Never.
Well ... possibly. Okay, okay, probably.
I didn't point out that I wouldn't have needed rescuing if he hadn't walked off with the lens.
"What's he saying?" Eleni asked.
"You're braver than me and smarter than me, and he trusts you more than he trusts me."
"So you think it's safe to go?" she asked.
"No," I told her. "Besides, there's no reason for you to get involved."
"To help you," she said.
"Once I'm there, I'll be able to see perfectly well even without the glasses," I reminded her. "Kazaran Dahaani might suck in the hospitality category, but it gives me twenty-twenty eyesight."
She gave that slow allowances-must-be-made-for-this-person nod I was beginning to recognize. What? I wanted to ask. What?
"Yes," she said. "But you'll still probably need help."
I couldn't tell if she said that because she figured I was inept and couldn't rescue Julian, or because she figured I was a weasel and wouldn't even try.
If I admitted that I was only planning on passing through Kazaran Dahaani on my way home, I suspected she would try to rescue Julian on her own. Larry was right: She had a bigger heart than me, and she was braver.
As for smarter: I'd have to wait to see if we survived this adventure she was pushing me into before I decided on that.
16. So Close...
"So," Eleni asked, "should we go back to where I first saw you?" Looking worried, she added, "Because Betsy's probably wondering what happened to us. She has a bit of an overactive imagination so she's probably trying to convince the ambulance crew that the only explanation for us being gone is that you must have staged everything just to provide an opportunity to separate us so you could kidnap me."
Oh, boy. Like my grandmother couldn't have a rational friend?
But before I could put my foot into my mouth with that, Larry said, "No use going back there, anyway."
I held up a finger for Eleni to wait and asked Larry, "Why not?"
"No gate there."
"You know," I told him, "you can be incredibly annoying. What do you mean 'no gate'? I just—we just—came through there."
Larry sighed like someone who was being asked for the seventeenth time to explain something. Something obvious. "You went through the gate in Kazaran Dahaani."
"Yes...," I said to him.
In a very condescending tone, he quoted himself from earlier: "From Kazaran Dahaani to anywhere."
"Yes..." My aggravation level was escalating beyond my ability to hide it.
He stood on Eleni's palm, which she was trying to hold steady, and not doing a wonderful job of it as she couldn't see him. If it had been me, Larry would have been making snide remarks. He put his little blue hand on his hip, like a cross between a sea captain on a storm-tossed deck and a disgruntled interior decorator, and said, "Well, so, like, you think there are gates everywhere?"
"Isn't that what 'From Kazaran Dahaani to anywhere' means?"
He rolled his tiny little eyes, probably unaware how much this made him look like an impatient hamster. Like an annoying impatient hamster. Like a blue annoying impatient hamster. Okay, so I guess he didn't look much like a hamster at all. But he did have beady little eyes that he rolled at me. He explained, "There are a limited number of permanent gates built on your world. You probably came through one to get to Kazaran Dahaani."
"Probably," I repeated.
"What's he saying?" Eleni asked.
"Gibberish," I told her.
"Technical stuff," Larry corrected me, which I figured was just his excuse for being incoherent. "When you wished to be here," he said, "an opening formed exactly where you wished to be." Although I'd finally caught on, he slowed down even more and enunciated oh-so-carefully: "A temporary opening."
I told Eleni, "Temporary hole in the space-time continuum, or some such." Addressing Larry, I asked, "So how do we get back?"
"Duh," he said. "Didn't I just explain that the first gate you came through was probably one of the permanent ones?"
"Define 'probably,'" I said.
"The temporary gates only last a few moments. So either someone from Kazaran Dahaani had just come out when you happened to stumble upon it, or it was a permanent gate."
I told Eleni, "He says the way I came through has closed, so to get back we need to go through the gate that's in the garden at Westfall Nursing Home."
She asked, "Where's Westfall Nursing Home?" and I was relieved she didn't ask what I'd been doing at a nursing home.
I said, "South and Robinson."
She looked as though she was trying to picture it in her head, and I figured South is a major road but Robinson is a side street, so I clarified, "Near the expressway."
"Expressway," she repeated in a perplexed tone that made me guess 490 must have been built after the 1950s.
"Ahmm, across from Highland Park?" I suggested.
"We'll have to take a bus."
"Okay." I dug into my pocket to see if I had any money for bus fare, and remembered that I had spent the last of my allowance in the cafeteria. My mother—a liberated twenty-first-century mom—believes high schoolers should be capable of making or providing for their own lunch, and I hadn't had time to make a sandwich.
Apparently that oops-I'm-broke expression hadn't changed in the intervening years. "Bus fare is a dime," Eleni said. "I can cover both of us."
I didn't tell her that, in my time, just about all a dime was good for was to use as an emergency screwdriver when the backs of the chairs in the cafeteria got wobbly enough to annoy. I only said, "Larry, you're on your own, because if Eleni walks around with her hand out like that, people are going to think she's begging for change."
Larry flew off her hand and landed on her shoulder. "Now you look like a pirate," I told Eleni, "with a psychotic bluebird instead of a parrot."
She gave me that increasingly familiar oh-dear-what's-the-matter-with-her-now? look and I remembered she hadn't been able to hear him when he'd been doing his pirate routine.
"Arr, arr," Larry said.
I sighed. "Never mind."
Luckily, the bus stop was only a block away; and, even luckier, we only had a short wait before a bus rolled up in a cloud of diesel fumes and hiss of air brakes.
"Behave yourself," I warned Larry before putting the lens into my pocket lest the people on the bus think I was playing at being the stereotypical monocled Nazi villain.
Well, without my glasses it was hard to tell what they thought, but the driver certainly seemed to be wearing a disapproving stare. He probably worried I was one of those people who would start talking loudly to myself and make the other passengers nervous. Eleni and I sat halfway back, behind a woman wearing a hat with big feather flowers on it. She clicked her tongue in a definitely disapproving way and sniffed as though testing the air to affirm her suspicion that someone who looked as bad as me must stink.
"Let me know when we get there," Eleni said, and we didn't dare say anything else for fear of being overheard.
I looked out the window, which was mostly a blur without glasses; but I could see well enough to note that there was a lot less to Rochester in the 1950s than what I was used to—less traffic, fewer buildings, and the buildings that were there were not so close together. What if, I suddenly wondered, Westfall Nursing Home hasn't been built yet? Eleni hadn't recognized the name. I told myself that there was no reason she should be familiar with the area nursing homes, but found it hard to ignore the dread that started squeezing me, whispering at me that there was no telling what I'd find. And how old was the gate I passed through? I asked myself. What if the elves had only built it recently? I wished that I could ask Larry whether he'd be able to find another gate if the one we were looking for wasn't there or wasn't accessible.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something flutter, and I wondered if I'd been hanging around Larry so long he was becoming visible to me even without the lens. But when I looked straight
on, there was no sign of him. I glanced at Eleni, but she was looking up and off to the side across the aisle, reading the advertisements over the bus's windows.
Something else fluttered and landed on my knee, not a vision or a wraith, after all. It was a feather, a feather flower petal. The hat of the woman seated ahead of us was molting.
Another feather petal drifted kneeward.
The next time, I was looking directly at the hat when I saw one of the petals stand upright, then jerk upward before it descended.
Less like molting, and more like being plucked.
Carefully, surreptitiously, I got the lens out of my pocket and brought it up to my eye just in time to see Larry, standing on the brim of the hat, yank another petal free.
"Stop it," I hissed.
Eleni glanced at me.
So did the woman with the hat.
I quickly removed the lens from in front of my eye and tried to give a reassuring that's-okay-I'm-really-mostly-harmless smile.
Before turning forward once more, the woman sniffed again as though sure that, eventually, she would discern a disagreeable odor coming from me.
Another petal bit the dust.
Eleni, of course, was watching me and so she missed it. In an intense undertone that was not meant to carry, I whispered, "Knock it off, Larry."
Eleni put her hand over mine and shook her head, warning me not to attract attention. The woman ahead of us glanced around again, probably assuming Eleni was trying to keep the poor schizophrenic calm.
"It's okay," I muttered.
Once again the woman faced forward, her back stiff with tension.
I handed the lens to Eleni, but obviously Larry had moved. She held it to her eye, looked discreetly around the bus, shrugged, then handed the lens back to me. I put it up to my eye just as Larry came back from wherever he'd been and landed on the lady's hat. I made a grab for him, but he shot out of there and I caught hold of one of the feathery blossoms instead.
The woman, who'd apparently been unable to feel Larry's weight, felt mine. She squealed and whipped around in her seat. Because I was holding the flower, the hat stayed stationary while her head rotated beneath it.
The hair stayed where it was, too, so that the side edge of her pageboy hairdo now covered one eye and came to her nose.
"Sorry," I said, hoping she hadn't noticed her wiggy secret had been revealed. Even as I spoke, I immediately let go of the flower.
Except that, weakened and made loose because of the petals Larry had already removed, the flower pretty much deconstructed in my hand. Petals wafted down toward the floor as all three of us—the woman, Eleni, and I—watched.
"You wretched person," the woman scolded me.
What could I say? It wasn't me. It was a little blue spreenie.
"Yes," I said. "I'm sorry."
Eleni leaned forward and straightened the woman's hat. "As good as new," she whispered, then assured her, "Nobody noticed."
No, it was pure coincidence that all the other passengers were facing in our direction.
The woman got up and moved close to the bus driver for protection.
"Stupid spreenie," I said from between clenched teeth.
"Stop muttering," Eleni said, obviously aware of the other people around us, all of whom had tense backs now.
The bell went off, indicating someone wanted to get off.
The driver pulled over to the curb and opened the doors, but nobody stood to leave.
The driver closed the doors and pulled the bus back into traffic.
A few seconds later, the bell went off once more.
Again the driver stopped, even though, again, no one was standing.
The driver said, "Whoever's messing with the bell, if I catch you at it, I'm throwing you off."
I held the lens up to my eye. I didn't see Larry, but I caught the gaze of the driver in the mirror, watching me.
I concentrated on looking innocent. Eleni suggested, "Maybe it's a malfunction."
The driver snorted and started the bus again.
And, just my luck, I suddenly recognized where we were. "I'm ringing the bell now," I announced, standing up to do it, to demonstrate that I had nothing to hide.
The driver sighed loud enough for us, halfway down the aisle, to hear, but he stopped and opened the door.
"Thank you," Eleni said brightly as she walked down the steps.
He took off again as soon as my feet hit the street, obviously not wanting to give us a chance to change our minds.
Despite the other people on the sidewalk, I put the lens to my eye and found Larry, once more sitting on Eleni's shoulder as though he'd never strayed. "I thought you wanted to do this," I said. "I thought this was serious business."
"Yes," Larry said to my first point, and "Yes," he said to the second.
"Then why couldn't you sit still for ten minutes?"
Bystanders, who thought the demented-farmhand-dressed girl was berating the presentable one, circled out of our way.
Larry said, "You might as well ask water not to be wet, or a maple not to shed its leaves in autumn. It's my very nature."
"Well, it's a bad nature," I said, and I put the lens back in my pocket so I wouldn't have to listen to his answer.
We walked the block from the office building that would, in another fifty years or so, become my dentist's office, to the address of Westfall Nursing Home. I knew we were in trouble even before we got there. There were too many houses, not enough businesses.
"I think," I said with a sigh, "we need to check out a few backyards."
17. ...And Yet So Far
In an attempt not to look like a total freak to anyone who saw me, I wasn't keeping the lens at my eye.
But the next time I glanced through it, I saw Larry pulling someone's lawn sprinkler closer to the sidewalk so that—if the homeowner turned the water on without checking first—it would douse anybody walking by.
"Larry!" I said in the most menacing voice I could manage without raising my voice.
"What?" he asked in a tone of such total innocence, I would have known he was doing something wrong even if I hadn't seen him.
"The place I'm looking for isn't here."
"I can sense the gate nearby," he said, which was a relief in all sorts of ways. "I'd estimate behind that house there." He pointed two houses down.
I pointed, too, to let Eleni know.
But we hadn't taken more than one step into that yard when a voice yelled at us from the porch of the adjacent house: "You two!" It was an old lady's voice. A cranky old lady's voice. Without the lens, I was lucky I could see the porch, and I didn't want to raise the lens to my eye and risk looking like a pirate with a spyglass. "Yes, you two: you, with the blue dress, and the other one—the scruffy girl or effeminate boy—with her."
Boy? Well, that was certainly endearing, wasn't it?
She demanded, "Get off my lawn."
I didn't point out that, actually, we were on her neighbor's lawn. Instead, I said, "Ahhm..."
Luckily, Eleni was better with words. "What absolutely gorgeous begonias!" she exclaimed. "We just wanted to take a closer look."
"Don't you pick them!" the old lady said. "First, you'll be picking their begonias, then you'll be after my peonies."
"No," Eleni assured her, "neither. Just admiring."
"Well, admire from the sidewalk," the woman commanded.
I got back on the sidewalk and resumed walking away. I said dismissively, "Aww, they're probably all full of ants, anyway." Not exactly a way to make peace, but—come on!—she should have seen I do not look like a boy, even if I was wearing pants.
Eleni joined me and we strolled right on past the house where Larry had guessed the gate was likely to be. Then we stopped at the next house to sniff at the roses in a bush just a step or two into the yard. I put the lens to my eye and casually glanced back to check if the old lady was still watching.
Oh yeah: She was standing by the rail of the porch, her arms folded
over her chest, and she was scowling directly at us.
"We'll have to go around the back of the block," I told Eleni.
Luckily, there were no paranoid-about-someone-stealing-their-flowers neighbors on the other street. I hoped our nosy lady hadn't moved to her back porch.
We cut through one yard, then had to detour around some laundry lines.
Larry plucked a sock off the line and started eating it.
"Stop it," I hissed at him.
"What?" he said. "I'm hungry. This is what spreenies eat: freshly laundered socks."
It explained a lot.
We had to squeeze through a hedge to avoid a fence. But when I put the lens to my eye, I saw the elven gate. "There it—"
Eleni yelped. Probably Larry did, too, but I couldn't hear him because a dog started barking. A dog that looked like a cross between a German shepherd and a grizzly bear. A dog that threw itself against the flimsy fence that was all that separated us from him. He was barking fiercely, like he was saying in dog-talk, "Fresh meat! Fresh meat! Fresh meat!"
We backed away from the fence—we didn't want that yard anyway, but the one that backed up to it, which was where the gate was. But like the nosy, crabby woman who suspected us of being flower thieves, that didn't satisfy the dog's territorial instincts.
"Nice doggy," Eleni said in a soothing voice. "Nice doggy."
She didn't convince any of us.
"My, what a fierce temper that dog has," Larry said. He'd been startled enough to drop what was left of the sock, and he was hovering anxiously behind me, keeping me between him and the dog's temper.
"Dogs can see spreenies?" I guessed.
"Oh yeah."
And eat them, too, I was willing to bet from Larry's edginess.
The dog was still barking and I was sure someone was going to come out to investigate and we were going to be stopped short just moments before we would have had success.
"Which direction does the gate work?" I asked Larry.