Delilah
OKAY, FIRST OF ALL, THIS IS NOT HAPPENING.
My mother is right. I need more sleep. It’s bad enough that I’m talking to a book, much less entertaining the thought of how to get a character out of it.
“I don’t think it works that way,” I say. “It’s not like springing someone out of jail—”
“I’m hardly a felon!”
“No, you’re a two-dimensional, inch-high illustration,” I point out. “If you were to get out, what would you do? Live in a shoe box? Be Flat Stanley?”
“Who’s Flat Stanley?”
“Another fictional character,” I say. I have a sudden flash of second grade, when my teacher had us take ourcutouts of Flat Stanley all around the world during spring break. My mother and I took pictures of him in Boston, eating clam chowder and waving at the seals in the aquarium.
So maybe Oliver isn’t the first fictional character with a hankering to travel.
“You don’t know that I’d stay this size. Perhaps I’d be scaled to fit your world, if I were lucky enough to reach it.”
“Why are we even discussing this?” I explode. “You can’t take a character out of a book!”
“How do you know? Have you ever tried?”
“No, but it’s not like Cinderella is working at Starbucks—”
“Cinderella? Starbucks?” Oliver says.
“Exactly. You wouldn’t survive ten seconds in this world,” I tell him. “There’s so much out here you don’t know.”
“I knowyou,” Oliver insists.
The way he looks at me, I almost forget that this is all in my imagination.
“You hardly know me. We’ve been talking for, like, twenty minutes.”
“You’re wrong,” Oliver says. “I know that your bedroom is painted pink. And that you bite your lip at the part where Rapscullio and I fight. And that you say good night to your goldfish without fail. And sometimes when you get dressed in the morning you dance to the music that comes out of that odd little box—”
“You’ve watched me getting dressed in the morning?”
He flashes me a grin. “You’rethe one who left the book wide open.”
“We don’t even know if this is a one-time thing,” I say. “I could close the book and you could be gone, forever.”
Oliver takes a step forward. “Try it.”
“Try what?”
“Closing the book.”
“But what if—” I realize that I don’t want him to disappear. I may not fully believe he’s real; I may not understand why I can hear him speaking to me—but I sort of like it. I like knowing that of all the people in the world, I’m the only one listening to what he has to say. It makes me feel like we’ve been destined for each other. Which is the way things work in fairy tales, not in my ordinary, boring life. “Are you sure?” I whisper.
Oliver nods. I start to close the book, but then I hear him shout, and I yank it wide open again. “Just in case,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “Just in case it… doesn’t work. I want you to know, Delilah. You’ve already been the biggest adventure of my life.”
I gently touch my finger to the blank space beside Oliver. He reaches toward my hand and spreads his own, pressing it against the filmy barrier between us. I can feel the pressure of his touch, the temperature of his skin.
Before I can lose my nerve, I close the book.
I take a deep breath. Then another one. I spell M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. Then I riffle through the book until I am on page 43 again.
