I feel suddenly dizzy at the height. But I grip Meg’s hand, and she squeezes back. I feel better. “I’m glad you’re here.” And I am.
After we’ve had our fill, we switch to the pedestal. As in the train station, people see us when we land, but as before, they sort of don’t. A kid crashes into us. “Hey, I didn’t see you.” His mother yells at him to be careful, completely oblivious.
I wonder if people at home would react the same way, if I would. Have I ever seen anything strange and unusual—and magical—but just ignored it because I didn’t believe what my eyes were telling me? I’ve been hearing stories about giants and yeti and Sasquatch all my life, but who believed them? Maybe it’s all real—the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, everything. Maybe the crazy people are the only ones who know the truth. If human beings can transform into swans, what can’t happen?
“Are you glad you know that magic is real?” Meg says, reading my thoughts.
“I am,” I say, “even though people would think I was on drugs if I told them.”
She shrugs. “I wouldn’t, even if I wasn’t here.” And I know it’s true. She’d believe me because she’s my best friend.
After we look up my great-grandparents on the monument at the Ellis Island Museum, we go to the Museum of Natural History and find the dinosaurs. Then, it’s off to the Central Park Zoo.
It’s there that Meg asks me about the earphones. “I didn’t know you had those things. Can you talk to this guy?” She points to the polar bear in his environment.
“No.” I hesitate. “I mean, maybe. It only works on animals who used to be human.”
“Are there a lot of those?”
“More than you’d think.” I tell her about the swans in the lobby, the rat at the Port of Miami, and the fox.
“No way. The swans? Seriously?”
“Totally serious.”
She takes the earbuds from me and leans forward. “Hey! Hellooo! Mr. Bear?”
The bear swims slowly around, and Meg adds, “Maybe after this is over, we’ll go to the North Pole together. We should see the bears while they’re still there.”
I nod, even though I know it won’t happen. I’ll be with Victoriana.
We wander around awhile longer, looking at animals, trying to talk to them (none talk back), and eating zoo food until finally they announce they’re closing.
I look at my watch. Six. “There’s still time. I don’t want to go back too early.”
“I hear New York pizza’s good. And then, maybe the top of the Empire State Building.”
An hour later, we’re there. We don’t use the cloak. I wanted to feel what it’s like to be in the elevator, zooming up 102 floors. We can see Central Park on one side, all the way to New Jersey on the other.
Meg points at something down below. “Look at that!”
“What?” The street in one place is painted white.
“That’s where the Thanksgiving Day Parade is.”
“Wow. From up here, it looks even smaller than on TV.”
Meg climbs onto one of the telescope things. “It’s like being a bird.” She spreads her arms and stands straight, the waning sun behind her, wind ruffling her short hair. She looks wild and suddenly beautiful, not like the girl I’m used to. She rotates so she’s facing the street.
I grab her hand. “Watch out!”
“For what?” She gestures at the chain-link fence that comes up over the wall, to keep anyone from jumping, I guess. “It’s completely safe.”
“You could trip.”
She laughs. “Only if I was a klutz, or drunk.” She holds out her other hand, the one I’m not already holding. “Come on up. You can see better.”
I do, and I can, far above the wall. I wobble a bit, and Meg steadies me, her hand on my waist. It reminds me of when we played together as kids, all the times she was more mature, more of a girl. I straighten up, and for a second, we are nose to nose, with only the wind between us. I can feel my heartbeat, or maybe it’s Meg’s.
“Do you remember,” Meg says, “when I asked you to take me to the eighth-grade dance to make Ben Abercrombie jealous?”
I look down. The people and cars below are so small, like toys. “Sure.”
“You know, Ben asked me to that dance.”
I look at her, and her short hair flutters around her face like brown butterflies. “Huh?”
“He asked me, but I said no because I was going with you.”
I laugh. “You never told me that. I’d have understood if you’d canceled on me to go with your dream guy. You were so hot for him.”
“No, you don’t get it. Ben asked me before I asked you. I told him I couldn’t go with him because I was going with you.”
I shake my head. “Okay, I’m confused. So you used me as an excuse to get out of going with him?”
“No.” She drops my hand and moves away. “Never mind. It was stupid.”
I remember that dance, three years ago. Meg got her hair done at the hotel salon, and she wore a black lace dress that made her look grown-up and glamorous. Ben Abercrombie glared at us the whole night. I’d congratulated Meg on making him stew. But there was one moment on the dance floor when I was holding her, and I forgot I was there to make Ben jealous. I’d wanted to kiss her.
I look at Meg and understand. I could have. And it would all have changed.
She steps down. “We need to get going.”
“No, wait.”
The sun is setting, and down below, the lights of Manhattan, which are always up, seem brighter against the gray semidusk. From here, you can only hear the horns and the people on the ground if you really concentrate, and I don’t. I don’t want to think about anything but where I am, who I’m with. I don’t know whether it’s that I don’t want to leave, or that I want to stay, but I grab Meg’s elbow, pull her toward me, and help her up. She leans against me, head against my shoulders, and in that second, I know, against the lights and the bright and the heat and the gray, I really want to kiss her.
No, I don’t. Me? Kiss Meg? I can’t. I want lots of things. Money. Adventure. Victoriana—a princess, for God’s sake. I want more than I’ve always had.
Don’t I?
And yet, Meg’s in my arms, like she was that night at the dance, and for more than an instant, I think this is what I want.
I lean closer. “I wish we could stay here.”
“Why can’t we?” Meg leans closer too.
“Excuse me? Are you using that?” Below us, a man and a little girl gaze up at us. “My kid wants to see. Can you find someplace else to make out?”
“Oh, sure.” I don’t even correct him about the making-out part. But, in that second, I’m glad for the interruption. Kissing Meg would have been a big mistake. It would change everything, things I don’t want to change.
I step down and hold out my hand to her. “You’re right. We should go.”
All the way down two elevators, Meg doesn’t look at me. Is she mad at me because I almost kissed her? Or is she mad at me because I didn’t? In any case, I violated some boundary between us, so now I have to earn back her trust.
So when we reach the bottom, I say, “Sorry.”
“For what?” She still doesn’t look at me.
“For ki . . . your friendship means a lot to me, Meg. More than almost anything. I wouldn’t want to do anything to mess us up.”
She looks down at the marble floor, tracing the alternating marble squares with her toe.
Finally, she sighs. “No, me neither.”
“Do you want to go now?” I don’t want to leave yet, not with her mad at me. And also, I want today, this day, to last longer. Victoriana’s beautiful, and rich, and I promised her I’d find her brother, that I’d marry her. But once I do, it will never be the same, being with Meg again like this, being a kid. Am I making a huge mistake? I wanted my life to change, but now that I’m on the verge of it, I’m frightened.
As long as I stay here, I don’t have to decide.
So when Meg says, “Let’s walk a little,” I’m happy to.
We walk toward Times Square because that’s where the lights and horns and taxis and people are all converging. Darkness has fallen now, but it’s hard to tell because it’s so bright with red and pink and green and gold, all combining to make the sky look still blue, or maybe it’s because the buildings are so high you can’t see the sky anyway. We nudge past a crowd looking at a mostly naked guy in a cowboy hat playing a guitar. Horns honk. Traffic whooshes.
Above us are lit-up signs and letters scrolling a news headline.
And suddenly, they say something I can’t ignore.
PLAYGIRL PRINCESS TO MARRY ZALKENBOURGIAN HEIR
Victoriana! She’s marrying Wolfgang! The cat torturer.
She’s marrying him. But why? I did all this work, stayed in the bed-and-breakfast, got sick, stole a bird, all so she wouldn’t marry him.
“She said she was marrying me,” I say before I remember Meg’s there.
“What?”
“Nothing. We need to go.”
Then she sees the scrolling news too, and I see her face registering that she understood what I said. “Marry you?”
“We’ve got to go.” Before she can protest, I wrap the cloak around us. Compared to the Naked Cowboy, we might as well be invisible.
And then, in a second, we’re back at the park in Florida.
Chapter 32
I land outside in case Ranger Wendell is still there. But everything’s dark, still. It’s almost too perfect. I hear voices, people singing campfire songs far away. And crickets.
And Meg’s voice.
“You were going to marry Victoriana?” She pulls away. Against the night, I can see her silhouette. Even in the darkness, her shoulders look angry.
“I can explain.”
“Oh, can you?” The shadow’s hands move to her hips. “Go ahead.”
“Can we talk later, maybe? After I get the frog?” After I think of an excuse.
“Were you planning on telling me?”
I don’t have an answer. “I wish I was in the ranger station.”
And then, I am.
It’s even darker in here, but more silent, which is good. I find Wendell’s office. The door’s locked, but I wish myself onto the other side, then walk to the desk where the tank was. I leave the light out but crack open the curtain to allow in a sliver of moonlight. I don’t look out, don’t want to see Meg, still waiting there, angry. The tank gleams like a hidden diamond. I run my hand along its smooth, glass side, up to the top. I remove the cover and stick my hand in.
Sharp pain sears through my finger, then my whole hand. Something bit me. Hard. Frogs don’t have teeth, do they? I pull out my hand and flip on the light switch. No one’s here. When my eyes adjust, I peer into the tank.
Scorpions. The whole tank is crawling with them. I’ve been bitten by a scorpion. And, not only that, but the frog isn’t even here.
My hand is burning like it’s cut in two. I glance back into the tank. He must be there, hidden behind something. He couldn’t have run away.
Then I see a sheet of memo paper. I squint at the writing, but a scorpion’s on it.
My hand throbs, pounds. I wish I could cut it off. It feels like it’s twice its usual size, and now the pain spreads to my arm, my torso, my head. My tongue feels like it’s swelling in my mouth. My legs hurt so, they can’t support me. My field of vision narrows to one red dot. My knees buckle. I’m on the floor.
In my last conscious act, I use my left hand to pull out Meg’s ring. Bring Meg to me. Then, with my thumb and middle fingers, I barely push it onto my left pinky. The red dot gets smaller. Then the pain overwhelms me.
Chapter 33
It’s dark, and I hear rain, very close rain. My hand doesn’t hurt anymore. I hold up my arm, wondering if the hand is missing. I wiggle the fingers. Am I dead? Do I feel better because I’m feeling no pain? No. At least, I don’t think so.
“You’re awake.” The voice in the darkness startles me. Then, a circle of light, a flashlight. My eyes readjust, and I see I’m in a tent. With Meg. Meg!
She holds up a sheet of paper. “Wendell knew you’d try to steal the frog.”
I take the paper in my hand (which feels totally fine). It says:
The frog stays with me until you kill the giants. No tricks.
“But how’d you get the note?” I examine my hand.
“I took it out of the tank, of course.”
“But the scorpions—”
“No big. Not all scorpions are poisonous. And if you’re friendly with them and don’t just stick your hand in and disturb them, they don’t bite.”
I turn my hand. A dime-size, red, C-shaped scar is the only sign of trauma. Is it possible a nonpoisonous scorpion bit me? Then, why did it hurt so much?
But I feel fine now.
“Well, that’s that,” Meg says. “You can’t kill the giants, so I guess it’s over.”
She turns her face away as she says it, and I suspect she’s smiling. She can’t stand Victoriana, and she’s furious at me for . . .
It’s all coming back to me. She knows I agreed to marry the princess. She hates me.
Still, I say, “Guess you’re right.”
But when I think of it, all of it, Victoriana marrying Prince Wolfgang, me and Mom, losing the business, me maybe having to work as a shoe-shop boy the rest of my life, I can’t handle it. I turn away, trying to keep my face out of the circle of flashlight.
Outside is silent. Even the campfire singing has ended, and I wonder how much time has passed. Not even a cricket or cicada chirps.
Meg breaks it. “What is it, Johnny?”
“It’s over.”
“Your quest? Your adventure? Yeah, I think so.”
“It wasn’t just an adventure. It’s . . . everything.”
“What do you mean?”
I don’t want to talk to her. I want to curl up in a ball and sleep for all the days I haven’t slept, sleep until the giants come back and stomp on me, and I won’t even notice because I’m sleeping so soundly. I want to sleep like a little kid who falls asleep in front of the television and wakes the next morning, in bed, not even knowing or caring how he got there. I want to forget. But I have no time. I tell Meg about Mom and me and our debt.
“Marrying Victoriana was a way out. I can’t afford college. We might not even be able to keep the business open much longer.”
“So you want to marry her for the money?”
I hesitate before saying, “Yeah.”
But my face must betray that it wouldn’t exactly be torture because Meg says, “Oh, it’s because she’s hot.”
“It’s mostly the money. It just doesn’t hurt that she’s hot. And she’s nicer than people think. But I’m seventeen, so I wouldn’t want to marry anyone if it wasn’t for the money. The money would fix everything.”
I examine my hand. It’s fixed too, amazingly fixed. Before, I’d have sworn it was the size of a bowling ball. Even the small bite mark seems almost gone. I’m still wearing Meg’s ring, the ring that brought her to my rescue. Now I hand it back to her.
“I have to find the frog,” I tell her. “I made a promise. I can’t let Victoriana marry Prince Wolfgang. He’ll kill her, and it would be on my head. And I can’t let Mom lose her business either, not without trying everything.”
“You’ve already been trapped in a dungeon and bitten by a scorpion. Now you want to be eaten by giants?”
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take.” I start to stand. It’s surprisingly easy. I look around for the cloak. Except it’s not there. It’s missing. I look at Meg. “Give it back.”
“Give what back?”
“You know.”
Meg purses her lips, thinking.
“Come on, Meg. You’re not being fair. I’ve made my decision.”
Meg’s silent a moment longer before saying, “You’re right. I can’t stop you. But I can make you wait. If we’re going to
fight giants, we should get a full night’s sleep.”
“We? Did you say we? You’re staying?”
“I can’t let you get killed. Your mother would be miserable. I’ll take the cloak and get in the tree. If I see one coming, I’ll put on the ring and bring you to me.”
“And what will I be doing while you’re in the tree?”
She stares directly into my eyes, then places her hand on my forehead and strokes it lightly. Her hands are cool, and my eyes start to shut.
“Sleep,” she whispers. “Sleep.”
Chapter 34
Just you wait here. I will finish off the giants by myself.
—“The Valiant Tailor”
I wake to the angry beeping of my cell phone, which is out of batteries. I switch it off. There’s no reception here anyway, and Meg called her mother from New York City.
It’s eight in the morning, and I wonder if Meg’s been in the tree all night. I look out the tent and see the cloak. Meg must have thrown it down. I wish myself into the tree, next to her, even though I still don’t know why she’s staying with me. She’s leaning against a branch, resting her head in her hand, staring at the tent. “Oh!”
“Did I frighten you?” I ask.
At first, she looks like she’s not going to answer me, and I remember she’s angry. But then, she gestures downward. “It’s a pretty scary scene, isn’t it?”
From the tree, I survey the damage on the ground below. The giants were here, if not last night, then during the day. Everything is ransacked. A Styrofoam cooler I bought is crushed like a peanut in the hands of an impatient kid. Shoes, clothes are everywhere. The food is gone, wrappers strewn like seaweed across the dirt, hanging from the weeds.
Nearby, the grass and pine needles are mottled down in what is unmistakably the shape of four giant legs and two giant rear ends. Maybe they thought we’d come back, so they could eat us.
Meg peers through Wendell’s binoculars.
“Any sign of them?” I ask.
She shakes her head and hands them to me.