Between the Lines Read online

  She couldn’t have given me a better opening for the conversation I’ve been hoping to have.

  “Funny,” I say. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Delilah frowns. “You feel like a princess too?”

  “No!” I shake my head. “I just… well, I think you’d make a wonderful one.” I force myself to meet her gaze. “I’ve never done this before. I mean, not for real, anyway.” Swallowing hard, I get down on one knee and take her hand in mine. “Delilah, will you marry me?”

  “What? What! What are you doing?” She shoves me backward, so that I topple over. “Oliver, I’m fifteen! I’m not getting married before I even go to prom!”

  “Maybe we could travel there on our honeymoon?” I suggest.

  She stands up, frustrated. “You don’t understand.”

  “I thought you wanted us to be together,” I say.

  She moves to the open window, a flashback to the climax of this fairy tale. “In my world, you don’t get married when you’re fifteen,” she says. “Unless you’re pregnant and have been on an MTV show. I want a boyfriend. I want to go to movies and hold hands and have inside jokes. I want to take silly pictures with the camera on my phone. I want to get a Valentine’s Day card that’s not from my mother.” Delilah looks up at me. “I want a date with you.”

  “A date. You mean like… the first Thursday in July?”

  She smiles. “Not quite. It’s when you go somewhere and get to know the other person a little better.”

  The picnic suddenly seems garish, over the top, a lousy idea. “We don’t have to get married,” I say. “All I really ever wanted was to be with you.”

  “I thought that was all I wanted too—but it turns out, I was wrong,” Delilah admits. “I also want to wake up in my own bed. And wear pants. And—oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m saying this—go to school.” She puts her hands on either side of my face. “I want you in my life. But I want it to be my life.”

  Guilty, I break away from her. “I know it’s all my fault. But when I realized that I was never going to be able to leave the book, I couldn’t stand the thought of—”

  “Back up,” Delilah says. “What do you mean, you were never going to be able to leave the book?”

  My face turns red. “I saw my future, when I was with Orville,” I whisper. “And you weren’t part of it.” I hesitate. “There was another girl in the vision he showed me.”

  “What?” Delilah says. “Who? Seraphima?”

  “Please. Ugh.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before.”

  Delilah considers this. “The future’s always changing,” she points out. “A week ago, you wouldn’t have pictured me in this book, for example. For all we know, if Orville manages to cast a spell that sends me home, your future might be completely different.” She reaches for my hand and pulls me across the stone floor. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Orville was flirting.

  I’ve never seen the old coot move so quickly before. He’s been blushing like a schoolgirl since I introduced him to Delilah, and he’s showered her with all sorts of magic tricks: the disappearing newt, the violin that plays itself in midair, and his latest project—a duck that speaks fluent Hungarian.

  In return, Delilah is apparently telling him everything she ever learned in science class. “You mix the zinc into the sodium hydroxide, and then heat it till it’s practically boiling. Then you add the pennies, and they’ll turn silver. If you heat up those same pennies, they’ll turn to gold.”

  “Alchemy!” Orville gasps.

  “Well, not really. It’s the zinc and copper fusing together to make brass. But it looks like gold, anyway,” she says.

  Scowling, I fold my arms. “If you two are finished exchanging notes, I’d very much like to see my future again… ?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Orville says. He leads Delilah into his workroom and lugs the stone birdbath onto the wooden table, along with several colored glass bottles. He begins to pour a mixture into the bowl, stirring rhythmically.

  Delilah and I have come up with a plan, of sorts. We know from my experiment with Pyro that the small book I carry, which is a replica of the story I’m living, has the capacity to effect change in Delilah’s world. After all, somehow, it made the book in which we exist catch fire. Likewise, if we can find a way to explode the replica of Between the Lines, maybe the one we are living in will fall from Delilah’s bookshelf and land open. Presumably, at that moment, all of us characters will be pulled into our usual positions. When the book realizes Delilah doesn’t belong, she’ll be sent back home.

  Or at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

  Orville keeps his potions and ingredients under a spell unless he’s in his workroom using them. Which means that we can’t very well break into his cottage and find some concoction to cause an explosion. Instead, we have to distract him when he’s present, and when the spell has been dismantled by Orville himself. It was Delilah’s idea to ask him to replicate the magic that showed me my future. That way, we’d be killing two birds with one stone.

  The liquid in the birdbath bubbles and evaporates almost immediately into a purple mist. “Let’s give it a test,” Orville says, and he looks around for something he can toss into the smoke. Delilah arches her brows at me and mouths a single word: Now?

  I shake my head. “Not yet,” I whisper.

  Orville scans the bottles and jars on the shelves behind him. Then he brightens, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small cloth bag. “Afternoon snack,” he explains, and he extracts a seed and drops it into the mist.

  The purple smoke plumes and peaks, taking the shape of a sunflower.

  “Now,” I tell Delilah. She falls back, ostensibly to let me get a better look at my own future, but in reality she starts grabbing every small bottle she can off the shelf behind Orville’s head. She tucks them into her pockets and up her sleeves.

  “It’s all yours,” the wizard says. He plucks a hair from my head and lets it waft down into the haze. Just as it did last time, the mist forms a tall column that spreads wide as a movie screen, playing my future. I can see myself on a couch in a small room with bookshelves.

  Delilah pauses, her fists still full of bottles and herbs, but she is drawn by the image too. “What’s the matter with this future?” she asks.

  “Give it a second,” I say.

  Sure enough, a girl walks in and embraces me. I can feel Delilah stiffen behind me.

  “It gets worse,” I tell her.

  The girl turns, so that we can see her face. Now, upon second sight, I realize this isn’t a girl as much as a woman. A woman I still have never seen before in my life.

  Delilah gasps. “I know her!”

  “You do?”

  “Yes! That’s—”

  Before she can finish her sentence, though, the door to Orville’s cottage slams open, smacking against the wall. Frump races inside, hurtling toward me with his teeth bared. I am so startled that I freeze. “Frump?” I cry. “What in the name of—”

  He cuts me off, snarling, jumping at my throat. We fall to the ground in a blur of limbs and fur. I barely have time to notice Seraphima standing in the doorway too, her face ravaged by tears.

  “You bloody liar,” Frump barks. “You broke her heart.”

  “You don’t have a cousin,” Seraphima wails. “You don’t even have an aunt or an uncle.”

  Before I can explain myself, I feel the weight of a vicious dog being lifted off me. I look up to find Delilah yanking Frump by the collar, pulling with all her might to get him to release his clenched teeth from the neckline of my tunic. Finally, the fabric tears, and Delilah and Frump roll backward in a somersault, crashing against Orville’s shelves so that a hail of bottles rains down over them.

  “Delilah,” I cry, scrambling toward her. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she mutters, stand