eeding my own advice, I headed home. Outside our disagreements regarding how broadly I could interpret take-home assignments, I was a nonentity at school. I sat at the back and participated in class only under duress. I was so inconsequential that I’d been erroneously marked absent three times during the past school year (including once when it was clearly untrue since I had presented my book report on Huygen and Poortvliet’s Gnomes first thing that morning). Moreover, even supposing it were opposite day and my absence was correctly noted, after the previous afternoon’s meeting with Mrs. Estabrooks, the administration would likely assume my mother had kept me home to punish the school by denying them the gift of my brilliance.

In less time than seemed possible, I was back in our front yard, surveying two of the trees that had blown over. They had been so newly planted that their roots were still wound up in tight balls of dirt. I righted them in their holes, poured on some top soil, and jumped on the dirt, stamping them in. It sure was convenient that while faeries couldn’t uproot trees themselves, they could cause windstorms, or snowstorms, or termites, or stampedes, or rogue beavers, or any other such contrivance to knock the trees over. Plant new trees, knock them over, plant new trees, knock them over. Just imagine what I could accomplish if I didn’t have to spend all my free time dealing with faerie nuisances. I’d have probably finished my faerie manuscript by now, at least.

Weighing the roots down would help. Mrs. Delavecchio had a large stack of bricks at the back of her yard. I grabbed three at a time to layer over the topsoil. Mrs. Delavecchio watched me from her kitchen window while I worked.

“No school?” she called when I had finished. “I saw you go to school.”

“We got sent home,” I lied. “There was a problem with the radiators.”

“That school is too old. They should tear down and build a new one like in the cities.”

“Yes, Mrs. Delavecchio.”

“You come over for lunch then? I have soup and sausages frying.”

“What time is lunch?” I asked.

“One o’clock.” Mrs. Delavecchio pulled her head back in through the window. The breeze caught her orange curtains, drawing them out to flutter against the side of her house. They clashed with the brick. She should put her screens back in, I thought. Ants will get into her house. Plus faeries.

Over on our property, I put in my key to turn the lock. It didn’t turn, because it wasn’t locked.

“Hello?” I called out as I nudged the door open. Upon re-evaluation (my mother kept the door locked at all times), I puffed myself up and shouted, “Police!” in as deep a voice as I could manage.

A chair scraped along the floor further inside. My heart thrummed with no pause between the beats.

“Don’t make me shoot you. Backup is on its way. Ten-forty, copy.” I made a crackling noise in my throat that I hoped sounded convincingly like radio static. “The situation remains critical,” I said into my shoulder. Television police always seemed to have radios strapped to their shoulders. “Come out with your hands up.”

“Oh, Enid,” my mother said wearily from the kitchen. “We all know it’s you.”

I scurried to where she sat, on a stool in the thin space between the cupboards and the kitchen sink. “Who’s we?” I asked. But there was only my mother, flipping through photographs that lay, loose, in a box.

“Don’t you have school?” she asked me.

“Don’t you have work?”

As she didn’t reply, I leaned in to look at the box. All baby photos. “Who’s that a picture of?” I asked. The photos weren’t like the glossy 4”x6” ones we sometimes printed off at the drugstore. These were all squares with rounded corners. The colored ink of the photos had faded to yellow.

“You.”

I scoffed. “Those photos are older than I am.”

“I had an Instamatic at our old house, and I used some film I found in a box under the sink. Waste not, want not.”

Waste not, want not? My mother believed using clichés was intellectually lazy. My mother was not intellectually lazy. “Nobody develops film anymore,” I said, testing her.

“The community college has film classes and darkrooms you can rent. A friend developed these for me.”

Choosing to ignore Amber, my mother didn’t have any friends other than me. “Who?”

“So many questions, Enid.” She went back to her photographs.

“Who?” I repeated.

She exhaled and glared at me. “One of the nephews of a patient who died shortly after your birth.”

“So, the patient died or the nephew?” I asked.

“The patient, Enid. Obviously the patient,” she said, exasperated by me as always. “The nephew developed the film for me.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t remember.”

This from the woman whose memory could recall pre-cise details from decades-old power bills? Curiouser and curiouser. “Really?” I asked.

“Really, Enid.” My mother stood and brushed her hands against her pants like wiping crumbs from her fingers. She put the lid back on the shoebox of photos. She took her bag from the counter.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“As you said, I should be at work. Someone needs to bring in some money to this household.” She gave me a pointed look.

“I’m only eleven. I can’t work.”

“Exactly.”

I couldn’t think of a smart reply to this, and so she left.