Why I Let My Hair Grow Out (14 page)

“I think you mean ‘prince among men,' ” corrected Lucia. “But Jack always treated me like a queen, believe me!”

When the group saw me they started whooping and applauding. The sound rolled into my ears and bitch-slapped my brain around my skull until I grabbed the back of a sofa for support.

“If it isn't the toast of the town!” Patty laughed, slapping me on the back. “I've a mind to cancel the bike tour today so the village can have a parade in your honor!”

What? I couldn't have heard her right. Something about a parade—must have been some fascinating historic tidbit about the village's annual potato parade or something—

“Good times, good times,” said Stuart with a sigh. He and Carrie both had their sunglasses on, even though we were still indoors. “What a night. I haven't partied that hard since Sun-dance.”

“What happened?” asked Sophie Billingsley, bouncing up and down. “Was there a party? Why wasn't I invited?”

“Because it wasn't for
babies,
” sneered Derek.

“There wasn't any party, dear,” soothed Mrs. Billingsley. She stroked her daughter's hair and looked at her husband with concern. “Was there?”

Mr. Billingsley shoved his hands in his pockets. “Other than young Morgan here drinking half the men in the pub under the table and dancing the legs off the chaps left standing, no, I wouldn't say so,” he said with an embarrassed chuckle. “Didn't see it firsthand, of course, I don't go in for that sort of carousing.” He glanced at me and looked away. “But it was all the talk at breakfast.”

“You were fantastic!” Heidi beamed. “American girls are so inner get ick!” She meant
energetic,
I figured out after a second. “Inner get ick! They'll do anything! That's what Johannes says.” Johannes turned vividly red.

Lucy Faraday gave me a hug. “I'm so glad you're feeling better,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, trying not to panic.

So. Evidently some stuff happened the previous night. So what. I was hardly the first person to get wasted and not remember all the gory details the next day. It sounded like no harm was done, except maybe to my liver.

At least only one night has passed,
I thought. One night here, one night in Long-ago. Maybe the time zones had gotten lined up somehow.

Sophie's bouncing up and down was making my head throb, but it also made me think of Erin. Where was she? How was I supposed to get back to Long-ago and save her?

The faery boy had called me Morgan.
Strange.

I turned to Patty. “If it's okay, I'm gonna ride in the van today,” I said, trying to sound weak and pathetic. It wasn't hard. “I have a really stiff neck.”

“After last night I'm surprised you can walk!” said Patty. “Don't worry. We'll have Colin load your bike into the van. And I'm sure
he'll
welcome your company.”

Was there an edge of insinuation in her voice? Hard to tell. How did Colin figure into my night of carousing? This not knowing what I'd done and who I'd done it with was very unnerving.

“You'll be needing this I'm sure,” Patty said, as she handed me a strong cup of Irish tea. She winked at me, as these Irish people seemed to do so well. “I'd wager you have some Irish blood in you, don't you?”

“I think I must,” I said.

 
colin Was jolly like he always Was, Whistling and goofing around as he put my bike in the back of the van with the luggage—but he seemed to be doing it all a little bit more inner-get-ickally than usual. He was hyped up for some reason. Was I the reason?

I figured since I couldn't remember any of what happened the night before, the best defense was a good offense. After we'd been driving along for some time and my head and stomach had adjusted to the bumping and lurching of the van, I made my move.

“I had a great time last night,” I said. What the hell, right?

He grinned. “Me too.”

We drove. Okay, that got me exactly nowhere.

Those American girls will do anything.
Gag. Not with Johannes, I hope. But what had I done with Colin? Anything more than dancing? That would be something I'd want to remember.

Colin drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in a happy-go-lucky way. “You're a marvelous girl when you let your spirits loose, Mor,” he said, after a while. “I figured you were, you know, but it was good to finally see it with my own eyes.”

“Colin, look.” I was staring out the window.

“What? That?” He looked and then laughed. “What's the matter, lass, haven't you ever seen a rainbow before?”

“Not like that,” I said, dumbfounded. Connecticut didn't get too many rainbows, it's true, but even I could tell that what I was looking at was not purely a weather phenomenon. This rainbow was shimmering, sparkling, bathed in a fine mist of slowly falling glitter. It looked like one of those tacky animated MySpace graphics.

“It rains a great deal in Ireland, so the rainbows are never far behind,” he said, matter-of-factly. “We get accustomed to them.”

“But,” I stammered. “But Colin.
Look.
”

“Oh, they're pretty, make no mistake. It's just water droplets, you know. The light refracts through the atmosphere and the water acts as a prism. . . .”

Colin, professional tour guide that he was, proceeded to give me a very boring explanation of how rainbows are formed. It was obvious that he and I were not looking at the same rainbow.

Strange.

I must be very close,
I thought. Very close to being able to slip back to Long-ago. But how?

“Did you mean what you said last night, Mor? About tonight?”

Poor me, with no clue what I'd said. And poor Colin, sounding so hopeful. Luckily I had a pretty good BS reflex (thanks Mom, thanks Dad).

“I usually do,” I said, carefully neutral.

“Fine. Fine.” He seemed quite satisfied. “We'll have a marvelous time, then.”

Plans had been forged and promises made, and I had no idea what they were. Under different circumstances I'd be tingly at the prospect of having something going on with Colin tonight, even if I didn't know exactly what it was. But right now Erin was all I could think about. I needed to concentrate.

“Would you mind,” I said, “if I took a nap?”

He smiled. “Not if I get to watch you sleep.”

I closed my eyes.

 
 
What's lost in the earth must be found. . . .

How was I supposed to get back to Long-ago to find Erin?

How had it happened before? I whacked my head on a rock. I drank till I passed out. There was definitely a pattern here. All I had to do was get myself totally fekked up somehow and the doorway to Long-ago swung open.

Some vacation this was turning out to be.
The thought of more drinking made my stomach lurch. But if that's what it took, that's what I'd do.

Because Erin needed me, and she was real. Fergus, too, and Cúchulainn and Samhain and all the rest. They were as real as I was, and just because I couldn't see them at the moment and they lived in the past didn't mean squat. They were real, the way my family and friends in Connecticut were real, even though they were across the ocean and five hours in the past, from a Greenwich Mean Time perspective.

The way those long-ago versions of me and Tammy in that old photo were real, even though I couldn't remember it.

The way Jack Faraday was real, and always would be, even though he was dead.

Even the way Colin's dreams of what he might be someday were real, even though no one could see those dreams but him.

Poor Fergus. He must be crazed. I hoped he and Cúchulainn weren't randomly galloping through the countryside lopping off heads and limbs just because they were pissed off. That kind of display was unlikely to make much of an impression on the faery folk. That much I understood by now.

I had to get back.

Think, Morgan,
I told myself.
You are an inner-get-ick American high-school girl, and if you don't know how to get yourself fekked up you have just not been paying attention.

I thought of the most reckless kids I knew and made my list. Beer, always an option, though at the moment a highly unappetizing one. Dropping E was another party favorite, but it scared me (I was no druggie), plus, duh, I didn't have any. Sleep deprivation? Possible but very difficult. I had a really hard time staying awake when I was tired, as had been proven by many failed attempts to cram for tests or write lengthy papers the night before they were due.

What else? There'd been a cheerleader in my freshman class who stopped eating for a couple of months until she got delirious and was shipped off to eating disorder rehab, but I didn't have that kind of time. And Raph used to talk about a “runner's high” that kicked in when he was training. Usually you had to be running at a good clip for forty minutes or so before you felt it.

Me, run for forty minutes? Yeah, right. I'd hardly exercised at all since my field hockey days. I'd be lucky to run to the corner.

As we drove, the rainbow followed us the way the moon follows you when you walk at night. I knew what it was telling me.

It was up to me—Morganne, Morgan, all of me. It was my job to find Erin. And if I didn't, no one would.

 
. . .
but the earth must be turned Without tilling. . . .

As we drove I napped, I dozed, I chanted in my head using my mom's old meditation mantra. I held my breath until I felt dizzy. Anything to alter my brain waves. But nothing happened.

When that got old I entertained myself by making up personal ads for King Conor.

 
When I dozed I dreamed, but they were actual dreamlike dreams: snatches of home, school, stuff from when I was a little kid, my favorite bits from
Scary Movie 4
, all random and jumbled the way dreams are supposed to be. No sign of a portal to other times and places. At the moment I was traveling nowhere except to where Colin was driving me.

I startled awake to the sound of a teeny, tiny heavy metal band playing its heart out through a kazoo. It was Colin's cell phone.

“Nice ring, eh?” he said, as he grabbed the phone from his shirt pocket. “I'm a big fan of the death metal—Colin here! Yes. Right. Ah, that's a pity. Where are you now, then?” He looked at his watch. “Right, not to worry, we'll do our best. Take a few deep breaths, dear. It'll calm you down. Cheers.”

“Fek it,” he said, flipping his phone shut. “Pardon the language, Mor. We have to go fetch Miss Pippin.”

“Why? Did she get hurt? Did she break a nail?” I yawned and stretched. “Did her implants deflate?”

Colin sighed. “I'm afraid it's worse than that.”

 
 
“let me impress upon you. it is a
borrowed
earring. It is from Harry
Winston
.” For a woman who was little more than skin and bones and silicone, Carrie Pippin sure could produce a lot of sound. She covered her face with her manicured hands in an impressive gesture of despair. “Do you
know
who Harry Winston is?”

“Haven't met him, sorry,” said Colin, staring at the ground. “It's round, you said? Like a hoop?”

Colin and Stuart and I were scanning the road searching for a single, obscenely expensive hoop earring whose twin was on Carrie Pippin's left ear. She was much too hysterical to join the search and kept touching the remaining earring as if it might vaporize at any moment.

“We're never gonna find it, babe,” Stuart said, helpfully. “We've been riding the bikes for an hour. You could have lost it anywhere in the last ten miles.”

Carrie's already strident voice climbed higher and higher as she spoke. “Would you
stop
being so
negative
! I'm sure I would have noticed earlier if it were gone. For God's sake, it's a
Harry Winston
! You
notice
when something like that falls off!”

“Whoa, I think I see it!” hollered Colin. He squatted and dug around in the dirt. “Whoops! Bottle cap. Sorry, false alarm.”

“Maybe it's turned into faery gold,” Stuart said. “Some old coot was telling me about that this morning when I was trying to buy the paper. Do you know how difficult it is to find a copy of
Variety
in this country?
The Hollywood Reporter?
I would've settled for the
LA Times
!”

“What's faery gold?” I asked. Colin rolled his eyes.

“It's when you see gold on the ground but every time you try to pick it up it turns to dust . . . just like show business, ha ha!”

At that Carrie started crying, and Stuart stopped his half-hearted searching to go comfort her. I could hear her blubbering on and on.

“. . . they were nice enough to lend it for my honeymoon and
this
happens. . . . Now what am I going to do for the Emmys? . . . Maybe we can call someone at Bulgari—oh my God, if Bulgari finds out about this I'll be
blacklisted
. . . .”

What an idiot,
I thought. Here I was, looking for some stupid earring when I was supposed to be searching for Erin. And my head still hurt, and despite all the talk about the rainy Irish weather the sun's glare was making my eyes water, and bending over to search the ground was not doing wonders for my hangover either.

I spotted another bottle cap in the dirt. I'd never been much of a do-gooder, especially when it came to picking up other people's trash, but the roads here were so spotless it made even a tiny bit of litter seem disgusting. I'd put the cap in the garbage; then at least some good would come of this ridiculous search.