Extraordinary (34 page)

“I'll never forget it.”

“I made the right choice, Phoebe. I just want to say it. Choosing you then. Choosing those few years we had. And just now, at the ceremony, choosing you once more.”

“You chose me over your mother.”

“It was right, my friend. My best friend.”

“Mallory. Oh, Mallory.”

“Go quickly, now, Phoebe. Go with Benjamin. Go to your mother. She'll wake up soon, and she'll be scared. She will have seen some of what has happened to you in her dreams. Nightmares. But she'll be fine, I promise, and you must be there, with your father, so that yours are the first faces she sees. Go, before I keep you here with me forever. Go.”

“Good-bye, Mallory.”

“Good-bye, my friend. Good-bye.”

 

Mayer Rothschild, his wife, Gutle, and their five extraordinary sons were real, but of course the meeting between Mayer and the faerie queen is entirely a figment of my imagination. Catherine Rothschild is likewise fictional, and for that reason, I deliberately kept Catherine's exact connection to the present-day Rothschild family vague.

Readers interested in Mayer Rothschild might like to read
Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Times,
by Amos Elon. To find out more about the family business and its involvement in and effect upon European politics, see the two-volume
The House of Rothschild
by Niall Ferguson. And for a chronicle of a real-life Rothschild love story, as well as a fascinating window into Victorian society, politics, and anti-Semitism in the mid-1800s, see
Charlotte and Lionel
by Stanley Weintraub, which is about Mayer's grandchildren.

However, despite the importance of the Rothschild family history in the shaping of
Extraordinary
, my original inspiration for the novel did not come from there. Stories beget stories; art inspires more art. And so for me,
Extraordinary
is a daughter of the remarkable novel
Wicked
by Gregory Maguire (itself a child of
The Wizard of Oz
), and of its musical adaptation (book by Winnie Holzman), and of the beautiful song “For Good,” music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz. These varied magical works moved me to want to write my own magical story about the soul-changing effect that one friend can have upon another ... for good.

I am grateful to my first- and second-draft readers for their thoughtful critiques and commentary: Franny Billingsley, Jane Kurtz, Dian Curtis Regan, Joanne Stanbridge, Deborah Wiles, Melissa Wyatt, Alexis Canfield, my terrific agent Ginger Knowlton (who is owed thanks for much more than being a reader), and, perhaps most importantly, Jennifer Richard Jacobson, whose early suggestions had a significant effect upon this novel's structure.

For fellowship and laughter along the way, my thanks go to: Sarah Aronson, Toni Buzzeo, A. M. Jenkins, Jacqueline Briggs Martin, and Tanya Lee Stone.

As with all of my previous novels,
Extraordinary
was edited by Lauri Hornik. This time I want to thank Lauri especially for her trust in me. I have never yet figured out how I got so lucky.

Thanks also go in great heaps to the folks at Penguin and Puffin Books for their creative and imaginative efforts on behalf of my books. I appreciate it, and all of them, more than I can say.

 

And I will end by thanking my husband, Jim McCoy, for everything.

Keep reading for a glimpse of Nancy Werlin's bestselling novel

O
n the evening of Lucy Scarborough's seventh birthday, after the biggest party the neighborhood had seen since, well, Lucy's sixth birthday, Lucy got one last unexpected gift. It was a handwritten letter from her mother—her real mother, Miranda. It was not a birthday letter, or at least, not one in the usual sense. It was a letter from the past, written by Miranda to her daughter before Lucy was born, and it had been hidden in the hope that Lucy would find it in time for it to help her.

It would be many years, however, before Lucy would have a prayer of understanding this. It was typical of Miranda Scarborough's terrible luck that her daughter would discover much too early the letter she had left for her. At seven, Lucy barely knew of Miranda's existence and didn't miss even the idea of her, because she had a perfectly wonderful substitute mother, and father too. She did not even know that, once upon a time before she was born, her mother had slept for a few months in the same bedroom that today belonged to Lucy.

So, when Lucy found the hidden letter, she was not capable of recognizing who it was from or that it was a letter at all.

Lucy had been in the process of taking possession of the bottom shelf of the built-in bookcase in her bedroom. Previously, the shelf had been crammed tight with books belonging to her foster mother. “Overflow storage,” Soledad Markowitz called it. And recently, she had said to Lucy, “I stuffed my college books in there when we first moved into this house, when your bedroom was a spare room. One day soon I'll move them down to the basement office so you can have that space for your things.”

One day soon had not yet arrived, however, and so Lucy had decided to take care of it herself. Her birthday—although it had not included the longed-for present of a little black poodle puppy—had brought her many books, including
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
and a complete set of
The Chronicles of Narnia
, and she wanted to arrange them all perfectly to wait for the day when she would be old enough to read them by herself.

It was only after Lucy had gotten all of Soledad's books out of the bookshelf that she noticed the bottom shelf was not quite steady. A moment later, she discovered it could be lifted completely away to reveal three shallow inches of dusty, secret space between the bottom shelf and the floor.

At seventeen, rediscovering the secret space, Lucy would see what she did not see at seven: The nails that originally held the shelf in place had been painstakingly pried out. Then she would understand that Miranda had done this. But at seven, all Lucy knew or cared about was that she had found a secret compartment. An actual secret compartment!

Lucy leaned in to see better, and then felt around inside with both hands. The only thing she found, besides dust, was a sheaf of yellowing paper covered with tiny handwriting.

She pulled the pages out and fanned them in her hands. They were not very exciting to her, although the pages did have a ragged edge, as if they had been ripped out of a book, which was somewhat interesting. But the handwriting on the pages was faded, and it was also so small and cramped and tight that it would have been hard to read even if Lucy was accustomed to cursive. Which she wasn't.

She had a moment of frustration. Why couldn't whoever had written the words on the pages have typed them on a computer and printed them out, like a sensible person?

Then she had an idea. It could be that the pages were really old. They might even be from before there were computers. Maybe the pages were ancient, and maybe also the words on them were magical spells. That would explain why they had been hidden. And it would mean that she had found a treasure in her secret compartment after all.

She wanted this to be true for good reason. If Lucy really did have a secret compartment, and magical spells, she already knew what she wanted to do with them.

In fact, it almost felt like an emergency.

Lucy sorted through her pile of birthday presents until she found the one from her oldest friend, Zach Greenfield, who lived next door. It was a Red Sox T-shirt that he had claimed, today at the party, to have bought for her with his own money. On the back, above the number eight, it said “Yastrzemski.” Every Red Sox fan in Boston knew the name, even if they weren't sure how to spell it. Lucy had been touched at first with the gift. Yaz was one of the players from the past that Zach just loved.

The problem was that the T-shirt was an adult medium, too big for Lucy to wear, which meant Zach wasn't really paying attention to her, only pretending to. Or even, possibly, that he had gotten it for himself (Zach wore his T-shirts large), and decided to give it to Lucy at the last minute, because he'd forgotten about her birthday.

Lucy, despite her willingness to believe in magic spells, was mostly a realistic child, so she believed this was probably the case. Lately, Zach had been busy with his other friends, the ones who were closer to his age, which was nine and a half. He had not played with Lucy much at all, and at school, he hardly even said hello.

Which hurt.

Filled with a sense of magical possibility, Lucy folded the T-shirt carefully and laid it down on the floor inside the secret compartment. Then she picked up the sheaf of pages with the cramped writing on them, and, by concentrating, managed to sound out a sentence located about halfway down the first page. The ink in which this sentence had been written was a little darker than the rest, as if the person writing had pressed down hard with the pen. Lucy decided that this sentence would be enough to start the magic. It would have to be, because she wasn't up to reading more. And, she told herself, it wasn't cheating to include only one sentence, because it wasn't as if it was a short sentence.

She read it out loud, softly, not sure she was pronouncing all the words correctly, and quite sure she didn't understand them.

“I look in the mirror now and see my mother and I am so afraid you will end like us: doomed, cursed ... all sorts of melodramatic, ridiculous, but true things.”

Saying the sentence out loud gave Lucy a distinctly unpleasant feeling. She had an impulse to call her foster parents to look at the pages and the secret compartment.

Everything would have been different if Lucy had done that.

Or possibly not.

She didn't, in the end. She wanted the magic too badly. Instead, Lucy added her own magic words: “Abracadabra! Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Yastrzemski!” She tucked the handwritten pages into a fold of the T-shirt inside the secret compartment. Then she put the shelf back in place on top, and arranged her new books on the shelf just as she had originally planned.

The magic spell would work, she knew it. Even if she had not said the words right, or had selected the wrong sentence to read out loud, the magical pages were inside the T-shirt, touching it, so they would do their job. Plus, she would be patient. She would not expect Zach to change back overnight. But once she was old enough to wear the T-shirt he had given her, Zach would remember to be her friend again.

She planned how she would check the magic compartment on her next birthday. She would try on the shirt. Maybe by then, she would be able to read the entire magical spell.

But by the time her eighth birthday arrived, Lucy had forgotten all about the secret compartment and the T-shirt, and about the mysterious papers with the faded, tight, urgent handwriting. She would be seventeen, and in deep trouble, before she remembered.

T
en minutes after the last class of the day, Lucy got a text message from her best friend, Sarah Hebert. “Need u,” it said.

“2 mins,” Lucy texted back. She sighed. Then she hefted her backpack and headed to the girls' locker room, where, she knew, Sarah would be. Nothing and nobody, not even Jeff Mundy, got in the way of track practice.

Because of course this problem of Sarah's would be about Jeff. Lucy had seen him at lunch period, leaning flirtatiously over an adorable freshman girl. Maybe this time Sarah would have had it with him for good. Lucy hoped so.

But still, it was delicate. And it wasn't like Lucy had a lot of experience to guide her friend with. Or any, really, if you didn't count Gray Spencer, which you couldn't, not yet, anyway. No, she didn't have experience, Lucy thought fiercely, but she did have years of understanding about who, exactly, Sarah was and what made her happy. And also, frankly, some basic common sense.

Which Sarah had totally lost.

Lucy found Sarah already changed and sitting on a bench by Lucy's locker. “Are you all right?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah. It's just—it's not Jeff, it's me. I'm the one with the problem.” Sarah made a little motion with her hand. “But now we have to go to practice.”

Lucy put an arm around her and squeezed. “There'll be plenty of time to talk later if you want.”

Sarah nodded and tried to smile.

Lucy turned to change. Then they walked out together toward the school's track, moving to the infield to stretch. Lucy's practice routine as a hurdler was different from Sarah's distance training, but they always did as much together as they could.

When they were side by side doing leg stretches, Sarah was finally able to talk. Lucy listened patiently to all of it, even the parts she'd heard many times before. But when Sarah said, “We both agreed from the start that we weren't serious and Jeff's right that it truly is my problem that I'm so jealous, not his, because he's not doing anything wrong,” Lucy couldn't help herself. She cut in.

“Sarah, please. It's not a problem that you want something more serious than Jeff does. There's nothing wrong with you that you want that! And there's also nothing wrong that he doesn't. Can't you see? It's just that you're fundamentally incompatible. You should just say so and move on.”

“But I don't want to move on! He's such fun and so smart and good-looking and I just love him and if I could only control the way I feel when—”

“Then be his friend. But that's it. For more, look around for somebody who's not going to hurt you all the time. Even if Jeff doesn't mean to hurt you, it's still pain, right?” Lucy grabbed one foot, and, standing on the other leg, pulled the foot behind her to stretch her quad muscles. She decided not to say that Jeff knew perfectly well he was hurting Sarah, and didn't care, so long as he got to do what he wanted to do, which included being with Sarah whenever he felt like it.