Chapter Eleven

Iris Dissents

No, Lark had not taken the ogre from Iris’s nightstand, as Iris discovered when she called her sister into her room the next morning. She hadn’t even known that Iris had pocketed it the previous afternoon, and in fact was somewhat confused as to why Iris had placed it on her bedside table in the first place, and Iris could not explain. “I just . . . felt like it?”

I just felt like it was a perfectly natural-sounding reason for Lark. But as to the question of where the thing had gone, she had no answer. It was just like her bracelet. It had disappeared.

“Gnomes?” Lark suggested.

“Oh, that’d be great.” Iris had enough problems without fairy-tale creatures coming to life.

“Maybe the thing actually is Mr. Hunt. Maybe it had to go work on planning today’s lessons.”

“I don’t really want that to be true, either.”

“Did you look under your bed? Behind the nightstand?”

“Everywhere,” Iris said. Something was very weird when it was Lark giving her advice on how to find things.

Lark was used to things getting lost—not important things, like the bracelet, but things from the clutter of random objects that populated her daily life. A plastic ogre getting up and walking away didn’t bother her too much. Iris, however, was not used to it at all. If you paid attention, and you had places for things, and you put everything back in those places, they tended to be easily findable.

Or they were supposed to be.

“Hey, can I borrow a T-shirt?” Lark asked, motioning to Iris’s closet.

“Sure. Did Mom forget to do laundry again?” Laundry had always been their dad’s domain and their mom didn’t seem to be adjusting well.

“No . . . I just don’t want to wear any of mine.”

“How come?”

She shrugged.

“Okay. Sure.”

“I’m not going to wear, like, all black or something. I’m not going all goth-emo or anything, like some people.”

“Okay.” Iris, herself clad in black again, opened her closet door. “Whatever you want. I really like your squid shirt, though.”

“Yeah, well . . . is this one okay?” She pulled out a dark blue T-shirt.

“I’ve got some striped leggings that go with that.” Lark had many varieties of striped leggings, but few that would go with something as muted as dark blue. Not that matching was necessarily Lark’s thing.

“No. I’ll just wear some plain ones. Thanks.”

Iris frowned. “Do you have plain leggings?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

When they went downstairs to get breakfast, their mom was staring at an article in the newspaper as if the letters on the page had come to life and started doing a jig.

“What is it?” Iris asked.

“Oh! Sorry, I didn’t hear you. It’s just some thieves have been stealing stuff from local museums. It’s bizarre.”

“Maybe they have my bracelet,” Lark grumbled.

Her mom looked them both up and down. “Is there any reason you both are dressing like you’re going to a funeral?”

Iris raised her eyebrows. Do you really want me to answer that?

“Never mind. You guys get your breakfast, and we’ll go in ten minutes.”

Neither girl’s wardrobe got any brighter over the course of the week. Lark kept fishing things out of Iris’s closet, because apparently Iris was the go-to-girl in the family for boring clothes.

It was fine. Iris’s class was fine. Ms. Shonubi was nice. The other kids were fine. But it all felt so empty, and still she could not get comfortable anywhere.

“You’re really twitchy this year,” Mira commented on Friday.

“I guess,” Iris said.

“I don’t remember you being so twitchy last year.”

“The chair’s uncomfortable,” Iris said.

“You were twitchy in art. And music.”

“Those chairs were uncomfortable too.”

“Maybe you have back problems,” Jin offered. “My mom has back problems and has a special pillow to sit on. You could bring a special pillow with you?”

“My dad has back problems too, so he uses one of those standing desks at work,” said Oliver. “Maybe you could use a standing desk?”

“Yoga’s really helpful too,” said Mira.

“And Pilates,” Oliver added. “My dad loves Pilates. He says it builds his core muscles.”

“There’s no such thing as core muscles,” Mira said.

“There are! They’re around the stomach and back and stuff.”

“I am pretty sure you are making that up.”

“Am not!”

Iris stuck her chin in her hand and tried to hold still. There is nothing to make you more twitchy than a group of people talking about how twitchy you are, and Iris suddenly felt like she was made of worms.

“Do you want me to ask my mom where she got her pillow?” Jin asked. “It’s a good temporary solution while you work on your core muscles.”

Mira rolled her eyes. “Come on. Everyone’s getting in line.”

Ms. Shonubi’s class had specialists after lunch every day, meaning that on successive days that week Iris had gotten to enjoy the confused looks on the faces of the music teacher, the drama teacher, and the art teacher at seeing her by herself, without a Lark in sight. I know, she wanted to tell them. I don’t get it either.

Iris felt even more useless in these classes than she usually did. If her separation from her sister was supposed to bring out some previously undiscovered talent in playing the glockenspiel or using watercolors, it had not, at least not that first week.

But on Friday they had the first meeting of media, and that was the one class where Iris didn’t feel completely useless. Maybe that was because the media specialist, Mr. Ntaba, was the only specialist who never had trouble telling the girls apart. (The music teacher had taken to calling them both Maguire just to avoid any errors, while all the other kids got to have first names.)

This year he sat them all down and cleared his throat and launched into the speech he gave on the first day of school every year, and for a few minutes Iris did not feel twitchy.

“The library,” he explained to them, “might look ordinary to you, but that, my children, is just a facade to fool the board so they don’t cut my budget. And they would do that if they knew the truth: this is a magical land where every one of you can find exactly the book you need at any given time—even if you don’t know you need it. Every one of you can find the book that will change your life.”

In kindergarten, Iris had taken all his words to be exactly true—maybe not that the library was magic, exactly, but that it was something like magic. What year was it when she knew that such things didn’t exist? She couldn’t remember. But still, it was nice to sit here and listen to him talk and believe it again for a little while.

“Someday this year you might feel some odd tugging at the center of your chest and you will find yourself standing among the shelves of this here library for reasons you barely understand, and all you have to do is say, ‘Mr. Ntaba, I am looking for the book that could change my life,’ and I will find that book for you. I am your fairy godmother, but with books.” He said this line every year, and no one ever laughed at it, not even Dexter Atwood.

But really, that was exactly what Mr. Ntaba was. At least for Iris. One morning in third grade she’d felt some odd tugging at the center of her chest and found herself standing among the shelves of the media center. She did not say, “Mr. Ntaba, I am looking for the book that could change my life,” because even in third grade she was not the sort of person who said that kind of thing. But he handed her a book nonetheless:

Amazing but True: Facts to Astonish You

“Here,” he said to her. “Iris Maguire, you look like a girl who could use some astonishment.”

Somehow he knew that Iris was not someone to be astonished by tales of great quests or mythological creatures or even wizard school. She pored over the book and found herself . . . maybe not astonished, but certainly intrigued. And that was good enough.

Did you know hippo sweat is red? Did you know cows kill more people every year than sharks? Did you know that the smallest mammal in the world is called the bumblebee bat, and is about the size of a half-dollar coin?

With Mr. Ntaba’s help she went through various phases. Weird animal facts. Collective nouns. Even accidental inventions. Play-Doh was invented by a scientist trying to make a wallpaper cleaner! Someone once tried to create a new soda and then left it outside with the stirring stick in it and invented Popsicles! And of course presidential pets. Did you know Thomas Jefferson had two pet bears that he kept on the White House lawn? That Theodore Roosevelt’s son put a pony in the White House elevator? That Benjamin Harrison once chased his pet goat, Old Whiskers, down Pennsylvania Avenue?

On the second day of fourth grade Mr. Anderson asked the class to contribute topics and a list of possible answers for a trivia game. Other kids came up with things like Dog Breeds, and Spider-Man Enemies, and Things I Am Allergic To. When Mr. Anderson got to Iris’s sheet, his white eyebrows went up, he cleared his throat, and then he read, “Presidential Assassination Attempts.”

That was before Iris understood that there is a difference between the things you have in your head and the things you present to the world—that sometimes you have to fit yourself into certain shapes, ones other people can easily name.

But none of that mattered when it was just you and a book. Today, when her classmates were browsing the shelves, Mr. Ntaba asked Iris, as he sometimes did, “Have you found it yet?”

He meant something to astonish her. And she certainly had been astonished of late, but not in the way he meant.

“Not really,” she said.

“But we will, Iris. Do not doubt my powers.”

“I don’t.”

“In the meantime, if you see anything astonishing, let me know, okay?”

“I will.”

He studied her for a moment. “I saw your sister earlier. Is this the first time you guys haven’t been in the same class?”

She swallowed. “Yeah. It’s weird.”

“Do you know why that happened?”

“Principal Peter thinks we need to grow as individuals or something.”

“I see. And do you agree with him? That you need to grow as individuals?”

She shook her head.

“I think I have just the thing.” He disappeared for a moment and then came back with a big bright picture book. “It’s about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Supreme Court justice. She disagrees with people all the time.”

The book was called I Dissent. Iris flipped it open and saw the text RUTH HAS DISAGREED, DISAPPROVED, AND DIFFERED.

“This looks good,” she said, heading for a chair.

“Iris, wait.” He leaned in. “I know it’s going to be lonely for you without Lark. But you can do it, okay?”

Iris stopped. And swallowed. She was not twitching at all; she was utterly still.

Lonely. It was the word her father had used, and she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. It was a feeling, she realized, that she’d never really had before. It was the sort of feeling that belonged to people in books and movies, not a real-life feeling.

But that was before, when she and Lark didn’t have separate classes, separate activities. When she lived constantly on two planes—the one with everyone else, and the one hidden underneath it where she and Lark lived together.

Lonely.

Iris looked at the floor and blinked once, twice. Everything blurred. Then she swallowed again and looked back up at Mr. Ntaba.

“I will,” she said.