Magic or Madness (15 page)

The lift creaked and groaned but didn’t move, as if it was considering Jay-Tee’s request but had by no means agreed that it wanted to go up. It might stay where it was, or perhaps descend, or possibly spin round and round on the spot.

Jay-Tee pressed the button again, gently this time, and whispered something that sounded like, “Sorry.”

The lift suddenly decided that up did, in fact, hold its interest, jerking into motion. We both lost our footing, and I stumbled into Jay-Tee. She giggled again.

I pushed my hood down and began to take off my gloves, watching the identical floors roll slowly by. Each had cream wallpaper dotted with roses, and gold doors, the numbers painted in black, and a red runner carpet—older than in the brand-new lifts, but far from threadbare—over floorboards. Jay-Tee watched me, her eyes narrowed, like a cat tracking a skink. When I returned her gaze, she blinked.

“It’s one of the oldest elevators in the city,” she said. “Kind of temperamental. Won’t start for just anyone. Kind to runaways, though.” Jay-Tee grinned. “It always starts for me.”

I nodded. Everything tends to get crankier as it gets older. Especially people. I wanted to ask Jay-Tee who she’d run away from, opened my mouth to do so.

“Why’d you run away?” Jay-Tee asked instead.

I closed my mouth, opened it again. Had she read my mind? “Er,” I said, not knowing how much to say. “My grandmother. Ran away from my grandmother. We don’t get on,” I finished pathetically.

“Get on what?” Jay-Tee stretched out the
a
sound in the word
what
until it hurt my ears. Her hands were on her hips. She looked annoyed.

“Huh?”

“You and your grandmother. What don’t you get on?”

“We don’t get on anything.” Why was she acting so weird? “We don’t like each other.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

I
had
said so. Suddenly I felt unbelievably tired, eyes unwilling to stay open. I had to lean back against the lift wall. If I could’ve lain down, I would have slept for a month. “What about you?” I made myself ask.

“I ran away from my dad. He beat me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jay-Tee shrugged. “I would’ve killed him if he touched me again. Better to run away.”

I stared at her. Was she being serious? “What about your mum?”

“My
mom’s
dead.”

“Sorry.”

Jay-Tee shrugged again. “She died when I was young. I never knew her. I don’t remember what she looked like. Just photos.”

“Brothers or sisters?” I asked, half expecting Jay-Tee to call me a stickybeak and demand that I stop with all the questions.

Jay-Tee shook her head. “Just me.”

“Me too. Sarafina says it’s the easiest and hardest thing in the world being the only child. All that attention.”

“Who’s Sarafina?”

“My mother,” I said, careful not to say “mum” and set her off again. “How long since you ran away?” The tiredness was gone, leaving me as suddenly as it had come. Strange.

“A long time. No one’s looking for me anymore. I’m free. Stick with me and you will be too.”

The lift came to a shuddering halt that ate what I was going to say. I stumbled, but Jay-Tee, expecting it, just rolled up onto the tips of her toes. Then silence. Several seconds of silence. The lift sat, waiting. I reached for the open door button.

“I wouldn’t,” Jay-Tee said. “She needs to think a bit more.”

She?
I wanted to ask, but didn’t. A loud groan rattled through the lift; the doors opened slowly and, from the sound, painfully.

Jay-Tee stepped out and I followed. We were in a red-carpeted corridor with cream rose-dotted walls just like all the other floors we’d passed. We walked by gold doors with numbers in black: 10E, 10D, 10C. I wondered which door we were looking for, but Jay-Tee led me past them all and up two flights of stairs. She stopped in front of a huge red door.

“Pull your hood up, put your gloves back on.”

I did. Jay-Tee leaned forward and pulled my hat lower and my scarf over my mouth.

“Ready?”

I nodded, though I didn’t know what for.

Jay-Tee opened the door. Snow swirled around us, the wind fast and cold. Jay-Tee pulled me after her, slamming the door behind us.

“Top of the world!” she screamed, laughing.

We were up on the roof. I could see the whole city. Like I’d thought,
definitely
a city. Why on earth had Jay-Tee called it a village? Vast and high and crowded. Even more than Sydney. As far as the eye could see: nothing shorter than six stories. In the middle distance: tall, tall buildings everywhere, towering far above, their heads lopped off by the heavy grey clouds. City, city, city. This was what I had imagined that word meant: concrete and glass, grey and brown, towering buildings, some of them crowned gold. People made small like ants. No plant life at all.

I pushed through the snow and wind—there was no salt up here, no ready-made paths—right up to the railing, sturdy and taller than me, hung with hundreds of little icicles glittering like diamonds. The street was a long way below, but not quite far enough to make ants of the people. I could distinguish the colour of their hats and coats from up here.

I wondered if the wind hadn’t been so wild and loud if I could have heard their shouted conversations. How cold would it have to get before there were no people out? Seemed too cold for life
now.
But there they were below, in their layers and layers of clothing. Fifty-three of them on this side of the street and thirty-six on the other, all flat out like lizards drinking. Like the people in the restaurant, everyone in this place was in an insane hurry.

The street was clogged with cars, mostly yellow ones. They drove with their horns permanently blowing. Even over the wind I could hear the constant honking, though I couldn’t see what they thought it would achieve. The cars were stopped because the lights were red. The blast of a horn couldn’t change that. Maybe it just gave them something to do while they waited.

It really wasn’t Sydney. No bridges, no long unbroken stretches of greenery, no greenery at all, definitely no flying foxes. They’d die in this cold. The wind roared in my ears. My eyes streamed water. I wondered if kidnappers had transported me to some arctic kingdom at the end of the world. Would I see penguins and polar bears if I got outside the city? Was this real at all?

Something hard hit my side. “Ow!” I turned.

Jay-Tee stood grinning at me—at least I imagined she was; her mouth was hidden beneath her scarf—something round and white in her hands. She hurled it right at me. I ducked. It hit the railing behind me and exploded in a cloud of white, made the icicles tinkle.

“What the hell!?”

Jay-Tee bent, gathered up snow, forming it into a ball in her mittens. I bent and copied her actions. I was so going to get her.

Wasn’t as easy as it looked, though. Gathering up the snow, I was hampered by the slipperiness of my thick gloves. And the wind kept blowing it out of my hands before I had a chance to pack it together. I mushed together the little I had. My snowball resembled an ice cube more than a ball. I grabbed more, feeling the satisfying crunch as it squished together. I rolled it in my hands into something more spherical. I grinned beneath my scarf and looked up just in time to get a Jay-Tee snowball in the eyes. Just a fraction lower and it would have smacked into my still-tender nose.

I screamed, blinking snow from my eyes, and hurled my very first snowball, too hard and fast—it zipped over Jay-Tee and exploded against the door. I ducked down and started on my second, faster this time, scooping up a palm full of snow, but with a wary eye out for more Jay-Tee projectiles. She loosed two more, but I ducked and they disappeared over my head. I made more, ducking and shifting away from Jay-Tee’s efforts as I worked. Hard and round they were, about the size of cricket balls.

Jay-Tee was across the roof diagonally, nearest the door. She had quite a stash. I made as though I was still working on my weaponry, but as soon as she wasn’t looking, I let them loose in rapid succession. Three missed, but the others got her on the head and chest.

“Yay! Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha!” I did a little victory dance, weaving out of the way of two more of Jay-Tee’s snowballs.

Jay-Tee jumped up and yelled, “Truce!”

I threw my final effort, my biggest so far. Too big—it fell harmlessly half a metre in front of her.

“Okay, I said! Can you still feel your face, Reason?”

“Truce,” I called out, trudging through the snow towards her; it crunched with every step. I could feel my face. It stung.

“You’ve never done that before, have you?” Jay-Tee asked, pulling me through the door.

“No,” I shouted above the wind. But then the door closed and my yell echoed, suddenly loud, down the stairs. “No,” I said quietly, still panting a little. “My very first snowballs.”

“I could tell.” Jay-Tee grinned. “Don’t worry. You’ll get lots of practice. It’s more fun in a park. Especially when it’s not quite as nasty cold. Winds are always worse higher up. Though in a park you’ve got to watch you’re not scooping up more than just snow.”

“Yuck,” I said, remembering the yellow snow down on the street.

“Exactly. Throw
that
in someone’s face and they’re
not
going to be happy.”

We both laughed and Jay-Tee held the door back into the hallway open for me. I rubbed my still-damp face. It tingled. The corridor felt oppressively hot. I pulled my wet gloves off, wiping them uselessly on the equally wet surface of my coat. My fingers were pink and tingling, but they didn’t feel like they were going to fall off. “How do you ever get used to this weather? Freezing outside, boiling inside.”

“You just do. Snow is excellent. Not just snow fights, but snowmen and snow angels. I’ll show you. You’ll like it.” She reached forward and pressed the button and almost instantly the doors of the old, recalcitrant lift opened. Jay-Tee grinned. “She likes you.” Jay-Tee stepped in and pressed the button gently and respectfully.

“What else is fun for a couple of runaways to do?” I paused to let Jay-Tee know I was teasing, “In the East Village, east of the West Village but west of the East River?”

“Are you kidding? No school, no parents, no bossy brothers. There isn’t anything we can’t do!” The lift surged into life as if in agreement with Jay-Tee and willing to take us wherever we wanted to go.

I sighed happily, suddenly so tired I had to slump sideways to rest my head. I let all the anxious and confused thoughts float away. If this was madness, it was still better than where I’d been before. Esmeralda’s house seemed such a long way away.

My eyes fell on a notice on the wall opposite me: City of New York. Department of Buildings. Elevator Inspections. Then in scribbled handwriting a list of dates and times and initials.

I was in New York City.

Magic was real.

Jay-Tee’s skin prickled. She
knew before putting the key in the lock that he wasn’t home, but he’d been here. She opened the apartment door; the smell of him was everywhere: the air shimmered with it, taking away all the sharpness and corners and replacing them with wavering soft edges. Jay-Tee hated it when the apartment was like this.

Reason leaned heavily against her, a rag doll, not noticing a thing. One minute she’d been full of life, talking a mile a minute, and the next she was practically in a coma, slow moving, stupid again. Hardly able to keep her eyes open. Jay-Tee led Reason to her room, wondering if she’d need help getting into her PJs. He hadn’t told Jay-Tee that she was going to have to be Reason’s maid.

“You know, you should really try to stay awake. It’s only three. You’ll miss the last hours of daylight.”

Reason made a noise that could’ve been anything and started struggling out of the down coat. She slipped to the floor and sat there on her ass, pulling at the coat with her head resting against the bed. Her eyes were half closed and her mouth half open. She hadn’t taken her gloves off first. Looked like one of them was caught in the sleeve, still on her hand. Reason kept pulling at the sleeve without moving it or the glove an inch. She probably hadn’t remembered that the gloves were held on by buttons.

Jay-Tee sighed and bent down to help her, extracting the gloves, slipping the coat off, then pulling the sweater and long-sleeved T-shirt over her head before Reason could tangle herself in those too. Finally she slid Reason’s boots off.

Reason still hadn’t figured out where they were. Jay-Tee wondered how long it would take her. It still amazed her that the girl couldn’t recognize New York City. It was like she was from Mars or something.

“How old are you?” Reason asked. Her voice seemed to come from somewhere a long way away.

“Eighteen,” Jay-Tee lied. She didn’t want Reason knowing they were the same age.

“I’m fifteen, just . . .” She trailed off. “Eighteen? Wow, that’s so old.” She giggled. “You could be dead already.”

Jay-Tee felt her hands clench. She had to fight the urge to hit Reason. What did Reason know? A lot more than she’d been letting on.
Calm down,
she told herself.
Never lose your temper, especially not now.

Reason grinned up at her dopily. Jay-Tee started to relax. The stupid kid didn’t know what she was saying. She was just exhausted. Jay-Tee too. It had been a long, cold, bitter wait for Reason to appear and for Jay-Tee’s life to stop sucking.

“Could we go dancing?” Reason asked. “I like dancing.”

“Sure,” Jay-Tee said. “It’s the best thing about the city. Lots and lots of dancing.” This wasn’t a lie. There was nothing Jay-Tee loved more than dancing. “What night is it? Tuesday, right? Lantern’s great Tuesday night. We could go there later, you know, when you wake up.”

“Good,” Reason said fuzzily. “Tuesday? Still? Huh. Can we have chocolate too? And pizza? I like pizza.”