Holly Black (28 page)

“Felicity, you have to go,” my mother insisted. “I’m grounded here and so is Carl, but you can go places. Do this for us.”

Thanks to Mr. Hunter, my education is paid for and I attend Rogers College in Southern California. Even though they have an impressive majorette squad, I elected not to participate. Twirling had taken up so much of my life that I wanted to see what more there was. Besides, I left my lucky baton behind. It was a last-minute decision.

My mother had brought Carl to the airport to see me off. As he slumped in his wheelchair, tourists maneuvered their suitcases around us, pretending we didn’t exist. I knelt down on the sidewalk as I struggled to explain to Carl why I had to leave. But he would hear none of it. He had been increasingly agitated, having lost Henry a week earlier. As my brother began to scream and swat the invisible demons that had been hiding, the people who had been trying so hard to ignore us stopped and stared.

“Carl, Carl, look!” I had to shout to get his attention. “Look at me, Carl!”

I began to twirl my baton and Carl grew quiet. I put everything into my routine—high kicks, trick moves, even stuff I learned from Auntie Alea’s. Everything. When I was done, the crowd cheered and Carl moaned with delight. He held out both hands and reached for my baton, but I held on tight. Yet he kept motioning for it, until we were both on the verge of tears.

Finally, I gave in.

When I handed my baton to him, I knew I was never getting it back.

“It belongs to you now,” I assured my brother as I held him tight. “It’s yours.”

Then I kissed him and waved good-bye.

Text by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci. Illustrations by Hope Larson.

by
kelly link

Dear Paul Zell.

Dear Paul Zell
is exactly how far I’ve gotten at least a dozen times, and then I get a little farther, and then I give up. So this time I’m going to try something new. I’m going to pretend that I’m not writing you a letter, Paul Zell, dear Paul Zell. I’m so sorry. And I
am
sorry, Paul Zell, but let’s skip that part for now or else I won’t get any farther this time, either. And in any case: how much does it matter whether or not I’m sorry? What difference could it possibly make?

So. Let’s pretend that we don’t know each other. Let’s pretend we’re meeting for the first time, Paul Zell. We’re sitting down to have dinner in a restaurant in a hotel in New York City. I’ve come a long way to have dinner with you. We’ve never met face-to-face. Everything I ever told you about myself is more or less a lie. But you don’t know that yet. We think we may be in love.

We met in FarAway, online, except now here we are up close. I could reach out and touch your hand. If I was brave enough. If you were really here.

Our waiter has poured you a glass of red wine. Me? I’m drinking a Coke because I’m not old enough to drink wine. You’re thirty-four. I’m almost sixteen.

I’m so sorry, Paul Zell. I don’t think I can do this. (Except I have to do this.)
I have to do this.
So let’s try again. (I keep trying again and again and again.) Let’s start even farther back, before I showed up for dinner and you didn’t. Except I think you did. Am I right?

You don’t have to answer that. I owe you the real story, but you don’t owe me anything at all.

Picture the lobby of a hotel. In the lobby, a fountain with Spanish tiles in green and yellow. A tiled floor, leather armchairs, corporate art, this bank of glass-fronted elevators whizzing up and down, a bar. Daddy bar to all the mini-bars in all the rooms. Sound familiar? Maybe you’ve been here before.

Now fill up the lobby with dentists and superheroes. Men and women, oral surgeons, eighth-dimensional entities, mutants, and freaks who want to save your teeth, save the world, and maybe end up with a television show, too. I’ve seen a dentist or two in my time, Paul Zell, but we don’t get many superheroes out on the plain. We get tornadoes instead. There are two conventions going on at the hotel, and they’re mingling around the fountain, tra la la, tipping back drinks.

Boards in the lobby list panels on advances in cosmetic dentistry, effective strategies for minimizing liability in cases of bystander hazard, presentations with titles like “Spandex or Bulletproof? What Look Is Right for You?” You might be interested in these if you were a dentist or a superhero. Which I’m not. As it turns out, I’m not a lot of things.

A girl is standing in front of the registration desk. That’s me. And where are you, Paul Zell?

The hotel clerk behind the desk is only a few years older than me. (Than that girl, the one who’s come to meet Paul Zell. Is it pretentious or pitiful or just plain psychotic the way I’m talking about myself in the third person? Maybe it’s all three. I don’t care.) The clerk’s nametag says Aliss, and she reminds the girl that I wish wasn’t me of someone back at school. Erin Toomey, that’s who. Erin Toomey is a hateful bitch. But never mind about Erin Toomey.

Aliss the hotel clerk is saying something. She’s saying, “I’m not finding anything.” It’s eleven o’clock on a Friday morning, and at that moment the girl in the lobby is missing third-period biology. Her fetal pig is wondering where she is.

Let’s give the girl in line in the hotel lobby a name. Everybody gets a name, even fetal pigs. (I call mine Alfred.) And now that you’ve met Aliss and Alfred, minor characters both, I might as well introduce our heroine. That is, me. Of course it isn’t like FarAway. I don’t get to choose my name. If I did, it wouldn’t be Billie Faggart. That ring any bells? No, I didn’t think it would. Since fourth grade, which is when I farted while I was coming down the playground slide, everyone at school has called me Smelly Fagfart. That’s because Billie Faggart is a funny name, right? Except girls like Billie Faggart don’t have much of a sense of humor.

There’s another girl at school, Jennifer Groendyke. Everyone makes jokes about us. About how we’ll move to California and marry each other. You’d think we’d be friends, right? But we’re not. I’m not good at the friends thing. I’m like the girl equivalent of one of those baby birds that fall out of a nest and then some nice person picks the baby bird up and puts it back. Except that now the baby bird smells all wrong. I think I smell wrong.

If you’re wondering who Melinda Bowles is, the thirty-two-year-old woman you met in FarAway, no, you’ve never really met her. Melinda Bowles has never sent late-night e-mails to Paul Zell, not ever. Melinda Bowles would never catch a bus to New York City to meet Paul Zell because she doesn’t know that Paul Zell exists.

Melinda Bowles has never been to FarAway.

Melinda Bowles has no idea who the Enchantress Magic Eightball is. She’s never hung out online with the master thief Boggle. I don’t think she knows what a MMORPG is.

Melinda Bowles has never played a game of living chess in King Nermal’s Chamber in the Endless Caverns under the Loathsome Rock. Melinda Bowles doesn’t know a rook from a writing desk. A pawn from a prawn.