“A lis. A lis.”
Girl wants to be good, wants to stay in this place, with this Her that smiles, and she knows that something is expected of her now, but she has no idea what she should do. It seems as if Sun Hair wants Girl to make the bad sounds, but that can’t be true. Her heart is beating so fast it makes her feel sick and dizzy.
Finally, Sun Hair pulls back her hand. She reaches into the square hole beside her and begins putting things on the table.
Girl is mesmerized. She has never seen any of these things. She wants to touch them, taste and smell them.
Sun Hair takes one of the pointed sticks and touches it to the book of lines. Behind her touch, everything is red. “Kraon. Colorbook.”
Girl makes a sound of wonder.
Sun Hair looks up. She is talking to Girl now. In all the babble of sound, she begins to hear a repetition. “A lis play.”
Play.
Girl frowns, trying to understand. She almost knows these sounds.
But Sun Hair keeps talking, keeps pulling things out of the secret place until Girl can’t remember what she is trying to remember. Every new object seizes hold of her, makes her want to reach out.
Then, when Girl is almost ready to make her move, to touch the pointed red stick, Sun Hair pulls It out.
Girl screams and scrambles backward, but she is trapped by this cage on which she sits. She falls, hits her head, and screams again, then crawls on her hands and knees toward the safety of the trees.
She knew she shouldn’t have let her guard down. So what that she can breathe here? It is a little thing, a trick.
Sun Hair is frowning at her, talking in a haze of white noise. Girl can make out no sounds at all. Her heart is beating so fast it sounds like the drums of the tribe that fish along her river.
There is almost no space between them now.
Sun Hair holds It out.
Girl screams again and claws at her hair, blowing her nose. Him is here. He knows she likes Sun Hair and he will hurt her now. All she can think is the sound she knows best of all.
Noooo …
Alice pulled at her hair and snorted, shaking her head. A low, throaty growl seemed caught in her throat.
Julia was seeing true emotion. This was Alice’s heart, and it was a dark, scary place.
Julia opened the door and threw the dreamcatcher out in the hallway, then shut the door. “There,” she said in a soothing voice, moving slowly. “I’m sorry, honey. Really sorry.” She knelt down in front of Alice so they were almost eye-to-eye.
Alice was absolutely still now, her eyes wide with fear.
“You’re terrified,” Julia said. “You think you’re in trouble, don’t you?” Very slowly, she reached out and touched Alice’s wrist. The touch was fleeting and as soft as a whisper. “It’s okay, Alice. You don’t have to be scared.”
At the touch, Alice made a strangled, desperate sound and stumbled backward. She hid behind the plants and began a quiet, desperate howling.
The child had no idea how to be comforted. Another of the many heartbreaks of her life.
“Hmmm,” Julia said, making a great show of looking around the room. “What shall we do now?” After a few moments she picked up the old, battered copy of Alice in Wonderland. “Where did we leave young Alice?”
She went back to the bed and sat down. With the book open on her lap, she looked up.
Between two green fronds, a tiny, earnest face peered at her.
“Come,” Julia said softly. “No hurt.”
Alice made a pathetic little sound, a mewl of sorts.
It tugged at Julia’s heart, that whimper that sounded at once too old and too young. It was a distillation of longing from fear. “Come,” she said again, patting the bed. “No hurt.”
Still, Alice remained in her safe spot.
Julia started to read: “ ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ said Alice, ‘a great girl like you, (she might well say this) to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you! But she went on all the same shedding gallons of tears until there was a large pool around her.’ ”
There was a sound across the room, a scuffing of feet.
Julia smiled to herself and kept reading.
It is a trick.
Girl knows this. She knows it.
And yet …
The sounds are so soothing.
She sits in the forest so long her legs begin to ache. Although stillness has always been her way, in this bright place she likes to move, if only because she can.
Don’t do it, she thinks, shifting her weight from one foot to another.
It is a trick.
When Girl gets close, Her will beat her.
“Comeherealis.”
From the jumble of sounds Sun Hair makes, Girl hears these special noises again. From somewhere, she remembers that they are words.
Trick.
She has no choice but to obey, of course. Sooner or later—sooner, probably—Sun Hair will tire of waiting; this game of hers will lose its fun, and Girl will be in Trouble.