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Tamburlaine looked down at her floor of incandescent flowers. She twisted her long hair in her fingers.
“Thomas…”
Thomas couldn’t breathe. He felt like his head was going to come off and fly up to the sun like a lost balloon. He knew, he knew what she was going to say, even though she hadn’t decided yet whether to say it. It was going to be Something Awfully Big.
“How do you know?” he said again. Thomas looked away from the painted forest, into her fretful hickory-hazel eyes. It’s a secret, her eyes pleaded. It’s a secret and if you tell a secret the secret comes alive and can never be kept safe at home again. Tears gleamed on her cheeks. Her face grew red and warm. She clenched her fists at her sides and looked up helplessly at her private night sky.
“I remember it,” Tamburlaine said, and she did not say it quietly. She said it clear and loud, daring him to laugh at her or call her crazy or any of the thousand cruel things Other Children might do. But then she lowered her voice to a library hush. “Thomas, I know a place where everything is alive.”
The troll that had slept in Thomas’s heart for so many years jolted up, wide awake. It jumped and leapt and tugged its hair and turned backward somersaults. It laughed and sang along with the lime-green lady and beat its chest. It tried to climb up out of his heart and into his throat, into his mouth, into his head. But it was not strong enough. Thomas had been human so long that the pounding and hollering and galumphing of his troll-self just felt awful, like starving for food while sick to his stomach. His human body wanted to stay human, and it punished his troll-self whenever it tried to wake.
“I don’t exactly remember it,” Tamburlaine said slowly, searching his eyes for understanding, for panic, for how much it was safe to say. “Or I don’t remember it exactly. It’s like…it’s like a dream I had while I was dreaming. Or like trying to remember a book I read when I had a fever, only the book had a fever, too. I remember it in scraps and handfuls. I chase it through my head, and it’s always faster than me. Sometimes I’m eating eggs at breakfast and I just can’t taste them anymore because I’m tasting something like sarsaparilla and coffee and molten gold and hot sugared limes mixed all up and my mouth is so full of that taste I feel like it must be dribbling out all over my chin, but it isn’t, because it’s only eggs. It’s only eggs and I’m remembering something from There, something that tastes like sarsaparilla and coffee and molten gold and hot sugared limes and rolls down my throat like cream-velvet. And eggs get ruined, ruined forever, because they’ll only taste like disappointment now. I can barely eat anything. I’m down to oatmeal and fried bread and cinnamon candy and persimmons and trout. Everything else tastes like it’s making fun of me. Teasing me because it knows it could taste like moonlight and whipped cream and watercress and teardrops, but it won’t, just to spite me. And sometimes I wake up and I know that some trees have clocks for fruit and if you eat one you’ll age sideways, even if I haven’t the faintest idea what that even means. But not here. Trees here have fruit for fruit. There. There is a real place. I came from There. Somehow I started There. And I think—I think—I could be really, really wrong—but I think you did, too.”
The troll inside Thomas pranced and whirled. He felt dizzy. The gramophone music pounded on his head now, so awfully loud and close. “I…I don’t understand,” he stuttered. “I’m not like you. I broke my arm trying to climb up to the chandelier when I was four, so I know. When I’m hurt it’s nothing interesting. Red blood and crying. I’m just a boy. I’m Normal.”
“Everyone’s interesting when they’re hurt,” Tamburlaine said in a curious voice. She scratched the back of her neck. “Stay here. I want to show you something.”
Tamburlaine sprang up and out of her painted, wondrous forest. He could hear her rummaging, knocking things over, stacking them back up again. She returned, out of breath, her arms full of books—big, wide, illustrated ones with ribbonmarks and colored edges. She laid them down in front of him one by one like gifts. Thomas the Rhymer. The King of Elfland’s Daughter. The Compleat Childe Ballads. Tam Lin.
“This is us,” she said softly, touching the books with her long fingers. “Heaven knows why they allow books like this in the world. Lying about without locks, where anyone, anywhere might just pick them up! It’s like leaving instructions for making tornados at the bus station!”
Thomas shook his head. He had read those books. (Well, not all of them. There were just so many of those ballads.) Maybe they were about her. Girls who were wooden on the inside, like Pinocchio, sure. But they weren’t about him. Even as he shook his head, Thomas started to cry. He wanted her to be right. He wanted to be Thomas the Rhymer instead of just Thomas the Un-Normal, Thomas the Patient of Dr. Malory, Thomas the Interviewed by Three Separate Schools for the Disturbed This Week. He wanted to be Tam Lin, he wanted to be special, but he wasn’t, he wasn’t. It was her, Tamburlaine—Tam! It was even in her name!
The troll in
him cried out to be heard: It is us, it is! Listen!
“Look at me, Thomas. I’m going to show you something. I know you won’t tell.” She ducked her head to catch his eye and lifted up his chin with a soft fingertip. “Look. It’s not scary, I promise.”
Tamburlaine reached up behind her ear and grabbed something there. She screwed up her nose and pulled out a hairpin. One, two, three more clattered to the floor. And all that beautiful hair, that long, dark, thick hair he’d stared at in class for six years, came away in her fist. She folded her wig very carefully in her lap, tucking in the ends so they didn’t get dusty.
Flowers tumbled down from Tamburlaine’s head. Long, thick, bright purple garlands like braids burst free and stretched, able to breathe at last. The sunlight streaming through the window pooled and played in the branches of Tamburlaine, turning her violet, indigo, fuchsia, rose. Thomas thought they were plum blossoms. She began to rub her arms as though she’d caught a chill, rough and hard. She scrubbed her cheeks with her palms—and her cheeks washed away like soap. All those little lines, the thin, strange scars she’d always had, were not scars at all but woodgrain. She was a girl made of fine, polished wood, the deep, dark, expensive kind, jointed and bolted at the elbows and neck like a doll. Tamburlaine breathed in little quick gasps, full of thrill and fearing, smiling all the while so that the green buds of her teeth showed.
Tamburlaine was the part of the forest she had painted all around her in colors as bright as her own.
“It’s not always like this,” she laughed nervously. “It’s only that it’s springtime. Oh, Thomas! I’ve kept quiet so long! I knew you were like me that very first day. When you talked to your desk. I was sure when you enchanted the whole class under the jungle gym. Just talked to them, just a few words, and they’d follow you to Hamlin if you had a pipe. You came to school in your coat with all that treasure sewn onto the shoulders—and now even the high school kids are wearing their grandmother’s brooches on their coats. Thomas, Thomas, don’t you know? Haven’t you always, just always felt you didn’t belong to your family, not really? Haven’t you always known there was something different about you, something off? That’s why you keep your little book of rules, because this world is so hard, isn’t it? It makes no sense; everything’s always upside down and sideways. Haven’t you always felt like the strangest boy in the world? Like nothing inside you matched the outside?”
Thomas Rood’s vision swam. Sweat wriggled through his hair. Maybe this is what dying feels like, he thought wildly. But before he could stop himself he was talking, talking like his tongue could outrace the dying.
“When I was little, they took me to the optometrist and I sat in the chair while the doctor put a black mask over my face and slid lenses in and out of it. And every time he asked if I could see better out of one or the other. One or the other. But I couldn’t see at all. I couldn’t see the room or my parents or the doctor. I looked through one lens and I saw a beach covered in gold and jewels and coins. ‘How about now?’ he said, and I screamed. So he changed the lens. ‘How about now?’ And I saw a city made all of wool and yarn and silk with a river of tea flowing round it. I started to cry. ‘How about now?’ And I saw a herd of giant bicycles barreling over a meadow toward me. ‘How about now?’ But all I could see was a great lavender eel speeding along under a million stars with people riding on it like a train. I screamed and screamed and clawed at the mask. They thought I was trying to get it off but really, really I was trying to get in, to that place where those things lived.” Thomas was out of breath, his hair sopping sweat. “I never told anyone, never ever. I never wore my glasses even once, even though I can really only see things close up—I’m useless at anything far away.”
Tamburlaine nodded eagerly. She held out her hands to the forest on her walls, throbbing with color. “You see it too. There. We’re the same, you and me. Tom and Tam. And there’s a word for us.” She ran her finger along the edge of Tam Lin. “You know what one. Say it. Come on. Say it once.”
“No, I don’t want to. I’m Normal,” he begged her. He could see his father’s face before him, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his own glasses and saying the names of medicines he did not want to send for like a magic spell. “I can be Normal.”
The lime-green lady’s voice trumpeted in his ears, deafening. He whirled around, expecting to see her crouching right next to him, singing into his skull. But there was no lady. Thomas stared down into the wide, flaring brass mouth of a gramophone. He screamed, but it couldn’t quite get out, and turned into a squeak instead.
The gramophone stopped short. It lifted its own needle. The music crackled down to nothing. And as Thomas stared, his heart coming utterly apart and rearranging itself around what it was seeing, the gramophone unfolded four long, curved brass legs from its wooden table. Each of them ended in a curly lion’s paw like Thomas’s bathtub. It had been very beautiful once. Bold green and blue filigree patterns still gleamed on its bell, though the paint peeled and cracked. The gramophone tottered up and backward like a baby bird, and though it had no face to flush or furrow or cry, Thomas knew he had hurt its feelings by shrieking.
The gramophone was embarrassed.
It clattered over to the corner of the painted room and stood with its bell facing the wall, punishing itself for scaring him. After a moment it put its needle down again. Its crank wound slowly. The lime-green lady sang out—and though he had heard her sing many times, somehow, now, it sounded almost apologetic:
In the mornin’, in the evenin’
Ain’t we got fun?
Then it lifted its needle again and went quiet.
