<- 6) Fencing with Fog ~0~
8) Skipping Stones -> The afternoon didn’t pass so much as it fizzled. Nobody really wanted to do anything much, least of all Leah, and since I was feeling every moment more like a tag-along little kid, trailing along behind her as we grabbed lunch and then proceeded to sit around was getting irritating. To top it all off, the fog had closed back in, and according to Leah, the best time to see the island was when there was natural light, so she flat-out refused to finish up the walking tour we had begun after breakfast. And, she claimed, there wasn’t much to do in the house - I suspected that she was avoiding her sisters, possibly her father as well. Or maybe there just wasn’t much for someone like me to do, I mused gloomily, picking at my sandwich. I’d pulled all the peppers off, then the spinach, and the mess on my plate didn’t look too much worse than when I’d started. Leah had wonderful taste in sandwiches, but when putting them together she lacked any sort of organization or order. And when she was angry… the completed sandwich had resembled nothing so much as frustration on rye bread.
“I thought you liked peppers.”
I did. I just wasn’t in a pepper mood. Banana peppers always left a slight, bitter heat on my tongue, and today definitely didn’t need to become any more bitter. The only thing that would burn my tongue more than the peppers was the bitter words that were hiding out in the back of my throat, the questions of why, the wondering whether or not it was my presence that had thrown the balance off of this beautiful, delicate world that Leah had for so many years called her own. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t noticed that Tess’ animosity towards her sister was also directed at me - was I an intruder in her word? And I had upset the cheerful balance that was Rhian as well, though it had taken quite a bit longer to do so. Too selfish to return her sister to her rightful place… True, Leah was my best friend. She was the closest thing to a sister that I had ever had. But Tess and Rhian had prior claim by some sixteen years. I felt like a spy, or a theif.
“I’m not really hungry.” It was only about eleven, but I suspected now that ‘getting lunch’ was an excuse for Leah to get out of the way of her sisters, rather than her occasional voracious appetite. If I hadn’t known how many calories her frequent bouts of flaunting her magical abilities burnt, I would have wondered where she put all the food.
Strangely, there was still more than half of her own sandwich left.
“Me either,” she said, putting her plate down abruptly.
Now we had nothing to do if we weren’t pretending to eat lunch. And, as happened occasionally when there was something rolling in my mind that I didn’t want to let out, I had nothing to say. And as always when my infrequent moods coincided with the moments when Leah, normally so talkative, withdrew into her thick-walled shell, we were at an impasse.
I stared out the window at the fog for a moment.
“I suppose we should stick these in the fridge or something,” I said, finally, as it was clear that neither of us were interested in our sandwiches anymore. Besides, cleaning up would kill about five minutes, and maybe I’d get an idea then. I felt like I was navigating a boat through the fog, without the benefit of a lighthouse or a compass, mired in that feeling of dissatisfaction that rose from the depths whenever I was stranded, as I so often was, in an unfamiliar place with no clear sense of purpose.
It’s strange that at that moment, I wasn’t exactly homesick. It’s hard, I think, to have a concrete sense of home when you never stay a full year in the same place, or at least hard to hold onto it when you’re confused and vaguely sad. The word ‘home’ could fit so many different places I’d lived - even if only for a few weeks - but the comfort of it vanished under the right circumstances, to be replaced by vague dreams of cicadas and a summer snow of cottonwood and dandelion, the lazy heat of a childhood summer were for once, my inability to see clearly where my future was headed wasn’t a problem. Things, my grandmother had believed, had a way of falling into place if you just did a little bit of work in the right direction.
“Yeah. I guess we’re not eating anymore.” Leah looked down at her plate without really seeing it, and I wondered just what thoughts were tumbling around in her mind that she didn’t want to escape at that moment. Maybe if I told her why things just weren’t working out, why she should spend this time with her family - selfishly, I wanted to stay with her, but the truth was that I’d been with her every day of the past two years, and blood ties were more important than an unlikely friendship.
Leah stood up and grabbed my plate from me with little ceremony. But she walked in the wrong direction.
“I thought the kitchen was that way.”
“Oh, it is,” she said, absently, “but my room’s closer. I put a spell in, years back, that’s more or less a good fridge substitute, at least for several hours. I never really got it right for long periods of time, but at least it doesn’t need to keep running all the time so that it doesn’t defrost.”
She was talking. And in multiple sentences, with a little bit of her show-off nature evident in the offhand way that she dropped tidbits of information about it. Whatever crept about the back of her mind had been firmly shoved back behind a door. Though perhaps not quite locked out.
“You made a fridge?” I asked, because something to be interested in was the best way to show doubts the door. We went down the stairs side by side.
“Well… yes, in essence. A cooler, really, since it doesn’t get that cold. Thermodynamics is a little more complicated than I knew at the time, so it’s less of a “keeps things cold” kind of spell than a “maintains the same temperature as before,” kind of spell. Nothing too unusual.”
I rolled my eyes at that, because Leah had to know that her use of magic to do whatever she wanted was ‘unusual’ by any definition of the word. She opened the door of her room for me, and cleared off a portion of her desk. Then she went hunting around the room for an object she didn’t even bother to describe, which turned out to be, when she smacked it down on top of the desk, a napkin.
Now, I knew better than to judge any object that Leah placed in front of me by its cover, but…
“A napkin?” I had to ask.
“Yup. I stuck the spell to it so I could carry it around.”
And as I watched incredulously, Leah tossed the napkin over the pair of plates. Nothing obvious happened, but she turned to me once more with the air of being ready to do something once again.
There was a knock on the door. Or rather, the doorframe, as we’d left the door open. Both of us turned around to see who was there. It wasn’t one of Leah’s sisters come to make up, nor was it her father.
“Do you still want to go out to the shed and help me pull things out of the void, Leah?” her mother asked, “Your father said you weren’t busy.”
Leah opened her mouth to say something, but I cut her off in an undertone.
“Go ahead, spend some time with your mom,” I said, smiling for her benefit, “I’m not exactly going anywhere, am I?”
I’m not sure if the look she gave me was one of gratitude, or if I simply couldn’t read her expression, but within a moment, she was gone, leaving me with my thoughts.
There were several times in my life that I had tried to figure out people, but all of them had proven inconclusive. Leah’s mind was as far beyond my reach as my mother’s had been, and puzzling over them made no difference. No, if I was going to understand, I was going to have to take the insights as they came. Meanwhile, I was going to have to get my own thoughts in order, and that required me finding something to do other than obsess over the details.
My feet, as if they had their own compass, lead me to the library.
Sometimes Leah teases me for relying so much on books, and for being able to get lost in them so easily, not to mention the fact that I had always liked fantasy books - ones that dealt with grand adventures in different times, with different types of magic, often beyond what any real mage could do. The heroes were always brave and chivalrous (and even if they weren’t, at first, they could be relied upon to later see their true character and make handsome amends to anyone that they had previously wronged,) and their companions on the quest were always true, not worried about inconsequential things like which one of them was the most popular or whatever incomprehensible drama rocked a high school on a daily basis. Most of all, books were stable. You always knew where you stood, with a book, and if you didn’t like it… well, you could close it. In a way, I suppose it was similar to how Leah saw the worlds we were eventually going to visit - stops along the way, places we could simply leave and close the door on when we were done.
It’s one thing to get lost in a book, another to get lost in a library. I didn’t go around sniffing books or anything, but the smell of a library is unlike any other. New books smell like ink - old books like dust and something else, depending on how they were bound and who has been reading them. And as I wandered down the shelves in the library, I realized how many different books were there.
Leather and cloth-bound books, paperbacks, hardcovers with bright jackets, some even with library stickers on the back, all piled up on the shelves, in an order that I couldn’t identify. There was definitely some order, though. And, when I picked up one of the paperbacks, there was definitely evidence of archival tape. I put the book back, laughing a little. One or more of the souls trapped on this island must once have loved books as much as I do, if they couldn’t bear the thought of even a little paperback like this suffering an untimely death because someone had opened the spine too far. I wouldn’t mind being visited by a literary ghost.
In the end, I searched the same way I would search any library - looking for promising titles and then flipping open to the first page to see if it was worth it. Predictable as my fantasy tastes might be, sometimes books are just duds.
When I had a stack that I had to steady with my chin, I had to remind myself that I was living in the same building as the library and had better call it quits for the time being. I wobbled with my pile over towards the window area, where I had seen some chairs, fully prepared to drown an afternoon in a book or two. I was in a mood to read something with dragons.
I narrowed in on my chair and barely made it there with the towering pile, collapsing into it with the topmost book, a paperback no thicker than my finger. The cover promised dragons, at least in the singular.
It was probably fifteen or twenty minutes - three chapters, give or take - that I looked up.
Normally, you could ring the fire alarm while I’m reading and I would hardly notice, but even though the book was amusing me, it wasn’t good enough, and I wasn’t relaxed enough, to have sunk quite that deeply into it.
Plus, Tess slams doors.
I looked right back down again. The predictable was always better than the confrontational, and Tess looked like she was going to blow a fuse. Of course, she more or less always looked like that, but if she thought she was coming to the library and going to contaminate it with all her petty frustrations - well, I was already here, and I wasn’t even going to acknowledge her.
That resolution lasted for exactly three pages. I listened quite hard as Tess, seemingly ignorant of my presence in one of the deep chairs, flung herself down on a couch and listlessly opened a book, one of the kind that I usually skimmed over. At least I wouldn’t have to share books with her. It was a very unkind thought, but I was not in a kind frame of mind, even though she appeared to be as uninterested in interacting with me as I was with her, and ended up with what was undoubtedly a textbook.
I managed another half a chapter, before the mysteries contained within paled in the face of those awaiting me outside of the book’s cover.
Now that I knew, more or less, what I was seeing, when I looked at someone without my glasses on, I tried not to do it very much. It seemed somewhat like spying on them, reading their diary, to me. At least, I tried not to do it on purpose; obviously, I caught glimpses of what people were like without the glasses, though the awkwardness of the conversation where I had finally told Leah that she was made of blue fire was not to be believed.
But at the same time, I was curious. There wasn’t really that much of a correlation that I could see between what a person looked like without my glasses and anything about them, but it was one of those things, like learning their middle name, that even though practically useless was still something you could know about them, maybe a way of marking in your own mind that you understood them better.
Besides, it wasn’t as if I were reading the whole diary. Merely opening it up to the first page.
I peered over the top of my book and twitched my glasses just a little lower on my nose.
From what her parents and her sister were like, I expected Tess to be something a little more concrete… perhaps not a ball of fire as bright as a star, or a gleaming set of armor, but definitely not what I saw.
Tess was made of a chain of silver snowflakes.
At least, that was the first impression that I got. The second was that she was made of a lot of tiny, glittery wire, hung with little glittering things, very brittle, like ice or glass, but at the same time they were changing, turning and shifting, like nothing so much as the currents in a stream. And for some reason, that told me less about her than the great big gob of blue fire told me about Leah.
I went back to reading. Or, more accurately, to looking at the pages while thinking. Maybe if I made an effort, it would help? After all, as unwelcoming as Tess had been, I hadn’t exactly reached out to her either.
The book ended up closed. Tess didn’t seem to notice - she hadn’t noticed me the whole time, but somehow that not-noticing seemed less hostile, and less deliberate, when it was because she was absorbed in a book. I guess I couldn’t hate someone who loved books that much, and I couldn’t even stay irritated with them that long.
After pretending to go and find another book - the one with the dragons had definitely turned out to be a dud - I moved myself and my stack over to the chair across from the couch, where Tess was reading with her thick book balanced on her knees, her eyes moving fast, only the occasional twitch of her fingers turning the page betraying the fact that she could move. Of course, as often as not, that twitch was nowhere near the page, which turned itself, but I hardly noticed that sort of thing anymore.
She looked up briefly when I sat down, and made a move to grab one of her other books - maybe to leave - but I didn’t even try to talk to her, just picked up a new book and used it as a good excuse. I listened hard, and the feet that had hit the floor returned to the couch as she decided that my presence wasn’t harming anything. I ended up taking my shoes off and tucking my feet up under me, and it was in that strangely companionable manner that we spent most of the afternoon.
At some point, after I had finished a particular chapter and was staring up into space, I was surprised to hear her ask me a question.
“Can you really see auras?” Tess asked, seemingly out of the blue.
I decided that the simplest answer would be the best. The things that I saw without my glasses were complicated enough without me making them any more complicated.
“Yes,” I said, “Though I didn’t know that they were called that until a little while ago.”
Tess regarded me intensely, and I twiddled my toes a little, uncomfortable. She dropped her gaze back to her book before she spoke again.
“Does everyone have one?” she asked.
I nodded. “Most people’s I can barely see,” I confessed, “Very faint - they’re blurry anyway without my glasses, but sometimes the color’s a little off, and that’s usually how I tell. It’s hard to see anything, really, unless someone happens to be a mage.” I shrugged. “I can see when people have written spells as well, and sometimes I can see when Leah does something, but… well, she’s pretty bright.” I wondered, belatedly, if the subject of Leah’s aura was a good one to be bringing up here, but Tess seemed not to have noticed.
“I only ask because I’ve been doing some research on it,” she said, twisting her fingers together, “For a theory. There are many theories on exactly what magic is, and none of them are satisfactory, because half of them contradict each other.” I nodded, even though I had absolutely no idea of what she was talking about, and she seemed to take that as all the encouragement she needed.
“Auras, for example,” she said, “some people think they’re a form of entropy, with the dismissal of some form of will or other non-physical energy, whereas other writers believed that they are the physical manifestation of the soul. Others have posited that the mage’s aura is where they store their magic, or that the aura can tell you about a person’s state of mind.”
“None of the auras I know well really change,” I volunteered, having understood the last bit. “I don’t know how it is with other people that can see them.”
She tilted her head. “Interesting.”
“It’s not just people that have them, either,” I continued. “Your house, for example - well, it’s blurry, but that’s my astigmatism, but it looks like one of those optical illusions - you know, like the one with the stairs that make a figure eight, where you can just keep climbing forever - with some sort of blotchy, random bits of color over it, kind of like those marble paintings kids make. You know, where you let a marble roll through a blob of paint and just keep rolling it around on a piece of paper in a pan.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why your house looks like that, that’s just what I see.”
“I wanted to know why you would roll a marble around in paint.”
I looked at her and she wasn’t joking. I’d forgotten that no one in Leah’s family had any conception of what it was to live a normal life. “Because it’s pretty and little kids think it’s fun,” I explained.
Solemnly, she nodded.
“So, why are you studying all these theories?” I asked, thinking that if this was a civil conversation, it was probably best to make it last as long as possible.
Tess began twisting her fingers together again. “I intend to continue researching it when I attend college,” she said, and the part of my brain that noticed rhymes noticed the similarity between intend and attend, though really there was no rhythm to her speech. That was probably why she sounded so… well, not comfortable, for one, but also just not like most people. It was something that I hadn’t noticed when she’d been talking to her sisters or parents, but maybe it was something to do with nerves, and it didn’t turn up when she was with her family.
I nodded encouragingly anyway. “Think you’ll be able to make all the theories match up?” I asked.
She looked so much like Leah when she looked at me that time. “If anyone can accomplish that, it’s me,” and for that moment, I believed her. “I’m actually working on a series of experiments…”
Years and years of being the new girl at school after school have made me a very accomplished listener. With a little bit of encouragement, Tess continued on for nearly a half an hour, at which point she had gone through a long and complicated explanation of some metaphysical theory that I didn’t understand, which trailed off into some sort of theoretical demonstration. After that, she clammed up and returned to her book, and both of us continued reading until the light faded into orange and Rhian popped in.
“Dinner’s ready,” she said, and then she saw us. “Well, I figured I’d find Tess in here,” she said to me, “I had no idea that you’d be here too.”
“I’ll eat when I’m hungry, Rhian,” Tess replied automatically, still looking at her book.
I looked between the two sisters for a moment. “I think,” I said, to no one in particular, “that there’s a metaphysical argument for feeding the body as well as the mind. Don’t you agree, Tess?”
She looked up at me in something approaching shock. Rhian seemed to be preparing for an explosion.
“Of course. I should have deduced that my sisters had already converted you into another nursemaid for me,” Tess said, though without any real bitterness in her tone. “I suppose if I must.”
Rhian looked from her to me and back again. Then, she apparently seemed to decide to quit while she was ahead, because all she said was, “Well, let’s go down then.”