Some evangelical groups are claiming that the events in Bedford, Maine-the site of all those missing boys and the site of the school bus attack-are a sign of an upcoming apocalypse. Some teens have even made T-shirts saying BEDFORD, MAINE: THE END OF THE WORLD STARTS HERE. -CARL F LECK REPORT ON FNN NIGHTLY WORLD NEWS
There are certain signs that your town is totally messed up:
1. Snow that lasts forever.
2. Evil pixies torturing and/or maiming people.
3. You are a regular nightly segment on cable news networks.
4. FBI agents patrol the streets.
5. Half the school population has to stay home because
their parents are too freaked to let them out of the house.
Issie, Devyn, Cassidy, and I have discussed this all day, hunkered down in the Maine Grind, our town’s one coffee shop. While we were there, Cassidy figured out the old anagram A BAA EBBED FLY TIGHT VIGOR TROLLS, which we found in one of my dad’s old Lovecraft books. It means, GET TO VALHALLA BY BIFORST BRIDGE. The BiForst Bridge is mentioned on a lot of the Web sites Devyn found. It’s a rainbow bridge, which we thought had to be too hokey to be real, but I guess not.
“So we have to find a rainbow we can step on?” Issie asked, only half kidding. “Do we have to find a leprechaun too?”
As the sun sets, we head out to patrol, minus Cassidy, who has a French test tomorrow. Pixies are stronger at night. Their senses and powers heighten, and they usually use the cover of darkness to attack. Ever since Frank came to town and my father ran away, they’ve been attacking a lot, to gain strength and control. They themselves are out of control.
We park the car in the back lot of a big-box store. Issie turns around and says, “You’re looking for him, aren’t you?”
I unbuckle my seat belt and lean forward. “Nick?”
“No, not Nick. The pixie king who killed him. Frank.” She shudders saying his name.
“I am.”
But we do not find him or any bad pixies tonight, and when we finally get home, Betty acts like some specially trained government interrogator. Issie sends me a text saying she is grounded because of all the violence and abductions. She has to go home right after school every day now. Her mother flipped, I guess.
That is sooo horrible, I text.
*SOB*, she responds. She is carrying round a pizza cutter 4 protection she’s so freaked. She wants me to carry a steak knife.
At least Betty doesn’t try to ground me. I basically spend the night finishing my ridiculously awful homework and worrying about what would happen if Astley was gone, since I don’t really feel like I’m destined to be some ruling pixie queen. Eventually I give up and write Urgent Action letters about the abuse of priests in Myanmar. Then I surf the Net looking for clues about Astley’s mom or Valhalla, pretty much anything. I fail again and again.
There’s a picture of Nick and me taped to my mirror. We got it at a picture-taking machine at the movie place in Bangor. We’re both sticking out our tongues. He’s pretending to lick me. It’s all I can do to not get all drama queen and kiss it and murmur that I’m trying to get him back, that I refuse to give up.
I don’t see Astley until Monday, when he shows up at the door of my Spanish class and nods at me. Even through the glass, I can tell that he’s pale and almost sweating. He’s holding a piece of gauze to his head. My heart bumps around in my chest, worried and scared all at once.
Paul hits my chair and whispers, “Do you know him?”
“Yeah,” I whisper back.
“It looks like he’s been in a fight.”
I raise my hand for the Spanish teacher. “May I go to the restroom, please?”
She raises one dark eyebrow. “ ¿En español ?”
You’d think with all the craziness around here that teachers would give us a little slack, but no. It’s like they think by being hardasses they are helping us somehow. In freaking Spanish. Grrr. If pixies were attacking, would she expect me to yell “Run!” in Spanish?
“ ¿Puedo utilizar el baño, por favor? ” I ask.
She nods yes, and I scoot my chair back and fly out the door.
“Whew. She must have to go. Maybe she’s pregnant,” Brittney says like she’s a character in some mean-girl movie.
“ ¿En español? ”
I shut the door gently behind me before I can hear Brittney’s response. If she can say that in Spanish, she has way more brain cells than I do.
“In Norwegian that would be ‘ Hun må dra. Kanskje er hun gravid.’ ” Astley attempts to smile.
I can’t help teasing him. “Which? Asking to go to the bathroom or dissing me because I’m pregnant.”
“You are with child?” His eyes open wide, all mock terrified.
“No! Shut up. You know I’m not.” I punch him in the arm and then lead him into the stairwell, shutting the door behind us. “Okay. Seriously, Astley, what happened to you? Why is your head bleeding?”
The long light tube hanging slightly from the drop ceiling begins to flicker. It makes a tiny hissing noise that human ears wouldn’t be able to hear. The light will fizzle out completely soon if the janitor doesn’t fix it.
“Sometimes,” Astley says, his voice a sad, tired stretch into the air, “I get a little tired of being Mr. Perfect, you know?”
A vein in his temple pulses so hard I can see it. He leans against the wall.
“And that’s what made your head bleed?” I lift the gauze away from his face to check out the wound. He doesn’t pay any attention. Doesn’t even flinch.
He continues talking. “Do you know how hard it is to be king? To always have to try to be good, to be perfect? Do you have any idea how hard it is to help you go after your stupid idiot of a were, all the time thinking you should just be satisfied with me, because that is how it is supposed to-”
“Astley, I- ‘Stupid idiot’ is not-”
He raises a hand up to silence me and I press my lips hard together, because what can I say, really? What can I say that won’t hurt him more than he already hurts? I may not have anything to do with the cut on his head, but he hurts inside because of me. He’s even being mean about Nick because of me.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Do not say that.” His voice cracks and his eyes flash with embarrassment. His arms cross in front of his chest and he looks down at the floor-Astley never looks down-and scuffs a shoe across the linoleum. The light fizzles again. The hum of it breaking gets a couple decibels louder.
I grab his face in my hands. Stubble grazes my palms. “But I am so sorry. I am sorry you hurt and that you think you have to be perfect, and I’m sorry I freaked out at the cemetery… I’ll try harder.”
I close my eyes.
“I know you will.” He makes a muffled noise and I open my eyes again. His eyes burn blue, cold like a winter sky when it isn’t snowing. They seem endless. “I have no doubts about you, Zara.”
Swallowing hard, I steady myself and recover. “Are you going to tell me what happened to your forehead?”
“I had a fight.”
“With who?”
“Amelie.”
“Amelie! That’s ridiculous. She would never fight with you.”
“She would and she did.”
Stepping back from him, I ask, “Why?”
He grasps my wrist. The radiator pops to life. The bell is going to ring soon.
“I want you to come with me,” he says, abruptly changing the topic.
“Where? I have to go back to Spanish before the bell rings.” I think I have maybe three minutes left.
“Iceland.”
“Iceland?” My voice squeaks. I try to maintain my composure. “You want to go to Iceland? In the winter? In the middle of all this pixie craziness? We can’t do that. We have to keep people safe. We can’t just up and leave and go to freaking Iceland.”
He sighs. “You sound like Amelie. Only she never says the word ‘freaking.’ ”
His voice is so heartbroken that my anger and shock sort of dissipate. His fingers still hold my wrist, surrounding it with his.
“You feel like none of us have faith in you anymore, is that it?” I guess. “Like you’re losing control?”
“Exactly.” He puts a hand on my back, then gently steers me toward the door leading to the hall heading to class, away from him.
I stop walking, think about how behind with my work I already am, how I haven’t had an Amnesty meeting in ages, how I’ve already missed so many indoor track practices… But I half turn to face him and say, “I have faith in you, Astley, and I’ll go with you to Iceland. When do we go?”
“Would you like to know why?”
I bite my lip and wait for the reason. A tiny spark of hope expands in my heart as he smiles.
“I have a lead,” he says. He lifts his hands up when he says it, all excited. “Vander found some evidence that points to the BiForst Bridge being in Iceland.”
I digest that, then ask, “Seriously?”
“Seriously. Asgard is where it is located, and we have a tip that the way to get there involves a geyser in Iceland. It is an amazing lead.” He bounces on the tips of his toes and his smile reaches his eyes. “We are one step closer, Zara. I told you we would find your wolf.”
I launch myself into his arms squeeing. He laughs and swings me around in a circle, my feet lightly bumping the walls. The bell rings. I need to get back to class to get my books. I need to go home and get my passport. I need to tell Issie and Dev and Betty, although she will probably flip. But all I can do right now is hug Astley and say the same thing over and over again: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!”
It’s not till lunch that I get the chance to tell Dev, Issie, and Cassidy.
“Okay, okay! This is totally exciting,” Issie says. We’re sitting in the library instead of eating lunch, googling “Valhalla” and “Iceland” and “geyser.” “But what if he just wants to whisk you away out of the country for a romantic rendezvous?”
“It’s not like that.” I rock back in my chair and stamp my feet on the floor. This is so awesome. “He doesn’t like me that way.”
She just points a finger at me, which in Issie speak means, “I am so totally right, you idiot, but I am too nice to argue with you.”
I really don’t think she is. Right, I mean-I know she’s nice. She even promises to bring a note to my track coach for me and collect all my schoolwork. Again. And Cassidy volunteers to run the Amnesty meeting that is supposed to be tomorrow. I have the best friends. Ever.
Even Devyn is excited. He points to the computer screen. “Look at this! There are links to Valhalla and Iceland. How amazing is that? I’m so embarrassed we never found it.”
Is jumps up, stands behind Dev, and kisses the top of his head. “You can’t be perfect all the time, Mr. Man. It’s okay.”
He scrolls down the page. His eyes are lit up because he’s so pumped. Cassidy yanks in her breath and points at a picture of a giant wolf. “What’s that?”
“Fenrir,” Devyn says. “It’s part of the mythology. He’s chained by the gods, but when he gets free, it’s supposed to portend the coming of the apocalypse, basically, an all-out war between good and evil.”
“Lovely,” Cassidy says. “Can you scroll down more so I don’t have to look at it?”
Farther down we see a picture of the BiForst rainbow bridge.
“Much better.” Cassidy sighs and stretches her hands out to me to grab. “Can you believe you’re going to get Nick?”
“I can,” I say, smiling. “I really can.”
At home I gather up my suitcase and passport, and then I call Betty at work. She does not react well. She’s all, “You are trusting him!” Enough said.
The Bangor airport is small, with only two main gates plus an extra one off to one side for international passengers. Because its runway is so long and because of where Maine is located, this is where planes land if they are having trouble (drunk passengers biting flight attendants, engine issues) before or after they head across the Atlantic. It’s also where U.S. military planes land to gas up on their way to Afghanistan or Kuwait or wherever the country is fighting. There are troops here right now, lounging around in camouflage, talking on cell phones to people at home. In the gift shop, one soldier is telling a younger one to buy lighters. “It’s like gold over there,” he says. The younger soldier snatches up about twenty of them, thanking him. It’s heartbreaking, really, how young some of them are. We’re at war too, I guess, and I guess we’re young, but I don’t actually feel young as Astley and I make it through airport screening, smile at the TSA agents, and then hunker down in vinyl chairs right across from the gate agents’ desk.
I stare up at the giant number 2 at our gate. An airplane rolls down the runway toward Gate 1. A few people mill about. I breathe in the smell of people and metal and forced air. “I can’t believe we’re in an airport,” I say.
Astley runs a hand through his thick hair and pulls his laptop out of his dark leather backpack. “Most other pixies can’t fly on planes, you know. They can’t handle the iron.”
“Why don’t you share the magic iron pills then? Wouldn’t that be a good thing to do?”
He rubs the skin behind his ear and explains, “It gives our people an advantage.”
Our people. He calls them “our people,” but to me, my people are in Bedford, fighting, being threatened. The guilt drives me against the dark blue vinyl seat. I tuck my legs up under me, push my thumbs against the top of my eyes.
“Do you have a pain?” Astley asks me. His voice is right at my ear, worried, deeper than normal.
“I think my feet smell. My feet never smell except when I go on airplanes. Why is that?”
His hand goes against my forehead. “Are you ill? You are not making sense.”
I open my eyes, look at him. He’s worried and scruffy looking under the fluorescent airport terminal lights. “I’m fine,” I respond.
He lifts an eyebrow.
“Okay… I’m feeling super excited but kind of guilty about leaving,” I admit, rubbing at my forehead.
“Zara, I could travel myself. Are you sure you want to come?”
In front of me a little girl in white leggings with major visible panty lines and dark brown boots twirls around in a circle as her baseball-hat-wearing dad talks to the ticket agent. She pulls on her hair.
“Yep.” I watch the girl tug on her long brown hair, studying the strands as if she can’t believe they belong to her head. “Tell me when we’ll hear from your pixie friend again?”
“He said he would call me again once we arrived.”
The little girl crouches down, balancing on the tips of her feet. She manages this a moment before giving up and plopping on the carpet, dingy alternating squares of bluish gray.
“I’m so nervous,” I announce.
All of a sudden, for no reason at all, the little girl’s face scrunches up and she starts crying sad toddler cries, just giving in to the sorrow. Her voice is deep and pained. Her dad doesn’t even turn around. My stepdad would have scooped me up in his arms. My pixie father? Who knows…
“Sometimes I almost wonder if humans are worth saving,” Astley murmurs.
“Pixies are just as bad,” I say.
“True. Do not listen to me. I am just tired.”
I swallow hard. “Do you think we have the capacity for good?”
“Pixies or living creatures in general?”
“Both.”
“I have to believe that.”
“Why?”
Before he can answer, the gate attendant leans toward the microphone and says, “We are now boarding Priority Pass passengers for Flight 5781 to Iceland. Again, only Priority Pass passengers.”
“That is us.” Astley stretches his arms over his head.
“Really?” I’ve never flown first class before, and as much as I think this is materialistic of me, I am kind of psyched.
“Really. We are royalty after all.” Astley rolls his eyes before I can get all upset. He stands up, offering me his hand, which is solid and clean. I take it and we stand there for a minute, just staring at each other, and then he slowly lets go of my hand. One finger, then another. “I shall tell you why I believe this on the plane, and perhaps it will help you feel more comfortable about your own change, all right?”
I nod. “All right.”
Stretching and gathering my carry-on, I watch the people mill about. The flight attendant has dandruff. Flakes fall as she scratches her hair. The little girl stops crying, her dad never seeming to notice. A woman with super-huge noise-reduction headphones reads a Glamour magazine. A man in a tie wearing a wedding band holds a John Grisham novel in one hand. They are all so innocent, so unaware that they are sitting here with pixies. They have no idea that the entire world could change if we fail. And I am glad that they don’t, since sometimes not knowing is so much safer, so much saner.
The woman puts down her magazine. I lean forward and ask, “Are you done with that? Would you mind if I read it on the plane?”
For a second she looks shocked, but then she says, “Of course not. It’s good and mindless.”
“That is exactly what I need,” I say, taking it from the seat. “Thank you.”
Astley and I sit next to each other. After we’re buckled, I start to pull the armrest down, but he stops me. “There’s a lot of metal in that.”
“But we took the pills.”
“It would be better to leave it up.” His voice holds an apology in it. It’s not an order; it’s a suggestion, so I nudge the armrest back up between the seats with my elbow.
“Better?”
“Much.” He smiles and hands me a little white airplane pillow and a deep blue blanket. “Thank you.”
People keep boarding, pushing their carry-ons in front of them or pulling them behind. A woman cradles a baby close to her body. A man expels some gas. Astley looks at me and presses his lips together, trying not to laugh. I cover my nose and mouth with my hand.
“There are a lot of people in a plane,” I whisper, “and a lot of smells.”
I touch the wall by my right. It’s plastic and it seems plain beige at first glance, but there are actually tiny little swirling circles on it. I wonder if I would have noticed that if I were still human. I wonder if everything is like that: if things just seem shallow and pale, but then if you stare closer, you can see the hidden aspects. Astley leans back in his chair, stretches his legs underneath the seat in front of him. His hair is darkish blond, but if you look closely there are red strands mixed in. They flash in the sun, the shades running from copper to strawberry blond. Looking away, I run my finger along the ridge by the oblong window. Some airport workers in orange vests and jumpsuits drive food trucks and scurry around. I wonder what they look like beneath their surfaces, what sort of lives they lead, if they have swirling circles in them as well.
Once everyone boards, the flight attendant checks that the cabin is ready for departure. She demonstrates how to buckle a seat belt (I can’t believe people don’t know how to do that), shows how our seat cushions are floatation devices, and explains how to use the oxygen masks if there is a sudden drop in cabin pressure. As she talks, Astley grows paler and paler. We taxi down the runway and he just keeps swallowing way more than a normal person would.
“Are you okay?”
“I am afraid of flying,” he admits, fidgeting in his seat. He keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs like a little antsy kid.
“Um, you do know you fly all the time.”
“But that is without the airplane.”
“Oh, flying on a plane is a totally normal fear. That’s called aerophobia, aviatophobia, aviophobia, or pteromechanophobia.”
He laughs. “What is one supposed to do when faced with aerophobia, aviatophobia, aviophobia, or pteromechanophobia?”
“Do not mock my excessive knowledge of phobias,” I kid and punch him in the arm. “I always think it’s good to name your fear, face it head-on, and you’re doing that. I mean, you’re in a plane-that’s facing your fear.”
His lips press together. I can literally see the tension running off him, like blasts of orange swirls. After a moment he says, “That does not make me feel better.”
“Give me your hand,” I say as we start taxiing, building up speed. He doesn’t ask why. He just gives it to me. It’s large and sweaty and clammy. I slide my fingers between his, clamp my other hand over it, and squeeze tightly. “Sometimes, when you are scared, it just helps knowing that someone else is here.”
The plane tilts upward as the nose pokes toward the sky and the front wheels leave the ground.
“You are right,” he says, his voice deep and serious. “It does.”
It isn’t until we’re safely cruising at the highest altitude that he stops shaking. I pretend like I haven’t noticed a thing and resist the urge to wipe the sweat off my hands when he finally lets go.
Once the flight attendant has poured us both some cranapple juice and given us our packets of cookies, Astley clears his throat and starts to tell me the story. I know right away that it’s the story he mentioned at the airport because his already formal voice gets even more regulated, more regal somehow.
“When I was twelve years of age, my father died. Someday, perhaps, you will tell me how your father died, if you like,” he begins. I guess until he says it like this I’ve never realized that we both have fathers who died. “But for now I will tell you my story.”
They’d taken a cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2, across the Atlantic to Spain, which seems romantic to me. Astley had been excited about the trip, about being able to hang out with his father for a while, without his mother.
“She was not…” He stumbles to find the right words, which is something he rarely does. “She was not like she is now. She loved my father deeply. She loved him more than anything else, more than clocks or jewels or me or herself.”
The trip had gone well. Neither became seasick. Nobody got on anyone’s nerves. Then they arrived in Spain and made their way overland to Madrid.
“We were in a train station. It was incredibly crowded. The earth seemed to shake. I was excited because I thought that was just the train coming closer. However, it was much more than that. My father cursed and took me by the arm, just above the elbow.” He touched his elbow as if remembering. His voice grew softer. “When I looked at him I realized that something was horribly wrong.
“The rumbling grew louder and it brought the smell of fire, burning bodies.
“Only a few moments before it reached us, people started screaming, running madly away from the tunnel and back up toward the stairs,” he said.
I remember seeing something about this on CNN. There were bombings, a terrorist attack. Almost two hundred people died.
“We were stuck in this massive wave of humanity. The heat coming from the tunnel was immense, and then came the cloud of fire. ‘Cloud’ is not the correct word truly. It was a massive rolling beast.”
Everything inside of me tightens up and I grab Astley’s hand again. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Couldn’t he fly?” I ask.
“No. He was one of the few kings who could not. He never taught me, which is probably part of the reason why I utterly fail at landing, but I digress.” He hauls in a huge breath as a starchy man in a suit unbuckles and heads to the restroom. “He saw what was coming and he grabbed me by the other arm; then he lifted me above his head and threw me. Instead of saving himself, he threw me, Zara. He threw me all the way up the stairs.”
His voice breaks with emotion, raw and jagged, an ache so huge and real that I cannot believe he is sharing it with me. I think about Nick and how he’s never trusted me enough to tell me about his parents.
“Is it hard to tell me this?” I ask.
“Quite.”
I wait. “Then why are you telling me? I don’t mean that meanly. I just-I just want to know why you are if it hurts you to do it, you know? I’m not making sense, am I?”
“You are. You usually make sense, Zara. Honestly. I am telling you because you are my queen and I count you as my friend and because you deserve to know.” He takes a sip of his cranapple juice. I wonder what I haven’t told Astley, what he should know about me, what I haven’t told Nick. Astley’s hand shakes and he finishes his story. He had landed on a sea of people, knocked his head a bit, and passed out. When he woke up, he was in a Spanish hospital; Bentley, their butler, was hovering over him, his mother had gone mad with grief, and his father was just gone.
“He saved me, Zara.”
I nod and grip his hand tighter. He squeezes back and then lets go. He uses that same hand to tuck my hair behind my ear as he says, “He saved me. He had an instant to choose my life or his and he chose mine to save. That’s how I know that pixies can be good. I have seen it with my own eyes. I know what my father was. He was good. And that’s what I want to be, what I want my people to be.”
I pull my lips in toward my mouth. Tears threaten. “You are,” I say, and I believe it without a doubt. “You are good, Astley.”
He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. “I hope so.”
Astley suddenly sits up all intense. “Do you smell that?”
“What?”
“Pixie. A powerful pixie.”
I focus. “Maybe. There’s that Dove soap smell. I just thought it was the restroom and you.”
“Lovely.” He unbuckles his seat belt. The flight attendant scoots right over. “Sir, I need you to sit down.”
He stares at her like she’s asked him to eat a truckful of Twinkies. His frustration slams into me like a fist. It’s not intentional. I just feel it.
“The captain has turned the seat belt sign back on,” she insists.
We hit some turbulence just as she says, “Sir, I must-”
“He has diarrhea!” I interrupt.
Astley gasps and his whole face and even the tips of his ears redden. I feel a little bad about it, but it’s so going to work and, seriously, it was the only thing I could think of.
“Oh!” She is at a loss for a second and staggers back a step as Astley rushes past her toward the bathroom. I don’t know how he’ll sneak out of there to check out the plane, but it was the best I could do on the spot. The flight attendant and I make eyes at each other.
“He’s horribly embarrassed about it,” I whisper. “He had bratwurst. Or maybe it was the baked beans. Either way you might want to get some deodorizing air spray.”
Ten minutes later Astley appears beside me again.
“Were you in the bathroom this whole time?” I ask, fiddling with my anklet.
He rolls his eyes and tells me he used a glamour to hide himself. He walked up and down the aisle but couldn’t locate the source of the smell.
“I don’t like that,” I say as he clicks the seat belt back in place.
He is still. His whole body is tense, as if waiting for an attack. After a moment he says, “Neither do I.”
“Did you recognize it? Who did it smell like?”
“Your father.”