Me, My Elf & I (2 page)

I turn around to face a tiny, angry woman scowling at me. She has small sharp features like a mouse. Her hands are balled into fists, which she holds on her hips like weapons. Plus she’s wearing all green. She looks just like the mean little pixies my grandmother used to tease us about. “I said, what are you doing out of class? Do you have a hall pass? What’s your name?” the pixie lady demands.

That’s when I lose it. Lose it like a snot-nosed, diaper-wearing, thumb-sucking, toothless, babbling baby. I drop my bag to the floor, let my knees go weak, slump over into a heap of quivering jelly, and cry miserably. The pixie lady stares me down while I wail. I swear she checks her watch and taps her foot impatiently until I pull it together enough to lift my head and squeak, “I don’t know where to go.”

She rolls her eyes. “Do you always get this worked up when you’re lost? ”

I suck back the snot streaming down my face, wipe my hands across my moist eyes, and say, “I’ve never been this lost before.”

“For God’s sake, girl,” she hisses. “You’re inside a school. How hard can it be?”

This only makes me cry harder, because I know she’s right. “But I, but I, but, but . . .” I sputter. “First the trains . . . and I went the wrong way . . . was it the F or the A or the 2 or 3 . . . and who can figure out those maps with all the colors? Red! Blue! Orange! How was I supposed to know which platform, which staircase, which end of the train I’m supposed to get on? Not to mention the subway stations! There are rats down there. And it smells. Terrible. And all those people? Where are they all going? Where could so many people be going?” I come out of my rant clutching my hair and stamping my feet as if I’m having a temper tantrum, which, actually, I am.

The pixie grabs me by the upper arm and pulls. I scoop up my bag and go tripping behind her. “How many drama queens can one school hold?” she mutters to herself as she drags me down the empty hall.

We pass closed doors through which I hear teachers’ voices over groups of kids laughing. I also hear music (drums, pianos, a trumpet from far away) and feet stomping in unison as if dancing. Posters cover the walls inviting me to “Join Student Government” or “Come to the First Chess Club Meeting Tonight” or “Help Plan the Halloween Dance!” I drag my feet to slow the pixie down so I can read every flyer on a large bulletin board. This weekend there’s going to be a film festival and an “open mic night,” whatever that is. And today after school I could go to a free talk about poverty in Africa or even learn how to crochet. I could never do those things in Alverland, but here, I can do anything, and that’s why I came today.

The pixie stops and I bump into her, nearly sending her to the floor. “Good God!” she says to the ceiling. “Not even nine o’clock yet and this is my day already.” She points to a half-open door and gives me a little shove. “In you go,” she says. “Tell it all to the shrinky dink, drama queen.”

 

I’m inside a bright, sunny office with a wilting jade plant in the window and sad yellow daisies in a vase. Without thinking I whisper one of the first incantations my grandmother taught us, “Flowers, flowers please don’t die, lift your heads up to the sky!” Slowly the jade plant unfurls its drooping leaves and the daisies stand tall in the vase. Then I remember that I shouldn’t be casting spells, no matter how harmless. What if someone saw me? How would I explain? I consider undoing the incantation, but that would be more magic. I have to be careful now. I must remember to act like an erdler.

I hear quick footsteps in the hallway. I peek out the door and see a couple hurrying by, holding hands. The girl’s hair flies over her shoulder as she looks up at the guy. “We’re so late,” she says, and they both laugh, then they’re gone around a corner.

I’m left with a tingly feeling in the pit of my stomach. Before my family left Alverland, my cousin Briar and I spent hours in the branches of a sycamore tree, talking about how erdlers fall in love, date, fight, and break up with broken hearts. Or so we’ve heard.

“Do you think you’ll have a boyfriend there?” Briar had asked me a hundred times.

“That’s not why I want to go,” I told her as I picked layers of shaggy bark off the peeling tree trunk. “I just want the chance to see another part of the world, try new things, eat food I’ve only heard of.” But secretly I wondered if I would find an erdler boy in Brooklyn. Then again, I can barely find my way to school, so how will I ever find a boyfriend? I need to focus on the real reason I’m here: music, art, experience! All of the things missing in Alverland.

I drop onto a little couch and try to regroup. I need to break the problem into manageable steps, as my mother likes to say. I take a deep breath and try to remember My Plan for Life in Brooklyn. First, make friends. (But how?) Second, get a boyfriend. (Yeah, right!) Third, and most important, find as many ways to perform as possible. I have one year here, and I’m not going to waste it.

I look around the office again. Beside me on a little table is a big black binder titled “Upcoming Auditions.” It’s filled with dozens of pages with information about trying out for plays, musicals, bands, ensembles, improv troupes, and commercials. I get prickly chills up and down my back.
This is it!
I think. The real reason I’m here. In Alverland we do the same pageants and plays every season—to welcome in the harvest, to give thanks for bountiful hunting, to celebrate the equinox. It’s always the same songs, in the same order, on the same day. Nobody writes plays about a different topic or makes up new songs except my dad. It’s not that I don’t like singing in the sugar shack when we make syrup for the Festival of Maple Trees, but there’s more to life than pancakes!

As I browse through the binder of possibilities, a door across the room opens and a woman walks in. She’s too preoccupied with reading the paper in her hands to notice me, so I take a second to get a good look at her. She wears a full, rippling purple skirt with tiny bells sewn on the hem that jingle as she moves. On top she wears a long flowing white shirt, not unlike what we wear in Alverland. She has three necklaces of brightly colored beads, lots of bracelets on both wrists and even around one ankle above her soft leather sandals. She tucks a loose strand of her brown hair behind one ear and I see that she has silver rings on nearly every finger. I like her already.

“Are you the shrinky dink?” I ask.

“Yow!” she shrieks, and gives a little jump so that all her bracelets, necklaces, rings, and bells clink and clatter. “The shrinky dink?” she asks, as if she can’t believe I said that.

“Sorry.” I cringe. “That’s what that woman told me.” I point to the door where the lady in green left me, but of course she’s long gone, vanished just like a mean little pixie would. “Am I in the wrong place?”

She narrows her eyes to study me. “Who are you?”

“My name is Zephyr,” I tell her, then remember how the erdlers always use last names, too. “Zephyr Addler.”

“Ah ha!” She grins. “So you are Zephyr. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“You have?” I ask, and for the first time since I kissed my mom good-bye this morning, I smile.

She nods. “I’m Ms. Sanchez, your
guidance counselor
,” she tells me carefully. I get the hint that “shrinky dink ” is not what I should call her. I imagine how the pixie will look after I zing her with a nasty little hair-loss spell for embarrassing me like this. Then I remember my no-magic promise to my mom.

“So you made it,” Ms. Sanchez says as she perches on the edge of her desk.

“Barely,” I admit.

Ms. Sanchez pulls a red file folder off her desk. I see my name printed on the tab. “So you’ve never been to a regular school?”

I shake my head, more embarrassed now. “I didn’t realize everyone in the universe would know that about me.”

Ms. Sanchez laughs. “Only your teachers and I know that about you. And you’re not the only homeschooled student we’ve ever had. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Especially with test scores like yours.”

“Thanks,” I mumble. “But being smart hasn’t stopped me from being an idiot today.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she tells me. “It’s tough coming to a new school as a sophomore, especially a week after everyone else started.”

“Oh no,” I groan and clutch my knapsack to my chest. She makes it sound so terrible!

“You’re going to do just fine,” she assures me as she flips the pages in the red folder. “Let’s see where you’re supposed be now and get you started.”

 

Ms. Sanchez knocks on a classroom door and goes inside. I wait in the hallway but I hear people murmur, papers shuffle, and someone laughing inside the room. “Settle down,” an adult says, then a girl comes out in the hall with Ms. Sanchez.

“What’s up, Aunt Nina?” the girl asks. Ms. Sanchez frowns for a moment until the girl rolls her eyes and says, “Ms. Sanchez,” in a silly voice that makes Ms. Sanchez snicker.

“Mercedes, this is Zephyr. Zephyr?” She turns to me. “This is my niece, Mercedes. She’s also a sophomore here and she’ll be your official tour guide today.”

When Ms. Sanchez steps aside, Mercedes and I face each other as if we’re looking in an opposites mirror. I am tall. She is short. I’m as pale as milk. Her skin is the rich, beautiful brown of acorns. My stick-straight, so-blond-it’s-nearly-translucent hair hangs down below my shoulders. Her thick, dark ringlets are cropped just above her chin. I am all points and angles: cheekbones, collarbones, elbow, knees; she is soft curves from her round cheeks down to her feet.

And it’s not just how we’re built, it’s how we’re dressed. I’ve taken great care today not to look like some hippie wood sprite straight off the commune (which is what most erdlers think of us when we leave Alverland). I purposely left my soft deerskin boots and handwoven tunic dress at home. I didn’t even wear my hat or the amulets my grandparents made for me. I gaze at Mercedes in her red-striped tank top over a white T-shirt and skinny jeans riding below her hips and pegged above her silver ballet flats. I realize I look nothing like a regular erdler kid. My navy blue pants are too fitted, too new, too stiff, too high up on my waist. I have on a bona fide blouse, aquamarine with pearly buttons all the way up to my chin. And I’m wearing white sneakers. I’m so embarrassed that I wish someone would turn me into a bird so I could fly away and never ever see these people again.

“My aunt told me about you,” Mercedes says. “You’re the girl from Michigan, right?”

“The U.P.,” I say hopefully, but Ms. Sanchez and Mercedes look at me blankly. “See, Michigan has two parts.” I hold up my right hand like a mitten with the thumb sticking out to the side. “This is the main part where Detroit and stuff like that is.” I hold my left hand sideways over the top of my right fingertips. “And this is the Upper Peninsula, the U.P.” They blink at me. “All this space between my hands is the Great Lakes. And up here? ” I point to the pinky knuckle on my left hand. “That’s where I grew up.”

“Close to Canada then?” Mercedes asks.

“That’s right!” I say, impressed with her grasp of geography. Most people in Michigan have no idea how close we are to Canada.

“Yeah,” she says, smirking. “I can hear your accent. ‘Out and about.’” She laughs because she pronounces it like “oot and aboot.”

I press my lips together as my cheeks grow warm, embarrassed by how obviously weird I seem, even in this school where the brochure says diversity is a good thing.

“But that’s okay, yo, because I’ll have you talking Brooklyn in no time flat.” Mercedes snaps her fingers in front of her face and grins at me, this time nicely.

Ms. Sanchez hands Mercedes a green slip. “Here’s a hall pass. Show Zephyr her locker, the cafeteria, her homeroom, then escort her to her classes for the rest of the day.”

Ms. Sanchez turns to me. “You can stop by my office anytime if you have a question.” She slips her arm around Mercedes’s waist. “Mercy will be a great tour guide, won’t you?”

Mercedes wiggles out of her aunt’s embrace, but I see her smile. “Yeah, yeah, Aunt Nina.”

“Ms. Sanchez,”
Ms. Sanchez says playfully over her shoulder as she walks away.

 

First I ask to stop in the bathroom so I can do something about how I look. I stand in front of the mirror and sigh. “I look like . . .” I say to Mercedes.

She sits on the countertop, kicking her feet into the big rubber trash can stuffed full of used paper towels. “A dork,” she says. “Which is weird because, you’re like, so freakin’ gorgeous and everything. Does your mom make you dress like that so boys won’t be looking at you?”

“No. I mean, I just didn’t know what to wear.” I untuck my shirt and undo the top button. I take off my belt and shove it in my bag. (A
belt
! She’s right. I am a total dork.) I try to squiggle my pants down around my hips, but it’s hopeless. “Is that better?”

Mercedes raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, better, but . . .” She hops down from the counter. “I don’t know what kind of malls they have up there in the U.P., but girl, we’re gonna have to take you shopping or something.”

I follow her out of the bathroom. “Please,” I beg. “I would really, really appreciate that.”

Mercedes snorts a little laugh. “‘I would really, really appreciate that! ’” she mocks, and I have to give her credit, she truly does sound like me. “For real you talk like that?”

I stop and tower over her. “How am I supposed to talk?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. However you talk, you talk, I guess. It’s sweet, kind of. Real nicey nicey. Polite sounding.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“Naw, just different,” she assures me. “But maybe you want to tone it down a little bit with people you don’t know. Otherwise, you know, they might get the wrong idea.”

“That I’m nice?” I ask. “What’s wrong with being nice?”

“Too nice. Like people can take advantage of you. Push you around. You know. Like that. You gotta be able to hold your own here.”