Wood Sprites

6: Mermaid Gambit

They had an older sister. Better yet, she wasn’t some beauty-pageant poser like Elle Pondwater; she was a super-cool gearhead. She lived on Elfhome. She probably knew Elvish. And their grandfather understood magic, so she might even know some real spells. She couldn’t get more perfect unless she also had all sorts of interesting pets. She could own an elfhound. Or a horse! According to April and old satellite maps of Pittsburgh prior to first Shutdown, the hotel where Alexander lived could house an entire zoo.

It was at once terrifying and intoxicating to think that they could actually call their older sister and talk to her. Maybe she could figure out a solution to how to save their baby siblings.

Every thirty days, the Chinese turned off the hyperphase gate (invented by their male genetic donor) and Pittsburgh returned to Earth. Initially Shutdown had been the first of the month. While the thirty-day cycle had worked for September, April, June, and November, all the other months and a half dozen leap years pushed Shutdown to some illogical date currently falling in the middle of the month.

They maintained a website for their production company, Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. Since their parents forbid them from using the website for any true advertising or promotion, they simply had a counter counting down to the next Shutdown. They used it for an interesting, self-imposed deadline for their videos. Louise sighed at the ticking numbers. While it would only be a few days until they could contact Alexander, it seemed like forever.

And there was the niggling problem that they didn’t have a phone number for Alexander. Apparently at some point Tim Bell had changed his phone number, and April had taken it as a sign that she was not to call his house. Trying to find any information out about Pittsburgh was much like being a jewel thief. Even the most mundane of information was locked away. They had to routinely hack into secure databases to get what they needed for their videos. They usually copied anything they could get away with, but up to this point they hadn’t needed a telephone list.

Louise glanced at her alarm clock. She had ten minutes until their mother expected them to be eating breakfast. She might have time to find a copy, especially if she got lucky and it was on one of their favorite sites. A band of anonymous hackers ran a data haven, posting information on Pittsburgh they’d “found” in undisclosed locations. As always, she made sure that she couldn’t be traced before dropping into the forum.

The first post made her heart jump. The heading was “Looking for Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.” She sat staring at it with fear. Should she read the post? Who in the world even knew that they visited this forum?

Taking a breath, she opened the post. It was breezy in tone, meandering in points, and signed with a name that made her squeak in surprise.

“What?” Jillian called from their bathroom.

“Nigel Reid wants to talk to us.”

“Nigel Reid? You mean ‘I just love Nigel’ Nigel Reid?”

“I never said that!” She respected the filmmaker. He was her favorite naturalist. “But yes, that one.”

Jillian squeaked, too. “Seriously? Talk to us?”

“Yes. Well. Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. He’s seen The Queen’s Pantaloons and wants to know if the gossamer call is real. He’s coming to New York to do the Today Show, and he wants to know if he can meet us.”

“Meet him? Like in person?”

“Generally that’s what ‘meet’ means.”

“Are you nuts? You know that Mom and Dad would just freak if they found out that we were going to meet some old guy from the Internet. They’ll get him arrested as a pedophile!”

“He wants to meet with a film-production company!” Louise cried in defense. “He doesn’t know Lemon-Lime is just two kids. If he did think we were kids, he probably thinks we’re in high school or college.”

“Pfft, high school is just as bad. Besides, we don’t know if this is really Nigel Reid posting this. It could be anyone. We list him as one of our influences. By posing as him, anyone could hope to lure us out.”

“It would be so cool if it was.” Louise went to Nigel Reid’s official personal site. How could they tell if he was actually the person contacting them and not a pervert using his name? “Nigel is going to be on the Today Show in like three weeks. We could go see the show.” Although “seeing the show” would really be standing on the sidewalk at the corner of 49th and Rockefeller Center with the crowd that gathered daily at the break of dawn.

Jillian considered it. “I don’t know. Feels like a trap to me. How is he going to know we’re really us? A big sign that says ‘Nigel, we’re Lemon-Lime’? And if it’s not him that posted that? Whoever is trying to lure us out would have us cornered.”

Jillian was right. They’d be out in the open for hours, with Nigel probably camping out in a green room. If someone was just using his name to lure them out, they could be in lots of danger. Although, no one knew they were two nine-year-olds. Lemon-Lime could be the group name for fifteen muscle-bound men — who liked Barbie dolls.

But why would someone like Nigel Reid want to meet them? While no one else seemed to realize how the elves were controlling the great living airships, the clues were there if anyone started to look in the right place. All the research they’d done, anyone else could do. They’d sketched out a mock-up of a gossamer call along the lines of a dog whistle, but they had no way of knowing if it would actually work. They agreed that they were probably missing something important in the design. Magic existed, flowed, pooled, and was depleted. The elves harnessed it in countless ways but guarded many of their secrets carefully. Humans still didn’t understand magic well enough to quantify it or even determine its source. If the elves were combining an ultrasonic whistle with magic, then no, the twins’ call had no hope of actually working.

Did Nigel think they had a working gossamer call?

And why would he think that? The only time they mentioned it in their videos had been a throwaway line in a comedic sketch about frilly underwear. Who in their right mind would use that as evidence of a working prototype? It made no sense.

Still, it was Nigel Reid! And yes, maybe she did love him. He seemed really, really nice, and he was always so gentle and kind to the animals he filmed. If there was a chance to talk to him face-to-face, she wanted it to happen.

What they needed was a two-part recognition process. The Today Show would serve to establish that Nigel Reid was the person who posted on the forum. After that they could pick someplace safe to meet.

Like maybe invite him to dinner at their house.

Even though she knew that was impossible, it made her insides go all fluttery with nerves. With trembling fingers, she double-checked that the forum only had an anonymous e-mail account that wasn’t linked to them in any way. Once she was sure that a reply couldn’t be traced to them, she created a private message and typed in, “This is Lemon-Lime. Say ‘hi’ to us on the Today Show so we know this post is really from you and then check back here. We’ll private-message contact information after the show.”

“What did you do?” Jillian asked.

Louise showed her the post.

Jillian squeaked in surprise. “You didn’t!”

“I did.”

Jillian flung arms around Louise and hugged her tight. “That is so awesome! I can’t wait to meet him!”

“No,” their mother said simply.

“Neither one of us could take the morning off to go with you,” their father elaborated. “People start showing up for that at like five-thirty in the morning and stand around in Rockefeller Center until nearly noon.”

“We could go alone. We have Tesla.”

“No!” their mother said. “Tesla can walk you from point A to point B, but for standing there for over six hours, you need an adult. And don’t go calling your Aunt Kitty and asking her — she’s got a deadline she’s behind on.”

“Nigel Reid is the guest,” Louise said.

“I know he’s your favorite,” their mother said.

“And he always brings animals,” Louise plowed on.

Their mother laughed as if this was a joke. “Of course he does. He’s a naturalist. That’s what people like him do when they’re on TV shows: bring animals that misbehave in funny ways and scare the daylights out of the hosts.”

“It’s not like he brings dangerous animals.” Louise felt the need to point it out, just in case this was part of their objection.

Their parents exchanged a look.

“Not everyone likes all animals, honey,” their father said. “Some people are scared of snakes and, and—”

“Spiders.” Their mother added what mildly scared her. “And creepy-looking lizards.”

“That’s just stupid,” Louise muttered quietly.

“Don’t pass judgment on people,” their mother said. “And no, you can’t go, and don’t you two dare sneak off by yourselves to see it, or there will be a world of hurt for both of you.”

“World of hurt” translated to them losing everything from Internet access to having to surrender their video equipment. In Louise’s opinion, corporal punishment would be over faster and thus less painful in the long run — which was probably why their mother opted for her way.

Louise was so disappointed that she forgot why she’d been on the Pittsburgh forum in the first place until they reached school. The day got worse as she searched through the forums and discovered no one had a telephone directory for Pittsburgh.

“This day sucks.” Louise explained what she’d found out and why she’d been looking.

“We have Alexander’s street address.” Jillian pushed Tesla into their shared locker. “He’s not going to fit in this when winter comes and we have two coats and snow boots to store in here.”

Louise really hoped that by winter they’d have worked something else out, although Tesla was making it so they had a great deal of freedom to move through the city. “Anything we mail has to hit Cranberry days before Shutdown to make it across to the border. If we miss the window, it will sit at the post office for a month until the next Shutdown.”

“So?” Jillian leaned against the wall and watched the ebb and flow of fifth-graders in the hallway. “It’s not going to go bad unless we send something like cookies. Real homemade cookies, not the Girl Scout cookies. We can only call during the twenty-four hours of Shutdown. The first five hours are while we’re asleep. Then we’re here at school. And if we make a call at home, Mom and Dad are going to want to know who the heck we’re talking to.” Because they never talked to people other than Aunt Kitty on the phone.

“I’d rather talk to Alexander instead of mailing her a letter.” Louise started to check sites that might have a Pittsburgh phone book. They were places like the universities and government offices, so she needed to actually hack the sites to search them. At least she could bounce through the café next to the school, so she didn’t have to worry about being traced. “Just dropping a letter into the mail feels a little like writing a letter to Santa Claus. In September! If she answers back, it could take months for her letter to get to us.”

“Her answering would be Christmas?”

“Duh!”

“Shoot! Well, the day just got worse,” Jillian warned. “Incoming.”

Louise looked up from her tablet. “Huh?”

Jillian nodded down the hall, where Elle stood surrounded by the girls from the other fifth-grade class, taught by Mr. Howe. “Elle is passing out invitations to the girls.”

“Already? I thought her birthday was next month.” Elle’s elaborate birthday parties were a yearly ritual. Pride and etiquette demanded that Elle invite all the girls in their grade; thus, they were always included. It had taken them two disasters to realize that they were invited only in form, not in spirit. They hadn’t attended in third or fourth grade.

“I only did one invitation.” Elle handed it over like it should have been on a silver platter. “But it’s for both of you. That’s why I just put ‘Mayer’ on it.”

“And this is yours.” Elle handed Jillian their broken camera that had been standing in as mini-Tesla. “I have no idea how it ended up in my bag, or why you’d want something so broken, but my mother said I had to make sure you got it.”

“Thank you.” Louise knew her mother would ask later if she’d thanked Elle for the invitation or not. She also knew that because there was only one invitation, Jillian figured that they were both covered by Louise’s thanks.

Invitation delivered, Elle turned on her heel and wove down the hallway, skillfully avoiding the curious boys to intercept Zahara. The beautiful African-American girl was in Mr. Howe’s class. She was always late to the fifth-grade floor because she had to deliver her younger brother to his classroom downstairs.

Jillian tore open the envelope and muttered a dark curse at the invitation. “Little Mermaid.”

“You’re kidding me.” Louise had never understood the appeal of The Little Mermaid. “I thought she would have grown out of that.”

Jillian kept cursing.

“We don’t have to go,” Louise said.

“This isn’t about Elle’s birthday, it’s about the class play. She wants to do the play The Little Mermaid, and she’s going to be Princess Ariel. I’ll end up as the Sea Witch.”

“Oh shoot,” Louise hissed.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if we did the original Hans Christian Andersen story where the mermaid dies after the prince marries another woman. At least that mermaid was a soulless creature made of water who was really after immortality by exchanging a three-hundred-year lifespan for a soul. The husband was just icing on the cake. No, no, we’ll be doing the story where she gives everything up for a boy, including everyone that she loves dear, screws the world to hell and back and then needs him to kill the villain while she’s helpless someplace else. Oh, God, I’m so sick of these wussy princesses and evil women. We’ve done the evil witches of Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel, the evil queen of Snow White and the evil stepmother of Cinderella. Is this some kind of campaign against femininity? Our choices are the evil and usually ugly powerful female or the helpless princess, desired just for her beauty? And what the heck is this shit about evil stepmothers anyway?”

“Well, it’s following a biological imperative that a female devotes all her attention to the children that carry her DNA as opposed to the DNA of another female.”

“Oh, shut up, monkey girl, we are not cuckoo birds, tossing eggs out of nests and getting someone else to raise our chicks. We’re humans!”

“Okay, Wilbur. What are we going to do about Elle and these damn mermaid zombie chicks?”

Jillian giggled. “Oh, it would be worth it if I could rewrite it to zombies.” She grinned. “The boys would love it if it was a zombie play.”

“They’re never going to let us do a major rewrite of a play again.”

Jillian nodded, thinking. “Too bad there are more girls than boys. That way, if we found a play that the boys liked, they could just outvote the girls. Something cool. Like Macbeth.”

“Like Macbeth but in plain English.”

“It should have sword fights,” Jillian said firmly.

“Robots. Dinosaurs.”

“Elves.”

“At least try to think like a boy,” Louise said.

“It has to be a real play, not something we write, that boys will like.”

“Do you think they made Lord of the Flies into a play?”

“All the characters in that are boys. There has to be at least one or two girl parts, just so we can sway the girls that don’t fall under Elle’s spell. If we can get a couple of the girls on our side, it would work.”

They thought for a moment. Louise found herself eyeing Tesla sitting statuelike inside their locker. Their mother had thought he looked liked Nana, the Darling’s Saint Bernard nanny.

“What about Peter Pan? Pirates. Sword fights. Indians.”

“Native Americans,” Jillian muttered, frowning as she thought through the casting. “Elle would want to be Wendy. That would leave Mrs. Darling or Tinker Bell for me.”

“You’d be Peter. He’s usually played by a girl.”

Jillian’s face lit up. “Oh, God, that’s perfect. Elle wouldn’t want to be a boy, and I would have the lead!”

They had Library as their first-period class, so they spent the hour digging through what had been produced for Peter Pan.

“God, I’m starting to understand why Mom never showed us the cartoon. What the hell happened? You take the most manly of boys — he runs around naked except for some leaves, and he fights pirates — and you turn his story into this.” Jillian turned her tablet to show off the big-busted blond Tinker Bell. “In the novel, Tinker Bell dies a year after Wendy goes back to London, and Peter forgets all about her.”

Louise had forgotten that twist. “Ignore her. She’s poison to the boys having any interest in Peter Pan.”

Jillian nodded. “We stick to the original play and focus on Hook and the pirates and the ticking crocodile.”

“But what format are we going to use for the pitch? Boys don’t like to read. And most of the movie versions are girly.”

Jillian flopped back from her tablet. “How about a music video? We do all things that are cool with Peter Pan and this ‘I’m a tough guy, don’t mess with me’ fight song with a heavy bass beat.”

“Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the bodies hit the floor.” Louise sung the first song that same to mind.

“Exactly.” Jillian opened up a file on her tablet and started to take notes. “Or at least something like that.”

“So the Lost Boys, the tree houses, the island, the pirates, sword fights. .”

“Yes, a swordfight on the pirate ship!” Jillian called up her storyboard app. “Start with Peter and the Lost Boys at the tree houses, run to the beach, look at the uber cool pirate ship in the moonlight. Then the Lost Boys board the ship and there’s a big swordfight.”

“In two weeks?”

“We can — could crank out a full episode of The Adventures of Queen Soulful Ember in a month, and those have a lot more to storyboard, full original animation, dialogue to dub, sound effects, and a music score.”

“We blew up our studio with all our sets and all our models.”

“We’ll work around that. I can act in front of a green screen for Peter’s part. We can base Hook off of. . hm.” Jillian considered the boys in their classroom with narrowed eyes. The plays were a combined effort of both classes of their grade. With the exception of “the Prince,” the boys usually had minor roles like dwarves and mice. Reed normally played the Prince for the same reason Elle got to be the Princess. He was tall, blond and handsome. Unfortunately, he was clumsy and as much a social wallflower as the twins.

If they needed all the boys, though, they should win over the boys’ leader.

“Iggy,” Louise said. “Iggy should be Hook.”

Iggy’s real name was Ignatius Martin Chen. He was apparently named after a baby of a movie star. His first-generation Chinese parents obviously didn’t realize how uncommon the name was. He was in Mr. Howe’s classroom across the hall, only sharing lunch, recess, and class play with them. He was the acknowledged leader of the boys, perhaps because he was also the tallest boy in the fifth grade and naturally athletic.

Jillian tilted her head, thinking. “Iggy does like to be in front of an audience, and he remembers his lines when he actually gets something to say.”

“We should use all the boys in the video. It wouldn’t be too hard to model their pictures onto CGI skin. We can do half for the Lost Boys and the other half as pirates.”

Jillian was nodding. “We can put the Lost Boys in war paint. Make them look cool. We’ll have to take pictures of all the boys without them noticing us.”

“Or we could tell them we want to cast them for a music video. They’ll be more vested in the end product.”

Jillian winced. “Actually talk to them?”

“If we’re going to highjack the play completely, we’ll have to talk to them a lot,” Louise pointed out. “We work for almost three months on the play. Half of April and all of May and June.” The play represented a massive amount of work, all in the name of learning how to cooperate as a class. Everything was a joint effort, from voting on what play to do, to designing and building sets, to the actual performance. “Either we talk to them or devote all that time to The Little Mermaid.”

“Ick! Okay, let’s talk to the boys at recess about this.”

“Today?”

Jillian waved the party invite. “Elle’s party is in two weeks. We vote on the play the week after. We have to get this up and running quickly if we’re going to head off Elle.”

Any time on the video would take time away from their research on finding a way to save their little brother and sisters. If they were going to do it, then they should do it as fast as possible. “Okay, we’ll do it this recess.”

Perelman School for the Gifted had a rooftop playground with tall perforated metal screens creating a protective enclosure and shade. Through the orange-painted mesh, they had a clear view of all the skyscrapers of New York rising up to loom over the school. Heat of the sunbaked roof battled with the cold April wind off the bay.

The boys played four square at the edge of the playground, taking turns at rotating through the grid as players fouled out of the game. Iggy tended to hold the King’s square for long periods, controlling the large red ball with ease. For some reason, today he was sitting in the shade, just watching the game.

While Jillian was fearless around adults, she tended to be shy of other kids, especially boys. Louise suspected it was because “cute” didn’t work on kids their own age. Or maybe it did, and they only thought it didn’t because when they were younger, what melted adults to helpless puddles utterly failed to impress other toddlers and preschoolers.

Louise marched up to Iggy and asked quickly, “Can we take pictures of you?” before she lost her nerve.

Iggy lifted his head to glare up at her. His left eye was swollen nearly shut and bruised dark purple. “Why do you want my picture?”

“What happened to you?” Louise asked.

“Doh. What does it look like? Some guy hit me.”

“A guy? Like an adult? Why?”

“Yeah, he’s twenty-four. He was one of those protesters that are pissed at the Chinese over the Elfhome thing. The whole ‘China is stealing the heartland of the United States’ bullshit. Like I have anything to do with that!”

“Why would he even hit you? You’re just a kid.”

“All Chinese are short even when they’re full grown!” Iggy obviously was imitating someone older than him. “I think the jerk just hit the first Asian-looking person that was shorter than him. There’s several billion Chinese on the planet, and most of them don’t give a shit about Pittsburgh or Elfhome. My dad says the protesters are a bunch of redneck idiots. The United States makes a hundred times more off the elves than China does, and China is still paying back the loans it took out to cover their original remuneration.”

The Saturday newscast that panicked their mother suddenly took on new meaning. The nine-year-old boy attacked on the subway was Iggy. His three older sisters also attended Perelman School for the Gifted.

Louise realized that the reason he was sitting out of the game was that two of the fingers on his left hand were splinted. “Are you okay?”

He followed her gaze to his fingers. “Oh, yeah.” He blushed and looked away. “My sister tasered him. We all ended up at the police department. They’re calling it a hate crime and throwing the book at him.”

“Good,” Louise said.

Iggy squinted up at her as if she was a miniature puzzle. “You know, I don’t think we’ve ever talked before.”

She wasn’t sure what that meant. “You don’t know our names?”

He laughed. “We’ve been in school together for five years. I know who you are. It’s just that you don’t talk to anyone. It’s kind of freaking me out.”

“We just want to take pictures of you.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s part of the weirdness. Why?”

“We’re making a music video.”

“If anyone else said that, I’d figure that they were setting me up for a viral-meme joke. I think, though, that you two would only do that if I’d done something epic to really piss you off, and I’m fairly sure I haven’t. Have I?”

“No.” Louise cut Jillian off because she saw her starting to consider making up a lie. “Elle is talking the girls into doing The Little Mermaid for this year’s play.”

“Oh, gross, another kissy-face play?” Iggy groaned.

Jillian frowned at Louise for telling Iggy the truth. As long as Elle didn’t know what they were doing, she couldn’t counterattack the twins. Jillian glanced pointedly at Elle playing jump rope with all the other girls from fifth grade. “What will end up happening is the same thing that happened all the other years. Elle and her friends will all vote together and everyone else will split the rest of their votes on a couple different plays and Elle wins by default. If we get everyone to agree on the same play, then Elle can’t win.”

“Girls outnumber the boys.” Iggy pointed out the flaw to the plan.

“We’re not going to vote with Elle. We just need one or two of the other girls to go along with us. Elle doesn’t control them all.” Just most of them.

“What play do you guys want to do?” Iggy asked.

“One with pirates and swordfights,” Jillian said.

“Peter Pan.” Louise got another glare from Jillian. She felt, though, if they misled Iggy and he turned against them, they’d lose all the boys. “Mr. Howe and Miss Hamilton aren’t going to let us do something like Hamlet or Macbeth. We need a play with at least twenty-five parts for both girls and boys that the school considers ‘a classic’ and thus safe. There aren’t a lot of those.”

“Do you want to be dressed as a hermit crab and sing ‘Kiss de Girl’ or be a pirate captain?” Jillian said.

“Sing with me now.” Iggy raised his hand and snapped his fingers together like a crab’s claw. “Sha-la-la-la, my oh my, looks like de boy’s too shy.” He burst into laughter at their shocked looks. “I have three sisters. The entire soundtrack has been burned into my brain. We’ve even been to the Broadway version twice.”

“You want to do The Little Mermaid?” Jillian cried with horror.

“No!” Iggy cried back. “Captain Hook, eh?” He laughed and held out his splinted fingers. “Look, I’m halfway there.”

“So, we can take pictures of you for Hook?”

He considered it while making funny thinking faces. “Hook is this weird mix of scary badass and just campy silly. He’d be fun to play. Okay, I’m in.”

They moved against the white wall of the gymnasium to shoot the headshots.

Iggy struck a pose. “I want to look more like Captain Jack Sparrow.”

“We’re not doing poufy Hook.” Jillian had gone into director mode. “Peter is coming with the Lost Boys. It’s all games to him, but you seriously want to kick his butt.”

“Who is going to be Peter?”

“Me,” Jillian admitted cautiously.

Iggy broke into surprised laughter.

“Don’t smile!” Jillian snapped. “You’re a badass pirate. Tell Peter he’s a little girly boy in French.”

Iggy laughed again. “Why French?”

“Because you’ll need to think.”

He frowned in concentration. “Vous. . etes. . une petite. . fille. Un singe. Mange. . des. . toilettes.”

“Yes, good,” Jillian said, even though the sentences made little or no sense.

“Stupide. . cul. . fromage. . singe.” He started to giggle.

“What?” Louise couldn’t help asking since it sounded like he’d said “Stupid ass cheese monkey.”

“I’m only pulling a B in French,” Iggy said. “My parents are ready to beat me for it.”

Jillian glared at them both, which only made Iggy laugh harder.

“Captain Hook cannot giggle,” Jillian stated firmly.

“Okay, okay, I got this.” Iggy forced himself to be serious. Surprisingly, he managed to look very fierce and determined despite having been giggling a moment before. “Excusez-moi, je peux vous aider? Vous avez des cartes postales?”

It was the practice dialogue from last fall with a customer buying postcards in a shop.

After they’d gotten a full set of headshots of him being serious and menacing, he called over the boys standing in line, waiting for their turn at four square. He told them simply that they were doing a music video and reassured them, “It will be awesome.” He also suggested that they cast all the Lost Boys from “Peter’s” class and the pirates from “Hook’s” class.

They managed to get photos of all the boys before the bell rang, ending recess. Iggy walked with them down to their floor.

“You know,” he said before they split up to their own classrooms. “You two should talk more to people. You’re really cool, but no one knows that.”