xiled from my very own home where a usurper was replacing me in my mother’s affections, I had nothing to do but stare around at the sorry state of the yard. The roots of the trees the faeries had knocked over were withered and brittle, and at this point, replanting them would be futile. The patches of lawn those trees had overshadowed, now bereft of the shade, were starting to burn. Normally my mother was fastidious about basic yard care, but nothing about the past few days could be described as normal. I’d leave the trees for my mother’s muscled arms, but I could turn the sprinkler on for the grass; Dr. Holden’s unwelcome presence in my life wasn’t going to distract me from ensuring our rented house still had some curb appeal.

Of course, around the side of the house, where the outdoor tap poked out, I couldn’t see the sprinkler. I lifted the coiled hose in case it had been tucked underneath. Nope.

Sigh.

My choices were clear: go back inside to inquire of the location of the sprinkler, which would incur my mother’s wrath for ignoring her instructions to stay away until dinner; let the lawn succumb to my mother’s inattention; or become the sprinkler myself.

I would become the sprinkler myself.

I turned the faucet on. The water wound its way through the hose, then spurted out as I dragged the hose to the front yard to stand where I would have put the sprinkler if it hadn’t been missing. I began to oscillate. The morning sunlight, caught in the water, floated rainbows across my lawn.

Then I saw something from the corner of my eye. It was gone before I moved my head.

Then again.

I sat down on the grass, moving slowly so as not to spook whatever was out there.

And waited.

Tried not to look.

Tried not to look like I was looking.

And there.

Where the rainbow met the ground, a mixture of light and lumps, brown, gold, and green. It was hardly attractive, but after witnessing my mother and Dr. Holden’s affections and the aftermath of drinking a glass of sour milk, I’d seen worse that morning alone. The creature moved in the rainbow, like the rainbow, not bathing in the spray from the hose but in all of the colors freed from the light. The pinprick of its mouth opened and shut like laughter. I stared until my eyes begged me to blink, and in that blink, the afterimage that burned in my retinas was one with which I was familiar: a faerie. I recognized the silhouette: the same as the shadow I’d seen two nights ago on my wall before my mother had switched off my light.

The trespassing faerie.

And if I had thought it was laughing with the joy of having a rainbow shower, I would have been mistaken. It wasn’t laughing at that.

It was laughing at me.

Everything tumbled into place.

The water sputtered; I had gripped the hose so tightly that I’d inadvertently kinked it. The rainbow vanished, and so did the faerie.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Come back here this instant!”

Considering I’d never heeded an adult yelling that at me, I wasn’t surprised that the faerie didn’t either. Frustrated, I threw down the hose, which uncoiled and sprayed me all over. But I didn’t care. That faerie explained everything Obviously, this rekindled relationship between my mother and Dr. Holden was nothing more than some vexatious trick that the faerie I’d let into the house had played on us.

And Dr. Holden’s non-reaction when you told him about the faeries: he’d been bewitched, or befaeried, or whatever.

Precisely.

A bit of hope hopped up in my chest.

Could this also mean that —

No.

Are you sure? That could also just be a consequence of whatever magic the faerie—

No. I stopped myself again. It wasn’t. For all my wanting to write off my DNA relationship with Dr. Holden, I knew that hadn’t been magicked into being because — well, I couldn’t specify why exactly. But maybe my mother had been right; maybe my lack of surprise meant I had known already, at some level.

Amber sure knows. That’s why she’s always so upset when you bring up Dr. Holden.

That makes sense.

Oh wait.

Does everyone know except me?

Probably.

That bit of hope changed to a pit of lead and plummeted down to my lower intestines. If everyone in town knew except me (and they would, because in a small town everyone knows everything about everyone else), they had been laughing at me behind my back my entire life. My teachers, the vice-principal, even Mrs. Delavecchio must have known. I was a laughingstock and didn’t even know it. How utterly, completely, disturbingly mortifying.

Hey. Stop it. You’re going to cry again.

I know. The pre-cry quiver in my chest had begun.

You need a distraction. So, let’s think about all the work we have ahead of us for the book.

What?

Enid, you just saw a faerie. An actual sighting. Not a shadow. Not a consequence. You saw a faerie. A faerie. With your eyes. Your very own eyes and your very own faerie sighting! You must realize what this means.

I did. In all my mother’s stories, she’d never once mentioned knowing a person who had actually seen a faerie directly! I’d become a primary source, and I’d been so distracted by my mother and Dr. Holden’s love-in that I almost hadn’t realized it.

Don’t let the two of them distract you from your life’s work, Enid.

I’m not. Just, first, I just have to —

No. You just have to do the faerie stuff first. You have to document everything that just happened. Where you were standing. How you were standing. What clothes you were wearing. Temperature. Altitude. Smells. Fauna. Flora. What sort of grass is this? Bermuda? Bluegrass?

I groaned again. Breaking up my mother and Dr. Holden, that had to be my priority. But unprecedented, first-person, time-pressing faerie field research should come first. But Dr. Holden was in my house. But my book.

Focus, Enid, and realize you can do both things at once.

I could! I could catch the rogue faerie, force it to reverse whatever it had done to my mother, and, in doing so, gather singular, original research for my book, whose rough draft, I recalled, was still missing (I’d do a full sweep of the house that evening). But before any of that, I needed to go inside for dry clothes. Except I knew the conversation that would happen if I did:

“Enid, I told you to remove yourself until supper.”

“I just need dry clothes.”

“How and why, Enid, are you wet?”

“Well, you see, I was watering the lawn when I saw a faerie and figured out that you were bewitched, so I’m going to catch the faerie and stop this spell and —”

I would blab that I knew faerie nefariousness was afoot. If that faerie happened to be eavesdropping right then, and it knew that I knew, who knew what other spells/charms/enchantments it would put on my mother to make it even harder for me to get our lives back to normal? I had to keep this knowledge safely unsaid in my brain where no one else could access it.

So keep quiet, Enid, I told myself. Keep your mouth shut.

And go to school.

Dripping wet?

To get your gym clothes out of your locker.

Oh. Good thinking, me.