Between the Lines Read online

  “Saving your life!”

  “It was working!”

  “Oliver, you started to show up in my room. But you started to show up flat as a pancake. Did you really want to live in my world that way?”

  “Maybe I just looked like that because I wasn’t finished yet,” he says. “Maybe I’d puff up like a pastry at the very end.”

  “Even so—how would you be able to finish painting yourself out of the story? At the very least, your arm or fingers or hand would have to stay behind to put those last brushstrokes on the canvas.”

  He sinks down to the ground. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I know,” I say sadly. “I’m really sorry.”

  Oliver is sitting with his knees drawn, his head bent. I wish I could tell him everything will work out in the end, but that’s only true in fairy tales—the very place he’s trying to escape.

  “Maybe we should call it a night,” I whisper. I set the book, still open to page 43, on my nightstand and crawl into bed.

  “Delilah?” Oliver’s voice drifts to me. “Do me a favor?”

  I sit up again. “Anything.”

  “Can you close the book, please?” He looks away. “I kind of want to be alone right now.”

  These are the very words I just said to my mother. The same ones she insisted were signs of depression. I wish I knew how to help Oliver. I wonder if my mother feels this way about me.

  But instead, I just nod and, as gently as I can, do what he’s asked.

  page 32

  Oliver eased his way inside the tiny cottage. There were piles of books and jumbles of glass bottles in all shapes and sizes. The old wizard led him to an adjoining room whose rafters were thick with dried herbs and flowers. He stuck a bony finger between his chapped lips and wet it with the tip of his tongue, then pressed it against the dusty page of a large leather book and flipped through it, scanning the spells. Finally he smiled, and his face creased into a hundred more wrinkles. “Ah,” said Orville. “Pass me that Rubicon flower, will you, my boy?”

  Oliver had no idea what that was, but he pointed to a dried, crusted orange button on the stone worktable before him. When Orville nodded, Oliver handed it to the wizard, who rubbed the bud between his palms before letting the petals settle in a big wooden bowl.

  “And the three bottles to your left?” Orville continued to mix and stir, to taste and test. “And the vial to your right—no, be careful with that!” Orville warned as Oliver realized how hot the glass was to the touch. He glanced down to find his fingerprint burned into a whorl pattern on its side.

  Orville took an eyedropper and dipped it in the vial, then counted out three sizzling drops into the wooden bowl. They vanished with a hiss and a puff, creating a wall of orange flame. Orville squinted into the heart of the fire as the hottest bits, the blue center, began to form into silhouettes.

  Oliver could see a tower, and a dragon beside it blowing fire. But where was the tower? There had to be a hundred like it in this kingdom alone. The flames dipped and spread, and then Oliver could see it—the cliff that rose from the edge of the ocean. The jagged rocks below, the pounding surf. Timble Tower was a former battlement, long abandoned—and the only tower Oliver had ever seen perched on a cliff. He knew exactly where it was.

  “Thank you!” Oliver cried, rushing out the door.

  A moment later the frantic pounding of hoofbeats sounded as Oliver galloped away. Orville turned back to the flames, which were reshaping and re-forming themselves. This time, the old wizard could see black hair falling over one evil eye, a scar that wound its way from brow to cheek, a wicked grin. He doused the fire with cornstarch and raced out the front door of the cottage, but by that time it was too late.

  Prince Oliver was gone. He’d have to find out for himself that this princess of his was not alone.

  OLIVER

  “YOU MUST BE KIDDING,” RAPSCULLIO SAYS WHEN he sees me for the third time. “What do you need now?”

  I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere in this stupid fairy tale. I am back to square one, actually. Although I’d believed that maybe I had found a way out of this prison, Delilah is right. I can’t be the one who paints myself free, and I can’t trust anyone else to do it for me, which means I’m going nowhere fast.

  I’d wanted to talk to Delilah, but she was fast asleep—my own fault since I was the one who asked her to close the book. After she left, I felt so completely defeated, as if nothing I could ever do would change my circumstances. Nothing I usually did in my off time—chess, a long walk, a bracing swim in the ocean—could take me away from my thoughts. And then I remembered Delilah.

  When she wanted to escape her life, she read books. Like this one.

  Queen Maureen had mentioned an entire library at Rapscullio’s cave—a room that I’d never actually reached, because I got so distracted by his magic canvas instead. But if Delilah could use stories for distraction, maybe they would work on me too.

  “I’m looking for a good read,” I tell Rapscullio. “I hear you’ve got quite a large selection?”

  Rapscullio brightens. “Oh, yes, indeed I do. I’m particularly fond of troubadour ballads and folktales, but my shelves seem to have a bit of everything: romances, horror, comedy. Even some plays by a fellow called Shakespeare. He’s not half bad.”

  “Maybe I could browse?” I ask. “I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”

  “Be my guest,” Rapscullio says, extending one emaciated arm toward a tunnel in the rear of the lair. “You go have a look around, and I’ll make us some tea. Chamomile. You seem a little… high-strung these days.”

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble—”

  “No trouble at all.” He elbows me and grins with half his mouth; the scar immobilizes the other half of his face. “Maybe you’ll even tell me more about that girl of yours.”

  “Girl?” I can’t tell him about Delilah. I feel like she’s my own personal secret. Like if I tried to explain her to anyone inside here, it would be giving a piece of her away.

  “The one you had me paint the picture for—”

  “Right.” The girl I made up, as an excuse. I wait for Rapscullio to unearth his teapot from under a moldering flutter of old maps on a broad table, and I turn and duck through the narrow passageway into another part of the lair.

  The small room is musty and slightly damp, with floor-to-ceiling shelves carved out of gnarled walnut. Books are stacked and tucked and jumbled in piles. There are astronomy tomes and volumes about insect species and a whole shelf about Renaissance painters. I read some of the spines. An Herbologist’s History of the World. War and Peace. A Tale of Two Cities.

  Rapscullio’s teakettle begins to whistle. Any minute now he’s going to come back here and expect me to rhapsodize about a make-believe maiden who lives somewhere in this kingdom. I pluck a book off the shelf. Maybe one of these stories will inspire me to come up with a good lie that he’ll believe.

  When I pull the book free, though, another one tumbles to the dirt floor, having been jammed behind the first on the shelf. I pick it up and dust it off, about to replace it more carefully, when I realize I’ve seen this one before.

  It’s purple leather, with gold lettering.

  BETWEEN THE LINES, I read on the cover. I flip it open and see a picture of myself on the very first page, as if I am staring into a mirror. “Once upon a time,” I murmur aloud.

  Maybe one of these stories will inspire me.

  “Milk or sugar?” I hear Rapscullio’s footsteps in the narrow corridor, so I slip the book beneath my tunic and hastily reach for another one, which I pretend to be thumbing through when my host arrives with the tea.

  My whole connection to Delilah started with words—a message etched onto the cliff wall. Why couldn’t it end the same way?

  I may not be able to paint myself into another world, but perhaps I can edit myself out of this one.

  Delilah

  MY MOTHER IS THE REASON I’