Alistair and Fiona walked along the slush-covered road away from Thessaly’s library. Fiona had just shown Alistair a newspaper story about Chua Ling. It frightened him, but not only because it was about a girl who was missing. It was because Chua was a girl who lived all the way across the country, and yet Fiona said she used to see her all the time. In Aquavania, of course.
Fiona blamed the Riverman for Chua’s disappearance, but Alistair didn’t believe in the Riverman. Not then, at least. What he believed in then was the tangible, the real. Maybe someone was out there stealing children, but it couldn’t possibly be a monster from another land. If anything, it was someone Fiona knew.
Alistair and Fiona walked in silence, passing a gas station with a convenience store lit by fluorescent lights. A man sat on a parked motorcycle near the gas pumps and sipped a fountain drink through a straw. As they passed him, the man tossed the cup to the ground, the plastic top popped off, and red liquid spilled over the pavement and mixed with the gravel and mush.
Fiona snorted her disapproval, but she was too far from the man for him to hear. “My sister, Maria, dated a guy who rode a motorcycle once,” she told Alistair. “He smelled like oil.”
“My sister, Keri, doesn’t date anyone,” Alistair replied.
“That’s because she’s in eighth grade,” Fiona said. It was a somewhat valid point, but there were plenty of people who were dating in middle school. Sixth graders, seventh graders. Even a few fifth graders.
“Maybe it’s that she doesn’t have a crush on anyone,” Alistair said.
“Maybe,” Fiona said. “You know, choosing a guy is more than choosing a guy. At least that’s what Maria tells me. She says it’s opening an interesting-looking door. It’s buying a ticket somewhere that promises sun and thunderstorms and food you’ve never tried. But you never really know where that place is.”
Alistair wanted to say Isn’t that true of most choices? but he remained quiet. He kept walking. They weren’t dating, at least not technically. But still.
Fiona had chosen him.