The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (9 page)

Smiling is very complicated. Scowling is better but you are not allowed to do it except in private.

Mothers and Fathers have certain Words of Power that cannot be denied. So far, I have collected: Go to Bed! Go Play Outside! You Must Have Your Bath! Eat Your Vegetables! There may be others.

I am not a troll.

I am also not a wombat.

Also I am not a saber-toothed tiger or an ogre or a Wizard.

I am a saber-toothed ogretroll wombat Wizard SO THERE.

I will understand everything when I am Grown-Up. A Grown-Up is a Person Taller Than Me.

The phonograph is off-limits.

Father's office is off-limits.

The cabinets are off-limits, even though there is candy inside.

If something is good, it is off-limits.

I am to Do What I Am Told.

There is no such thing as magic.

Some things are alive and some things aren't but it is hard to tell right away sometimes.

Boys wear trousers and girls wear dresses and I am not allowed to wear a dress even though trousers itch and do not come in very many colors.

In the Nation of Learmont Arms Apartments (Apt. #7), children are taken away from their parents at the age of six and sent to a castle on a hill and this is called the Kingdom of School and if I cry any more about it I shall have no supper.

Thomas's hand trembled a little over the last law. He looked out his darkened window, where a moon as big as the one on Inspector Balloon's cover looked down, examining him with its huge white detective's glass.

*   *   *

And so it came to be that only a little while after taking Inspector Balloon into his confidence, Thomas Rood stood at the iron gates of a wily, dark, enchanted country. He stood bravely, armored to the teeth: On his feet he wore the great and powerful Golden Galoshes; upon his head the Long-Tailed Cap, stitched with protective sigils of polar bears and kangaroos to watch over him with foot and tooth. He sheathed his hands in the rare and precious Carnivorous Mittens, striped like a tiger's paws, complete with black wool claws. He donned his Troll's Mantle about his shoulders: one of his father's old beaten leather jackets that was far too big for little Thomas, hanging as long and billowy as a nightgown. Beneath it, the formidable Houndstooth Suit, which would, if he needed it, tear and bite at his enemies. For weapons he had his baseball and the Magic Pencil, the very one given to him by his own mother so long ago, nestled in the hoary depths of the Secretive Satchel.

Thomas had made himself ready, though his heart quailed within him. He longed to be in his home country—far-off and far-flung!—by his old hearthside with a bowl of soup and a song. The pleasures of home, which he had once disdained, now seemed the sweetest of all possible things. But they were lost to him now. Now was he an exile, a lonely creature on the borders of a foreign and perilous realm.

All around him, folk streamed in through the twisted gate. Giants with pockmarked faces, shrieking maidens with shining hair, and many not so different from him, weeping and gnashing their teeth and covering their faces with their own pitiful, clawless, non-carnivorous mittens. Thomas felt sorry for them.
We are all of us poor exiles,
he thought, though like many of his thoughts, he did not know why he should think of such an odd thing, or be so comfortable calling himself an exile, or even quite where he had learned that word.
I will protect you if I can.

Thomas had done all he could to prepare himself to enter the barbarian city. He could only hope it was enough. He looked up, through the whipping winds of Autumn and the wild cascade of blood-dark leaves spiraling through his vision. He read what had been writ—by what fell and ancient hand?—upon the gate.

PUBLIC SCHOOL 348

“You'll like school, darling,” Gwendolyn said sweetly, tucking the tail of his polar-bear-and-kangaroo hat into his coat.

“Shan't, though,” sniffed Thomas.

“There'll be lots of other nice children there, and a desk all your very own, and things to draw with and books to read. And Mrs. Wilkinson is a wonderful teacher. You'll come home all bright-eyed and full of stories.”

“Shan't,”
Thomas repeated. His eyes darkened and his eyebrows waggled. He leaned forward and clenched his fists, and this was Thomas Rood's traditional posture when he meant to deliver a Something Awfully. Gwendolyn had started calling his little tirades Something Awfullies—for it was always Something Awfully Important, or Something Awfully Funny, or Something Awfully Nice, or Something Awfully Wicked that he absolutely
must
tell her
right now
. Thomas never said anything plainly or patiently.

But Gwendolyn knew the signs. She pulled up her son's scarf over his mouth before he could get a breath up under the hundred balloons of his thoughts and bundled him off to that dreadful castle on a hill that grew windows and chimneys and doors the way a briar grows roses.

The boy took a shaky, freezing breath, clenched his fists, safe inside the Carnivorous Mittens, and stepped inside.

*   *   *

The Realm of 348 was divided, Thomas quickly observed, into several smaller districts. His new home was to be in the Underclassmen's Wing, Classroom 4. A thick carpet decorated with a pattern of tiny red flowers covered the ground beneath his feet. Thomas hunched down on his heels, scowling at them. Light as bright and harsh as white paint splashed over everything—the flowers, a herd of slick brown skinny-legged desks grazing in their petals, the shoulders of his coat, the heads of Other Children milling about in small packs. Crushed pencils and crayons and barrettes and hairpins and buttons and pennies and doll eyeballs and bits of someone's ancient lunch crunched underfoot. Pictures of letters and numbers hung on every wall like portraits of their ancestors. A papier-m
â
ch
é
model of the solar system spun, wrinkled and wired and garish, in one corner of the classroom.

Thomas did, indeed, have a desk of his own. He was introduced to it by Mrs. Wilkinson, who had curly hair and wore a necklace of little jade stones. Thomas knew they were jade; he knew the names of all the gemstones just the way I know the names of all my cousins. He looked down at his wooden desk and chair, the slick, brown, skinny-legged creature in the field of red flowers. It had scuffs on the wood and gum underneath it and some time ago someone had carved HUMPHREY! into the bottom-left corner with little lightning bolts around it.

“Hullo, Desk,” said Thomas softly. He was charmed to meet it. If something is all your own, you ought to treat it well, like a horse or a dog, and pet it and feed it and take it for walks. Or at least look after it better than Humphrey had. “How old are you, Desk? Have you seen many battles? What do you dream about at night when all the children have gone? Do you ever wish you were something other than a desk? What is your favorite thing to have written on you?”

“Mrs. Wilkinson! Tommy R's talking to his desk!” wailed one of the Others. Thomas was frightened of the Others. The Other Children his father was always wishing he could be. Normal Children. Nice Children. Other Children. This particular Other Child was a boy with yellow hair and glasses and a pen stain on his cheek. He was much bigger than Thomas. His voice wore a sneer like a cap with a feather in it. Thomas had seen him crying into his mother's skirt outside the school. The Other Children giggled nervously, staring at him while Pen-Stain pointed urgently.

“Mrs. Wilkinson! I
heard
him! He was
talking
to his
desk
! You ought to punish him!”

A little thrill went through the Others as they imagined the exciting shapes and colors of his punishment. But Mrs. Wilkinson seemed to be occupied with a little girl who had gotten her hair caught in a stapler and paid little attention to either of them. Pen-Stain, robbed of his chance to make it clear he was better than at least one other boy on the very first day, reddened in frustration. Then his embarrassment turned into a smile—but the kind of smile that shows sharp teeth.

“Fine,” he said gleefully. “
I'll
punish you, then. After school. Just you wait, freak-o. I'm gonna thump you.”

Mrs. Wilkinson suddenly noticed that her classroom had gone far too quiet for its own good and pealed forth with what was to become her battle cry:

“Settle down, children, settle down!”

Even though they were all quite settled, except for Pen-Stain.

Thomas did not pay much attention to his lessons that day. It hardly mattered, as Mrs. Wilkinson only seemed interested in how to make an
A
and what color was magenta and how to add one and one together. Thomas knew all that. Only that morning, he'd been reading a book full of big, violent illustrations of the Great Battles of Britain with quite a lot of magenta in it. At that moment, the Battle of Hastings came into his mind (he liked it best because it had a bull in one corner of the illustration looking on with a bewildered expression on its brown face. Thomas deeply preferred the bull to William the Conqueror). He wondered if School was a Kingdom like Britain or France. If classes were miniature Hastings and Waterloos. You march out in your best clothes and get hollered at and thumped on all day by knights bigger and better equipped than yourself, who talk roughly and angrily in languages not very much like yours, and if you are not very good, you get walloped and wake up French. Thomas did not know. He had not seen enough of the land yet. But he knew he had to be very good. The only question was: What did good mean in this bizarre country? Only when Mrs. Wilkinson began talking about addition and this many cherries and that many glasses of milk did Thomas notice someone staring at him. A girl at her own desk, her hands folded just the same as his, her eyes large and dark and mildly interested, like a bull who has just witnessed the Battle of Hastings and found it reasonably entertaining.

Beneath his desk, Thomas quietly wrote in Inspector Balloon, so that he would not forget what he had learned so far. The way the boy with the pen stain said
After School
made it sound like a savage, lawless country of its own. Who knew what Sense was Common in that mysterious place? After all, every Nation has its rules. Some are Neat and Prim and Well-Groomed through many years of constitutional congresses and revolutions and having their hair brushed one hundred times each night before bed. Others are Rude and Roaming and Reckless, having sprouted like raspberry thickets and taken root without watering, feeding, or filibustering. A Well-Groomed Law is written down, on very nice paper, preferably using a quill pen—for in the world of humans a pen with a feather attached has certain properties that undecorated ballpoints do not. Anything written with a quill becomes instantly splendid, official, and eternal. This is why clever senators, wedding officiants, and playwrights always keep one close by. A Rude and Roaming Rule is one that no one invented, or carved on stone plates, but that everyone knows, or learns on the double if they know what's good for them.

The Kingdoms of School and After School are full of untamed, unnamed, hungry-hearted rules waiting to pounce upon the unexpected. It was more important than ever to keep Inspector Balloon informed.

*   *   *

The boy with the pen stain, along with what seemed like the whole of the rest of Underclassmen's Wing, Classroom 4 and possibly some of Classroom 3, waited for Thomas beside the jungle gym, a twisted pile of metal girders towering like giants' jaws over the gray stone of the play yard. The Other Boy already had his fists up and looked very much as though he knew what to do with them, so Thomas copied his stance.
I'll be all right,
he thought.
I have my Troll's Mantle and my Carnivorous Mittens to protect me.
He tried not to think of that morning, when Gwendolyn had tucked his hair behind his ear and said gently:

“Darling, you do know that those aren't really tiger paws, don't you? Tell your mother you know that.”

He knew what she wanted, but he couldn't make his mouth do it. It was a just a bit of yarn, of course it was. He'd seen her knitting them over the summer. But Thomas couldn't, he just
couldn't
make himself not believe that they would not
become
claws and fur and sinew if only he wanted it hard enough, if only his need was great enough.

“I'm warning you,” Thomas whispered to the jungle gym as he brandished his fuzzy orange fists. He wasn't quite brave enough to say it to the crowd of children. “My paws have known the jungles of Sumatra.”

“What the devil is a Sumatra?” Pen-Stain boggled.

“It's a place far across the sea where there are tigers and coffee and—”

“Stop talking! I'm gonna hit you now! Hold still!”

The part of Thomas that was human, and thus heir to territorial orangutans and Hastings and Sumatran coffee and assorted other belligerencies, wanted very much to not hold still, but rather, punch the boy in the nose before he could get punched himself. But the part of him that was a troll, and thus heir to the gentlest of woolly mammoths (for they are the extremely-great-grandmothers of all trolls; mammoths, and igneous rock) and the most patient of mountains, knew how to do one thing better than anything else: talk to a thing that does not want to listen.

Thomas fixed the Other Boy with a solemn gaze. He lowered his fists a little—but not all the way. Thomas was not a fool. He made his eyes into deep, endless pools with soft stars in the mud of their bottoms. He didn't know why he could do that lately. He thought he had probably learned it from the glassy, unblinking button eyes of his scrap-yarn wombat. But when he did it, it made people stutter, and he liked that. It was like a magic spell:
Look into my eyes and I'll take your talk
. Thomas put on his best eyes and said in the very softest, kindest, most seductive of voices: