment on students in higher grades. But Sara-Kate had been held back in school that year. She was taking the fifth grade all over again, which made her a curiosity.

“Can you tell me where you found those amazing boots? I've just got to get some exactly like them,” Jane said to her one day, wearing a look of such innocence that for a second nobody thought to laugh.

In the middle of Sara-Kate's backyard, Hillary recalled the sound of that laughter while she stared at Sara-Kate's boots. Then she glanced up at Sara-Kate's face.

“Why does it have to be elves? Why couldn't it be birds or chipmunks or some animal we've never heard of? Or maybe some person made these houses,” Hillary said, a sly tone in her voice. She got off her knees and stood up beside the older girl. “We are the same height!” she announced in surprise.

They were almost the same except for Sara-Kate's thinness. Hillary was sturdily built and stood on wide feet.

“In fact, I'm even a little taller!” Hillary exclaimed, rising up a bit on her toes and looking down.

Sara-Kate stepped away from her quickly. She folded her arms across her chest and beamed her small, hard eyes straight into Hillary's wide ones.

“Look,” she said. “I didn't have to invite you over here today and I didn't have to show you this. I thought you might like to see an elf village for a change. If you don't believe it's elves, that's your problem. I
know
it's elves.”

So, there they were: elves—a whole village of them living down in Sara-Kate's junky, overgrown backyard that was itself in back of Sara-Kate's broken-down house with the paint peeling off. Sara-Kate's yard was not the place Hillary would have picked to build a village if she were an elf. Where there weren't thistles and weeds there was mud, and in the mud, broken glass and wire and pieces of rope. There were old black tires and rusty parts of car engines and a washing machine turned over on its side. Carpets of poison ivy grew under the trees and among the bushes. Nobody ever played in Sara-Kate's backyard. But then, as Sara-Kate would have said, nobody had ever been invited to play in her backyard. Except Hillary, that is, on that first afternoon of the elves.