Doll Bones (2 page)

The Queen was a bone china doll of a child with straw-gold curls and paper-white skin. Her eyes were closed, lashes a flaxen fringe against her cheek. She wore a long gown, the thin fabric dotted with something black that might be mold. Zach couldn’t remember when exactly they’d decided that she was the Great Queen, only that they’d all felt like she was watching them, even though her eyes were closed, and that Poppy’s sister had been terrified of her.

Apparently, one time, Poppy had woken in the middle of the night and found her sister—with whom she shared a room—sitting upright in bed. “If she gets out of the case, she’ll come for us,” her sister had said, blank-faced, before slumping back down on her pillow. No amount of calling to the other side of the room had seemed to stir her. Poppy had tossed and turned, unable to sleep for the rest of the night. But in the morning, her sister had told her that she didn’t remember saying anything, that it must have been a nightmare, and that their mother really needed to get rid of that doll.

After that, to avoid being totally terrified, Zach, Poppy, and Alice had added the doll to their game.

According to the legend they’d created, the Queen ruled over everything from her beautiful glass tower. She had the power to put her mark on anyone who disobeyed her commands. When that happened, nothing would go right for them until they regained her favor. They’d be convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Their friends and family would sicken and die. Ships would sink, and storms would strike. The one thing the Queen couldn’t do, though, was escape.

“You okay?” Zach asked Alice. She seemed transfixed by the case, staring into it as though she could see something Zach couldn’t.

Finally Alice turned around, her eyes shining. “My grandmother wants to know where I am every second. She wants to pick out my clothes for me and complains about my braids all the time. I just am so over it. And I don’t know if she’s going to let me be in the play this year, even though I got a good part. She can’t see so well after dark, and she doesn’t want to drive me home. I’m just so tired of all her rules, and it’s like the older I get, the worse she gets.”

Zach had heard most of that before, but usually Alice just sounded resigned to it. “What about your aunt? Could you ask her to pick you up after rehearsals?”

Alice snorted. “She’s never forgiven Aunt Linda for trying to get custody of me way back when. Brings it up at every holiday. It’s made her superparanoid.”

Mrs. Magnaye grew up in the Philippines and was fond of telling anyone who would listen how different things were over there. According to her, Filipino teenagers worked hard, never talked back, and didn’t draw on their hands with ink pens or want to be actresses, like Alice did. They didn’t get as tall as Alice was getting either.

“
Made
her superparanoid?” Zach asked.

Alice laughed. “Yeah, okay. Made her extra-superparanoid.”

“Hey.” Poppy came into the living room from outside, holding the rest of their figures. “Are you
sure
you can’t stay over, Alice?”

Alice shook her head, plucked Lady Jaye out of Zach’s hand, and went down the hallway to Poppy’s room. “I was just getting my stuff.”

Poppy turned impatiently to Zach for an explanation. She never liked it when she wasn’t part of a conversation and hated the idea that her friends had kept any secrets from her, even stupid ones.

“Her grandmother,” he said, with a shrug. “You know.”

Poppy sighed and looked at the cabinet. After a moment, she spoke. “If you finish this quest, the Queen will probably lift the curse on William. He could go home and finally solve the mystery of where he came from.”

“Or maybe she’ll just make him do another quest.” He thought about it a moment and grinned. “Maybe she wants him to get skilled enough with a sword to break her out of that cabinet.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Poppy said, only half joking. “Come on.”

They walked down the hall to Poppy’s room just as Alice came out, backpack over one shoulder.

“See you tomorrow,” she said as she slipped past them. She didn’t look happy, but Zach thought she might just be upset that she was leaving early and that they were going to be hanging out without her. He and Poppy didn’t
usually
play the game when Alice wasn’t there. But lately Alice seemed to be more bothered by he and Poppy spending time alone together, which he didn’t understand.

Zach walked into Poppy’s room and flopped down on her orange shag rug. Poppy used to share the room with her older sister, and piles of her sister’s outgrown clothes still remained spread out in drifts, along with a collection of used makeup and notebooks covered in stickers and scrawled with lyrics. A jumble of her sister’s old Barbies were on top of a bookshelf, waiting for Poppy to try to fix their melted arms and chopped hair. The bookshelves were overflowing with fantasy paperbacks and overdue library books, some of them on Greek myths, some on mermaids, and a few on local hauntings. The walls were covered in posters—
Doctor Who
, a cat in a bowler hat, and a giant map of Narnia. Zach thought about drawing a map of their kingdoms—one with the oceans and the islands and everything—and wondered where he could get a big enough piece of paper.

“Do you think that William likes Lady Jaye?” Poppy asked, settling herself cross-legged on her bed, the pale pink of one knee visible through the rip in her hand-me-down jeans. “Like
like
likes?”

He sat up. “What?”

“William and Lady Jaye,” she said. “They’ve been traveling together awhile, right? I mean, he must like her some.”

“Sure he likes her,” Zach said, frowning. He pulled his beat-up army surplus duffel bag toward him and stuffed William inside.

“But, I mean, would he
marry
her?” Poppy asked.

Zach hesitated. He was used to being asked how characters felt, and it was a simple question. But there was something in Poppy’s voice that made him think there was a meaning behind it that was less simple. “He’s a
pirate
. Pirates don’t get married. But, I mean—if he wasn’t a pirate and she wasn’t a crazy kleptomaniacal thief, then I guess he might.”

Poppy sighed as though that was the worst answer ever given by anyone, but she dropped it. They talked about other things, like how Zach couldn’t play the next day because of basketball practice, whether or not aliens would ever land, and if they did, whether they would be peaceful or not (they both thought not), and which one of them would be more useful in a zombie uprising (a draw, since Zach’s longer legs would be better for getting away, and Poppy’s small size was a hiding advantage).

On the way out, Zach paused in the living room to look at the Queen again. Her pale face was shadowed, but it seemed to him that though her eyes were closed, they weren’t quite as closed as they had been before. While he stared at her, trying to figure out if he was imagining things, her lashes fluttered once, as if stirred by an impossible breeze.

Or as if she was a sleeper on the verge of awakening.

CHAPTER TWO

Z
ACHARY WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE FOR SCHOOL WHEN
his father limped in from work. He stank of grease and favored his left foot. The restaurant he worked at closed around three in the morning, but checking the stock and reorders and getting a meal with the rest of the crew meant he came home much later than closing time most days.

“Bad blisters,” Dad grunted, by way of explanation for the limping. His dad was a big guy with a mess of short curly hair the same burnt-toast color as Zach’s, the same beach-glass blue eyes, and a nose that had been broken twice. “And then, like an idiot, I splashed oil on myself. But we were slammed, so that’s something.”

Slammed was good. Slammed meant that people were eating at the restaurant, and that meant Zach’s dad wasn’t going to lose this job.

Mom got out a mug, poured coffee into it wordlessly, and set it down on the table. Zach grabbed his backpack, heading for the door. He felt bad, but it sometimes still surprised him to see his father in the house. His dad had moved out three years ago and moved back in three months ago. Zach couldn’t get used to him being around.

“Tear up that court today,” his dad said, tousling Zach’s hair as though he was a little kid.

His father loved that Zach was on the basketball team. Sometimes that seemed as if it was the only thing about Zach he liked. He didn’t like that Zach played with girls after school instead of shooting hoops with the older kids a couple of blocks over. He didn’t like that Zach daydreamed all the time. And sometimes it seemed to Zach that his father didn’t even like that Zach had gotten really good at basketball, since it meant that he couldn’t scold Zach about how all that other stuff was getting in the way of his performance on the court.

Mostly, Zach didn’t care what his dad thought. Every time his dad gave him a disapproving look or asked a question that was supposed to make him defensive, Zach would pretend not to notice. Zach and his mom had been fine before his father moved back in, and they’d be fine when he left again, too.

With a sigh, Zach started toward school. Usually, he met up with some of the other walkers, but today the only other kid he saw walking was Kevin Lord. Kevin told Zach a long story about seeing deer when he was riding his dirt bike through the woods and ate a toaster pastry thing, raw, right out of the wrapping.

Zach got to Mr. Lockwood’s class just after the buses. Alex Rios leaned back in his chair to bring his fist down on top of Zach’s. Then they both slapped their hands together and dragged them until they were hooked by the ends of their fingers. It was a handshake taught to everyone on the basketball team, and every time that Zach did it, he felt the warm buzz of belonging.

“You think we’re going to win against Edison next Sunday?” Alex asked in a way that wasn’t really asking. It was part of the ritual, like the handshake.

“We’re going to wreck them,” said Zach, “so long as you keep passing me the ball.”

Alex snorted, and then Mr. Lockwood started to take attendance, so they turned toward the SMART board. Zach tried to stop smiling and appear to be paying attention.

After lunch Poppy pressed a triangle-shaped note into his hand as she passed him in the hall. He didn’t need to unfold it to know what it was.
Questions.
He couldn’t remember which one of them had come up with the idea, or when, but Questions existed as a strange private thing outside the game. He and Poppy and Alice had to answer
any
in-game question they were asked, on paper, but the answers were only for the questioner. Characters didn’t get to know.

They passed notes back and forth, especially if one of them was about to get grounded or before someone went on a trip. He always felt a flush of excitement—and a little bit of dread—when he got a folded-up paper. It was a part of the game that felt particularly risky. If a teacher got ahold of the note or Alex saw it—just thinking about the possibility made the back of Zach’s neck burn with embarrassment.

He unfolded the sheet carefully, smoothing it against the pages of his textbook as Mr. Lockwood started his history lecture.