“My parents are getting divorced,” Callie said, trying the words on for size. They felt a little loose, but it wasn’t impossible that she’d grow into them in time.
Sarah looked over the top of the sand castle she and Callie were building. “Really?” she asked solemnly.
Callie nodded matter-of-factly. “I’m going to stay in our house with my mother,” she said. “My brother Evan has to move out and live with my father.”
“They’re going to split you up?” Sarah put down her shovel to give this disturbing thought her full attention. “That’s really mean. Unless, I guess, unless you don’t like your brother, then I guess it’s okay.”
“Oh, I like my brother,” Callie said, checking out of the corner of her eye to see if Sarah’s mother, sitting under a nearby umbrella, was listening. Seeing that she was occupied reading to Sarah’s little sister, Callie dared to proceed.
“It’s not fair, but what can you do?” She shrugged. “We’re just kids, they don’t care about us.”
“But they’re your parents,” Sarah argued. She began to rock back and forth on her haunches, feet splayed, arms tightly wound around her knees. Callie leaned across their half-finished castle and pushed Sarah’s glasses, which were forever slipping, up to the bridge of her nose. Callie and Sarah had been friends for three days. They had already worn each other’s bathing suits; they were accustomed to familiarity.
“I told you it wasn’t fair,” Callie said, sounding impatient but not feeling it. She was surprised how quickly she was growing into her story, how the words were starting to fit.
“But why?” Sarah asked. She too glanced over at her mother, not to see if she was listening but to be sure she was there. “Why are they getting a divorce?”
Callie thought. “They’re tired of each other, I guess. You know how you have a favorite doll and you think if you ever lose her you’ll die?”
Sarah nodded; her glasses slipped.
“But then you get a new doll for your birthday or something?”
“Christmas,” said Sarah.
“Or Chanukah,” said Callie because that was her holiday. “Anyway, so now this new doll is your favorite and you don’t care about the old one anymore and you could even give her away if you had to.”
“I could never give one o f my dolls away,” Sarah said passionately. “I don’t care if she wasn’t my favorite anymore. I just couldn’t.”
“Oh, I know. I could never, either. But, just say you could, okay? It’s like that with my parents, see?” Callie scooped up a handful of sand. “Understand?”
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said. “How do you know the old doll isn’t going to be your favorite again? I mean, you never know, right? That’s happened to me lots of times.” She picked up her shovel and began furiously to dig.
“Hey,” Callie said, “you’re getting sand on me.” “Sorry.”
Adding her handful of sand to the pile Sarah was rapidly building up, Callie said, “You’re lucky your parents aren’t getting divorced.”
Sarah said, “I don’t know anybody whose parents are getting divorced.”
“You’re lucky,” Callie said.
“How many towers are we going to have?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know. Seven?”
Sarah smiled. “That’s perfect,” she said. “It’s like us. Get it? We’re seven years old: seven towers. Get it?”
“Yeah,” Callie said happily.
“Seven: seven.” Sarah ran to get her best plastic tower mold, which had somehow found its way into her little sister’s hands, as Callie, patting a mound of sand, gazed past her friend to the girl sitting on the wooden steps in the distance. The girl seemed to be looking at her, too, but they were so far apart Callie couldn’t tell for certain.
“Did you ever read Harriet the Spy?” Callie asked Sarah when she returned. Sarah was being trailed by her sister Irene, who was wailing and grabbing for the sand toy.
“Sarah, you mustn’t just take!” Sarah’s mother yelled at her.
“Me want!” demanded Irene.
“My dad read it to me,” Sarah said, pushing aside her sister’s sandy little paws.
“No-o-o!” Irene shrieked.
“Sarah!”
“I didn’t just take it!” Sarah called over her shoulder.
“Well, that’s her,” said Callie.
“Who?”
“Harriet the spy, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“Where?”
“I can’t point because she’s watching us, but if you turn very slowly and pretend you’re looking for something, there’s a girl sitting on the steps over there and that’s Harriet the spy.”
“Me-e-e!” Irene screeched.
“Let her play with you!” Sarah’s mother shouted. “Sarah, do you hear me?”
“I am!” Sarah called, giving Irene the evil eye.
Sarah turned to look where Callie had instructed her. She shaded her eyes with one hand. “I don’t see—oh, that girl? She’s there all the time.”
“Well, that’s Harriet the spy.”
“You said that.”
“But I’m telling you,” said Callie with such confidence it didn’t occur to Sarah to contradict her.
“I didn’t know she was real,” Sarah said, handing Irene a toy the younger girl didn’t want. “I thought that story was made up.”
Callie said, “It is, but it’s based on a real girl. And that’s her.”
“Wow,” Sarah said as the two girls began digging a moat and Irene found peace with the new toy, which turned out to be more intriguing than a tower mold. “That is so cool. I wish I could be like her. You know: spy on people, write stuff down. You think she looks in people’s windows and everything?”
“Of course,” Callie said. “She’s Harriet.”
The girls worked in silence until Sarah said softly, “I wonder if she’s writing about us.”
Callie looked up, meeting her friend’s eyes, and the two girls began to giggle.
“Why are we laughing?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know,” Callie said.
Returning to her work, Callie imagined:
There are these two girls on the beach. One of them has straight red hair and glasses and a bratty little sister named Irene. The other one has brown hair and freckles like her mother. That one, the one with brown hair and freckles, is a big liar who makes up stories. Like about her parents getting divorced, which who knows if it’s even going to happen, and me being Harriet the spy when everybody knows that book is made up and I’m a real girl.
All of a sudden Callie wondered just who the girl was, if she wasn’t Harriet the spy. It wasn’t long, however, before the effort of building their sand castle took all her concentration, and the girl in the distance, the girl Evan called the watcher, faded away in Callie’s mind to a ghost of a thought.
There, but invisible. And after a while Callie forgot her altogether so that the girl became nothing, not even a ghost, not even there.
When her brother and parents arrived on the beach, Callie ran to meet them, eager to show off the completed sand castle.
“We worked on it all morning!” she crowed.
“Both of us!” Sarah said. “I made the bridge.” Tugging on Evan’s hand, Callie said breathlessly, “We can’t decide whether we should call it Castle Saracal or Castle Callisar. What do you think, Evan?”
Looking down at his sister’s—and her new best friend’s—eager faces, Evan said, “That’s a pretty important decision.”
“It is,” Callie agreed seriously.
“I know,” said Sarah, “let’s take a—what do you call that, when you ask lots of people the same question?”
“A poll?” Evan asked.
“It starts with an s,” said Sarah, shaking her head.
“A survey,” said Evan.
“A survey, that’s it.”
“Good idea,” said Callie. “J know. Let’s collect shells and stones. Then we’ll take two buckets. Everyone who wants Castle Saracal will put a stone in the stone bucket, and everyone who wants Castle Callisar will put a shell in the shell bucket.”
Propelled by their own cleverness and the importance of their mission, the two girls raced off, leaving Evan to shake his head at the way seven-year-old minds worked.
“What do you say?” he heard his father ask. “Shall we launch this thing? It’s a perfect day for flying a kite.”
Evan turned to see his father holding the kite he had brought back with him from the “mainland,” as he insisted on calling it. It was a beauty, there was no denying it. A delta kite with long silvery streamers trailing off its three points. On its back was the image of an imaginary bird, handpainted in brilliant colors: turquoise and silver, purple and orange, bright, bright yellow.
When it was airborne it was unlike any other kite in the sky. It shimmered and swooped, and the way the silver caught the sun it seemed to burst into tiny flames, to dance with silver shoes.
Although his father had launched it, it was Evan who now held the spool, Evan who felt the tug of the wind as he let out or took in the line.
“That’s it, give it a little more now,” he heard his father coaching from a few feet behind him.
“I know what I’m doing,” Evan said, even though he didn’t really. At least, his mind didn’t. His body seemed to know exactly what it was doing. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so connected to something outside himself. It was as if he and the kite were one. As if he were flying.
“I want a turn,” he heard Callie say.
“In a minute,” he told her.
“Please,” Callie pleaded. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair,” Sarah echoed. “Please, Evan!”
He looked down, first at Sarah, then at his sister, who had a glint in her eye that told him she knew she had already won.
“Hold it with me,” he instructed them.
As Callie and Sarah jostled for a position next to Evan and ended up on either side of him, Evan felt Irene brushing against his legs.
“Me-e-e!” she whined.
Evan laughed. “You, too?”
“Me, too.”
“Well, I don’t know, can somebody—” Looking over at his parents, Evan was surprised to see that his father had his arm around his mother’s shoulders and she was just then putting her arm around his waist. They smiled at him, easily, the way they used to smile before they had to think about it.
“Can somebody put Irene on my shoulders?” Evan continued.
“Oh, let me,” said her mother.
She rushed forward and lifted Irene up. As Evan felt the child’s soft, sandy thighs grip his neck and her arms wrap themselves tightly around the crown of his head, he kept an eye on his parents and was relieved that they had not removed their arms from each others bodies. He said a silent, a quick, an u n conscious prayer, and breathed out, realizing when he did that he’d been holding his breath.
“Oh, look at you kids,” Sarah’s mother gushed. “Don’t anybody move, I’m just going to get my camera, if I can only ...”
She hurried off to dig in her beach bag. Irene bounced on Evan’s shoulders as Sarah muttered, “My mother takes a kazillion pictures.”
“I like pictures,” Callie told her friend. “I like having them.”
“Me, too,” said Sarah, “but who needs a kazillion?”
“Evan,” Callie said, “would you ask Sarah’s mom to take a picture of Mommy and Daddy?”
“I thought you said your parents were getting divorced,” Sarah whispered to Callie, loud enough that Evan heard. “They don’t look like they’re getting divorced.”
“I said they might be getting divorced,” Callie hissed.
“Did not,” said Sarah. “You said—”
“Everybody look over here!”
Evan smiled, tickling the soles of Irene’s feet so that she was laughing when the shutter clicked.
“One more! Nobody blink! And, Sarah, don’t make rabbit ears behind Callie this time!”
Callie and Sarah poked each other from either side of Evan’s legs and giggled.
As the second picture was being taken, Evan heard someone call his name. “Evan, yo, Evan! Awesome kite, man!”
He turned his head in the direction of the voice, and there were the boys in black, standing at the water’s edge, watching him fly his kite. His awesome kite.
“Hold on tight! Don’t let it go now!” he warned the girls as he took a hand away from the spool to wave to Shane.
Shane waved back. He yelled something Evan couldn’t hear.
“What?” Evan shouted.
“Check out the flake!” Indicating that Evan should look behind him, Shane called out again, “The flake!”
Awkwardly, Evan turned his head to look where Shane was pointing. There, on the top of the steps where she usually sat, the watcher stood with her arms stretched out wide, her back arched, her head lifted to the sky.
“She’s flying!” Evan called back to Shane.
“She’s crazy!” Shane returned.
Evan shook his head no. “She’s flying,” he said again, not quite so loudly this time, because he was flying, too, and he didn’t want Shane or his gang spoiling anyone’s fun. Not his, not the watcher’s. It’s a perfect day for flying, he thought to himself.
Giving the little girl’s foot a squeeze, he said, “Right, Irene?”
Irene squealed. And Evan took it to mean, Right, Evan.
The queen held her locket up next to the girl’s. The two halves fit perfectly.
The queen began to cry. “When you said your name was Miranda, I... I did not dare hope . . . Miranda. We thought she had drowned when she was a baby. When we were shipwrecked off the shores of this island . . .”
The queen could control her crying no more. She left off her speech, and the king went on.
“I held both my babies to my chest as I attempted to swim to safety,” he explained. “But it was a stormy sea that day, and a sudden wave knocked one of my children out of my arms. I did not know which one it was. I called out, Evario! Miranda! But I heard no cry, only the roar of the angry sea fighting to take my other child away from me.”
Miranda looked at Evario. “Then you are . . .”
“Your brother,” said Evario. “Your twin.”
The girl fell into her long-lost brother’s arms.
Caliandra hugged her, too. “At last, I have a sister,” Caliandra said. “A real sister.”
“Yes,” said Miranda. And to the prince she said, “And so it is true that we have always known each other.”
Alas, Miranda’s happiness was but brief.
For she knew she must return each night to the beast. His powers were too great, too strong
too magical
to be resisted. If he discovered her with her true family,
he would destroy her he would destroy them all.