Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie

I started to laugh.

Nuala slapped me, raising goose bumps. “Shut up!”

I covered my face with an arm and kept laughing. “God, woman, how’d you come up with that name? It sounds like a drunk guy asking if someone’s got leprosy.”

Nuala slapped my arm again. “Shut up. It’s distinctive. People would remember it. You know, they’d be, ‘Oh, Izzy Leopard did this film.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ ‘She’s brilliant.’”

“And a leper.”

Nuala’s expression was fierce. “I could kill you.”

“Oh, if I had a dime for every time someone’s told me that. Oh, if I had a dime for every time you’ve told me that.”

She took the popcorn bucket from me and set it on the seat on the other side of her. “I can’t believe I gave you popcorn. I should make you drink popcorn butter for mocking my director name.”

I grinned at her. “Truly, a fate worse than death.” I thought of what she’d said, about living one thousand lives without leaving her own. Living one thousand human lives. It seemed like an important distinction. “But, you know, sixteen years is a long time. You could’ve been a director.”

Nuala turned in her seat to face me, eyebrows pulled down very low over her eyes, and spoke to be heard over the suspenseful music of the final scene. “Seriously, you are special ed, aren’t you? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.”

People who made excuses always pissed me off. “What, because it’s not enough time? You could’ve at least tried. Sixteen years is enough time to try.”

She hissed through her teeth and shook her head. “You are stupid, piper! Don’t you remember what happened with the piano? Well, I can’t write any words, either. If I had to create anything new while I was directing, it—it just—wouldn’t happen.”

“Difficult. But not crushing,” I observed.

Her eyes didn’t so much narrow as tighten around the edges. “Okay then. What happens when I change appearances between movies?”

I grinned at her crookedly. “Madonna did that her whole career.”

Nuala raised her hands and fisted them, as if imagining them around my neck. “Yeah. Whatever. Okay, how about this? I’m like all faeries. I have to go wherever the strongest cloverhand takes us. So what happens if the cloverhand decides to move across country just as I’ve gotten settled? Don’t you get it? I can’t have a normal life at all, much less think about doing something like having a real career. It’s not about trying or not trying.”

I got the subtext: just human enough to be miserable as a faerie and just faerie enough to ruin everything good about being human. But I just said, “You lost me at the cloverhand bit.”

Nuala waved a hand at the movie screen without looking at it. It went dark, instantly throwing us into utter black. After a few seconds, my eyes started to adjust to the light of the dim runner lights along the aisles, but still, all I could see was Nuala’s giant blue eyes in front of me. Even without any other facial features visible, I could see the disbelieving expression in them.

“Your girlfriend-who-isn’t? It only took me two seconds to figure it out. How can you know all about the faeries and all about her and not know what a cloverhand is?”

At the mention of Dee, a weight clenched in my stomach. I didn’t want to be there anymore, sitting in a sticky movie theater seat. I wanted to be standing, pacing, moving. I wanted to be punching my fist through a wall.

Nuala’s eyes dropped to my hands as if she imagined them punching through a wall, too. “The last queen was a cloverhand. She’s dead. So now your fake girlfriend is here, and she’s the strongest cloverhand. So we’re here too.”

“Stop calling her that.”

Her eyes made a grinning shape as she willfully misunderstood me. “It’s just what it’s called. Someone who attracts the faeries. We have to stay near them. Wherever they are is Faerie.”

I remembered what Dee had said, that first night we ran into each other at the school. Did you see Them? The faeries?

I was tired of trying to see in the dark and tired of having my eyes open, so I closed them and rested my forehead on my fists. “So she’s always going to have Them around her.” I didn’t know if Dee was strong enough for that.

“Until there’s a stronger cloverhand.” Nuala’s voice was closer to me than before, but I didn’t open my eyes. I felt her breath on the skin of my arm. “Why do you have dead written on your hand?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I don’t believe you. What were you thinking when you wrote it?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you love her?”

“Nuala, leave me alone. Seriously.”

She was insistent. “It’s a yes-or-no question. And it’s not even like I’m a real person. It’s like you’re just telling yourself.”

The pressure of my knuckles against my closed eyelids was starting to make colorful patterns in the darkness, light violet and green dancing in nonsensical, falling patterns. “I asked really nicely for you to leave it, Nuala. It’s not secret man-code for ‘keep asking me until I change my answer.’ It means I really don’t want to talk about it. With you or anybody. It’s not personal.”

Nuala grabbed my fists in her hands, sending chills through my arms. “Why haven’t you played any music since you kissed her?”

Leave me alone. I didn’t say anything. Even if I wanted to answer her, what would I say? That stupid things like music and breathing hadn’t seemed important since then? That there was so much white noise in my head ever since I’d kissed Dee that I couldn’t find a single note to hold onto?

“That’s a start,” Nuala said. Reading my thoughts again. Maybe she couldn’t stop.

I didn’t feel like adding anything more to my thoughts on Dee. I changed the subject. Sort of. “I think maybe you’re lucky.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.” I turned my head on my fists to look at her; it made one of her hands lie against my cheek. The skin of my face tightened with the strangeness of her. “Immortality would be awful in our screwed-up world if you were the only one who had it. You’d have to remember all those years of everyone else disappearing. At least you don’t have to watch everyone you know get old and die while you live forever.”