Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception

“Good idea,” James said. “I’ll take you to see Granna after you’re done. And I’ll walk Sara to her car.”

I went through my closing routine, locking the back door and closing up containers of sprinkles and cookie crumbs. Sara went through hers, mechanically wiping down the milkshake machine and the counter. Her silence made me uncomfortable, like I ought to say something just to make her speak. I suddenly wondered if that was why she normally babbled all the time—maybe she’d been trying to get me to break my pensive quiet.

We emerged from our uncomfortable female bonding session to find James stacking the last of the chairs on the tables. He retrieved his shovel from beside the door. “We should go before it rains.”

My phone rang in my pocket, and I pulled it out. This time I knew who the number belonged to, and I opened it halfway through the ring. “Luke?”

I could barely hear him say, “I saw Granna. It was Them.”

fourteen

Lightning glowed inside the towering thunderheads as they crowded out the last of the blue sky. A second later, the boom of thunder was loud enough to shake the windows on James’ old Pontiac. I slouched down inside the car, turning my head into the familiar camel-colored leather of the seat. The smell of this car, old leather and carpet, would forever be associated in my head with James. In a way, this car was James. He’d spent so many hours rebuilding it from the chassis up, it might as well have been a part of him.

He turned down the Audioslave album we’d been listening to and seemed about to say something before thinking better of it. The quiet built between us, strange only in contrast to our usual banter, and for a moment I couldn’t think of anything to say. Then: “How did you know Granna was in trouble? What was it like?”

James drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, making himself busy staring at the road. “She told me. Your grandmother. I started to feel sick, and for some reason I thought about her in her workshop. So I called you, and somewhere in between all those calls I was making to you, she told me.” He let out a noisy breath. “Man, Dee. I’m almost as big of a freak as you. Soon you’ll see me on TV with my crystal ball and my 900 number.”

I frowned at him as lightning flashed one side of his face pale and featureless. “You’d have to change your name to something more foreign sounding, I think. No one would believe a domestic psychic.”

“Esmeralda is pretty,” James mused.

Thunder cracked, so loudly that my ears hummed afterward, and shifted my mind to another, more immediate subject. “I just can’t believe They did something to her. That’s what Luke told me.”

“I know.” James’s eyes flitted over to me. “She told me that, too. She called it ‘elf shot.’”

It sounded so innocent, like “love sick.” Elf shot. I wondered what I was going to find when I got to the hospital; the thought made me shift anxiously in my seat. “It’s just so hard to believe. Error. Resubmit. Cannot compute.”

“Oh, there’s more,” James assured me. “I’ve been doing some research on Thornking-Ash—do you remember them?”

“Duh. They keep calling, trying to get me to send in an application.”

“I got a letter from them, too.” James slowed at a sign advertising the hospital and turned down a tree-lined road. Even through the lush green canopy overhead, purple-black clouds were still visible. Cars in the hospital parking lots glinted on the other side of the trees; my stomach squeezed, thinking about Granna inside. “Apparently, they’re a freak school.”

“I thought they were a conservatory. A what-do-you-call-it? Charter school?”

“Yeah, I did too. But I started looking up some grads and they all seemed sort of peculiar. Then I started calling the grads, and they were sort of peculiar. Apparently, musical genius, such as we possess, is strongly associated with being freaks, such as we are.”

“Do huh?”

James found a parking spot among a sea of cars; they all seemed to be silver, reflecting dull purple back at the sky. He turned the car off and swivelled in his seat to face me. “I finally got ahold of the recruiter you talked to, Gregory Normandy—he’s the head honcho, did you know? Anyway. I pinned him down. He told me psychic ability was linked to musical ability, and that good musicians frequently had what he called ‘gifts.’ What you and I call ‘freakdom.’ He claimed to be able to tell whether or not a musician had freakdom just by listening to them.”

“No way!”

“Yes way. He knew I was psychic. Luke was something else—I can’t remember what he called it. Astral something? And he said you were freakdom off the charts.”

I felt oddly flattered.

“I think that’s why They’re after you, Dee. Not they, the Thornking-Ash people. They, like capital ‘T’ They. I mean, it seems like an awfully big coincidence that you should be a major freak and They should want you this bad.” His red-brown eyebrows furrowed. “Maybe They can hear your freakdom in your music. Didn’t this all start at the competition?”

It started with Luke.

I put my hand on the door handle. “So, why do they want people like us at the school? Lowercase ‘T’ they.”

James opened his door. A rush of humid air, smelling of rain, flooded into the car. “Apparently a lot of people like us get really messed up in life. Normandy’s kid was a concert violinist at age fifteen, and he killed himself. They set up this school to help us deal with it, I guess.”

I shook my head. Of all the things I’d heard this week, this turned out to be the one thing that was too big and distant to really comprehend. A freak school for the musically talented.

“I can’t process this right now. Let’s go before we get soaked.”

Together, we hurried across the silver parking lot into the ugly, flat hospital. It looked like a giant white box that someone had squished down in the center of an equally ugly concrete parking lot. A vaguely artistic soul had painted the doors and window frames bright teal, but it didn’t make the hospital any less flat or ugly.

Inside, it smelled like antiseptic and old people. The low ceilings and chemical smell seemed to squash all thoughts out of me, making me aware of only the smallest, most inane details. The short squeak of my shoes on the tile. The hum of a fax machine. The whistle of air from the vent overhead. The tinny laugh of an actor on the waiting-room television.