This Isn't What It Looks Like (17 page)

Well, not now, anyway. Back then I suppose it might have been nice if just one person had smiled at me. If a single solitary
individual had taken just the slightest bit of interest in that red-faced baby boy with the yellow snot running down his nose
and the heat rash on his toes.

You see, had someone taken just a little itty-bitty bit of interest, he or she might have discovered the little green pea,
hardened and blackened over time, lodged between the folds of my little baby thigh. It had stuck to my skin somehow and caused
a small but persistent pain, an icky-itchy-sticky-scratchy-pushy-pully feeling in my leg that never went away, day or night.

Call me the Princess and the Pea. Make fun of me all you like. But that pea bothered me for nearly a year. It was the reason
I was crying. Or the main one. Who knows what would have happened if some kindly person had thought to look into my thigh
and remove that pea the day it got stuck there. Who knows what a smiley, bouncy baby I would have become. All the smiling
and bouncing that would have been bestowed upon me.

Ah well, then I wouldn’t be the same person
now, would I? Our hard-luck knocks define us. Those peas in our thighs, they make us who we are.

But I digress from my digression.

Both my parents worked, and neither had time to take care of me. And yet, due to my incessant crying, they were unable to
find me a nanny who would stay more than a week. Some lasted less than an hour. One, memorably, quit after only a minute.
By the time my first birthday came around, there were no nannies or babysitters or even semi-responsible ten-year-olds left
within a hundred-mile radius who would put up with me.

And so the unthinkable happened: my parents were forced to take me along on my birthday dinner.

They should have known better.

While, as usual, my parents spoke nary a word to each other, my crying grew so loud at the restaurant that the waitress begged
my parents to let her take me into the kitchen.

Naturally, I only cried louder once she took me away from my parents. The waitress tried giving me all kinds of sugary, salty,
and otherwise unhealthy treats, but nothing would shut me up. Thinking maybe I needed a diaper change, she
rather roughly threw me onto the hard, cold, wet, stainless-steel kitchen counter and lifted my tender little baby legs. I
wailed and wailed, but lo and behold, she found what no one had found before:

the pea.

By now, however, it had been there so long that it had practically grown into my skin. It looked like some kind of blackish-bluish-brownish-greenish
wart—something you were more likely to find on a witch’s cheek than on a baby’s thigh—and it gripped into me so hard the waitress
even wondered if it wasn’t a sort of parasite or leech. Unable to remove it with her bare fingers, she searched desperately
for a lubricant, preferably industrial-strength.

Can you guess where this is going?

The nearest item within reach: a vat of mayonnaise the size of a smallish garbage can, just large enough, in other words,
to hold a baby.

In her defense, she sought only to dunk my lower body. But when my toes hit the cold mayonnaise, I started wriggling like
an eel. She simply couldn’t hold me. Once I fell in, there was no way to pull me out with her hands. I was far too slippery.

I waved and waved, I shook this way and that, but I only succeeded in sinking further. I coughed and sputtered, gasping for
air but sucking in mayonnaise. It went up my nose and got into my eyes. It filled my ears and got under my nails.

Soon I was entirely submerged in the chilly, slimy, smelly, gelatinous, high-caloric, cholesterol-raising, bacteria-collecting,
botulism-inducing, absolutely disgusting, and utterly gross white goo.

In only seconds, I would be no better than a tuna sandwich: drowned in mayonnaise.

Luckily, the sous chef happened to be working on his famous Thousand Island salad dressing at the time, and—thank the gods,
or rather, the Green Goddess—he needed an extra cup of mayo. Just as I was about to suffer the humiliating fate of a fish
stick, he reached in and gripped me by the neck with his salad tongs.

While I wriggled in the air, crying like a newborn, the sous chef deftly squeezed the pea between his thumb and forefinger
and twisted hard. The pea snapped off of my thigh, leaving a red-raw circle about the size of a dime. (Just like twisting
the end off a string bean, the chef said.) It hurt, of course, but the relief was immediate.

I stopped crying and stared with fascination at
the object that had caused me so much pain and distress. Shrunken to the size of a peppercorn, it sat on the stainless-steel
counter, taunting me with its very smallness.

Perhaps because I felt a desire to vanquish my enemy in a dramatic fashion, or more likely just because it was there, I reached
for the pea and, before anyone could stop me, I did what babies do: I swallowed it.

That’s when I started crying again. Not because the pea bothered my stomach, but because, free of other distractions, I noticed
I was still covered with that slimy white substance I’d nearly drowned in. Sensing my discomfort, the sous chef hastily wiped
it off. Then he handed me over to the grateful waitress and went back to work.

Now I don’t want to brag, but everybody complimented him on his salad dressing that evening. It seems I added a certain piquant
je ne sais quoi
to the flavor—not to mention a certain yellowness to the color—that only a baby can provide.
^*

Ever since then, I have felt a warm affinity for sous chefs—and a morbid fear of mayonnaise.

C
ass wasn’t sure she’d heard the Jester correctly.

“Really? You don’t know the Secret?”

“I promise, I don’t know the Secret. I have never heard of the Secret,” said the Jester. “
You
are the invisible girl.
You
are the time traveler.
You
are the only secret I know. I should be asking
you
for the Secret.”

Yes, unfortunately, she’d heard him correctly.

She was crestfallen. Here she’d come so far to ask him the question, and he didn’t know the answer. He seemed barely to understand
the question. Her mission was a failure. Beyond that, her role in the Terces Society—her whole purpose in life—would now be
in jeopardy. How could she be the Secret Keeper if she had no secret to keep?

She glanced around the woods, as if the Secret might be hidden behind a tree. But she saw nothing more illuminating than a
pinecone sitting on a rock.

“But what about the Terces Society?” she persisted. “You’re the founder of the Terces Society. And the whole point of the
Terces Society is to protect the Secret. It’s the secret society of the Secret!”

“Sorry, I know nothing of any secret society. If I am the founder, I have not founded it yet.”

“Well, what about my parents? Who are they?” asked Cass, increasingly desperate. “At least you must know that. I came all
this way to find out who I am. I thought you knew. All I know is I’m supposed to be the Secret Keeper.”

“If you come from the future, how could I know who your parents are? You haven’t been born yet,” said the Jester with indisputable
logic. “You make no sense—even a fool like me can see that!”

“You’re serious, you don’t know anything? I don’t understand—”

The Jester shook his head, muttering. “Either you are not here, after all, and I am nothing but a madman talking to the wind.
Or you have been sent on purpose to make me go mad. It is the same either way.”

Cass slumped against a tree trunk. “I can’t believe I came all this way for nothing! What am I supposed to do now?” She tried
to choke back a sob, but failed.

“Oh, it can’t be so bad as that,” said the Jester. The sound of her crying had shaken him. “Where are you? Give me your hand
so I may pat your head.”

Reluctantly, Cass nudged him on the arm.

“Oh, there you are—you can’t keep moving around like that! It’s disorienting. Now, there, there—”

He patted her invisible head as promised. “How
is that? I have not much experience comforting little children. Only making them laugh until they get tired and cross. When
they start to cry I send them away—’tis bad for business.”

“I’m not a little child, but you’re doing fine,” said Cass, sniffling.

“Here’s an idea,” said the Jester. “Are you sure it is not another jester you are looking for? I hear the King of France has
a very funny fellow in his employ.” His face clouded. “And that lucky dog still has a job!”

Cass shook her head. “No, it’s you. We’ve met before. I mean, I think we have. But it was different, you were older, some
of the time, anyway….”

“Ah, well, that explains it, then,” said the Jester, brightening. “You’ve simply come back in time too far, that is all. It
may be that I will discover the Secret tomorrow, or next year, or not until I am an old man. And this society of yours may
not arise for many moons after that. You just have to go home, then come back again—to my future!”

“I’m not sure I can do that,” said Cass sadly. “I don’t even know if I can go home in the first place.”

Home. She wanted to go home now. Desperately. Even if she was going home empty-handed. There was no sense delaying any longer.
It would only make the disappointment worse.

But how? How was she supposed to go home?

She was depending on Max-Ernest to bring her back, but shouldn’t he have done it by now? He’d made the antidote before. How
hard could it be to make it again? Or had it not really been that long?

How much time had passed in her own world since she’d left? She had no way of knowing whether it had been seconds or minutes
or hours or years. In her real life, she could be ninety years old by now, for all she knew. Her friends and family might
all be dead. She might not recognize her own home—or even her own self.

Max-Ernest had warned her there might be a problem like that. Why hadn’t she listened? She, not the Jester, was the true fool.

By the time they heard the barking it was too late.

The regal beagles, roused from their velvet pillows and made for once to work for their roast beef, had sniffed out the bandits’
trail and had led the King’s soldiers directly to the campsite. The bandits had been taken by surprise—the man on watch had
been drunk on mead, Cass gathered from Anastasia’s cursing—and they were outnumbered.
^*

Now the camp was surrounded, and all the bandits
had bayonets at their backs. The regal beagles circled watchfully, as if they were herding sheep.

Only the Jester and Cass, about forty feet from the camp, remained free, unseen by the soldiers and as yet unsniffed by the
beagles.

“How proud you must feel, hounds, catching your prize fox!” cried Anastasia. (By
hounds
, mind you, she referred not to the beagles but to the soldiers.) As scornful as ever, she seemed oblivious to the fact that
her throat could be cut at any second. Cass couldn’t help admiring Anastasia’s bravery under pressure. “I see the King needed
only to send one hundred of his best men to capture ten thieves! And you call yourselves soldiers?”

“Soldiers, yes, and trained killers each of us. Tell us where the treasure is and we will make your deaths quick and easy,”
declared a rather pompous soldier with thick gold braiding on his uniform and beads of sweat on his brow, clearly the Commander.
“And if you lead us to that two-foot-tall dung heap they call the homunculus, we may even spare one or two of you. Lord Pharaoh
has offered a big reward for his little monster.”

“Come on,” the Jester whispered urgently. “Let’s get out of here before they see us.” He nodded in the
direction of the nearest soldier, who was shifting on his feet, perilously close to turning around. “Or smell us—” The Jester
nodded toward the beagles, who were sniffing the ground suspiciously, as if they were just then catching the scent of a renegade
jester and an invisible girl.

“What do you mean—we can’t just leave them!” Cass sputtered.

“Easy for you to say—you’re invisible.”

“But that’s just… wrong.”

“Why? Did not the Bandit Queen command me to leave? I am but following her orders.”

“Yeah, but she freed us from the dungeon, remember? And she gave us her horse. We owe her our lives!”

“
Lent
us the horse, you mean, and very grudgingly, I might add.”

“I kind of thought you liked her.”

“Liked her?”

“Yeah, you know,
like
liked,” said Cass, automatically raising her eyebrows to make the point, even though the Jester couldn’t see them. (Having
a conversation when you’re invisible is like talking to a blind person; you have to communicate everything with your voice.)

“
Like
liked? What does that mean—that I like
her twice? But I don’t like her even once—I
loathe
her thrice!” protested the Jester, but he made no further movement toward leaving. It was clear Cass’s words had had their
intended effect.

“OK, you go stall them,” she said, going into the operations mode she had practiced so often with Max-Ernest and the Terces
Society. “I’ll try and see if I can untie anybody.”