Sure,
my conscience jeered at me.
Just like you couldn't do anything for Julian.
"Oh, shut up," I muttered to myself, thinking the emphasis of actually speaking out loud might help convince me. This might be how those demented street people started: overactive consciences.
My stomach churning queasily, I set my hand on the rock that was jutting out of the tree trunk. I prepared myself to avert my eyes at the first hint of blood splatter or gore. I yanked the rock out of the tree trunk and squeamishly glanced into the opening. Then a second glance. Then a longer third glance. Then I just went ahead and looked.
There was nothing in the hole.
I leaned in closer. There was no opening deeper in the tree that he could have been forced down into. I glanced at the rock, still in my hand.
The little blue guy was clinging to it. Not injured at all. More like a leprechaun hugging the Blarney stone. He puckered his lips in my direction and gave a noisy kiss. "Thanks, sweetie. That saved me a lot of digging." He held up a teeny-tiny spoon that could absolutely never have made even a dent in wood.
But that wasn't my first thought. My first thought was:
Eek!
I dropped the rock.
Fortunately for him, the blue guy let go, so when the rock landed, it didn't land on him. "Hey!" he complained, standing on the ground, hands on hips accusingly.
"Sorry," I said. "I thought you were dead."
"Oh." He threw himself onto his back. "Were you ready to give me mouth-to-mouth?"
"Yuck," I said. "Absolutely not. Don't be disgusting."
He flung his arm across his forehead, like a silent screen actress about to swoon. "I'm failing fast!" he proclaimed. "Get those big, luscious lips over here."
"I do not have big lips," I protested. I couldn't even bring myself to say
luscious.
"Hey, they're big from where I stand," the blue guy said, even though, technically, he was lying down. He squeezed his eyes shut and pursed his own itty-bitty lips.
"Nice meeting you," I lied. "Glad to see you aren't dead." Well, I
had been
—until he started talking. "Good-bye." I stepped around him and onto the path, because—as he was so icky—there was no way I was going to step
over
him, even though I was wearing jeans and not a skirt he could look up.
"Hey!" he called after me. "Hey!"
I ignored him as I started back the way I'd come, but the next thing I knew, I felt him land on my shoulder. How could he do that? From the ground to almost five feet straight up into the air when he was no taller than—you'll excuse the expression—my extended middle finger?
"Hey!" he shouted into my ear.
I brushed him off like dandruff.
A moment later he was on my other shoulder.
"Hey!" he shouted into that ear.
"Get off me," I demanded, never stopping. "I do not allow"—what the heck was he, anyway?—"little ... blue ...
whatevers
to take a free ride on my body."
He made a throaty growl like a cat in heat. "Sounds sexy," he said.
I swatted him off again.
This time I saw tiny iridescent wings unfurl from between the folds of his shirt. Well, I didn't so much
see
them as
extrapolate
that's what must have happened,
because he was hovering in front of my face like a nervy hummingbird, those wings moving in a blur as he flew backward to keep up with me.
"Spreenie," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"I'm a spreenie."
All right, he had my curiosity going for him. Though I refused to slow down. "What's a spreenie?"
In a voice that was no doubt meant to mimic me, though he didn't sound a bit like me, he said, "It's a ... little ... blue ...
whatever.
"
"Wonderful," I said. "Thank you so much for completing my education."
"Larry," he said.
"What?"
"My name is Larry."
I stopped. He did, too. "What kind of name is Larry..." I realized I couldn't finish with "for a spreenie" since he was the first one I was being introduced to. But still. You'd figure in a magical world...
I started walking again, and he started flying backward again to keep that eight or ten inches from my face.
"And you're a human," he said. "See, I know more than you do. And your name is...?"
I knew it probably wasn't a good idea, but I told him, "Wendy."
"So where are we going, Wendy?"
"
We
are not going anywhere," I informed him. "I am going back home." I did not add,
I hope.
"Well," he said, "unless you came through another portal besides the nearest one, you've passed it."
"No," I told him. "Even though you've been a distracting little nuisance, I would have seen the archway if I'd passed it."
Larry laughed so hard he did a backward somersault. "Silly Wendy," he said, once he caught his breath. "You're going the wrong way."
"This is the way I came," I said.
"But you can't see it going from east to west," he said, "only from west to east."
I ignored him.
"Check," he urged me, pointing behind me.
He was only trying to trick me into proving myself a gullible fool.
But I knew I'd already traveled farther than I had coming in. So I turned around.
And there, right in the middle of the path where I'd just walked through, impossible to miss—except, of course, that I'd missed it—was the archway.
And even though—whether or not I'd seen it—I'd just walked through it, I was
not
back in my own world.
"That wasn't there a minute ago," I said.
"Of course it was," Larry told me. "You just couldn't see it."
Couldn't see it? The archway was like ten feet tall and ten feet wide, and made of granite. Even without my glasses, I would have had a hard time missing it.
Despite the fact that it sent chills up my back and made my toes curl with anxiety, I went back and touched the thing. The stone was cool and rough. It didn't look weathered at all, so it was probably new. But it was solid enough that it wasn't likely thirty-seconds-new.
Could I really not have seen it coming from the other direction? It wasn't like the path was crowded by an overabundance of trees that could have obscured anything that big, so I walked around the outside of the arch, even though I had to step off the path to do so, to the other side.
As soon as I passed it, the arch disappeared.
Not obscured by trees or by a bend in the path: just ... disappeared.
I stepped back, and the arch reappeared.
Though I knew there was the danger of someone coming upon me as I wasted time trying to understand what I suspected was un-understandable, I spent precious moments in the grass and leaned from side to side without moving my feet: As I leaned to the right, the arch would be there one instant, gone the next; when I leaned in the opposite direction, it would come back. I couldn't go slowly enough to see any shrinking or fading: just there, or not there. I pushed the glasses down my nose and looked over the tops. The arch misbehaved no matter how I looked at it. I put both hands on the side of the arch—or at least I tried to: My left hand could touch the solidness of the stone; my right hand felt nothing and passed right through, smacking against my left palm.
Something hit the back of my head. I whirled around just in time to see Larry, standing on a nearby tree branch, hide his hands behind his back.
"Don't you dare throw stones at me," I said, sounding as grumpy as our neighbor Mrs. Freelander, complaining if a kid stepped one foot off the sidewalk onto her lawn.
"I never did," he protested.
"Let me see your hands."
He hesitated, then brought his hands around to the front, empty palms upward—never mind that something bounced off the branch on which he was standing, then dropped to the ground behind him.
"I saw that," I told him.
"It wasn't a stone," he assured me.
Stone, acorn—I wasn't going to quibble.
"Why can I only see the arch from this side?" I asked him.
"Because it's here"—he gestured with his left hand—"but it's not there." He wiggled the fingers of his right hand.
"West to east," I said, repeating what he'd said earlier. "Not east to west."
"Yes," he said with that extra brightness you'd use with a kindergartner who'd finally learned to tie
her shoes after making you watch thirty-two failed attempts.
I remembered having seen a similar arch in Highland Park. "Do they all face the same direction?"
Larry gave a dismissive snort. "That would be just plain silly."
How ridiculous of me to even ask.
A sudden, awful idea hit me. "So does that mean I can only travel in one direction? I can't go back to where I was?" It wasn't like I could see the nursing home's garden through the arch—just the stupid path in this stupider forest.
Larry sighed as though I was a real burden. "Of course you can go back."
I had the feeling that, despite his blue color, Larry had the potential to be a lawyer. And I don't mean that in a nice way. I'm thinking about the kind of lawyer who invented the word
loophole.
So I asked, "How does the gate work?"
Larry snorted again. "How does a computer work?" he countered.
"The gate is computerized?" I asked. He smacked himself on the forehead and said, "No."
"Ah," I said. "You were being sarcastic. You were saying I wouldn't understand—"
Larry looked very pleased with himself.
I finished, "—even
if
you knew."
He had to work that out before he realized I'd insulted him.
Meanwhile, I said, "I don't mean: What is its energy source and what are the physics of its operation? I mean: How do I use it to get home?"
"It transports you where you want to go," Larry said. "But you can't go home." I must have looked ready to go for his tiny blue jugular because he hurriedly added, "I mean, you
can,
but what about the son of the elven king? You can't just abandon him. I mean, I presume by how fast you turned up to let me out of the tree that you were close enough to see Berrech and his rebels abduct him."
Okay, I let myself get sidetracked. "
Julian?
Julian who I go to school with? Julian is the son of the elven king?"
"
Duh.
" Larry smacked himself on the forehead again to show he couldn't believe how dense I was.
Wow. So Julian was a prince. Still..."Julian is the one who chased me in here," I explained.
Larry looked at me skeptically. "Why? What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything."
Larry was giving me the same fishy-eyed look
Mrs. Pincelli, the school secretary, gives kids whose teachers have sent them to see the principal.
Kids who often, I had to admit to myself, made that same claim of innocence.
"My life," I said—recognizing, even as I said it, the overly dramatic sound of that—"was in jeopardy."
"That's doubtful." Larry used his sleazy-lawyer voice to show the contempt he had for that thought. "You mean because of those glasses?" He flipped his wrist dismissively.
I looked at him, through the glasses, then over the frames. Absolutely nothing on this side of the gate looked any different through these lenses. So it wasn't like I was reacting to stuff he couldn't see. How did he know there was anything special about them?
"What do you know about these?" I demanded.
Larry tried to look confused and innocent. "What?" he asked.
"Never mind, Little Mr. Anti-Smurf," I told him. "If Julian is in trouble, I'm sorry for it. But I've got enough troubles of my own without getting involved in a coup d'état in the elven world. I wish I could say it's been nice meeting you. But it hasn't."
It transports you where you want to go,
Larry had said. Well, I wanted to go home. I stepped through
the archway, wondering how long I'd been away, wondering if my mother had gotten to the nursing home yet, wondering if Gia and my grandmother had missed me—well, Gia, anyway—as they looked through the photo album that had pictures of Nana as a young woman.
It transports you where you want to go.
Sure.
I should have stopped to think how I had certainly never wanted to come here.
Just as looking at the arch was a case of "now you see it/now you don't," as I walked through the arch, one instant I could see the path ahead of me winding among trees, trees, and more trees—and then I was suddenly on a street corner: So suddenly, in fact, that I was unbalanced and stumbling off the unexpected curb before I could catch myself.
Even as I fell, I knew there was something wrong, more wrong than falling, which was bad enough, since I was falling off the sidewalk and into the street, where there was oncoming traffic.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
I had been expecting to find myself in the yard of
Westfall Nursing Home. Or even back in the room with Nana and Gia, since I'd been thinking specifically of them. Which hadn't been very smart: Nana, who pretty much lived only in her own mind, wouldn't have been unduly alarmed to see me suddenly wink into existence in front of her, but Gia would have been sure to notice in a negative sort of way.
But I wasn't even on South Avenue or Robinson or any street I recognized. As I fell, my face approaching the pavement—slowly enough to notice things in a surreal way, but too fast to do anything to prevent imminent impact—I glimpsed unusual cars. I mean, I'm not an expert on cars or anything—I classify them by color rather than make—but these were all big and rounded in an old-fashioned kind of way that just screamed, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!"
Yet another wrong thing was the people I caught sight of on my way down. A man in an ugly tweed suit, wearing a hat and carrying a big satchel, turned from the doorbell he was about to ring and gawked at me. And there were several women—all dressed in pastel dresses that were buttoned and formfitting on the top, with really full skirts that came below their knees, not a pair of pants or shorts among them. The women, too, wore hats—not like sun hats or rain hats or winter hats, but these itty-bitty why-bother?
hats with flocked netting coming over their foreheads—giving the impression they all had really nasty collections of freckles, warts, and birthmarks. One of the women had a little girl with her, also wearing a hat, and—as she watched my endless fall—the mother grabbed hold of her child and spun her around to protect her from seeing me flattened and/or splattered. Woman and girl were both wearing little white gloves.