ime restarted, and the photons I’d been hiding behind bounced away, literally at the speed of light. Out I popped by the front door, visible again to all, but thank-fully out of sight of my mother. Plus (surprise!) there was a letter for me I hadn’t noticed earlier, pinned to the corkboard in the entryway.

“Margery, grab that X tile over by your foot there.” Dr. Holden’s voice wandered in. “And where’d Enid go? I’d love to take her to a geneticist to have some tests run on her and on us. Not now, though. Where would we find a geneticist at this time of night?”

I yanked the letter off the corkboard for later, folding it then stuffing it into my pocket, where I expected it to crunch up next to my “letter” to Mrs. Delavecchio. But in it slid, unimpeded, because, I realized, I hadn’t gathered up my “letter” to Mrs. Delavecchio after it had fallen to my mother’s feet. She was likely picking it up right now, reading it, discovering my “letter” was less of a letter and more of a blueprint of my escape plan.

Fly, you fool.

“Enid is —” my mother began, in reply to Dr. Holden, but I have no idea how she finished because I opened the front door and ran.

By the time I found myself again, the sun had risen and I was standing on the farmhouse drive. My toes were wet, dew having soaked through my shoes, and I had no memory of the journey from town to country and I must have meandered because it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did for me to get back to the farmhouse. Not, I decided to clarify to myself, because of faerie interference, but because my brain had blocked out all unnecessary inputs so I could focus on everything I had to think about, i.e. my mother, me, Dr. Holden, the faeries, magic, Amber, my plan, Amber’s destruction thereof, more on my mother, changelings, being discarded/upgraded (depending on your point of view), my mother (again), me (again), cephalopods (they seemed cool), etc.

My brain, after all that thinking, gave a dull ache I’d have to deal with later. I stepped further onto the drive, safely into the tree line, then turned back to the road.

I didn’t see any faeries, though by now I knew this didn’t mean I was alone.

“I’m sorry,” I called out to wherever they were hiding in the long grass. “‘It’s not that I’m not interested in you. You know I am. It’s just I’d rather be here. Plus, I’m too big to be a faerie. You should keep your Enid changeling. Don’t give her to my mother. Your Enid doesn’t deserve that.”

Dear Ms. E. Strange,

You might be wondering how I got your name and address when you signed your letter to me A Concerned Friend. Well, Ms. E. Strange, you wrote your name and return address on the envelope. We’re not supposed to see the envelopes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t, so now I’m writing back to you, and if that’s not what you wanted, then you really shouldn’t send letters out in the first place because people are going to write you back when you do.

You wrote to me about my mother. I kinda get the impression, Ms. E. Strange, from your letter and your handwriting, that you’re not that old, and so I’m not going to describe my mother the way I usually do, but I’ll just say she and I have never much gotten along. Tibetan Buddhism says you choose your parents before birth, picking the ones who will teach you the lessons you need to learn in your next reincarnation. So, let’s say I chose my mother. Then what sort of lessons did I learn from her if I ended up here in prison? Only lousy ones, that’s for sure.

Sure, I’m a disappointment to my mother, and I bet by now you’ve already seen that most kids end up as disappointments to their parents, but here’s a secret that parents will never tell you: however much of a disappointment you are to your parents, your parents will be that much of a disappointment to you a thousand times over. You should think about that.

Please feel free to write again, Ms. E. Strange. It would be nice to have a pen pal so long as you learn to mind your own beeswax.

Lem Delavecchio

Currently incarcerated

Lem’s letter was proof of more faerie bedevilment: there was no way my letter could have made it to the federal penitentiary and a reply from Lem made it back to me in a single day without magical intervention (no disrespect meant to any postal employees). Plus, the content of Lem’s letter, with its measured suggestion that I repudiate my relationship with my mother being exactly what my mother wanted so she could get her magical changeling Enid, bespoke even more faerie meddling in my mother’s and my lives.

And this was not even considering how depressing the contents of Lem’s letter were, with all his talk about disappointment. He and Mrs. Delavecchio deserved better. No matter how much I had to meddle in their lives, I was going to fix their relationship, once I’d mended my own with my mother by getting her out from under the thumb of the faeries.

Or we could stay out of it. You don’t like the faeries meddling in your life; why would Lem and Mrs. Delavecchio appreciate you meddling in theirs?

Because I was going to make everything better. That’s why.

He told you to mind your own beeswax.

Reading between the lines, it’s pretty obvious he meant the opposite.

Harumph.

No one said you had to help, I told myself.

Then I won’t. And don’t expect me to, either. Or to give you any more advice if you’re just going to ignore yourself.

Fine.

Fine.

Fine!

And now I was on my own.

Well, sort of.

“How are you feeling?” I asked Amber when she woke up.

“Not bad, considering,” she said, pushing herself up from the floor on her elbows. “Good thing we ran away in the summer.”

“There is no we,” I told my unwanted visitor. “You go home now.”

“But I’m useful. I have a credit card. I can buy whatever we need. My parents pay it off every month without even looking at the bill.”

“They’ll look at the bill if you disappear.”

Amber ignored this. “So, what do we do next?”

“Still no we,” I reminded her. “And time for you to leave.”

“Come on, Enid.”

“No. Go home.” The last thing I needed was to partner up with Amber only for her to get hijacked by faeries again, ruining whatever new plan I managed to come up with (although a tiny part of me was pretty chuffed that someone, even if that someone was Amber Holden, wanted me around, wanted to spend time with me, wanted me as I was and didn’t want to trade me in for a newer, magical model with all the bells and whistles and —)

“Enid?” Amber said. “While you’re staring off into space, at least let me get us some food. Then we can talk this over. You don’t have much left to eat here.”

Of course: let Amber think she was off to buy me a bag of apples and refill my water bottle; in actuality, I’d use her absence to sneak away myself. A new plan was forming in my mind; reconsidering what I’d called out to them on the driveway at dawn, I would be willing to go with the faeries. But rather than a passive pawn, I’d go as an infiltrator, bringing down the whole system from the inside. Maybe in the process I’d even learn some faerie magic direct from the source. Other than my inability to do magic, what evidence did I have that I was non-magical? The only person who’d ever actually said that to me was my mother, and maybe the non-existence of my magic skills was more a function of my mother’s incompetent teaching habits and overwhelming personality than anything to do with me. Channeling Lem now, maybe I’d chosen my mother thinking she was the best on offer, not realizing that her being good at magic didn’t mean being able to impart that wisdom to someone else. Maybe while being immersed in a magical world fluency would come more quickly, like learning French in France. How’d my mother like that, if I became well-known for my magical skills, maybe even rivalling hers? Her smug and condescending monopoly of Strange magic would be at its end, and I would emerge, victorious, as the true magician of our house. And the first step was to make contact with the faeries as soon as Amber left.

I looked at her.

“What?”

“You said you were going. To get food,” I added, in case the faeries had screwed around with her short-term memory.

“Okay,” Amber said warily. “I’ll be back soon.”

She was, about thirty seconds later.

“Enid.” Her voice shook. “Maybe you want to see this.”

I groaned. Amber sure needed a lot of hand holding.

“Aren’t you coming?” she demanded.

If it meant getting rid of her quicker, of course I was. We walked together down the drive, Amber trailing a step or two behind me, and she stayed behind me, peering over my shoulder, as we stopped at the drive’s end. Still visible out on the road was the previous day’s cord-hiding trench, and, thinking this were what Amber Holden found distressing, my eyes did a full 360 degrees around in their sockets.

“Someone,” I told her, purposefully vague as to who that someone might have been, “probably just ran an extension cord across the road.”

“Yes, you, yesterday.” So Amber must have remembered some of her drunk stumbling; it would have been nice if she’d followed that up with an apology for the destruction she had wrought the day previous, instead of just saying, “I don’t care about an extension cord.” She pointed in the other direction, back towards town. “I care,” she continued, “about those.”

Oh. Those. Yes. I could see why Amber might care about those frighteningly deep gouges in the dirt road. I mean, I had cared about the scratches in the paint of the shed door, and those were paper cuts compared to the gashes angrily crissing and crossing the dirt road ahead. How I’d missed them so completely, even having been in a fugue state, during my walk to the farmhouse was worrying.

“Now you see,” Amber said, still pointing. “Enid,” her voice wavered, “did I make those last night?”

I mashed my forehead into my palm. “Seriously? No, of course you didn’t make those,” I said, exasperated. “Faer—”

“Don’t tell me faeries made those, Enid!” she shouted. “Faeries aren’t real.”

“For something not real, they sure make deep scratches, don’t they?” I snapped back.

“There have been documented cases of people experiencing mental psychosis who were able to perform extreme physical acts with great rapidity,” Amber said, sounding like me when I was writing my faerie book and trying to sound brainy. “And I’m experiencing mental psychosis, therefore —”

“The only mental psychosis you’re experiencing is the one you’re always experiencing: that you’re the most important person and that the universe bends to your will to make you the protagonist. You’re not the protagonist,” I screeched. “I’m the protagonist!”

Amber didn’t even have the sense to look chagrined at this.

“And don’t you think,” I added, “that I would have noticed you getting up in the middle of the night to scribble on the road?” Of course, Amber didn’t need to know that I hadn’t actually been there for most of the night, since her knowing that would completely refute my only argument.

“If not me, then who?” Amber asked. “Not you.”

“No.”

We stared at the road silently. “Well,” Amber said eventually, “aren’t you going to investigate?”

I hung back behind the tree line of the property. “Me? You’re the one who thinks you might have made it. You should go see.” Yes, my current plan involved being captured by the faeries, but not until I’d prepared myself more thoroughly. Plus, I was feeling a little (okay, quite) uneasy about how violent the road markings looked. I was, in a word, perturbed.

“We could look at it together,” Amber suggested.

“Why? You scared?” I mean, I sure was.

“Of course I am.”

“You’re older,” I pointed out.

Amber gave a huge sigh. “I’m so tired,” she muttered, “of having to do everything myself. It doesn’t always have to be me, you know.” She threw down her messenger bag and marched towards me with a forcefulness that could only mean she was about to throw me onto the road, leaving me at the mercy of the faeries, faeries I’d yelled at, defied, tried to catch, and was now hiding from. But Amber didn’t toss me out on the road. She flung herself at a tree, grabbed a low-hanging branch, and started to climb.

“I hope you’re not like a cat,” I said to her. “I hope you know how to get down.”

She didn’t answer.

“Amber, come on. You can’t climb away from your problems.” Said me, when it could be argued that I was hiding from mine. But she kept going, until she was completely obscured by the canopy.

“Amber?” I called. “Amber?”

“Hold on,” she finally called back. “I’m coming down.”

After some rustling, her feet reappeared, then legs, then body. She slid down onto a branch to sit, legs on either side, with her back against the trunk and her head still obscured by branches and leaves. “Okay,” she shouted down. “They’re words. Letters. It’s easy to see from above. They go down the road a long way. At least to the big turn, and obviously physics dictates I can’t see around the bend, but I’m guessing that they continue further down the road as well.”

“A physics lesson is less important than what the letters say,” I said, realizing with disgust that I sounded exactly like my mother, while Amber had sounded a fair bit like me.

“Lies,” Amber said.

“It’s not a lie. Physics is important, granted —”

“No, that’s what it says. In big block capital letters. LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES. I wonder what that means?”

“Something is a lie, and they want us —” Nope. Not us. Us meant including Amber in this. “They want me to know about it.”

“They. Let me guess. Faeries. Imaginary creatures want you to know that someone is lying to you?”

“Obviously.” So, before I surrendered myself to the faeries, I needed to sort out who was lying to me. Since the faeries were alerting me now, the liar must be someone I’d spoken to since the last time I had noticed the state of the road, which would have been the previous afternoon as I was laying out the extension cord. I’d only spoken to two people since then: my mother and Amber. (I decided not to bother with Dr. Holden, since he’d only blathered on about genetics and Scrabble tiles. Oh, and the drugstore owner, but I wasn’t going to count him either, because how could one lie about asking me to say hello to someone else?) I couldn’t see the faeries wanting to warn me about Amber, since they were the ones who had drawn her out here the previous evening. And nothing Amber had said to me was pertinent. Therefore, conclusion: my mother was lying to me. Unless (new thought) it was Lem, but I only had his letter because of the faeries, and they wouldn’t give me something that was a lie on purpose, so it couldn’t be him. Back to my mother. My mother was lying to me. Was she lying about me being non-magical? But if she was lying about me being non-magical, and I was magical, then why would she need to exchange me for magical changeling?

(Of course, a larger question was why were the faeries warning me of anything anyhow? Larger, odder, more worrying. Adjectives abounded.)

“Hey, Enid?” Amber broke in, an unwelcome disruption as always.

“What?”

“Does Margery know you’re out here?”

Amber’s question was like a kick in the shins, whether from the mention of my mother or the fact that her query revealed her lack of confidence in me going it alone, I couldn’t say. “I’m fine,” I told her.

“That’s not an answer to the question I just asked.”

“It’s not your problem.”

“No.” Amber swung down, looking graceful as she did so. Apparently Amber could do everything with grace. Stupid, perfect, possibly-but-very-unlikely-to-be-lying Amber. “It isn’t my problem. But I can still be concerned.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“Why are you always so suspicious?” Amber asked. “I’m just trying to be nice.”

“I know,” I said slowly. “It’s just …” My brain was overloaded. I couldn’t talk to Amber while trying to figure out what lies the faeries were trying to draw my attention to. I needed her gone ASAP.

“Amber,” I said. “Is that your phone over there in the weeds?” I pointed to the field. This seemed as good a way as any to get her to leave me alone for a few minutes, which would be better than nothing.

“I don’t see anything,” Amber said.

“Yes, you do. See, right there.” I pointed again vaguely at the field. “Maybe you can’t see from your angle. If you go over there, you’ll be able to see it no problem.”

Amber pulled a rectangle from her pocket. “My phone’s right here.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s not your wallet or a rock or something?”

“Why would I carry around a rock?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” I panicked. “For ballast?”

“That’s weird, Enid. Even for you.” She handed me her phone. “I think you should check in with Margery.”

“I wouldn’t want you to miss a text from your friends because I was using your phone.” Lame, but I was thinking on my feet here.

Amber shook her head. “I don’t want to talk to them. They wouldn’t understand.”

For a moment I thought Amber was going to turn to me and say, in the sappiest voice imaginable, “Not the way you understand, Enid.” Instead she pursed her lips and asked, “Where’s the bathroom?”

“The water’s off and drained in the house, so —” I pointed to the trees.

Amber looked appalled.

“Too good to pee in the woods, princess?” I asked.

She was. “I’m going to walk to the town’s campsite,” she told me, “to use their toilets.”

The campsite was all the way on the edge of town. It would take Amber forever to go all the way there then all the way back. “I won’t look or anything. I promise.”

Wait, why was I dissuading Amber from leaving? I wanted her to go.

“Never mind,” I said. “See you soon.”

Amber did that cutesy frown she often did and shook her head before stepping out onto the road. I watched her closely, to check for faerie interference.

“You doing okay?” I called out, as if she were fifty feet away rather than five. “Feel any different?”

Amber stopped. “Unless you want me to pee myself, we can have whatever conversation you want when I get back.” She turned and primly, stepping in bizarre patterns to avoid the letters marked in the road, walked off.

No faeries jumped out and grabbed her.

Maybe it was safe for me.

I went to edge a toe out onto the road.

My heart pounded.

Almost there.

Nope.

I pulled my foot back in. Just because the faeries weren’t messing with Amber didn’t meant that they wouldn’t mess with me. I’d get my new plan thunk-out before risking any further interactions with the faeries.

And what was my mother lying to me about?