The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (10 page)

“What's your name?”

“What? Nothing. Max.”

“Why are you so mad at me, Max?”

The boy blinked. He tried to look away from Thomas, but succeeded only in looking at his chin.

“'C…'cause you were talking to your desk like a freak. My dad says freaks and hobos are scum.”

Thomas opened his eyes wider. The rain clouds above the jungle gym rolled and reflected in them.

“Max! Do you mean you
don't
talk to your desk?”

“N … no. Why would I? That's stupid,” Max sneered.

Thomas blinked slowly. His eyes shone. “Why is it stupid, Max?”

Max's voice began to shake. “'Cause…'cause they don't talk back, dummy.”

“Are you sure? Maybe yours doesn't. Maybe you got a dud. Or maybe it can't talk. But that doesn't mean it isn't lonely and sad because you haven't even said hello to it. My cousin had the mumps when he was little and he can't talk at all now. But he listens and laughs at jokes and he can make signs with his hands so we all know what he's thinking. Just because you can't use words doesn't mean you can't talk. There's lots of kinds of talking. Talking is the best thing in the whole world, I think. Talking is Something Awfully Magic. You can make things happen just by saying the right words, in the right order, at the right volume. You can make your mother bring eggs instead of tomatoes for breakfast or take you to the pier to see the lights instead of staying home and going to bed early. You can make a toy appear in your arms and chocolate appear in your cup.”

Max was breathing slow and heavy. The Other Children leaned in, their mouths open, listening fiercely.

“Maybe, if I can think of the right words, I can even make you stop wanting to hit me. I'll make you a deal, okay?”

“Yes,” Max breathed.

“If my desk hasn't talked by the time we're out of this school, you can hit me. Twice. And your fist will be bigger then. And if it does—”

“You get to hit me?”

“Sure, if that's what makes you happy. I get to hit you. Sound fair?”

It worked better than Thomas had thought it would. His parents were mostly immune to this sort of thing by now. Max nodded. He looked like he was going to cry. Thomas felt it best to exit while he was still mercifully unpunched. He turned to go, almost tiptoeing, as if he could give them all the slip and vanish like a spy in a comic book. But he couldn't, not in real life. Max came to and flailed out with his foot. He knew he'd been shown up somehow, and no small primate can bear that for much longer than a minute. Max's kick landed and Thomas went sprawling, the Secretive Satchel flying open, his baseball and his pencil and Inspector Balloon skittering out under the toothy mouth of the jungle gym. His mittens did not unravel into real paws. They landed in a freezing, half-dried mud puddle. One of his Golden Galoshes came loose as he landed on the pavement. One of the Other Children snatched it up. His stocking foot soaked through in a moment with filthy, sludgy water.

Goodbye, shoe.

“What's
that
?” one of Max's friends shrieked. “Is that your
diary,
Thomas?”

The Other Children gasped all together at this juicy bit of fresh meat thrown before them. Thomas scrambled for Inspector Balloon, but Max was faster. He seized it and held it up like a hunter parading the head of a vanquished lion. Only then did a snag in his plan seem to dawn in his eyes.

“Well, but I can't read it, though.”

Thomas breathed relief. Saved by Mrs. Wilkinson only having gotten to the letter
L
today. But it was not to be: A girl in the back of the throng trilled out:

“Make him read it!” The voice was only a little thing, strangely flat and soft, but it carried over all their heads and into Max's ear.

Max, triumphant, shoved Inspector Balloon back into Thomas's muddy hands. “Read it or I'll thump you till your mummy won't know you,” he barked. “Nice and loud, Bobby's deaf in one ear.”

Thomas wiped the rainwater off of his notebook. He shoved the Carnivorous Mittens in his pocket and sniffled. They would hate him forever if he read them his rules. They would stare at him like his father did and tell him to shut up shut up shut
up
. They would know he wasn't Normal. That he had no Common Sense. That he couldn't understand things the way they could understand them. He would be a leper in the Kingdom of School forever. For the first time, Thomas Rood longed for his house full of things that he wanted so desperately to be alive but stubbornly refused. Real alive things were terrifying. And they could pull out
your
stuffing if you disappointed them. But none of the Great Battles of Britain had much to say on the subject of just wanting to go home and have some milk and a sulk.

Thomas tried to make his eyes deep, endless pools with soft stars in the mud of their bottoms. But he was crying too much and his nose was dripping and they just stayed a little boy's red eyes. He tried to make his voice kind and hushed and seductive, but it cracked and shook like a skinny twig in the wind.

“The Laws of the Kingdom of School,” he squeaked. “One: A Teacher is the same thing as an Empress only a Teacher wears skirts and uses a ruler instead of a scepter. Two: Be present at eight o'clock sharp or you will be marked Tardy and if you are Tardy enough you will be banished to the Land of Detention, where no food or joy can live. Three: If you write that you shall not do a thing five hundred times you cannot do it again for your whole life. Only Teachers possess this magic, as Mother and Father have never tried it. Four: A race of Giants live in the Kingdom of School. They are the Big Kids and they dwell in the Upperclassmen's Wing. They must be treated as dragons and never bothered or they will destroy us, for they know great and terrible magic as well as how to drive cars. Five: When the clock strikes three in the afternoon, the power of the Teacher is broken with the pealing of a bell and all go free. Six: There is a curse called Homework a Teacher may cast if she longs for her power to continue after the great bell has rung.…”

Thomas stopped. Twenty children stared at him. Twenty children gawped at Thomas the Un-Normal in the wet, gray play yard. Finally, Max coughed.

“You got any more?” he whispered.

*   *   *

When Gwendolyn Rood collected her son from his first day at school, she was surprised to see him surrounded by boys and girls, all smiles and chatter and
See you tomorrow, Tom! Bye, Tom! My mother says you can come round for cake if you want, Thomas!
Thomas was surprised to see her waving in the distance. It had not occurred to him that his exile was not final and absolute, that he would be allowed visitors—that he would be allowed to go home and have toast with honey and play with his toys as though the castle on the hill did not exist at all. He folded this away with all the other facts he had learned about the fell land of Public School 348, drawing it into a kind of map he could hold in his head, a map that showed the classroom and the play yard and Mrs. Wilkinson and HUMPHREY! and Max and staplers and carpets with little red flowers on them.

A warm hand settled on his shoulder. At first, Thomas thought it was a teacher, or perhaps, perhaps—the hand felt like something he could almost remember, but not quite, another hand, gloved in red, and how it moved on a pelt of black fur.… But the hand did not belong to the Red Wind, nor to Mrs. Wilkinson. It belonged to a girl his own age. It belonged, in fact, to the girl who looked like a bull at the Battle of Hastings.

Thomas turned and saw two curious, hickory-brown eyes dancing before him. The girl was staring at him with acute interest, standing awkwardly, like an improbable giraffe poised to flee through the long grass. She twisted the ends of her hair in her fingers, fine and thick and black. Her skin was darker than his, and in places here and there the fine lines of scars snaked over her limbs. Her skirt had a threadbare hem and she clutched her satchel like it could save her from drowning.

“What happened to your shoe?” she said in a soft, bright voice. He'd heard that voice before, only then it had said:
Make him read it
. Thomas opened his mouth and closed it again. He lifted his sodden stocking foot.

“I lost it,” he said.

The girl smiled. It was a smile like a soapbox racer—tiny, uneven, crooked, a smile that looked brand new, as though she had just made it in her cellar and was trying it out for the first time.

“You didn't lose it,” she said, letting her soapbox smile run free, careening all the way across her face. “You left it.”

She held up one of his Golden Galoshes, rinsed clean and shining.

“My name is Tamburlaine,” she offered.

“That's a funny name,” Thomas said, and immediately regretted it.

“It's not funny, it's Marlowe,” she sighed. “My father is a librarian.” She seemed to think this was an explanation.

And she left him to his boots and his mother and his sudden, bursting desire to know who Marlowe was.

*   *   *

The Kingdom of School is guarded by a peculiar breed of demon-wights called Report Cards. As I have special privileges concerning all the belongings of Thomas Rood, particularly the secret ones, I shall snap my fingers and summon one of these cruel beasties to guide us out of the gates of the realm:

REPORT CARD: THOMAS ROOD, GRADE 1

Mathematics: Good

Language Skills: Excellent

Penmanship: Poor

History: Fair

Science: Excellent

Deportment: Very Poor

I am writing to share my concerns regarding your son, Thomas.

Thomas is a bright and intelligent child, although we might perhaps wish he were
less
bright and intelligent at the end of a long day with him. We all think your son is going places! However, I have reason to be worried by his classroom behavior. Thomas, as I'm sure you're aware, is extremely talkative and inquisitive, which has become quite disruptive. Last week, when asked the sum of 3 + 1, young Mr. Rood responded with the following:
When Carbuncle, the Emperor of the Deeper Trolls, was exiled from the Citadel of Gullion, she took with her three wishes granted her by the Elk-King of Mottleworst, and only one arrow for her bow of stone, making her treasures four and her soul bereft.

Thomas is six years old! I haven't the faintest idea where he gets these notions, and I certainly am not a cruel enough teacher to have put such words as
bereft
and
carbuncle
on the spelling tests of first graders. He simply cannot answer a straight question—yet he blurts out his ridiculous troll trivia without so much as raising his hand.

More important, the level of influence Thomas has among his classmates is highly disturbing. On his first day, I made the mistake of assigning him to a desk which had a spot of vandalism on it. Nothing profane, I assure you; boys will be boys and school boards will be school boards and school boards never replace anything that can still be held together with a rusty nail and a prayer. Well, children miss nothing—they caught him straightaway whispering to his desk, calling it Humphrey, being generally peculiar, and sticking out, which is a hard suit of clothes to wear on your first day, as I'm sure you know.

Now, I felt for the boy. There is always some sensitive soul in every class who is too imaginative and gentle for his own good, and I thought little Tommy was this year's poor lost lamb.

But not a bit of it! By the next week all the children had found some way to carve a name into their desk—and not a one their own! I've a classroom full of desks called Genevieve and Victor and Frankincense and Secretariat, and I'll be an old maid in Heaven if I didn't catch Annabelle Bosch whispering to hers during Quiet Reading! What's more, they've all started addressing me as Queen Wilkinson, and I can't say as I like it. Additionally, he is destructive toward school materials when frustrated (please see enclosed bill for the classroom planetarium) and insolent toward his teachers.

Mr. and Mrs. Rood, I think you can agree this is not normal behavior for a little boy. We don't like to use words like “deranged,” but what is one to say when a child of six insists that the library is alive? When he convinces other, well-behaved children that the wind is red—Mr. and Mrs. Rood, they believe it so wholeheartedly that when they come in from any stormy recess, all sopping wet and filthy, the whole class babbles on about how “red” they are. Should this behavior persist, I would recommend special schooling for Thomas, as his presence is impeding the progress of other students, who are currently more adept at reciting the genealogy of King Goldmouth the Clurichaun than geometry.

I am trying to run a classroom, and it is quickly becoming a little Bedlam. Please see to your child!

1st Grade