The Blue Girl (18 page)

The smile broadens into a grin, and she pokes me in the shoulder.

“Is it working yet?” she asks.

“Just wait until you’re asleep tonight,” I tell her. “I have a black marker—with permanent ink, I should add—and I’m not afraid to use it.”

“Just make sure you draw pretty designs,” she says, and bounces down the steps to the sidewalk.

The only revenge I get is making her wait while I take my sweet time with my own descent.

Maxine phones her mom when we get back to my place. Usually we have this way organized in advance with all the specifics of a study session, or a project for school, or
something
Ms. Tattrie will find impossible to counter, ready to offer up as an excuse for a sleepover. But we’re so excited about what might happen tonight that neither of us thinks of it until Maxine is actually on the line with her mother. I watch her face drop and get depressed, because I know what that means. Ms. Tattrie never has a problem letting you know that no means no, decision final. She might have lightened up some when it comes to what Maxine and I wear, but there’s still this whole uptight fierce thing going on with her.

So I’m expecting the worst and figure I’ll have to let Jared in on it so that he can watch over me tonight. But then Maxine surprises me.

“Well, then I guess I’ll just have to stay with Dad,” she says into the phone.

There’s this long moment of silence, then I can hear her mom say something, though I can’t hear what it is. Before I can even start to guess, I’m mesmerized by the rest of Maxine’s side of the conversation.

“No, we’re not planning anything,” she says. “We’re just going to have a pizza and watch some videos we rented, that’s all. We’ll be in bed before midnight. No, Mrs. Yeck is still at school but she should be back around nine thirty, ten. We will, Mom. Really. You sleep well, too.”

She grins at me as she puts down the phone.

“Wow,” I say. “Backbone City or what?”

“I can’t believe she caved.”

“I can’t believe you stood up like that. I mean, I’ve always known you had it in you. I’ve just never seen you use it.”

“It felt pretty good.”

“You should hold that thought the next time Barbie Doll mouths off to you.”

Maxine shakes her head. “It’s not the same.”

I could argue that, but I don’t want to bring her down from the glow of having successfully stood up to her mom, so I let it slide. To get her thinking about something else, I ask, “So you and Jared aren’t going to hole up in his room and ignore me all night, are you?”

Works like a charm.

“When have we ever done that?” she asks.

“Oh, about a million times.”

“Not true!”

“What are you guys
doing
in there anyway?” I ask, and laugh when she blushes.

But while she can’t control her blushing, she’ll give as good as she gets—at least with me.

“Only what we learned from you and Thomas,” she tells me.

But it just makes her go redder still.

*    *    *

We weren’t lying to Maxine’s mom. We do order a pizza and then watch
Ghost World,
which we’ve all been meaning to see, but none of us have. Conveniently, Jared brought it home when he got back from band practice. It’s so cute watching the two of them sitting there through the movie, holding hands. If I hadn’t been there, I guess they’d have been all over each other.

“That’s so cool,” I say when the bus pulls away at the end of the film.

“We can’t let that happen to us,” Maxine says.

“What? Taking a bus?”

“No, drifting apart.”

“We won’t. But I think we should start following people around—you know, insinuate ourselves into their lives and all.”

Jared laughs. “So you can end up with a fifty-year-old nerd with a jones for vinyl?”

“Careful,” I tell him. “You’ll be fifty someday and you already have the vinyl.”

*    *    *

It’s kind of weird having Maxine sit in a chair instead of lying beside me on the bed where she’d normally be. She and Jared spent a while saying good night to each other in his room until Mom finally made a bunch of noise in the hall and started talking loudly about how tired she was and how happy she was to finally be able to go to bed. The lovebirds got the message, so now here’s me stretched out on the bed, Maxine sitting in a shadowed corner, and I guess Pelly and his little dream fairies waiting in the closet to start up their orchestra.

I’m so not scared of the dark—even as a kid I never was—but tonight the shadows seem all wrong. They’re like they were last night in my dream. My walkabout. My whatever. They seem to move in ways they shouldn’t, just ever so slightly: a flicker here, caught from the corner of my eye; inching forward there, where they pool under Maxine’s chair.

I feel so stupid. Shadows don’t move on their own. But then I remember snippets of my first conversation with Adrian:

There’s also the darkness  ...

And there was something in that darkness, something that he was scared of.

I don’t know what they look like, but I’ve felt them
  ...

 ...
Tommery says they eat souls
 ...

 ...  the souls of people who walk at the edges of how the world’s supposed to be  ...

Because those people are supposed to carry some kind of shine that attracts the darkness. And I guess I’m sort of walking on the edge of how the world’s supposed to be right now, because tonight I believe way more than I don’t. I can’t stop thinking about it—you know, the way you can obsess on something. Even when you know it’s not for real, it just keeps running through your head. You look at it this way, then that way, turn it upside down, right side up, and you never figure it out, so you start all over again.

Bottom line, I try to convince myself, is that Pelly s only a dream. And I’m pretty sure that all I’m really doing is spooking myself, but it doesn’t feel like that. Because if Pelly and the little gang of whatnots that come out of my closet are real, then maybe the fairies in the school are real, too. And then maybe I
am
putting out some kind of shine and the darkness really
is
looking for me.

I sigh and turn my head away from the closed door of my closet.

As if.

I can see Maxine from where I lie, and she can see me. I want to ask her if this all feels weird to her, too, but talking’s not going to bring a new night’s dreams, so instead I close my eyes. I think I won’t fall asleep—never mind what I told Christy—but I drift off almost immediately. Or at least I must have, because suddenly I hear the fairy orchestra start up, that now familiar sound, tinny and distant, and then the closet door creaks open.

The open door hides Maxine from my view, but maybe that’s a good thing because it also hides her from the fairies. I peek through cracked eyelids and watch the little host go streaming over to the window onto the fire escape. Heading off for their evening s rave. What had Pelly called it? Oh yeah, a revel.

And then there’s Pelly, following on their heels. He hesitates at the end of the bed to give me a considering look.

“Heading off again?” I ask as he starts to turn.

He jumps, like I caught him off guard, which strikes me as odd. You’d think fairies would be way too cool to be startled.

“So you’re awake,” he says.

I laugh. “No, I’m dreaming, just like I always am.”

“Ah, yes.”

“So you were telling me about these fairies in the school—how they’re making me dream about you and how that’s a bad thing.”

He nods.

“And that would be because?”

He doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and I figure he’s going to blow me off with some more cryptic babble. But he doesn’t.

“If you accept my being here as real,” he says, “you’ll start to believe in me again and then you’ll be able to see me anytime. That, in turn, will open the closed door in your mind, allowing the Otherworld to become part of your world once more, just as it was when you were a child.”

“What do you mean ‘the Otherworld’?” I ask. “I never saw your little orchestra before, or anything else for that matter. I only ever saw you.”

“That’s only because you never looked for the others.”

“Ho-kay. But you still haven’t said why this is a bad thing.”

He hesitates, the moment dragging out.

“I’m guessing,” I finally say, “that it’s got something to do with this thing called the darkness.”

“Who told you about that?”

“Adrian—the dead kid who lives in my school.”

“And what did he tell you about it?”

“That whatever lives inside this darkness feeds on souls. But not just any souls. Only those of ghosts and, um, people that walk on the edges of the way the world appears to be  ...  or something like that.”

Pelly nods. “Humans acquire a fairy shine when they interact with us.”

“And this—what? Automatically sics the darkness on it?” I’m talking brave, like it doesn’t mean anything to me, but my creep-out factor is escalating way big-time. Because I can’t forget how seriously wigged I got last night when I realized the shadows were all wrong and Pelly took off. “Not usually,” he says.

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“Except this time  ...”

His voice trails off, and he won’t meet my gaze. It’s funny, there’s still this look of knowing too much in his eyes, but it doesn’t bother me like it did when I first started dreaming about him. Now it’s his
not
looking at me that’s making me feel nervous.

“This time, what?” I ask. “And don’t you dare go all cryptic on me.”

His gaze turns back to me.

“This time,” he says, “I think those fairy friends of your ghost are deliberately bringing you to the attention of what lives in the shadows.”

“Oh, right. Like that’s going to happen.”

“I felt their attention last night, and it wasn’t directed toward me.”

I’d felt it, too,
something
in those shadows, something that didn’t like me. That didn’t like anything. I don’t feel comfortable talking about it. It’s like talking about it will draw them to me. But I realize I can’t just ignore it.

“This is so stupid,” I say. “Why would they bother to go through all that trouble? What have they got against me?”

“Nothing, so far as I know. It would just amuse them.”

“I didn’t know fairies could be so  ...  so evil.”

“They’re not, generally speaking. Most of us just
are.
And the ones you might consider evil aren’t so much that as amoral. They don’t see right or wrong the way we do. I don’t know if they see a difference at all.”

“So aren’t there any good ones we can turn to for help?”

“There are good fairies, certainly, but the trick is to find them.”

“I still don’t get why these bad ones chose me.”

“Because you came to their attention.”

I give a slow nod. “By going to see Adrian. So what do you think? Did they kill him, or was he a suicide?”

Pelly shook his head. “I wasn’t there to see it happen. It could have been an accident. The fairies in your school might not have been so nasty then.”

“But you said they were amoral anyway.”

“No, I didn’t explain it properly. They
become
amoral. Those fairies were probably once house spirits, brownies of some sort. Maybe bodachs, or hobs. Their job, their reason for being, is to keep a place tidy. But they need direction, from an older brownie or hob, like a Billy Blind, or from the mistress of the building. Without that, they can go ... wrong.” He pauses, cocking his head to think. “It’s like making homemade bread,” he finally explains. “Baked just right, from goodly ingredients, it can be the best loaf you’ve ever tasted. But leave that same loaf alone long enough, and it becomes moldy and it will make you sick if you eat it.”

“So these fairies went moldy?”

Pelly laughs. “Something like that.”

“When I woke up last night,” I say, “I was still on the street where we were talking. I wasn’t dreaming, was I?”

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?”

“For not doing a good enough job of making you disbelieve what you once knew was true.”

“So this stuff ...  you, the little orchestra  ...  it’s all real?” He lays a hand on my comforter, and those strangely jointed fingers give my foot a squeeze.

“I missed you, too,” he says. “Maybe that’s why I didn’t try hard enough. So now all of this is my fault.”

Before I can say anything, he turns and steps to the window. He’s gone while I’m still trying to figure out what I want to say.