Small Persons With Wings

Table of Contents

 

 

 

DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by The Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by Ellen Booraem

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Booraem, Ellen.
Small persons with wings / Ellen Booraem.

p. cm.

Summary: When Mellie Turpin's grandfather dies and leaves her family his run-down inn and bar, she learns that for generations her family members have been fairy guardians, and now that the fairies want an important ring returned, the Turpins become involved in a series of magical adventures as they try to locate the missing ring.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47551-5

[1. Fairies—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Grandfathers—Fiction.
4. Lost and found possessions—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B646145Sm 2011 [Fic]—dc22 2010008400

For Fletcher
and
Louise Booraem

LAST JUNE, MY PARENTS JUMPED OFF A ROOF because of a pinky ring.

Beware of jewelry, especially if it's more than a thousand years old. And definitely beware of your own brain. Imagination is part of life, but also it sucks.

I'm not actually allowed to say “sucks.”

Fidius had imagination. Every bedtime until I was almost six, he curled up on my pillow in his tattered jacket and knee breeches, not too close because touching him could give a person frostbite. Three inches tall, barefoot, and scraggle-haired, he told me about his elegant youth: the beautiful clothes, how everyone insulted each other, what they ate, how popular he was. I dreamed of (a) cockroach fricassee, (b) minuets, (c) winged ladies dressed up like Cinderella.

If you organize your thoughts and assign numbers and/or letters to them, they stop being imagination and turn into scientific inquiry, which is safer.

Fidius lived with us in our Boston apartment, which was the size of a French king's closet. One day when I was five, I sat in the tiny kitchen with my Winnie-the-Pooh plate empty except for summer squash, all soft and slimy. “You'll sit there until you eat it,” my mother said, in Model Mom mode. She left the kitchen so my father could do the dishes like a Model Dad.

“Pssst.” Fidius made a transforming sign, a loopy
q
. The squash turned into candy corn, which I didn't love, but anything beats squash. I scooped it into my mouth, realizing too late that Fidius hadn't done a thing to (a) the taste or (b) the sliminess, only (c) the looks.

“Bleah,” I said.

Fidius cracked up. “That's what you get for having a sense of taste,” he whispered. He wasn't mean—there were just things he didn't understand about being big and warm and human. I gulped my milk and I didn't feel hurt at all. Not. At. All.

A week later, I scattered three sets of LEGOs over my bedroom floor, organized by shape and color because Fidius was going to make Versailles, the palace of the French kings. Mom said I had to put them all back in the right boxes so she could vacuum. “They're organized by shape and color,” I told her. “We're going to make the palace of the French kings.”

“It's too late to make the palace of the French kings today,” Model Mom said. “You should know that, Fidius.” She wasn't looking at him—she hardly ever did—so he went all beady-eyed and stuck out his tongue at her. “The two of you, pick up those LEGOs or no macaroni and cheese, just broccoli.”

We ignored her, because it was my room and she wasn't the one with a building plan. But then I smelled macaroni and cheese, which is my favorite, and broccoli, which isn't. Mom yelled, “I'm coming in there now. Those LEGOs better be picked up, dang it.” She didn't actually say “dang it.” She always uses a swear word that means exactly the same thing and yet I can't repeat it until I'm sixteen. This makes no sense but what can you do.

Anyway, Mom was coming and Versailles was all over the floor. Fidius flew around and moved his pointy fingers in a “go away” sign, like brushing a spider off your sleeve. One by one, the piles of LEGOs disappeared. “Whoa. It worked,” Fidius said, so low I almost didn't hear. He sounded surprised.

“Where'd they go?” I panicked, because he didn't sound like he knew what he was doing.

“They're still there. Or somewhere.”

“What happens when she vacuums? Will she suck them all up because she can't see them?” I felt around with my hand, but there was only carpet.

Fidius's iridescent wings turned mud color. “Am I a
magus?
” he snapped. That's what his people call a scientist, and talking about
magi
made him cranky. “I don't know where they went.” But then his wings lightened; some faint purples and pinks appeared. His thin lips stretched in an almost-smile, the closest he ever got to an expression on his pale, pointy face. “Don't worry, Turpina. They're pretending to be gone. It's a trick of the eye.”

Fidius almost always called me Turpina—my last name with an
a
stuck on the end, which made it a girl's name in Latin, his first language. When I annoyed him he used my full name, Melissa Angelica Turpin, which he said was “of lineage,” although he never explained what that meant.

He pronounced “Turpin” in French, his second language, with not much
r
and absolutely no
n
—“Tooghh-peh,” kind of. Grand-père pronounced it that way too. Dad said “Turr-pinn,” with as many
r
's and
n
's as he could shove in there.

Fidius tried to be helpful. One time he fixed a hole in my jeans before my mom saw it, but the hole opened again ten minutes later. He said he was too lonely and depressed to make a spell last. That's why he was all raggedy—he had some magic in him, but not enough.

He made My Little Pony come alive and gallop around the room for five whole minutes, which was cool except that she ate a hole in my Wild Things bedspread and pooped squishy blue plastic BBs, and when the magic died she didn't have any tail left. I started to cry and Fidius laughed.

“Bring back her tail,” I sobbed. “You can do it. You're a fairy.”

Fidius whirred at me, wings darkening, tiny, sharp fingers curled into claws. “Fairies!” he snarled. “Figments!” His frigid fingers were an inch from my eyes.

I cowered and that lightened him up, wings and all. “We are not fairies, Melissa Angelica Turpin,” he said. “We are Small Persons with Wings.” He went out to the living room to watch the DVD player open and close, so I was the one who had to clean up all the blue plastic poop, and my pony never got her tail back.

I never saw anyone love appliances as much as Fidius did. “Electricity is the same as magic, Turpina,” he said, “except it doesn't decay your body.” I didn't know what he meant by that, and he wouldn't explain because he was too busy posing for himself in the mirror. He unfurled his wings in towering iridescent glory, the shimmery pearls and blues and golds catching the light and improving it.

He always expected you to gasp when he unfurled his wings. And I'm sure I always did, always.

Wings have to be groomed. Fidius pulled them through his sharp fingers, the way a bird pulls a feather through its beak. They flowed through his hands as if they were liquid, the colors rippling and swirling like oily puddles at a gas station when you stir them with a stick. Imagine having something so beautiful on your body, and you'd flap them and they'd carry you up into the air.

No, don't imagine any such thing. It doesn't happen. It's not real. Item A on the list of made-up stuff.

It was my fault that Fidius went away. One day he was sleeping on my pillow and disappearing the Cheerios off the floor, the next he was gone and I had a little china guy that looked like him except he had a chipped elbow and no wings. I talked to the china guy as if he were alive, even though I knew he wasn't. Not for one minute did I think that little guy was anything but china, with that stupid painted smile.

I remember every second of Fidius's last day, and I do think a lot of it really happened.

Nobody said not to talk about him. Nobody said, Talking about a little guy with iridescent wings won't get you invited to Janine Henry's birthday party, won't help you ride a bike, won't take away your excess vocabulary. You will still be not-skinny with not-blond curls and say “not necessarily” and “who's SpongeBag SquarePants?”