“Yeah.”
“I can help you apply for a loan, but they’re going to want two weeks of paystubs.”
I sigh. “No job yet.”
She twirls her hair around her finger. “I can recommend you for a position here,” she whispers, “but the boss is a leprechaun, and he hasn’t hired anyone new in ages. Rumor is we’re on the verge of a restructuring.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got something lined up.” I have nothing lined up, but the idea of working at a bank for a stingy leprechaun turns my stomach.
“So…” She tips her head from side to side. “You want to grab lunch?”
I laugh. “You’ve just learned I don’t have a dime to my name.”
“My treat. Please, Sophia. There’s something I want to do, and I need a friend to do it.”
I look at my watch. It’s noon. All I want to do is go home and sleep until an idea of what to do next pops into my head, but the hopeful look on Pen’s face is impossible to deny. I don’t have the heart to tell her no. And let’s be honest, I need all the friends I can get. “Sure.”
Twenty minutes later, I’m sitting on the back of a giant bumblebee, eating a cucumber sandwich at a glass table twenty feet in the air. Penelope is beaming, face turned toward the sunshine. “Interesting choice,” I say.
“I never get to come here. Flick is afraid of heights, and the kids are too wiggly. I always worry they’ll jump. I mean they both can fly, but I don’t trust that they won’t get caught up in the gears.” Pen is sitting atop a purple butterfly with a golden saddle, sipping champagne.
The placeischarming. It’s called Garden Party and consists of two dozen such tables revolving around a giant mechanical rabbit wearing a top hat. “Glad I could be your excuse to come then.” I clink my glass against hers.
“It’s just…” She shifts in her saddle. “I love Flick, but life can get so…dull. And all the pixies here are the same. If I listen to Swallow Everlane talk about her rosewater cookies one more time, I think my head is going to explode. I mean they’re not even good! It’s all the same people, Sophia. We’re all older, but it’s just like high school.”
“You mean they’re still all talking about me behind my back?” I sip my drink.
“They never stopped talking about you. You’re the most exciting thing to ever happen to Bailiwick’s.” We both laugh at the truth in it.
“What was it like out there anyway?” she asks me. “You must have felt so free! To do anything you wanted, whenever you wanted… It must have been amazing.” Her eyes twinkle with excitement.
Crap on a cracker, she’s completely romanticized my life journey. I’m tempted to just nod my head and let her go on thinking I’m some sort of adventurer, but in the end, I can’t bring myself to do it. What if she does something stupid, like leave Flick and try to follow in my footsteps?
“It wasn’t like that,” I say. “It wasn’t what I wanted. It was what I had to do to survive.”
Her smile fades. “In what way? It couldn’t have been all bad or you wouldn’t have stayed gone.”
Gah, here we go. At least we’re in the air. It would take effort for her to fly away. “I was pregnant with Arden. Pregnant the human way by a human man.”
She inhales sharply. “I’d wondered.”
“I knew if I stayed things would be difficult.”
Her face falls. “You’d be lucky if Godmother allowed you to carry the pregnancy,” she says boldly.
“I find it refreshing to hear someone else acknowledge that out loud.”
“I’m sure everyone denies it, but you know if you’d stayed that’s how it would be.”
I nod, beyond grateful for Penelope’s company. She actually looks like she might understand. “I think everyone should make their own choices when it comes to motherhood, and I’m sure that another pixie might have stayed and happily allowed Godmother to undo her pregnancy.”
“But?”
“But for me, I knew her. Even before the doctor confirmed I was pregnant the human way, I felt Arden. She was this other presence…becominginside me, like a candle burning in the window of my soul. I couldn’t risk that they might blow her out.”
Pen places a hand over her mouth, then lowers it slowly. “I think you did the right thing, Soph.”
I give her a nod, and she reaches across the table to squeeze my hand. “But it wasn’t easy. I was homeless for a while. I had to use illusion to survive.”
