Foul is Fair (2 page)

Lani's remarks as Megan raised and lifted the fork through lunch seemed awkward. So did their conversation on the bus that afternoon. Was that Lani's Guilty Face? It was hard for Megan to tell anything with Lani anymore, but there'd be time to figure it out later. '
[(x-h)
2
/a
2
] + [(y-k)
2
/b
2
]=1.'

Lani didn't get off at Megan's stop this time. Megan let herself into the little off-white house and poured herself a glass of water. She tried to work on the formula.
[(x-h)
2
/a
2
] + [(y-k)
2
/b
2
]=1.

The timer went off. She took the orange pills with her glass of water. Something tasted strange, but Megan tried to get back to work. She got out the graph paper with the coordinate system, plotted out the horizontal curves, and properly labeled it with the appropriate equation, double checking three times. Then it was time for the vertical oval. In the course of drawing it, Megan became aware of the fact that she had a headache.

She got up to get herself another glass of water. Having drunk it, she was putting the glass away, intending to get back to her desk, when her stomach growled. It almost took Megan a moment to remember what to do about something like that. It wasn't even suppertime, and she was hungry.

Half an hour later, Megan was on the couch with her third banana in one hand and a 2001 photo album in the other. She looked at the last photograph pasted into it, above careful calligraphy that read "
Sheila
,
Ric
,
and Megan
."

Sheila O'Reilly looked tired, certainly, but there was still something in that tired smile that Megan never tended to see in her mother.

Megan was newly two, her face covered in ice cream. Holding her was a lithe-looking man with long hair, and somehow she always knew he had a voice like
chocolate: dark, deep, and rich. Megan had always told herself that she was silly, that she'd been too young to properly remember now what his voice sounded like.
But she knew it all the same.

Her mother's car pulled into the driveway. Megan put the photo album back on its shelf and hurried back to her desk. What had she been doing? Right, she'd been labeling the graph. Somewhere.

In the morning, which seemed to come so much sooner, with much less counting sheep than usual the night before, the headache was worse. It was a good thing her mother could drive her, because Megan was just slightly behind schedule. During the drive, her mother occasionally glanced anxiously at her, asking after the headache, which Megan had not been able to hide. Megan shrugged it off. She looked at the charcoal pantsuit and pinned up hair, thinking of the green jacket and long flowing hair in the photograph. She looked at the anxious expression and thought of the smile. She didn't say anything, though. Some things they'd long since learned not to talk about.

School happened again, fortunately on a Friday. They were reminded that their assignment on graphing conic sections was due Monday. At lunch, Megan bit into her sandwich and almost, for a moment, savored the peanut butter goodness before clutching her head a little. Lani really did look worried. She looked worried on the bus ride home, too, whenever Megan looked up from the circle equations, which were
(x-h)
2
+(y-k)
2
=r
2
. But Megan almost thought that part of Lani's worried expression looked almost... hopeful?

She got home, let herself in, got out the graph paper, and went for the water. When the timer went off, she took her pills. The taste was strange again—citrus, she decided—but maybe it was something to do with the headache.

She checked over the listed equations. She drew a small circle to the left of the leftmost horizontal curve and carefully labeled its equation. Then she drew another on the right of the rightmost curve. Then an additional pair on each side. And two diagonal line segments, jutting out from the top of the oval. Megan had to eventually stop herself, go back, and check all the equations for each component before writing them. Then she sat for a moment, looked at the spotted butterfly on the carefully labeled graph paper, and got out her colored pencils.

Chapter 3: Painted Lady

After supper came chores, starting with the dishes. Then her mother retired to the living room to read the paper while Megan wandered out to get the mail.

She supposed, at first, that it was her headache, but the world seemed brighter or more vibrant than usual as she made her way out of the house. Halfway to the mailbox, she found her eyes drawn to the Halloween decorations displayed up and down the block. Some were just lonely little cutouts taped to the insides of windows or the outsides of doors. More than a few houses had pumpkins, carved with varying degrees of artistic talent, laid out on their porches. A couple of the houses had gone overboard with orange lights or lawn ornaments.

She didn't focus on any one setup, instead finding her mind wandering and trying to place when all of these had gone up. That train of thought led to her noting her own house, the sole one not decorated in the least for the holiday. She still had a few of her own decorations from past years, but it struck her as wrong, somehow, to just put them up without doing something new. Nothing was occurring to her, and, of course, she had some homework left. Maybe she could make something once she'd finished and checked the equations, though. She was having trouble remembering them.

She wasn't sure quite how long she spent outside in the fading light of dusk, looking around at the displays or lack of display. Shaking off the trail of thoughts, and hoping her mother hadn't missed her yet, if she'd been too long, she made the rest of the trip to the mailbox.

Sitting on the mailbox, canting its head at her quizzically, was a crow. They were common enough in the neighborhood, but none of them had ever let her approach quite so close before without flying off. This one, however, showed no signs of moving. As she took another step forward, a splash of color on the crow's back became more evident.

Megan blinked a couple of times, sure she was seeing things. Despite the efforts to clear her head, she became certain that, yes, in fact, resting on the back of the crow's neck was a butterfly. Its wings were black, white, and orange, but had somehow been ripped at the edges to more jaggedly reveal the pink-and-brown underside.

As she was simultaneously trying to remember the type of butterfly and thinking how sad it was that something had happened to its wings, she came around to the thought that she shouldn't be seeing what she was seeing. As that thought hit her, she also noted that the crow was looking at her like she was the strange one. A bird was silently evaluating her while wearing a—Painted Lady! That was it. She knew them. They were so common throughout the world that they were also called Cosmopolitan butterflies. Despite that, they didn't get up to Seattle very often, though she'd seen a few before.

"You need to talk to Lani."

Megan blinked and looked around. She heard the wind whispering through the trees, which was odd, because the branches weren't blowing.

"Over here. And you need to talk to Lani."

Another glance around, and Megan shifted her attention back towards the crow. As she did, the light started to dim as the sun slipped below the horizon.

"You need to talk to Lani," repeated the little wisp of a woman, sitting astride the crow's neck. She was delicate, even for her tiny size, and her skin was amber-colored. She wore a light dress, black with odd white zebra striping. The tattered orange-patterned wings were still there, though.

"What happened to your wings?" Megan heard herself asking, out of all of the questions that were fighting the headache to rise to the fore in her brain.

"I'll tell you the story later," the tiny girl promised. "But I only have a few more seconds before you won't be able to hear me." A pause. "Yet. We'll talk a lot more later. Right now, you need to promise me that you'll talk to Lani."

The crow cawed, and the tiny girl patted it on the head. "Yes, Count. You're right. Megan, you need to promise to meet with Lani, somewhere private. And you need to listen, really listen, when she talks."

"His name is Count?" Megan managed. It made more sense, at the moment, to ask than anything else occurring to her.

"Yes, yes. I'll tell you that story too. And where babies come from. And where faeries come from. And why you can't tickle yourself. Later. Promise me."

"Okay," Megan managed. She stared a few moments longer, as if expecting the crow or the butterfly to either disappear or make sense. "I promise," she added.

The pair glanced at each other in satisfaction. A few moments later, the scene changed again. It was only slightly less surreal, seeing a butterfly on a crow's back again. Megan blinked once more, trying to form another coherent question. Before she could manage, the crow lifted off, bearing the butterfly away again.

Megan continued trying to frame questions, even after they were gone. She walked around a little more, staring around to make sure nothing else in the neighborhood had changed. She glanced back at her plain, undecorated off-white house and resolved, homework or no, to do something to decorate it this year. Probably after she talked to Lani.

Megan returned to the house, made sure her mother was occupied, and then headed to her room to call Lani. The phone picked up on the first ring. "Hello, Megan?"

"Yes. Someone says I need to talk to you. You won't believe me if I tell you who. I'm not sure I believe me."

"I bet I will. There was a crow involved, right?"

Chapter 4: Bad

Talking about it on the phone when Megan's mother was home hadn't been an option for Lani. Letting Megan walk to Lani's in the dark hadn't been an option for Megan's mother. Neither had driving her, or letting her ask Mrs. Kahale for an unscheduled ride. Megan really wished that Lani and her dad would finish putting Lani's car together already. Assembling a 1992 Chevy wasn't Megan's idea of a hobby, but then she didn't have much to say on the subject of father-daughter bonding.

So they'd agreed to meet first thing in the morning, at the park. Of course, first thing had meant after the medical timer, breakfast, and the multi-colored pills.

The park was on the small side, but it was only a few blocks from Megan's house and had a playground with a slide. That also meant it typically had enough mothers with small children nearby that Megan's mother didn't mind her hanging out there. As they got older, and some of the neighborhood kids started getting their drivers' licenses, most of the locals started traveling further to where there was more space for actual sports, or at least fewer small children, but it had continued to serve as the favored meeting spot for the girls for now.

And now it was time to discuss... a lot. Most prominent on the agenda was the crow-and-Painted-Lady thing, although that seemed even more surreal and impossible right now than it had as it happened.

Despite the obviousness of the looming questions about tiny ladies with tattered wings talking to crows, Lani had some questions of her own first before she let Megan get a word in edgewise. "How are you doing?"

"Okay," Megan answered. "A little headachey. Wondering if it's some kind of hallucination headache, considering."

"That would be a no. It's probably more of a...well, a readjustment-to-a-more-appropriate-dosage headache."

"Huh? Haven't changed my dosage in weeks."

"Well—and I'm sorry about this, and I want to apologize for that right off—you did, recently. The orange pills in your room right now are just Vitamin C."

"Okay, that really doesn't seem like a thing that should happen. At all."

"I know, and I'm sorry. I just couldn't think of what else to do, and it's an emergency."

"Okay. Apology accepted. And I could probably use a little extra Vitamin C. So, now that we've been mature about that, for certain values of mature, I guess it's time to talk about…little winged people?"

“Definitely time to discuss little winged people, and a lot of other people you’d probably find even stranger,” Lani agreed.

“Let’s start with the butterfly and the crow. Then we’ll hit weirder.”

“You’re usually the one who loves the weird.”

“Today is definitely not usual. So, butterfly and crow. Not hallucinating due to my best friend replacing the pills my mom worked so hard to get for Vitamin C tablets?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“And the apology was accepted. I’m not upset. I’m just saying that seems like a far more likely reason for… things.”

“No. Not hallucinating. The butterfly is actually a pixie. Her name is Ashling. And technically, she’s the one who replaced your orange pills for Vitamin C tablets.”

“Only when it was your idea, though, right?” Lani was the one who had apologized for it, after all. “She’s not going to go doing anything else odd?”