My mother wanted to know why I let Jake wrap himself up in bicycle chains and then watched while Peter and Michael pushed him into the deep end of the school pool. I said that Jake had a backup plan. Ten more seconds and we were all going to jump into the pool and open the locker and get him out of there. I was crying when I said that. Even before he got in the locker, I knew how stupid Jake was being. Afterwards, he promised me that he’d never do anything like that again.
That was when I told him about Zofia’s husband, Rustan, and about Zofia’s handbag. How stupid am I?
So I guess you can figure out what happened next. The problem is that Jake believed me about the handbag. We spent a lot of time over at Zofia’s, playing Scrabble. Zofia never let the faery handbag out of her sight. She even took it with her when she went to the bathroom. I think she even slept with it under her pillow.
I didn’t tell her that I’d said anything to Jake. I wouldn’t ever have told anybody else about it. Not Natasha. Not even Natalie, who is the most responsible person in all of the world. Now, of course, if the handbag turns up and Jake still hasn’t come back, I’ll have to tell Natalie. Somebody has to keep an eye on the stupid thing while I go find Jake.
What worries me is that maybe one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians or one of the people under the hill or maybe even Rustan popped out of the handbag to run an errand and got worried when Zofia wasn’t there. Maybe they’ll come looking for her and bring it back. Maybe they know I’m supposed to look after it now. Or maybe they took it and hid it somewhere. Maybe someone turned it in at the lost-and-found at the library and that stupid librarian called the F.B.I. Maybe scientists at the Pentagon are examining the handbag right now. Testing it. If Jake comes out, they’ll think he’s a spy or a superweapon or an alien or something. They’re not going to just let him go.
Everyone thinks Jake ran away, except for my mother, who is convinced that he was trying out another Houdini escape and is probably lying at the bottom of a lake somewhere. She hasn’t said that to me, but I can see her thinking it. She keeps making cookies for me.
What happened is that Jake said, “Can I see that for just a second?”
He said it so casually that I think he caught Zofia off guard. She was reaching into the purse for her wallet. We were standing in the lobby of the movie theater on a Monday morning. Jake was behind the snack counter. He’d gotten a job there. He was wearing this stupid red paper hat and some kind of apron-bib thing. He was supposed to ask us if we wanted to supersize our drinks.
He reached over the counter and took Zofia’s handbag right out of her hand. He closed it and then he opened it again. I think he opened it the right way. I don’t think he ended up in the dark place. He said to me and Zofia, “I’ll be right back.” And then he wasn’t there anymore. It was just me and Zofia and the handbag, lying there on the counter where he’d dropped it.
If I’d been fast enough, I think I could have followed him. But Zofia had been guardian of the faery handbag for a lot longer. She snatched the bag back and glared at me. “He’s a very bad boy,” she said. She was absolutely furious. “You’re better off without him, Genevieve, I think.”
“Give me the handbag,” I said. “I have to go get him.”
“It isn’t a toy, Genevieve,” she said. “It isn’t a game. This isn’t Scrabble. He comes back when he comes back. If he comes back.”
“Give me the handbag,” I said. “Or I’ll take it from you.”
She held the handbag up high over her head, so that I couldn’t reach it. I hate people who are taller than me. “What are you going to do now,” Zofia said. “Are you going to knock me down? Are you going to steal the handbag? Are you going to go away and leave me here to explain to your parents where you’ve gone? Are you going to say goodbye to your friends? When you come out again, they will have gone to college. They’ll have jobs and babies and houses and they won’t even recognize you. Your mother will be an old woman and I will be dead.”
“I don’t care,” I said. I sat down on the sticky red carpet in the lobby and started to cry. Someone wearing a little metal name tag came over and asked if we were okay. His name was Missy. Or maybe he was wearing someone else’s tag.
“We’re fine,” Zofia said. “My granddaughter has the flu.”
She took my hand and pulled me up. She put her arm around me and we walked out of the theater. We never even got to see the stupid movie. We never even got to see another movie together. I don’t ever want to go see another movie. The problem is, I don’t want to see unhappy endings. And I don’t know if I believe in the happy ones.
“I have a plan,” Zofia said. “I will go find Jake. You will stay here and look after the handbag.”
“You won’t come back either,” I said. I cried even harder. “Or if you do, I’ll be like a hundred years old and Jake will still be sixteen.”
“Everything will be okay,” Zofia said. I wish I could tell you how beautiful she looked right then. It didn’t matter if she was lying or if she actually knew that everything was going to be okay. The important thing was how she looked when she said it. She said, with absolute certainty, or maybe with all the skill of a very skillful liar, “My plan will work. First we go to the library, though. One of the people under the hill just brought back an Agatha Christie mystery, and I need to return it.”
“We’re going to the library?” I said. “Why don’t we just go home and play Scrabble for a while.” You probably think I was just being sarcastic here, and I was being sarcastic. But Zofia gave me a sharp look. She knew that if I was being sarcastic that my brain was working again. She knew that I knew she was stalling for time. She knew that I was coming up with my own plan, which was a lot like Zofia’s plan, except that I was the one who went into the handbag. How was the part I was working on.
“We could do that,” she said. “Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.”
“Can we please just hurry?” I said.
Zofia just looked at me. “Genevieve, we have plenty of time. If you’re going to look after the handbag, you have to remember that. You have to be patient. Can you be patient?”
“I can try,” I told her. I’m trying, Zofia. I’m trying really hard. But it isn’t fair. Jake is off having adventures and talking to talking animals, and who knows, learning how to fly and some beautiful three thousand year old girl from under the hill is teaching him how to speak fluent Baldeziwurleki. I bet she lives in a house that runs around on chicken legs, and she tells Jake that she’d love to hear him play something on the guitar. Maybe you’ll kiss her, Jake, because she’s put a spell on you. But whatever you do, don’t go up into her house. Don’t fall asleep in her bed. Come back soon, Jake, and bring the handbag with you.
I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I’m a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don’t believe in that kind of shit.
We hadn’t been in the library for five minutes before Zofia picked up a biography of Carl Sagan and dropped it in her purse. She was definitely stalling for time. She was trying to come up with a plan that would counteract the plan that she knew I was planning. I wondered what she thought I was planning. It was probably much better than anything I’d come up with.
“Don’t do that!” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Zofia said. “Nobody was watching.”
“I don’t care if nobody saw! What if Jake’s sitting there in the boat, or what if he was coming back and you just dropped it on his head!”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Zofia said. Then she said, “It would serve him right, anyway.”
That was when the librarian came up to us. She had a nametag on as well. I was so sick of people and their stupid nametags. I’m not even going to tell you what her name was. “I saw that,” the librarian said.
“Saw what?” Zofia said. She smiled down at the librarian, like she was Queen of the Library, and the librarian were a petitioner.
The librarian stared hard at her. “I know you,” she said, almost sounding awed, like she was a weekend birdwatcher who had just seen Bigfoot. “We have your picture on the office wall. You’re Ms. Swinks. You aren’t allowed to check out books here.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Zofia said. She was at least two feet taller than the librarian. I felt a bit sorry for the librarian. After all, Zofia had just stolen a seven-day book. She probably wouldn’t return it for a hundred years. My mother has always made it clear that it’s my job to protect other people from Zofia. I guess I was Zofia’s guardian before I became the guardian of the handbag.
The librarian reached up and grabbed Zofia’s handbag. She was small but she was strong. She jerked the handbag and Zofia stumbled and fell back against a work desk. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone except for me was getting a look at Zofia’s handbag. What kind of guardian was I going to be?