Chapter Twenty-Five

The Compliment Box

At school the next day, Iris could not stop thinking about Alice. About the sensitive sixteen-year-old girl who had grown less and less—what was the word he’d used?—tethered. About the crows around her.

What was it with the crows? What did they see in girls like Alice? In girls like Lark?

Of course, it could be a coincidence. It could be that the girls were both animal lovers, and prone to shiny things themselves.

Anything more would have to be magic.

And there was no such thing.

Lark was the girl who defeated the monsters—the Pied Piper, the ogre, the vampires, the trolls. She was the one who taught Iris how to be safe. So what was Iris supposed to do when Lark invited them in?

Lark would be back in school tomorrow, and Iris did not know how she was going to do it. For Lark, if you threw up in class, the only proper course of action would be to transfer schools, and possibly states.

If this were a Disney movie, Iris and Lark would switch places now—Lark would happily enjoy Iris’s pod and get into arguments about superheroes and anxiety disorders while Iris stared down the snickering masses in Mr. Hunt’s class while demolishing them in math drills. But in her heart of hearts Iris still could not believe that people couldn’t tell them apart: they were identical, but not the same. They’d get caught. She didn’t know what the punishment was for identical-twin-related fraud, but it was probably pretty dire.

And life was not a Disney movie.

What life was, though, Iris no longer felt sure.

It Lives!

Travels through clocks!

The Phantom Is Coming for You!

Magic has a cost.

It was this last one that stuck in her brain. The Child’s Guide to Our World was clearly not interested in magic in the same way that Alice was: it spoke of magicians pulling rabbits out of hats and picking a card, any card. There was no cost to those kinds of tricks, except perhaps to the rabbit.

“Do you guys know what it means to say magic has a cost?” Iris asked her pod during lunch. It seemed like the sort of thing they would know.

“Oh, yes,” Mira nods. “It’s true for psychic powers, too. Whenever my aunt does a reading on a cat, she gets a headache.”

“True,” said Jin. “In lots of stories you can’t just do magic. You have to give something up or else it takes something from you. Like Mira’s aunt gets sick. Or maybe you need to give up some blood or something.”

“Not in Harry Potter,” Oliver said. “You can just do spells.”

“Yeah, but it does have a cost,” Jin said. “There are dark wizards and stuff. There’s no cost to do spells, but, like, there’s a big cost to magic existing. There’s a Dark Lord and Death Eaters and this whole war, and most of the good guys die.”

Oliver regarded Jin for a moment and then began to nod slowly and gravely.

“Not everything’s in your dictionary, Oliver,” Mira said.

“Well, I’m going to write that in, and then it will be,” Oliver said.

Iris stared at the page in her notebook: Magic has a cost. What did Alice mean? Was it the crows—a cost to them giving her gifts? Or something else? Was that why she’d disappeared?

Magic has a cost. There was magic to Lark, and it made it hard for her to live in a world of owl pellets and Tommy Whedons and math drills.

And there was magic to their sisterhood. There was. She’d always known it, on some level, but now it was clear that no one else understood what they had. It was rare and special. And now everyone was trying to take it away.

And that was the cost.

But she wasn’t going to let them. She was going to hold on, with everything she had.

She was going to fight back.

First, she needed to know more. About Alice, about just what Mr. George Green was not saying. There was something behind his words, something he was keeping from her.

But, before she could go to Treasure Hunters again, there was Camp Awesome to endure.

Every day when she walked in, Iris felt a little worse than the day before; by the end of the semester she was going to be oozing into the room like a pile of insecure goo.

Yesterday Abigail had had them decorate shoeboxes for what she termed SECRET REASONS, and today the shoeboxes were lined up on the table at the side of the room, each one labeled with the name of the girl who had made it.

Iris had done her best. She’d taken paper and colored markers and written out things she knew to be true and pasted them on the box. Grover Cleveland was the only president to get married in the White House. The collective noun for ducks is a paddling. There’s no word that rhymes with orange. It was something, anyway.

There was a stack of brightly colored note cards in front of each girl’s place. Gabrielle immediately started separating hers out by color, and Hannah spread hers out into a rainbow. Iris just stared at hers, feeling like Lark in a math drill.

“Now that you girls have really gotten to know each other,” Abigail said, “I think you will all agree that each girl in here is awesome in her own way.”

A couple of the girls giggled, and Abigail took that as affirmation. Iris just flushed.

“So take some note cards and write the name of each girl on top of one. And then write down a compliment for the girl. Tell her what makes her awesome. When you’re done, you’ll slide them into the boxes. You’ll all take home your boxes tonight, and whenever you need a reminder about how awesome you are, you’ll have it.”

Abigail beamed like the sun.

Iris sank in her seat. This was going to be a disaster. She’d barely said a word at camp besides “I don’t know” and “I couldn’t think of anything.” What were the girls going to say about her?

Iris, you are awesome because you sure don’t know much.

Iris, you are awesome because you can’t think of anything.

This wasn’t her. She knew that. She’d never been this way before; it was like she was playing this role here and she couldn’t get out of it. Whatever the other girls put in her box, it wouldn’t be about her; it would be about this other-Iris, the one who possessed her when she crossed the threshold of the community-room door.

As for her own compliments for the other girls, she had no idea what to say. She’d been observing them all as if behind glass this whole time.

While the other girls worked on their note cards, Iris got out her journal for inspiration and flipped to the chart she’d kept about them. Would anyone notice if she used the adjectives the girls used about themselves? Novalie, you are nice. Amma, you are amazing.

“What are you doing?” Hannah asked.

“Uh—just checking something . . .”

Hannah’s eyes flicked over the journal page where Iris had been keeping her chart. “You’ve been writing down everything we say?”

“I guess?” Though it was rather obviously true. This was the thing that other-Iris said. “I guess.” She never guessed. That was the point of trying to know things—so you didn’t have to guess.

“Why?”

“I just—” Why? What was she supposed to say? She had no good reason at all. Because she couldn’t decorate her journal. Because she didn’t even know what kind of superpowers she wanted. Because she liked the other girls. Because she didn’t know what to say to them. So instead she wrote things down.

Something like that, she guessed.

Hannah peered at Iris through her glasses. “Are you some kind of spy or something?”

“What? No.”

“Like from Camp Not-Awesome or something?”

“No.”

“That stuff is private.”

“I’m not going to show anyone!”

A couple of the other girls looked up at them, and then back down at their cards.

“But—it’s still private. How would you like it if I wrote everything you said down?”

She probably wouldn’t. She knew she wouldn’t. But then, she never said anything.

“I just . . . I want to keep track. So I know who you are.”

“But that’s not who I am. That’s just . . . stuff. You could know who I am by, like, talking to me? But you don’t want to talk to anyone, do you? You’re too good for that.”

Words choked up into Iris’s throat. Hannah’s usually bright, open face was twisted in—was that anger? And it looked all wrong, like getting glared at by a daisy.

Iris closed her journal. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Hannah narrowed her eyes, as if she doubted it, she doubted it very much, and turned away.

Iris stared at her cards, cheeks burning.

Around her, the other girls were starting to get up and slip their cards in the boxes. Hannah stacked hers and banged the edge of the pack on the table, perhaps a little more firmly than was strictly necessary, and then got up haughtily and went to the boxes.

Iris watched as Hannah slipped a card into her box. Maybe it would say, Iris, you are a spy, or Iris, you are creepy, or Iris, you should go to Camp Not-Awesome.

This was not going to end well.

The other girls were sitting back down and talking and laughing together as Abigail grinned like a mad scientist whose preposterous experiment had suddenly come to life.

Iris’s own cards were half blank, and so she scrawled messages—Amma, I think it’s awesome you know how to fence; Morgan, you know lots of interesting books; Hannah, the monsters on your notebook are so cool—all these girls who were so good at things, who had stuff to say, who were not creepy at all.

Now the girls were circling up, and starting a sound-and-motion exercise, and Iris hurriedly slipped her alleged compliments into the array of boxes, when there was a knock on the door. And another. Everyone else was too absorbed to hear it, but it didn’t matter, because whoever was knocking just opened the door anyway.

A tall overly-polished-looking man in a business suit stood in the doorway, surveying the group. “Is there someone in charge here?”

Abigail turned around. “This is a private class. Is there something I can help you with?”

“I’m afraid the noise from your group is making it difficult to concentrate. Could you ask your girls to keep it down? They’re making quite a ruckus.”

The girls all stopped and stared at him. Iris sank into the shadows.

“We were not making any kind of ruckus,” Abigail said.

“There’s no need to be rude. I’m just asking that you control your girls here. And if it continues, I’ll have to talk to the library board.”

Abigail drew herself up. “My girls can take care of themselves. Feel free to talk to whomever you like, and in the meantime, I ask you not to violate our space again.”

From her corner, Iris was impressed. Abigail had lost her bounce and her bubbles. Suddenly she was tall and firm and still, a warrior at the gates. Do not mess with my girls. This, Iris understood. This was the sort of awesomeness she could get behind.

After the man left, stalking out like he was heading straight for his man meeting, Abigail whirled around and faced the group.

“Girls, listen. There are people in this world who will tell you you need to dim your flame. That it’s better to be nice all the time, and you should be ashamed for making noise. But you don’t have to listen to them. You have a right to be loud! Do you hear me?”

The girls mumbled assent.

She put her hand to her ear theatrically and repeated, “Do you hear me?”

“Yeah!” the girls shouted.

“Do you hear me?”

“Yeah!” they all yelled at the top of their lungs.

“Now,” she said, grinning, “let’s make some noise.”

Abigail waved Iris over and led the girls in some kind of collective stomping exercise, and Iris tried to stomp along with them.

Once upon a time, she was a girl who knew how to stomp. If Lark had been there, Iris would have had no trouble stomping; she could have made enough noise for her and Lark both. If Lark had been there, Iris would have stomped up to Abigail and said that some people were not stompers and that did not make them less awesome.

But now she was not stomping, not really. It was like her legs didn’t know how to do that. Maybe soon she’d stop being able to talk, or clap her hands, or make any noise at all. Maybe soon she’d just fade away.