Because of his vorpal.
His mom was looking at him, jaw clenched. Dylan ducked his head. “I’ll wait in the car,” he said, giving up the idea of watching for Dad. Over his shoulder, he called, “I can work at the store tomorrow,” by way of apology; for what, he wasn’t sure. Then he made for the Tahoe, his ears full of the sound of trees crackling in the wind.
The pawnshop was a trove of old guitars and DVD players and a pair of cracked leather boots that had Dylan’s name on them if he could get ten more dollars. Everything in the store had once been great but was now only kind of cool, and only to someone like Dylan, who wasn’t currently in a position to buy anything not-used.
He went to a shelf in the corner that held a row of fantasy novels everyone reads by the time they’re twelve. Wizards and monsters and magical relics. Stuff Dylan was too old for. Even so, he opened a copy of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There and studied the illustrations. He made himself do this from time to time. He was trying to convince himself that the girl who haunted him wasn’t real.
Her face floated to mind more and more often lately, bright with wonder or squinting in concentration. And now he was seeing her even in Hevlen’s gym, like his brain didn’t know when to quit. He couldn’t say how he had met her, or where, or when. Couldn’t remember anything else about her.
Except for one thing.
He had the distinct idea that she was a queen.
Obviously impossible. How does a kid in Seattle meet a queen? That was how he knew he was only remembering a character from a story. A picture from a book, maybe.
He flipped a page and found a drawing of Alice with a crown and scepter. But her inkblot eyes held nothing familiar.
The bell on the shop door jingled, and a customer walked in. Dylan poked his head around a shelf. Not a customer. Hunter, lumbering around like he owned the place.
“What are you doing here?” Dylan called. “I told Mom I’d work today.”
“Good for you,” Hunter said, heading toward the back room.
Dylan shoved the book back in with the others on the shelf and wandered toward the counter. “What’s the movie we used to watch when we were kids?” he called to Hunter. “The one with the girl who’s a queen?” Could be that’s where Dylan remembered her from—a movie.
No answer from the back room. Hunter had a terrible memory for movies. He never watched one twice unless it included an exponential number of explosions.
“The NeverEnding Story?” Dylan wondered aloud. The girl in that movie was technically an empress. Close enough?
Dylan thought he heard someone rummaging through the bins near the door. A customer after all. He closed his eyes and tried to guess exactly where the customer was standing. The bin on the far left—DVDs. He didn’t have to guess. He could feel it in the way the air moved—could sense it with his vorpal. He checked the mirror in the corner of the ceiling and saw that he’d been right: a girl in a canvas jacket stood at the DVD bin. Dylan slid behind the counter and propped himself against a stool to wait.
Hunter emerged from the back room carrying the cash box. “We watched too many weird movies when we were kids,” he told Dylan. “How am I supposed to remember a . . .”
“Girl queen. She had these eyes like”—Dylan pictured them in his mind—“like cracked ice.” He waited for some hint that Hunter knew what he was talking about. He could swear he heard a clicking sound coming from Hunter’s brain, thoughts shuffling and reshuffling.
“I’m not really sure she was from a movie,” Dylan admitted finally. Or a book, he added to himself. “I might have met her somewhere.”
It was always dangerous to say something like that to Hunter, that he’d met a real queen in person. Like he’d stumbled across her in a coffee shop or maybe over in snooty Bellevue, ha-ha. Those kinds of admissions made Hunter deeply unhappy. A Huskies losing to Oregon level of unhappy.
“It doesn’t matter,” Hunter said. “Stop worrying about it, okay?”
Can’t, Dylan thought, and pictured her eyes again: cracked ice, sunlight reflecting off every facet. Why do I remember someone who isn’t real? Add it to the list of Impossible Questions.
Hunter pulled a cloth from his back pocket and handed it to Dylan. “Dust instead.”
The girl in the canvas jacket popped out from behind a shelf of junk, a shiny mask strapped over her face. “Hey, Hunter, what do you think?”
Hunter chuckled. “C-3PO.”
“It’s not,” the mask-girl said. “It’s from—”
“Metropolis,” Dylan said. “That robot girl.”
She shoved the mask up over her dark hair. “Have you seen it? The movie—Metropolis?”
“Sure,” Dylan said. “Who hasn’t?”
She smiled, her brown eyes reflecting the gold of the mask. Her hair was like polished wood, like the black walnut trees behind his house when they were wet with rain.