Chapter Twenty-Three

The Fortress of Solitude

The plan was that Lark would stay home from school for two days to “recover.” No one specified whether it was her health or her dignity that needed recovery. Whichever it was, Lark looked like she needed it. She looked like a plant someone had forgotten to water.

Their mom was going to work from home in the mornings, but she needed to be at work in the afternoons, so Lark would go into the office with her and read and do homework, and perhaps with a couple of days of quiet all the uneasy things inside her would settle, and Lark would unwither.

Perhaps.

As for Iris, when she got to school she stalked around the fifth-grade wing listening for whispers of her sister’s name. Gossip always skittered around the school like spiders: you needed to stomp on them early before they mutated and took over the whole place.

But she was too late. It seemed like all the fifth graders were stopping to ask Iris if Lark was okay, and in Iris’s agitated state it was impossible to tell who meant it and who was snickering behind their concerned masks. Everyone was talking about Lark, and no one seemed to be talking about the ogre who had caused this whole event. No one was talking about the barbaric practice of making elementary schoolers piece together regurgitated prey.

So Iris was already in a black mood when she went into her classroom, and of course the kids in there immediately pounced on her as if she were the prey.

“Is Lark okay?”

“I heard she projectile vomited!”

“I heard she turned green.”

Iris stuck her head in the air. “She’s fine, thank you,” she said as primly as possible. “People don’t actually turn green, you know.” Lark had been a little green-tinged, but that was different.

Summoning as much dignity as she could, she set herself down at her desk, where her pod mates were eyeing her like she herself might regurgitate prey at any moment.

“So, did you, like, feel it when she threw up?” Jin asked.

Iris glared at him.

“Jin.” Mira said. “This is not the time.”

He sunk in his chair. “I—just wondering—”

“No!” Mira said. “Does she look like she wants to talk about psychic powers? I’m sure this was very stressful for her.”

“Vomiting can be a reaction to stress, you know,” Oliver said. “Maybe Lark was under stress.”

“She should try chamomile tea,” Mira said.

“Is that a pet-psychic thing?” Jin asked.

“Chamomile,” pronounced Oliver, “is a plant.”

“It’s a person thing. My mom makes tea. It helps me when I’m stressed.”

Jin rolled his eyes. “What could you possible be stressed about? You’re a girl.”

Mira and Iris both turned on him. “What?”

“Girls aren’t stressed!” said Jin.

Oliver shook his head solemnly. “That’s not true. My sister is the most stressed-out person you’ll ever meet in your life. She’s more stressed out than Superman.”

“Why would Superman be stressed out?” Mira asked. “He’s Superman.”

“Superman,” Oliver said, “is always stressed. About everything. I think he has an anxiety disorder.”

“He’s got a point,” Jin said. “You don’t go hang out in a palace made of ice called the Fortress of Solitude because you feel really chill about things.”

“Ha!” Oliver said. “Chill!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Mira said. “My aunt sees pets with anxiety disorders all the time and they’re nothing like Superman.”

“That,” Oliver said, “is a logical fallacy.”

“You’re a logical fallacy!” Mira snapped. “You guys are being insensitive. Again.” She turned to Iris. “Is Lark okay?”

And now they were all looking at her not like she was a curiosity, not like they might snicker as soon as she turned around, but like they cared.

Iris blinked. “She’s not really. She’s super embarrassed.” Normally she would have lied and said Lark was fine, why wouldn’t she be fine? But somehow in the face of all of this pod sympathy, she couldn’t manage to lie. “Everyone laughed at her,” she added quietly.

Mira exhaled. “Those jerks.”

Jin shook his head slowly. “People are awful.”

“The worst,” Oliver agreed. “Repugnant.”

“When is she coming back?”

“Thursday, I think.” Though Lark had an oral report scheduled for Thursday and would probably do everything in her power to stay home.

“We should do something nice for her,” Mira declared.

“I agree,” proclaimed Oliver. “I don’t know her, but you’re our pod mate, and Lark is your sister, so she’s like our sister. Our pod sister. And you know what they say?”

“What?”

“Always stand behind your pod sister.”

“Superman would,” Jin agreed.

Iris didn’t know what to say. No one had ever really taken her side before, other than Lark herself.

Just then Ms. Shonubi called Iris’s name. There, standing in the doorway, was the ogre.

“Iris,” Mr. Hunt said after she followed him into the hallway, “I wanted to know how your sister was.”

Iris gave him her best haughty look. “She’s . . . recovering.”

“Good. That was . . . I’m very sorry that happened to her. Anyway, I know she won’t be back for a couple of days. I wanted to give you her homework so she doesn’t worry about getting behind. There’s an astronomy project due Thursday, but she knows about that.”

He was acting very nice, a fact Iris tried hard not to acknowledge in any way. “Okay.”

“Is she all right? Lark?”

“I’m sure she’ll be okay. Eventually.”

“I see. Well, please tell her I hope she’s feeling better.” He shifted, looking as uncomfortable as Iris felt. “I . . . ,” he started, scratching his face. Iris waited. “Yes, I hope she’s feeling better.”

He was very nervous, for an ogre.

Now that Lark was with their mom, there was no reason for Iris to go home right after camp, no reason at all for her to stay away from Treasure Hunters and the old books and the small pocket away from time. And the sign, still there.

When she walked in—and there, the smell; and there, the dust in the air; and there, the silence—Mr. George Green was already at the glass counter, hunched over another experiment. This one was a pyramid made out of dowels with a small doughnut-shaped magnet hanging in the middle and long magnets strapped to the base. The hanging magnet was swinging around the pyramid, bouncing around and spinning.

He smiled when he saw her. “Miss Maguire! I was afraid you weren’t going to return!”

“Oh.” Iris could not help but be flattered that he remembered her, though she supposed not many eleven-year-olds came into Treasure Hunters. “I was busy.”

He put his hand to his chest dramatically. “I was afraid it was something I’d done. I’ve been told I am ‘a little strange.’”

“No! I mean, no.”

“Well, I am glad. You must live near here?”

“Sort of. I mean. Yes, but. I go to this . . . camp. At the library after school every day. And I bike home, so—”

“So, you have time on your hands to explore the wonders of antiquing.”

Iris’s eyes popped open. “Yes, that’s exactly it,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing.

“And”—he motioned to the contraption on the counter, a sly smile spreading across his face—“I suppose this is science too?”

“Well, yeah? Those are magnets, right? So it’s just the different polarities making it spin. . . .” The doughnut continued to bounce and spin, and as Iris looked more closely, she realized the whole thing was set upon an antique map of Minneapolis, and the whirling doughnut was moving back and forth over it as if in a frenzy of indecision. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“It is a finding spell,” he said. “Or an attempt at one. As you see, the magic seems to be a little confused. But I will persevere! Or perhaps,” he added with a sly grin, “I should use ‘science.’”

“You might be a little strange,” Iris said. He winked. “Can I look at the books? . . . Just on the one shelf, of course,” she added quickly.

While Mr. George Green turned his attention back to the magnets, Iris settled back into Alice’s book and the world as it was in 1947.

Last time she’d just browsed through the brittle yellowed pages of the book, reading its brittle yellowed facts, but now she went through looking for Alice’s pencil marks.

Really, it didn’t make sense that this was Mr. Green’s Alice. Iris could not tell if he was thirty or sixty, but he didn’t seem 1947 old. But maybe this book was old for Alice, too. Maybe she read it, marveling at the dusty facts, just like Iris was.

Now that Iris was looking more carefully, she realized that this Alice had spent a lot of time with this book, and not just drawing wings on dinosaurs. In the entry for SCIENCE they kept saying man for person and he for they: A scientist is a man who studies science. He records his observations. He does experiments. A psychologist is a man who studies the minds of men. The sociologist studies man’s way of living in groups of men. Alice had circled every man and every he. There were a lot of them.

Some of her notes felt more random. Under BIRDS she’d underlined everything about flying. (It seemed clear what her superpower would be.) Under MUMMY she’d written, It Lives! Next to CAT she’d written, Travels through clocks! Above OPERA she’d scrawled, The Phantom Is Coming for You!

It was the entry for MAGIC that was most curious. Alice had underlined Magic is tricks performed by magicians for entertainment and added several exclamation points. And then in the margins she’d added, Magic has a cost.

Iris took out her journal and wrote this down. And then added some of the other notes:

It Lives!

Travels through clocks!

The Phantom Is Coming for You!

Magic has a cost.

When she went back to the BIRD page to look for any other notes, she noticed that Alice had drawn on top of the existing full-page illustration under the BIRD entry. She’d given some of the birds speech bubbles—the sparrow said cheep and the mallard said quack and the mockingbird said ha-ha. But it was the drawing on the crow that caught her eye—there was something hanging out of its mouth. Iris squinted at it. It looked like . . . a necklace.

Iris carried the book over to Mr. Green. “Was this book Alice’s?”

“How do you—”

She thrust the inscription on the front in front of him. “Is this the same Alice?”

His eyes widened. “How could this be? Where did you find this?”

“On the shelf.”

“This is a mistake. I need to put this back in her room.”

“Her room . . . where?”

“I would not have imagined this was hers. Alice was not interested in—hmm.”

“Who is she?”

“. . . My sister.”

Iris took a step back. “Oh.”

Mr. Green did not look like a mole anymore. His eyes were big and sad and oddly focused, like he was watching a parade of ghosts. “Yes,” he said, taking the book. “She was my sister.”

“Could I—could I ask you a question?” She should not do this, she knew. He clearly did not want to talk about it, and talking about it was poking him in a bruised place. And yet Iris poked. “Here, on the bird page.”

“Yes. Alice had . . . quite an imagination.”

“It’s the crow I’m wondering about. Do you know why she’d draw . . . a necklace hanging out of a crow’s mouth?”

His eyes flickered, hardened as he stared at the page. “Alice had a friendship with crows when she was a girl. They liked to bring her gifts. You are a sensible girl and I know that must sound like odd behavior to you, but crows—”

“Are collectors,” Iris breathed.

He exhaled. “Yes. Alice was enchanted with them. That’s the sort of girl she was.”

“What happened to Alice? Where did she go?”

And there, his eyes filled with ghosts again. “She disappeared,” he said.