In an Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire Page 0,4
a joy to teach. Whoever has that opportunity next year will be very lucky.”
Katherine seemed to mull her words over for a while, considering them from every angle. Then she smiled. “Thank you, Miss Hansard,” she said, and slipped out, leaving the classroom suddenly, echoingly empty.
Miss Hansard, who had been teaching for nearly twenty years, slumped against her desk and wondered when retirement had gone from a distant impossibility to something to be devoutly yearned for. They got younger every year. She was certain of that much, at least. They got younger, and harder to understand, every single year.
* * *
THE OTHER STUDENTS were gone, whirling off into the dawning summer like dandelion seeds in the wind. Katherine looked mournfully back at the classroom once before she started walking away. It would have been nice to spend a little longer at her desk, reading where no one knew how to find her. As soon as she got home, her mother would probably try to pass Diana off to her for “just a few minutes, be a good girl now and help your mother,” and that would mean playing babysitter for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t particularly want to go outside and run around playing the sort of games that weren’t safe for toddlers, but she didn’t want to be stuck keeping Diana from eating thumbtacks, either.
Daniel never had to babysit. Daniel could have spent all day, every day reading in his room if he’d wanted to, and their parents would have been right there to applaud and tell him how amazing he was for being so serious about his studies. They didn’t discourage her, exactly, didn’t tell her she wasn’t supposed to read because she was a girl or that she needed to be better at her chores, but there was always a vague impression that they expected something different from her, and she didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t want to know what to do with that. She suspected it would involve changing everything about who she was, and she liked who she was. It was familiar.
Dwelling on what would happen when she got home made her uncomfortable. She took her book back out of her bag and began to read, following Trixie Belden and her friends into another mystery. Mysteries in books were the best kind. The real world was absolutely full of boring mysteries, questions that never got answered and lost things that never got found. That wasn’t allowed, in books. In books, mysteries were always interesting and exciting, packed with daring and danger, and in the end, the good guys found the clues and the bad guys got their comeuppance. Best of all, nothing was ever lost forever. If something mattered enough for the author to write it down, it would come back before the last page was turned. It would always come back.
Katherine had made the walk home from school hundreds of times, tagging at her brother’s heels when she was in kindergarten, forging her own trail in first grade, and now following it with the faithful devotion of one who knows the way. She didn’t look up as she walked, allowing her feet to remember where they needed to fall if she was going to be home before dark.
It is an interesting thing, to trust one’s feet. The heart may yearn for adventure while the head thinks sensibly of home, but the feet are a mixture of the two, dipping first one way and then the other. Katherine’s feet were as sensible as the rest of her, trained into obedience by day after day of walking the same path, following the same commands. They knew where to go, and needed no input from her eyes. So it was truly an act of unthinkable rebellion when, at the corner of Pine and Sycamore, her feet—acting entirely on their own—turned left instead of right.
At first Katherine, deeply engrossed in her book and trusting in the inalienability of routine, didn’t notice the deviation. She continued walking as the familiar streets dropped farther and farther behind her, replaced first by the shabby neighborhood which bordered the creek, and then by an old walking trail that wound its way through a field of blackberry brambles. It was only when a shadow fell across her book, rendering it temporarily impossible to read, that she stopped and looked up, blinking at the unexpected absence of light.
In front of her, growing right in the middle of the