Between the lines

Delilah

MY MOTHER IS THE REASON I’M HOOKED ON fairy tales.

After my father left, my mom and I got hooked on Disney movies, the ones adapted from darker, creepier fairy tales. In the Disney version, the Little Mermaid doesn’t commit suicide and become foam-she winds up having a gorgeous wedding on a boat and sails away forever with her prince. The original Cinderella had stepsisters slicing off parts of their feet to try to fit into the glass slipper. My mother and I needed the whitewash that Disney provided. We’d sit with a big bowl of popcorn, wrapped together in a queen-size blanket, and would escape to a place where magic was ours for the taking, where men rescued the people they loved, instead of abandoning them. A place where, no matter how bad things looked at that moment, there would always be a happy ending.

It’s silly, I know, but I sort of imagined my mother as the Disney Cinderella. She cleaned houses all day long and then came home and helped me with my school-work or cooked dinner or did our laundry. When I was younger, every time the doorbell rang and a UPS truck driver or the mailman or the pizza delivery guy was standing on the other side, I’d wonder if this was the prince who’d sweep her off her feet and give her a completely different life.

It never happened.

I don’t think often about my father. He lives in Australia now with his new wife and two twin girls, who look like little princesses, with yellow curls and baby-blue eyes. It’s as if he started his own fairy tale, half a world away, without me in it. Although my mother swears I had nothing to do with my father leaving, I have my doubts. I wonder if I wasn’t smart enough, pretty enough, just… enough to be the daughter he wanted.

Once or twice a year, though, I dream about him. It’s always the same dream, where he’s teaching me to ice-skate. He’s holding on to my outstretched hands, skating backward in front of me so I can balance. You’ve got it, Lila, he says, because that’s what he always called me. He lets go of my hands, and to my surprise, I don’t fall. I just glide forward, one foot in front of the other, as if I’m flying. Look, I cry out, I’m doing it! But when I look up, he’s gone; I’m all by myself in the freezing cold.

When I have this dream, I always wake up shivering, and lonely.

This time, when it happens, I stare at the ceiling for a moment, and then I roll onto my side and pick up the book where I left it last night. I open it to page 43.

“Thank goodness!” Oliver shouts. “Where have you been?”

“Sleeping,” I say.

He looks up, doing a double take when he sees my face. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I seem to be saying that a lot lately.

“Then how come you’re crying?”

Surprised, I touch my cheeks and realize they’re wet. I must have been crying while I was asleep. “I was dreaming about my dad.”

Oliver tilts his head. “What’s he like?”

“I haven’t seen him in five years. He’s someone else now, with a whole new family. A whole new story.” I shake my head. “It’s sort of stupid. The reason your book even appealed to me was that one line in the beginning, about you growing up without a father. But Maurice wasn’t really ever your father, I guess. He’s just another actor.”

“I still know what it feels like,” Oliver says quietly. “To be overlooked. You have no idea how many times I shouted, in my mind, trying to get a Reader to see me for more than just what she needed me to be: some stupid character in a book.”

“Until me,” I say.

He nods. “Yes, Delilah. Until you.” Even my name on his lips sounds softer than it does on anyone else’s. “I do understand you,” Oliver says. “If I didn’t, you never would have heard me.”

“Well, nobody else does. My father ditched me, and now my mother thinks I’m crazy.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because instead of joining the debate club or going out on Friday nights with guys who watch Lord of the Rings marathons and speak Elvish, I spend all my time lost in a book that isn’t age-appropriate for me.”

“Well, I’m not crazy, and I spend all my time lost in a book that isn’t age-appropriate for me…”

I smile at that. “Maybe we can be crazy together.”

“Maybe we can,” Oliver says, grinning widely. “I found another way out.”

My eyes widen. “What are you talking about?” I whisper. “Why didn’t you tell me right away?”

“Because you were crying,” he says, truly surprised. “That mattered more.”

Zach, the vegan lab partner I was recently crushing on, couldn’t even remember to hold the door open for me when we were heading into class. This chivalry thing Oliver’s got going on-I could get used to it.

Oliver reaches beneath his tunic and pulls out a leather-bound book with gold lettering-an exact replica of the one I’m reading. “I found this on Rapscullio’s shelves. The author painted it into the illustration of his lair, along with hundreds of other book titles. You don’t even notice them when you’re paying attention to the story-but they’re there. And they stay there when the book is closed. And look”-he leafs through it so I can see-“it’s exactly the same, isn’t it?”

It seems that way. As Oliver flips the pages, I see Pyro breathing fireballs and Frump trotting through the Enchanted Forest as fairies dance in circles around him. I see a tiny illustration of Oliver too, standing at the helm of Captain Crabbe’s ship as the wind ruffles his hair.

I wonder if that very small fictional prince is, at that moment, wishing for someone to notice him and get him out of his own story.

“It makes perfect sense that I couldn’t paint myself out of this story-because a book isn’t a painting. But you’ve already noticed things that I’ve drawn or written before on the pages-like that chessboard, and the message on the cliff. Perhaps rewriting the story in my copy will rewrite the story in yours as well.”

“I guess it’s worth a try,” I say.

“What’s worth a try?”

My mother’s voice sinks through the blanket I’m hiding beneath. I emerge from under the covers. “Nothing!” I say.

“What’s under there?”

I blush. “Nothing, Mom. Seriously!”

“Delilah,” my mother says, her face settling grimly. “Are you doing drugs?”

“What?” I yelp. “No!”

She rips aside the covers and sees the fairy tale. “Why are you hiding this?”

“I’m not hiding it.”

“You were reading under the covers… even though there’s nobody in your room.”

I shrug. “I guess I just like my privacy.”

“Delilah.” My mother’s hands settle on her hips. “You’re fifteen. You’re way too old to be addicted to a fairy tale.”

I give her a weak smile. “Well… isn’t that better than drugs?”

She shakes her head sadly. “Come down for breakfast when you’re ready,” she murmurs.

“Delilah-” Oliver begins as soon as the door closes behind my mother.

“We’ll figure it all out later,” I promise. I shut the book and bury it inside my backpack, get dressed, and yank my hair into a ponytail. Downstairs, in the kitchen, my mother is cooking eggs. “I’m not really hungry,” I mutter.

“Then maybe you’d like this instead,” she says, and she passes me a plate that has no food on it-just a single young adult novel. “I haven’t read it, but the librarian says it’s all the rage with girls in your grade. Apparently, there’s a werewolf who falls in love with a mermaid. It’s supposed to be the new Twilight.”

I push it away. “Thanks, but I’m not interested.”

My mother sits down across from me. “Delilah, if I suddenly started eating baby food or watching Sesame Street, wouldn’t you think there was something wrong with me?”

“This isn’t Goodnight Moon,” I argue. “It’s… it’s…” But there’s nothing I can say without making things worse.

Her mouth flattens, and the light goes out of her eyes. “I know why you’re obsessed with a fairy tale, honey, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself. But here’s the truth: no matter how much you might wish for it, princes don’t come around every day, and happy endings don’t grow on trees. Take it from me: the sooner you grow up, the less you’ll be disappointed.”

Her words might as well be a slap in the face. She slides the eggs onto a plate and sets them in front of me before leaving the kitchen.

Sunny side up? Yeah, right.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst. So how do you tell an adult that maybe everything wrong in the world stems from the fact that she’s stopped believing the impossible can happen?

I usually say I hate Biology, but it’s possible we just got off on the wrong foot. My teacher, Mrs. Brown, completely lives up to her name: she is addicted to self-tanner and Crest Whitestrips, and spends a lot of time talking about her favorite spots in the Caribbean instead of helping us prepare for the next day’s lab. I think it’s fair to say I’ll be teaching myself about cell division, but I’m totally set if I need to plan a vacation to the Bahamas.

I spent Sunday in my room, plotting Oliver’s escape with him. Sometimes we forgot the task at hand because we went off on a tangent. I told Oliver things I’ve never been brave enough to tell anyone else: how I worry about my mom; how I panic when someone asks me what I want to be when I grow up; how I secretly wonder what it would be like, for an hour, to be popular. In return, Oliver confided his biggest fear: that he will pass through his lifetime-whatever that may be-without making a difference in the world. That he will be ordinary, instead of extraordinary.

I told him that-as far as I was concerned-he’s already been successful at that.

I told him I’d rather die than go to school on Monday and face Allie McAndrews. But here it is, third period, and she’s absent.

Maybe Oliver’s right; wishes can come true.

“Does everyone have a frog?” Mrs. Brown says. I glance down at the poor, dead amphibian in front of me. Usually my lab partner is Zach, but he’s taken a conscientious objector position on this lab, due to his veganism, and instead of doing a dissection he is writing an independent paper on growth hormones in dairy cows.

The door opens, and in walks Allie McAndrews, with two black eyes. She looks like a raccoon, and has a crisscrossed strip of tape over the bridge of her nose too. She hands Mrs. Brown a hall pass. “Sorry I’m late,” she says.

“Better late than never,” the teacher says. “Allie, why don’t you pair up with Delilah?”

Allie shoots me the look of death as she takes the stool beside me. “Touch me,” she whispers, “and I will make your life miserable.”

“Now, class, pick up your frog. I want you to measure the posterior appendages…”

I turn to Allie. “Do you… want to go first?”

She glares at me. “I’d rather join Chess Club.”

I joined Chess Club last year. “Okay, then,” I say. Sorry, buddy, I think as I lift the frog into my palm and pick up a ruler.

Allie’s boyfriend, Ryan, drags his stool toward our lab table, even though he is supposed to be working with someone else. “Hey, gorgeous,” he says, grinning at her. “So what do you say you and I get some takeout and download a movie and not watch it tonight?”

“I’m not in the mood,” she says, glancing at me. “I have to go home and ice.”

“It was an accident,” I tell her. “I didn’t purposely cross five lanes of the pool just to smack you in the face.” Although, I admit, I might have daydreamed about doing just that.

“You’re the only girl in the school who could make two black eyes look hot,” Ryan says.

Allie twines her fingers with his. “You’re just saying that.”

“Cross my heart,” Ryan answers.

“I love you, babe,” Allie says.

Ryan grins. “Love you more.”

I thought there was a good chance I would feel like throwing up during a dissection lab, but I figured it would be because of the frog, not the conversation.

Mrs. Brown winds past our lab table. If she notices that Ryan is now our third partner, she doesn’t comment. “Now, class, I want you to examine the chest area… What skeletal feature is missing?”

I wait for Allie to pick up the frog to examine it. “You, um, want a turn?” I ask her.

“To smack you in the face? Break your knee?”

“Right, then,” I say, poking at the frog again.

“What kind of takeout should I get?” Ryan asks. “Chinese? Indian? Italian?”

“Ribs,” I announce.

They both look at me with disgust. “Who asked you?” Allie says.

“No… the frog. The skeletal part it’s missing… is ribs.”

She tosses her hair. “Who cares?”

“Gently,” Mrs. Brown warns a boy to my right, who is squeezing his amphibian so tightly that its head is swelling. “Dissection is both an art and a science. Show your frog a little love.”

Suddenly, Ryan grabs the frog off our lab table in one hammy fist. “Yeah… show your frog a little love.” He shoves it so close to my face that I can breathe in the scent of chemicals and death. With all my might I push away from him, knocking over the lab stool and causing enough of a commotion that the entire class stops to watch.

“My bad,” Ryan says. “I thought it said it was a prince…”

The class bursts into laughter. I turn seven shades of red.

“That’s enough!” Mrs. Brown says. “Ryan, go to the principal’s office; you and I will be seeing each other at detention this afternoon. Delilah, take the bathroom pass and go clean yourself up.”

As I grab my backpack and stumble out of the classroom, the students are silent. And then, just before I cross the threshold, I hear it: “Ribbit. Ribbit.” It’s one of the kids in the back, and suddenly everyone is snickering and Mrs. Brown is trying (and failing) to get them to quiet down.

The girls’ bathroom is empty. I scrub my hands and face and blot them dry with paper towels. Jules used to be my go-to girl whenever something horrendous happened-the person I could count on to make me feel better. But now I find myself searching through my backpack. Just like after my dream, the only person I really want to talk to right now is Oliver.

I rummage in my backpack, past my Biology textbook and my English binder and my lunch, but the book is missing.

“No,” I mutter, and I pull the textbooks out of the bag. All that’s left now is crumpled paper, nubby pencils, bits of crushed granola bars, and forty-two cents.

The fairy tale-which I had put in my backpack that morning with my own two hands-is gone.

It doesn’t take me long to decide that I’m not going back to Biology class. I’ll just tell Mrs. Brown I was so traumatized I was in desperate need of a guidance counselor. Instead, I hurry to the library, where I find Ms. Winx pasting bar codes into new books. “Ms. Winx,” I ask, “has anyone returned Between the Lines?”

“Aren’t you the one who has it checked out?”

“I’m pretty sure I left it by accident in the cafeteria before homeroom…”

“Well, if anyone turns it in, I’ll let you know.”

As I leave the library, in the pit of my stomach is a stone. What if I can’t find the book? What if it’s gone forever?

What will I do without him?

I’ve never been in love, but I’ve always imagined it-weirdly-like some sort of OxiClean commercial. The TV host shows a scene from an ordinary day, and then takes a big old sponge soaked in love and swipes away the stains. Suddenly that same scene is missing all the mistakes, all the loneliness. The colors are like jewels, ten times richer than they were before. The music is louder and clearer. Love, the host will say, makes life a little brighter.

When I’m talking to Oliver, I feel like there’s nobody in the world but the two of us.

When I’m talking to Oliver, I want to keep talking forever. I want to know how old he was when he learned to ride a horse, and what his favorite color is, and what pops into his mind just before he falls asleep.

When I’m talking to Oliver, I wonder what it would be like if he held my hand.

In spite of what Ryan and my mother think about me and fairy tales-it’s not that I’ve been looking for a prince.

It’s that, without even trying, Oliver makes me feel like a princess.

Seventh period Jules and I have Driver’s Ed, the only class we share this semester. The third kid in our car, Louis Lamotte, who always smells like soup, is at the wheel. Which means that Jules and I are stuck in the back while Mr. Barnaby tries to keep Louis on the right side of the road.

“So are you going to tell me why you’re pissed off at me, or do I have to play Twenty Questions?” Jules says.

“I’m not mad at you!”

“Yeah, right. You don’t answer my texts all weekend, you don’t wait for me after school, and today at lunch when you were totally ignoring me and I told you I had an asteroid growing out of my butt, you said, That’s nice.”

“I’m just a little distracted,” I tell her. “Really, I’m not angry.”

“Girls,” Mr. Barnaby says, “you’re supposed to be observing.”

Jules totally ignores him. “When you accidentally tripped Allie McAndrews last year during the hundred-meter dash at Field Day and she broke her knee, I was the first one to know. You called me up hysterical and told me I had to run off to Mexico with you because you weren’t coming back to school. Today, I found out that you broke Allie’s nose from that kid who chews gum too loud in the library.” She looks at me. “I don’t even know that kid’s name and he knew something about my best friend that I didn’t.”

“Look,” I tell Jules. “I’m not hiding anything from you. And you’re still my best friend. Things at home are just… crazy right now. My mother wants to take me to a shrink.”

Jules shrugs. “Big deal. My parents take me two or three times a year. Just tell them you have deep-seated issues with your father and they’ll say you’re cured.”

“Girls!” Mr. Barnaby says, over his shoulder. “Louis needs to focus.”

“Louis needs a lot of things,” Jules says under her breath. “Starting with a shower.”

I can’t help it; I stifle a laugh. Jules glances at me sideways and bumps shoulders with me. “Don’t shut me out, okay?” And just like that, I’m forgiven.

I felt like I was in a sort of frantic fog, mentally retracing my morning steps to figure out where I could have misplaced the book. By the end of school, it still hasn’t turned up. I shuffle to the curb where cars are lined up to retrieve kids, and find my mother’s van.

“So,” she says as I open the door, “how was your day?”

I shrug. “The same as usual.”

“Oh, really? I thought you might have missed this.” She reaches beside her and pulls out Between the Lines.

“Where did you find that?” I shout, grabbing it out of her hands. I know it will send Oliver and Company into a tizzy, but I open the book quickly and flutter through the pages without reading it. Then I hug it to my chest. “Thank God! I thought I lost it!”

My mother shakes her head. “That’s exactly why we’re going to Dr. Ducharme, Delilah.”

“Now?” I thought at least it would take my mother a few months to get an appointment. And by then, she might have totally forgotten about the psychiatrist, and we could just not show up.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. He’s only going to chat with you for a little while. Help you get in touch with what’s making you sad.”

Angry tears spring to my eyes. I’m not sad; I’m tired of being told by someone else what I’m allegedly feeling. “You’re one to talk,” I say. “You’re taking me to a psychiatrist when you haven’t opened up for five years! I guess it’s perfectly normal to just work yourself to the bone, because then you don’t have time to realize how depressing your life is!”

My mother reels back as if I’ve slapped her. “You have no idea what my life has been like, Delilah. I had a daughter to raise on my own, with no income. I can barely cover the payments on my mortgage. Somehow, I have to find the money to send you to college. Someone has to be the grown-up here, and that means knowing the difference between what’s real and what’s make-believe.”

“I know the difference between reality and make-believe!” I cry out. But even as I’m saying it, I wonder if that’s a lie. If it makes a difference, when you keep wishing they were one and the same.