The Modern Faerie Tales Read online

  “Nobody is supposed to be down here,” he said, sitting down next to his brother. “Not you, not me, not them.”

  Val rolled her eyes, but she didn’t think he noticed in the candlelight. Scooting close to Lolli, she whispered, “Is he this much of a dick when I’m not around?”

  “It’s complicated,” Lolli whispered back. “They used to squat here before, but Derek got sent upstate for some shit and Tanya moved to some abandoned building out in Queens.”

  Luis shifted closer to his brother and spoke quietly to him. Sketchy Dave got up, hands fisted. “You get everything,” he shouted at Luis, tears on his cheeks, snot running from his nose.

  “What do you want from me?” Luis demanded. “I never touched that girl. It’s not my fault you’re whipped.”

  “I’m not a thing,” Lolli yelled at both of them, a terrible expression on her face. “You can’t talk about me like I’m a thing.”

  “Fuck you,” Dave shouted. “I’m boring? I’m a coward? Someday you’re going to wish you didn’t talk that way.”

  The girl in the blanket sat up, blinking rapidly. “Wha—”

  “Come on,” Luis said, taking Dave’s arm. “Let’s get out of here, Dave. You’re just drunk. You need to walk it off.”

  Dave jerked away from his brother. “Fuck off.”

  Val stood up, the last lingering threads of Never making the chalky dark of the tunnels swim. Her legs felt rubbery and the soles of her feet burned from all the walking her body was just starting to realize it had done, but the last thing she wanted was to get caught up in claustrophobic bullshit. “Never mind. We’re out of here.”

  Lolli followed her back up the stairs.

  “Why do you like him so much?” Val asked.

  “I don’t like him.” Lolli didn’t bother to ask who Val meant. “His eye is jacked up. He’s too skinny and he acts like an old man.”

  Val shrugged and threaded her thumb through the belt loop of her new pants, watching her boots step on the cracks in the sidewalk, letting her silence speak for her.

  Lolli sighed. “He should be begging me for it.”

  “He should,” Val agreed.

  They walked down Bayard Street, past groceries selling bags of rice, piles of pale golden apples, bamboo shoots in bowls of water, and huge spiky fruit that hung down from the ceiling. They passed little shops selling sunglasses, paper lamps, clumps of bamboo bound with gold ribbons, and bright-green plastic dragons molded to resemble carved jade.

  “Let’s stop,” Lolli said. “I’m hungry.”

  The mere mention of food made Val’s stomach growl. The fear had soured her belly and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since the night before. “Okay.”

  “I’ll show you how to table-score.”

  Lolli picked a place where several ducks hung, necks bent around a wire, dripping with red glaze, empty pits where their eyes once were. Inside, people lined up to pick out food from an assortment of steaming dishes. Lollie ordered hot teas and egg rolls for both of them. The man behind the counter didn’t seem to speak any English, but he dumped the right items onto their tray along with nearly a dozen plastic packets.

  They slid into a booth. Lollie looked around, then ripped open a packet of duck sauce and squirted it on her roll, topping that with hot mustard. She nodded her head casually in the direction of an empty booth with a few plates still on it. “See those leftovers?”

  “Yeah,” Val bit into her egg roll, grease slicking her lip. It was delicious.

  “Hold on.” Lolli got up, walked over to a half-eaten plate of lo mein, picked it up, and walked back to their table. “Table-score. See?”

  Val snorted, slightly scandalized. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  Lolli smiled, but her smile faded into a weird expression. “Sometimes you wind up doing a lot of crazy stuff that you can’t believe you did.”

  “I guess so,” Val said slowly. After all, she couldn’t believe that she’d spent the night in an abandoned subway station with a bunch of homeless kids. She couldn’t believe that instead of screaming and crying when she’d found out about Tom and her mom, she’d shaved her head and gone to a hockey game. She couldn’t believe that she was sitting there calmly eating someone else’s dinner when she’d just seen a monster.

  “I moved in with my boyfriend when I was thirteen,” Lolli said.

  “Really?” Val asked. The food going into her mouth was calming her, letting her believe that the world would go on, even if there were faeries and weird faerie drugs. There would still be Chinese food and it would still be hot and greasy and good.

  Lolli made a face. “Alex. He was twenty-two. My mom thought he was a pervert and told me not to see him. Eventually, I got sick of sneaking around and just took off.”

  “Shit,” Val said, because she couldn’t think of what else to say. When she was thirteen, boys had been as mysterious and unattainable as the stars in the sky. “What happened?”

  Lolli took a couple of quick bites of lo mein and washed them down with tea. “Alex and I argued all the time. He was dealing out of the apartment and he didn’t want me doing anything, even when he was shooting up right in front of me. He was worse than my parents. Finally, he found some other girl and just told me to get out.”

  “Did you go back home?” Val asked.

  Lolli shook her head. “You can’t go back,” she said. “You change and you can’t go back.”

  “I can go back,” Val said automatically, but the memory of the troll and her bargain haunted her. It seemed unreal now, in the light and heat of the restaurant, but it nagged at the back of her thoughts.

  Lolli paused for a moment, as if she were considering that. “You know what I did to Alex?” she asked, wicked smile returning. “I still had the keys. I went back when no one was there and I trashed the place. I threw everything out the window—his clothes, her clothes, the television, his drugs, every fucking thing I could get my hands on got dusted onto the street.”

  Val cackled with delight. She could just imagine Tom’s face if she done that to him. She pictured his new computer cracked open on the driveway, iPod smashed into white pieces, black clothes spread out over the lawn.

  “Soooo,” Lolli said with a mock innocent look. “You enjoyed that story way too much not to have an asshole-boyfriend story of your own.”

  Val opened her mouth, not sure what she was going to say. The words stalled on her tongue. “My boyfriend was sleeping with my mom,” she finally forced out.

  Lolli laughed until she was choking, then stared at Val for a moment, eyes wide and incredulous. “Really?” she asked.

  “Really,” Val said, strangely satisfied that she’d managed to shock even Lolli. “They thought I got on the train and they were making out on the couch. Her lipstick was all over his face.”

  “Oh, nasty! Nasty!” Lolli’s mouth contorted with honest, giggling disgust. Val laughed too, because, suddenly, it was funny. Val laughed so hard that her stomach hurt, that she couldn’t breathe, that tears leaked out to wet her cheeks. It was exhausting to laugh like that, but she felt like she was waking from a strange dream.

  “Are you really going back home to that?” Lolli asked.

  Val was still half drunk with laughter. “I have to, don’t I? I mean, even if I stayed here for a while, I can’t live the rest of my life in a tunnel.” Realizing what she’d said, she glanced up at Lolli, expecting her to be insulted, but she just leaned her head on her hands and looked thoughtful.

  “You should call your mom, then,” Lolli said finally. She pointed toward the lobby. “There’s a pay phone out there.”

  Val was shocked. It was the last piece of advice she expected to get from Lolli. “I’ve got my cell.”

  “So call your mom already.”

  Val fished out her cell phone with a feeling of dread and turned it on. The screen flashed, calls missed count climbing. It stopped at sixty-seven. She’d only gotten one text. It was from Ruth and read: “where
r u? your moms going crazy.”

  Val hit reply. “Am still in city,” she typed, but then she stopped, not sure what to write next. What was she going to do? Could she really go home?

  Bracing, she clicked over to voice mail. The first message was from her mom, her voice soft and strangled sounding: “Valerie, where are you? I just want to know you’re safe. It’s very late and I called Ruth. I guess you heard a lot from her. I-I-I don’t know how to explain what happened or to say how sorry I am.” There was a long pause. “I know you’re very mad at me. You have every right to be mad at me. Just please let someone know you’re all right.”

  It was weird to hear her mother’s voice after all this time. It made her gut clench with hurt and fury and acute embarrassment. Sharing a boy with her mom stripped her deeper than bare. She deleted the message and clicked to the next one. It was from Val’s dad: “Valerie? Your mother is very concerned. She said that you two had a fight and you ran off. I know how your mother can be, but staying out all night isn’t helping anything. I thought you were smarter than this.” In the background, she could hear her half sisters shrieking over the sound of cartoons.

  An unfamiliar man’s voice spoke next. He sounded bored. “Valerie Russell? This is Officer Montgomery. Your mother reported you as missing after a disagreement the two of you had. Nobody is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but I really need you to give me a call and let me know that you’re not in any trouble.” He left a number.

  The next message was a silence punctuated by several wet-sounding sobs. After a few moments, her mother’s choked voice wailed, “Where are you?”

  Val clicked off. It was horrible to listen to how upset her mother was. She should go home. Maybe it would be okay—if she never brought a boyfriend to the house, if her mom would just stay out of her way for a while. It would be less than a year before Val was out of high school. Then she wouldn’t ever have to live there again.

  She scrolled to “home” and pressed the call button. The phone on the other end rang as Val’s fingers turned to ice. Lolli arranged the remaining lo mein noodles into the shape of something that might have been the sun, a flower, or a really poorly rendered lion.

  “Hello,” Val’s mother said, her voice low. “Honey?”

  Val hung up. The cell rang almost immediately and she turned it off.

  “You knew I couldn’t do it,” she accused Lolli. “Didn’t you?”

  Lolli shrugged. “Better to find out now. It’s a long way to travel just to come right back.”

  Val nodded, afraid in a new, acute way. For the first time she realized that she might never be ready to go home.

  6

  Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

  —PHILIP K. DICK

  Val woke to the shriek of a train barreling past. Sweat stuck the wool coat to her clammy skin, despite the cold. Her head throbbed, her mouth burned, and even with all the food she’d eaten the night before, she felt ravenous. Shivering, she wrapped the covering tighter around herself and curled her legs closer to her body.

  She tried to think back, past the table-scored food and the phone call home. There had been a monster and a sword made of glass, then a needle in her arm and a rush of power that still filled her with longing. She scrambled into a sitting position, looking down at new clothes that proved her memories were not formed only from bits of half-remembered dreams. Dave’s arm had bled and strangers had done whatever she told them and magic was real. She reached for her backpack, relieved that she hadn’t left that somewhere along with the rest of her clothes.

  Only Lolli was still sleeping, curled up in the fetal position, a new dress layered over a skirt and a new pair of jeans. Dave and Luis weren’t there.

  “Lolli?” Val crawled over and shook Lolli’s shoulder.

  Lolli turned, pushed blue hair out of her face, and made a small, irritated noise. Her breath was sour. “Go away,” she slurred, pulling the stained blanket over her face.

  Val stood up unsteadily. Her vision swam. She picked up her backpack and forced herself to walk through the darkness up onto the night streets of Manhattan. The evening skies were bright with clouds and the air was thick with ozone, as if there was a storm blowing in fast.

  She felt dried up and cracked and fragile as one of the few leaves that blew out from the park. It seemed that if you stripped away all the sports and the school and the normal life, what was within her wasn’t much at all. Her body felt bruised, as though something else had been riding around in her skin the night before, something so awful and vast that it had charred her insides. There was a feeling of satisfaction, though, in spite of the fear. I did this, she thought, I did this to myself.

  Deep breaths of cold air settled her stomach, but her mouth just got hotter.

  The creature’s words came back to her unbidden: You will serve me for a month. Each dusk you will go to Seward Park. There, you will find a note under the wolf’s paw. If you do not do what it says, things will go hard with you. She was already late.

  Val thought of the slick solution the troll had spread over her skin and felt a tremor shoot through her, an electric charge that jolted her hand to her lips. They were dry and swollen to the touch, but she found no cut or wound to explain the stinging.

  She walked into a deli and bought a cup of ice water with some of the change at the bottom of her bag, hoping that it might cool her mouth. Outside the shop, she sat down on the concrete and sucked a cube of ice, her hand shaking so much that she was afraid to take a sip.

  A woman coming out of the liquor store next door glanced down at Val and dropped some change into Val’s cup of water. Val looked up, startled and ready to protest, but the woman had already walked on.

  By the time Val removed the folded slip from under the wolf’s paw, her whole mouth was sore as a wound. She squatted near the dried-up fountain and leaned her head against a chipped bar of metal fencing as her fingers numbly opened the paper.

  She half expected a blank page she’d have to crumple and toss, like the one Dave had gotten, but there were words, written in the same looping hand that had addressed the bottle of amber sand:

  “Come beneath the support of the Manhattan Bridge and knock thrice on the tree that squats where no tree should.”

  She jammed the note into her pocket, but as she did, her hand bumped something else. She pulled it out—a silver money clip with a huge, rough piece of turquoise at its center, the clasp stuffed with a twenty, two fives, and at least a dozen singles.

  Had she taken the money? Had Lolli? Val couldn’t remember. She’d never stolen anything before. One time she’d walked out of a Spencers in the mall with a Rangers poster in her hand, not realizing she hadn’t paid for it until she and her friends reached the escalators. Her friends were impressed so she acted as if she’d done it on purpose, but afterward she felt so bad that she never hung it on her wall.

  Val tried to think back to the night before, but it was as if she were remembering a story told by someone else. It was all a blur that, despite everything, made her skin itch for Nevermore.

  She started walking, in too much pain to do anything else. Dread coiled in her stomach. She started down Market, passing Asian stores and a bubble tea place with a group of teenagers standing in front of it, all talking over one another and laughing. Val felt as disconnected from them as if she were a hundred years old. She reached for her backpack, wanting more than anything to call Ruth, wanting to hear someone who knew her, someone who could remind her of that old self. But her mouth hurt too much.

  Cutting across onto Cherry, she walked a little farther, close enough to the East River that no buildings blocked her view. The water shone with the reflected radiance of the bridge and the far shore. A barge nearly became a mass of negative space except for a few lights glittering at the prow.

  The bridge loomed directly ahead of her, the supports like the tower of a castle, rough stonework rising high above the street,
ruddy with runoff from rust on the metal above. The stretch of rock was interrupted by casement windows high above the street.

  Broken glass crunched beneath Val’s boots as she passed under the graceful arch of the underpass. The sidewalk stank of stale urine. On one side was a makeshift wire fence, blocking the way into a construction area where a mound of sand waited to be spread. On the other, close to where she walked, was what looked like a bricked-up doorway. Below it, Val saw the stump of a tree, its roots digging deep into the concrete.

  “The tree.” Val kicked the stump softly. The wood was wet and dark with filth, but the roots sank down into the concrete sidewalk, as though they stretched past the tunnels and pipes, worming their way into some secret, rich soil. She wondered if this was the same tree that bloomed with pale fruit.

  It was an eerie thing to see a stump here, nestled up against a building as if they were kin. But perhaps no eerier than the idea that she’d fallen into a fairy tale. In a video game, there would have been some pixilated storm of color and maybe even an on-screen message warning her that she was leaving the real world behind. Portal to Faerieland. Do you want to go through? Y/N.

  Val knelt down and rapped three times on the stump. The wet wood barely made a sound under her knuckles. A spider scuttled out toward the street.

  A sharp noise made Val look up. A fracture appeared in the stone above the stump, as though something had struck it. She stood and reached out to run her finger across the line, but as she touched the wall, patches of stone cracked and fell away, until there was a rough doorframe.

  She stepped through onto the stairwell, steps extending up and down from the landing. When she looked back, the wall was solid. A sudden burst of terror nearly overwhelmed her and only pain held her in place.

  Trip Trap.

  “Hello?” she called up the steps. It hurt to move her mouth.

  Trip Trap.

  The troll appeared on the landing.

  Who’s trip trapping over my bridge?