Oliver #3
“You don’t want to know,” Delilah answers. She glances away from the book. “I wonder if my mom realized that my phone’s plugged into the wall at my desk.”
“So?”
“It makes it considerably harder to be having a conversation with Jules.” She sighs. “How long until my mother thinks there’s something wrong with me again, because I’m obsessing over this book?”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll try to be quieter next time I yell at you.”
This, at last, makes her smile.
“When he touches you,” I ask softly, “do you think of me?”
Delilah’s eyes are like molten gold. “I think of how he’s not you,” she replies. “Of how no one ever could be.”
I stare up at her. She’s my sky, my whole universe. “Tell me about your day,” I say.
The next morning, I decide to turn over a new leaf. Baking clearly isn’t my forte, art isn’t quite in my wheelhouse, and apparently stalking doesn’t qualify as a hobby. So, borrowing some equipment from Scuttle and Walleye, I head to the beach to try my hand at fishing.
No sooner have I cast my line than Marina surfaces, her tail slicing through the ocean. “You know, fish have feelings,” she says reproachfully.
“So do plants,” I point out. “How was your kelp salad this morning?”
In a huff, she dives beneath the surface.
For a few moments, I enjoy the sun beating down on the crown of my head, and the lull of the waves, and the distant cries of seagulls circling overhead.
It feels good to stretch my muscles as I reel in and cast again.
This…this is something I could get used to.
My solitude is shattered by the wet, messy, barking arrival of a tornado of fur, which knocks me to my knees and proceeds to slobber all over my face. “Humphrey!” I hear. “Heel!”
Immediately the dog sits, his tail still quivering, so that he is moving closer inch by infinitesimal inch. His tongue hangs so far out of his mouth it nearly brushes the sand.
Seraphima clips a leash onto Humphrey’s collar. “Sorry,” she says. “We’re still working on basic training.”
The dog looks up at her. “You’re so pretty. Your hair looks like the sun.”
She blushes and pats his head. “Thanks, Humphrey.”
I put down my rod and get to my feet. “So,” I say. “How have you been?”
Seraphima looks out over the ocean. “I keep thinking it was a dream. The crazy carriage without horses…and the indoor marketplace…and how Frump…well, you know. But it wasn’t a dream, Ollie, was it?”
I shake my head. “It was real.”
Her eyes light up. “I was real,” she whispers. “I never thought about making my own choices before, I guess. I mean, when you’re a princess, why would you want to be anything other than that?” She leans toward me, conspiratorial. “Can I show you a secret?”
“Erm…yes?” I say.
Delicately she lifts the hem of her gown, hiking it to her waist to reveal a pair of blue breeches stitched to look like a pair of jeans.
“They’re incredible,” she enthuses. “You can run and climb and dance in these—you can do anything—and you don’t have to worry about getting tangled up in your petticoats. ”
I grin. “Oh, I know. I’m always tripping over my petticoats….”
“Right?” she agrees. “I traded Scuttle a needlepoint trivet for his spare pair of breeches. And then it really only took a few hours of sewing to alter them to fit.”
“They look splendid on you,” I say.
Her eyes grow wide. “You won’t tell anyone, will you, Ollie? It’ll be our secret?”
Of all the characters here with me, Seraphima alone truly understands what it was to live in a world other than this book. Ironically, the one person with whom I had nothing in common is now the only one I can really relate to.
I suppose that means we’re friends.
“Have you ever been fishing?” I ask.
Seraphima blinks at me. “It’s not ordinary princess practice.”
“Good thing you’re no ordinary princess.”
A smile unfurls across Seraphima’s face.
She glances down the beach in both directions, then drops Humphrey’s leash.
He begins to run in circles, barking at the seagulls, while Seraphima unfastens the skirt of her gown and places it carefully on the sand.
Dressed now in her bodice and her makeshift jeans, she crouches beside me as I pick up a worm.
“Ooh!” she cries. “Let me!”
I watch with no small amount of appreciation as she threads the hook through the worm. Who would have guessed that Seraphima is so bloodthirsty?
She stands, the rod in her hand and the worm wriggling. “Now what?” she asks.
Before I can answer, however, a breeze whips across the beach, whisking her skirt into the air like a kite. As I watch, it catches at her waist and wraps neatly around, fastening itself.
“That’s odd,” I say, the only words I manage to get out before being yanked off the beach and tumbled through pages and phrases and dangling participles that strike me in the face until I land, heavily, on the parquet floor of the throne room in the royal court.
It’s been so long since I performed the story that at first, I don’t realize what’s happening.
Why the devil is Delilah starting from the beginning? Why not just meet me on page 43, as is our custom?
I do not appear on the first page of the story. That is a flashback to my birth, and so while I wait for my scene—the one where Rapscullio, our villain, convinces me that I must find his daughter, who has been kidnapped and locked in a tower—I am usually alone with Frump.
But that’s not possible anymore.
Humphrey whimpers and moves from edge to edge of the page. “What’s going on? What’s going on? It’s the end of the world. We’re gonna die. Wait! I know. I’ll chew through this wall. That’ll help.”
“Relax,” I tell him. “It’s not a thunderstorm. It’s just a Reader. All you have to do is sit next to me and look like a dog.”
“I…I don’t know. I’ve never done that before….”
“Trust me. You’ll be a natural.”
I can hear the lines being recited on the previous page, and I know my entrance is coming.
Rapscullio slides effortlessly from the previous scene into this one, and I open my mouth, intending to ask Delilah what on earth she’s doing.
But Rapscullio gives me a nearly imperceptible shake of his head, and when I look up at the Reader, it’s not Delilah at all.
It’s her mother.
We are rusty. But we are professionals. I feel the words pulled from my throat, as if they are a ribbon. Save who? I say, scowling.
Surreptitiously I glance at Mrs. McPhee and I see her eyes widen as she squints at my face. Oh God. She’s going to recognize me as Delilah’s boyfriend.
It takes all the effort I can muster to angle my head against the illustration’s will so that she can only make out my profile instead of my full features.
“What is inside this book that you can’t live without, Delilah?
” Mrs. McPhee murmurs absently. She finishes the page and turns to the next.
Suddenly I stand with Queen Maureen, trying to explain to her why I am about to embark on a mission to save this princess.
Maureen’s lips tremble as I speak; I can register the fear on her face as she channels what it must be like as a mother to say goodbye to her son.
She is doing an acting job better than I’ve ever seen, but then, so is everyone else.
They are all bristling with energy, delighted to be read for the first time in months.
All but me, that is.
I am reliving a nightmare.
I gallop through the Enchanted Forest and outwit the fairies, I nearly drown in the ocean, I cheat the trolls to ensure a safe passage, and all this I do while managing to keep my face turned away from the Reader.
By the time I am on page 43, scaling the cliff wall, my body is shaking from exertion.
When Rapscullio locks me in the dungeon, it’s almost a relief, because my face is drawn in shadow.
Finally I am pulled to the white sand of Everafter Beach.
Humphrey is trying to eat the wedding rings attached to his collar.
The mermaids wave from the breakers; the trolls hold the poles of the bridal canopy; the fairies have twined ribbons around them.
And Seraphima, as always, is in my embrace, wearing her silver wedding gown.
And a pair of jeans underneath.
As Mrs. McPhee’s eyes skim the last words of the fairy tale, I am drawn inexorably toward Seraphima.
I think of Delilah, kissing Edgar.
And just as Delilah said about that kiss, all I can think about is how Seraphima is the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong everything. How she isn’t Delilah.
But my lips stay pressed to hers, glued by a happily-ever-after, until the back cover is closed.
Around me, the other characters start to cheer.
Well done! Bravo!
That was excellent.
Did you see the part where I—
Oh, how I’ve missed performing….
I fall to my knees as if I’ve been punched, gasping for breath. Rapscullio claps me on the shoulder. “Just like old times, right, Oliver?” he says, smiling widely.
His words are the match that ignites the fire within me.
Staggering to my feet, I start to run as fast as I can.
I move across the pages so quickly that the scenes blur behind me; I don’t stop to see where I am.
I run until I pass my first scene, and the one before it, through the dedications, skittering past the copyright, until I skid into the great white morass of the title page.
There, I hesitate, momentarily dizzied by the empty expanse.
There’s nowhere else to go.
But that isn’t going to stop me.
I hurl myself headlong into the margin, bouncing back. I beat myself against the cardboard cover, over and over, until my hands come away bruised. And still I force myself upright again, launching my body against the boundaries of this book.
Finally, battered, I fall backward on the frontispiece.
My fists leave smudges of blood on the vast white surface.
I stare up at the sky, at nothing.
After a moment I come up on my elbows, still panting. I flex my aching fingers. I watch the bruises fade. I watch my blood vanish, as if it never existed.
As if I never existed.