With a half hour to go until meeting time, I sat at the register removing portions of my scalp with the fingernails of one hand, while flipping through The Snow Queen picture book. The first few pages were a prologue, something long and boring. Prologues, if you asked me, were like base coats of nail polish, not worth the time or effort. The book’s illustrations, on the other hand, were beautiful: glittery and silk-spun and all kinds of inspiring. I looked up and got spook-bumps to find Ofelia an arm’s length away. I’d heard nothing, seen nothing.

“You startled me.”

“I’m early,” was all she offered by way of reply.

I noticed the soft brown hat was tucked under her arm; her scalp had no angry lesions; and she appeared torment-free, calm even. So why did her presence now, as on that very first day in Afi’s store, fluster me?

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“Avoid the cap.”

“Ah.” She turned the Thomas book to face her. “My previous council were renegades in this respect.”

“Renegades?” The word itself had a nice zip to it. “In what way?”

She placed her palm flat on the book, covering the little engine’s body. “What emotion, above all, do you suppose a renegade or maverick — or however you want to term those who effect change — overcomes?”

I was taken aback.

“What is it that grips you the moment the cap appears?” Ofelia asked.

“Pain,” I blurted out.

“But is the pain manageable at first?”

“At first, yes. But, by now, I know what’s coming.” Realization dawned. “Wait, I change my answer to fear,” I said in a choky voice.

“Precisely.” She removed her hand from the book. “Such a sweet story.”

I blinked. She made it seem like she’d absorbed it as we were speaking.

“Do you know the book?”

“I do now.”

I got the willies, one stop past goose bumps on the scare train. And I wasn’t a wait-and-see kinda gal.

“Ofelia, do you have some kind of psychic ability?”

“Ah. You recognize a kindred spirit.”

Kindred? Spirit? We were now pulling into the heebie-jeebies station. And I didn’t even want to think about a final destination. What was it with her?

“Are you talking about me?” I asked.

“Of course.” Her finger ran the length of the Thomas book’s spine, yet it was my own that felt a cold digit trail from nape to waist. “This book is a medium of sorts, right?”

A medium? Hardly. More like a small, as in a small voice that was telling me to run fast and far.

“Kat, your humor is just one of your many gifts.”

Kind of a compliment, sure, except that the only funny bits had been in my head. And the last time someone — Hulda, to be precise — had talked to me of gifts, I’d ended up at a portal to another realm.

“You must trust yourself and your instincts,” Ofelia continued. “Your youth is significant. Now, more than ever, Fru Hulda would encourage you to explore your gifts.”

“Do you know Fru Hulda?”

“No. Shame. Had I arrived just one day earlier.”

The timing of Ofelia’s arrival — the same day as Hulda’s collapse — had me wondering. And how much of a shame was it for her to have the unchaperoned ear of the novice interim leader? “Then how do you know what she would want?”

“I may not know Fru Hulda, but I know of Fru Hulda. Of her open mind. Of her open heart. I feel it is why I was called home.”

Sure, she said all the right things, had big Bambi peeps, but there was still something that bugged me. And I even knew she could sense my distrust, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that, or about her, for the time being.

The arrival of Grim and then the others put an end to our meeting of the minds. Our Stork powwow got under way a few minutes later.

We began with an update on Hulda, except there really wasn’t anything to report. She was still in a faraway “safe place,” and there’d been no change to her condition. Our next topic was also a bust; Fru Svana had been unable to discover anything about Dorit’s whereabouts.

I moved on to the evening’s business. Ofelia, with a soul to deliver, had prompted the meeting.

“I have been contacted by an essence,” Ofelia began as was customary. “A girl: vivacious and intelligent. For one so smart, I divine either a thirty-year-old doctor or a thirty-five-year-old teacher as the vessel.”

“You divine!” Grim snapped.

“Yes.”

“We do not claim to divine,” Grim said. “We merely recommend, based upon those candidates by whom we are contacted through dreams or physical manifestations. To divine is to pretend some sort of influence upon the nomination of vessels.”

Ofelia held her hand up in defense. “My apologies, Fru Grimilla. It is simply a misunderstanding of verbiage. My old council tossed about the word divine with quite a different meaning than what you describe.”

“It is not a term accepted here,” Grim said.

We managed to get through the rest of the meeting without Ofelia committing any more acts of heresy. I couldn’t help but be a little relieved that there was finally another rogue Stork to take the heat off me. But exactly why had Ofelia called her previous council renegades? And what was up with her sixth sense? And exactly what had she meant by divine? And why did she rile me so?

By the time our meeting was done, despite the whole time-bending thing, I caught only the last minute of the basketball game. Even though the scoreboard showed us ahead by ten points, I could tell that something was wrong.

“What’s up?” I asked, plopping down between Jack and Penny on the bleachers.

Penny narrowed her lids into mere slits, gazing onto the court. I watched as Pedro stole the ball and drove it back for a layup. Pedro, for a little guy, was one tough point guard.

“Did something happen?” I asked, concerned by the boil in Penny’s coloring. Even her hair seemed redder.

Tina dumped an arm over Penny’s shoulder. “Pedro got editor in chief.”

“No way,” I said.

“No shit,” Penny replied.

Jack pretended to watch the game, but I could tell by the way he bit his lip, he was listening.

“What did Mr. Parks say?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Penny said. The buzzer sounded, signaling an end to more than the game.

Outdoors and out of the chaos of the mass exodus, Jack and I lingered a few paces behind Penny, Tina, and Matthew. “Did you know about Mr. Parks’s decision?”

“Yes,” Jack said.

“What?”

“That doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it.”

“It’s bogus. She has more experience.”

“But he’s a senior. It’s his last chance.”

“Are you on his side?”

“Since when did an opinion constitute a side?”

“So you are on his side.”

“It wasn’t an election. There are no sides. Mr. Parks made his decision. Can we just change the subject?”

“Fine,” I said. Except it wasn’t. We were both irritated. We walked in silence, the mood just as frosty as the night air.

Jack finally broke the stalemate. “I have news from Stanley’s meeting.”

With my Stork meeting and Penny’s sulk, I’d forgotten that Stanley had called a project meeting. “What is it?”

“I’m going to Greenland.”

“You’re what?”

“You heard me right.” He was suddenly animated, chipper even. “A two-week field study in April. One week will be during Spring Break. The other I’ll have to get excused for. Brigid has invited a small team of us to observe the gathering of the quarterly ice-sheet measurements. It’s a really big honor. She picked me over some of the graduate students.”

I’ll bet she did.

“It’s gonna be awesome,” Jack continued.

“Greenland?”

“And way, way, up there. We’re talking Arctic, baby.”

Forget chipper. The guy was downright gleeful. And only my snowman would consider the frozen roof of the world as a Spring Break destination. “Congratulations, I guess. You sound really excited.”

“Gonna be epic,” Jack said.

Who was this guy? And what had he done with Jack? And moreover, epic was how Homer’s vacation could be described — if he didn’t just go ahead and call it the Odyssey.

We joined our friends at one of the Kountry Kettle’s back tables. It didn’t feel the same without Jaelle as our waitress, but it was nice to know she was happy working as my dad’s office manager. Shortly after we had placed our orders, the basketball team came bursting through the door, celebrations already begun. Coat still on, Pedro came and stood in front of our table.

“How’s everyone doing?”

“Good,” everyone but Penny replied. She sat staring at the tabletop.

“Not talking to me?” Pedro asked her.

“We can talk,” Penny said.

“How about outside?” Pedro replied.

Penny drew her coat over shoulders and followed
Pedro out the door. About ten minutes later, she returned, while he joined the team at a table up front.

“Well, that’s done,” Penny said with a slight catch in her voice.

“What’s done?” I asked.

“We broke up.”

“You what?”

“For the record, he broke up with me. Said I was being a bitch about the editor thing. That if I couldn’t be happy for him, we weren’t meant to be.” Penny, who had managed to keep it together until then, burst into tears.

Tina and I spent the next half hour in the bathroom with Penny, returning to cold food and the eyes-down faces of Jack and Matthew. When I dropped Penny off that night, she told me not to worry about her. She’d been seeing a jerky side to Pedro since New Year’s. As much as I wanted to think that the split was mutual, for the best, I couldn’t help notice the droop in Penny’s shoulders as she trudged up her front steps.