Between the lines

Delilah

OKAY, FIRST OF ALL, THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.

My mother is right. I need more sleep. It’s bad enough that I’m talking to a book, much less entertaining the thought of how to get a character out of it.

“I don’t think it works that way,” I say. “It’s not like springing someone out of jail-”

“I’m hardly a felon!”

“No, you’re a two-dimensional, inch-high illustration,” I point out. “If you were to get out, what would you do? Live in a shoe box? Be Flat Stanley?”

“Who’s Flat Stanley?”

“Another fictional character,” I say. I have a sudden flash of second grade, when my teacher had us take our cutouts of Flat Stanley all around the world during spring break. My mother and I took pictures of him in Boston, eating clam chowder and waving at the seals in the aquarium.

So maybe Oliver isn’t the first fictional character with a hankering to travel.

“You don’t know that I’d stay this size. Perhaps I’d be scaled to fit your world, if I were lucky enough to reach it.”

“Why are we even discussing this?” I explode. “You can’t take a character out of a book!”

“How do you know? Have you ever tried?”

“No, but it’s not like Cinderella is working at Starbucks-”

“Cinderella? Starbucks?” Oliver says.

“Exactly. You wouldn’t survive ten seconds in this world,” I tell him. “There’s so much out here you don’t know.”

“I know you,” Oliver insists.

The way he looks at me, I almost forget that this is all in my imagination.

“You hardly know me. We’ve been talking for, like, twenty minutes.”

“You’re wrong,” Oliver says. “I know that your bedroom is painted pink. And that you bite your lip at the part where Rapscullio and I fight. And that you say good night to your goldfish without fail. And sometimes when you get dressed in the morning you dance to the music that comes out of that odd little box-”

“You’ve watched me getting dressed in the morning?”

He flashes me a grin. “You’re the one who left the book wide open.”

“We don’t even know if this is a one-time thing,” I say. “I could close the book and you could be gone, forever.”

Oliver takes a step forward. “Try it.”

“Try what?”

“Closing the book.”

“But what if-” I realize that I don’t want him to disappear. I may not fully believe he’s real; I may not understand why I can hear him speaking to me-but I sort of like it. I like knowing that of all the people in the world, I’m the only one listening to what he has to say. It makes me feel like we’ve been destined for each other. Which is the way things work in fairy tales, not in my ordinary, boring life. “Are you sure?” I whisper.

Oliver nods. I start to close the book, but then I hear him shout, and I yank it wide open again. “Just in case,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “Just in case it… doesn’t work. I want you to know, Delilah. You’ve already been the biggest adventure of my life.”

I gently touch my finger to the blank space beside Oliver. He reaches toward my hand and spreads his own, pressing it against the filmy barrier between us. I can feel the pressure of his touch, the temperature of his skin.

Before I can lose my nerve, I close the book.

I take a deep breath. Then another one. I spell M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. Then I riffle through the book until I am on page 43 again.

There’s the cliff, and the sea in the distance. There’s the gravel that was beneath Oliver’s feet. But Oliver is missing.

It feels like a punch. Tears fill my eyes, and I wonder how I could be upset over losing something I never had.

Just then, Oliver pokes his head out from behind a boulder. “It was only a jest,” he says, laughing.

“Not funny.” I start to slam the book shut.

“Wait! Wait, I’m sorry. Truly!”

I let the pages fall open again. “You owe me,” I mutter.

“I promise to make it up to you,” Oliver vows. “The very minute I get out of this book.”

“I really do have to leave, though,” I tell him. “If I don’t go to Algebra, I’m going to get into trouble.”

Oliver nods his head. “Of course,” he says, and then hesitates. “Is Algebra quite a distance away?”

I stifle a grin. “Light-years,” I say. “I’ll come back later.”

“And help me get out of here?”

“I don’t know-”

“Promise?” Oliver asks.

I can’t remember anyone else who’s ever been desperate for me to return. Most of the kids in school are desperate for me to leave, and the ones who aren’t are totally indifferent. There’s Jules, of course, but she doesn’t need me. Not the way Oliver does, anyway.

“Yes,” I say. “I promise.”

I suffer through Math and English and an embarrassing moment in Social Studies when Mr. Uwenga calls on me, asking for the name of the secretary of state, and I say “Oliver.” Then, finally, it’s my free period. Jules and I always meet at the same table in the cafeteria. It’s the one where the geeks congregate. Jules could probably announce she was the love child of President Obama and a cat and they wouldn’t look up from their Calculus textbooks.

She slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. “Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we’re out of purgatory for the weekend.”

“Maybe later,” I murmur, still distracted by the day’s previous events.

“So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested.”

“Huh?” I say, turning to her. I shake my head. “I’m sorry. I’m kind of out of it today.”

“What’s up?” She pops a grape into her mouth. “Did Uwenga spring another pop quiz on you guys? And if so, can you tell me what’s on it so I don’t fail?”

I desperately want to tell Jules the truth about what happened. I want her to see it for herself, because if she believes it too, then I’m not crazy. After all, if anyone’s going to hear me out and not judge me or call me a freak, it’s my best friend. So I turn to her. “Did you ever wonder what happens when you close a book?”

Jules stops chewing. “Um. It stays closed?”

“No. I mean, what about the characters inside?”

She tilts her head. “They’re just words.” She peers at me. “Is this an English major kind of thing?”

“No. They’re words, but they’re more than words. They come to life in your head, right? So how do you know that doesn’t keep going when you stop reading?”

“Like how little kids think their stuffed animals wake up and party when they fall asleep?”

“Yes-exactly!”

Jules laughs. “Once, I took my dad’s video camera and let it run all night long while I was sleeping because I thought I could catch my toys in the act. I was convinced my Tickle Me Elmo was a closet ax murderer.” She shrugs. “If he was, it never showed up on tape.”

“I’ve got something better than a tape,” I say. I look at the two geeks sitting across from us. They are completely enraptured by their matrices and graphing calculators; Jules and I might as well be on the moon as far as they’re concerned. So I take the book from my backpack and open it up to page 43. “I need to show you something,” I say. “Watch carefully.”

I crack the spine a little bit, so that the book lies open. “What is this?” Jules says, laughing a little. “Did you swipe it from the last kids you babysat for?”

“Just read it,” I say.

Jules raises her brows but starts to read out loud: “Oliver grasped a root sticking out of the rock wall and hoisted himself a little farther up the cliff. With his dagger clenched between his teeth, he swung one arm up, and then the other, climbing the sheer granite, driven by the force of his determination. Seraphima, he thought. I’m coming for you.”

“Fat chance,” I said.

“Did you say something?” Jules asks.

“Just keep watching,” I tell her.

We both stare at the illustration. Then Jules nudges my shoulder. “Delilah? What exactly am I looking for?”

Although the book has been open for thirty seconds, Oliver hasn’t budged, or spoken, or in any way indicated that he is more than just an illustration on the page.

“Say something,” I mutter.

Jules looks at me, baffled. “Um, it’s a nice paragraph?”

The fact that Oliver isn’t talking to us both makes me feel sick to my stomach. For all I know, I’ve only been kidding myself. If I tell her now that I’ve been chatting with a prince in a fairy tale who wants my help getting out of his story, Jules is going to march me to the nurse or call a guidance counselor. Jules, who understands everything about me, just wouldn’t understand this… and I can’t risk losing the only real friend I have.

“I’m still waiting. Is he going to jump out of the page and attack me with that knife?”

If you only knew, I think. I pretend Jules has made the funniest of jokes. “Now, that would be absolutely ridiculous. I just wanted to show you… the description. This writer’s something else, isn’t she? It’s like, when you read the words, it’s actually… happening!”

I laugh again, a big fake laugh, for good measure. Jules looks at me like I’ve grown three horns out of my forehead. “Have you been sniffing Sharpies again?” she asks.

I stuff the book into my backpack. “Totally forgot-I have to go take a makeup test with Madame Borgnoigne.” I silently curse Oliver for making me look like an even bigger fool than usual. “I’ll call you after school,” I say, and I run out of the cafeteria.

I’m not in the habit of sneaking into faculty restrooms. In fact, this is something I’ve never even thought of doing, but then again nothing I’ve done today is something I’ve ever thought of doing. The bottom line is I need to be alone with this book, and in a faculty restroom I can lock the door and not have to worry about any gossiping girls who might run to a teacher to snitch on the insane student who’s conversing with a fairy tale.

I crack open the book once again to page 43, lean into the story, and whisper, “Hello?”

When Oliver smiles, I catch my breath. “You came back. You said you would… and you did.”

Get a grip, Delilah, I tell myself. “What was that all about?”

“What was what all about?”

“Why didn’t you talk when I asked you to?”

“I thought you didn’t want me talking when strangers were around!”

“I don’t!” I argue.

“I’m having a little trouble keeping up, here… You’re angry because I did what you asked me to do?”

“I’m angry because Jules isn’t a stranger.”

“She might as well be, to me,” Oliver says. “She wouldn’t have heard me even if I were yelling at the top of my lungs.”

“How do you know that? You didn’t even try.”

“I’ve been trying for years-you’re the first person who has ever noticed me.”

I sigh. “But if you’d talked to Jules-if she could hear you…” My voice trails off.

“Then you wouldn’t feel quite so crazy?” Oliver asks gently. “Can’t you believe in me, if I believe in you?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” I say, completely honest. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.”

Oliver sits down on the ground. “And nothing at all has ever happened to me.”

I look at him, resigning himself to an endless life trapped inside someone else’s plot. I know what that feels like. If I’d written my own story, my father would never have left us, and my mother wouldn’t have to work till she was so tired she fell into bed each night before dinner. If I’d written my own story, I wouldn’t have broken a cheerleader’s kneecap and single-handedly turned the entire school against me. If I’d written my own story, I’d have someone like Oliver here who loved me.

Then again, maybe I can change my own story. Or at least try. “I think we need to do a test,” I say.

“I don’t understand.”

“What if I cut you out of the book and you stop breathing? What if the only oxygen that works for you is in the pages?”

“Cutting? Who said anything about cutting-”

“And what if you do make it into this world but you’re small enough to fit in my pocket?” My voice rises as I think of everything that could possibly go wrong.

“So by test,” Oliver says slowly-hopefully, “you mean you’re going to help me get out of here?”

“Yes. And we’re going to start with a trial run. I’ll meet you on page twenty-one.” I hesitate. “You can see the numbers on the pages too, right?”

“If I squint,” Oliver says. “They’re so far up in the corners.”

“It’s the part where you and Frump are walking through the forest… Yes! We’ll try the dog first!” I say.

Oliver shakes his head. “Frump? You can’t do that!”

“He’s just a dog, Oliver. He’ll probably never even know.”

“Just a dog!” Oliver stands, angry. “That ‘dog’ speaks three languages and is brilliant at chess and happens to be my best friend. Or did you forget that he used to be a human too?”

“I guess I maybe skimmed that part,” I confess, although I’d rather die than admit that I often skipped over the pages without Oliver in them. “If we can’t experiment on Frump, then what do you recommend? Or does even the bacteria in your book do rocket science on the side?”

“I could give you my tunic,” Oliver suggests.

“Keep your clothes on, buster. I think we’d be better off seeing what happens with something that’s alive and breathing, don’t you?”

“Give me a moment.” He paces from one end of the page to the other, briefly disappearing into the spine for a moment before reappearing with a smile on his face. “I could get you a fish from page forty-two.”

“I don’t know… Shouldn’t you try something that doesn’t belong in the ocean? That way, if it doesn’t survive intact… we can’t blame the problem on a lack of lungs.”

“You’re quite right.” Oliver sighs. He swats at the back of his neck, then waves his hand in front of his face. “Blasted spider.”

I start to ask him where it came from, fascinated by the mechanics of what appears and disappears in his world-but then I realize there might be any number of microscopic things that readers overlook-chessboards in the sand, spiders, even princes. “Wait!” I lean closer. “Oliver, did you kill that spider?”

“It bit me!”

“It’s the perfect sample for a trial run,” I tell him.

He brightens. “Of course. And if it doesn’t live, I’ll actually have something to celebrate.” He falls to his hands and knees and begins to search for the bug. “Got it,” Oliver says, and he extends his palm. In its center is a writhing, fat spider.

“Now what?” I ask.

Oliver blinks up at me. “Well. I guess you just take it.”

I gently reach down, trying to pinch the spider off the page, but nothing happens. There is a barrier between us, thinner than silk and incredibly solid. “It’s not working.”

“I forgot about the wall,” he says. He sits down, lost in thought.

“The wall?” I ask.

“It’s what keeps us safe, I suppose, if a Reader handles the pages without much care, or folds one down right in the center of an illustration. It’s like a bubble. Soft, but you can’t push through it no matter how hard you try.” He glances up. “Believe me, I have.”

“So you need something that can poke a hole in it…”

Oliver reaches for the dagger in his belt and takes a running leap directly toward me, so forceful that I find myself covering my face with my hands, as if he might burst through the pages and land right in front of me. But when I peek between my fingers, I find him flat on his back, staring up at the sky.

“Ouch,” he murmurs.

“Scientific discovery number one,” I say. “You can’t break the barrier between us.”

He sits up, rubbing his forehead. “No,” he replies, “but maybe you can.”

“You want me to poke the book with a knife?”

“No,” Oliver says. “You have to rip the book.”

I gasp. “No way! This is a library book!”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Oliver mutters. “Come on, Delilah. Just a little tear, so that I can sneak the spider out to you.”

When he offers up that smile again-the one that makes me feel like I’m the only person in his universe (although in this case that’s probably true)-I am utterly lost. “Okay,” I say with a sigh.

Gingerly, I take the page between my fingers and make the tiniest, most minute, infinitesimal tear.

“Delilah,” Oliver says, “I couldn’t squeeze protozoa through that, much less a spider. Could you try again? A little less imaginary this time?”

“Fine.” I pinch the top of the page between my fingers and give a good, solid tug. The paper tears.

“It had to be up at the top of the page, didn’t it…” Oliver rolls his eyes and wearily looks at the sheer cliff of rock before him.

“You do it for Seraphima,” I point out.

“Very funny.” Clenching the spider in his fist, he looks up. “How am I supposed to hold on to this thing and climb?” With a grimace, Oliver opens his mouth and pops the spider onto his tongue.

“That is so gross!” I cry out.

“Mmffphm,” Oliver says, but his eyes speak volumes. He starts to climb up the rock wall, getting quicker and quicker as he comes closer to the top. He inches to the right, to the part of the page that I’ve torn.

Holding his hand in front of his mouth, he spits. “That,” he says, “was revolting.” He glances at me over his shoulder. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I say. Feeling foolish, I hold my finger up to the rip in the paper.

Oliver extends his hand. The spider begins to crawl across his knuckles, his ring finger, his pinkie. When it reaches the edge of his skin, its legs grasp for purchase and find the seam of the paper.

And suddenly, there is the tiniest of black dots in my palm.

It’s nearly invisible, and it’s uncomfortably warm and wet. Before my eyes, it begins to grow, expanding into a familiar formation of eight creepy, crawly legs.

“Oliver!” I say, stunned. “I think it worked!”

“Really?” He has jumped down to the ground again and stares up at me eagerly. “You’ve got the spider, then?”

I glance down at the tiny arachnid. But now that I am looking more carefully, I see something’s not quite right. What I thought were legs are letters, raveling and unraveling. I think I can make out a d. And a p.

It’s not a spider, really. It’s the word “spider,” taking the shape of the bug and crawling across my hand.

Before I can tell Oliver, however, a knock at the bathroom door startles me. I shake the word-insect off my palm, beneath the inside cover of the book, and shut the book tightly. “I’ll just be another minute,” I call out.

Gingerly, I open the book again. There is no insect. Instead, written neatly on the inside cover, at a bizarre diagonal angle, I read: spider.

“Oliver,” I murmur, although the pages are still closed, although he probably cannot hear me. “I think we need to go back to square one.”