“Why, this is the Up-and-Under, of course,” said the Crow Girl. She cocked her head in the opposite direction. “You must not be very clever, if you don’t even know where you are. I blame the shoes.”
“Shoes?” asked Zib.
“Shoes.” The Crow Girl held up her bare left foot and waggled her toes extravagantly. “If you can’t feel where you’re going, how will you ever know where you’ve been? Skies for wings and roads for feet, that’s what the world is made of.”
“How can something be up and under?” asked Avery.
“Up a tree’s still under the sky,” said the Crow Girl. “Here in the Up-and-Under, we’re both things at once, always, and we’re never anything in-between . . .
—From Over the Woodward Wall, by A. Deborah Baker
Book IV
Complicate
I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.
—L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
They were only pencil sketches, all the fantasies we chased;
Step right up if you can see me, I’m the one who got erased.
—Michelle “Vixy” Dockrey, “Erased”
PHLEGMATIC
Timeline: 17:20 PST, November 16, 2008. Again.
“When are your parents expecting you?” Dodger is at the far wall, a marker in her hand, adding numbers in a swift, steady stream to the columns already there. She pauses after she asks the question, turning, a perplexed expression on her face. “Or did I already ask you that?”
Roger is cross-legged on the bed, looking equally perplexed. “Yes,” he says, and then, “No,” and then, “I don’t know. I don’t think so? Maybe you thought it really loud, and I picked it up.”
“With my eyes open?” she asks dubiously. “If we’re starting to communicate with our eyes open and our mouths shut, the entanglement is getting worse. We should probably be concerned about that.”
“Or not,” says Roger. “Maybe we’re going through . . . I don’t know, psychic puberty. That usually means more stability.”
“Yeah, when it’s over,” says Dodger. “I don’t know about you, but when I was in the middle of physical puberty, I spent an evening in the kitchen smashing plates and crying for no good reason. Mom didn’t even get mad, because she’d done something similar with a hammer and a bunch of her mom’s wedding china. Do you want to know what kind of damage we’d do during psychic puberty? Because I don’t want to know that. I don’t want to know that at all.”
“The Midwich cuckoos have nothing on us,” says Roger.
“They changed the title to The Village of the Damned when they made the movie,” says Dodger. “Anyway, those kids weren’t good planners. We would be the end of days.”
“Probably less oddly sexist, though.”
“Ever notice how our last names make the word ‘Midwich’ if you cut them in half?” asks Dodger. “Middleton gives us ‘mid,’ and Cheswich gives us ‘wich.’ Midwich. It’s like a lousy word puzzle.”
Roger straightens, looking down the length of his nose at her. “Did you seriously just ask me whether I had noticed a word puzzle? Even a bad one?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been inhaling marker fumes again?”
“Yes.” Dodger widens her eyes, giving him her best sappy smile. “They make my head all bubbly.”
Roger picks up a pillow, weighs it carefully in his hands, and flings it at her. She dodges, laughing, and for a moment he can almost forget the crushing sense of déjà vu hanging over the room. We’re diverging from the original script, he thinks, and that makes no sense, but it soothes his nerves all the same. Divergence is good. We got it wrong, he thinks, and that makes even less sense, and does nothing for his nerves. If anything, it sets them back on edge.
“Well?” says Dodger. He looks back to her. She’s put the cap on her marker and is looking at him expectantly, clearly waiting for something.
Roger hastily reviews their conversation, backtracking to the point where everything went strange. His answer should be easy. It’s not. “I don’t think I’m going to go,” he says, and the feeling of disoriented doom recedes. He can breathe again. “It’s not a good time to fly to Boston. The tickets are refundable, I can say I have to stay on campus for some reason . . . Could I come to Thanksgiving dinner at your place? It’s cool if I can’t, I’m happy to roast a chicken and lecture it for not being a turkey.”