The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

  Tamburlaine was the part of the forest she had painted all around her in colors as bright as her own.

  “It’s not always like this,” she laughed nervously. “It’s only that it’s springtime. Oh, Thomas! I’ve kept quiet so long! I knew you were like me that very first day. When you talked to your desk. I was sure when you enchanted the whole class under the jungle gym. Just talked to them, just a few words, and they’d follow you to Hamlin if you had a pipe. You came to school in your coat with all that treasure sewn onto the shoulders—and now even the high school kids are wearing their grandmother’s brooches on their coats. Thomas, Thomas, don’t you know? Haven’t you always, just always felt you didn’t belong to your family, not really? Haven’t you always known there was something different about you, something off? That’s why you keep your little book of rules, because this world is so hard, isn’t it? It makes no sense; everything’s always upside down and sideways. Haven’t you always felt like the strangest boy in the world? Like nothing inside you matched the outside?”

  Thomas Rood’s vision swam. Sweat wriggled through his hair. Maybe this is what dying feels like, he thought wildly. But before he could stop himself he was talking, talking like his tongue could outrace the dying.

  “When I was little, they took me to the optometrist and I sat in the chair while the doctor put a black mask over my face and slid lenses in and out of it. And every time he asked if I could see better out of one or the other. One or the other. But I couldn’t see at all. I couldn’t see the room or my parents or the doctor. I looked through one lens and I saw a beach covered in gold and jewels and coins. ‘How about now?’ he said, and I screamed. So he changed the lens. ‘How about now?’ And I saw a city made all of wool and yarn and silk with a river of tea flowing round it. I started to cry. ‘How about now?’ And I saw a herd of giant bicycles barreling over a meadow toward me. ‘How about now?’ But all I could see was a great lavender eel speeding along under a million stars with people riding on it like a train. I screamed and screamed and clawed at the mask. They thought I was trying to get it off but really, really I was trying to get in, to that place where those things lived.” Thomas was out of breath, his hair sopping sweat. “I never told anyone, never ever. I never wore my glasses even once, even though I can really only see things close up—I’m useless at anything far away.”

  Tamburlaine nodded eagerly. She held out her hands to the forest on her walls, throbbing with color. “You see it too. There. We’re the same, you and me. Tom and Tam. And there’s a word for us.” She ran her finger along the edge of Tam Lin. “You know what one. Say it. Come on. Say it once.”

  “No, I don’t want to. I’m Normal,” he begged her. He could see his father’s face before him, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his own glasses and saying the names of medicines he did not want to send for like a magic spell. “I can be Normal.”

  The lime-green lady’s voice trumpeted in his ears, deafening. He whirled around, expecting to see her crouching right next to him, singing into his skull. But there was no lady. Thomas stared down into the wide, flaring brass mouth of a gramophone. He screamed, but it couldn’t quite get out, and turned into a squeak instead.

  The gramophone stopped short. It lifted its own needle. The music crackled down to nothing. And as Thomas stared, his heart coming utterly apart and rearranging itself around what it was seeing, the gramophone unfolded four long, curved brass legs from its wooden table. Each of them ended in a curly lion’s paw like Thomas’s bathtub. It had been very beautiful once. Bold green and blue filigree patterns still gleamed on its bell, though the paint peeled and cracked. The gramophone tottered up and backward like a baby bird, and though it had no face to flush or furrow or cry, Thomas knew he had hurt its feelings by shrieking.

  The gramophone was embarrassed.

  It clattered over to the corner of the painted room and stood with its bell facing the wall, punishing itself for scaring him. After a moment it put its needle down again. Its crank wound slowly. The lime-green lady sang out—and though he had heard her sing many times, somehow, now, it sounded almost apologetic:

  In the mornin’, in the evenin’

  Ain’t we got fun?

  Then it lifted its needle again and went quiet.

  Tamburlaine got up and went to the gramophone, stroking it like a German shepherd scolded for barking too loud. It turned its bell up to her lovingly. She looked back over her shoulder at him, plum blossoms falling down her back, her face framed by the spires of a distant city beyond the forest she’d drawn, a city of many colors, a city that looked as though it might just be made all of cloth.

  “Say it, Thomas. It’s not a bad word, it’s not. Say what we are.”

  The troll in Thomas Rood laughed and wept and wrote the word over and over on the walls of his heart, on his ribs, on the insides of his eyelids.

  “Please?” Tamburlaine begged. “Tell me I’m not wrong.” Green tears welled in her eyes. “Tell me I’m not alone.”

  Thomas put his hands over his face. From beneath them, he whispered:

  “Changelings.”

  “Changelings,” she answered, and the gramophone shuffled its brass feet, singing over and over:

  Ain’t we got fun?

  CHAPTER VIII

  PLEASE BE WILD AND WONDERFUL

  In Which Thomas Summons a Guest (and Her Dog), Learns How a Piece of Wood Became a Daughter, Writes Out a Recipe for Wombat, and Becomes the Legal Property of a Marsupial

  Time ran differently in the Empire of After School. If you didn’t go home, it could almost stretch on forever. It wasn’t like the Kingdom of School. It wasn’t a particular place. The great clanging bell could ring at three o’clock and you could play on the swingset and throw a ball against the brick wall of the schoolhouse and still, somehow, not find your way to the Land of After School. But you could drag your feet walking home, spend a precious dime on a strawberry pop, cut through the park, kicking a pinecone down the grass while thinking about what it would feel like to be a hippopotamus and take your baths in the Nile and suddenly find yourself there, in the long orange hours before supper, where a hundred games and a thousand jokes can squeeze in.

  The trick to making it last, as Thomas faithfully reported to Inspector Balloon, whose cheerful cover had grown a bald spot and many wrinkles, as befits an old scholar, was to avoid the Enemies of the Empire, which is to say, anyone bigger than you. Teachers would tell you to get on home and remind you to read the longest book they could think of just at that moment for a surprise quiz tomorrow. Big Kids, if they had suffered one of the strange and mystic sorrows that plagued their kind and had a mood on, would probably wallop you one or trip you flat. Parents would flex their magic and you would find yourself boiling spaghetti or sweeping the porch or doing math problems at the kitchen table no matter how much you struggled and strove.

  But the best part of the Empire of After School was coming home to an empty house all to yourself, knowing your parents have got to be away visiting their own exotic countries: the Duchy of Dinner Parties, the Commonwealth of Overtime, Dance-Hall County, the misty and mysterious nations where Grown-Ups venture alone, like the dancing princesses disappearing at night.

  On this particular evening, Nicholas and Gwendolyn Rood had mounted an expedition to the Marshes of Politics, attending a rally to benefit men like Nicholas, who had gone away to war and felt that things ought to have been better when they got back. The Country of War was so distant and dreadful that Thomas could hardly think about it, could not begin to make a section for it in Inspector Balloon. His father had been there, had lived there, but he would not talk about it. Thomas understood that the Country of War casts a spell of silence when you leave it, so that it can keep its awful secrets forever. Thomas never wanted to go to the rallies—and today would not be the day he changed his mind. Tamburlaine was coming, and thus a herd of Egyptian hippos could not drag him out of his house before she arrived.

  It was his turn to l
et her into his house, his room, his little Nation of the Learmont Arms Apartments, #7. He raced home and tried to think of the rituals his mother used to summon a visitor: sweep the floor, put flowers in the vase on the dining table, turn up the lights, put the kettle on, make little miniature sandwiches. Thomas always vanished into his room when his mother’s friends arrived, so he did not know that the kettle meant tea. It only seemed important to fill it with water and make it whistle. Nor did he see why the sandwiches had to be so tiny and thin when people were always hungry in the afternoon and those wouldn’t feed a doll, but he did it anyway, slicing cheese and radishes carefully with the big knife. He made his bed, which he never did, preferring to keep it as more of a nest or a cave than a bed. He brushed out all the cobwebs in his room and shoved his clothes into his chest of drawers till it was packed so tight it groaned. He made sure all his troll and fairy-story books were lined up neatly on his bookshelf where Tamburlaine would see them straightaway. And he waited. The kettle screamed—and the summoning seemed to work, for a knock rapped at the door.

  Tamburlaine was wearing her wig and her skin again. Behind her she pulled a huge red Irish setter with chocolatey, warm eyes. Thomas hadn’t heard a dog when he’d visited her house! Perhaps he lived outside. Tamburlaine seemed strange to him, now he knew what she really looked like. Like somebody wearing clothes she had outgrown years ago. But she didn’t take them off or shake out her plummy hair as she had before. She looked around politely, thanked him for the sandwiches, and munched on one with a thoughtful expression. The Irish setter sat on his rear and yawned. Out of her own house, Tamburlaine seemed much less sure of everything in the world.

  “I didn’t know you had a dog,” Thomas ventured.

  “A dog? Oh! Silly me.”

  Tamburlaine reached up a hand and smacked him hard on the side of his head. It made a loud thwack in the quiet. And it hurt like fire.

  “Ow! Hey!”

  Thomas’s eyes crossed a little—and when they came uncrossed, the Irish setter had vanished. The gramophone stood hesitantly behind Tamburlaine, shifting bashfully on its long brass legs, tilting its bell this way and that.

  “He wanted to come,” Tamburlaine explained. “He likes you. Thomas, this is Scratch. I made him, and he’s just the most marvelous thing there is. Do you have anything for him to eat? He likes ragtime and jazz and torch songs…but it has to have lyrics. He doesn’t have a mouth, you know. He can only say what’s on his turntable.”

  Scratch arched the neck of his bell in pleasure. He wound up his crank and dropped his needle. The lime-green lady’s voice poured out:

  Now the curtain is going up

  the Entertainer is taking a bow!

  Thomas thought he might cry again. But his face decided to grin instead. Scratch was an alive thing. A talking thing. Alive and talking the way he’d always wanted everything, just everything, to be. Thomas went over to his parents’ gramophone, which seemed rather shabby and dull just now, and pulled a record out of the cabinet where his parents kept them. It had a great handsome fat man in a sky-blue suit on the cover, his mouth wide open to let the music out.

  “And…and sometimes he’s a dog?” Thomas handed it over and tried to sound casual, as if he already knew that sometime gramophones could be dogs.

  Scratch shook his bell and moved his needle to a different groove on the spinning black record. He sang again:

  No, sir, don’t mean maybe…

  “No, no,” Tamburlaine laughed, petting Scratch’s bell. She took the record from him and changed out the lime-green lady for the sky-blue man.

  Scratch lowered his needle gingerly.

  Tell me, tell me, what did you do to me

  I just got a thrill that was new to me…

  Scratch bounced his bell joyfully. He liked the record. It would let him say new things, exciting things. Tamburlaine gave him such a tender, happy smile—a new smile Thomas had never seen her make before, and he wished it had been made for him.

  “It’s a glamour,” she said. “So that we can walk down the street together without people staring. A glamour is like…if there’s a hole in your wall because somebody opened a door too fast or wasn’t careful enough moving a bookshelf, you could hang a picture over it, so nobody sees. The hole’s still there, it’s just hidden.” She seemed to grow suddenly shy. “I could show you…if you want.”

  Thomas did want, more than anything. “Tam…can I call you Tam now? I know you said not to but I understand now why you didn’t like it. It can be just our secret, I’ll only say it when we’re alone. Tam…I know you think we’re the same, but you must see we’re not. I can’t make a Scratch. Believe me. I’ve been trying to since I was little. Nothing comes alive just because I want it to be alive. I don’t have any flowers on the inside. You…you are marvelous, and your gramophone is, and your painting…but I can’t do any of that. I wish I could. You have no idea. I know what I said the other day but…but I’m still just Thomas. Just a boy.” Tell me I’m wrong, his heart begged. I want to be wrong.

  Tamburlaine nodded. She put down her plate and wiped her mouth. “I can prove you’re not. I guess…I guess I thought it would be nice if you believed me. Because I’m technically your oldest friend and all. I guess I thought it would feel nice if you just looked at me and knew, down deep in your gut. The way you knew the word Changeling. But that’s okay. This will be fun, too. It’ll be like when we made those clay mugs in Mrs. Miller’s class.”

  Thomas licked his dry lips. He’d made a beautiful mug—shaped like an elephant, with a little clay palanquin and a little clay prince for a lid. His father had dropped it a week after he brought it home and shattered the poor prince all over the floor.

  “First: materials. Do you have anything you can use like a wand? Something that’s yours, not like a rolled-up sheet of math problems. Something you like.”

  Thomas shook his head, trying to shake it into sense again. A wand? He was having a conversation with a girl in which wands had a starring role.

  “Um…yeah. Sure.”

  He knew what it had to be. Without even thinking about it, it popped into his head like the answer to a riddle. Thomas darted down the hall to his room and yanked open his desk drawer. He pulled out a long, yellow No. 2 pencil. The Magic Pencil. When he turned around, Tamburlaine was standing in the doorway to his room. Scratch peered curiously over her shoulder. She knew Vampire Law, too: You have to wait to be invited. Thomas held out his pencil toward her.

  “I’ve had it since forever. My mom gave it to me. When I was a baby. She pulled it out of her hair and gave it to me and I’ve been really careful, I haven’t used it up yet, because…” He was aware he was babbling, and clammed up before the rest could come hurrying out. Because I’m on a quest. She gave me a quest. She pulled this pencil out of her head like a sword out of a scabbard and I knew it was a sacred quest, the kind Galahad got. She charged me to go to the Kingdom of University and meet a Girl Called Lovely and Practice Psychology like my Father before me. And I want to, I want to, but it’s taking so long. “…Well, I guess for no good reason. It’s…it’s okay, you can come in.”

  Tamburlaine stepped in lightly and sat on his bed. He wished his quilt weren’t so plain, that he had something extraordinary to show her besides cheese sandwiches and a pencil. She squinted and eyeballed his pencil, turned it over in her hands, poked her fingernail into the eraser.

  “Okay,” she said, nodding satisfaction. “Now, pick something you like.” Tamburlaine grinned up at him, eager, enjoying being mysterious, stretching out the game like a stage magician.

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the house. Pick something you like. Anything you think is pretty or interesting or nice?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Just pick something, silly. We don’t have all night. It has to be something you like or it won’t work. Don’t ask me why. I don’t have any whys. I only know a couple of things and they’re only the things I know. An
d the only reason I know things you don’t is that I couldn’t help knowing. It’s hard to go along thinking everything is fine and someday you’ll go to nursing school when you have plums growing out of your palms.”

  Thomas looked around. He didn’t have much in his room—he’d broken most of his toys ages back. His baseball sat quietly on his desk, his books in their shelf, his alarm clock, his bedside lamp…and his wombat. Thomas’s eyes fell on the scrap-yarn wombat his mother had made him so long ago, her patchwork colors mismatched, her stuffing showing near her tail, her lopsided button eyes dull and scratched. Tamburlaine followed his gaze.

  “Perfect,” she said. She picked the scrap-yarn wombat up off his pillow with both hands—she was really rather enormous for a toy—and handed her to him. “I like wombats. What’s its name?”

  Thomas hesitated, scratching the back of his neck. He had never told anyone the names of his belongings before. “Her. Her name’s Blunderbuss. I like to name things; I know it’s dumb.”

  “Of course you like to name things,” Tamburlaine said with a little smile. “We all do.”

  “Tam, what if I can’t do…whatever it is you think I can do? You keep saying we’re the same but I’m not…I’m not a tree.”

  The troll inside Thomas clapped its hands. Not a tree, it giggled, a rock.

  Tamburlaine looked startled for a moment. Then she laughed, and under all her strangeness was a twelve-year-old girl again.