—
HARRIET AND ZU convened in Dottie’s bedroom to play nurse, fluffing the patient’s pillow and tying garlands of dried comfrey leaves around the plaster cast on her leg. Dottie had a little bouquet of sweet peas and mint leaves that her younger brother had picked for her, and she sniffed at it hopefully as all three agreed on Zu’s summation that they’d help meals stretch further on the farmstead just by not being around. And it was daft not to jump at a chance to send money home.
Is Gretel definitely not here? Dottie asked, for the fifth or sixth time.
Seeming like someone in love, Harriet sang, but Dottie said: There should be more songs about needing to know where someone is so you can take it easy and not have to keep thinking about your kicking leg being out of action. You’re sure she’s visiting another farmstead? I feel like she’s right here, hiding again. Or she’s around a corner plotting something. Don’t you feel like she’s listening in right now?
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING HARRIET found Gretel standing outside the Lee cottage and surveying the clouds. It’s Thursday, she said. She took out her half of the lottery ticket, and Harriet produced the other half. They held the two pieces together and hunted rogue numbers in the vicinity of Giant’s Clog, Mr. Jack-in-the-Box (who did not emerge), and the rusted loom. The measuring tape wrapped around the loom stand had fallen down and looped in a skew-whiff sequence, but the numbers didn’t match the ones they had.
As they went about, Gretel spied more numbers than Harriet did. Harriet wondered if it was because she was seeing things four ways, and she asked about that. Gretel said she didn’t know what Harriet was talking about, so back at Gretel’s Well Harriet rubbed a tile clean with the corner of her jumper and bade Gretel take a look at her own eyes.
Huh, said Gretel. Four pupils. But there were only two last time I looked.
She said her eyes hadn’t been like that before she went down the well . . . “her” well.
Maybe I was completely different before. I’m not going in again, so I guess we’ll never know.
Dottie and Harriet had gone farther in than Gretel had and they hadn’t changed. Harriet put this to her point blank.
Oh, la, Gretel said. So you didn’t change. Is that anything to brag about? Three girls went down a well: two were made of gingerbread and one was—not . . .
Made of gingerbread . . . this was insulting. And yet. And yet Harriet had heard Gretel’s musings over consecutive platefuls of gingerbread: Is there anything that this foodstuff lacks . . . is there any other food that so completely nourishes body and soul, any food more absolute in its embrace of the life-force of its eater . . . ? Gretel Kercheval would defend the virtue of well-made gingerbread before any gourmet tribunal. So all right, insult wasn’t really what Harriet had just taken from those words. It was more chagrin at being lumped in with Dottie. This was a wholly new chagrin, as being lumped in with Dottie and the other farmstead kids had been something she’d welcomed up until then. The newness of her chagrin may or may not have mirrored Gretel’s upon hearing Harriet partition the three of them on the basis of cellular stability. They stood on opposite sides of the well, sad and angry, trying to decide whether to patch things up or whether this was just the way things were and therefore there was nothing to patch up.
What were you doing down there, anyway?
Point of view, said Gretel.
What?
I thought there might be a point of view down there. Most of the time I just go here and there without one. So.
Jiaolong, Nathan, and Atif walked past with threshing forks over their shoulders. Harriet and Gretel put away their lottery ticket halves, and the Threshing Fork Three greeted Harriet. Gretel they snubbed. It seemed to them that she’d come to take the girls away. She’d tried to do it one by one beginning with Dottie but had got caught at first attempt, so then there was this drawing of some bonkers distinction between the boys and the girls, and now all the girls were going to go and live with Gretel. They were sure Elsa would end up going too. If the girls came back, if they did, they’d come back awful, in lace shirts and satin overalls and boots that fastened with gemstones.
The Threshing Fork Three walked on, and Harriet and Gretel watched them go. There were numbers shaved into the tangled hair on the backs of their heads. Nathan, Thibault, and Atif were never able to determine at what place, time, and by whose hand those numbers were shaved, but there were nine. Three numbers per head. Harriet and Gretel got out their lottery ticket halves again. They hadn’t won. They hadn’t won, but the shock bulletin sent tremors of mirth through them. The Threshing Fork Three heard snuffling and looked back—what was Gretel up to . . . weeping crocodile tears, perchance? She and Harriet were rolling around on the grass, crying with laughter. Harriet already seemed to be a bit of a lost cause, but the Threshing Fork Three had known her all her life and were reluctant to give up on her. Nathan went back, handed Harriet a threshing fork, and reminded her that she wasn’t a Miss Moneybags; she was only a sidekick.
Gretel got up and demanded a threshing fork too. The Threshing Fork Five got down to work and had their share of the wheat ready for winnowing faster than ever before. There was even time for a game of carrot-patch tag before Gretel was bundled into a limousine, torn clothes and all, leaving the other four draped around motley items of farm machinery wheezing through what felt very much like perforations in their breathing apparatus. They’d kept up with her and it had felt easy while they were keeping up. While they kept up they were all child, fast and light, testing the stretch and reach and pull of their forms and finding laughably little resistance. Falling so much as a millimeter behind Gretel brought them up against joint and bone and sinew.
8
Harriet didn’t sleep well in the city. The dormitory was too hot. She sat up in bed and looked down the row of gently snoring girls, punched herself in the side of her head, and whispered: What did you think this was going to be like, idiot? Did you think you’d have free time to tumble around Druhá City searching for lucky numbers with Gretel Kercheval?