Hunter set the cash box on the counter, a little too hard.
“Grab whichever DVDs you want, Chess,” Hunter said to the girl. “I’m just gonna put a twenty in here and that’ll cover it.”
“There’s another bin of them you didn’t go through yet,” Dylan told her, pointing.
The girl—Chess—gave him a brief look (curious? interested?) and then disappeared down an aisle. Dylan swiped dust from the glass counter with the cloth, thinking about that look, until he noticed something under the glass: a wide band of gold etched with vines.
He clamped a hand on the counter, dizzy with confusion.
“Where’d this come from?” he asked Hunter.
Hunter shrugged. “A guy came in yesterday.”
It’s a bracelet, just a bracelet, Dylan told himself.
But in his mind he could see the Girl Queen sliding it onto his arm.
“Dylan?” Hunter said.
“This is mine,” Dylan said.
Hunter snorted. “It’s yours if you have three hundred dollars.”
“It’s mine. I got it from . . . from . . .” Where? He reached for it with a shaking hand and touched cool metal. Instantly, the smell of moldering leaves came back to him, along with a barrage of images: the damp fallen trees in a shaded forest, a girl’s porcelain face. A gilded rooftop glimpsed through a puzzle of branches. She put her hand in mine, her fingers were so cold. Mud all along her hem and spattered on her bare feet. “Where are we going?” She looked at me over her shoulder and then the light was in the branches and in her hair . . .
He remembered. Not only the Girl Queen but . . .
. . . a forest.
Where?
He slid the band onto his wrist. The cold metal sliding up my arm. Her voice uncertain: “Remember me.”
A prickle went down his neck. He remembered Dad reading from The Blue Fairy Book, remembered listening so intently that everything around seemed to vanish.
He remembered the world parting to reveal enchanted trees, water churning over rocks.
Things no one else could see.
Hunter snatched the gold band off Dylan’s wrist. “You got it from the display. And that’s where you’re going to leave it unless you can pay for it.”
Dylan’s hands trembled. He looked again at the gold band. Was it just a bracelet?
Of course it was.
And those memories? That place?
A dream, he told himself. An image from a storybook. A childhood fantasy only a sad loser would still believe in.
Chess returned with a stack of DVDs. “Wow,” she said, coming closer to peer at the gold band Hunter still held. “Looks like something from Lord of the Rings.”
“Here, try it on.” Hunter held it out, and she slid the band onto her wrist before Dylan could object.
“Looks good on you,” Hunter told her, spearing Dylan with a glare.
“Yeah, it’s cool.” The girl turned her wrist to admire the band some more.
“So keep it for a few days,” Hunter said.
“What? You can’t take stuff from the store,” Dylan said to Hunter, his voice sharp with desperation.
“She’s borrowing it,” Hunter said. He passed the DVDs back to Chess. “This all you want?”
Chess nodded. She looked between him and Dylan. “Are you sure it’s okay for me to—”
Hunter grabbed her hand and steered her toward the door. “You want bagels?”
The bell over the door chimed again and they were gone.
Dylan heaved plastic file boxes out of Mom’s closet and disemboweled them. Papers spilled over the carpet: Dylan’s childhood artwork. Paintings of green fish and bulbous insects, of uneven spirals like whorled snail shells.
Shaky drawings of a girl’s face.
Another memory rushed to mind: swimming through dark, frigid water. Around him, tiny fish, drifting insects, crustaceans felt their way along gravel and silt. The water brightened, and Dylan surfaced in a sunlit cave.
A girl with ice-bright eyes pulled him by the hand up a rocky crawl that bit into his bare toes. He felt he was moving through a spell: the clinging mist, the chime of water dripping into shallow pools. The walls of the cave were dimpled with nooks where odd treasures lay like catalogued talismans. The girl picked them up one by one: a pearly snail shell the size of her fist, a yellow-green mushroom gone brown under the cap, a clump of water-logged feathers, a smooth river rock veined with blue and red. Her collection.
Footsteps and then Mom’s voice interrupted Dylan’s thoughts. “What are you doing?”
Dylan shoved the papers into a folder. “Looking through some old stuff.” He didn’t know why he felt embarrassed about it. But it was like being caught sleepwalking, like explaining a dream to someone only to have it come out sounding absurd. Plus, he never went into Mom’s closet, not even just to look at old papers. “Did you see that gold bracelet that came into the shop yesterday?”
In the doorway, Mom held her half-open laptop in one hand and squinted at Dylan. “No, and I wish you boys wouldn’t offer loans on stuff like that without calling me in to do the appraisal.”