Page 2 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

“No, ma’am. I don’t think anyone is.”

“That’s a terrible thing for a child to carry, but in this circumstance, it may be for the best. Investigations are disruptive, and bad for the educational environment. Can you tell me how you found us? What brought you here?” She’d paused then, making a space for Antsy to speak. Antsy had never needed anyone to make spaces for her. When she hadn’t been able to find them on her own, she had barged ahead and made them, whether or not people wanted her to. But in that moment, her head had gone empty, and her mouth had gone dry.

Everything she had to say was impossible. Everything she’d gone through was impossible. She was nine years old, with the body of someone on the high side of sixteen and the mind of… She didn’t even know how old her thoughts were, and she didn’t like to think about it. The idea that the Doors might have changed her mind while they were changing her body was too much to take, one more violation piled onto an endless tower that threatened to come crashing down and crush her flatter than anything. So when offered the opportunity to tell her story, she couldn’t decide how she was supposed to begin.

Finally, the silence had become too heavy, and Eleanor had begun to speak again. “When I was a little girl, some of my cousins used to talk about how I’d had an aunt none of us ever had the opportunity to know,” she’d said. “They didn’t know her name, and they didn’t know for sure whether she was an aunt or another cousin, one tied to the generation before ours, but her story was so delicious that they told it anyway. They said she had been willful and disobedient, that she had run away from her parents when she was meant to be doing the mending, run off to play in the woods like a wildthing. And someotherwild thing had come and snatched her away, so completely that they never found her, and that was why none of us were allowed to go to the woods alone, no matter how responsible or careful we were.

“Well, I didn’t care for hearing that one little bit, and so the next chance I was given, I snuck away to the woods—they were even nearer the house then than they are now, and they’re near enough to the house now that some of the rooms can be reached from the trees, if you’re the climbing kind. You look like you might be the climbing kind. Are you, Antsy?”

It was the sort of question that wasn’t intended to receive an answer, and so Antsy hadn’t given one, just kept looking at Eleanor in wide-eyed silence. Eleanor had smiled a little, like that was all the answer she could ever have asked for, and said, “I thought so. You’ll be able to be happy here, if you allow it. So off I snuck to the woods, brave and bold as only a seven-year-old on an adventure can be. She was me and I was her, and sometimes I remember her so vividly I expect to see her waiting in my mirror. I suppose we all feel that way, when we’ve gotten old. Into the shadows of the trees I went, with their stained-glass leaves and their branches like reaching hands. I suppose I was trying to prove I was braver than my cousins, who thought they were better than me because they were older. I suppose I was trying to prove I wasn’t afraid, even though anyone who saw me would have known that wasn’t true. And I suppose I was trying to solve a mystery. Where did this cousin I’d never heard of before go? Why had we forgotten her as a family, when we could have been out looking for her in the wild places?

“I had so many questions that day, and what I found answered all of them and none of them and taught me that questions are like coats: you can turn them inside out when you need to hide from the fairies. Nothing sees you when you’re cloaked in a question with its seams showing. I found a little space between the roots of a tree, the sort of space that only calls to children and other small creatures, and it looked like a doorway. It looked like it could be the passage into something wonderful and new, something I had never seen before. So I squirmed myself between the roots, and do you know what I found there?”

This was the sort of question thatdidask for an answer, even though an answer should have been too impossible to occur to anyone. “Another door,” Antsy had replied, slow and careful as anything. “Small, but big enough for you.”

“Do you know what waswrittenon the door?”

“Be sure. It asked you to be sure.” Antsy had started to cry again then, even though it had been hard for her to notice after all the crying she’d already done, and she had looked at Eleanor, and wondered if this kind, smiling old woman had seen the Store, if sheunderstood. “And then, one day, you weren’t.”

“Not quite, my darling, but close enough for corkscrews.” Eleanor had stepped back around the desk and offered Antsy her hands. “Every door is a little different, and every world they take us to isverydifferent indeed, but they all ask the same thing of us, and they all break our hearts, in the end.”

“Did you ever find your cousin?” Antsy had asked, taking the offered hands and letting herself be tugged to her feet.

“Yes, and she didn’t thank me for banishing her back to this world after so much time had passed, but that’s neither here nor there, and as I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t have to tell anyone about your door if you don’t want to, although you’ll be asked to share in group, if you’re comfortable. We’re part school, part… readjustmentcenter, let’s call it, for people who’ve been to places like the ones we went to, and need a little help remembering what it’s like to live inthisworld.”

“I thought Iwassure,” Antsy had replied. “I thought I was so sure, of everything, and then I was back where I began.”

But not really, not all the way: the Store had put her back where it had found her, restoring what had been taken into its keeping, but the things she’d lost while she was on the other side, those were gone forever. Those were payment due.

“If there’s any doubt at all, the doors throw us back,” Eleanor’d said. “But more than that, sometimes there are… other rules. Some doors are anchored. They allow for a certain amount of going back and forth on the part of the traveler. Other doors only appear for people who fit a list of requirements, and if even one thing changes, it’s possible the door will decide you weren’t who they wanted after all, thrust you out, and leave you. It’s a terrible system. Cruel comfort, I know, but you won’t be alone here. Youwillbe expected to attend classes. It keeps the state from bothering us. Do you have any special skills?”

Antsy somehow knew that Eleanor wasn’t asking about hopping on one foot for an especially long time or tying daisy stems into knots with her eyes closed. She’d opted for honesty. “I get… static… in my head sometimes. Like a radio that’s not quite tuned to the channel it’s supposed to be tuned to. When that happens, it’s because there’s something that wants to be found, and I can find anything. Anything at all.”

“You would have been great help when I lost my keys,” said Eleanor, in a flippant tone. “Come along, then. We’ll get you sorted. Is there anything youdofeel comfortable telling me about the world on the other side of your door?”

Antsy had stumbled her way through an explanationof the Store, leaving out all the parts she knew a grownup wouldn’t want to hear, and by the time they’d been halfway up the stairs to the second floor of the grand old home, Eleanor had declared gleefully that “Nonsense! It was all Nonsense, from one shelf to the next, and so you’re a Nonsense girl, and I have just the perfect place for you.”

2 GETTING SETTLED

THEN HAD COME THEtop of the stairs, and then had come Cora, quiet, tragic Cora, who seemed to be slowly bleeding to death from a wound that no one, not even she, could see. Eleanor had informed Cora that Antsy was going to be her new roommate, and thus had the die been cast and the decision made.

For her part, Cora had accepted this intrusion with stolid good grace, as she seemed to accept almost everything, and while she didn’t offer Antsy her hand in friendship, she wasn’t cruel to her, either. As for Antsy, well, she didn’t try to push the issue. She’d never been around girls her own age before. She didn’t honestly know what that terrifying phrase, “her own age,” was supposed to mean. So she watched Cora carefully, trying to figure out how to pass for what she appeared to be, trying to learn the tricks to moving among the teenage population of the school as one of their own.

They weren’t the only students, of course: there were around twenty others. They ranged in age from thirteen to nineteen, divided into academic groups by tests and experience rather than age. Antsy was alone in what Eleanor called “the Basic Curriculum,” trying to learn all the things she hadn’t needed to know either as a nine-year-old girl or while she was effectively helping to run the Store, but which were now necessary here in the world where she’d been born.

“At least you can read and write and do your numbers,”Eleanor had said, after the first time Antsy complained about being alone in the classroom. “We’ve had students who had been raised by wolves, or dreams, or dinosaurs, and didn’t know much beyond how to say their own names. You’ll catch up to the others in no time at all.”

Antsy had been quiet after that, realizing that Eleanor thought she was worried about being forced to learn something below her grade level and not about being left alone. “I understand,” she’d said, and that had been the end of that. Things moved on.

If Antsy had been required to summarize her first six months at the school, that’s what she would have said: things moved on. She met her roommate, she abandoned attempts at friendship for the small luxury of friendliness, and things moved on. She met the other students, including Cora’sactualfriends: Kade, with his steady, calming personality, the oldest student currently at the school, who never willingly spoke of the world on the other side of his door; Sumi, who was exactly the opposite of either steady or calming, whose parents were dead and who talked about the time she’d been murdered and resurrected in the same airy, careless tone she used when explaining why maple syrup was a natural topping for spaghetti and meatballs, why wouldn’t you want a little sweet with your savory?; Christopher, who was quick and cool and careful, who carried a flute made of bone that only Sumi could hear him play. They were far from the only students, but they were the ones who worried about Cora, who came to the room to try and lure her out, who made note of Antsy if only as a change to the landscape, and whose easy acceptance of her presence made settling in at the school less difficult than it could have been.

Leaving Cora’s narrow circle of friends, Antsy went looking for Angela, the girl whose kitten had been lost. Finding it hadgiven Antsy the first clue she needed to reach the school. “I met your mother,” she’d said, haltingly, on the day in the cafeteria when she approached the brown-haired girl with the companion so heart-stoppingly beautiful that Antsy couldn’t look at her directly.

Not that Antsy wanted to. From the way her eyes refused to focus on the girl who walked with Angela, she was fairly sure she knew the world she’d been to visit. It had never been kind to visitors, and the one time Antsy had opened a Door there, even Vineta had been unwilling to let her pass through to the other side.

Angela had blinked, very slowly and deliberately, as if Antsy’s proclamation were the rudest thing imaginable, and then she’d asked, “Why do I care?” while her companion tittered, and Antsy had walked away from them knowing she’d find no friendship there. Then again, she hadn’t been expecting it. The static would have led her to them, if they’d been what she was here to find.

Six months of long, boring classes, slightly more engaging therapy sessions that felt almost more like fairy-tale story circles, and waking in the middle of the night to Cora’s screams. The blue-haired girl’s invisible wound was bleeding faster and faster, and Antsy didn’t see any way that she could help her. Antsy was still getting used to shoes and schedules and dental floss and all the other little ephemera of being back in the “real” world.

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