Elliot especially did not like the “other kids” aspect of magic land. Elliot had “does not interact well with peers” on all his report cards.
If the teachers had been more precise, what they would have said was “does not shut up well around stupid people,” but that was teachers for you. And there were always kids who were stunned when crossed, as if they had expected that life would go their way forever.
Elliot had already spotted the two kids who looked as if they thought life was a song. Practically all of the relatively few girls were staring at them.
One of the boringly human pair of boys, the obvious leader, was tall and broad-shouldered, with golden hair, as if Nature had said, “No worries, buddy, I gotcha, no nasty tiring thinking will ever be necessary, also have a crown.” The other had a bright vacant smile that someone, finding it empty, had filled with light.
The blond guy was wandering around from kid to kid, talking kindly to them and taking hold of them by one shoulder with the patronizing air of a kid who thought he was as good and wise as a teacher. He knelt and spoke to one much smaller girl in a My Little Pony T-shirt, then rose to his feet and turned away, leaving her staring after him with shining eyes as he obviously forgot all about her: as if he were a king dispensing largesse to the peasants. The other boy was following the blond guy around, nodding at everything he said. Both of them looked entirely self-assured about the whole situation. Elliot knew their type. The blond boy looked like he would throw the first punch and the smiling boy like he would throw the second and the third, in eager imitation.
Elliot mentally christened them Blondie and Surfer Dude.
He peered around to the woods, where perhaps there were more elves, and to the skies, where he was almost sure he’d seen something that was winged but too big to be a bird.
A cough distracted Elliot from his perusal of the skies. He looked down into blue eyes and saw that it was apparently Elliot’s turn on the condescension rounds.
“You should stop sitting on that fence,” Blondie instructed.
“Oh, I see,” Elliot muttered darkly. “Even this is to be taken from me.”
Nobody Elliot was aware of had made Blondie the boss of the fence, but being tipped over backward into the mud was not Elliot’s idea of a good time. He slipped off the fence and looked resentfully up at Blondie and, of course, his sunny shadow. He found tall people tiresome.
Elliot scowled. Blondie frowned. Surfer Dude kept smiling.
“Don’t worry, little guy. I know this must all be very confusing for people from the other side of the Border,” said Blondie.
Elliot stared for a long moment. The moment grew uncomfortable. Elliot was glad.
“This is all terribly confusing,” Elliot agreed. Blondie smiled, relieved, and Elliot held up a hand to stop him saying anything. “I was so hoping,” Elliot continued soulfully, “that somebody would come explain all this to me. Preferably someone who would do it in small words. And you two look like the small-words type.”
“Sure, what do you need explained?” asked Surfer Dude.
Elliot rolled his eyes and saw that Blondie’s sweet blue eyes had narrowed. He tilted his head and grinned.
“First off, this,” said Elliot, and produced his phone from his pocket. It looked a little bit melty and was sending off sparks. Surfer Dude took a step back.
“You’d better give me that,” said Blondie. “You could hurt yourself.”
He stepped forward. Elliot took a step to the side, and the group as a whole moved away from Elliot. Everyone else had discarded their technology when it malfunctioned, because they were quitters.
“Nope,” said Elliot. “It’s mine.”
“I think it’s about to go on fire.”
“It’s my thing that’s about to go on fire, and not yours,” Elliot said firmly. “Now, why have all our methods of communication just literally gone up in smoke? Are we kidnapped? Are we going to be ritual sacrifices? Is there some sort of magical spell that destroys our ability to call for help?”
A distressed murmuring spread across the group. Blondie looked around in dismay.
“No,” he said. “Everything’s fine. Your little gadgets from across the Border just don’t work here, that’s all. They never have. You don’t need them here.”
“Of course not,” Elliot murmured. “The Industrial Revolution was a silly business anyway.”
Everybody looked confused now, not just Surfer Dude.
Elliot raised his voice. “Are you telling me none of us are going to be able to play video games?”
Blondie looked like he had his doubts about answering, but he did anyway. “I’m not sure what a video game is . . . but I’m pretty sure you can’t play them here.”
One of the other boys, who, judging by his clothes, was from what Blondie called “the other side of the Border” and Elliot called “the real world where stuff made sense and phones did not explode,” burst into tears. Blondie’s head whipped around.
“Oh no,” Elliot exclaimed sadly. “Look what you did.”
“I didn’t—!”
“He seems awfully upset,” Elliot continued. “You must feel really bad.”
Blondie did not look as if he felt bad at all. He looked, in fact, as if he was going to punch Elliot in the face.
He took a deep breath and did not, which was a pleasant surprise and made Elliot feel quite cheerful.
“Go on then,” Elliot said brightly, and made an encouraging yet dismissive gesture. “See to the children!”
Blondie turned and moved toward the crying boy, but he glanced back over his shoulder at Elliot, eyes still narrowed.
“Not everyone who can see the Border belongs on the right side,” he observed. “Being trained to protect the Border is a sacred duty. And my father says that some people are too weak and too concerned with their own comfort to fight the good fight.”
“That’s fascinating. Run along.”
“You can choose to go or stay,” said Blondie. “So I don’t think I’ll be seeing you again.”
“Yes, oh my God, I already understood the implication that I wasn’t man enough to tough it out beyond the Border. Your attempt at an insult was extremely clear,” Elliot informed him. “You’re just making the whole thing laboured and awkward now.”
He waved Blondie away again, and on Blondie’s retreat Elliot squinted suspiciously up at Surfer Dude.
“When he said all that stuff about duty and protection . . .,” he said. “Is this a military operation?”
Surfer Dude looked pleased to be asked. “Yes. They train you up, those who can pass through the Border on either side, to be guards and keep the peace between the peoples in this land and those who may come through from the other. You learn how to handle all sorts of weapons, how to form a unit, all this cool stuff.”
“Oh my God,” Elliot said in a hollow voice. “We’re child soldiers?” He considered this and then said: “I need to sit down. I’m going back to the fence.”