Fairy School Drop-out (4 page)

How can you pick a fairy's house? It's easy,
once you know what to look out for:

1. The garden is always green, no matter what the weather has been like.

2. All the flowers grow to exactly the same height.

3. The house often has a fancy doorknob.

4. The chimneys blow out multi-coloured smoke.

5. Fairy houses always seem to look a bit different each time you look at them, although it's hard to say why.

There were hardly any human kids living in Elly's street either, until a family moved in to the empty house next door to the Knottleweed-Eversprightlys. Elly had seen a boy in the backyard and she'd glimpsed a girl gazing out one of the windows who looked about her own age. Fairies were allowed to befriend humans so long as they never revealed their real identities. In fact, these friendships were actually encouraged, as it helped fairies discover more about humans. But there was no way Elly was going to make friends with one. She hated humans.

As far as she could see, fairies were expected to be servants to humans – granting their wishes, fixing up their dumb mistakes. What did fairies get in return? Nothing! Elly didn't see why she should be expected to help them out. Half the humans didn't even believe in fairies. The other half loved fairies way too much. Elly had heard terrible stories about fairies nearly getting squeezed to death by mobs of excited little girls. No, in Elly's opinion humans were best avoided altogether.

When Elly arrived at her own house, she felt like a snack. Quietly she tiptoed to the kitchen and peeped around the corner. The fridge was humming away quietly. It looked like a perfectly normal fridge. But it wasn't. Elly carefully put on a crash helmet. Then she took a deep breath and rushed into the room, head down. As she neared the fridge the door flung open and a large lump of moldy, smelly cheese flew out. It splattered against her crash helmet and oozed down the sides. Elly ignored it and kept running. A moment later the fridge opened again and flung out a handful of soggy lettuce leaves. Elly tried to dodge them, but they squished across her face.

Elly sighed and peeled the leaves off. The fridge was one of her mum's latest inventions: a self-cleaning model that ejected anything past its used-by date. Elly knew that a fridge like that might be useful but why did it have to be so violent about it?

The Knottleweed-Eversprightly household was full of stuff like this, but luckily not all of it was as bad-tempered as the fridge. Elly's favourite was the bath that kept the water at the perfect temperature for as long as you were in there. It also had an inbuilt bubblebath dispenser which offered 120 colours of bubble-bath – everything from red to purple or even gold with pink stripes. It was a singing bathtub too, with a rich, melodious voice. Sometimes Elly sang along with it, but other times she liked lying back in a lather of multi-coloured bubbles while the tub sang to her. The songs it sung depended on what mood it was in. One day it was pop songs, and the next it was country music. Elly and the bath had spent many happy hours together, and whenever she walked by it would try to convince her she needed washing.

‘You are looking diiiiiiiirty,' it would warble. ‘Come and take a baaaaaaaaath!'

Finally, Elly reached the fridge. She grabbed some biscuits and ran out of the kitchen as fast as she could, narrowly avoiding getting hit by a rotten tomato. Only when she was safely out of there did she look at the biscuits.
Great.
They were her dad's healthy zucchini biscuits. Elly ate them anyway – there was no way she was dealing with that fridge again so soon.

Just as she finished, Elly's dad appeared, holding Kara with one hand and a big net with the other.

‘Elly, look after Kara for me, please,' he said. ‘Someone's turned all our washing into birds. I'll have to catch it all before it flies away.'

Elly looked outside. The backyard was full of birds, some of which had pegs attached to their wings. Swans, parrots and crows were perched on the line while below, a couple of seagulls that looked distinctly like Elly's underpants were squabbling over a worm. It was obvious to Elly who'd done it.

‘Bird!' exclaimed Kara, looking very pleased with herself.

Their dad handed Kara to Elly. Kara dribbled lovingly onto Elly's shoulder and a puff of smoke rose up where the drops fell. Baby-fairy dribble is very strong stuff.

‘But I've got homework to do,' Elly grumbled, quickly wiping up the drool with a special reinforced hankie that she kept just for this purpose.

‘Do it later,' said her dad, heading outside. ‘I'm very busy.'

What else is new?
thought Elly. Her parents were always busy these days. Elly could remember when they had time to take her to the park and read her stories. But that was before Kara came along, and before her mum's work became so important. Now it sometimes felt like they'd forgotten Elly even existed.

Elly put her sister down in front of her blocks, and Kara stacked them into towers. This might not sound unusual, except that Kara didn't use her hands to do it. The blocks obediently rose from the ground one by one to form the stack. When the tower got too high, it tumbled over and Kara gurgled with delight.

Elly felt a tiny stab of jealousy.
How did
Kara get so good at magic without ever even going
to fairy school?

It was hard not to feel dumb around Kara. Elly's parents kept saying, ‘You're just a late bloomer,' but Elly wasn't so sure. She suspected she was one of those boring plants that never flowered at all.

Elly's wand beeped. Saphie had sent her a wand-message. There was just enough power in the wand for Elly to see Saphie's face faintly in the star.

‘Our homework for next week's spelling class is learning to make a star-trail,' Saphie reported. ‘It's pretty easy. Just fill the handle with dehydrated stardust then push the purple button. A trail of stars should follow behind your wand when you wave it.' The message crackled to a finish.

Elly knew right away there was no way she'd be able to do that homework. The only thing she'd ever been able to make trail behind her wand before was a stream of toothpaste. It wasn't even a good flavour either, like Sparkle-Mint – the toothpaste that makes purple sparks burst from your mouth like fireworks as you brush.
Her
toothpaste tasted like parsley.

Of course, Elly should've been happy about all this. After all, she was trying to get expelled from Mossy Blossom, and making a parsley toothpaste trail would definitely do the trick. But watching how easily Kara did magic made Elly wish she could do it too. Was it possible that her parents were right about her being a late bloomer? Elly had some stardust in her bag. Maybe she should just
try
making a wand-trail.

But just as she started working, Kara got bored with her blocks and started climbing all over her big sister.

‘I can't play right now,' said Elly, looking around for something to distract Kara with. Nearby was another of her mother's inventions: the Space-Case.

The SpaceCase was like a flying suitcase, designed for fairies who had lots of things to carry. Air-holes in the top meant that even pets could be transported in it. The case was made from a new, top-secret material that instantly blended in with any background it flew up against, hiding the contents as well as the case itself. This was useful for avoiding human attention while flying, but it caused problems, too. Elly could never remember where the SpaceCase was, and tripped over it almost every day.

Still, it might be good for entertaining Kara – it was the perfect size for a baby to sit in. Elly looked out the window at her dad. She suspected he might not like her idea as much as she did, but luckily he was running around after a large white swan.

Elly plonked Kara inside the Space-Case. Kara gurgled delightedly.

‘Fly to the other side of the room and back,' commanded Elly, and the SpaceCase rose and sailed smoothly to the far wall before returning.

Kara clapped her hands. ‘More!' she said.

‘Fly downstairs and back,' said Elly, and the Space-Case obediently took off. Elly continued working on her wand but hadn't gotten very far when the Space-Case returned, so she sent it away to do twelve laps of the lounge room. By the next time the Space-Case returned, Elly was in a very bad mood. Her homework was not going well. Every time she tried filling the wand with stardust, it made an odd sneezing sound and all the dust blew out again.