Off the Page Read online

  Oh, Edgar. She squeezed my hand. Life’s not fair.

  When I was in the fairy tale and miserable and Oliver came to check on us, I instinctively told him things were great, even though they weren’t. It was Frump who said, afterward, that we all hide things to make the people we love happy.

  So I forced a smile onto my face, a square peg in a round hole, a shoe two sizes too small.

  I told her we’d better start working on her bucket list.

  When I was five, my mother and I went apple picking on Cape Cod. It was September, and the farm had a corn maze. The air smelled like cider and fresh-baked donuts, and families were dotted throughout the orchard, collecting apples in canvas sacks. It was sunny and cold all at once, and the sky was so blue it looked like a movie backdrop. A shaggy horse pulled a wagon to the parts of the orchard where the trees hadn’t been picked over yet. My mom and I walked as far as we could, to the edge of the field, where a bored teenager took our money to let us into the maze.

  The stalks were taller than me. I ran down the straight edge of the corridor, high-fiving the fronds like they were my adoring fans. My mom chased after me, careful to make sure I didn’t get too far ahead.

  It was dusty and dry, and after about fifteen minutes my eyes and my throat began to itch. My mother scooped me up and put me on her shoulders so I could be her periscope, but even with that vantage point we weren’t tall enough. I was pretty sure we were going in circles.

  After a while the sun lit the tips of the cornstalks, as if they were candles. I was hungry and tired, deadweight in my mother’s arms. Edgar, she said, desperate times call for desperate measures.

  Instead of turning at the next fork in the maze, my mother kicked at the stalks with her boots, creating a small passage. Like ghosts, we began to walk through the walls. Finally we got spit out on the far edge of the farmland, in a field we had never seen before. It was like someone had pulled the rip cord, and night floated down over us.

  “Where are we?” I asked. Everything looked unfamiliar, and I was starting to get that weird feeling in my stomach that came when I was scared.

  My mother took my hand. Let’s find out, she said, and just like that, I wasn’t afraid. I was on an adventure.

  Jules is right.

  My mother is going to die if she stays here.

  But what if she didn’t have to?

  Given the number of times characters have traded places with ordinary people, there’s got to be a way. And no one would know that way better than the author of the fairy tale. But that means coming clean with my mother and explaining everything that’s happened.

  When my mother’s eyes open, they are foggy for a moment, and then they fix on me.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer; she just nods.

  “Mom, there’s something I have to talk to you about. And it’s going to be hard for you to believe, so I have witnesses.” I motion for Delilah and Jules to come inside. Delilah is cradling the book in her arms. “You know Delilah already, and this is her best friend, Jules.”

  They step into the room gently, as if the floor is made of lava. “Jules, hello. And, Delilah,” my mother says. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I’m really, um, sorry . . . to hear that you’re sick,” Delilah says. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  “You already have. You’ve made my son very happy.” She smiles at me.

  “That’s kind of what I need to talk to you about,” I tell her. “Delilah isn’t really my girlfriend.” I pull up a chair beside the bed and sit down so I can take my mother’s hand. “And when you thought I was an imposter, living in your house? You weren’t really all that far off.”

  My mother frowns and tries to sit up in the bed. “I don’t understand.”

  Delilah takes a step forward. “It all started with me,” she says, gesturing to the book. “I found your story in my school library. And I fell in love with it. I read that fairy tale ten times a day. I knew every word, forward and backward. Then one of the characters spoke to me.”

  “It’s always nice to hear when a reader feels a connection to a character,” my mother says.

  “No,” Delilah explains. “This character? Actually spoke to me.”

  “It was Oliver,” I jump in. “The prince you wrote.”

  “Except he didn’t want to be a prince,” Delilah says. “He wanted to be real. And he wanted my help escaping the book. So I did everything I could think of to help him—including coming to your house and asking you to rewrite the ending.”

  “But I wouldn’t,” my mother says, remembering.

  “No,” I agree. “And to be honest, I thought she was nuts. Until I opened the book, and Oliver spoke to me too.”

  “But that’s impossible,” my mother says, and then she relaxes against her pillow, as if it suddenly all makes sense. “This conversation isn’t happening. It’s the medication.”

  “We figured out a way to get Oliver out of the book,” I tell my mother. “But it meant that someone else had to take his place: me.”

  “Edgar, honey, I know this has been a really difficult day for you. There are people here you can talk to who can help—”

  “He’s not crazy,” Jules interrupts. “I was inside the book with him. And Delilah’s been there too. I know it sounds insane. And I know every fiber of your being is telling you not to believe this. But you have to, because it’s true.”

  My mother turns to me. “All right,” she says, in the tone you’d use to placate someone who’s nuts.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense. Somehow we edited the story so that the book would think it needed me instead. Would think that I was the main character, and not Oliver. And it worked, for a little while. But the book has a mind of its own. When something’s not right, it corrects itself.”

  “Well, of course,” my mother says, as if I have finally begun to speak English. “What you’re describing . . . that’s what writing is. Characters get up and walk away with a plot all the time.”

  She’s not getting it. “For a few months, Oliver was pretending to be me,” I tell her, remembering what she had said earlier: I saw a boy who looked like my son . . . but who I just knew wasn’t. That was what made her go to the doctor in the first place, and even if she hadn’t been delusional—just really observant—it was also what made the doctors do the tests that found the tumor.

  What if they hadn’t? Would she not even know she was sick?

  Would that be better?

  I push aside the thought. “Oliver is Delilah’s boyfriend,” I continue. “Me . . . I was hidden inside your story.”

  My mother looks from me to Delilah to Jules, as if she can’t understand our strange conspiracy. “Edgar,” she says quietly, sadly, “there’s no such thing as fairy tales.”

  A long time ago, when my mother first wrote that book, she thought otherwise. I guess life can take you to a place where you are completely different from the person you used to be.

  Before I know what’s happening, Jules yanks the book out of Delilah’s arms. She flips it open to the page where Oliver is climbing the tower wall. He looks up, sees a familiar face, and smiles. “Oliver,” she says, “there’s someone who wants to say hello.”

  She turns the book so it’s facing my mother. Oliver’s eyes dart up, and when he sees my mother’s face, he looks shocked but recovers quickly. He grimaces and hangs on more tightly to the rock wall, doing his job, assuming that he isn’t supposed to speak.

  I lean closer to my mother so that he can see my face too. “Oliver,” I tell him, “it’s okay to talk to her.”

  Very slowly, his face turns toward us. “Hello,” he says shyly. “It’s quite a pleasure to officially meet you.”

  My mother’s face goes white. “This is not happening.”

  “I’m sorry, should I perhaps go back to hanging on the wall?” Oliver asks. “But before I do that—might I just say, I loved playing your son, for a little while. You