“One’s missing.”
Jeremy gave the books a quick, almost cursory glance and said, “The Silver Chair.”
She laughed. “You know them all?”
“C. S. Lewis wrote those books in Oxford. I was born in Oxford. My parents met while students at Oxford. I lived in Oxford. I went to Oxford. So yeah, I know them all,” he said as if annoyed that she even questioned his deep ancestral knowledge of Narnia. “What’s this?”
He opened a folded sheet of poster board covered with pictures Shannon had cut out of magazines. A page of fairies and elves. A page of tigers and wildcats. Doors without walls, freestanding in strange deserts. Giants. Goblins. Queens and princesses and knights and archers and girls with swords. Valkyries. Lost boys. Smoke-colored foxes. Dragon boats on rainbow rivers.
On the top of the page, it read in a girl’s looping print, WHERE I WILL BE IN TEN YEARS.
“Guidance counselor project, I think. He wrote on the back that she was supposed to do a collage of what she wanted to be doing for a job in ten years,” Emilie said. “Not make up a fairy world to live in. He gave her a B− for not understanding the assignment. Jerk.”
It appeared she’d tried to do it the “right” way and had quickly given up on that. In the bottom corner of the page was a pencil drawing of a teeny tiny girl sitting at a desk. Wouldn’t anyone rather be a queen than have a desk job?
“She understood the assignment,” Jeremy said, more to himself than her. He ran his fingers across the magazine pictures—the strange mossy forests, the fairy circles, the mythic animals—almost tenderly, like they were family photos and not some kid’s old homework.
“Check this out.” Emilie pulled out a sheet of paper. “She did get an A on this one in English class.” The Nobody Queen By Shannon K. Yates
Once upon a time, in a world unseen.
A nobody girl became the queen
Of a land of magic so wild and airy
Full of giants and tigers, ghosts and fairies
Wizards and wolves, battles and glories
Told in unicorn songs and old crow stories.
Fierce girls with swords and princes and knights
Went on brave quests, turned wrongs into rights.
They searched for a princess. At last, she was found.
The loneliest princess, lost and then crowned.
So that’s the whole truth and most of the lore
Of the nobody queen, nobody no more.
“Straight As,” Emilie said. “Writing poetry. Won awards. Was in the school play. Who knows what she could’ve done with her life, what she could’ve been? Then one day a monster picks her at random, and the whole story of her life is just…lost. Forever.”
Jeremy didn’t seem to be listening. He read the poem again, looked at the pictures on the collage, tore through the box looking for more.
“Is there anything else?”
“They never found her backpack, so that’s it. You okay?”
He set the box down again.
“Sorry. Having a mild mental breakdown. Ignore me.”
Suddenly, Jeremy sat up straight and ran his hands through his hair, slicking it back. He breathed through his fingers, eyes red like he was trying not to cry.
“Jeremy?”
His head fell back and he laughed. He laughed like he’d won the lottery, or better, like he’d won the heart of his true love. Or even better than that, he laughed like the doctor had said they’d made a mistake, and he would live a good long life after all. She’d never heard a more beautiful laugh.
In a flash, so fast she gasped, he grabbed her hand, looked up, and met her eyes.
“Thank you,” he said. He wasn’t laughing anymore.
“For what?”
“For finding me,” he said.
“Okay, you’re scaring me again.”
“Good.”
“Good. What does that even mean?”
“I mean, there’s no bringing her here. We go to her.”
“So she is alive? Can you tell me that much?”
