ventually, me-of-the-thin-font calmed myself down. By the time my rage lowered to manageable levels, I was telling myself the following:

Confront her when she gets home. With the evidence. And you can laugh at her too: what sort of adult practises her handwriting by scribbling nonsense? She’s not a child bored and doodling in social studies. Work on your unkind laugh.

I did for a few minutes.

At least she’s trying a more mature handwriting style, I told myself. Those block cap letters she usually writes in look like a robot’s handwriting: functional, yes, but a bit too uncanny-valley for my taste.

Well, as long as we don’t lead with a compliment on her new style of penpersonship.

I wasn’t planning on it.

You know what we should lead with? What’ll show her you being cleverer than she gives you credit for? Something astute about that thing she told you to learn about. Quorum psychics?

I don’t think it was called that.

Unimportant. What was important was her talking about what you’d written and causation’s arrow.

Wait. Causation’s arrow? I heard my mother say that?

I think so.

Curiouserer. But what, exactly, had she said? I sort of remembered, but I needed it verbatim. Unlike my mother, my memory was hit or miss. I needed to trick my brain somehow. Distract it. I found that, like with faeries, my memory worked better when I wasn’t expecting it to. So I focused on my lungs, one breath in, one breath out, counting to ten, stopping, counting to ten again and again, all to not think about what I wanted to think about.

Writing as a way to compel your ideas to veracity.

Inverting the arrow of causation.

That’s what my mother had said. And veracity was a fancy word for truth.

My breath caught like a croak in my throat.

I had written down three types of things in How to See the Faeries:

1. my own observations;

2. tidbits my mother passed along regarding faeries; and

3. my wishful, wouldn’t-it-be-great-if-these-were-true ideas.

Points one and two, already being true, I couldn’t make truer. So those couldn’t be the ideas my mother had been talking about just now on the telephone; I couldn’t compel ideas that were true to be any more true than they already were.

But point three, the other ideas, my wishful, wouldn’t-it-be-great-if-these-were-true ideas, they hadn’t been innately true like the first two points. So my mother must have meant I’d compelled these ideas to veracity: I’d written down some awesome ideas and, by doing so, I’d made those ideas come true. I’d flipped causality’s arrow.

You’ve forgotten an important part.

Really?

Maybe.

Maybe I’ve forgotten?

No. Maybe. Your mother prefaced both of those statements with Maybe.

A mere possibility that my writing ideas down made them come true.

Exactly. Your mother likely meant wouldn’t it be lovely if such a thing were true.

Or maybe she meant the unlikely meaning. My eyes shone at the possibility.

Well then, test it out. Write down you’re the cleverest person on the planet, and we’ll plug the phone back in and wait for the Nobel committee to call us up.

It won’t work like that.

Unsurprisingly.

No, I mean because winning the Nobel Prize is all about me and my talents. The faeries don’t care about that. My mother said, and I quote, Humans changing faerie behavior.

And faeries changing human behavior.

Well, we’ve never seen a faerie write anything down, so this only applies to me writing things down for the faeries to do.

Okay then — prove it.

Although less likely to occur now that weather patterns are constantly tracked by television meteorologists, faeries do have the ability to modify the weather. Rainy days change to sun. Breezes turn into hurricanes. Sudden cold fronts appear at inconvenient times. Perhaps you’re at the beach in August and have just changed into your bathing suit when it starts to snow.

Snow.

In August.

Northern hemisphere.

At the beach.

Some say storms with only three visible flashes of lightning are also caused by faeries. The reason(s) why is (are) currently unknown.

As I affixed the period to the end of the final sentence, the sun moved behind a cloud.

See, I told myself, massaging the twinge I always got in my wrist when I wrote too much too quickly. It’s working.

Sure it is. It always gets sunnier when it’s about to rain.

Indeed, the sun had popped back out from behind the cloud. In the backyard, where I’d gone for a more panoramic view whilst writing, I watched that lonely cloud rapidly vanish over the horizon. The rest of the sky was clear and beautiful and a uniform shade of baby blue.

I must have given the faeries too many choices. Rain, sun, breeze, hurricane, snow. How could I have expected them to follow all that, and so quickly? And I didn’t even know if faeries could affect the weather to begin with. Maybe that cloud was the best they could do.

“Further study,” I added to the entry I’d just written, “is required.”

I sighed. Further study, in the form of tests, double-blind studies, and experiments, was not what I wanted. Why couldn’t magic just work the way I wanted magic to work, right now, without effort, without me having to do anything special?

You know that hypotheses are disproved all the time. Therefore not all of our ideas are going to work out. Plus we didn’t really believe it was going to work. You know you didn’t really believe.

Maybe I’d been a little doubtful, sure, but I was still disappointed, and my disappointment had rapidly curdled into unhappiness. All the way down to my core I felt it, the empty, pushing, overwhelming pressure of being sad. I needed a distraction. My mother needed mayonnaise. I shuffled back into the kitchen to grab some loonies from the petty cash jar my mother kept inside the microwave.

Take a few extra coins. We can buy one of the used paper-backs in the spinning display at the front of the grocery store.

I did enjoy new books, even used new books.

But, before we go —

Yes, of course. I grabbed a school notice off the fridge (fundraising, which my mother had not participated in), folded the page into a long, thin, rectangular bookmark and taped it to the inside front cover with the top third of my bookmark/wrapping-paper-order-form sticking out.

“ATTENTION,” I wrote on that top third, “THIS BOOK, OPEN, CLOSED, OR IN BETWEEN, IS NOT FOR YOU!” Even my mother would struggle to find any ambiguity in that.

The answering machine message light was flashing when I came back from the store.

“Enid,” my mother’s voice said. “I had my conversation with Dr. Holden, and I would prefer if you spent the night at Mrs. Delavecchio’s. I’m …” She didn’t say anything for a long time, but the background noises of her floor — the wheeling of carts and the squeak of sensible shoes on linoleum tiles — let me know she was still there. “We’ll talk when I get back. Thank you for your understanding.”