I climbed the stairs and stuck my head through the trapdoor. Another bedroom. Smaller than the other two, it had just a single bed with a tiny table next to it. A long wooden beam stretched across the ceiling. A square window with a big metal frame sat in the middle of a low stone wall on one side. The front half of the ceiling sloped down all the way to the floor. I hitched myself up into the room. There was only just enough room to stand! It was like a secret den.
I wondered who used to live in this room. It must have been a child. A grown-up would have been too tall. Maybe it was a girl like me. Someone I could have been friends with. I would have enjoyed coming over to visit and hanging out with her up here.
When we’d booked the cottage, the owners had said we were almost the first to rent it. The family who used to live here had only sold it to them in the last year. I couldn’t help wondering where the family had gone to and why they would sell such a lovely house.
Either way, this was definitely going to be my room!
I ran downstairs to get my bags. Mom was still exploring the living room. “They’ve got lots of games,” she said vaguely as I got my bags from the kitchen and dragged them past her.
Dad had found some leaflets and spread them out on the table in the middle of the living room. “Lots going on around here,” he said, flicking through the leaflets. “Hey, there’s salsa dancing on Tuesdays.”
I prepared myself for a week of being embarrassed by my parents. Which was quite easy to do. My parents embarrassed me most of the time, so I was pretty much always prepared.
“There’s a stone circle near here, too,” Dad murmured.
“Ooh, is there a full moon this week?” Mom replied, coming into the kitchen and joining him at the table. I tried not to despair as I headed back upstairs with my bags.
I lay on the bed, looking around my bedroom. It was like a sanctuary, my own little hiding place from the world. The only thing wrong with it was — well, it would have been nice to share it. I felt a little bubble of sadness rise inside me. If this had been like our old vacations, Charlotte would probably have been with me.
Charlotte’s my best friend. Or was my best friend. It was still really hard to admit that we’d grown apart. She and her family moved away last year, and our lives had quickly started going in different directions. We kept in touch for a while with e-mails and an occasional phone call. I even went to stay with her in the summer, but it was a disaster. It was so strange; despite knowing each other nearly all our lives, we found we didn’t have anything to say to each other after the first couple of days. I spent most of the week wanting to go home. Things hadn’t been the same between us since I’d met Daisy.
Charlotte is one of those types who thinks reality is reality. Which, when you put it like that, is quite hard to argue with, I suppose. But I think there’s more to life than just the things that make sense!
When it was simply a case of our having different opinions, it wasn’t so important. I didn’t mind Charlotte laughing at my theories about how rays of sun poking through a cloud might be channels for carrying messages from another dimension. I kind of laughed at it myself, and it was part of the fun we shared.
But it all changed with Daisy. Daisy really was a fairy! A fairy godmother! Or fairy godsister; that was what we decided she’d be called. It made more sense, seeing as she was the same age as me. But the point is — she was real. And no amount of logical argument could convince me that she wasn’t. I saw her, talked to her, made friends with her. And she changed my life when she gave me three wishes — even if the biggest change was that I discovered my life was pretty good as it was.
Once I knew that fairies existed for real, I wasn’t OK with Charlotte laughing at me anymore. I tried telling her about Daisy in a letter. I’d hoped that maybe this one time, she’d believe me, that she’d see I was telling her something that really mattered to me. So when her response was to give me the usual stream of facts and figures explaining why fairies were a physical impossibility, well, I guess something changed for me after that.
From then on, I stopped wanting to share things with Charlotte so much. What was the point? For one thing, she was living hundreds of miles away, and from the sound of her e-mails, she was getting more and more involved in her new life and further away from the one we used to share. And for another, why bother trying to explain things to someone who tells you that the things you really believe in are a bunch of jokes and nonsense?
I actually did ask her if she wanted to come on vacation with us. Part of me wanted her to, hoping that perhaps we’d get our old friendship back if we spent some time together, away from all her new things — just the two of us with my parents. But a bigger part of me was nervous that if she did, we’d end up spending another week having nothing to say to each other. So when she said that she couldn’t leave her pony and her new puppy, I was honestly more relieved than disappointed. It felt horrible to admit it, but it was true.
It didn’t stop me from feeling a bit lonely now; although when I thought about the week ahead, it was Daisy I wished I could be sharing it with, not Charlotte.
But Daisy was even more out of my life than Charlotte. She’d done her assignment, and that was that. No matter how much I wished I could see her again, or looked for scraps of evidence that she was still around, it was probably time I faced that truth as well. Daisy was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. Charlotte and I had grown apart. And I still hadn’t found a new best friend at school. Which meant that right now, things weren’t going so well, actually.
I slowly unpacked my clothes, putting them away in the tiny chest of drawers under the window.
“Philippa!” Mom called from landing. “We’re going out to explore the village. You coming?”
“Two minutes,” I called down. I threw the rest of my clothes on the bed and joined them downstairs.
Mom was unwrapping a dish she’d brought from home and putting it in the oven. “Lentil bake,” she said. “Should be ready in half an hour.”
“Right; let’s hit the town!” Dad said with a grin. Then, looping my arm in his, he made me copy his silly walk all the way into the village.
Well, I always had Mom and Dad, I reminded myself. They might be the ditziest dingbats on the planet, but at least they hadn’t deserted me.
Hitting the town didn’t take long.
There were three main roads that led into the center of the village, where a group of shops and a couple of restaurants huddled around a cobbled square. A secondhand bookshop, three gift shops, a grocery store, and a deli. They were mostly closed, so we had to settle for window shopping.
Mom spotted some clay dragons in the window of one of the gift shops; it was called Potluck. “Oh, look at these!” she enthused. “We have to come back and get one of them.”
Dad peered through the glass, his head cocked almost upside down. “Not at that price, we don’t!” he sputtered. “Nearly two hundred dollars for that one!”
I scanned the shopwindow. As well as the dragons — which took up half the window — there were brightly painted cups and saucers, enormous plates with writing all around the edges, photo frames with prints of baby-size feet in blues and pinks all over them, plant pots, piggy banks, all huddled together on the wide shelves.
“Oh, look,” Mom said. She was pointing to a poster in the middle of the window.
“‘Make a mug. Paint a plate. Pottery sessions for the whole family,’” I read.
“That sounds like fun, don’t you think?” Mom squealed excitedly. “We could make things for each other.”
“Good idea. At two hundred dollars apiece, it’s about time one of us became a professional dragon-maker!” Dad said with a wink. Then he looked more closely. “Hey, that’s the same as one of the leaflets in the cottage,” he said. “Said something about a special offer this week: half price or something.”
“What d’you think? Shall we check it out one day?” Mom asked, looking at me.
At least it wo
uld keep me busy; it might even stop me from feeling so miserable and lonely. “Why not?” I said.
“Right. That’s settled,” Dad said. Then, grabbing my arm and looping it back over his, he silly-walked me back to the cottage.
“Almost dinnertime!” he announced. “There’s a slice of lentil bake in that kitchen with my name on it.”
Which, knowing the bizarreness of my mom’s dishes, there probably was.
Mom poked her head through the trapdoor. “You sure you’ll be OK up here, sweetheart?” she asked.
“Of course I will,” I replied over the top of the blankets. I loved my little den, even if the bed did sag like a deep well in the middle, and the blankets itched a bit and felt tight all around the edges where they were tucked in. It was still cozy.
“As long as you’re sure,” Mom said, hitching herself up the steps and crawling over to the side of my bed. “Night-night, darling,” she said, kissing my forehead. “Sleep well. Sweet dreams.”
“You, too,” I replied. Once she’d gone, I switched off my light and shut my eyes, suddenly tired out. Maybe it was from spending all day putting on a happy face for my parents. I didn’t want to do anything to spoil their vacation. And anyway, I guess I was glad to be away from home as well. I just wished I had someone to share the trip with.
I turned over, pulling the covers with me, but I couldn’t get comfortable. Moments later, I threw them off again, restless and indecisive.
The blankets made my arms itch, and my back was starting to ache from the dip in the mattress. I shifted to the edge of the bed and turned over again.
It was no use. I couldn’t sleep. How long had I been lying here? As I tossed and turned, I grew more and more irritable. Desperate for sleep, I tried counting sheep, counting clouds, counting stars — but nothing worked.
I pushed the blankets to the bottom of the bed. It was a hot night. Why was it so hot? Why couldn’t I sleep when I was so tired?
My mind raced and scrambled, until eventually I drifted off into a jerky, dreamless sleep.
Tap, tap, tap.
What was that? Something had woken me. I lifted my head off the pillow and listened. Nothing. I let my head drop back down on the pillow again and was on the verge of falling back to sleep, when —
Tappity-tap, tap, tap.
What was it? Something at the window? My head was heavy and full of sleep.
I peered into the darkness of my bedroom. Nothing. It was probably just one of those huge trees that stretched higher than the roof, its branches hitting the windowpane, scratching at the glass.
I pressed the pillow over my ear and tried to settle back to sleep. But the tapping carried on, growing louder and more insistent.
Tap, tap, taptaptaptap, TAP!
Eventually, I dragged myself out of bed. Kneeling down at the window, I lifted the latch and pushed the window frame. Nothing happened. I pushed harder, but the window was jammed. I pushed again and again, bashing at the frame with my fist. Nothing. Frustration grew inside me, coiling up like a tight spring in my chest.
Come on, open! What’s wrong with you?
I peered at the frame through the glow from the bedside lamp. It had been painted down. Surely paint couldn’t be that strong? One more try.
I hit the frame as hard as I could with the palm of my hand. Finally the window creaked and the paint cracked. I bashed again, nudging it open, bit by bit, but then my hand slipped and I hit the glass, too. It splintered all along the edge and I froze, silently watching to see if the glass was going to shatter and fall out of its frame.
A tiny sliver had split from the side, but apart from that, it was still in one piece. There was a crack running along the edge of the glass, but you could hardly see it. I decided not to worry about it. One tiny piece of glass missing from the edge of the frame wasn’t going to hurt anyone!
I opened the window, and the night air rushed in to meet me, fanning my face and soothing my rattled mind.
I leaned out of the window, sticking my face right out and taking a few deep breaths. It felt as if I were breathing the whole forest into me, and I shivered as its cool stillness seeped into the room.
A tiny crescent moon hung low in the sky, as though dangling from an invisible string, like a hammock, lazy and peaceful. The night was completely still.
That was when I realized — there were no branches near my bedroom. Nothing in scratching distance of the window at all. Had I imagined the tapping? I couldn’t have — it had woken me up!
But there was nothing here.
Something caught my eye, glinting against the blackness. It was flickering in the ivy below the window, catching the tiny bit of light from the moon.
It glinted again, just out of reach, not near enough to have caused the tapping. Then I saw what it was. The glass — the splinter that had broken from the window — it was stuck in something. I reached down toward it. My hand touched something smooth and feathery. Yikes! I yanked my hand back.
But I was intrigued. What was it? I reached out again and unhooked the whatever-it-was as carefully as I could. Bringing it inside, I sat down on the bed and examined it. A metal hoop, with feathers looped all around the edges. The circle was filled with tiny pieces of material all carefully sewn and woven together. The material was so delicate and thin, like a see-through skin of the smallest animal in the world. I’d never seen anything like it. Right in the center of the delicate skin, the shard of glass had pierced it and was lodged, like an archer’s arrow on a bull’s-eye.
I got up and shut the window. Then I hooked the feathery thing onto a jagged piece of wood sticking out of the beam above my bed.
Lying down again, I stared up at it, thinking that it reminded me of one of those mobiles you hang above babies’ cradles and wishing it had a little wind-up machine inside so that it would turn around and around and play “Rock-a-Bye Baby.” The thought made me smile. Or perhaps it was some kind of feathery lucky charm, like a symbol that ancient tribes used to worship. A feathered charm — yes, I liked that idea!
I was finally getting sleepy. Yawning, I told myself something that Dad used to say to me when I was little: if I made sure I still had a smile on my face as I fell asleep, I’d be certain to have happy dreams.
But then, what did Dad know?
Another minute and she’d have woken up — I’m sure she would have. Then I could have seen her.
I couldn’t risk waiting, though. I’d sneaked out when I had a spare five minutes. I knew it wasn’t long enough — and I knew I’d been warned not to. But still. What did they expect me to do? Sit around doing nothing while my best friend in the world was just down the road?
Well, they could think again. I just had to think of a way to sneak back tomorrow night.
But how? For a moment, I hesitated. Was I crazy? I knew ATC would be watching me closely on this assignment. I had to prove they could trust me, and I didn’t want to blow it.
But on the other wing, I had Philippa right here, literally on my doorstep!
No. I couldn’t ignore her. I wasn’t going to waste another day. I had to see her.
I’d think of something. I’d find a way.
I can’t see anything. Why can’t I see anything?
It’s so dark — too dark. It’s pitch, pitch-black. More than that, even. It’s like a complete absence of light, absence of everything. There’s nothing. So much nothing that I want to cry.
I try to make my way through the emptiness. I’m on my knees, crawling, reaching out with my arms for something — anything. I feel like a blind man without his cane, hoping someone will notice him, flailing around, calling out.
Then I’m slipping through nothingness.
My hands hit something. A wall. I feel my way around it, inching up with my fingers. I pull myself out of the vacuum and stand in the darkness. Another wall on my other side. It’s too near, closing in on me. A corridor. I walk forward — it’s all I can do.
And then I see it. A bright light, ahead
of me. I want to cry again, this time with happiness. The light — it’s full of everything I want. There’s a face inside it, looking at me, calling to me. A woman — what’s she saying? I need to know what she’s saying to me!
I’m running blindly down the corridor, running toward the light, toward the face. Wait!
But she’s gone. Only the light remains. It keeps moving, changing, growing strong, then faint, disappearing altogether and then returning, strong and focused, almost blinding me.
“Philippa.”
I have to get to the light. Don’t go — don’t go — stay!
“Philippa! What’s wrong? You’re shaking.”
No, don’t stop me! I have to get to the light. It’s fading — disappearing. I can hardly see it now. Please! Come back!
“Philippa, you have to wake up!”
Mom was holding my shoulders. What happened? Where’s the light?
“Darling, are you all right?”
I stared blankly at her.
“You were calling out.”
I looked around the room, trying to take in the reality of it. Of course. It was just a dream. A nightmare. Nothing to worry about.
I took Mom’s hand. “Sorry,” I said.
Mom hugged me. “It’s all right, sweetheart. I was still awake. I can never get to sleep the first night somewhere new. Shall I fix us a couple of hot chocolates?”
I sat up and pulled the blankets off me. “That would be great.”
“You stay here,” Mom said, tucking me back in. “I’ll bring it up.”
Mom left the room, and I snuggled down again, still unsettled by my dream. I could hardly remember what it had been about now; just the feeling remained — a huge feeling of sadness. I’d never felt this sad in my life. It was as if the sadness were bigger than me, as if it could swallow me up and I’d disappear completely.
I must have drifted back to sleep, because I don’t remember Mom coming back. I woke in the morning with a dull ache inside me that I couldn’t explain.