Lunch was awkward. Ben pretended to not be mad at me, but it’s not like I can’t tell when he’s angry and can’t let something go. Not that I expected him to just let it go. We absolutely needed to talk. We couldn’t do it at school, though, so I was doing my best to be normal. He wasn’t trying as hard. He talked to the other people at the table, but more or less ignored me. At least he sat by me. I was glad Raven wasn’t at lunch with us so she couldn’t say anything about the sandwich I was eating.
As soon as the truck pulled into the driveway after school, I turned to Ben, and before I could even open my mouth, he said, “We need to talk.”
I’ve never seen two people move as quickly as Raven and Tony did when they got out of the backseat. They may as well have been the ones with magical powers,
“What is that?” I asked Ben, moving toward the swath of pink I could see in the distance between trees.“I don’t know,” he said, following along behind me. He was probably looking to take me hope, drop me off, and never have to see me again after the conversation we had just had. But we were switching frames of mind now. We were no longer “relationship” Ben and Harlow. We were “work” Ben and Harlow. And “work” Ben and Harlow are able to put things behind them and set aside their differences much more easily than “relationship” Ben and Harlow were.I picked my way between the trees until it came into focus. It was a tree, and what I was seeing was pink bark. Unlike the last trees that Brice and I had seen in these same woods, further away from here, it was a bright fuschia pink from th
By the time I got to the school, I could tell the situation was pretty bad, and I didn’t know if my powers had completely recharged since I’d been using them so much lately, particularly to build this monstrosity of a school, I probably should’ve brought my staff with me, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was too busy picturing Kayla, Liam, Leo, Lluvia, Sean, Liz, and the others all frozen.Remarkably, when I walked inside and saw Maggie floating there near Mage Jaye’s desk, I realized Mage Jaye had been mistaken.Fionna had missed someone, perhaps on purpose. It didn’t make me happy to see Abeo standing in the hallway, next to Fionna, as if they were both waiting for me.“Fionna,” I said in a calm voice as Mage Jaye hung back outside. “What’s going on?&r
“Fionna, dearest, what did you do to the other mages, and can you undo it?” I asked her as I took a peek out the window. Those Buzzards I’d seen flying in were landing all over the clearing outside, and even though there were plenty of wolves howling in the distance to let me know that my pack was summoning anyone and everyone who might be willing to come and help, we were in a world of trouble. I knew that a wolf’s abilities were limited against a mage, especially the ones as powerful as the mages landing outside. I didn’t get a good count, but it looked like there were at least twenty, maybe more. They were of all ages, shapes, sizes, etc. from young women to old men and everything in between. The one thing they all had in common as they shifted from bird to human and touched down in my forest was that all of them looked pissed off at the world and ready to fight. One girl in particular caught my eye. S
I wasn’t aware of what was going on around me for a very long time. How long, I couldn’t say for sure, but I knew, when I finally tried to open my eyes, something was very wrong and had been that way for a lengthy amount of time.At first, I couldn’t open my eyes. I felt a lot like I did anytime I completely used up all of my energy from the forest. But this was different. This was… painful. I wasn’t just depleted of energy, my body felt like I’d gotten hit by a semi-truck. Not only was my head throbbing, but every time I breathed, my ribs hurt. I didn’t know what Cody Buzzard had done to me, but if I ever learned to move again, I was going to remove his nuts--with a spoon.“Harlow? Can you hear me?”It was his voice! Did this guy want me to remove his nuts with
Ever since the day when I met Fionna Flamingo, I’ve thought there was something very interesting about her mind. Very interesting--and extremely messed up. Like really messed up. Now that I am essentially trapped in it, I can see that I was right. It is a bizarro world like none other.Once Cody is gone, I sit on the blue grass for a long time, just staring at this odd world around me. Puffy clouds roll by along the green sky, their pink, fluffy cotton changing forms and shapes similar to the way ours do back in the real world. Except when I say these looked like bunnies or puppies, that sort of thing, they really did. I probably could’ve sat there for a few hours just staring at the sky.But the longer I sat there, the longer I would be trapped in this ridiculous world. I needed to find a way out.The p
The next morning, before I opened my eyes, I fully expected to feel my own bed underneath me and to know that this was all just a crazy dream, that I hadn’t really been whisked away into another realm made by a delusional person by her equally delusional cousin. His crazy half-brother wasn’t attempting to kill me, my entire pack, and wipe out the council of mages. No, I’d open my eyes and be back in my bed at Grandma’s house.Bonus points if Grandma was still alive.Extra bonus points if I’d never actually met Starla, too.But while my eyes were still closed, I felt the grass beneath my fingers and knew that I was still there, that I hadn’t been taken home, and that I’d never left this strange world.I sighed and ro
There wasn't a lot to do there in Fionna’s fictitious world. I mostly sat around, ate chocolate fruit, and drank out of the river. I noticed that it was green whenever Sam was there with me. Whenever he started to fade away, it changed color again, mostly to red. I didn’t know where he went when he left, and he didn’t know either. It was all so strange and surreal. I walked around some and tried to figure out if there was a secret door somewhere. Sam had said he didn’t think that was the case, but he’s just a brain. What does he know?At one point, late in the afternoon of that first full day that I was there, I noticed the river changing colors again. It turned an odd smokey blue color for a while. I looked around me to see if I could figure out the source of the change, but I didn’t see anything else different. So then, I went back to wandering aimlessly, and Sam
Have you ever seen the movie “The Hours?” At the beginning of that movie, Nichole Kidman reenactes the suicide of Virginia Woolf, who killed herself in 1941 by filling her pockets with rocks and walking into a river. I can’t imagine what that must be like, to weigh yourself down so much that you can’t possibly float back up again. Of course, I suppose a person could empty their pockets quickly, but she was clearly resolved to end a life she didn’t quite understand.You could probably say the same about Holly Hunter’s character in “The Piano” when she tries to let that instrument suck her down into the water when it’s tossed overboard.I didn’t have any rock or a piano to weigh me down when I dove into the river looking for my own sanity, looking for a way back home, but I did have resolve.