Welcome to Bordertown (49 page)

“But you’re wrong,” he said. “You
do
make the rules here.
Because
you live here. Don’t you see?”

I ruffled his hair and laughed as I told him it looked like he was growing it long enough to pose as an elf. He shrugged my hand off as if I were a troublesome parent. “Sorry,” I said, and looked out the window over my kitchen table.

From my grime-streaked window, I could see clouds of smoke rising from the mill stacks down by the canal. That view was the reason I rented that apartment. Back home, where I’d come from, there’d been smokestacks I could see from my kitchen window, too. So when I looked through this one, I could pretend for a moment that I’d gone home a year ago, when I still could have, before the Way between the World and the Borderlands closed for those mysterious thirteen days, before enough time passed to make me a stranger to my old friends and family. Time has a funny way of bending here on the Border. Thirteen days here had been thirteen
years
back in the World, as we discovered when people like Mouse started coming through with their new toys and new ways of thinking. By now, back home, nobody’s heard a word from me for thirteen years. I’d probably been declared officially dead. And if I’m not dead on paper, in the hearts of my old friends and family, I must be.

“Sorry,” I said again, wishing things could be different for both of us.

“Don’t be sorry, Marius,” said Aleksander. “Be angry.”

*   *   *

Over the short days of that winter, I showed him the city’s darkest corners, its best angles, and the wild Nevernever that surrounded it. I pointed out the neutral territories, encouraged him to stick to those. And by his fifth month in the city, when spring returned and washed the streets down, he said, “I think I’ve decided to stay.”

“Where?” I said. “In town? Or with me?”

That got a smile, a rare thing from Mouse, who had been carrying a frown around like an anchor.

But disappointment is an odd emotion to witness in others. It comes and goes as it pleases, returns after you think you’ve beaten it. For weeks—even after Mouse decided to stay, even after that glint of a smile he’d offered—it seemed he wouldn’t speak unless I asked him a question. It was as if he lived inside the space of his own skull, and only occasionally would he come out, eyes blinking in the new light, mouth slowly opening to say, “I’ve taken a job as a bike messenger.” That was in his sixth month.

“Where did you get a bike?” I asked, and Alek replied that he and a friend had gone in together on buying one. The friend paid for it, but Alek was paying his half off little by little with the job. Fair enough, I thought, hoping the work would be good for him.

Or, a month later, when summer was starting to heat up: “I met this guy who says the elves want to push the humans and halfies out of the Bordertown High Council. Said they’ve been up to something. Said he could smell bad magic brewing.”

“And was this guy staggering around?” I asked. “That would explain a lot.”

“He was perfectly sober,” said Mouse.

I shrugged. “Just don’t go getting caught up with anyone who worries about stuff like that too much.” Gang wars sometimes break out because an elf looks at a human the wrong way, or a halfie tries to pass for a Trueblood and gets caught. Already the
streets were heating up early that summer with random spats of violence. “Don’t take any of that on yourself.”

“Oh, Marius,” he said, shaking his head, his mop of brown hair rolled into dreadlocks by that point. “I wish you weren’t so afraid.”

“Afraid?” I said.

“You’re exactly the sort of human they desire.”

“Who’s they?” I asked. “And what sort is that?”

“The self-policing sort,” said Mouse. “The sort that, in the back of their minds, really do believe the pointy-eared bastards are somehow better.”

“You’re a very rude boy,” I said.

“I know you’ve been here longer than me, Marius,” he said, “but don’t do what they do. Don’t try to pretend you’re better than me just because you’re a few years older.”

“Do you hate me that much?”

He shook his head. “I don’t hate you, Marius. I feel bad for you. I want to help you.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

“By convincing you to believe you’re worth something.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You’re just not ready to hear the truth,” said Alek.

“Why are you still here?” I asked.

He looked shocked at the question. “Here with you?”

“Here in Bordertown,” I said. “I mean, you seem to not like it here very much. So I don’t understand. Why are you staying? The Way back to the World is there for you if you want it.”

We looked at each other, then awkwardly away. He put his hand over mine on the table. Finally he said, “I do like you, Marius. I do. You’re so very good. You’re much kinder than I am. Thank you for everything. I don’t say that enough. And there are things I like here. There are. And that’s why I talk the way I’ve
been doing. There are good things here. But they’re threatened.”

“It’s almost evening,” I said, looking out the window. The sky was tending toward violet poured over a red horizon of buildings. “I need to get ready to go down to Ho Street and stake my corner. Coins are waiting to be tossed.”

“I may still be out when you get back,” he said as I got up from the table.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Down to Soho, too, with some friends from work. We’re going to the Magic Lantern to see a movie. Hopefully one will be playing.” He laughed. The Magic Lantern wasn’t a very reliable theater. Sometimes they would put on a live show so that if the movie cut out, you could keep watching. And you could never tell if the projector would show the intended film or some nonsensical silent movie that was a cross between watching a stranger’s family videos from the middle of the twentieth century and a surrealist experiment in green dogs and unopened umbrellas during winter. I sometimes went hoping for the stranger’s home videos, especially now that the twentieth century was so far behind me, sealed away, impossible to go back to. I was relieved to hear Mouse make a noise like that, though—a laugh—and also relieved he’d recently been saying words like
friends
and
hopefully.

“Have fun,” I said, tucking my case under my arm to leave.

“Wait,” said Mouse. I waited with my hand on the knob as he stood there searching for the words to tell me something. After a while, he seemed to give up and settled for: “Be safe while you’re out there. I worry about you sometimes.”

I smiled. I didn’t know if he was somehow saying he loved me. And though I saw a possibility of love in him, I couldn’t help but feel he was too young, that I’d be no better than the Trueblood who’d spotted him when Mouse had first arrived. I couldn’t help
remembering that Mouse had been a baby when I was already a teenager back in the World, thanks to the Way closing and screwing up time.

“No worries,” I said, my voice low in my throat, holding it in as if it might escape me. I was a master of self-restraint. It was my new art form. “I’m a big boy,” I told Mouse. “I’ll be careful.”

*   *   *

I’ve said that the music had left me. Although I didn’t know it then, I realize now it was right around the time the Way between Borderland and the World closed that it began to slip away. First for a night, as if it were just flaking out on me, not showing up where we’d arranged to meet. Then a week went by, and no matter how many times I placed myself on my corner across from Danceland, no matter how many times I put bow to string, I couldn’t catch a song. I could play my old music, but nothing new would come, and the songs felt funny all of a sudden, as if they were too old-fashioned. A change was in the air around that time, a big one—you could see it by the banners of shining lights that stretched over the city like the aurora borealis—but I had the strongest feeling that I was somehow being left behind. As if the bus I needed to catch had stopped while I’d fallen asleep on the bench, then continued on without me.

I started to toss in my sleep during those long nights, and inevitably my thoughts would return to the world I’d left behind. I’d think of all the good things first. My mother’s voice in the morning, waking me for school. My father’s hand on my head like a hat, after I’d brought home straight As. My friends in the school orchestra. My teacher, Mr. Humphrey, who told me I had talent and that I should go to college, that I’d get a scholarship for playing the violin the way I could.
Did.
Then I thought of all the bad things. A heart broken by a boy who didn’t love me. The way my
parents’ faces fell when I told them who I really was, how all they could do was blink. Their silence. Their retreat from me. Thinking back on it, the things that had made me unhappy might have faded over time if
I’d stayed. When I realized I was playing the game of regrets, though, I made myself stop and do other things.

I’d pace my apartment by candlelight, trying to think of something—anything—to make the music come back. That elf who had smiled and applauded and threw coins, who had taken me home and used me, I wondered if what he’d done had been the killing blow, because I’d already been bleeding confidence for a while.

Even after Mouse arrived—an event I’d hoped meant my fortunes were changing—I played my old-fashioned music on the streets only to keep the apartment and to keep us fed, to make the money from that elf last a little longer. Mouse’s arrival hadn’t changed things, not in the way I wanted. It didn’t bring the music back. I’d been closed off from it, the way the World had been closed off from Borderland—but it didn’t return after the Way was clear again.

*   *   *

For most of that summer, Mouse was gone during the day more and more. Delivering messages, I figured, on his shared bicycle. In the evenings he’d come back for a few hours, for dinner, some conversation, to ask how I was doing, to give me things he’d gotten on the job: a bag of coffee beans, a bar of dark chocolate, a package of cigarettes, though I never smoked as a rule. “You can trade them, then,” he said when I rejected his offerings, and I realized he was, in his own way, paying me for room and board.

“You don’t owe me anything, Alek,” I said. “I’ve got the place covered. Do for yourself instead.”

“No,” he said. “We do for each other.” He smiled, happier than I’d seen him since he’d arrived. I nodded and offered a smile of my own. That was our currency. No teeth. Just upturned corners.

I was happy for those offerings, but I was worried about where they’d come from. I wasn’t stupid. I knew he must have been running something illegal on that bike of his—messages or drugs or black-market items from the World or the Fair Lands—but I traded his offerings anyway on the streets of Soho, for food and clothes and to keep the roof over our heads.

After Mouse started giving me things, I stopped playing my violin altogether. The
must
had gone out of me. Instead of playing on my corner, I started walking with my case under my arm, my collar up and my chin tucked against my chest. Rarely would I meet the eyes of a stranger, rarely would I do more than say hello to an acquaintance who stopped me to ask how I’d been doing. “Fine,” I’d say, and keep moving. I didn’t want to trap myself in a situation where I needed to explain why people no longer saw me out playing. I didn’t want to admit I could still eke out a song but they all sounded labored now, awkward, as if I were a beginner all over again.

So I stopped trying, avoided my old haunts for a while, walked in other directions, my violin case tucked under my arm like a bunch of useless flowers. I looked like I was going somewhere, but I was hiding out in the open. And months later, in the summer, when I finally got up the nerve to go back to Ho Street—to what had been
my
corner—I found a girl with green spiky hair standing behind a table with a strange machine hooked up to two tiny speakers. She sang a song I’d never heard—the streets were full of them now more than ever—into a microphone attached to the machine. Her voice drifted down the block easily. I stood there listening, until she brought her tune to a close. And then I went up to her and said, “I’m sorry, but … what is all of this?” I waved my hands at the equipment on her table.

“This?” She pointed at the main piece of machinery. “It’s a laptop.” When I didn’t respond, she said, “You know, a mobile computer? I can play downloaded karaoke songs on it? Well, as long as it’s been spelled. Live and learn. This place rocks, but it has its downsides.”

“Downloaded?” I said, vaguely recalling a word like this that Mouse had used.

The girl nodded but didn’t explain. Instead, she tapped the keyboard and stroked her fingertip across its bottom edge, tapped a few more keys, and soon a new song was playing and she was singing it. Another song I didn’t recognize. She smiled around the words. It wasn’t my idea of music, but I placed a few coins on her table before leaving.

On my way home, bemused and a bit melancholy, I stopped in a café, hoping a strong cup of coffee might change my mood. But when I sat at a communal table, where a halfie with a long coat and scraggly teeth poured tea from a pot into his cup, he looked me up and down before asking, “What’s wrong? Someone murder your sister?”

“Excuse me?” I said after swallowing a bitter sip.

“You look like you need a beer.”

“I don’t drink,” I told him.

“Name’s Billy Buttons,” the halfie said. I didn’t offer him mine. “New arrival, are you?”

“No. I’ve been around for a while. Why?”

“You look like you haven’t got a clue what’s going on,” he said. “That’s why.”

“I just saw a girl singing karaoke songs from a miniature computer. When I left the World, computers took up an entire desk.”

“Now they sit pleasantly on your lap like a cat,” said the guy. “Some in the palm of your hand. Must be one of the new kids.
They’re bringing all sorts of nifty things with them from the World these days, aren’t they?”

“Seems so.”

“Well, you roll with the punches,” said Billy. “Otherwise, you get knocked down. I’ve been around B-town long enough to learn to make adjustments when the World changes. Of course, it’s worse for you younglings who were here before the Pinching Off. You’ve got all these kids coming through now who look like you but don’t think or act like you. Makes you old before your time. It’s a shame.”