As the kids walked past the dorm buildings, the group dwindled to two as the girls disappeared into their dorm. I could get closer then, close enough that the glow of him reflected on my twilight skin and made me want to touch him and pull bright strings of music out of his head. If only he’d said yes.
James and the remaining boy were talking about vending machines. One of them, a boy whose chief characteristic was an innocent, smiling face, was quoting statistics about how many people get killed by vending machines tipping over on them.
“I don’t think they pulled the machines onto themselves,” James was saying.
“They showed video,” the round kid said.
“No, I think there’s probably an avenging vending machine angel that pushes them onto grabby bastards who are bad sports about losing their money.” James made a pushing motion, a panicked expression, and a squashing sound in quick succession. “Lesson learned, bucko. Next time, just accept that you’ve lost your fifty cents.”
Round-o: “Except there wouldn’t be a next time.”
“How right you are. Dying would prohibit one from acting upon the lesson they’d learned. Scratch that. Let the record show that vending machine tragedies are not morality tales but a form of natural selection.”
Round kid laughed, then looked past James at something. “Hey, man, there’s a chick staring at you.”
“Is there ever not?” James asked, but he turned to look anyway, past me at someone else. The yellow inside him flashed, twisted, flared toward me as if begging for me to turn it into something else. But his eyes didn’t find me; they instead rested on a pale girl. Black hair, face washed out in the artificial light of a streetlight, fingers plucking anxiously at her backpack strap. There was something missing from James’ voice when he told Round-o, “Hey, I’ll be up in a second, okay? She’s from my old school.”
Round-head duly dispatched, James made his way through the circles of streetlight to where the girl stood. She had faint threads of orange glow running through her, like neon taffy, making me think that she would’ve made a good pupil if I hadn’t liked mine young, handsome, and male.
James’ voice was very brave, all funny and strong, even though the thoughts I could catch of his were chaotic. “Hey, crazy, what’s up?”
She smiled back at him, annoyingly pretty—I didn’t really care for attractive members of my own gender—and made a weird, crumpled, rueful face. Again, annoyingly cute. “Just getting ready to go up to my room. I came over this way because I always, um, never, because I never saw the fountain when it was lit up. And I wanted to.”
Yeah, whatever. So you came over to see him and don’t want to say it. Right. Stop being coy. I glared at her. James half-cocked his head in my direction, as if listening, and I skirted a few feet away from them. But at my sudden movement, the girl’s eyes lifted abruptly, following me, frowning as if she saw me. Crap. I leaned down as if I was tying my shoe, like I was a real student and I was actually visible to everyone. Her eyes didn’t focus on me after I’d bent down—she couldn’t quite see me. She must have some of the second sight. That annoyed me too.
“Dee,” James said. “Earth to Dee. Calling planet Dee. Houston, our communication lines seem to be down. Dee, Dee, do you read me?”
Dee pulled her eyes away from me and back to James. She blinked, hard. “Um. Yes. Sorry about that. I didn’t get enough sleep last night.” She had a very beautiful voice. I thought she must be quite a good singer. I finished fake-tying my shoe and started to walk very slowly toward the fountain, to hide myself in the water. Behind me, I heard James say something and Dee laugh, a relieved laugh, as if it had been awhile since she’d heard something funny and she was glad humor still existed.
I lay down in the fountain—invisible, I couldn’t feel the wetness—and looked up at the darkening sky, the water rippling over my vision. I felt safe in the water, utterly invisible, utterly protected.
Dee and James walked to the edge of the satyr fountain and stood directly over the top of me, close to each other but not touching, separated by some invisible barrier they had constructed before I’d arrived on the scene. James cracked jokes the whole time, one meaningless, funny line after another, making her laugh again and again so that they didn’t have to talk. His agony would’ve made a gorgeous song. I had to find a way to make him take my deal.
Dee and James stared at the satyr, who grinned back at them, permanently dancing upon a tiny oak leaf in the middle of the water. “I’ve heard you practicing,” Dee said.
“Stunned by my magnificence?”
“Actually, I do think you’ve gotten better since the last time I heard you. Is that possible?”
“Entirely possible. The world is a wonderful and strange place.” He hesitated. Lying in the water, I could read his thoughts more easily. I saw his brain form the question, how are you holding up here? But instead he said, “It’s getting colder at night.”
“Friggin’ freezing in our room sometimes!” Dee’s voice was too enthusiastic, glad of an easy conversation. “When do they turn on the heat, anyway?”
“It’s probably a good thing they haven’t. If they turned on the heat now, it’d be hot enough to toast marshmallows in the rooms during the day.”
“That’s true. It’s still really warm in the afternoon, isn’t it? I guess it’s the mountains.”
I saw James struggle with his words before he said them, the first deeply sincere statement he’d made since finding her underneath the streetlight. “The mountains are gorgeous, aren’t they? They kind of make me sad for some reason, looking at them.”
Dee didn’t reply or react. It was like if he wasn’t saying something funny, he wasn’t speaking at all.
She moved away from him, around the edge of the fountain. He didn’t follow. Dipping her hand in the water, close to my feet, she said, “This fountain’s really weird. Why is he smiling like that?”
James reached over and patted the satyr’s butt. “Because he’s na**d.”
“I’m just glad he’s in front of your dorm instead of the girls’. I think he’s a nasty little piece of work.”
“I’ll deface him for you, if you like,” James offered.
She laughed. I could almost imagine her singing when she laughed. “That’s okay. But I’d better get inside. Don’t want to be caught by that crazy teacher again, after curfew.”
He reached a hand toward her like he was going to take her hand, or her backpack, or touch her arm. He said, “I’ll walk you back.”
“It’s okay. I’m going to run,” Dee said. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
The line of his shoulders seemed tired all of a sudden and his hand went into his pocket. “Indubitably.”
Dee flashed a smile at him and pelted back toward the girls’ dorm, backpack flapping against her body as she ran. James stayed by the fountain long after she’d disappeared, motionless as the satyr, his close-cut hair turning redder in the sunset light and his eyes half shut. I lay in the water and waited.
Long minutes passed, the sun slowly burning down toward the trees, and I kept looking at that gold glow that flickered inside him, the promise of creative greatness. Why hadn’t he said yes? Was it only because he’d turned me down that I now wanted him so badly? I could make him incredible. He could make me warm, alive, awake.
I’d give him a dream. That’s what I’d do. I’d show him just a little of what I could do, and next time he saw me, he wouldn’t be able to say no.
Above me, James started. He had his head cocked, listening like when he’d sensed me before, only now he heard something else.
The thorn king. I heard the melody begin to ripple across the hills as he began his journey across them. My ears had barely registered the sound, but when I blinked, James was gone. I hurriedly pushed myself out of the water—the surface moved in slow concentric waves around me—and I saw James, a dim figure in the darkness, running flat out like his life depended on it. Running toward the antlered king and his slow song for the dead. Who ran to meet death?
Long after James had traded the hills behind Thornking-Ash for his dorm room, I made my own way to the hills. I wasn’t interested in the antlered king’s music, though. It was faerie music that drew me now—it sounded like a dance, as improbable as that was.
I had never liked the dances. If there was one thing in the history of the world that had been invented to make me feel like a complete outsider, it was the dances the faeries held inside faerie rings. And this dance, on the biggest hill behind Thornking-Ash School, was no different—but it was ten times bigger than any dance I had ever seen. And no faerie, with the exception of myself, of course, could touch iron; mere proximity to it drove most faeries far under the hills and into isolated stretches of countryside. So no matter how tempting the music of the Thornking-Ash School might be to my kind, the invisible iron that reinforced it and the shimmering cars in the parking lots should’ve rendered it a faerie no-fly zone.
But there were hundreds of faeries of every size and shape, from the tall, lovely court fey, who I expected to see, to the short, ugly hobmen, who I didn’t—they rarely ventured out from their holes and their drudgery to come to the dances. They all danced in twos and threes, touching each other’s hair, moving their bodies as one, all beautiful while dancing.
Hanging back a few dozen feet, up to my waist in the dry field grass, I brushed my palms over the seed tops and sighed. I wasn’t thrilled to see any of them. I had been hoping to have Thornking-Ash to myself.
But their music called to me, pulling at my body, irresistible. The longer I stayed there, listening to its pulsing rhythm, the more I knew that I had to go and feel it for myself.
The dancers didn’t interest me, with the impossible shapes they made of their bodies and the sensuality of skin touching skin. It was the musicians I headed toward. A lithe, beautiful boy faerie was all wrapped around a skin drum on his lap and it was he who gave the dance its hypnotic, primal heartbeat. There was a haunting fiddler who scratched and wailed on his fiddle, another faerie who shook a tambourine in perfect counterpoint to the booming drum, and a flutist who called us to dance with frightening, frantic urgency. But that drummer—the one who could make his drum sound like water dropping into a bucket or like the footfalls of a giant or like rain scattering on a roof—he was the one to watch. He was the one who could make you forget yourself.