Golden Girl

Los Angeles, California, May 1, 1935

Once upon a time in Kansas, there was a normal girl called Callie. I thought she was me. I’d been told all my life she was me.

Turns out, all my life I’d been lied to. Turns out, I was about as far from a normal girl as you could get. I wasn’t even human. Not all the way, anyhow. My father, Daniel LeRoux, who’d run out on my mother before I was born, wasn’t just a piano player; he was a prince of the fairies. The Unseelie court fairies, to be specific. He hadn’t run out on my mama for any of the usual reasons. He had gone to renounce the throne so they could get married.

But he never came back, and I grew up with just Mama in the Imperial Hotel in Slow Run, Kansas. Times were worse than bad because the rain had stopped and the dust had come to cover Kansas. I guess Mama decided all that
truth—my being half a fairy, or having magic in my bones, or waiting on my father to get back from telling his Unseelie parents he wasn’t taking up the family business of being royalty—was kind of a lot to lay on a girl stuck out in the Dust Bowl. I didn’t know for sure why she hadn’t told me about Papa and the rest of it. By the time I found out, Mama had vanished too, in the middle of the biggest dust storm the world had ever seen. But it wasn’t the dust that got her; it was the fairies. The bright, shining ones. The Seelies.

Now I was out looking for Mama, and Papa, and the rest of the truth about myself. As you’ve probably figured, that was a tall order, and a long road. So far, it had taken me all the way to Los Angeles, California. I had no idea how far it was going to take me before I hit the end.

“Callie LeRoux, where are you going?”

I froze on the stairs and looked down at my landlady. Mrs. Constantine was big and broad, with black hair, sandy skin, a hook nose, raw hands, and the sharpest pair of ears known to man. She ran a boardinghouse for families and “respectable” single ladies, and puffed up when she got angry or proud. She was also blocking the stairway I had been trying to sneak down.

“Sorry, Mrs. Constantine,” I said, trying not to squirm. “I’ve got to get to the streetcar. I’m going to see about a job today.”

“A job?” My landlady squinted around to see if I had my suitcase with me. When she didn’t see me with anything
more than a pair of high-heeled shoes from the mission store and the blue suit I’d been up all night stitching on so it mostly fit, she gave way.

“Well, you’d better get going, then, and you can drop the letters in the box on your way.”

“Yes, Mrs. Constantine.” I picked up the envelopes on the table in the hall and tucked them into my battered blue handbag, which almost matched the suit. The white gloves I’d bleached to within an inch of their lives stretched tight over my country-girl fingers. I’d have to remember to keep the palms turned in so nobody could see how worn out they were. I settled my blue straw hat into place over my black hair. I might know I was half fairy, but I was also the daughter of a brown-skinned man. People in Los Angeles didn’t take as much offense at that sort of thing as they did back in Kansas, but they weren’t all that keen on it either. Most days it was easier to try to pass for white. I had what mama had called “good skin,” meaning it was pale, and “good eyes,” meaning they were a kind of stormy blue-gray. It was my hair that I had to be careful with. I’d washed it the night before with lye water and lemon juice, like Mama had taught me, but that hadn’t made it any lighter or softer. So far, the French twist I’d spent half an hour before sunup wrestling into place was holding.

As I watched my reflection in the hall mirror, I tried to find a way to hold my face that didn’t show the guilt so plainly. I wasn’t going out about any job. I was going to try to sneak into the biggest movie studio in the country.

“Now, just one minute, Miss Callie.”

I spun around on my crooked heel, and had to catch myself against the wall. Mrs. Constantine frowned again. She was coming up the hall carrying a white napkin bundle.

“You can’t go for a job without something to eat.” She pushed the bundle into my hand and then straightened my jacket shoulders. We both pretended she didn’t notice I’d stuffed my brassiere with tissues to help cover up the fact I was still only fourteen. “Don’t forget to drop off those letters. You want your people to know you’re safe, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” I scooted out the front door before she could say anything more about me or my family. I was glad for the hot biscuit she’d wrapped in that napkin, though, and the apricot jam.

When I stopped in front of the mailbox, I sorted through the letters and pulled out one to stuff back into my purse. I’d written that one with Mrs. Constantine standing over my shoulder. It was a happy letter, saying how I’d made it to the city just fine, and how Mama didn’t need to worry about me because I’d found a clean, respectable boardinghouse and everybody was being so nice and friendly. I’d addressed it to the Imperial Hotel in Slow Run, Kansas, and borrowed a stamp. Mrs. Constantine beamed as she handed it over, sure she was doing her job helping to look out for me.

But there was nobody back at the Imperial, and there wouldn’t be until I got my parents out of wherever the Seelie fairies had taken them. Problem was, I only had hints about where that might be. They weren’t very good hints
either. One of the biggest problems with fairies and magic people is that they don’t talk in straight lines, even if they’re on your side, which, believe me, they mostly aren’t. I’d been told my folks were locked up in the golden mountains of the west, above the valley of smoke, in the house of St. Simon, where no saint has ever been.

You see what I mean? And that was from somebody who was actually trying to help.

Fortunately, there aren’t too many places you can mean when you say “the golden mountains of the west.” That’s pretty much got to be California, so that was why we’d come out here. “We” is me and Jack Holland. Jack’s my best friend. Without him I wouldn’t have made it ten feet from my own door. On the other hand, without me he’d probably be on another chain gang somewhere, so I guess it mostly evens out.

Now, California’s a big place. It’s got a lot of hills and a lot of gold, but another thing I learned about fairies is that they like music and bright lights, pretty people and dancing, and all those other things that are beautiful about human beings. And where are the brightest lights, the best music, and the prettiest people in the whole world?

Hollywood, and the movie studios. Me and Jack both figured if there were fairies hanging around anywhere in California, that’s where we’d pick up their trail. After that … well, like Jack said, we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

See, fairies live in a world of their own. Maybe it’s a
bunch of worlds; I’m not sure about that part yet. But they don’t seem to like it there much, because they want to get into our world awful badly. To do this, they need a special kind of gate between their world and the human world. If I could find one of those gates, I could open it or close it. That was the extra-special magic I’d been born holding. That magic is so special, in fact, the fairies have a prophecy about me. They say:
See her now, daughter of three worlds. See her now, three roads to choose. Where she goes, where she stays, where she stands, there shall the gates be closed
.

I’ve got no idea what that means. Jack says that’s normal for prophecies. He says that until they come true nobody knows what a prophecy’s actually about. If you ask me, that makes them pretty pointless. But pointless or not, this particular prophecy caused me all kinds of trouble. The fairies get all worked up into a tizzy by that “where she goes, where she stays, where she stands, there shall the gates be closed” part, and they keep trying to get me onto their side, either by threats or by tricks. Except I don’t want to side with any fairies. I just want to find my parents and get a chance to find out what being a normal person is all about.

Now, my idea for starting our search through the studios had been to join up with one of the tour groups. Jack, being Jack, had a different idea. He spent most of our last fifty cents on a clean shirt at the secondhand store and the rest on a bath at a flophouse. Then he just walked right through the front door of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which is the biggest movie studio in Hollywood, and asked for a
job. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he walked out again and said he’d gotten one. It seemed that the MGM back lot was so big, they needed boys like Jack to run scripts and messages and stuff to the different offices and movie sets there. One glance at Jack’s mile-long legs had apparently sealed the deal. He was on the back lot now, and I was following after so he could sneak me in. We didn’t figure we could wander around looking like the kids we were without somebody getting suspicious, so I had to pretend to be a secretary or something like that, and that’s why I was all dressed up trying to appear older than I was, and wearing exactly one piece of clothing that had never belonged to anybody else: I had on my first and only pair of silk stockings. I wished I could stop being nervous long enough to enjoy them.