She shook her head.
No kids,
Delbert had said.
Not this year, and probably not next.
“So you’re not married?” she blurted.
“No,” Marshall said. That grip on her hand remained loose. The question didn’t seem to bother him. “No girlfriends either. Not for the last year or so.”
She wanted to say
How lonely
, but then she hadn’t had a special fella for years now and she wasn’t lonely. (Was she?) She had grown up with most of the guys at the North Pole, and they held no mystery for her.
She wanted mystery. She wanted difference. That was why she wanted to travel.
“I should say I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, “but I’m not.”
Then she smiled. She usually wasn’t that forward. In fact, she couldn’t ever remember being that forward, especially with a guy she knew nothing about.
“I can make you coffee inside,” he said, “Or bring it out if you think that’s too bold.”
“It’s not too bold,” she said.
“It’ll take maybe ten minutes to finish the driveway. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” she said.
He smiled at her, then slowly let go of her hand. She felt the loss, not just of his warmth, but of him. She stepped back out of the way. She wished she had the skills some of the elves did. Snow removal with the snap of a finger. But her own magic was odd: seeing solutions when other people didn’t even know there were problems. And the added magic she had gotten for the rooftops job hadn’t helped at all.
He turned his back on her and started up the snow blower. As he went forward, someone grabbed her arm. She eeped. She didn’t see anything. But she smelled peppermint and stale elf sweat.
Delbert.
“Hey,” he said. “What is all this? You’re not supposed to fraternize.”
She could barely hear him over the snow blower, and she couldn’t see him at all. He had on his invisibility shield, the same kind of shield that Santa used when a kid stumbled on him in the middle of the night. Only S-Elves could use an invisibility shield, but she’d sure like to try, if nothing else than to get rid of Delbert.
“Leave me alone,” she said in the direction of the hand gripping her arm. She could see a Delbert-sized opening snow drift created by the blower. He had apparently barreled through. He had probably even left tracks all the way back to the invisible sleigh. Delbert really was not the brightest elf in the workshop.
“No,” he said, tugging on her arm. “We’re going to get in trouble.”
And he couldn’t afford any more trouble.
“If something goes wrong, I’ll tell the truth,” she said. “This is all my idea.”
Behind her, the blower sounded louder. It was moving in a different direction. For some reason, that made her nervous. She started to turn—
When an arc of cold snow coated her. Her and Delbert.
8
MARSHALL WAS MOVING too fast. He hadn’t been thinking. (Well, he had been thinking. Of Julka, not of anything else. Julka and coffee and the fact that she had found him, all on her own, and that she seemed nervous and she let him hold her hand and jeez, he felt like he was thirteen, only he hadn’t felt this way when he was thirteen because he hadn’t been able to get up enough nerve to talk to a girl, let alone touch her, or do anything until he was much, much older. College, really, and then only because he had met girls who were also interested in math and didn’t mind awkwardness—and there he was, not thinking again.)
Anyway, he hadn’t been thinking about blowing snow or the powerful machine vibrating under his hands. He had been hurrying so he could get to that coffee, and hurrying never really did anyone any good. He kept going in this kinda fugue state until he heard the blower go crunch, and then make a growly noise that wasn’t normal.
That caught his attention. He had probably hit some kind of decorative rock—which he really had to remove come spring. He backed the blower up, turned it sideways to get it out of the awkward position it was in, and then turned again—and walloped poor Julka with a mound of snow.
His face flushed so hot he could have powered the entire block. He shut off the blower so he could apologize (even though she did look cute, standing there in her red not-elf costume, with snow frosting her hair, eyelashes, and cheekbones) and that was when he realized that there was something else beside her.
Somehow the snow had formed a weird kinda snow man next to her. Only it looked vaguely like an unfinished Santa. Marshall had never seen the snow do anything like that, and he figured it was probably like the ways that clouds formed animal shapes—at least, he thought that until the Santa shape moved and cursed in definitively not Santa-like language.
“Hey!” the Santa shape said in a burly male voice. “We’re standing here.”
Its (his?) violent movement made half of the snow fall (off? Was there something to fall off of?), leaving a partial Santa shape that reminded Marshall of nothing more than a half-eaten unfrosted Santa sugar cookie.
“Shh, Delbert,” Julka said, not moving her lips. But she wasn’t as quiet as she clearly thought she was, because Marshall heard her.
“There really is someone there?” he asked.
“No!” she and the male voice said in unison. Then Julka turned her head and glared at the half-Santa shape.
Marshall looked at him (it?) too, and realized that just past it was a roundish opening in the snow drift, and footprints in the snow that came from the yard somewhere.
This time, Marshall couldn’t blame it on tiredness or on not having food or on his imagination. This time, he knew he was seeing something odd, and he knew it for two reasons:
One, other people in the Burger King had seen Julka. (And besides, he’d been struggling with ketchup-flavored burps ever since he left, so he had clearly been to Burger King.)
And two, if they had seen Julka, and she had come here (and she had, he knew it, because he could still conjure the sensation of her hand in his), then she was talking to the half-Santa shape, and that meant she saw it too.
In fact, that meant that she knew what it was.
“Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” Marshall asked.
“No,” the male voice said.
“
Delbert!
” Julka clearly reprimanded the voice, but Marshall couldn’t tell what for. For talking? For standing there? For being rude?
“Just…just…just fix it,” she was saying as if that thought broke her heart.
“I can’t,” the voice (Delbert?) said. “I had most of my S-Elf privileges removed.”
Julka rolled her eyes. “Okay, then,” she said, grabbing the air in front of her and pulling.
As she did, the air waved, like a tablecloth in the breeze. Marshall wasn’t sure what caused that effect. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. But his mind didn’t linger on it long, because as she tugged, a round man appeared.
He had a white beard and white hair, and he was wearing sweats that clearly needed washing, and a too-small T-shirt that said,
Lobstermen do it with nets
. He looked like Santa but not really.
“You’re not supposed to see me,” this Delbert guy said to Marshall.
“Well, I think the reindeer missed that sleigh,” Julka said, rolling her eyes.
She clearly wasn’t making the comment to Marshall, who was still having a bit of trouble comprehending all of this.
“It’s not my fault, really,” Delbert said. “I’m supposed to have the power to make you not remember seeing me, but they took my privileges away from me, and now I can’t do that. I mean, how can you blame me?”
“I can blame you,” Julka said softly.
Marshall wanted to ask who “they” were, and what the “privileges” were, but he wasn’t sure he would like the answer. The last time he heard the words “they” and “privileges” in an incoherent context, “they” referred to the mental health hospital staff and “privileges” meant walking the hospital grounds.
Which he didn’t want to think about. Because if Delbert was off the hospital grounds, did that mean Julka was too? And how come Delbert had looked invisible? No one could become invisible. Marshall firmly believed that. If he didn’t, he would need to be led along a sidewalk on the grounds, heading toward the hospital proper.
“So,” Delbert was saying to Marshall, “can you just like pretend that you didn’t see me? Because if an unauthorized someone ever sees me again, then I’m going to be sent home and never be allowed out again.”
There it was. Hospital grounds, couched in the vague terms. Marshall closed his eyes and sighed. No wonder people emphasized the power of “nice” where Julka lived. “Nice” meant that folks with mental health issues had to learn how to get along.
It explained why she had looked so happy when she had come into Burger King. Freedom did that for folks.
It also explained why she was here. She had nowhere else to go, except back.
And somehow, he was going to have to be the one to get her there. How on Earth was he supposed to find out where she had come from without tipping his hand? The only clue she had given him was that she was from up north, but he wasn’t even sure he could trust that. Did folks with mental health issues have a good sense of direction?
He had no idea.
He held up his hands as if he was being robbed. Maybe he was. Robbed of his delusions.
“I’ll make sure no one knows I saw you,” Marshall said to Delbert. “I promise.”
“You don’t have to promise him anything,” Julka said. “He screwed up. He shouldn’t have gotten out of the sleigh.”
Then she clapped both hands over her mouth as Delbert slapped her arm.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I didn’t. If they blame me for that, I’m going to give you up. I mean it, along with all that weird behavior. And
fraternizing
. You shouldn’t fraternize. I told you nothing good would come of it.”
Fraternize. Apparently he meant with Marshall. Apparently, these two weren’t even allowed to talk to people.
Marshall let out a small sigh. A perfect capper to a perfectly bad week. He leaned back, shut off the snow blower, and tucked the key in his pocket. Then he almost put his hands up again. That robbing metaphor stuck with him, probably because he felt like he’d been robbed.
“Look, you guys are clearly far from home, and in a strange place and I’m sure that’s not comfortable….”
Lord, he was babbling. Julka was staring at Marshall with such disappointment that he felt worse than he had a moment ago. He stopped talking altogether.
He had encountered yet another situation that he didn’t know how to handle. He had no idea how many more of them he could take.
9
JULKA’S BREATH CAUGHT. Marshall thought she was crazy. She had been warned about this reaction in all of her Greater World classes. If she talked too much about the North Pole or exhibited too much magical behavior, the people of the Greater World would dismiss her as a crazy person.
But she didn’t want Marshall to think her crazy. She had liked the way he looked at her before, the interest in his eyes, the way that he smiled at her, the touch of his hand on hers. She had liked that a lot. More than a lot, actually. She had been looking forward to coffee and conversation, and stretching those 35 houses into five days worth of work, and getting to know Marshall and maybe putting in a request to meet the folks who ran the New England advance team—the entire team, not just the Entry Access Quality Control section. Maybe she could be assigned here permanently. She liked the snow, after all.
She hadn’t realized all of those dreams had been in her mind just since lunch until Marshall looked at her like she wasn’t right in the head. If she could righteously punch Delbert right now, she would. But he had just been trying to save her from herself.
And failing.
But he was correct: it was her fault. She had wanted a bunch of things that were forbidden to her. And she was going to get into trouble for it.
Then she frowned.
She was going to get into trouble for it
.
Anyway
. That’s the word she was missing. She was going to get in trouble
anyway
, so why not go for broke?
It was better than finding an S-Elf who would make Marshall forget he even met her. She had momentarily been willing to follow that rule, and the pain in her chest—in her heart—had been severe.
She liked this man. She more than liked this man. This man felt—she didn’t even have the word. More appropriate? Better? Right? He felt right for her.
So she was going to go for broke. And if they decided to punish her at the North Pole, so be it. Nothing could feel worse than that moment when she had asked Delbert to make Marshall forget him. Her. Them.
Make Marshall forget them.
She shoved the invisibility shield at Delbert, and hit him with it in the stomach. She liked to think that was an accident, but it probably wasn’t.