“And if it’s the wrong key?”
Kyrie shrugged. “The oxygen spell wears off. And you drown.”
How on earth would he know which key to pick? One wrong choice here would be his last. Oliver blinked, struggling to swallow his panic.
“Come now,” Ondine snapped, leaning over the half shell. “We don’t have all day.” Annoyed, she overturned the bowl of keys, scattering them into the sand at Oliver’s feet.
There was the tiniest flicker in his fading vision—perhaps a ray of sun slanting through the sea, maybe the reflection of a fish’s silver scale. At any rate, it drew Oliver’s attention to his father’s compass hanging around Ondine’s neck.
Very slowly, as he watched, the needle began to jump, quivering to the right until it seemed to be an arrow directly indicating one key that had drifted and fallen a distance away from the others.
It points you home, his mother had said.
Oliver leaned down and grabbed that key. He felt his vision fading as he slid the key into the padlock. It slipped easily, effortlessly, and the hinge fell open. A black cloud of squid ink billowed from inside.
The contents were not gold, or jewels, or anything that would be considered treasure by any stretch of the imagination. The mermaids brought him, one by one, each item from inside the chest.
A fire extinguisher.
A megaphone.
A shark’s tooth.
Oliver blinked, his vision blurred. “But these aren’t riches,” he forced out.
“What makes a treasure a treasure,” Marina replied, “is how rare a find it is, when you need it the most.” She reached toward Ondine and ripped the compass from her sister’s neck, pressing it into Oliver’s palm.
Oliver considered her words. And as he passed out, he thought that maybe this was the best advice one could ever be given about love.
OLIVER
THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DELILAH MCPHEE:
She bites her nails when she’s nervous.
She sings off-key.
She mispronounces the word schedule in her flat, odd accent, yet insists that I’m the one who can’t speak correctly.
She has the most mesmerizing eyes. It’s as if she needn’t speak at all, since everything she’s feeling is written within them.
“You’re not listening,” Delilah says.
After my spending hours without her, we are finally together again. It is a little difficult to hear her, because she’s blasting music from that magical box called a radio, in the hopes that it will keep her mother from hearing her talk out loud to me. Behind Delilah’s shoulders I can see the familiar bits of what I know is her bedroom—pink walls, pink lampshades, pink everything. At the edge of my vision is a fringed, furry throw pillow. And yes, it’s pink.
“You keep distracting me,” I tell her.
“All I’m doing is sitting here talking to you!”
“Exactly,” I say, and I smile at her.
I like knowing that when I smile that way, it makes her cheeks go red. It’s interesting that the same thing happens when I smile at Seraphima, but I don’t find that nearly as charming.
I am looking at the way Delilah’s eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks and trying to decide if her hair is the color of milk chocolate or polished teak as she natters on and on. “I completely understand why you feel trapped,” Delilah says. “But it’s better to be trapped and alive—whatever that means inside a book—than free and dead.”
Teakwood, definitely. Or maybe walnut.
“If something as simple as a spider didn’t make it out of this book, how do you think a human being is going to fare? What if I pull you out of the book and you’re only… a word?”
She gets up from where she is lying on her bed, talking to me, and starts pacing back and forth. From this perspective, I can see more of the room behind her: a mirror with pictures affixed around its edge, of Delilah and the girl she was speaking with earlier today; of Delilah with her arms spread wide at the top of a mountain; of Delilah and her mother making funny faces. I think that if I were to get out of this book, one of my first orders of business would be to steal one of those photos, so that I could always have her with me.
The other thing I can see from this angle is the way every inch of her figure is quite visible in the odd clothing she wears—some sort of blue hose with several rips and tears. They’re so tight it’s as if she’s practically wearing nothing.
“Why aren’t you wearing a dress?” I blurt out.
Delilah stops moving and faces me. “What? What does that have to do with anything?”
“What you’re wearing is indecent!”
She snorts. “It’s a whole lot more decent than what some of the girls in my school wear,” she says. “Relax, Oliver. They’re just jeans.”
I realize that although I’ve seen Readers in strange garb before, they are usually so close to the page that I haven’t marked the differences between their clothing and mine. On Delilah, though, I can’t help but notice.
“As I was saying,” she continues pointedly, “I really wish I could help you. But I’ve been thinking about you all day—believe me, you’re all I’ve thought about—”
At this, I grin.
“—and I don’t think I could ever forgive myself if I were the one who killed you.”
My head snaps up. “Killed me? Why the devil would you do that?”
“Oliver, have you listened to anything I’ve just said? I can’t risk having what happened to that spider happen to you.” She sits down, looking into her lap. “I only just found you,” Delilah says. “I can’t lose you now.”
In the fairy tale, I’ve never had to worry about death. I know the mermaids will not let me drown. I know I’ll always beat the dragon. I know I’ll always defeat Rapscullio.
But this Otherworld, it doesn’t work the same way. There are no second chances. Death, here, is for real.
It hits me with the force of a blow: the understanding that I’d rather die than know I might never have a chance to truly, finally, kiss Delilah McPhee.
Maybe the reason I’ve never died in this story is that I’ve never had something worth dying for before.
“We just need to think of a different escape method,” I suggest. “There has to be another way.”
I hear Delilah’s mother calling her name, and all of a sudden the book is slammed shut. I wait a few moments, in the hope that Delilah might come back.
When she does, it’s on page 43 once again. “Sorry,” she says. She is hurrying around her room, locating a rucksack and stuffing a towel inside. “I have to go to swim practice.”
“I’m sure you’ll get the hang of it quickly,” I reply. “I did.”
“I know how to swim,” Delilah says. “It’s a sport. I’m supposed to be doing it for fun. But when you come in last place every time in the individual medley, it’s hard to find the joy.”
“Then why do it?”
“My mother thinks it will help me fit in.”
“You should just tell her you’d prefer not to.”
She pauses and looks at me. “Why don’t you tell your mother off when she gives you a hard time?”
“That’s different. I was written that way.”
“Well, believe me,” Delilah says. “Being a teenager isn’t all that different from being part of someone else’s story, then. There’s always someone who thinks they know better than you do.”
I offer my most charming grin. “You could stay with me instead.”
“I wish.” Delilah sighs. “But that’s not going to happen.”
“Then take me with you.”
“Water and books don’t mix very well.”
“DELILAH!” Her mother’s voice booms in the background once again.
And so she closes the book, more gently this time, and abandons me.
I sit down on the edge of page 43, already missing her, as Queen Maureen wanders into the edge of the margin. It’s like that when the book is closed??
?any of us can wander anywhere; there’s no privacy. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she says, backing away. “I didn’t realize anyone was on this page!”
“No, no,” I say, getting to my feet. “It’s quite all right. Really.”
Queen Maureen isn’t really my mother, of course. Technically, the author of this story is the woman who gave life to all of us. But like two actors in any long-running play, Maureen and I have become so comfortable with each other and our roles that she is the closest thing I have to a parent inside the pages of this book. I like the way she always saves me one of her fresh-baked ginger cookies from the castle kitchen when she’s in a cooking mood. And from time to time, I’ve turned to her for advice when Frump and I have had a disagreement, or when Seraphima is so delusional that she’s chasing me nonstop during our time off. I respect Maureen’s opinions. In this way, I guess, my character has started to blend with the real me.
“Have you got a minute?” I ask.
“Of course.” She walks closer and sits beside me on a stubby boulder. “You look like you want to kick a wall.”
I exhale heavily. “I’m just so frustrated.”
“Who spit in your porridge?” she asks, raising a brow.
“If we’re all just make-believe, are the emotions we feel still real?”
“Well,” Maureen says. “Someone’s philosophical today—”
“I’m serious,” I interrupt. “How am I supposed to know what love really feels like?”
“Dear Lord, please tell me you haven’t suddenly become smitten with that ditzy princess—”
“Seraphima?” I shudder. “No.”
Maureen’s eyes light up. “It’s Ember, isn’t it? I’ve seen her looking at you from the corner of her little eye.”
“I’m not in love with a fairy—”
“It’s not Cook, is it?”
“Cook? She’s twice my age—”
Maureen frowns. “One of the mermaids? I should warn you that your dates would be impossibly soggy—”
“She’s not in the book,” I say.
Maureen just blinks. “Ah. Well, my boy, I don’t think I can help you there.”
“She’s not like anyone I’ve ever seen before. When I’m not with her, I want to be. And when she opens the book and I see her face, I can barely remember what I’m supposed to say, much less how to speak at all.” I test the words on my tongue. “I think I might be in love with her. But how can I really know, since the only love I’ve ever experienced was written for me?”
“Oh, darling, that’s what love is. It’s some power greater than you and me, that draws us to one special person.”
Maureen sounds like she knows exactly what she’s talking about. As if she’s felt the same way I feel right now.
“I guess you really loved Maurice,” I say.
She laughs. “Sweetheart, he’s just a flashback.”
I press my fingers to my temples. It’s all so confusing—what’s real, and what’s only make-believe. In the story, I fall in love with Seraphima, but the way I feel when I’m with her is far different from what I feel for Delilah. With Seraphima, I’m going through the motions. With Delilah, everything is brand-new, brightly colored, always changing. “Then how do you know what love is?”
“Because so many stories are all about love, written by people who’ve felt it before. Rapscullio’s lair is full of books about characters who aren’t in this story but who are mad about each other. Romeo and Juliet, Beauty and the Beast, Heathcliff and Cathy.”
“Who are they?”
Maureen shrugs. “I don’t know, but our author wrote them onto the shelves on the illustration of page thirty-six. I’ve read a few, myself, during our off time. You know that anything that was in the author’s mind might exist in the book, even if it doesn’t show up in the proper story.”
This is true. The world we live in is bigger than just the fairy tale; in fact, it’s as spacious as the imagination of the woman who created us. It’s why Frump and I know how to play chess, and Captain Crabbe has a passion for creating crosswords. It is as if whatever the author was thinking when she created the spaces we are in was richly imagined, three-dimensional. The castle kitchen, for example, is fully stocked with grains and flours and dishes and tableware, even though in the fairy tale, Cook is never actually seen baking. Because of this, during our off time, Maureen pores through recipe books and bakes cakes and pies and biscuits for the rest of us.
“Can I ask you something else?” I say, turning to Maureen. “I know he’s just a flashback to you. But Maurice, he rode off to save you, and wound up leaving you behind forever. Is it really worth dying for the person you love?”
She thinks about this for a moment. “That’s not the real question, Oliver. What you should be asking is, Can you live without her?”
* * *
Frump has called a meeting of all the characters, so we are gathered on the final page of the story, on Everafter Beach. He stands on his hind legs on a driftwood stump, addressing the masses. “It has come to my attention, friends,” he says—he’s truly the best orator of us all—“that we may be falling down on the job.”
“Falling down is my job,” says Pyro the dragon, who I must admit looks rather fetching with new fiery red rubber bands on his upper braces. “It’s on page forty.”
“I meant it more as a metaphor,” Frump says. “None of us have gotten a lot of face time lately, because the Reader seems to be fixated on a particular page.”
From my position, where I am sitting with my back against a palm tree, I freeze.
“Page forty-three,” Frump adds, staring at me.
I give a flat laugh. “Well,” I say. “Go figure.”
“Can you think of any reason, Oliver, that the Reader’s ignoring the rest of the story?”
“I’m, um, certain that it’s only a coincidence,” I stammer. “Perhaps she’s very interested in rock climbing?”
“She?” Rapscullio says, stepping forward with a frown. “How do you know it’s a she?”
I swallow hard. “Did I say she?” I shrug. “Just a guess. I mean, aren’t most of our Readers little girls?”
“My point exactly,” Frump says. “Which is why I think we need to amp up the action a bit. The next time this book is opened, let’s leap off the page.”
“Good luck with that,” I mutter.
“What was that, Oliver?”
I cough. “Just a tickle in my throat.”
“Right. As I was saying—mermaids, creepier! I want these kids to have nightmares! And trolls, make sure you slam Oliver to the ground when he crosses the bridge. And Rapscullio, when you’ve got him dangling sixty feet off the ground—”
“Hey, wait a minute!” I interrupt. “What about me?”
“Seems to me you’re doing just fine.” Seraphima sniffs. “Whereas I haven’t spoken a single word in days.…”
“There’s a silver lining,” I murmur.
“You’re absolutely right,” Frump agrees, so eager to support Seraphima that he yelps. “With a voice as pure as yours, Princess, you should speak constantly….”
But he might as well be talking to thin air. Seraphima completely ignores Frump, instead settling down beside me on the sand and running her fingers up my arm in a tickle. “Ollie,” she purrs. “I really miss you. How about we go to page sixty and practice the kiss?”
“I promised, uh, to help Maureen in the kitchen,” I say.
She sighs. “Suit yourself.” Then she looks up at Frump. “Are we about done here? Because I really need a nap. Beauty sleep, you know.”
“If you’ll allow me to say so, milady, nothing could make you any more beautiful than you already are,” Frump replies.
Kyrie, the mermaid, rolls her eyes. “For goodness’ sake, Frump, you’re making me seasick.” One of the great ironies of this book is that the mermaids, in real life, don’t have a boy-crazy bone in their bodies.
“All right, then!” Frump barks. “We all know what we’v
e got to do to engage the Reader. I highly recommend using this off time to practice, so that we’re in top-notch performance shape by the time the story is in play again.”
He hops down lightly from his stump as the characters scatter. “Oh, Princess? Princess Seraphima? If you need someone to stand in for Oliver on page sixty, I’m happy to volunteer….”
She turns around and points a finger at him. “Stay. Good boy.”
With his tail between his legs, Frump shuffles off the beach. I am about to head after him, to try to lift his spirits—or at least to get him to abandon a ridiculous crush on a woman with the mental resources of a brick—when Captain Crabbe slaps me hard on the back. “Ahoy, Oliver. Did I hear you say that Maureen’s cooking again? Dare I hope it’s the pineapple upside-down cake? I’m happy to cut it into slices.”
He draws his rapier from its sheath. The steel gleams, but not as brightly as his smile. Guess that’s what happens when you floss daily.
Flossing daily.
Putting braces on dragons.
Moonlighting as a dentist instead of a pirate.
I take one look at Captain Crabbe and realize that this man might actually understand why I so desperately want to get out of the story. “Captain,” I say, “how about you and I take a little walk?”
* * *
“Leave the story?” Captain Crabbe says, stopping dead in his tracks. The fairies, which have been accompanying us, swarm about his face like large mosquitoes. “I could never!”
“But imagine—somewhere, in another world, you might have your own orthodontics practice. You could fit retainers all day long, without ever having to stop to rig a mainsail or blow a cannon!” I offer him my widest, most hopeful smile.
He looks, for a moment, like he’s considering this option. Then he says, “You know, that eyetooth on the left is just a little crooked. I can fix that….”
I sigh, frustrated. “What if I told you I’d made contact with… the outside?”
Glint crosses her tiny arms. “Sounds like someone’s been daydreaming again….”