Frump waddles across the polished black-and-white marble floor, his tail wagging vigorously as he skids to a halt beside me.
Suddenly I hear a voice—distant, through a tunnel, but clear enough: “Delilah, I told you twice already… we’re going to be late!”
From time to time, I’ve heard Readers talking. They don’t usually read out loud, but every now and then, a conversation occurs when a book is open. I’ve learned quite a lot from being a good listener. Like, for example, Don’t let the bedbugs bite is apparently a common way to say good night, even in rooms that do not appear to be infested with insects. I’ve learned about things the Otherworld has that we don’t: television (which is something parents do not like as much as books); Happy Meals (apparently not all meals bring joy. Just the ones that come in a paper bag with a small toy); and showers (something you take before bedtime that leaves you drenched).
“Just let me finish,” the girl says.
“You’ve read that book a thousand times—you know how it ends. Now means now!”
I have heard this Reader speaking to the older woman before. From their conversations, I’m guessing it’s her mother. She is always telling Delilah to put the book away and go outside. To take a walk and get some fresh air. To call a friend (though how many could be within earshot?) and go to a movie (whatever that is). Repeatedly, I wait for her to heed her mother’s directions—but most of the time she finds an excuse to keep reading. Sometimes she does go outside, but opens the book and starts reading again. I cannot tell you how frustrating this is for me. Here I am, wasting away inside a book I wish I could escape, and all she wants to do is stay in the story.
If I could talk to this girl Delilah, I’d ask her why on earth she would ever trade a single second of the world she’s in for the one in which I’m stuck.
But I’ve tried talking out loud to other Readers. Believe me, it was the very first thing I attempted when I started to actively dream about life in the Otherworld. If I could just get one of those people holding the book to notice me, maybe I’d have a chance at escaping. However, the people holding the book see me only when the story is playing, and when the story is playing, I am compelled to stick to the script. Even when I try to say something like “Please! Listen to me!” I wind up announcing, instead, “I’m on my way to rescue a princess!” like some sort of puppet. If I ever had reason to believe that a Reader could see me for who I really am—not who I play in the story—I’d do, well, anything. I’d scream at the top of my lungs. I’d run in circles. I’d light myself on fire. Anything, to keep her seeing me.
Can you imagine what it would be like to know that your life was just going to be a series of days that were all the same, that were do-overs? As Prince Oliver, I may have been given the gift of life… but I have never been given the chance to live.
“Coming,” Delilah says over her shoulder, and I exhale heavily, a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding. The thought of not having to go through the motions again—it’s a gift, an absolute gift.
There is a dizzying whirl of gravity as the book starts to close, something we’ve all gotten used to. We grab on to details—candelabra and table legs and in some desperate cases, the hanging tail of a letter like g or y, until the pages are completely closed.
“Well,” I say, letting go of the drapery I was clutching. “Guess we got off lucky this—”
Before I can finish, however, I find myself flying head over heels as the pages are riffled through, and our world reopens on the very last bit of the story. As if by magic, and Seraphima is glittering beside me in her shimmering gown. Frump has a wedding band tied to a silver ribbon around his neck. The trolls are holding the pillars of a bridal bower; the pixies have spun silken ribbons that wrap around them and blow in the sea breeze. The mermaids gather in the shallows of the ocean, watching us bitterly as we wed.
I glance down, and suddenly panic.
The chessboard. It’s still there. The pixie chess pieces are gone, certainly, but the squares I drew with a stick—the proof that there is life in this book when no one is reading it—are still carved onto the beach.
I don’t know why the book hasn’t reset itself. It never makes mistakes like this; every time we are flipped to a new page we will find ourselves ready, in costume, with any necessary set in place. Maybe, for all I know, this has happened before and I never noticed it. But it stands to reason that if I noticed, someone else might too.
Like a Reader.
Delilah.
Deep breaths, Oliver, I tell myself. “Frump,” I hiss.
He growls, but I can understand him clearly: Not now.
Okay, Oliver, I tell myself. This is not a disaster. People read a fairy tale for the happy ending, not to hunt for a faintly visible chessboard scratched into the sand on the final page. Still, I try to pull Seraphima toward me in an attempt to hide the chessboard beneath the fabric of her billowing dress. Seraphima, however, misinterprets this to mean that I might actually want to get closer to her. She tilts up her chin and her eyes flutter closed, waiting for her kiss.
Everyone’s waiting. The trolls, the fairies, the mermaids. The pirates with their anchor lines tightly wrapped around Pyro the dragon to keep him subdued.
The Reader is waiting too. And if I give her what she wants, she’ll close the book and that will be that.
Oh, fine.
I lean forward and give Seraphima a kiss, winding my hands in her hair and pulling the length of her body along mine. I can feel her melt beneath my touch, leaning into me. She may not be my type, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t enjoy myself at work, after all.
“Delilah!”
As the girl leans closer, the sky darkens above us. “How strange,” she murmurs.
Her finger comes down, pushing at the edges of our world, bending the scenery even as we stand in it. I draw in my breath, thinking she is going to trap me, but instead, she touches the very spot where the chessboard is etched onto the sand.
“That,” she says, “was never here before.”
Delilah
I’M WEIRD.
Everyone says so. I suppose it’s because while other fifteen-year-olds are talking about the best lip gloss and which movie star is hotter, I would rather be curled up with a book. Seriously—have you been to a high school lately? Why would anyone sane want to interact with Cro-Magnon hockey players, or run the gauntlet of mean girls who lounge against the lockers like the fashion police, passing judgment on my faded high-top sneakers and thrift-store sweaters? No thanks; I’d much rather pretend I’m somewhere else, and any time I open the pages of a book, that happens.
My mom worries about me because I’m a loner. But that’s not entirely true. My best friend, Jules, totally gets me. It’s my mom’s fault that she can’t see past the safety pins Jules sticks through her ears and her pink Mohawk. The cool thing about hanging around with Jules, though, is that when I’m with her, nobody even looks twice at me.
Jules understands my fixation on books. She feels the same way about B-movie horror films. She knows every single line of dialogue in The Blob. She refers to the popular girls in our school as Pod People.
Jules and I are not popular. In fact, I am pretty much banned from ever being popular or, for that matter, within a hundred feet of anyone popular. Last year when we were playing softball in gym, I swung the bat and broke the left knee of Allie McAndrews, the head cheerleader. Allie had to stay off the top of the pyramid for six weeks and accepted her prom queen crown on crutches.
The worst part was I completely missed the ball. Anyone who didn’t hate me before the Injury suddenly had a reason to ignore me or sneer at me or slam me against a locker when we passed in the halls. Except Jules, who moved here a week after it happened. When I told her why I was a social pariah, she laughed. “Too bad you didn’t break them both,” she said.
Jules and I have no secrets. I know that she is addicted to soap operas, and she knows that my mother is a cleaning lady. There’s onl
y one thing I haven’t told Jules, and that’s the fact that for the past week, the reason I’ve avoided her is that I’m embarrassed by my choice of reading material.
A fairy tale written for elementary school kids.
If you think it’s social suicide to literally bring the head cheerleader to her knees, you should try reading a children’s book in plain sight in a high school. If you read Dostoyevsky, you’re weird but smart. If you read comic books, you’re weird but hip. If you read a fairy tale, you’re just a dork.
I discovered this story a month ago, when I was eating lunch quietly in the school library. There I sat, chewing on a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich, when I noticed that one book on the shelf was upside down and backwards, as if it had been jammed in. Figuring I could help Ms. Winx, the librarian, I went to fix it, and got an enormous electric shock to the tips of my fingers.
The book was tattered and the spine was shaky—I would have thought that by now it would have made its way to the annual sale, where you could buy old novels for a dime each. It was illustrated—clearly a fairy tale—but it was shelved with nonfiction books about World War I. And strangest of all, it didn’t have a bar code to be checked out.
“Ms. Winx,” I asked, “have you ever read this one?”
“Oh, a long time ago,” she told me. “But it’s actually quite special. The author hand-painted the pictures and had it bound.”
“It must be worth a fortune!”
“Not so much,” Ms. Winx said. “The writer was known for her murder mysteries. This was more of an experiment for her. A prototype that never evolved. In fact, she never wrote another book after this one. I was a big fan of her other novels, and couldn’t pass this up when I found it at a rummage sale. So for a nickel, it became the property of the school.”
I looked down at the cover—Between the Lines, by Jessamyn Jacobs.
I checked it out that first day, and while I was in Earth Science class, I hid the fairy tale inside my textbook and read it from cover to cover. It’s about a prince, Oliver, who goes on a quest to rescue a princess, who’s been taken hostage by the evil Rapscullio. The problem is that Oliver, unlike most fairy-tale princes, isn’t a big fan of taking risks. His father died in battle, and as far as he’s concerned, it’s far better to be safe than sorry.
I think that’s what made me keep reading. The very first thing you learn about Oliver is that it wasn’t easy growing up without a dad. It was as if the words had been taken straight from my mouth. My father had not died in battle, but he’d left my mother when I was ten years old and found himself a new, improved family. She cried every night that year. I was a straight-A student—not because I loved school but because I didn’t want to be one more person who disappointed my mother. We had to move to a small house and my mom had to work hard cleaning the homes of the girls who treated me like pond scum.
True confessions time: Oliver is cuter than any guy in my school. Granted, he is two-dimensional and illustrated. Don’t judge me—go take a look at Wolverine in an X-Men comic and tell me he isn’t hot. With his jet-black hair and pale eyes, it seems that Oliver is smiling up from the page directly at me. Clearly, any normal girl would take this as a sign that she needs to get out more. But me, I don’t have too many places to get to.
Plus, he is smart. He conquers one obstacle after another—not with his sword but with his cleverness. For example, when he is held captive by a trio of creepy, boy-crazy mermaids, he promises to get them dates in return for a pack of supplies—flotsam and jetsam that had washed into the ocean after shipwrecks. He uses that junk—other people’s garbage—to rescue himself from the snares of the fiery dragon that had killed his own father. He’s not your typical prince, more like a square peg in a round hole, kind of like me. He’s the sort of guy who wouldn’t mind reading side by side on a date. And he knows how to kiss, unlike Leonard Uberhardt, who practically tried to swallow me whole behind the jungle gym in seventh grade.
That first week, I read the book so often that I memorized the words; I knew the layout of the pictures on the pages. I dreamed that I was being chased by Rapscullio or forced by Captain Crabbe to walk the plank. Each week, I’d bring the book back to the library, because that was school policy. I’d have to wait until it was returned to the shelf a day later, giving someone else a chance to read it. But what other ninth grader cares about fairy tales? The book was always waiting for me, so I could check it out again and reconfirm my position as Public Loser Number One.
My mother worried. Why was a girl like me, who could easily read thousand-page adult novels, obsessed with a children’s book?
I knew the answer to that, not that I was about to admit it to anyone.
Prince Oliver understood me better than anyone in the world.
True, I’d never met him. And true, he was a fictional character. But he also was what people needed him to be: a dashing hero, an articulate peacemaker, a cunning escape artist. Then again, Prince Oliver had never existed anywhere but on a page, and in some random author’s brain. He didn’t know what it was like to be stuffed into a locker by the cheerleading squad and left there until some janitor heard me yelling.
Today, I decide as I wake up and stare at the ceiling, is going to be different. First thing, I am going to return the book to the library. In my English journal, I’ll write down that I’ve been reading The Hunger Games for my outside reading requirement (like 98 percent of the ninth grade), and I’ll explain why I am Team Peeta instead of Team Gale. I’ll tell Jules that we should go to the Rocky Horror marathon at the cheap theater this weekend. Then in Earth Science I’ll finally get enough courage to go talk to Zach, my vegan lab partner who insists on feeding tofu crumbles to the class Venus flytrap, and who probably will save the whales before he turns twenty-one.
Yes, today is the day everything is going to change.
I get up and take a shower and get dressed, but the fairy tale is sitting on my nightstand where I left it before I went to bed. This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story. But this time, something feels wrong. It is like an itch between my eyebrows, a wrinkle in my mind. Frowning, I scan through the dialogue, which is all the way it should be. I glance at the illustration: the prince sitting on a throne, his dog waiting beside him.
“Delilah!” my mother yells. “I told you twice already… we’re going to be late!”
I stare at the page, my eyes narrowed. What is it that’s off? “Just let me finish—”
“You’ve read that book a thousand times—you know how it ends. Now means now!”
I flip through the book to the final page. When I see it, I can’t believe I haven’t noticed it before. Just to the left of Princess Seraphima’s glittering gown, drawn into the sand, is a grid. Sort of like a bingo chart. Or a chessboard.
“How strange,” I say softly. “That was never here before.”
“DELILAH EVE!”
When my mother uses my middle name, it means she’s really angry. I close the book and tuck it into my backpack, then hurry downstairs to scarf down breakfast before I am dropped off at school.
My mother is already rinsing her coffee cup as I grab a slice of toast and butter it. “Mom,” I ask, “have you ever read a book and had it… change?”
She looks over her shoulder. “Well, sure. The first time I read Gone with the Wind and Rhett walked out on Scarlett, I was fifteen and thought all that unrequited love was wildly romantic. The second time I read it, last summer, I thought she was silly and he was a selfish pig.”
“That’s not what I mean…. That’s you changing—not the book.” I take a bite of the toast and wash it down with orange juice. “Imagine that you’ve read a story a hundred times and it always takes place on a ship. And then one day, you read it, and it’s set in the Wild West instead.”
“That’s ridiculous
,” my mother replies. “Books don’t change in front of your eyes.”
“Mine did,” I say.
She turns and looks at me, head tilted as if she is trying to figure out if I am lying or crazy or both. “You need to get more sleep, Delilah,” she announces.
“Mom, I’m serious—”
“You simply saw something you overlooked before,” my mother says, and she puts on her jacket. “Let’s go.”
But it’s not something I overlooked. I know it.
The whole way to school, my backpack sits on my lap. My mother and I talk about things that don’t matter—what time she is coming home from work; if I’m ready for my Algebra test; if it’s going to snow—when all I can focus on is that faint little chessboard scratched into the sand of the beach on the last page of the fairy tale.
Our car pulls up in front of the building. “Have a good day,” my mother says, and I kiss her goodbye. I hurry past a kid plugged into his earphones, and the popular girls, who cluster together like grapes. (Honestly, do you ever see just one of them?)
The school’s current “it” couple, Brianna and Angelo—or BrAngelo, as they’re known—are wrapped in each other’s arms across my locker.
“I’m gonna miss you,” Brianna says.
“I’m gonna miss you too, baby,” Angelo murmurs.
For Pete’s sake. It’s not like she’s leaving on a trip around the world. She’s only headed to homeroom.
I don’t realize I’ve said that out loud until I see them both staring at me. “Get a life,” Brianna says.
Angelo laughs. “Or at least a boyfriend.”
They leave with their arms around each other, hands tucked into each other’s rear jeans pockets.