The Girl Who Kissed a Lie (9 page)
I make the decision. No harm in running down there. My aunts think I’m in bed. They won’t think to look for me; they won’t notice I’m gone. Anyway, they’re in bed by now too.
I pull on my sweatshirt, check its pocket, all the strange things I’m randomly carrying around because I’m insane: pages ripped from old books, check; shard of glass wrapped in tissue, check. Then I slip past the grandfather clock on the landing—it chimes 6:15 as I pass—down to the front hall and out of the house.
I walk briskly down to Park Street. It is a damp, chilly night. The air feels saturated with rain. I don’t expect Ben to be out on a night like this, but he is there, just out of the circle of light from Park Street, standing on the grass. He is wearing jeans and a windbreaker, sweatshirt,
and
raincoat, and none of them match—bright orange sweatshirt, bright blue windbreaker, Kelly green raincoat, the colors clash and run together, and that is also not unusual for Ben. He is, however, without anything to sell, which is highly unusual for Ben. He is standing, the collar of his raincoat turned up against the rain in the air, hood over his head, his hands tucked into the pockets of his windbreaker, and he watches me approach, his eyes never leaving me. In this half-light, those distinctive eyes of his are the color of the rain beginning to fall around us, quicksilver, hinting flashes.
I walk over to him, but once there, I don’t know what to say, how to begin.
What
do
you
know
about
my
mother? What do you know about
me
?
Ben looks at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable, and I look back, and he talks first. “Don’t say my name.”
The only name he has ever told me is Ben, but I know that’s not what he’s talking about, and that makes me furious suddenly. Ben clearly knows so much more about me than he has ever let on, than I have ever told him, and I still know
nothing
about him. He doesn’t even want me to know his
name
.
“Benedict Le Fay?” I ask scathingly. “
That
name?”
Ben winces like I’d reached out and slapped him, which is so overdramatic. All I did was snap his name.
“So that’s your name, is it? A name you never told me? How do you know I know it now? Are you in constant contact with my father’s nurses? And how does my father know your name, anyway? How do you
know
my father? Why does my
father
get to know your name and not me?” The questions trip out of my mouth in a tidal wave. Now that I’ve started asking things, I think I might never stop.
“Okay,” says Ben, his eyes flickering around us as if he’s scared I’m making a scene, attracting attention. “You clearly have a lot of questions, and you deserve answers—”
“I
deserve
answers?” Something about the phrase makes me even more furious than I already was, like the truth about my entire life is a treat he’s giving me, a reward for good behavior. “How nice of you.” My voice is dripping sarcasm. “Exactly how much do you know about me, Benedict Le Fay?” I fling his name at him, the only thing I’ve managed to learn about him.
He hisses in a breath. “Stop that,” he commands harshly. “You need to stop that.”
I am so sick of being ordered around. “Stop what? Saying your name? What is the big deal? I know
one
thing
about you. Benedict Le Fay, Benedict Le Fay, Benedict Le Fay.”
Ben staggers away from me as if I’d shoved him, although I haven’t touched him. For the first time, confusion begins to thread through my anger. This upsets him
that
much
?
“Benedict Le Fay,” I say again, curious now.
Ben seems to gather himself enough to lunge forward and grab my shoulders unexpectedly, the motion making his hood fall away from his head.
I gasp in surprise.
“Stop saying it like that. Please. Where did you
learn
that? You’re going to—”
The skies above us open up suddenly, drowning out whatever he was going to say. He groans and drops my shoulders, hastily pulling his hood up again.
I feel so battered by strangeness I’m exhausted. “You need to tell me what’s going on, Ben.”
“Fine,” he agrees. “Yes. But not here. We can’t stay here.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I tell him, annoyed.
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I’m not,” I repeat very deliberately, “going anywhere. You’re going to tell me what’s going on. Right now.”
“I can’t,” he snaps. “You said my name. Several times. Not nicely. And now it’s pouring and I’m wet. So we do
not
have a choice. We are going. If we stay here, the world will end.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you start making sense,” I insist.
“Selkie,” he bites out, “I am the only thing that has ever made your life make sense. Do you trust me?”
I hesitate. Only hours earlier, I would have said yes unequivocally. I study Ben’s pale eyes, but I might as well try to interpret the mood of the puddles growing around us. “I don’t know,” I admit.
“Good answer,” says Ben cryptically, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. “But I need you to now, just for a minute more, just the way you usually do, and come with me.”
I search his face, his well-known features, the well-defined slope of his cheeks, the elegant curve of lips that I have given far too much thought to. I look over my shoulder. Beacon Street is nothing more than a row of impressionistic lights, looking very far away and unattainable to me.
“Please come,” Ben begs me.
I look back at him.
“Please come
now
,” he says. He is looking anxiously around him, and he is coiled up, poised to spring. “
Please
. I will explain everything to you, but there isn’t time right now. We have to
go
.” He looks back at me, pleading with me, and I realize that, up until this moment, Ben has never asked me for anything. I am still angry, but I am also struck by his nervous determination, so unlike him; he is normally so unflappable.
“Where?”
“The subway station,” he says.
It sounds safe enough, I figure. It’s late, but there are still people in the subway, and it’s only a few feet away. “Okay,” I say.
“Thank you,” says Ben, heartfelt, and then he takes my hand, dashing to the cover the station represents. The raindrops are hard as they hit the cement, tiny explosions that reverberate and soak the cuffs of my jeans as I am pulled in Ben’s wake, and then he tumbles through the station doors, pulling me after him, and he slams them shut behind us, and every single person around us in Park Street station, the people going in and out, the people going up and down, all vanish into thin air. The silence that falls is terrifying in this space that is made for the noise and bustle of a city.
I stare around myself in shock because there were
people
there; they were everywhere.
“Well,” says Ben, and I realize that he is breathing much harder than the quick dash through the rain should have warranted. “We
just
made that. Let’s not do that again in the future if we can avoid it.”
I look at him, leaning against the door. “What have you done?”
“I haven’t done anything.
You
did it. You said my name. A lot.”
“And that made all the people in Park Street station disappear?”
“All the people in
Boston
,” he corrects me, and he steps carefully away from the door. “If you open this door, we will be pulled out into the Nowhere, do you understand me? You cannot open the door. But you can look through the window.”
I walk to the door, and I realize that Ben is standing very tensely, as if he expects me to throw the door open and that somehow we will be pulled out into some place called Nowhere and that will be very bad. I don’t pull the door open. I put my face to the window. Outside is nothing but darkness. It is not just that the lights have gone out in Boston. It’s that there are no lights to go out. There is
nothing
.
I step back in alarm. “I don’t understand. Where did it go?”
“You broke my enchantment,” says Ben simply, as if that makes sense.
I stare at him. “I what?”
“You broke my enchantment. You said my name, and you made it rain, and you broke it. And really I’m never going to hear the end of it, I must say.”
“What are you talking about?” I demand, bewildered. “I didn’t make it rain. I can’t make it rain.”
“Of course you can,” Ben says, as if
I
am the crazy one.
“You’re not making any sense.” I am losing patience now. “Nobody has made any sense—”
“Ever in your life. You’re just noticing it now.”
“Ben,” I say firmly, ignoring his flinch. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“What’s happening right now? What we’d been waiting for, I suppose, although I didn’t think it would happen quite this way. But you told me your birthday—that was the first break in the chain.” Ben starts pacing, shaking rainwater out of his thick, dark hair with his hands, the droplets flying everywhere. “Then you got into the Salem Which Museum, and Will gave you the books, and you started asking the right questions finally, and it was only a matter of time until you knew the right words, but I thought we’d be able to tell you everything very calmly. I think your aunts were planning an old-fashioned tea or something. I didn’t think you’d be able to dissolve my enchantment. That’s usually so much harder to do than you made it look just now.”
“What are you talking about? Your enchantment?”
“Yes. You know. Your whole life and the way you were just normal enough to stay hidden and safe.”
I stare at him, thinking he’s lost his mind. “You’re telling me that my whole life is nothing but an
enchantment
?”
Ben stops pacing and looks at me, quicksilver eyes serious. “Yes,” he answers simply. “And you just broke it.”
I continue to stare at him, silent, trying to comprehend this.
“I told you the world would end if you kept saying my name,” says Ben.
Skylar Dorset grew up in Rhode Island, so she hates to drive more than twenty minutes to get anywhere. After receiving a law degree from Harvard, Skylar was an attorney in Boston for many years, where she wrote much of her first book during bouts of being stuck on the subway. Visit her at
www.skylardorset.com
.
Selkie’s story continues in
The Girl Who Never Was
. This is not your average trip to Fairyland.
