Finally, reluctantly, he agreed.
With nowhere else to go, we trudged back to the witch’s house. When we arrived, the sun was high in the sky, the better to see the change that had occurred.
“Where is the picket fence?” Charlie asked.
A smile spread across my face as I now fully believed that the witch was dead and gone. “The children, they are free. They are free!”
“Girl?” A small voice came from behind the house.
I knew that voice. “Miranda?” I ran to her. She was a sweet little thing, with red-gold curls and freckles.
“You … you killed her?”
“Charlie and I did. And now you can go home, to your mother.”
“All the others have left already, but I, I wanted to thank you.”
I embraced her. “You will be safe?”
“I think so.”
“Then you should leave.” I broke off a bit of gingerbread from the windowsill. “Here. For your trip.”
And then, she left.
Charlie and I, with nowhere else to go, entered the gingerbread house. We were free! We were alive. The house was on fine, farmable land, and I knew that we would leave behind our dismal past, build a real house, and live happily for many years to come.
EPILOGUE
Or a few days, in any case. For, you see, one of the escaped children ran straight to the next village with his tale of a gingerbread house and the witch who resided there. Of course, the constable would not believe such a wild story … until it was corroborated by a second, a third, a tenth child. Perhaps little Miranda tried to tell them what had truly happened, but her voice was too small, and too late.
They showed up in a pack, with nooses. I knew there would be no trial, least of all a fair one. I only thanked Providence they had not brought torches.
“Run!” I told Charlie. “Do not look back, and if anyone asks, tell them only that you escaped an evil witch who would have baked you into gingerbread. Do not mention your sister. They will not believe you. Or they will think you a wizard too.”
This time, he listened. At least, I think he did, for he left. They came moments later.
They hanged me. It hurt, but I did not die. The next morning, as the sun rose, I felt a crow, pecking, pecking at the rope around my neck.
And that was how I came to leave England. The bird turned out to be my friend, Lucinda. She advised me to travel. I did, first to Scotland (where I met the witches who had inspired Shakespeare’s Macbeth), later to Spain and Italy, Greece, and eventually France, where I lived many years. Lucinda showed me how I too might change to a bird to escape, a useful skill.
I never saw Charlie again.
That’s another thing about witches.
We are often lonely.
And so, to alleviate my loneliness and to honor the vow I made in the gingerbread house, I’ve made it my life’s work to help people. There are many who do so, using their own special talents for reading, baking, or envelope stuffing. I try to use my own talent for witchcraft. Unfortunately, as you might have noticed in this story of the gingerbread children, using my talent sometimes backfires. Actually, my failures kind of outnumber my successes. Over the years, I’ve been banished from more countries than most people ever see. For this reason, I have learned to choose my victims—er, people I help—carefully.
It’s hard for me to make friends. People don’t, I am surprised to say, usually like me, and those who do tend to grow old and die. I haven’t had a real friend in many years.
I can change my looks at will. I’ve used magic to stay young and pretty, the way other people use Botox, and I’ve found it easiest to stay in school as much as possible. I don’t need school, of course. I can make the necessities of life from thin air, and after all these years, the curriculum is a bit dull. (Can you imagine taking Algebra Two more than once?) This is particularly true of history, as I’ve lived it. It irks me how often the books get it wrong, and reading Shakespeare is dull when one has seen it performed in the great theaters of Europe (though, for reasons I will perhaps explain later, I was unable to see the great Sarah Bernhardt when she was in France). Even the people are, for the most part, boring. The school queen who thinks she’s one of a kind would be surprised to learn she is one of a million, and bullies have plagued every generation. But teenagers make good companions. Absorbed as they are in their own worries, they tend not to notice me much.
And, occasionally, I find, if not a friend, a deserving (or not so deserving) soul who needs my magical assistance. Or correction.
Like now. There is a girl named Emma. She lives in Miami, and I’ve had my eye on her for quite a while. She’s had some problems involving a member of her family, her stepsister. I’d like to help her out, but first, I have to decide if she’s worth the risk.
Her story? Well, here it is.
Part One
Lisette and Emma
1
My mother, in her sweet way, always reminded me that Daddy wasn’t my real father. “Be on your best behavior, Emma,” she’d said since I was old enough to remember. “He could ditch us anytime.” Sooo comforting. I don’t know why she said those things. Maybe she was jealous. True, Daddy and I looked nothing alike. He was tall and slim, blond and hazel-eyed, while I was short and clumsy with frizzy hair the color of rats. Yet on days like this one, as we sat across from each other at Swenson’s Ice Cream, it seemed impossible that I wasn’t Daddy’s and Daddy wasn’t mine. We had been together since I was three, after all; ten years since he and Mother had married. If I’d known my other father, the father that had left, I didn’t remember him. This was the only dad I had.
It had been his idea to spend the day together, “Daddy-Emma time,” without even Mother. I’d found out just the night before. He’d come home from work and told me he’d gotten tickets to the national tour of Wicked. It had been sold out except for nosebleed top balcony seats. At least, that’s what Mother had said when I’d begged to go. But Daddy told me one of his clients had given him second-row seats and he was taking me as a special surprise.
I’d breathed a secret sigh of relief. He and Mother had been arguing all week behind closed doors, alternately whispering and yelling, the sound muffled by television shows I knew neither of them watched. I’d sat in the family room, worrying in front of endless Full House reruns. Maybe Mother was right and they were getting a divorce. Maybe I’d end up like Kathleen, this girl in my class who’d had to be a flower girl in her own mother’s wedding. Maybe I’d lose Daddy. Occasionally, I’d hear my own name. Mother would say something like, “What about Emma?” and Daddy would reply, “What about Emma? I’m thinking of Emma.” Thursday night, Daddy had said, “I won’t discuss this anymore, Andrea!” and the house had gone silent.
But now, I understood. The whispered conversations had been about this. Mother was obviously angry because she’d wanted to go to the play herself, but Daddy was taking me. Me!
Our seats had been so close I could see the actors spit when they sang, and the play had been perfect, perfect for me because the ugly girl, the weird girl, the girl no one understood was the heroine. I identified with Elphaba, the outcast, except for the part about magic powers. Perfect, also, because Daddy had taken me, which meant he got it. He understood me as my mother never could.
After the matinee, we went for dinner, and even though I’d ordered an adult cheeseburger instead of the kids’ meal Mother would have pressured me to get in the name of “portion control,” Daddy let me get a Gold Rush Sundae too. “Not much of a meal without ice cream,” he’d said, and I agreed. I tried to eat slowly, like a lady, and also to make the day last longer. Plus, I had on a new dress, BCBG, and I didn’t want to stain it. Dad said, “What do you want to do now?”
“Now?” A bit of fudge dribbled onto my lip, and I caught it quick with my napkin. Mother would have said it was piggish, but Daddy didn’t wince.
“Sure. I told your mom we’d be late. Gameworks, maybe?”
Most people I knew would rather go there than anywhere, but the sounds of Wicked still filled my head, and I didn’t want to drown it out with pulsing game music. So I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the bookstore instead?” I loved going to the big bookstore, selecting a pile of novels, then spending an hour or more examining them over tea. “Would you be bored?”
Daddy grinned. “No, I can read. They prob’ly even have some of them there magazines with pitures in.”
“I didn’t mean that.” The kids at school all thought I was a nerd too.
“I know you didn’t, Pumpkin.” He glanced to the side. “Hey, don’t look now, but you’ve got yourself an admirer.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Right. Nine o’clock. Redhead’s been looking at you since dessert arrived.”
“Guys don’t look at me.”
“See for yourself.”
I shook my head. Parents lived in some happy place where everyone my age dated or had guys in love with them when, in truth, only popular girls like Courtney and Midori did. I looked around. To one side was a crowd of stick-thin girls in Greek letter shirts, pigging out on Earthquake Sundaes. But when I got to Daddy’s “nine o’clock,” I was surprised to see he was right. Someone was looking at me. It was Warner Glassman, a boy from school, a smart boy who’d won a playwriting contest. As soon as I saw him, I wondered if my face was clean, if I had whipped cream on my lips. It wasn’t like I could lick them now, though, not in front of Warner. I’d look like a perv. I fumbled with my napkin. Warner looked away.
“He’s a boy from school, Daddy. He’s looking at me because he knows me, that’s all. He’s probably trying to figure out where he’s seen me before.”
Daddy took a sip of his coffee. “You are a beautiful girl, Emma.”
“Mother says I’d be pretty—pretty, not beautiful—if I lost ten pounds and did something about my hair.”
“Mothers are too picky. You look great. Boys are going to be swarming.”
“Right.” Still, I straightened my shoulders and resolved to eat extra neatly until Warner and his family left. Maybe, if they passed close enough, I’d say hi. I took a minuscule bite of ice cream and glanced at Warner again. He was looking. This was the coolest day ever!
I knew I wasn’t ugly or fat either, just plain, like the heroines in books I loved, like Jane Eyre or Little Women. Of course, those girls usually ended up getting the guy.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Emma,” Daddy said.
“Sure.” I took another nibble, trying not to look at Warner. Still, I could sort of see him out of the corner of my right eye.
“… and her name is Lisette,” Dad was saying.
“What?”
“I said her name is Lisette.”
“Whose name? Start at the beginning.” I slurped up the ice cream that had melted to soup on my spoon. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I said I wasn’t sure if you remembered that, before I married your mom, I had another wife, and we had a daughter named Lisette.”
Remembered? I was three. But, yes, I knew he’d had a wife before Mother, in some foggy part of my mind. The daughter was news, though. I’d have remembered a daughter. “Where?” I choked out.
“She’s been living in Lantana with her mom.”
Lantana. Lantana wasn’t far. We passed it all the time when we drove up to visit my aunt. My aunt was two hours away, and Lantana was closer. How weird was it, that I’d never met her? Had my father had a secret life all these years, like one of those guys on talk shows who turns out to have two families? What else was there, what else I didn’t know?
“… here on Friday,” Dad was saying.
“Wait? What, again?”
“She’s coming here on Friday.”
“Coming? To visit?” No wonder Mother had been freaking out. She wasn’t big on things that weren’t all about her.
“No. To live. Aren’t you listening, Emma? Her mother passed away, and Lisette is coming here. You should get along great. She’s exactly your age.”
The chocolate ice cream fell from my open mouth and onto the front of the BCGB dress. I glanced down at the huge splotch, then at Dad, then at Warner.
Of course, everyone was looking right at me.
2
The first time I saw my stepsister, Lisette, she was crying. A battered white economy car with patches of rust so big it looked like a calico cat pulled into our driveway. The door opened and it disgorged its contents: a girl who was, as Daddy had said, my own age but taller; a carry-on, which I later found out held all her clothes; and a black plastic garbage bag, which I later learned held everything else. All her stuff in one suitcase and one garbage bag? We gave more than that to the Salvation Army. We threw more than that away.
It was Friday afternoon. I was in the tree house Daddy had built me when I was five, reading Vanity Fair (not the magazine, the novel by Thackeray, which Daddy had bought me after I got my jaw undropped from our talk), waiting for Lisette, but not waiting. Mother said I was too old for tree houses, that it ruined her landscaping. It was Daddy who said we could keep it and was always too busy to take it down when Mother complained. I liked to go there to read. And hide.
I was doing both that day, plus spying on Lisette. Mother was out, even though she’d told Daddy she’d be home. She’d wanted me to go too, but I said I had homework. I wanted to see Lisette. Since my conversation with Daddy, I’d been wondering what Lisette would look like. Would she be pretty? Prettier than me? Taller? Thinner? I hoped she’d be plain too, so we could be friends. Would she look like my father? Would he like her better? Would she think I was a geek? Would we be like sisters?
I peeked out from between the branches. Lisette tugged the black bag across the bright green lawn. Whoever had driven her didn’t offer to help. The engine started and the car was gone before Lisette was even halfway to the door.
Her head was down, so I couldn’t see her face. What I could see was her hair, gold-blond like Princess Aurora’s at the Disney character breakfasts we went to on vacation and spiraling to her waist. My fingers stole to my own frizz. She wore a black dress a size too small and black sneakers that were too large, but even in that, I could see that she was skinny, skinny and graceful, like a ballerina. She stopped to check a hole in the bag, which had something sticking out of it, a bit of sapphire-colored fabric. Her hand reached to stuff it back in but, instead, lingered on it, and that was when she began to sob.
Something black soared into my peripheral vision. I turned my head and saw it was a turkey buzzard. Two of them, actually, diving and bouncing at some dead thing in the street.
I should have welcomed Lisette, or at least introduced myself. That would be the normal thing to do. But I wanted to put off the time in my life when I became Lisette’s stepsister.
As long as I didn’t meet Lisette, everything could be the same. Everything could be possible. My father would still like me best, even though Lisette was his real daughter. I could still imagine that Lisette and I would be best friends. As long as I stayed in the tree house, there was still the possibility that Lisette might love me. But as soon as I approached her, that would all end. She’d take one look at me, with my curly hair and freckles, and realize I wasn’t worth knowing, just like girls at school did.
I ducked my head lower and went back to reading about Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp, BFFs even though Becky was evil, and about Dobbin, the grocer’s son, who was in love with the wimpy, goody-goody Amelia and stood by her for years, even when she married his unworthy friend George. I had a secret crush on Dobbin and pictured him looking like Warner Glassman. The book was eight hundred pages long, and it was the second time I’d read it since Sunday.
Which I knew Lisette would think was completely weird.
Everyone did. Most of the kids at school, even in the smart classes, which I was in, didn’t read books that weren’t assigned, certainly not classics. Sometimes, I’d try to act like them, force myself to slip a S
eventeen or an Elle into my binder or spend the time before class texting. But always, by lunchtime, I’d be at the media center, begging for my Brontë or Austen fix. It was pathetic.
I pressed my face hard against the slippery slats of the tree house floor, looking down at her crying.
Mother and Daddy’s arguing had continued all week, and I’d read and read to drown out the yelling, but it didn’t always work.
“There must be someplace else,” Mother had said.
“We’ve been through this. There are no relatives on Nicole’s side.”
“On your side, then. Maybe she could move in with your mother.”
“Give me a break. My mother’s eighty.”
“There are other alternatives besides relatives.”
“Don’t go there, Andrea. I’m not putting my own daughter in foster care for your convenience.”
“Not convenience, safety. Who knows what sort of upbringing this girl has had. She could be into drugs or … worse. But maybe you don’t care about Emma.”
“Of course I care about Emma. I’ve always taken care of your daughter.”
Your daughter. My father’s words were like a shard of ice through my heart.
“Besides, I’m sure Nicole’s done a fine job raising her. She was always a sensible woman.”
“Unlike me, I suppose.”
“Who said anything about … never mind. I know you’ll see reason in this. The girl is coming to live with us, and that’s final.”
And with that, a door slammed.
I’d known better than to ask Mother any questions, but the day before, she’d come into my room without knocking and sat on my bed. Taking me by the shoulders, she’d said, “Don’t worry, Emma. This is just temporary. Your father loves you. We won’t let anything change that.”
Which is when I started worrying that it would.
Now, I stared down at Lisette. I still couldn’t see her face. She’d pulled the piece of fabric from her bag. It turned out to be a shawl, which she sniffed deeply before draping it around her stooped shoulders. She knotted the broken bag, then pulled it the rest of the way toward the doorstep. Guilt tugged at me, urged me out. I knew I should go down the ladder. I didn’t. In my lap, my hands were working. I pulled out a page of Vanity Fair, then a second. Only when my hands were so full of the crumpled, ripped pages that I couldn’t hold any more did I stop. What was I doing?