f you have never had an active relationship with the faeries, despair not! At any time, an amenable faerie could take an interest in you, and an active relationship will have begun. Yet, for a variety of reasons, possibly including but not limited to age, gender, height, weather patterns, altitude, attitude, breakfast choices, percentage of blended fabrics being worn on one’s person at any given time, illnesses both physical and mental, scent, and/or numerology, an amenable faerie might never present itself.

Of those with an active faerie relationship, almost all keep their faerie interactions to themselves to prevent mocking, ridicule, or rejection. However, I am willing to accept whatever taunting comes my way in the pursuit of educating the general public about faeries.

I sat on the floor. The clouds that morning had burned away, and the sun shone through the kitchen window with a brightness so intense it was like being an ant under an ant-frying magnifying glass. I let my vision lose focus. I blinked. I kept my eyes shut while I counted to two hundred and forty-nine. I held them open until I started to cry.

Nothing happened.

I shifted position so more of my body faced away from the window.

Still nothing.

Since I’d started collecting data for my book, I’d never gone two days without seeing any faeries. Two days was too long a time to not see any faeries.

It’s really only been about thirty-six hours.

Still too long.

Not counting the faerie you saw inside not even eight hours ago.

Doesn’t count. I mean faeries I see out the window.

I stood and grabbed the phone to call the Will O’Wisp. My mother would know where all the outside faeries went, and she’d be eager to make clear that she, as usual, knew more than me. Plus I’d be safe from Amber picking up. (I might be skipping school, but there was no way that Amber, Miss Goody-Goody herself, would be.)

“Unless you’re calling to apologize, Enid, I am quite busy,” my mother said before I could say anything. I looked around as she said this, both for nanny cams and for faeries.

“How did you know it was me?”

“Call display, Enid.” Then Dr. Holden must have been walking by, because my mother’s voice took on a conciliatory tone. “What can I do that would help you today?”

“Did you do something different?” I asked her. “I looked for faeries today and there weren’t any. I know the spells keep them out of the house —” and hopefully, I added to myself, banish any that might have snuck in “— but even so, they usually still creep around the windows outside where I can see them. I haven’t seen any today.”

“How long have you been waiting for that particular test result?”

“Almost two days.”

“You probably didn’t wait long enough. Give it time. Sometimes the labs …” she trailed off. I guessed Dr. Holden had gone off to lurk somewhere else.

“I don’t have time to give it time,” I told her. I had to go to lunch with Mrs. Delavecchio. I had to read at least three and a third library books a day to meet my goal of two hundred books read over the summer. I had to make cookies to surprise my mother. I couldn’t waste a whole day waiting around to see the faeries.

“They are probably just busy.” Then, in a particularly graceless transition, my mother asked, “Do you think you could go to the store and get some mayonnaise?”

“Mayonnaise?”

“I think ours has gone off. I want to make potato salad, and I need mayonnaise.”

“Then why don’t you buy mayonnaise on your way home from work? You go right past the store.” I turned to the window. The two trees I’d replanted before coming inside were again uprooted, my weighty bricks stacked alongside in neat rows.

“You’re not a child anymore, Enid. More responsibility is going to fall to you now. I tried to encourage responsibility in you yesterday. Even though such encouragement failed, I am trying again today.”

“By having me get mayonnaise?”

“Or maybe I just want you out of the house for a bit.”

“But I know the faeries are still around here somewhere,” I whispered, in case they were listening in. “They knocked over the knocked-over trees again.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the faeries too much. I’m sure your relationship with the faeries is, how did you put it, still active.”

I almost dropped the phone.

“It’s interesting,” she continued, “you having written that —”

“It’s interesting you having read it,” I interrupted. “My private notes.”

“You left your notebook open on the counter. In leaving your notebook open in the kitchen, private or not, you invited passersby to participate.”

“I left a notebook open in the kitchen because I got distracted while writing and put it down.”

“I’ve always found the act of expressing an idea in words to be fascinating. Writing as an act of creation. Writing as a way to maybe compel your ideas to veracity,” she mused. “Especially in regards to faeries. Of course, faeries and humans, being a two-way relationship, engagement on either side changes both the engager and the engagee. Faeries changing human behavior. Humans changing faerie behavior. Maybe even inverting the arrow of causation in interactions. Like in quantum observation,” she said after a moment of thought.

“Quantum what-now?”

“My university physics textbook is on the bookshelf.”

“I doubt I’m going to understand a university physics textbook.”

“There’s a scientific dictionary somewhere around too. You have the time. Figure it out.”

“I’d rather figure out why you have no regard for my privacy. You shouldn’t have read my notes.”

“I won’t in future, now that you’ve made it clear how much doing so upsets you. Acceptable?”

“Wait.” My skin went clammy and my muscles tensed in panic. “Did you read anything other than the faerie parts?” Little plastic tabs divided my notebook into sections; How to See the Faeries was only one. The other sections were filled with my very own personal and private thoughts not for anyone else’s consumption. Ever. My mother would never speak to me again if she’d read some of the things I’d written about her. (Although she was speaking to me now. But maybe this conversation was a trap? Maybe she was just readying her massive verbal takedown of me?)

“I only read pages you left open,” she assured me. “I never turned a page.”

“That doesn’t change that you don’t value my privacy. I really wish —”

“I don’t have time to disagree with you now, Enid. I have patients, as well as my requirements with Dr. Holden. He and I have been trying to have a private conversation all morning, but interruptions abound. So I’m going to hang up now, Enid.”

“You could apologize.”

“Yes, I intend to apologize to Dr. Holden once we finish speaking.”

“Not to Dr. Holden,” I said, exasperated. “To me.”

“What for?”

“For reading my notebook!” I shouted. “Seriously! What else have we been talking about? What else could you possibly be sorry for? I can’t believe —”

But I pulled too hard on the phone, and the cord con-necting it to the wall came loose, clattering the phone to the floor and disconnecting me from my mother. She probably thought I’d hung up on her, and nothing I could do would convince her otherwise. That would make for a pleasant face-to-face conversation the next time we were face-to-face. I kicked the telephone cord, hoping it would snap in two, so then maybe my mother would finally buy a cordless phone and we could get rid of this stupid, ancient, malfunctioning rotary.

My hope was for naught; the cord didn’t break.

At least I could vent into my notebook. I grabbed it from further down the counter where, likely, my mother had been reading it. It was open to the faerie section, partway through. I flipped to the last page I’d written on and readied a pencil.

“Really?” I said out loud. The page was scratched up, with sentences crossed out and arrows defacing the page. “Not only did she read my private notebook, but she left editorial comments as well? That’s rude.” I turned to the next page, which should have been blank.

Should have been.

But the whole of the next two pages were covered in gibberish. Letters upon letters of different sizes and orien-tations and in no discernable order. Obviously I hadn’t written it; I would have remembered. That left only one option.

“You lying mother,” I whispered. “Never turned a page.”

I kicked the dangling phone cord again. Then I threw my pencil at the wall.

Neither made me feel any better.

Not in the least.