Chapter Sixteen

Parts of Speech

So, all too quickly, the school year settled into its inevitable rhythm, and what had once been inconceivable soon became everyday reality. For Iris, the very structure of the school day—once comforting—felt oppressive. Every day would be like this. Reading. Gym. Math. Lunch. Specials. Science. Social studies. Bus. Camp Awesome. None of it with Lark. All of it feeling like she was this weird twitchy ghost.

Mostly she tried not to talk to anyone, as there didn’t seem to be anything worth saying, and weird twitchy ghosts did not talk. But she couldn’t always help it. For instance, each day right before lunch they had Pod Time, which involved some sort of discussion or activity with your pod—the collective noun for students in a cluster of desks in Ms. Shonubi’s room. Today in Pod Time everyone was supposed to name a place they wanted to visit and tell the group why. This would, Iris suspected, be one of those assignments that seemed innocent on its face but would eventually lead to some kind of Pod-based project involving poster board and glue sticks and uncomfortable conversations about who should do the lettering and Iris having to find a way to correct people when they got the state flower wrong without them thinking she was a know-it-all, or, worse, ignoring her and getting the state flower wrong anyway, and either way someone telling her she was too bossy. Because you just can’t win with group projects.

But, for now, Jin was explaining how much he wanted to go to Orlando to see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and ride on the Incredible Hulk Coaster, and Mira said that her grandparents wintered down there, by which she meant they spent winters down there so consistently that it was a verb, and so Iris surreptitiously got out her Awesome journal and flipped open to the verb page and added:

Wintering

She bit her lip and studied the list. Snippets from her dad’s work calls ran through the back of her head. The calls were way too boring to pay attention to and tended to be conducted in a language that sounded like English but none of the words were used in the right way. But now those words had a use:

Incentivizing

Workshopping

Bucketizing

“What are you doing?” Oliver asked.

“Me?” Iris looked up. “Nothing.”

“This is Pod Time!” Mira said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be writing things down.”

Meanwhile, Oliver had leaned all the way over and was reading her journal. “‘Crafting,’” he read. “Actually, that’s not a made-up verb. It’s a verb already. To craft: to make something with care and skill.”

Iris narrowed her eyes. “What, do you read the dictionary for fun?”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway,” she said, straightening, “I know it’s a verb like that. But not like Abig—not like this girl was using it. She meant crafting, like doing crafts. There’s already a way of saying that.” He looked at her blankly. “Doing crafts!”

He frowned. “But if you’re making those crafts with care and skill—”

“No! It doesn’t work like that. In the world of actual words used in the actual right way you don’t say ‘I crafted’ and leave it at that. You have to craft something.”

“Guys,” Mira whispered.

“Oh.” Oliver adjusted his bow tie sagaciously. “It’s a transitive verb and they’re making it intransitive. You should put an asterisk by that one, like—” He reached for her journal.

“Hey,” she said, sweeping the journal shut. “That’s private!”

He raised his eyebrows. “Your list of made-up verbs and one transitive verb used incorrectly is private?”

“Guys!” Mira’s voice was a hiss now. “We’re supposed to be discussing places! Also you guys are being really really boring.”

“Maybe you could go to a dictionary theme park,” Jin added.

Mira snorted. “Grammar World!”

“There could be a haunted house with whiches,” Jin said, giggling. “Get it? Not witches, but whiches?”

“That would be Homophone World,” Oliver corrected.

“You could ride the train at the Railroad Conjunction!” Mira said.

“Yeah, the but train,” Jin said.

Iris tapped her foot on the floor. She did not want to go to a dictionary theme park. And she certainly did not want to go anywhere with Oliver, who would probably put asterisks on the rides and explain that they were not really roller coasters but intransitive coasters, whatever that meant.

If Lark had been there she could have tapped a message to her about the whole conversation and Lark would have rolled her eyes in solidarity. Or, Lark would have tapped out her own syntax puns that were way better than these, and Iris could have rolled her eyes in solidarity. But now she had to sit and suffer in silence, both actual and figurative.

If someone annoys you in class but your sister isn’t there to tell about it, did it really happen?

“How’s it going over there?” Ms. Shonubi called.

“Fine!” Mira said, glaring at them. “What about you, Iris?” she said pointedly. “Where would you want to go?”

With a sigh, Iris closed her journal. “Um, London, I guess.”

“London, England?” Oliver asked.

“Obviously. Is there another one?”

“There’s one in Canada. And Ohio. I also read atlases for fun.”

(What Oliver said was true. Iris looked up other Londons later and made a list in her Awesome book. There were also ones in South America and Africa and all over the United States, including a London in California that wasn’t a town but rather a “census-designated place,” whatever that meant. Like, there’s a guy out there who looks at a map and says, I hereby designate this a place! And all the other areas of the map are like, Can we be places too? And the guy says, Nope, sorry. Maybe someday, if you dream.)

“Well,” Iris said, “I mean London, England. My dad’s living there right now.”

Jin’s eyes went big. “Your parents got divorced?”

Iris blinked. “No.”

“Are they getting divorced?”

“No, he’s just working there for a while. Then he’s coming back.”

Iris glared at Jin. Her parents weren’t getting divorced. It was just her dad’s job. He was coming back. When their parents had sat them down to tell them that this was happening, that he was just going to be out of the country for a few months and it was just part of his job and it would go by so fast and he would call them every day and be home before they knew it, they’d talked quickly and brightly and confidently, words tumbling out of their mouths like polished stones.

But now Iris had to wonder if they’d been talking like that to distract the girls, like waving something shiny in front of their faces so they’d miss the monster crawling toward them. Grown-ups pretend that if they don’t talk about things, kids won’t know they’re there. But you do know, at least you know something is there: you can see the weird blank space where the things they aren’t talking about are supposed to be and you can see that something is lurking just behind it but you know you are supposed to pretend you haven’t noticed anything.

“My dad’s coming back,” Iris said definitively.

Jin gasped. “You had a premonition!”

“No. Not a premonition. His assignment ends in December.”

Oliver turned to Jin. “I think it was a premonition too,” he whispered.

“I heard that!”

“Can we just do the assignment?” Mira squeaked.

That afternoon, Iris didn’t see Lark before getting on the bus to the library, though she wasn’t sure what she would say if she did. Part of her wanted to tell her everything Jin had said and watch her sister for any sign that she believed it was the truth—but she couldn’t do that to Lark. Why plant a seed like that in her sister, who had enough to worry about as it was? Especially since the seed had already sprouted into something tangled and awful inside Iris’s brain.

So when she walked into Camp Awesome, the thing was with her—no longer growing but still twisting into something more and more menacing. But it was her secret; no one noticed a thing. Abigail beamed at her as if seeing Iris was the best thing that had happened to her all day.

Which could not possibly be true.

Hannah and Morgan both greeted her cheerfully, and she tried to look cheerful back. This took some thinking. What sort of thing did cheerful people do? Well, they smiled, so Iris tried that. They said hi, so Iris tried that, too. They asked friendly questions like How are you? and made nice comments like I like your journal cover and That’s a cool Twins shirt. But Iris couldn’t quite make those words come out, as there were so many of them and there was a thing in her brain and it seemed likely she might put the words in the wrong order.

Today’s game was another get-to-know-you exercise. Abigail told them to circle up, and informed them she was in possession of a magical invisible ball—and here she held her hands out at beach-ball width, and shouted, “Catch!” and thrust her hands toward Emily. Emily just stared at her.

“Oh! Let me get my ball!” And Abigail ran behind Emily and mimed picking up her beach ball, then shouted, “Catch!” again, and threw it at Gabrielle.

Gabrielle did catch the ball, and Emily said, “Oh!” so Gabrielle tossed the invisible ball to her. Iris didn’t blame Emily for being confused; why they couldn’t use a real ball was beyond her, unless Abigail had spent all her budget on glitter glue.

The game was that they would toss the “ball” around, and when someone threw the ball at you, you introduced yourself with your name and an adjective that started with the same letter as your name.

At that very moment, a whole alphabet’s worth of adjectives popped in Iris’s head, from Admirable Annalise to Zesty Zinnia—every letter but the one she needed, I.

Iris’s brain stopped. The ball went around. One girl caught it, said her name, and then threw it, and the other girl repeated that name and said her own.

“I am Awesome Abigail!” (Throw.)

“Awesome Abigail . . . Amazing Amma!”

“Amazing Amma . . . Playful Preeti!”

Slowly, she regained the power of thought, and slowly some I adjectives popped to the front of her mind, all of them unacceptable. She wasn’t going to say intelligent, because that’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to say about yourself. There was invisible, but that was ridiculous, as Iris was standing right there and everyone could see her. Same with imaginary. And she did not wish to be icy or icky. Everyone had a name—Genuine Gabrielle, Maleficent Morgan, Haunting Hannah (here she made a ghost noise)—and then Nice Novalie hurled the invisible ball at her and her mouth opened and her mind turned to fuzz and what came out was:

“Indecisive Iris.”

Silence. Iris’s insides turned to slime.

To make it worse, she’d done it wrong. She hadn’t followed the rules. She was supposed to repeat Nice Novalie, but she’d gotten so fuzzy she’d forgotten. Games have rules and you are supposed to follow the rules—that’s how games work. And Novalie, Novalie was so nice that she just whispered, “Repeat my name” at Iris super quietly. But Iris was already hurling the invisible ball at Abigail again and it was all much, much too late.

Then, of course, Abigail wanted them to use the game to learn one another’s names, so she pronounced “Energetic Emily!” and then threw the ball to Emily, who this time caught on and said, “Maleficent Morgan,” giggling a little bit, and Morgan said, “Haunting Hannah,” who then announced, “Indecisive Iris!” and this went on for a full five minutes.

When camp was over, Iris ducked out ahead of everyone else and went to the library computers and searched for I adjectives, intending to write them down in her journal in case this sort of thing ever happened to her again. Instead she ended up with a list of adjectives she could not use.

She was neither illogical nor imaginative; she did not wish to be inexperienced or irresponsible, immature or infantile; she did not feel impressive, important, or impulsive; and she really hoped she wasn’t immoral or irksome. She certainly was a little impatient and maybe irritable, but they didn’t sound like things she should advertise. And sometimes impassioned, but that hardly characterized her. Igneous was a kind of rock. Mostly the adjective that best described her was itchy.

She had been doomed from the beginning. Even the dictionary knew it.

Iris picked up her backpack, which now felt much heavier than before, like someone had snuck in a bunch of reference books while she wasn’t looking, and wandered out of the library.