nid.”

I put down my head and walked faster.

“Enid,” the voices called out again in stereo. Then “Enid” again in quadraphonic sound. I’d almost made it to the crosswalk when, grabbing the loop on the top of my backpack, Amber pulled me to a stop. Sadly, she was neither banished nor vanished by any motes of powder still on my bag.

“Rushing off, are we?” asked Amber.

“I have to get to school,” I muttered.

Amber and her coterie laughed.

“Oh, do hold up, Enid.” She sounded just like my mother, a skill likely honed during all their time together at work. Yay. A new way to annoy me. “I’m so glad I caught you,” Amber continued, all faux-sweet. “You can give these back to your mother for me.” She extracted a pair of novels from her army-green messenger bag. “She lent these books to me so that we could discuss them together.” To prove it, Amber flipped the cover open of the topmost book to show me my mother’s name written in my mother’s super straight block caps: MARGERY STRANGE. “It’s not like she can expect you to discuss these books with her.”

“So now she’s lending you X-rated novels?” I raised my left eyebrow in an attempt to look wise. If Amber thought my mother wouldn’t share the books with me they must have contained some adult-only content (although my mother didn’t bother herself with censoring my reading; she let me read whatever books she left lying around the house). I stifled a yawn. I was too tired to engage in Amber’s and my usual useless sparring. “So what?” I readied my weapon to get this interaction over with. Amber may have had her newfound maternal mimicry to upset me; I could stick with my steadfast approach for riling up Amber. “Your dad spends just as much time with me as you do with my mother. And we don’t work together, so he has to go out of his way to find me.” This was so much of an exaggeration that it should more accurately be called a lie. As I mentioned previously, Dr. Holden did nothing more than give me a fake, distant smile and a fake, distant wave whenever we met. “What do you think of that?” I asked, already knowing. For reasons unclear, putting myself in her father’s orbit made Amber furious.

Sure enough, the corners of Amber’s eyes narrowed. “You little worm,” she said, not yelling, not hissing, not shouting nor spitting. Just cold and flat like I wasn’t even worth her time. “You are nothing more than an inconsequential collection of atoms. A cockroach is worth more than you. A weak virus is worth a thousand Enids. Don’t you ever speak of my father again. You have no right. You don’t even have a father.”

“Better to not have a father than be a spoiled and jealous daddy’s princess like you.”

Amber’s mouth floundered and bobbed like a metaphorical fish eating its own bubbles, but her discombobulation didn’t last. Unfortunately. “Come on,” she said smugly to the other three girls, who had spent our conversation excessively interested in the crosswalk button. “Let’s let sweetheart Enid scamper off to school. So eager for school in the last week of June. She needs to see her teachers so she can get her socialization in before summer starts, since she has no friends.”

“You all are going to school too,” I snapped, hoping no one would notice how I’d sidestepped Amber’s last barb.

“We’re seniors,” one of the chorus said. “These are our last few days to spend together.”

“Not really,” I pointed out, my smart-alecky mouth over-powering my desire to end this encounter as quickly as possible. “You have all summer to spend together. But instead you mindlessly choose to do so in school even though your university acceptances were sent out months ago, making high school, at this point, completely irrelevant. You’re all just too unimaginative to think of some other place to spend your time.”

“I told you never to talk to her.” Amber turned on the girl who had spoken. “But Chelsey is right. They’ll hardly be able to spend time with me this summer while I’m in Europe.”

“You’re only going for two weeks,” I reminded her. Amber’s parents had given her, as a high school graduation present, a summer trip to Europe. She’d gotten the tickets at Christmas, giving the rest of us six months of listening to Amber gloat about her fortnight’s Continental-plus-British-Isles-to-visit-Dr.-Sivaloganathan’s-family holiday.

“Au contraire. My parents have generously reconsidered, and I am now spending the summer in Europe. Two weeks in the UK, one week with family, one without. Then the rest of the time backpacking wherever I so happen to choose. Oh, Enid, has your mother ever given you a two-month vacation?”

No one with eyes could have missed my expression of longing accompanying Amber’s taunt, how the movie camera in my brain started showing all the sights via scenes stolen from films and old Paris Match magazines they had us read in French class: the reading room at the British Museum, Paris at dusk, the large Ferris wheel in Vienna, Prague architecture, Amsterdam-ian and Venetian canals, la Promenade des Anglais, Portuguese beaches, Greek ruins, the Hermitage Museum, the Brandenburg Gate.

“No,” I said. “My mother hasn’t bought me a trip to Europe.” I thought the truth would deflate her, but then I foolishly added, “Not yet. You can’t tell the future.”

“Not for everything. But for some things.” Amber patted my head. “And I can tell that this teeny town is going to be the most exotic place you’ll ever visit.”

Then she and her friends flounced off, stopping traffic as they crossed the road even though they hadn’t pressed the crosswalk button.

There are two types of people in this world:

1. people who have an active relationship with the fairies; versus

2. people who do not.

Most of humanity falls in the latter category. But precisely how much most are we talking about? No such census has ever been undertaken.

Also interesting to find out, how many people are there who once had an active relationship with the faeries, yet who no longer do? I can see answers to these questions placed within the context of a pie chart or scatter plot. There are some really colorful ways to present this sort of data.

Now, an astute reader may be asking herself, What exactly constitutes an active relationship? How often must the interaction occur? How much time must pass before the relationship is deemed inactive? If once a year a human and faerie meet, is this relationship considered active, or is it considered active only on the day of their meeting and inactive for the remaining 364 (365 in the case of leap years) days of the year? Does there need to be a pattern to the timing of the rendezvous? Lunar-based like Easter or Ramadan? Or periodic? What if the period is quadratic? Fibonacci? Prime number based? What if …