Strange Creatures Page 4

  She thought that the new baby would be different. Someone who was hers, and like her. Outwardly. Inwardly.

  But then Elijah was born, red-faced, with a full shock of dark hair—practically a Xerox of my father’s baby photos. The delicate peace my mother had imagined was broken by the baby’s colicky squalls, and the home we’d known was shattered completely.

  Jamie didn’t mind the baby. In fact, he was the only one who could comfort him. He’d lie all night on the sofa with Elijah on his chest, even on school nights, letting the baby suck on a finger when he stirred. Sometimes he would sing to him in sweet, low tones—the same songs he’d sung to me when I was a baby.

  I didn’t feel jealous of their relationship. But seeing them together did make me feel . . . strange. Because I didn’t experience any of the warmth or wonder that Jamie did. While Jamie would count Elijah’s tiny peanut toes, or blow raspberries against his belly, I’d hang back, watching with owl eyes. I was scared to touch the baby. I worried he might bite me with his toothless gums, or poop on me, or worse. Elijah revealed unimaginable horrors: how babies have two huge eyeballs in two huge sockets, how they wrinkle their thin, pinkish eyelids closed in some perverse impression of a human being.

  I felt these things. Numbness, disgust, fear. Of course, I didn’t dare speak them. I knew how they’d hurt my parents’ feelings. I knew that we were supposed to love Elijah, even when he was crying all the time. And he was. If he couldn’t be with Jamie, he was screeching his head off. I’d ball up the pillow over my ears and try and try to sleep, but it never worked. On school days, I moved through the halls in a fog. Gumlea was my only respite. If I could get my brother away from the milky, dark living room, where Mom half slept beside the Rock ’n Play, and if it wasn’t one of the days when he was playing basketball or video games over at someone’s house down the block, then we could be in our kingdom, where the only babies were immediately sacrificed to harpies. The moment Jamie and I had turned backward and passed through the portal, he drew a breath and changed back into the brother I knew. Once it happened, we could pretend that the world still belonged to just the two of us. The Emperata and the Nameless Boy. The only creatures who mattered.

  Sometimes it worked. But sometimes Jamie would stay behind to help Mom, distracting Elijah during a diaper change. I’d watch them and feel all the ways that I was inadequate. Girls were supposed to like babies, but in a secret place only me and Jamie knew about, I wished my little brother had never been born.

  There are pictures from that time. My family, in rumpled dress clothes, at the reform synagogue in Woodstock at Elijah’s naming. Jamie holds little Elijah tight. Beside them, my eyes are wide and sleepless. There’s only one word for my expression: shell-shocked.

  5

  ONE AFTERNOON, JUST AFTER HER arrival, Annit had called the children from their tree houses. They all climbed a crooked path together, up and up the mountain. The air was swirled with gray clouds, and they met in a point there at the apex, then parted to allow the yellow sunlight through.

  “Harpies, take me!” Annit cried, and she threw back her arms. For a moment, there was nothing, not even birdsong. But soon, the sky darkened, until the sunlight was nothing more than a razor-thin disk in the center of her forehead. A target. The shadows took on form, black and jagged. The children crouched low. Soon the world was full of wings.

  The First Law of the Island of Feral Children states that a child must make one blood tithe to the King to stay there. Just one. The children who hid in the bushes had all done their service. They’d netted mermaids, strung up Winter Watchers, laid traps for pirates. They’d skinned those bodies and burned them at the mountaintop in a steaming pyre. They’d paid for their time.

  But Annit didn’t pay only once. When the sky had cleared of feathers and dust, when the blood—hers, theirs—was washed from her face, when the bodies were tallied and the bones burned, the truth was apparent to all.

  She had killed every single harpy.

  I wasn’t like the other girls. That’s not to say that there was anything wrong with the other girls. In fact, I thought that they were lovely creatures—like hollow-boned birds who called to one another from across the schoolyard. Jamie and I agreed about this. So often, our games were predicated upon saving some fictional maiden, who, we’d decided, was always discovered in some titillating state of undress. When I say that I was different—at least from any girl I’d met up until that point in my brief life—I mean exactly that. My presence among them always felt like an anomaly, to them, and to me.

  Jamie understood, but no one else did. The teachers at school kept pairing me with other girls for school projects, and I was left to wonder if they hoped some of their softness might rub off on me—make me stop shouting the answer during class or doodling in my notebook margins when I should have been listening. And Mom kept arranging playdates between me and Nina Westervelt, the only other girl my age on our street. It would have made life easy for my mother; she was sometimes-friends with Nina’s mother. I assume that she wanted me to be more like Nina: pretty and put together and a little snooty. But those drab afternoons were awful, and my mother could never convince me otherwise.

  Nina had three older sisters, and so she’d learned how to be a girl. Or maybe it came naturally to her, the same way that drawing came to me. In either case, the room she shared with one of her sisters was nothing like mine. It contained a pair of white enamel beds with trundles for the sleepovers I’d never be invited to. Pink walls, lace coverlets. I hated Nina’s room. It wasn’t all the pink, necessarily, or all the fuss. I could ignore fuss. It was the dolls: the porcelain ones in the glass case in the corner who watched with shining eyes. Still. Waiting.

  “You can’t play with them,” Nina told me, the first time I ever set foot in her room. I’d had no interest in playing with them, but she felt it necessary to warn me anyway. “My grandmother gets one for each of us on our birthday. They’re going to be worth something someday.” Then she paused. “You’ll just break them, you know. You’re such a baby.”

  I blinked a few times but didn’t say anything. Even at eight years old, I knew that someone like Nina didn’t matter. She needed to cut me down to make herself feel better, but what harm could come to me from what she’d said? It didn’t change my body or the way that I worked inside it.

  “Fine,” I said, tearing my eyes away from those creepy glass eyes with their creepy spidery lashes. “But I don’t see what the point is of dolls you never play with.”

  The look on her face told me that it was the wrong thing to say, but I was used to saying the wrong thing by then. Nina stuck her nose in the air like my answer confirmed some suspicion she’d been carrying with her all along.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Weirdo. Do you want to play Uno or not?”

  We climbed up on top of her lace coverlets and, without another word, proceeded to play.

  After, Jamie would ask how it went at Nina’s house. I always figured he wanted to help me figure out how to escape her, the same way I’d helped him. I’d told him everything: the names she called me, the organic foods her mother would cook, the magazines full of makeup and sex tips she’d stolen from her older sisters. On those afternoons, standing in the doorway to my bedroom, Jamie would roll his eyes.

  “Emperata Annit doesn’t wear makeup,” he declared. I let out a wicked grin.

  “Sure she does,” I told him. “Only it makes her look like an African wildcat, or maybe a fennec fox. All whiskers and fangs.”

  Jamie grinned back at me. I knew, in that moment, that we understood one another completely. That we were still the same.

  And for a long time, that’s how it was. One day, in the fall of fourth grade, Jamie and I wandered deeper into the woods than we ever had before, chased by invisible Winter Watchers, and we found a picnic table, flipped over, to which someone had taken a Sharpie. There, all along the splintering, peeled-paint surface, were obscene images, wedged between pot leaves and pentacl
es.

  “Don’t look,” Jamie said, and shoved me in the other direction. But I saw enough to get the gist: Jagged marijuana leaves. Dozens and dozens of cocks of every shape and size. Testicles spiked with dark hairs, and women squatting low with their legs spread.

  “Why would they do that?” I asked Jamie on the way home. The images were worse than anything I’d seen in Nina Westervelt’s magazines. Worse than anything they showed us during the special assemblies we had in school, where they sent the boys away to learn of some other, unimaginable terrors. “Why would they draw those things?”

  He looked over his shoulder, as if the invisible teenagers who had been there once and would visit again could hear him. His brow was furrowed, his mouth wrinkled, like he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Something happens to you when you get to middle school, I think,” he said. “You change.”

  “Just boys?” I couldn’t imagine drawing those hairy, distended body parts, all dripping and slick. Just the memory of them gave me a strange sort of queasiness.

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie. “I’ve never been a girl.”

  We both got quiet thinking about it. I could have promised to tell him what happened when I got to middle school, if what warped boys touched girls in the same way. But even that seemed wrong, as if I were admitting that I was going to change. I didn’t want to. And Jamie was a year older than I was. For all we knew, he’d be lost to me by then, seduced by grown women and their dark, mysterious ways.

  (If only I knew then what I know now about losing Jamie. But I was nine, and knew very little.)

  So instead, I scrambled up the rock wall, using Jamie’s hand-me-down sneakers to grip and climb. He laughed a little and reached out to me, but I was too fast for him.

  “That’s why I’m staying on the Island of Feral Children forever,” I said, craning my arms open wide, as if I could soak up all of childhood through the mid-autumn air.

  “You know the price of that,” Jamie shouted back to me, and he pulled himself up on the wall, too. Precariously balanced, we walked together, one tottering foot in front of another in front of another. “There are rules.”

  It was true. My brother and I had whole notebooks full of rules. Rules for mermaids. Rules for pirates. Rules for ourselves. And we’d made promises to each other: that we would never tell a soul about Gumlea, that we’d never drink the sour wine our mother loved, that we’d never do drugs, that we would always love each other above all other people. In some ways, these promises were no different from the ones that other children made to themselves or their best friends. But because of Gumlea, ours were different. Every transgression would require a tithe to the King. Some sacrifice of flesh, or blood, or worse.

  “Do you think I’m a coward?” I shot back at him.

  When he smiled, I could see what teeth were missing, a couple of back ones that made him look a little like a rotten-toothed pirate. We never put our baby teeth under our pillows anymore. Dad was disappointed. He said we weren’t too old for fairies.

  If only he knew the half of it.

  “Never, Annie,” Jamie swore, his voice full of quiet awe. “You’re the heart of all of Gumlea.”

  And then, just like that, he dive-bombed me, his chest hitting my shoulder, my elbows hitting the soggy ground below, and we fought and scrambled there until my hair was tangled with leaves and I pretended to forget all the things I’d seen, marker-drawn and spray-painted, like prophecies carved in stone.

  6

  IN THE SHALLOWS, THE BOYS and girls all tumbled and fought like their bodies would never be broken. The only one who didn’t wade in was Emperata Annit. She stayed on the rocky shore stacking rocks upon rocks.

  “What are you doing?” the Nameless Boy asked, wading in from the deepest part of the bay. He knelt in the water, covering his nakedness. Strange, he thought, how the other children didn’t even seem to know that they were naked.

  Annit was dressed in leather and fur, as always, and her mouth was a flat line of concentration, as always.

  “I’m building cairns.”

  “What’s a cairn?”

  “They’re markers. Some tell you about the people who have passed through a place. Others tell you about people who have died.”

  “This one?” Boy asked, gesturing to the stack of rocks that Annit was precariously balancing.

  “A marker for the children who were drowned by mermaids.”

  “Mermaids.” Boy turned toward the sea. In the distance, he saw figures in the water, black and murky. Sometimes a head would poke through the glassine surface. Boy would see a flash: blue or purple or golden or green hair, bright as a traffic light. But then, with a faint titter of bells, the blip of color would disappear.

  We’d promised each other that life wouldn’t change. But it was a promise we couldn’t keep. The rules were shifting, just like my body had started to soften at the edges in preparation for what was to come—but I hadn’t noticed yet.

  That fateful day toward the start of fifth grade seemed like any other. Jamie and I went through our usual routine. He’d started middle school, while I was still at elementary, but while his bus came in ten minutes before mine, he always waited for me at the curb. That day, the squeaky yellow door folded shut behind me and we tumbled together into the house, leaving our backpacks in a heap by the front door. Then we raced straight out into the backyard. That day, Mom was somewhere in the house, but we weren’t worried about her. It was a Friday, which meant that we had roughly an hour and forty minutes until Dad got home from the grocery store with our little brother, when he’d make us sit down to do our homework at the dining room table and then eat a proper dinner together, as a family. That meant we had an hour and forty minutes to be ourselves together, out in our little tangle of woods.

  It all went well at first. We jumped over the creek. Turned around.

  “The Feral Children are catching fairies today,” I told my brother as we turned back around. I’d been thinking about it all day, all through a boring fundraising assembly at school. I thought that maybe whatever Feral Child got the most fairies would get a special award from Emperata Annit. Something better than an iTunes gift card and a rubber bracelet that said “WINNER.” A necklace of bones, maybe.

  But Jamie was walking fast today, his eyes half-hooded. Distracted. I jogged to catch up with him.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I asked. I reached out toward his arm, but he yanked it away.

  “No,” he said flatly. I knew he was hiding something from me, though he was doing it poorly, as usual. Walking faster than he had to, his eyes searching through the bramble beyond. “Everything is fine.” And then he broke out into a run.

  “Hey, Nina!” he shouted, waving a hand.

  I stopped. Out by the broken concrete stood Nina Westervelt, dressed in her usual uniform of brightly patterned leggings and an off-the-shoulder shirt. She looked unnatural in the woods, her ironed waterfall of hair standing in stark contrast to the frizzy poison ivy vines and sun-bleached soda cans and the saggy empty bladders of grocery bags that hung from the branches of nearby trees. She was our neighbor, but not one who usually spent her time in the forest. Her world stopped at the pickets that bordered the back of her yard.

  “What’s she doing here?” I asked, not even trying to disguise my disdain. We had a story we were working on in Gumlea, had been working on for a year. Nina Westervelt was not part of it.

  She rolled her eyes at me. “James invited me,” she said. “Hi to you, too, Annie.”

  “What the hell,” I said. It wasn’t even a question. I looked dumbly at my brother, who was sort of milling about the concrete girder’s base, kicking stones around, not letting his gaze touch mine.

  “There are girls in Gumlea, too, right?” he said, sort of vaguely, hooking his hands on to some rusted iron peg that was buried in the girder, pulling himself up. He sat there, close to Nina, and finally looked at me. Our eyes were the same, but I had no idea what was going on i
nside his head. When had he had time to invite her here? She wasn’t even in his grade. “I thought it would be cool if we let Nina try. She can be a Feral Child, to start.”

  My eyes widened. I was glowering at Nina, my nostrils faintly flaring. But she just held her head high, like it was nothing that my brother had invited her into our secret kingdom.

  “But . . . !” I whispered to my brother. He looked away from me, shrugging. He knew I didn’t like Nina, knew how much I hated spending those afternoons in her room with her. Now she was here, in a place that was supposed to belong to me. I chewed the inside of my cheek.

  Jamie’s words came to me then. You’re the heart of all of Gumlea. Well then, fine. I’d be the heart. We hadn’t officially stepped through the portal and into Gumlea, but it wasn’t as if it really mattered; Nina wouldn’t know how to follow us in anyway. I pulled myself up on the girder, too, and set my hands on my hips.

  “You should know, child,” I declared, “that in Gumlea, I’m not Annie. I’m the Emperata, Annit.”

  Nina looked at Jamie for a second, doubt wrinkling her brow. She giggled. “Okay,” she said.

  “I rule the Feral Children,” I told her. “And there are certain laws they must follow.”

  “G-d, you’re so weird,” Nina muttered. But then she forced her mouth into a smile. “What laws?”

  “All Feral Children must pay a tithe.”

  Nina hesitated. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a wrinkled twenty. “Here,” she said. “Don’t tell my mom. I’m supposed to save that for horseback riding lessons.”

  She was holding out the money to me. But I didn’t take it. I just grinned. “Foolish child,” I said, still in my Annit voice. “Your tithe can’t be money. Nameless Boy, tell her what she owes.”

  My brother’s gaze was back on the forest floor. Only now, he wouldn’t look at either of us. He’d started to blush a little, to chew his lip a little. He answered, but his voice was almost inaudible. I whacked him on the shoulder.