The Colors of Madeleine 01: Corner of White (19 page)

Jack leaned back and looked at the crescent moon, so Madeleine did too. They were sitting side by side.

From inside the flat, they could hear Madeleine’s mother sewing and watching her quiz show. Only, she was not calling out any answers.

“It never gets personal,” Jack continued. “Unless saying, ‘I hate your guts and I wish you would die in a pool of maggot blood’ is personal.”

He paused, sighed, and added, “Which I don’t think it is.”

Madeleine considered this.

“So the thing is,” Jack finished, “the way she’s been around you lately — it’s not you, it’s just our thing. Or anyway, Belle’s thing. She flares up sometimes.”

They watched the stars.

“Well,” said Madeleine eventually, “a flare is what people send up into the sky when they’re in trouble.”

“That’s true.”

“So maybe it’s her way of saying she’s in trouble?”

“Could be.”

“Only,” said Madeleine, and now she glanced sideways at Jack, “if you’re in the way of a flare, you could end up getting burned.”

“I guess,” agreed Jack. “I don’t really know the true nature of a flare.”

“I think it might be made out of fire.”

They were both smiling a little — glinting at each other — and they were speaking in odd, lilting voices. As if they were playing at wisdom, or at psychology, even though they half meant what they said.

“So you’ve got,” said Madeleine, “to be careful.”

Jack leaned over and kissed her.

His hands were in his pockets, her hands were in her pockets. Their heads turned sideways and the angles were perfect. Then he took out one hand and put it on the back of her head.

To Madeleine, the whole thing was startling. For one thing, she’d never kissed a boy before. She always
acted
like she’d kissed boys, so her first thought was that she had to maintain the illusion. She couldn’t let Jack know she was a beginner.

Her second thought was that his lips were kind of like snails, exactly like the texture of a pair of snails (only without their shells). That was a shock. She’d always thought boys’ lips would be like caramel.

After a moment more, though, they stopped being like snails and started to feel softer and more interesting.

Around then, the kiss ended. They stayed close for a minute, looking at each other.

It was suspenseful. She didn’t know what you were supposed to do.

“Well, you see,” Jack said eventually — chattily, “it was those three problems. For one of mine I wrote,
I want to kiss Madeleine.
Then I wrote:
Kiss her, then.
So I had to.”

“Uh-huh.” Madeleine nodded.

“It was, like, part of an assignment or something.”

Madeleine nodded again, more slowly, making him smile. He stroked her face with the side of his hand, but one of his fingernails caught the skin of her cheek and scratched her, just slightly. It felt good, though, the scratch, like the edge of a tiny star.

“Also,” continued Jack, “it said in my horoscope that I had to do the thing I’ve been afraid of, and
yours
said somebody close would surprise you. What else could that mean? I had to do it.”

“Practically compulsory,” Madeleine agreed.

“And we both had our hands in our pockets….” He shrugged, and added, “I won’t do it again, though.”

“Why not?” she said.

Surely that couldn’t be the end of her first kiss? It seemed sort of pointless, to do that once without doing it again.

When she’d learnt to ice-skate, as a very small child, it had been strange at first. So slippery and awkward! But there’d also been a faint sense that this could turn out to be great.

Kissing seemed exactly the same.

So she kissed Jack herself, taking her hands from her pockets and crossing them together around the back of his head, looping her fingers through his hair. That felt sophisticated. Also, his hair was soft, thick, and coarse all at once; and even better was the sense of him shifting, murmuring, some echo from behind the kiss.

It was part of the same singing in her heart, was what it was.

It was part of the same truth. That all of this — Cambridge, Jack, Belle, the teachers, this flat, this roof, this sky — it was all just an interlude. A game!

So it might as well be fun.

6.

I
n a way he was still falling, still flying over the fence, his hand around that warm glass jar, still falling.

A festive hospital room, crowded with overlapping talk. They had lost the deftball championship, they were all too excited. The Butterfly Child right here in Bonfire! Turned out that Elliot had a concussion and a dislocated shoulder and a fractured ankle!
How
had he driven the truck to the game in that condition? A red wooden house walked right through the door into the hospital room. Elliot kept falling. They’d all been drinking GC teakwater at the after-party, and doesn’t it go to your head?! The red wooden house moved across the room and settled on the bedside table. It was a spiral fracture of the fibula, but the doctor said she thought she wouldn’t operate; she’d just now put it in a cast. Cody spoke: “I wasn’t
serious
, Elliot, when I asked for you all to break some bones,” and someone else: “He’s too obliging is the trouble, is that Elliot.” Then there was his mother’s voice, somewhere across the room: “What sort of extra damage did you do anyhow, pushing your foot down on the clutch to change
gears
, is what I want to know?”

So they were back to him driving the truck, but Elliot was still falling. Cody was telling Shelby what he planned to paint on Elliot’s cast and how he’d redo Shelby’s to match it. Shelby said she was just about ready to take her own cast off with a chain saw. Never mind the truck, how did Elliot even get up from the ground and open the lid to let the Butterfly Child breathe, is what they wanted to know, what with all his injuries? Ah, he’s a tough one, isn’t he? It goes to show what adrenaline can do. And did you see when Jimmy popped his shoulder back in,
how Elliot went so pale! In all her life, said his mother, she’d never seen him look so
white
. And did anybody notice how, once the shoulder was back in, Jimmy glanced down at the ankle, and the words slipped off the edge of the microphone, and what did Jimmy say?

A faint sound like a low-down whistle was running through Elliot’s head. Maybe the sound of a train leaving without him. Nobody paid it any attention; they were all still reciting the events of the day.

“What the heck have you gone and done to yourself, Elliot?” Jimmy had said — or something like that, but mostly those words had been lost. He’d beckoned the doctor over, the ambulance came and went, and everything had tumbled into jubilation.

Then the deftball finals had begun.

Nobody could concentrate, it was nearly hysterical out there — nobody except for the Horatio Muttonbirds, of course, who concentrated fine — and anyway, Bonfire’s best player was in the hospital! So. They didn’t win, but there’ll be other championships, and there’s just
one
Butterfly Child! Right here in Bonfire! The Mayor gave them the party with the GC teakwater, even though they lost, and now everybody’s planning. The whole town’s planning more parties, and what they’ll do with the surplus crops, and how they’ll have to put on extra markets and contractors, and how they might end up exporting to other Kingdoms!

Because look at her, look at that sweet Butterfly Child. Look at her sleeping in an empty tissue box on the shelf just above Elliot’s head. Alongside the chart that says his blood pressure and so on. She looks more like a teenage girl than a child, though, doesn’t she, let’s say a teenage girl could be shrunk to the size of a cork.

Corrie-Lynn was opening the front of the red wooden house. It was the doll’s house she’d built: She’d brought it into the hospital room and placed it on the bedside table. Now she gently scooped up the Butterfly Child from the tissue box, and there was quiet while she lifted her across to the doll’s house, and positioned her, still sleeping, on a tiny wooden bed lined with a handkerchief.

Then they were talking again, about how much pain he was in, poor Elliot, and what a hero he was, and he was falling through it all, but through the fall he found a way to speak.

“But I’ve gotta get the train in the morning,” he said. “Train to the Magical North,” and the room laughed.

“Not a chance,” they said, and he kind of knew that anyway, so he gave back his half smile. He said, “Well, as soon as it’s better, I’ll be taking the train. How long does a broken ankle take to heal?” and there was quiet.

Someone ventured: “You won’t be able to put any weight on that ankle awhile.” Someone else: “When my cousin broke his ankle it took eight weeks to heal.” And: “We’ll ask the doctor when she’s back.”

He was falling faster: Eight weeks was too long. A plummet toward the ground.

“Ah,” he said. “I’ll get crutches. I can take the train on crutches.”

Then Corrie-Lynn, standing alongside the doll’s house, right by Elliot’s bed, spoke in a big, clear voice.

“You can’t go, Elliot,” she said, and she swung her elbow sideways, indicating the doll’s house. “The person that finds the Butterfly Child? He’s got to stay and take care of her for as long as she’s around. And that could be a year, maybe two. Did you not know?”

His head cracked hard against the dirt.

7.

T
wo weeks later, Petra Baranski watched from the porch as a pickup truck pulled into her driveway.

Elliot negotiated his way out of the passenger door. He grabbed his crutches from the back of the truck and gave Kala a thumbs-up to say thanks. Then he waited, leaning on the crutches, while she reversed, gunned it down the driveway, and was gone.

It was summer again in Bonfire, but a good sort of summer — long days, balmy nights, breezes that touched your shoulder blades just when you needed them. The celebrations had quieted and everyone was waiting. So far, no sign of any change in the crops, but it can be weeks, people said, before a Butterfly Child takes effect.

Petra had been doing paperwork at the porch table, and now she straightened the edges of papers while Elliot got himself up the porch steps. Five or six butterflies were lined along the porch railings, and a dragonfly was hovering above Petra’s pen. She waved it away gently.

Elliot stopped beside his mother and pressed his forehead against the window to look inside.

The doll’s house was on the sideboard in the living room.

“She gone out?” he said.

“Sleeping. How was school?”

“She sure does sleep a lot.” He rested the crutches against the wall of the house and sat down, breathing in the quiet afternoon. There was a smile about him, a spark in his eye, and Petra waited, watching his face.

Then he took an envelope from his pocket and set it on the table.

“Elliot Baranski,”
said the envelope in bright red marker. There were fat quote marks around his name like little balloons.

Petra raised an eyebrow.

“From Cody’s sculpture,” he said, his smile open now. “I’d forgotten all about it, but I was walking by today, so I looked, and there it was.”

“A letter from the Girl-in-the-World!” exclaimed Petra. “Did she get
your
letter? Is she answering you?!” Then she quieted. “Nobody saw you? You didn’t tell Kala or any of the others, did you? I looked it
up the other day, and turns out the penalty for not reporting a crack is banishment to the Undisclosed Province, or even
death
. It’s kind of hard to believe in this day and age, but still.”

Elliot shrugged. “That must be an old law. Wouldn’t be enforced anymore. Read the letter.” He leaned back, closing his eyes.

His mother opened the envelope and read.

Petra finished reading and widened her eyes, and they both laughed.

“I don’t know where to start,” said Petra through her laughter. “Honey, she’s
critiquing
your existence. She thinks Cello is —”

“I know.” Elliot picked up the empty envelope and balanced it on the palm of his hand. “She seems harmless enough, I guess, this
M.T.
” They both laughed again.

“Now, what do you think?” Petra shook her head thoughtfully. “Has the World forgotten about Cello? Or is this girl just ignorant? Will you write back to her?”

“Well …” Elliot put his hands behind his head, looking out over the fields. There was still that grin at the edge of his mouth. “It seems to me that if I do start up a correspondence, it’ll just end up as a whole lot of me trying to persuade her that I’m real. Which could get —”

“Tiresome,” his mother agreed.

She reached over, across the table, to brush the hair out of his eyes, and there it was beneath her fingertips — the faintly damp forehead, the sun-warmed hair, the sweet, complex realness of her son.

But later that night, he did write a reply.

He’d finished his homework; the Butterfly Child was still asleep; and there was a pecan pie baking in the oven, which he planned to give to Kala the next day.

“Don’t go baking her pecan pies,” scolded his mother. “She’ll just fall for you harder than she has.”

Elliot wasn’t listening. His ankle was playing up. Taking all his attention.

“Ah,” he said eventually. “She’s driving me to and from school every day. Least I can do is bake a pie.”

Then, because he couldn’t run across the fields to the greenhouse, or play deftball, or pack his rucksack for a journey north, he sat down and wrote.