“Hiya, Lefty,” Mo cooed. Two fluorescent green eyes blinked back at him. He removed a sardine from his sandwich and held it out to her. Lefty materialized from the shadows and took the sardine from Mo’s hand, afterward licking each of Mo’s fingers with a rough pink tongue. “Thatta girl,” Mo said fondly.
Lefty mewled again, then turned and shot once more out the cat door, which banged and shuddered in the cat’s wake.
When Mo was finished with his sandwich and had taken a last, satisfied slurp of his hot chocolate, he settled his hat more firmly over his ears, slumped down a bit in his chair, and promptly fell asleep. He dreamed of many strange things—at one point he was standing at the fishmonger, but the fishmonger was a sardine, and refusing to wait on him—and then, as so often happened, he dreamed of his sister.
In his dream she was wearing her pink-and-blue-striped pajamas, as she had been the last time he had seen her. She had her favorite stuffed animal in her lap: a ratty lamb with one eye missing and stuffing coming out of its socket.
She was cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom, except the bedroom was not the bedroom of his childhood but his bedroom now, with its bare stone floor (he had had to take up the carpet, after the fleas) and its plain whitewashed walls and its single mattress, as hard as a chair.
“Hi,” she said to Mo quite casually, as though she had not been missing for nearly twenty years, and as always in his dreams, Mo was at first too overwhelmed to speak. His gigantic heart seemed to be having some sort of convulsion. He was flooded with emotions, all tugging at him from different sides, like wrestlers grappling somewhere deep inside his chest. Relief that she was alive; joy at finding her again; anger that she had stayed away so long; despair that he was so much older now, and she was still so young, and they had missed so much time together.
“Where have you been all this time?” he managed finally. “We searched everywhere for you.”
“Under the bed,” his sister said. She had a nickname just like he did, except that hers, Bella, meant beautiful, and she had earned it by being the most beautiful child in a three-mile radius, and possibly everywhere.
“Under the bed?” Mo felt tremendously confused. A small corner of his brain said, That’s impossible and You must be dreaming, but he swatted that part away like a fly. He did not want Bella to be a dream. He wanted her to be real. “All this time? How did you eat?”
“Lefty brought me food,” Bella said, laughing, as though it was obvious, and just then Mo’s cat streaked by, a blur of fur.
“Look, I’ll show you.” She tugged his hand and made him kneel down and peer under the bed. He felt awkward—he was so much bigger than her now! They had been almost exactly the same size before she had disappeared. He felt he must seem like a clumsy giant to her.
“Come on.” Bella scampered into the space under the bed, then turned around and held out a hand. “There’s plenty of room.”
“I’ll never fit,” Mo said shyly. Bella’s eyes winked out at him from the dark space under the bed. “You were really here all this time?”
At that moment, Mo began to hear muffled shouts from below. His parents. His mother and father were calling them down to dinner.
“It wasn’t that bad.” Bella shrugged. “The only problem was how cold it got.” The shouting grew louder, more insistent. They must hurry. His mother hated it when they were late to dinner.
“You were cold?” Mo asked.
“So cold,” Bella said, and now her breath came out in little clouds, and Mo could see she was shivering. It was cold under the bed, he realized: It was absolutely freezing. Bella’s teeth were clattering together.
The voices from below, sharper, sounding angry: “Where are you? Where have you gone? We need you for dinner!”
“You should have a hat, Bella-Bee,” Mo said, and just then he woke up, and found himself staring not at the darkness under the bed of his dream, but into the darkness of the space under his desk, and into the pale and terrified face of the hatless boy from earlier that night. His teeth were clattering together, just as Bella’s had been in the dream.
Still groggy from his nap, Mo could not even be surprised. “Why, hello,” he said, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “What on earth are you—”
The boy made a frantic no-no-no gesture with his head and then lifted his fingers to his lips. At that moment Mo realized that the shouting he had heard in his dreams was, in fact, real shouting from outside.
From the courtyard he heard a man calling out, “Where are you, you useless, worthless shrivel-head? When I find you, I swear, I’ll cook you for dinner and turn your innards to meat loaf!” He recognized the man’s voice: It was the one with the dripping nose, the man who had introduced himself as the alchemist.
Hmph, thought Mo. Not nearly so nice as being called down for dinner—being turned into dinner.