Over The Sea (2 page)

I did not want Clair deciding I was too weird, and leaving.

“I love beautiful things,” I said longingly, looking at the ugly stucco houses, the smoggy black sky hiding the stars, the telephone lines, palm trees that never cast any shade. “I don't get to see many beautiful things here. So I try to find them in books.”

“I love books as well,” Clair said. “What is the most beautiful name you can think of?”

I sighed, closing my eyes. “Cherene. It makes me think of jewels with fire inside, and purple and blue outside.” I opened my eyes. “Does that sound stupid?”

“Cherene.” She pronounced all the vowels, so there was a soft ‘eh' at the end, which made the name even prettier. Cher-enn-eh. “Not at all.”

“Yours?”

“Jennet.”

I grinned. “We have one kind of like that. Not JENN-et, but Jenn-ETTE. I love that name too! It sounds like a bird taking flight!”

Clair grinned back. “A bird on wing, up, up. I like that image very much.” She hugged her arms close. “Very much,” she said softly. Then, with a quick gesture, as though pushing something away, she said, “I wish I could do that — say things and see images from them. Tell me: what does Kwenz sound like to you?”

“Chewing a mouthful of rocks.”

Clair shook with silent laughter. “And Glotulae?”

“Gargling motor oil.”

She whispered the words to herself, and then shook harder, but no sound came out. Presently she wiped her eyes.

“So tell me about more beautiful things in that magic kingdom,” I asked.

“Well, there's the Sherwoods' Forest,” she began.

“You mean in England? Where Robin Hood once lived?”

She shook her head. “It's not in this world. It's called the Sherwoods' Forest because that's the last name of the royal family, and one of them kept Glotulae's ancestors from allying with the Chwahir to take it, level it, and get more land. The Sherwoods come from ancient Sartor, near as we can tell. Maybe the name came from Earth, because humans have crossed back and forth from that world to this countless times, but it's more likely it came from somewhere else, and just sounds similar.”

“What's the somewhere else like?”

“Beautiful — ” She paused, frowned slightly. “Uh oh. It's late. Would you like me to visit again?”

“Yes,” I said fervently.

She nodded. “I'll be back when I can.”

I jumped down off the fence, thinking she would as well, but no one landed beside me. I turned, saw that she was gone. Only a slight breeze briefly touched my face, then that was gone too.

I retreated inside, climbed into bed, and stared out the window. I didn't believe she'd come back.

She didn't come back the following night, though I stayed awake nearly the whole time, this time wearing my summer shorts and t-shirt under my nightie, and sweltering. That next day I was desperately tired in school.

A week passed with painful slowness, each day hotter and smoggier than the last. My spirits veered between hope and despair and anger at myself for dreaming that Clair and her story had been real.

About eight days after she first came, Clair came again, at night, tapping lightly at the glass door to my room. As soon as I saw her long white hair glistening in the light from the streetlamps, and her long skirt and bare feet, joy rushed through my mind like nothing I had ever experienced before.

I opened the door and eased out, not daring to exchange my nightie for clothes lest she disappear again. She didn't seem to notice what I was wearing.

“Want to play?” she asked.

“Sure! Or tell me more about magic.”

“What about it?”

‘How it works, because here, there is no magic. Or, we're told it's not real.”

“There's magic in this world,” Clair said, looking about as if she were about to sniff something. But she didn't sniff. Instead, she grinned. “If there weren't, I'd be stuck.” She really was from another world!

“Show me?” I asked.

“Well, here's an illusion.” She muttered something under her breath, and made a gesture. A rose bush glowed on the grass in front of us. As I watched, the petals of the roses paired off, moving, then took off as bright butterflies, fluttering upward like golden embers and then winking out. The rose bush slowly faded, until I could see the grass through it, then it was gone.

“Oh. How pretty,” I breathed.

“I saw that in a play once.”

“Can you make a princess gown? And long hair? I always wanted long hair, but I'm not allowed to have it.” I tugged at my ugly Dutch-boy bob.

“I can give you the illusion, but it won't be real. At home I could make you the dress, but it's tremendously complicated magic. Easier just to buy one! And also, making hair grow means relaxing time, which is a
really
complicated set of spells. Way beyond me as yet, I should add.”

“An illusion is okay,” I said.

She did the muttering and gesture again. This time, faint glitter at the edges of my vision made me blink, then I looked down. My thin hair, chopped straight at my ears in reality, now lay in a shining mantle against a wide skirt of silken blue. I twirled around, but there was no sound, and I just felt my nightgown, full of static, clinging to my legs.

When the illusion faded, she said, “Those gowns are actually quite heavy, and you'd feel like a stuffed cushion in this weather.”

“I'd like to try one.. Just once.”

She grinned. “Maybe someday. Want to go somewhere? I can do transfers.”

“How about the beach? It's close, but we hardly ever get to go.”

“Picture it in your mind,” she said.

I did. She murmured again, touched my arm, and a dizzy-spell splorched behind my eyes. But before I could do anything it passed, and my vision cleared, and I found that we were standing at the water's edge. The crash and sigh of small breakers, the heavy smell of brine, the feel of wet sand under my toes were all real.

We ran, kicked sand, made mountains, and time sped by until she jolted me with, “I have to go.”

She touched my arm again, and we stood outside my room.

“I'll be back,” she promised, and I went inside.

I was tired at school the next day, but I didn't care. I no longer doubted her existence — and I believed her promise.

Sometimes it would be a week before she came again. A couple times the weeks stretched into months. Summer passed, and school started again, a new grade, the same old stuff. The first time she let so long a time go by once again I found it difficult to believe that she had been real, or that I would ever see her again, and my mood veered between the hurting kind of hope — when you don't really believe, you only wish, really hard — and anger. Yet mad as I got, I never wished she hadn't come. The memory of her visits was much stronger than the pain of hopes dashed yet another dreary day.

Of course I had to hide my feelings, for I knew that I could never talk about Clair. Oh, just the thought of mentioning a girl with white hair who came from another world and knew magic would make me cringe inside, for I'd either get laughed at for more silly stories, or else called a liar. And if I dared to say that I wished I could go away with her, I'd get the belt for being pouty.
You want something to whine about? I'll give you something to whine about
. I can still hear that threat, and the sickening feeling that one could not get away, that one was not safe in one's own home, and then afterward,
Smile! If you pout you're asking for it
. Even though you never, in your whole life, would ever ‘ask' to be beaten with a wire hanger or a belt, or to have a shoe flung at your head.

Not that I lived with villains, for I didn't, really. I know what real villains are. But that was the way people treated kids in those days, and they hit you the harder, convinced that it was somehow good for you — that they were in the right. If you got in trouble at school, you could count on getting in more at home, for having been bad enough to have the first trouble.

So violence was used to get you to behave, to work harder, to listen — and to think, or at least to pretend to think, like everyone else, to behave the way they told you to. The only safe place was away from adults. And the very idea that someone like Clair could be real would be something the adults would feel they had to beat out of me for my own good.

A soft tapping at the door — she was back!

Soon we sat on the fence. “What's your favorite color?” I asked.

“Mmm ... I keep changing my mind, truth to tell. To see, I like them all. Blue right now. And you?”

“Green. I love blue too, but the green of trees, of grass, and there couldn't be anything prettier than green velvet. I saw some once, in a movie.”

Her lips shaped the word
movie?

I explained. She said it sounded like magic, and I asked her to do another magic trick, to prove to myself again that that, too, was real.

After that we talked, and played, and traded stories. I told the stories of books that I'd read, sometimes acting them out, and she told me more about the Mearsieans — and a little more about Glotulae, her brat of a son, and Kwenz. Though not much. Talking about them made her angry. And once her voice went so soft I couldn't hear what she was saying, and I got impatient until I looked over and saw the sheen of tears on her eyelids, glistening in the light of the street lamp.

Each time she stopped herself and said something like
I should talk about the good things.
And I was too scared I'd lose her if I said that the villains were
interesting
— and that I'd been drawing pictures of them at school, imagining ways of defeating them. I remembered my promise to myself to be calm, not wild, polite.

Other times we talked about, oh, all kinds of things, like horses, what foods we loved or hated, and why flowers smelled good, and even about government, although I have to admit my mind wandered the one time she brought that up.

Sometimes — if I forgot my vow — I made her laugh.

We only talked about our families once. “Who else is in the house?” she asked, pointing.

“Family,” I said, wrinkling my nose.

“They are evil, then?”

“Evil? Nah,” I said, though I was thinking of those terrible beatings with the belt. But other kids got that too. The next door neighbor girl had gotten it once just for talking to another kid who was of a religion her parents didn't like. Their windows were next to our driveway, where I was playing hopscotch that time. I could hear the snap of the belt, which sounded even scarier when someone else was getting it than when I was, her sobs in between
But I didn't know anything was wrong
.

“Indifferent, then?” Clair asked.

At the time I didn't know what that word meant. I shrugged. “I feel like a cat among dogs, or maybe like a dog among cats. How about you?”

“I am now alone, except for a cousin I rarely get to see.”

And that was that, leaving me almost overwhelmed with envy. Alone! So that was why she got to come here, and not worry about getting into trouble, and why she could learn magic! Freedom! Never any terror when you go home that someone's in a bad mood, and a thing you do or say wrong that one day just gets a dirty look will today get you welts that last for three weeks.

Oh, then came the great surprise.

On her next appearance she said right away, “At last I've learned enough magic to take you with me to my world, and get you back here at the same time you left, so there won't be trouble. Would you like that?”

I had to whisper, of course, lest I wake someone up, but my YES! nearly blasted the stucco from the walls.

She took my hand, muttered some crazy words . My teeth hummed, my scalp felt like it was crinkling —

— And my vision smeared, leaving me feeling dizzy and upset at the stomach. Not so that I had to barf, but more like you feel after spinning round and round just after you ate a big meal.

But the feeling passed, and Clair said, “Sorry about the transfer ickies. It happens when you go long distances.”

I blinked.

“Like between worlds,” she added.

I realized I was standing on a balcony, and it was daylight. At first I thought the railing was made out of ice, except the air was warm. Was it plastic, then? Because it reminded me of the fake North Pole at Santa's Village, which featured fake icicles and snow, but when I touched it, it did not feel like plastic. It felt like stone. I looked at it more closely. It was glistening, just like ice, and even faintly translucent near the surface, but under the surface the color was white.

“What is this stuff?” I asked Clair, who looked much the same in daylight as at night: a girl of maybe twelve, square face, ordinary kid build, pale skin, light hazel eyes, and pure white hair — not blond, but white, so white it had a faint bluish cast. Her brows were thin but black, as were her eyelashes.