Selfish Elf Wish (6 page)

“What else have we got to do?” Timber asks.

I can think of about fifty better things to do with my time than watch Bella sing, like scrub my toilet with a toothbrush or stand in a bucket of leeches. But I don’t say anything because if Timber’s planning to be where Bella is going to be, then I need to be there, too. “Briar and I are free,” I say.

“We are?” she asks.

I step on her foot under the table. “Yes,” I tell her.

“Oh yeah,” she says, yanking her foot away from mine. “We’re totally free.”

“Great,” Timber says. “Let’s all meet there at eight.”

WE ALL GO
our separate ways when we leave Galaxy. Ari’s band has rehearsal. Mercedes has to babysit her twin sisters. And Timber promised to go Christmas tree shopping with his mom. Briar and I ride the train back to our station, but instead of going straight home, we slip into Prospect Park. Even though I love my school, by the end of the day I feel like a trapped raccoon ready to claw my way out a closed window. Despite the slushy gray snow covering the sidewalks, I need to be outside, to breathe some fresh air (well, as fresh as air can get in Brooklyn), and see the sky (even if the sun is already sinking at 4:30). I can tell Briar feels the same by the way she lifts her face and inhales the crisp, cold air.

After we’ve walked for a few minutes in silence, I say, “I can’t believe we have to listen to Bella sing tonight.”

“Could you believe her hanging all over Timber, then having the nerve to invite everyone to her gig? You should’ve zapped her,” Briar tells me.

“I wanted to,” I admit.

“Why didn’t you, then?”

“Because,” I say, “the last time I zapped her, it came back to bite me in the butt.”

She ducks under a large cedar tree and heads up a hill dusted lightly with fresh white snow. I follow, happy to be off the cement walkways erdlers stick to in the park.

“Besides,” I trudge behind Briar, “what good would it do? It’s not like Timber’s even my boyfriend.”

“First off,” Briar says, “he’ll never be your boyfriend if you don’t do something.”

“Like what?” I ask miserably.

She turns around to face me. “Like zapping Bella when she’s hanging on him!”

I roll my eyes at her.

“Or getting the part you wanted today,” she says.

“I had no control over that.”

Now she rolls her eyes at me. “You’re an elf!” She wiggles her fingers. “You can work magic! You have all the control you want.”

“No, Briar.” I peer around, making sure no one’s near. “At school, we’re ordinary kids.”

A small, mean smile lurks on Briar’s lips. “You think
ordinary
kids wouldn’t use every advantage they have to get what they want?”

“We can’t use magic here,” I tell her. “We could get caught.”

She scoffs and continues walking. “You wouldn’t have gotten caught.”

“You don’t know that,” I say.

“You’ve always been afraid of getting in trouble.” Briar points to a low-hanging branch over my head. She shakes her finger and makes the branch quiver, dumping snow on my head. “Then you complain about what you don’t have.”

“Hey!” I yell, dusting myself off and frantically looking around to make sure no one saw what she just did.

“Relax,” she says as she walks away. “Nobody’s around.”

“You’ve always been a troublemaker and you don’t fight fair!” I scoop up a handful of snow off the ground and whiz it at her, but she jumps out of the way. “We have to play by erdler rules now,” I say as I think back to how sick I got after I cast my last spell on Bella—the spell that caused her to botch the audition so badly that everyone thought she was on drugs (which she was, but that’s not why her audition was so bad). I got sick because I used my magic for ill will, a big elfin no-no.

“Whatev,” Briar says.

“We have to use our magic for good,” I remind her.

“Come on,” Briar says. “A tiny little hex when she’s singing tonight.”

“That’s how it starts,” I warn.

“Just the hiccups, that’s all. It’d be funny.”

“Dark elves cast spells for mischief,” I say. “Not us.”

“There’s no such thing as dark elves. Grandma Fawna made that up to scare us. Besides, I’m not a dark elf. I’m me, and casting spells is part of who I am.”

“Not here it’s not.”

“No wonder your sister hated it here.” Briar pulls away from me. We’re in the midst of bare sycamores and snowy evergreens with only the squirrels to overhear us now.

I think back to my sister Willow sitting in the window seat on the third floor of our Brooklyn house, looking out over the red and gold autumn trees. She was miserable when my family moved to Brooklyn and she had to leave her boyfriend. “Willow was unhappy because she was away from Ash,” I say. “Not because she couldn’t use her magic.” Now she’s back in Alverland, engaged to Ash, and preparing for her wedding, which makes her happy, but the rest of us miss her terribly because elf families always stick together.

From the top of the hill, we stop and look down at the fence separating the park from the sidewalk and street. On this side of the fence is an open meadow where dogs run free in the mornings and people play soccer on the weekends. Beyond that, farther into the park, is the copse of maple trees where Timber kissed me this past fall, back when Willow still lived here and before Briar came. The memory gives me happy shivers. Or maybe it’s the cold as the sun sinks behind the pale pink clouds in the sky.

“What do you think Willow and Ash’s wedding will be like?” Briar asks, a little dreamy.

I shrug. “Probably like every other wedding in the history of Alverland.” My sister is traditional, to say the least.

“Isn’t it exciting that she’s going to get Mama Ivy’s land?”

“Ivy’s not dead yet,” I remind Briar as we tromp through heavier snow dotted with squirrel prints and a few bird tracks.

“She’s 199!”

“Grandmother Aster lived to 206,” I say, but then I sigh. “I do love Ivy’s house, though.” We’re quiet as we think of the small stone cottage in a glen, surrounded by giant red pines and goldenrod, that my sister will inherit because she’s the firstborn daughter in a long line of first daughters—my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and all the way back eight generations to Ivy, who’s the oldest living matriarch in our family now.

“It’s so romantic!” Briar says with a sigh. Then she stops. “But if you marry Timber you wouldn’t be allowed to live in Alverland.”

“Stop,” I say, but a little ripple of excitement goes through my chest at the thought of marrying Timber. “I’m not going to marry him. I can’t even get him alone. And besides, who says I want to live in Alverland?”

“I know,” Briar says. “But it could be a problem. Falling in love with an erdler.”

We turn at a big Norway maple and head down a steep hill with old sled tracks packed into the snow. This trail will take us to the road that goes by our house.

“You know what I miss most about Alverland?” Briar asks.

I shake my head because I can think of twenty things I miss right now.

“Dancing,” she says.

“You dance every day at school.”

“No, not that kind. With you and our sisters.” She reaches out and spins herself around the trunk of a small tree. “The fresh snow makes me want to dance an elf circle.”

I smile. “I miss that, too.”

We follow the track down through the trees, talking about our favorite dance spots in Alverland, but before we get to the road, we both jump when two people come out from the midst of the pines. Both of us fling our hands up, ready to cast mischief if we need to, but a guy and the girl in puffy white coats and white knit hats step back.

“Sorry,” says the girl.

“We didn’t see you there,” the guy adds.

It takes a second for all of us to register that we know each other.

“Hey,” Briar says. “Didn’t we just meet?”

“At the coffee shop,” the girls says, nodding and smiling.

“You were with Bella,” I say.

“And you were with Timber,” says the guy, then he laughs. “Guess we all had the same idea about a snowy hike off the beaten path.” He sticks out his hand and reintroduces himself. “I’m Clay Corrigan. This is Dawn.”

Dawn smiles as we all shake hands. Her teeth are as white and straight as the guy’s. “Not many people like to come up this far in the woods.” She looks up into the graying sky above the trees. “Especially when the sun is starting to sink.”

“We’re on our way home,” Briar says.

“You live near here?” Clay asks.

“Yeah,” Briar says, and starts to point toward our house.

I grab her arm. “We should be going, before it gets dark.”

“You look familiar,” the girl says to me. “I’m sure I’ve seen you before. I mean before we met at the coffee shop today.”

What’s funny is, they look familiar to me, too, but I’m sure we’ve never met. “Probably seen each other around the park.”

She shakes her head and steps closer to me. We’re almost exactly the same height. “Nope. I know I’ve seen you somewhere. Are you an actress or something? I feel like you’ve been on TV.”

“I’m not an actress,” I say, walking away. “We should be going.”

As we crunch past them in the snow, Dawn yells, “Aha! I’ve got it. You’re the daughter of that singer, Drake Addler, aren’t you? I saw some documentary about your family on VH1 a few months ago.”

I cringe. We were on VH1, trying to show what a normal, happy family we are when my dad was trying to prove that he isn’t the leader of a weird pagan cult (a chat-room rumor I think Bella started). “I didn’t think anybody saw it.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen everything about your dad,” she says.

“We’re big fans,” Clay adds with his signature toothy grin. I wonder if he’s going to hand me a card to give to my dad.

I try to smile graciously, but my stomach knots up. “I’ll tell him.” I start down the path again.

“Hey, what are your names?” the girl calls after us.

“I’m Briar!” Briar shouts over her shoulder. I elbow her hard in the side, but it doesn’t do any good. “And she’s Zephyr.”

“Will we see you tonight at Bella’s gig?” Dawn asks.

“Yes!” Briar says, waving to them. “We’re all coming.”

“Bring your brother Grove,” Dawn says. My stomach flutters. The fact that she knows so much about my family might mean she’s one of those nut-job fans. They have Web sites and chat rooms to speculate on my family’s life. A few months ago, one of them tried to find Alverland.

“See you at the club,” Clay says.

I yank hard on Briar’s arm and pull her down the path away from them.

“What is your problem?” she asks, wriggling away.

“Could you be friendlier to those weirdos?” I whisper as I maneuver through the trees.

“Just because they rep Bella—” Briar starts to say.

“That’s not it.” I look over my shoulder to make sure they aren’t following us. “They’re creepy. Walking around up here in the woods.”

“We’re up here in the woods,” Briar points out.

“Exactly,” I say as we come down from the hill onto the road that circles the park. “And we aren’t your normal, average erdlers, are we?”

“You’re paranoid,” Briar says.

“And you’re naïve,” I say.

“But they like your dad.”

“This isn’t Alverland, Bri. Not everyone is nice.” I stop and look over my shoulder one last time. The woods are quiet and we seem to be alone. “Besides,” I whisper, “they could have overheard us.”

“They wouldn’t know what we were talking about.”

“That’s just it,” I say. “We can’t let anyone know. Ever. Don’t you get it? We’re different from everybody else and we have to protect that.”

“Whatevs,” Briar says, and snatches her arm out of my grip. We walk side by side out of the park, to the main road. “But,” she says as we wait to cross the street to our house, “it was kind of cool that they recognized you, don’t you think?”

“They only recognized me because of Dad,” I say, pausing for the traffic to clear.

“What difference does it make?” she asks.

“If I’m going to be recognized,” I say, “I wish it’d be for something I do, not because Drake Addler is my father.”

 

I can smell the fire crackling in our living room as soon as I open the front door. As much as I miss our house in Alverland, I’ve grown to like this place with its cozy rooms, creaky steps, and wheezing radiators.

“Zephyr and Briar are home!” Bramble shouts as he catapults from the middle of the stairs. His brown tunic flies up behind him like a cape, and his little green cap tumbles off his head. “Did you see that?” he asks, looking up from a crouch near our toes. “Seventh stair because I’m seven years old. I bet I could jump from the third highest rock at Barnaby Bluff. There’s no way Lake could do that.”

“I don’t know,” says Briar, unwinding her long, red scarf that her mom (my aunt Flora) knit for her. “My brother’s a good jumper. I think he was already jumping off the third rock when I left.”

Bramble bounces up and climbs the steps again. “I’m going to keep practicing so when we go back I can jump farther than he can.”

“Where is everybody?” I ask as I shrug off my coat.

Bramble climbs to the eighth step. “Kitchen or out back, maybe. Doing Harvest stuff. I’m a bobcat!”

“It’s called Thanksgiving here,” I remind him.

He growls then leaps again. Briar and I hop out of the way of his crash landing. “Be careful, would you?” I tell him. “And don’t call it Harvest Festival when everyone is here tomorrow, okay?” But he’s already back up the stairs, ignoring me.

Ever since my mom had the bright idea to invite all my friends and their families over for “Thanksgiving” at our house, I’ve been half dreading tomorrow. First off, elves don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. We have a Harvest Festival, which from what I can tell is similar, but not the same. And for that reason I’m absolutely sure that my family will do something embarrassing in front of everyone.