The Boy with the Hidden Name (35 page)

My friends, for continued wisdom, talking- off- ledge- ness,

and hilarity, including Sonja L. Cohen, who stayed up late help-

ing with copy editing and provided design services; Claudia

Gray, who basically knows everything in the world in the best

way possible; and Larry Stritof, for ongoing tech support.

Tumblr and Twitter and all who reside there, for saving my

sanity and being madly inspirational.

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Skylar DorSet

And as always, my family: Mom, Dad, Meg, Cait, Ma,

Bobby, Jeff, Jordan, and baby Isabella, for being people I love

to come home for.

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aBOuT The auThOr

Skylar Dorset grew up in Rhode Island, graduated from

Boston College and Harvard Law School, and has lived in

New Orleans, Mississippi, and Washington, DC. But she

actually spends most of her time living with the characters in

her head. She hopes that doesn’t make her sound too crazy.

Visit www.skylardorset.com.

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w hen spring comes to Boston, the populace always

seems dazed. They wander out to the greening

spaces, as if they can’t quite figure out what happened. Where

did the snow go? Where did the sun come from? What is this

strange sweetness in the air?

The seasons shift and tumble, and we never question it. We

wake up one day and the world is different, the day is longer

or the night is shorter, and we move forward, until the time

when the day is shorter or the night is longer. It is its own

kind of magic, the march of time in this fashion.

I notice it now because, for me, spring really does come out

of nowhere, even more than it usually does. One minute I am

writing down my story in my bedroom while underneath me

a war rages, and the next minute the clock on the landing is

chiming one o’clock and I am waking from a doze. My aunts

are hunting for gnomes in the conservatory and pretend not

to know what I’m talking about when I ask what happened.

I know they are pretending, and I know they think this is

what they should do, that maybe everything will go back to

normal if they don’t acknowledge everything that happened.

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This is the special talent of my ogre aunts, I think: the ability to only recognize the reality they want. And frustrating as it

is, I am so relieved to have them back that I can’t help but

love them for it.

And in this world I have wakened into, it is spring.

I stand with the door open, looking out at the traffic on

Beacon Street. The street is paved smooth. In fact, it is smoother than I have ever seen it, clear of potholes. There are tourists

taking photos of the lavender windowpanes in my house, and

there are besuited businesspeople hurrying past. I think that

one of them, a particularly attractive one, pauses and salutes at me, a funny little half wave, half bow. I blink at him.

“Selkie,” a voice calls to me from the staircase, and I turn

away from the doorway.

“Dad,” I say in shock, because there he is, looking
wonder-

ful
, descending the staircase toward me. “You’re here!”

“Of course I’m here,” he tells me. “Where else would I be?”

He hugs me, and he whispers in my ear, “Well done.”

“But what happened?” I ask, bewildered.

He draws back a bit and cups his hand onto my cheek.

“We won,” he answers simply. “Thank you. Now.” He drops

his hand. “Your aunts are going to pretend nothing ever hap-

pened. We can let them do that. In the meantime, Arawn

and I are going for a drink.”

“Who?” I turn as my father walks past me, pausing by the

open doorway to pull a bowler hat off the coat stand by the

door. That bowler hat has always been on that coat stand. I

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have never seen anyone wear it before. I never even thought

about the fact that it must have been my father’s. Just the

sight of him in it makes me want to cry.

“Your faerie godfather,” my father says, as if this makes

total sense. “I’ll be back later.”

“My…what?” But my father winks at me and, whistling,

steps out onto the doorstep and then down the street.

“Aunt True?” I call. “Aunt Virtue?”

“Yes, dear?” Aunt Virtue calls back.

“I’m going to the Common,” I tell them and step out and

close the door behind me.

Ben is not on the Common. I stand in the middle of

the swirling crowds in and around Park Street and feel lost

and bereft.
We
won
, I think. I got my father back, and the Otherworld is presumably much better off. I wrote the story

I wanted. But my story had Ben. And I can’t find Ben.

I turn away from Park Street, walking up and over to a

patch of sunny grass, where I sit.

And as if on cue, Kelsey and Merrow and Trow are there.

I’m not sure where they came from.

They don’t seem to know where they came from either.

Kelsey says dazedly, “What
happened
?”

“I have no idea,” I answer.

“But you were the one who told us to do this!” she points

out.

“But I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was just

making things up as I went along.”

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“We rewrote the story,” Merrow says. “I’ve been reading

prophecy after prophecy and…we won. We made the world

we wanted. Everything is the way it always was. Only every-

thing is
better
. We saved
everyone
.”

“We won,” I say and look out over Boston Common. I

want to know how to find the rest of the Otherworld crea-

tures. Where are the Erlking and his goblin army? If I snuck

my way into a subway tunnel, would I be able to find him?

Or are we cut off now? Is that part of my life over? Is the rest of my life just going to be…normal? Was that the story I

wrote for myself? I feel like I didn’t get that far.

And where is Ben? When I saved the world, did I send him

back into the Otherworld? Will he just stay there now that his

job is over, now that he doesn’t need to protect me anymore?

“So the Seelies are gone?” I say.

“Seems so. I don’t know. You were the only one of us who

ever actually got to go over to the Otherworld.”

“Kelsey did, too,” I tell her. “And it’s not really something

to be jealous of. Trust me.”

“Agreed,” says Kelsey, nodding emphatically.

“I don’t know.” Merrow shrugs. “Maybe now it will be.

Now that we’ve fixed everything. Maybe we can ask your

traveler boyfriend if he’ll take us.”

“I’m not going to run
tours
,” says Ben good- naturedly from behind us, and I whirl around.

He smiles at me. His eyes are green like the new grass all

around him and blue like the bright sky above us. I want to

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fling myself into his arms, but I am aware of the audience and

I am also aware that I don’t know where we stand. Not quite.

“We are third, fourth, and fifth wheels,” Merrow remarks.

“I’m always the third wheel when it comes to all of you,”

says Kelsey.

“I’m sure you won’t be single long,” Merrow tells her. “I

mean, us faeries are pretty irresistible. Right, Trow?”

“Being a faerie myself, I wholeheartedly endorse that,”

replies Trow.

“Know a good ice cream place?” Merrow asks.

“Do I ever,” says Kelsey, and they all pick themselves up

from the grass.

I sit, awkward, trying to decide if I’m supposed to go

with them.

“You’re supposed to stay here,” Kelsey says. “But later,

you and I are going to have a long discussion about my

being
supernatural
.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” I say. “I don’t know

anything about being supernatural.”

“You’re doing a pretty good job with it,” Kelsey replies.

“I’m not.” And then I say honestly, “I’m just trying to

be me.”

Kelsey smiles at me, and then she moves off with Merrow

and Trow, and they are laughing about something. I think

how maybe saving the world together is kind of a huge bond-

ing experience.

I watch them go, and then I look at Ben. Ben walks over to

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me and stands with his hands in his pockets, looking down

at me.

He
is
so
dazzlingly
beautiful
, I think. It’s been a while since I thought that, in the middle of all the running for our lives

we’ve been doing. In the middle of how angry I’ve been with

him, how betrayed I’ve felt by him. It almost hurts to look

at him, he’s so gorgeous. I squint up at the cloudless sky

then look back at him. “You’re the only person on Boston

Common wearing a raincoat today.”

He doesn’t smile. “Glockenspiel,” he says.

“What?” I ask, wondering if he’s started speaking another

language.

“It’s Glockenspiel,” he repeats.

He’s not making any sense. “What is?”

He sighs and sits beside me on the grass. Next to me, closer

to me, I can see he looks tired, smudges of exhaustion under

his eyes.

“Are you okay?” I ask in concern.

“In my time, everything happened two minutes ago.”

“In my time too.”

“Not really. It just seems that way to you.” He lies down on

his back on the grass and looks up at the sky. “It’s been a very long day, Selkie.”

I think of his mother, and I say again, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Just tired.”

“So we won?”

“We won,” he confirms.

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“And what happened? How are things in the Otherworld?”

“Wonderful, actually. Safford sends his gratitude.”

“So that worked,” I realize. “Writing him back in. What

about Will?”

“Ah,” says Ben and almost smirks. “You should ask your

Aunt True about that one.”

I wince. “Stop it,” I tell him.

He looks at me, abruptly serious. “Speaking of the

Otherworld. I could, if you wanted, spend, you know, a lot

more time
here
.”

I swallow thickly, my pulse racing wildly. “More time than

you spend now?”

“I could spend forever here.”

My heart feels too full for me to talk. “Forever’s a long

time,” I tell him.

“It’s the blink of an eye,” he counters.

“I don’t want to just stay in Boston. I want to see every-

thing. I want to see it all without being afraid for our lives

the whole time.”

“I will take you anywhere you would like to go. Say

the word.”

I don’t know how to respond to that. I take a deep breath.

It’s exactly what I wanted Ben to say, and yet at the same

time, it’s all too much.

“So she loved you,” I say abruptly. “Your mother. She was

protecting you all along, helping you, in a convoluted, faerie

way. Right?”

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“She was protecting all of us. By making it look as if she

wasn’t. But she found the way to get the prophecy to be ful-

filled in exactly the way she wanted it to be fulfilled, and she saved all of us in the end.”

“She also caused a lot of problems,” I say, thinking of the

cursed coat.

“She was a faerie,” Ben says and looks at me. “We always

cause more problems than we intend to.”

“Why didn’t she just
help
us at the Unseelie Court? It would have saved us so much trouble.”

Ben says after a moment, “I wasn’t…I wasn’t trying to

manipulate you.”

“When?” I ask, confused. I have no idea how that answers

my question.

“When I asked you to kiss me to escape from Avalon. It’s