Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

I felt disoriented. We had roles that we played when we were around each other, and now Nuala was letting me down. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be around her anymore.

Nuala scrubbed her hands against her short jean skirt, wiping the tears off in an angry movement, and then jerked down the bottom of the skirt, straightening it out. I reached behind her to knock the crap off the back of her shirt. She flinched at my touch. I didn’t know what to do about that so I pretended not to notice.

“So now you know.” Nuala didn’t look at me, just kept busy flicking invisible pieces of lint off her clothing.

This was easier than silence. “Now I know what?”

“How it is. With me.”

I blinked. Clearly, from the expression on her face and the ragged edge to her voice, this was supposed to be a statement pregnant with meaning. I ran back over the scene in my mind and everything she’d said. “Nuala, you’re the one who reads minds, not me.”

Nuala looked back at me and her stance said so clearly no, never mind that I almost thought she’d said it out loud. But instead she said, “I’m one of the solitary fey. You know what that means?”

She paused as if she really did expect me to answer.

“Means I’m a freak, James.”

I didn’t remember her ever calling me by my name before, and it had a really weird effect on me, like I couldn’t trust anything I thought about her anymore. I had a pen in my jeans, and I wanted to get it out. I could already see the shape of the letters I would write: call by name.

“I don’t care if you do,” Nuala said. She jerked her chin toward the pocket where my pen was. “Don’t you get it? I’m a bigger freak than you are.”

I crossed my arms tightly across my chest. I should’ve said something sarcastic to lighten the mood, but I didn’t want to. I wanted her to finish saying what she was going to say.

“And nobody vouches for me. You don’t know how lucky you are. You have human laws and school rules and you have your parents and Sullivan and even Paul, and they all keep the world from you. I’m just me, nobody to nobody. Is it so stupid that it’s taken me this long to figure out that I’m jealous of you?” She laughed, wild and unhappy. “You, who were supposed to be my ass**le free ride until I got torched this year and forgot about everything.”

I sighed. If she’d been Dee, I would’ve waited a second longer, to let her completely implode, but she wasn’t Dee, and I didn’t think Nuala worked quite the same way. I thought about what I had wanted to write on my hand, so that I wouldn’t forget to do it.

“Nuala,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Nuala, can we just have, like, a cease-fire? I mean, you can go back to calling me an ass and trying to lure me to my death tomorrow and I’ll go back to treating you like a psychotic bitch and researching ways to exorcize you in the morning, but seriously, can we just have a cease-fire for tonight? ’Cause, seriously, trying to think about this is making my head hurt, and—can we just go somewhere and get some food or something? Is there even someplace that has food at this time of night?”

Her face was unreadable. “I just keep thinking that at some point, I’m going to stop being surprised by how stupidly ballsy you are. Were you ever afraid of me?”

I said, truthfully, “You scare the shit out of me.”

She started to laugh then, crazy, real laughing, like I was the funniest thing in the world. When she laughed like that, it made her either the scariest girl or the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t decide if the feeling inside me was because I wanted to make her do it again or because I wanted to run away.

James

I was sitting in a movie theater at 4:13 in the morning, with a faerie muse who had vaguely psychic vampire tendencies, watching The Sixth Sense.

At this point in my life I’d had some pretty freaky, surreal experiences already, such as (1) watching my best friend move things with her mind, (2) being dragged from my wrecked car by a soulless faerie assassin, and (3) feeling the inexorable pull of the king of the dead’s nightly song. And really, sitting with Nuala and watching a crazy little boy tell Bruce Willis that he saw dead people should’ve been included amongst them.

But it felt almost normal.

Okay, so maybe Nuala had gone a little overboard with the butter on the popcorn, but hell, I didn’t know how to really use one of those movie theater popcorn machines either. And was there really such a thing as too much butter on popcorn?

“Look,” Nuala ordered. She wasn’t eating the popcorn. It occurred to me that maybe she didn’t eat food, period. I knew humans weren’t supposed to eat faerie food because it would trap them in Faerie. Did it work the same way for faeries and human food? Nuala swatted my arm to get my attention. “Look, see? Every time something supernatural is about to happen, the director gives you a clue. The red. See the red there?”

I didn’t bother to comment on the irony of Nuala pointing that out to me. “Yeah.” I’d been sitting in the seat so long that my butt was going to sleep. I shifted, propping my feet up on the seat in front of me. Nuala’s eyes were still fastened on the screen in front of us; the light of the movie flickered across her face. Her pupils dilated and contracted with every change of light. So much like a human while still being three thousand miles away from being one.

“How many movies have you seen?” I asked. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in the movie, just that I’d seen the ending, like, fourteen times, and I was more interested in why Nuala was sitting in a movie theater and why, of all the movies in the world that she’d wanted to watch, she’d picked this one.

She slouched down in the seat beside me. “Thousands, I guess. I don’t know. Before I figured it out, I thought I would be a director.”

I was a little tired; it took me a moment to figure out what she meant. I didn’t have time to comment before Nuala gave me a withering look and said, “You can’t really get to be a director in sixteen years, you know? And like, what’s the point?”

It seemed like a stupid question to me. “The same point as anyone else wanting to be a director. You really want to be a director? Like, movies?”

“Yeah, like movies. All of those lives played out, with music in the background. It’s like living a thousand lives without ever leaving yours.” Nuala smiled lazily at the movie screen. “I even thought of the name I’d use: ‘Izzy Leopard.’”