Page 4 of Mislaid in Parts Half-Known

“Oh, I don’t care what you eat,” said Antsy. “It just reminded me of this holiday we used to celebrate when I was little, with the whole family and a roast turkey and stuffing my grandmother would make from bread she’d baked the day before. I don’t remember what it was called, though. Do you remember that holiday?”

Emily looked at her with careful suspicion. “Are you making fun of me?” she asked. “I’m American too, you know. I was born in Minneapolis.”

Antsy blinked. “Is there a reason I would be making fun of you?”

“Maybe. You never can tell who’s going to turn out to be the sort of person who tells you to go back where you came from, like all the white people didn’t come here from someplace else to begin with.” Emily’s shoulders untensed, and she reached, still cautious, for her fork. “Yeah, we had Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving! That was the name!” Antsy snapped her fingers, grinning—a grin which faded as she realized, only a second later, that the word was gone again. “Oh, darn. I hoped it would stick.”

Emily was staring at her. “Hoped what would stick?”

“I was in a market square in… a place very, very far away from here, and when an old merchant said she could teach me the word that unlocked every door, I said I wanted it,” said Antsy matter-of-factly. “She said she wanted the names of all the holidays I’d ever celebrated with my family, and we didn’t have holidays where I was, so it didn’t feel particularly important. Still doesn’t, most of the time.”

Emily’s stare slowly morphed into a look of horror. “So you don’t rememberanyof the holidays you had with your family?”

“Nope.” Antsy shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me much. I still remember theholidays,and what they felt like. They just don’t have names to keep them in focus. There was the one with all the food, and the one with the presents and the home invasion, and the one with the giant rabbit.”

“You forgot Halloween,” said Emily.

Antsy looked at her blankly. “I’m sorry. That name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Halloween,” said Emily again, more firmly. “It’s the best holiday of the whole year. It’s costumes and candy and everyone’s all the way the same, because no one knows who you are. There’s no rich kids or poor kids on Halloween, no one being a jerk just because they don’t like that you’re better than them in dance class when they think your skin’s not the right color for a prima ballerina—like skin has anything to do with dancing, like being white makes up for having no discipline when it comes to practice—it’s just skeletons and hayrides and this taste in the back of your throat like candy corn and bonfire smoke and apple cider all mixed together.”

“Oh,” said Antsy, and then, more firmly, “Oh. I remember that night. My daddy took me trick-or-treating, said we could watch scary movies together when I was older, but not until I was old enough to help him keep Mommy from being frightened. There was candy, and I wore an orange dress and a black hat with glitter on it, and told everyone who asked what a wicked witch I was. I even cackled, like this—” And she laughed, a high and cackling laugh that would have been right at home behind a bubbling cauldron.

Emily didn’t look concerned. If anything, her expression softened, some of the horror leaching away and replaced by something that looked almost like contentment. “Just like that,” she said. “Everyone’s a monster on Halloween, and that means no one’s a monster, and if there aren’t any monsters, you get to decide what ‘monster’ means.”

“There’s a word,” said Sumi, plopping down next to Emily with her own tray. Her lunch was a riot of brightly colored candy and three kinds of cake, which might not have lookedquite so appalling if she hadn’t tied the whole mess together with a lazy spiral of whipped cream and rainbow sprinkles. “Or I guess it’s a phrase, really. ‘Semantic satiation.’ It means when you say the same thing too many times it stops meaning anything. I think you just said ‘monster’ so many times that now it means the same thing as ‘mashed potato.’ Treat or trick!”

Emily frowned at her. “It’s ‘trick or treat,’ Sumi.”

“Okay!” Sumi dipped a hand into her pocket and produced a blue-wrapped KitKat with pink flowers printed on the outside, dropping it onto Emily’s tray. She narrowly missed the acorn squash. “You working your way around to asking for your big favor?”

“Shush,” said Emily.

“Haven’t yet,” said Sumi. She turned a broad, somewhat unnerving smile on Antsy.

Sumi was a lot smarter than she tried to seem, and Antsy knew better than to believe she was here by coincidence, any more than Emily was. The Whitethorn escapees had a tendency to stick together, and Emily had never come up to her at lunch before, much less tried to have a real conversation. She picked up her sandwich—tuna on white bread, one of the most decadent things she could think of—and nibbled at a corner, waiting for one or both of them to get on with it.

Emily squirmed, appearing to realize that if she didn’t get to whatever point she was dancing around, Sumi would get there for her. She shifted to face Antsy straight on, sitting up straight and leveling her shoulders until her posture was unquestionably perfect. “I heard you can find anything,” she repeated.

“That’s exactly what you said instead of ‘hello,’” saidAntsy, not putting down her sandwich. “Word for word. Do you have ascript?”

“I was wondering—I mean, some of us were wondering—do you charge? Could I pay you to find something for me?”

“I haven’t charged so far; it would seem wrong, I guess, unless you were asking me to find something for a mean reason, or that I’m not supposed to look for. If you asked me to find Sumi’s diary, I would probably charge you forthat. Also, I wouldn’t do it.”

“Unless your ‘finding anything’ reaches all the way to finding things that don’t exist, you’re not going to find my diary,” said Sumi, fishing a cupcake out of the mess on her tray. It dripped whipped cream on the table as she added, “Or my underwear,” in a suggestive tone.

“I do not want to know about your underwear,” said Antsy.

“Your loss,” said Sumi, and rose, wandering away. She left her rainbow nightmare of a lunch behind.

“I’m sorry about her,” said Emily, clearly trying to salvage whatever she’d been trying to accomplish. “She’s been in a mood all morning, since Kade said he wanted to go over the admissions from the last year with Carrie and Julia. He thinks too many students have been getting filed as Nonsense, and it’s skewing his map of the Compass.”

“And Sumi doesn’t like the idea of the Nonsense kids losing their numerical advantage,” said Antsy. “Makes sense.” Hopefully, this would get the Store moved to someplace on the map that made more sense. Then she could start thinking about the Compass like it actually reflected reality, even if it was only a little bit.

“Which is another thing Sumi doesn’t like,” said Emily. She picked up the KitKat, frowning at the wrapper. “‘Sakura-flavored’? It tastes like cherry trees?”

---