Me, My Elf & I (12 page)

“He’s not here,” I tell her. This sets her tears off again. “Where’s Willow?” I ask, more annoyed now that I’m the one taking care of the little ones by myself when I’ve got my own problems to deal with.

“All she does is hug her pillow,” Poppy says.

“She’s sad,” Bramble adds.

I squint up at the top floor of the house. The hawk perches on the roof peak above the open windows and wispy clouds float by. “You’re right,” I tell Poppy. “All Willow does is stare at the trees with her pillow in her arms thinking about Ash.” And this is annoying, because sure, I’d like to have a boyfriend, too, but at least I’m making an effort to have a life here. I pick up a wood chip and fling it up toward our bedroom window while shouting, “Willow! Hey, Willow! ” Poppy joins me. “Willow! ” we both yell and throw our wood chips. The hawk spreads its wings and takes flight above the trees. Then Bramble and Persimmon start jumping around, throwing wood chips and yelling, too. “Willow! ” we all scream at the top of our lungs. “Willow!”

For some weird reason the hawk swoops down and lands on the top of our fence to screech at us. “Look! Look! ” Bramble yells excitedly. He starts climbing up the fence to get a closer look. “Do you think its nest is up there?”

Before Bramble gets very far, the back door flies open and my mom is yelling at us, “What are you doing? Have you lost your minds?” The hawk flaps its wings and lifts off into the air again.

“You scared it away!” Bramble yells at my mom.

“I cannot run a business with you howling like a bunch of wild coyotes when I’m on the phone,” Mom shouts. We all start talking at once to protest, but then she zaps us. I feel it in my throat, a deep itchy tingling and my tongue goes numb. We’re all mute. No sounds come from our open mouths. We stare at her—this crazy, shouting woman who used to be our calm, happy mother. She slams the door and we can see her through the kitchen window, pacing furiously while talking on the phone again.

Bramble has dropped down from the fence. He, Poppy, and I blink at one another. Our mother has never hexed us before. Never. Only the worst, most impatient elfin mothers hex their children. I look down at Persimmon. She wails silently, bewildered by what has happened and where her little voice has gone. My stomach is tight and my head hurts. I want to scream but I can’t.

Just then, Willow pops her head out the upstairs window. “What’s going on?” she asks sleepily. “Why’d you wake me up?” I’m so angry right then that I pick up a rock and fling it at her. “Hey! ” she shouts and ducks back into the window. The rock bounces off the side of the house. Willow peeks out again. “Why’d you do that?”

Poppy must feel the same as me because she picks up a handful of pebbles and hurls them toward the sky. They rain back down on us, pelting our heads and shoulders.

“What’s going on?” Willow demands. I pick up another rock and aim it toward her. Before I can throw it, she zaps it and turns it into a fistful of sand that sprinkles through my fingers to the ground.

I drop the sand and point to a sparrow flying past the window, toward a tree. I redirect the bird straight toward Willow’s long hair ruffling in the breeze. The bird flaps frantically, fighting against the force of my magic. I see Bramble out of the corner of my eye. He waves his arms and jumps up and down, pointing toward the bird, but his magic is not powerful enough to stop me. Willow, though, is quick and sharp. “Wither Arm!” she shouts, sending my arm flopping uselessly by my side. The bird cartwheels in the air then swoops away and disappears into the branches of a tall oak tree.

I try to yell at Willow, to tell her that I’m sick of her not helping and that her stupid moping is making everyone else miserable, too, but my voice is still gone. So I run toward the house. I fling the door open with my one good arm (the other flaps like a broken wing beside me) and I charge through the kitchen, past my mom, and up the back stairs. I hear the others close behind me.

Willow is waiting for us at the top of the steps. “Zephyr, what’s wrong with you?” she asks. “You’re acting like a lunatic.”

I move my mouth, but no words come out. Then Bramble tackles me from behind. I’m on the floor, Bramble on top of me. I wrench around and see his mouth opening and shutting, opening and shutting, and I imagine that he’s silently yelling at me about the bird. I’m powerless then without my voice while one arm lays like a dead fish on the floor and the other is pinned to my side by Bramble’s strong little legs. Poppy darts out from the stairwell to my rescue. She flings herself at Bramble, knocking him off my back, and they land in a heap on the rug. Willow rushes to them. “What in the name of Mother Earth is going on with you guys?” she shouts.

Now I’m peeved at Bramble, the little toad, for tackling me. I zing a hiccupping hex at him, but in all the confusion of arms and legs with Willow trying to separate Poppy and Bramble, my hex hits all three of them and they are instantly seized by tiny squeaking convulsions, “Hic! Hic! Hic!” I try not to, but I laugh because it’s so funny to see them all hiccupping in unison. And wouldn’t it figure that that’s when my voice comes back so they all hear me. My magic must be getting weak, though, from all the spell casting, plus I’m out practice, because the hex lasts only a few seconds, then all three of them are glaring at me as I snicker meanly from my place on the floor.

“No, no! ” I squeal, because my voice is faint. I skitter backward across the rug. “I didn’t mean it.”

Poppy is as mad as a cornered skunk. It’s almost funny to watch her try to summon some kind of spell to get me back. She lifts up on her toes and raises her arms above her head, then she yells, “Poop!” with all her fury as she flings her arms toward me. But her magic is so puny that in the tense seconds following her mighty attempt to zap me with a horrid hex only an itty-bitty squeaky fart escapes from my butt. Then we all lose it. Even Willow. We are all on the floor rolling, clutching our sides, and howling with laughter until our eyes are full of tears and we can barely breathe.

The only thing that stops us from laughing until we’re sick is my mom, who storms up the stairs yelling, “What in the stars is wrong with you kids!” She stands over us with her hands on her hips, then suddenly asks, “Where’s Persimmon?” Each of us pops upright. We look around.

“Percy?” we say. “Percy, where are you?”

“Where’d you go?”

“She’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

“Come out.”

“Come on, Persimmon, no hiding now,” Mom says firmly, but our sister doesn’t reappear.

We comb the upstairs, each of us sure that she followed us up the steps. But she’s not in her room, not under her bed or anyone else’s bed, not in any of the closets, or hiding in the bathtub, or squatting behind a chair. We fan out. Willow and I go to the first floor, my mother is on the second floor, while Poppy and Bramble continue looking on the top floor. We all call to her, our pleas going from gentle coaxing to angry demands that she show herself. We meet up in the kitchen after five minutes of fruitless searching and then we begin to panic.

“When’s the last time you saw her? ” my mother asks.

“Outside,” we tell her. “But then she came upstairs.”

“Are you sure? ”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I went first. Bramble, did you see her? ”

“I followed you,” he says and turns to Poppy. “Did you? ”

“I thought she was behind me,” Poppy says, but my mom is already out the back door, not interested in our excuses. We run behind her.

The garden is tiny and with the five of us scouring every square inch, it doesn’t take long to realize that Persimmon’s not here either.

“Where is she?” Poppy crumbles to a little quivering heap on the ground. Bramble’s chin quivers and soon he’s sobbing, too. My eyes fill with tears because I know this is all my fault. I should have been more mature. More responsible and helpful instead of so self-centered, focused only on my stupid problems at school and how much Willow is bugging me.

My mother stands motionless in the center of the garden. She closes her eyes and then slowly lifts her arms. Soon, the air is still, the breeze is gone, the leaves above us no longer flutter, and the birds are quiet. We wait. My mother raises her head to the sky, her arms are above her now. We feel her, inside of us, pulling at us, bringing us toward her, drawing us back into her heart. Her magic is so strong that it almost hurts and we wince, whimper, moan a little, but we stay put so her power can go through us to our lost baby sister. My mother strains, calls all her children. Somewhere Grove must feel the tug of her, too. We each add our own yearning for Persimmon, making the force of our family undeniable, and then we hear her. A distant cry from behind our garden.

We run to the fence, shouting her name. “Persimmon! Persimmon!” Bramble is the first to pull the ivy and honeysuckle away from the fence. He sees a hole at the bottom and tunnels down like a groundhog. The rest of us claw at the vines as my mother scrambles to the top of the fence. She hops over and disappears.

Willow runs for a ladder leaning against the house. We prop it against the fence and each clamber to the top. I go last. Ahead of me, Willow and Poppy hop over a row of our neighbor’s peony bushes, then run up a stone walk after my mother and Bramble. They swing open the cellar doors against the back of a stranger’s house.

“Stay there, Zephyr,” my mother commands over her shoulder and I plant myself on top of the fence, ready to pull everyone back home to safety.
Please let her be okay. Please let her be okay,
I say over and over again in my mind.

Persimmon’s wails are louder now and the owner of the house comes out her back door, frightened by the sudden intrusion of five tunicked strangers tumbling out of her cellar. My mother emerges from the dark steps with Persimmon tucked up against her body.

“What on earth . . . ?” the neighbor woman says.

“My baby,” says Mom, then buries her face into Percy’s soft hair. “She must have wandered into your yard and . . .”

“But how? Why?” the woman sputters and looks from my mother and my siblings to me on the fence.

“There’s a hole under the fence,” Bramble says, and points to the back of her yard.

“We live over there. My name is Poppy!” my sister adds brightly. “And she’s Persimmon.”

“Is she okay?” the woman asks, softened by Poppy’s and Bramble’s sweetness.

My mother lifts Persimmon up and gazes at her tearstained face. “Yes,” she says softly. “She’s okay. Just frightened.”

“Oh dear,” says the woman. “Poor little thing. How could she have gotten down in my cellar . . . ?”

Mom hands Percy to Willow. Poppy and Bramble follow them back toward the fence.

“I’m so very very sorry,” Mom says to the woman. “She doesn’t normally do this kind of thing. We just moved here and . . .”

I don’t hear the rest of the explanation my mother is concocting, surely leaving out the part where my entire family was hexing one another like a bunch of uncivilized trolls running rampant in the woods. Willow hands the little ones to me and I carry them down the ladder, one by one, into our garden.

Soon, my mother and Willow are back over the fence and we are all inside, huddled together on the floor of the kitchen. Persimmon is asleep against my mother’s chest with the rest of us draped over her. No one talks. We are all shaky and exhausted from casting spells and losing Percy. Plus, I’m absolutely sick to my stomach. This whole thing is my fault and everything in Brooklyn—at school and at home—is going wrong. Nothing is how it should be and no amount of new experience—performing, making friends, or getting a boyfriend—is worth this. For the first time since we moved here I want to be back in Alverland where things make sense, where my family is normal and together and everyone is nice again. Where I don’t have to worry about who my friends are, whether my sister will ever be happy again, how long my dad and brother will be gone, or when my mom will freak out next and turn us all into stone.

I’m the first to sniffle then sneeze. My head feels buzzy and my eyes are tired. I’ve only ever exhausted my magic once before, when I was eight years old, trying to make a mischievous raven tell me where it hid my favorite silver amulet. Bramble coughs next, then Poppy sniffles, too.

“See, this is what happens,” my mother says quietly. “Your magic is a powerful force and you have to use it for good.” But then Mom sneezes. We all look up into her face. Her eyes are as wide with surprise as ours are.

“You, too, Mommy,” Poppy says. “You hexed us.”

“Oh dear,” says Mom. “That’s right. I did, didn’t I?”

“You did?” Willow asks, her eyes wide and worried.

“Yes and she yelled, too,” Bramble says. “So now she has a cold.”

Willow and I exchange slight smiles. We know that our mother couldn’t possibly have exhausted her magic from one little hex on us. She’s far too powerful for that. But it’s cute that Bramble and Poppy think so.

“I’m sorry,” Mom says, wrapping her arms around us and squeezing. “I lost my temper with you guys. Just like an erdler mother.”

“But why?” Poppy asks.

“It’s hard here, Pop, with your dad and Grove gone. I have to take care of you guys and I also have to work so we’ll have enough money to pay for this house and food and lights and water.”

“We have to pay for water?” Bramble asks, amazed.

Mom nods. “We have to pay for everything here,” she explains.

“Even air?” Poppy asks, looking around suspiciously as if it’s costing her something to breathe.

Mom laughs. “No, not air, but just about everything else it seems like.”

“I don’t like it here,” Bramble is the first to say, burrowing deep into my mother’s side.

“Me either,” says Poppy. “When can we go back to Alverland?”

Willow searches my mother’s face hopefully. I also watch my mother’s expression carefully, trying to detect her true feelings. Does she hate it here as much as Poppy, Bramble, and Willow? Could it really be that we’ll leave? Even though I’m miserable today, I feel my heart sinking at the prospect of leaving Brooklyn. I would never see Ari and Mercedes again. Never know if I could beat Bella at the audition. Never again see Timber grinning at me. And worst of all, I’d never know if I could truly be a performer beyond the pageants and festivals in Alverland. If I have what it takes to make it in the erdler world. I don’t want to be just an ordinary elf like everyone else except my dad.