“I think Hunter brought it in. He found it somewhere.”
Mom set the laptop down on her desk and flipped through a stack of bills. “Where would Hunter get something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
Mom frowned at Dylan.
“Well, make sure you hold that stuff and wait for me in the future.”
She straightened a framed photo she had knocked over: Hunter and Dylan standing knee-deep in lake water, smiling with the sun behind them. She glanced from the photo to Dylan, then bent to ruffle his hair affectionately.
“Do you remember a girl at the lake?” he asked. “When you took me and Hunter there for Fourth of July? She showed me a cave.”
The lines around Mom’s mouth deepened. “I don’t know, Dylan. Maybe.” She glanced at Dylan’s folder of artwork. “How about spending a little more time in the here and now? When am I going to see a progress report from school?”
Dylan pushed the box back into the closet, but stuck the folder under his shirt. “When’s Hunter getting home?” Maybe Hunter remembered the girl, the cave.
Mom’s attention was back on her laptop and the bills. “Late.”
“How come when I take the car I have to be home by ten?”
“He didn’t take the car, his girlfriend picked him up,” Mom said. “And from now on you’re here every night doing homework. Until I see a progress report, you won’t be so much as looking at the car.”
“Mom—”
She waved off his protest. “Enjoy the view from your room, sir.”
“The view from my room is of your car.” Dylan waited to see if she would crack a smile, and she did.
He stole away to his bedroom with the folder of drawings. The pine needles scrabbling against his bedroom window brought back another memory: searching in the yard for his pet rabbit, which had slipped the latch on its cage again. Worrying, absurdly, that it had crossed over into one of the magical lands in the books Dad read aloud to him and Hunter. And then yearning to be there, in that magical land, away from the sound of his parents arguing in the kitchen.
Dylan closed his eyes now, listening to the wind, and imagined himself in a forest. He smelled damp wood, heard a stream rolling over rocks. One step to the side, maybe, and he’d be there again, in the imaginary land he used to call the Other Place.
He opened his eyes to pine needles splayed across ordinary glass.
He’d ask Hunter about the girl and the cave.
He waited in the den, hoping to catch Hunter when he came home, but later he woke up on the couch with the TV still on, not knowing if he’d only dreamed about the Other Place in the night or if he’d actually gone there. He vaguely remembered chasing his pet rabbit, hearing his parents arguing in the kitchen. So, dream.
Spread across the coffee table were the childhood drawings he’d taken from his mom’s closet: lopsided toads and spotted trees and a girl with overlarge eyes. Does the Girl Queen still wait for me? Does she think I’ve forgotten?
He gathered the papers up and stumbled into the kitchen.
Hunter came down while Dylan was still eating breakfast. Dylan was wearing one of Hunter’s school blazers—it looked good with the Battle of the Bands T-shirt he’d picked out from the pawnshop a couple of weeks ago. Sort of preppy punk. He hunched over his cereal bowl and hoped his brother wouldn’t notice.
Hunter stopped short in the middle of the kitchen and narrowed his eyes at Dylan. Annoyed? Dylan tried to use his vorpal to control what Hunter was seeing. It snicked and pinged all over the place, like some kind of crazy radar—a sound only Dylan could hear. Hunter glared at his own blazer on Dylan’s back. He opened his mouth to say something. Dylan kept his vorpal bouncing off the fridge, off his back, off the fridge.
“You got milk on your shirt,” was all Hunter said, and then he went to the fridge.
Dylan smiled. He had pulled it off.
He had a theory about why he could do things like that: He knew everyone had a vorpal, because he could sense them, but most people’s vorpals were weak. Dylan’s was strong enough to overpower anyone else’s. His vorpal could trick theirs into seeing what he wanted them to—when Dylan could control it.
“Does your girlfriend still have that bracelet?” Dylan asked. Got straight to the point; might as well.
Hunter swigged orange juice from the carton with a disinterested air. “It’s not yours. I don’t know why you think it is.”
“Where did you get it?” Dylan asked. “Will you just tell me?” Tell me where you really got it.
Hunter fumbled with the carton. “I found it,” he admitted.
Dylan tensed.
“Out in the shed. It must be—” Hunter almost dropped the juice, finally wrestled it back into the overfull fridge. “Something Mom put out there after Dad left, or . . .”