Off the Page Read online

  I am sitting in the great hall of the castle, my back against the stone, pitching a ball to strike the far wall and bounce back to me. I do this over and over, and the ball makes a satisfying thwack each time it hits.

  Queen Maureen comes into the hallway wearing an apron, her hands dusted with flour. “Good Lord, Oliver, I thought we were under attack. Is that really necessary?”

  “Sorry,” I mumble. “I’m having a bit of trouble occupying myself.”

  “Well, I could use an extra set of hands. Come into the kitchen.”

  I let the ball drop, and out of nowhere, Humphrey comes flying to catch it in his jaws.

  Maureen is in the middle of making a cake. “Why don’t you frost this for me,” she suggests, “while I start rolling out croissants?”

  I look at the three rounds of cake and the bowl of pink frosting. I dip my finger into it and take a taste. As usual, it is delicious. Maureen is a master baker. “May I ask you a question?” I say. “Who exactly eats all the stuff you bake?”

  “I know it seems excessive,” she admits. “But it’s always gone at the end of the day. About half of it winds up in Seraphima’s tower.”

  Having watched that girl devour everything that was not nailed down at the mall, I hardly find this surprising.

  I watch Maureen roll out a square of dough and begin to slice through it with a sharp knife, cutting it into triangles. “Now it’s my turn to ask you something,” she says. “What was it like?”

  I glance at her. “You mean out there? Imagine no boundaries. No walls.”

  She holds her hand up to her throat. “It seems terrifying.”

  “It is. But in the best way,” I say. “There are books with so many recipes you couldn’t count them all.” I glance around the kitchen. “There are ingredients and spices from countries whose names you can barely pronounce. Pans in every shape and size. And so many people . . . so many people that you could bake all day and all night and still not feed everyone.”

  Queen Maureen’s eyes widen in awe. “I can see why you might be struggling to be back here.”

  I pick up the spatula and slop a layer of frosting onto the top of the first round of cake.

  “It might not be ideal, in your situation, but we all must keep a stiff upper lip, you know. Make the best of things. It’s the lot we’ve been given.”

  “But by whom?” I ask, jamming the second layer of cake onto the first. “Why should I have to be locked in here just because a woman decided to tell a story?”

  “Why is the sky blue? Why does the sun rise?” Maureen says. “Can you honestly tell me that this girl of yours in the other world doesn’t have to play by rules as well?”

  I think of school, of chores, of Allie McAndrews. Of all the walls that box Delilah in.

  I suppose the difference isn’t that there is a box. It’s that I’m not inside it with her.

  “What you need to do, dear, is find an avocation. Something to occupy yourself. Perhaps you could take up whittling. Or I hear Sparks has started a knitting circle.” She smiles. “Maybe you’ll even find that you have a knack for baking.”

  We both look down at the creation between my hands. The confection lists to the left, frosting pooling on one side, with a large crack running down the center where I accidentally speared the cake with the spatula.

  “Or maybe not,” Queen Maureen says kindly.

  Rapscullio and I sit side by side in the unicorn meadow, in front of our respective easels. On each is a bare canvas. We both pick up a palette of paints, and I mimic his actions. One of the beasts munches moongrass just a few feet away from us, completely oblivious to the fact that he is a model.

  “When we think about foreshortening,” Rapscullio instructs, “we really want to use our eyes. The horn facing us is going to be ten times larger than the back left hoof, simply because of perspective.”

  He looks at me with so much hope for my understanding that I give him a toothy grin, even though he might as well be speaking ancient Greek.

  “Now,” Rapscullio says, “pick up your brush, and feel the energy. Let the art flow from your mind through your fingertips. No sharp edges, just gentle movements of the hand.” He sketches with his paintbrush, and a reasonable facsimile of the unicorn appears on his canvas.

  I take a deep breath and draw my first line.

  “You know,” he muses, “of all the people in this book, I’m probably the only one who truly understands what you’re feeling right now.”

  I frown. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, after all, I know what it’s like to not end up with the girl.”

  I hesitate, my brush hovering over the canvas. “But that’s not you. That’s your character.”

  “What is a man, if not his character?”

  I shake my head. “It’s different. You didn’t choose to fall in love with Maureen. It was written to happen that way.”

  “Did you really choose to love your Delilah? Do you remember the exact moment you made that decision? Or did it just . . . happen?” Rapscullio cocks his head. “Perhaps your romance was written too. By fate, by the stars. We all have authors, Oliver.”

  Suddenly Pyro, flying overhead, dips low and startles the unicorn, which goes bolting into the Enchanted Forest. Rapscullio sighs. “I suppose we’ve lost our model. Let’s see how you’ve done.”

  On my canvas, I haven’t drawn a unicorn. Just two stick figures, holding hands.

  Rapscullio clears his throat. “Well,” he says politely, “I think you’ve really captured its essence.”

  When I burst into Orville’s cottage, he is on a ladder, stirring a cauldron three times his size. “What are you—” I shake my head. “Never mind. I don’t even want to know.”

  It is the first time since I’ve been back that I feel like I have a purpose. I may not be able to live in Delilah’s world, but I know how to get a glimpse of it again. If I can just see her, that might be enough to get me through the day. After all, it’s unreasonable to expect me to give her up wholly and completely, instead of weaning myself from her bit by bit.

  “Ollie, my boy! I’m so glad you dropped by! I can use some help with this—Pyro is suffering from heartburn, and it’s a challenge to stir a kilo of sodium bicarbonate into twenty gallons of yogurt, but that’s the only way to keep it from tasting like tar.”

  “Orville,” I begin, “do you remember when you showed me my future?” Before I escaped the book, the wizard created a plume of smoke that illustrated what was yet to come. A seed, for example, morphed into a vision of a flower. And a strand of my hair allowed me to witness a scene that now makes perfect sense: me, in an unfamiliar home, with an unfamiliar woman—Jessamyn Jacobs.

  “Of course,” Orville says.

  “Do you have something that can show me the present?”

  Orville looks at me, confused. “You mean . . . your own eyes?”

  “No,” I say. “I want to see the present somewhere else. I want to see someone else’s life.”

  “Ah! Perhaps a telescope.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to reach quite far enough.”

  “This is an enchanted one,” Orville explains. He climbs down from the ladder and rummages through a satchel that I’ve seen him wear numerous times around the book. “Sometimes, when I’m being called by another character, I use this,” he confesses. “If my knees are stiff or if I’m just feeling a tad lazy, I check to see if it’s an emergency before I expend the effort to hike all the way across the pages.” He hands me the brass tube, and I extend it to its full length.

  “How does it work?” I ask, peering into one end.

  Orville snatches it away from me. “Not like that, naturally.” He chuckles. He sets the scope on the ground and, with a flick of his fingers, sets it spinning like a bottle. “Round and round and round it goes. . . . Where it will stop, nobody knows!”

  “Well, that’s rubbish!” I exclaim. “What good is that going to do me?”

  “No, that�€