Page 29 of In an Absent Dream

Lundy smiled. “So let’s find out.”

***

THE EXAMSwere easier than Lundy had feared. Either her halting patchwork education in the Archivist’s shack had been more extensive than she’d realized, or the schools of this world were woefully unchallenging for their students. Whatever the explanation, she passed them all, save for the history exam—and as her father had been expecting that, she was already set to be nestled snugly in the bosom of the remedial history class, where her lack of knowledge about current and past events wasn’t as likely to trip her up.

Monday morning, she found herself bundled into the back of her father’s car, belted in next to Diana, who was fiddling with her slide rule. She didn’t object to the seating arrangement. She had never, in all her life, been allowed to ride up front, which was a privilege reserved for adults and older brothers. It would have seemed too strange to be seated there now. It would have seemed like she was claiming an adulthood she didn’t really want.

The school, which was dauntingly, terrifyingly full of bodies—other students, some of whom remembered her as “Katie from my second-grade class,” more of whom remembered her as “that girl who disappeared,” and most of whom didn’t remember her at all; teachers who’d been told to treat her gently after her recent, if fictional, illness—and hallways and classrooms, all of which seemed to be the wrong one.

But there were also books, and lessons, and rules. Rules she could learn and, after learning, follow. Diana was still at their father’s school, enduring the scorn of students who didn’t want to be seen with the principal’s daughter, but here, at high school, Lundy could finally move among her peers without being singled out. She was another student, strange, unfamiliar, but one of them. Ordinary. Normal.

She had been extraordinary as a child, when she had too much authority hanging around her solitary shoulders, and extraordinary in the Market, where she was a summer person and a quester and the girl who’d helped to slay the Wasp Queen, who’d fought for the safety of their borders even before she was a citizen. Ordinary was a novel experience for her. In what felt like the blink of an eye, she had been attending school for weeks, learning her lessons and the nature of her peers, finding the rules that bound them as well as the rules that bound her education.

At the same time, she was learning her sister.

Let us speak, for a moment, on the matter of sisters. They can be enemies to fight or companions to lean upon: they can, at times, be strangers. They are not required to be friends, or to have involvement in one another’s lives, or to be anything more than strangers united by the circumstances of their birth. Still, there is a magic in the word “sister,” a magic which speaks of shared roots and hence shared branches, of a certain ease that is always to be pursued, if not always to be found.

Even more adroitly than she studied her lessons and the rules of this familiar, suddenly strange world, Lundy studied her sister.

Diana didn’t care much for reading, but she had a deft hand with a pencil, and her pastel drawings were years ahead of anyone else in her class. She liked to ride her bicycle, and had chafed for years under restrictions that hadn’t existed when Lundy was a child—restrictions she suspected were her fault. Diana had a sweet tooth, didn’t enjoy beets, loved to paint her toenails brighter red than her father approved of, and did the dishes without complaining, but hated to wash the windows. She was aperson. Lundy supposed she always had been. It was just the difference in their ages that had kept her from seeing it before.

More importantly, Lundy liked her. Diana was blunt and funny and pointed when she needed to be; she reminded Lundy of Mockery, only younger, and still alive, and gloriouslyhere. She planned to be an artist, to travel the world and see her work hanging in the finest galleries, in the most prestigious museums.

Her face had fallen after the first time she’d admitted her goals, and the look she’d given Lundy had been half love and half loathing.

“I guess that won’t happen, though,” she’d said. “Once your year’s up, you’re gone, and I’m back under lock and key.”

“Sixteen isn’t eighteen,” Lundy had replied. “They’ll understand.”

And they did, that was the beauty of it: when her year ran out and she went looking for the door she knew was there, she found the Archivist and Moon waiting for her at the portal’s end. Moon was smiling when Lundy stepped through. Then she looked at Lundy’s clothes—clean and tight and ill-suited for running through the trees—and her empty hands, and her smile dimmed, and died.

“Oh,” she said, softly. “Sothat’show it’s going to be.” She handed Lundy the pie she’d been holding, and turned, and walked away.

Lundy, stunned into silence, watched her go. Only when Moon was out of sight did she look to the Archivist, and say, “Her eyes. They’re almost brown.”

“She’s giving and getting fair value, every day,” said the Archivist. She looked carefully at Lundy. “Sixteen years. Are you here for good?”

Lundy looked down at the pie in her hands. “My sister’s birthday is next week,” she said. “I promised her I’d come to the party. But I’ll come back afterward.”

“Oh, child.” The Archivist reached out and touched her cheek, gentle as a whisper, so far from her mother’s slap. “There will always be a birthday. There will always be a holiday, or a funeral, or a birth. If you delay, you can delay yourself right over the edge of being sure.”

“Iamsure,” Lundy protested. “I just need a little more time.”

“Good,” said the Archivist. “There is only a little time left.”

Lundy turned and walked back into the passage. The Archivist, who had seen this all before, watched her go.

15

FAIR VALUE

IT CANbe easy, when hearing about someone else’s adventures in a far-off, magical land, to say “I would never choose the mundane world over the fantastical. I would run into rivers of rainbow as fast as my legs would carry me, and I would never once look back.” It is so often easy, when one has the luxury of being sure a thing will never happen, to be equally sure of one’s answers. Reality, it must sadly be said, has a way of complicating things, even things we might believe could never be that complicated.

Lundy returned to her family. Celebrated her sister’s birthday. Her mother, whose eyes had lost some of their hollowness, baked a lemon cake, as she had so very long ago, when Diana had been a dream inside her stomach, and Lundy had been a quiet, reserved reality.

Daniel came home on leave from the Army. He stared at Lundy like she was some sort of miracle, and when he asked her if she’d be there when he came home for Christmas, she answered “yes,” before she could think twice.

Her seventeenth birthday came and went in a flurry of gifts and cards, in an increasing warmth that seemed to sweep through the house as every day took them further from the time when she had been a phantom, and not a figure.

---