Harry could never see the point to cheating anyway. School was the same kind of machine: you did the work, collected your reward in the currency of grades, which then translated to money. It was all very black and white.
There was clockwork decisiveness to this black and white world that made sense to Harry. When Phillip Argyle, a classmate was caught sabotaging the toilets, Harold reported him with the swift retribution of a holy avenger. It made him no friends, but it did earn him a Hall Monitor promotion. It was ten years later he passed Phillip scrubbing sewers in the Industrial Wedge, sad grimy eyes looking up at Harold, his trousers stained in filth, his hands gnarled and dyed almost black. Harold never forgot a face.
That was how it worked and for Harry it worked very well. Good behavior was rewarded, bad behavior punished. It was all very tidy, very clean and neat.
Harold never argued with his father, because he understood that his father was part of the machinery as well, and the machinery made sense. The only time they had ever disagreed, the entire debate lasted thirty seconds and consisted of three sentences:
“Father, I’d like to go into the Tinker’s Guild when I graduate.”
“Nonsense. You’ll study accounting and get a good job at your uncle’s bank. You’ll thank me for it, Harry.”
“Okay.”
As always, his father was right. Harold wondered why he had ever wanted to chase that watch-making dream. Money made sense to Harry in the way that roads made sense to a cartographer.
He would have said, “In the way that gears made sense to a watch builder,” but Harold always felt a little sad when he thought about it that way and sadness was like quicksand, catching you unaware and pulling you in the more you fought it. It was best to just avoid the entire swamp, stay on the path and keep moving.
The financial world had its own machinery as Harry observed on more than one occasion. Cheaters belonged in places like Lassimir and Arist, not Bollingbrook. He saw their faces before and after they were caught, gumming up their own works with greedy confusion. He couldn’t help but smile a bit every time the fraud inspectors dragged one of them off to court.
The first time Harold met Francine and saw her smile, it was as if his heart beat in time with the machinery that ran the universe. She met his eyes and for a single perfect moment, all the gears stopped and waited until he could catch his breath again. The tiles all read “JACKPOT.”
They were married a month later.
*
The first time the gears slipped was shortly after Fran’s first pregnancy. There was blood and screaming in the middle of the night, fists clenched over sweat-stained sheets, then a terrifying rush to the doctor. Afterwards there had been weeks of crying from both of them. Harry began to wonder what it was he had done wrong, what either of them had done to deserve any of this.
A priest suggested they pray.
So they prayed with clenched eyes and sweaty brows. They prayed for a miracle, a child of their very own.
When their miracle arrived, wrapped in a blanket and staring up at them with large, beautiful eyes, they named her Melissa after Fran’s grandmother. Fran, almost having died during childbirth had been warned against having any more children, and thus Harold and Francine Montegut were happy with what the Lord gave them.
Melissa was a peculiar, curious child, full of questions from the moment she knew how to ask them. If there was a rule, she would see just how far she could bend it before it snapped. Harry had tried his late father’s technique of bribing her, but that only made her want to bend the rules even further.
“Just because you give me a reward doesn’t make it fun,” she said to him with all the sage wisdom of a monk. She was five at the time.
This baffled Harry, who until this point believed that all children could be taught to behave for a price, but increasing the reward only ended with disastrous results. It was almost as if the greater the price, the more fun it was for her to break the rules. It ran contrary to everything Harold understood about the universe.
One year, Harry had offered her a bike for her seventh birthday if she would get straight As. She instead brought home a report card with Cs down every column. She handed him the card with a firm hug and a smile, missing a tooth. On the back of the card was a beautiful drawing of a horse in a meadow. The horse was purple and the meadow was orange.
Harold had it framed.
*
It had seemed that all hope was lost for his daughter until she burst in the door one day in a fit. She looked as though she might literally explode with excitement and it scared Harry half to death. Excitement graced the Montegut household about as often as a butterfly visits the North Pole.
He barely had time to ask her what all the fuss was about before she grabbed his hand and pulled him halfway across town to the city gates. There a group of traveling gypsies were arguing with the gate guards over entry fees. Melissa pulled his head down close to hers and pointed a mittened hand at the merchant’s caravan.
On one of the wagons was a red hardcover book, the artwork arcane and ugly in Harold’s opinion, not the sort of thing you would see in a museum or even a book
about
books. He even asked Melissa twice if she really meant that “ugly red book with the black scribbles.”
“It’s not ugly!” she protested, pleading with him to buy it for her.
It took little persuasion and a lot of coin to obtain the book. He saw the way the guards had looked at him when he pulled it from the stack. Pictures of giants and dragons and snakes adorned the cover in stark black ink. It was the sort of questionable subject matter that wound up confiscated with the owner answering to a tribunal.
“It’s a children’s book,” he explained with a smile, and then dropped a coin in each guard’s hand to help them forget they ever saw it.
The look on Melissa’s face was more than worth it. She even brought home an A on her report that week. Harold had never been prouder. He thought that there might be hope yet that his daughter could see the world as the same perfect machine he saw: you do the work, you get the reward.
Those hopes had begun to dim when he tried to bribe her again with another children’s book. He had been unable to find the same merchant, so he opted instead to buy a Church-approved storybook. To Harry they all looked the same anyway—bright colors, smiling animals and children—if you’d seen one you’d seen them all.
Melissa accepted the gift with polite gratitude.
That week she brought home a D. Harry was baffled.
*
Things began to make sense when Harold started to meet the sort of children his daughter was beginning to associate with. By ten he had hoped she would be eager to join the Young Ladies’ Society, which had been the starting point for a girl’s upward mobility in Bollingbrook’s social circles.
The friend she brought home instead was anything but that. Harold couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something was not quite right about the girl. She was friendly enough, shaking his hand at the door before scampering upstairs to “Missy’s room” to play. Harold hated that nickname and it made him like his daughter’s new friend even less.
But it wasn’t just the nickname. No, something about the way the girl looked at him, at his house, at his
wife
. Her dark eyes fell on things in the house that weren’t exactly objects of interest. Rather than admiring his wife’s fine china—sure to be a hit with all the young ladies—she instead looked at the feet of the cabinet.
She then opened the latch as Francine held her breath. The girl didn’t break anything, and didn’t even open the door all the way. She simply wanted to “see how the hinge felt.” She then closed the cabinet silently and giggled with Melissa as they both ran upstairs.
He had saved his ranting for later. “Who the hell
says
anything like that?”
“She’s just a girl,” Francine said between coughs. “Girls go through phases. You know they don’t have any money. Maybe she’s never seen anything like it.”
That cough was beginning to worry Harold, but she said it was nothing—just a cold.
“You bet they’re poor,” he said. “Didn’t even have a last name. Who names their child ‘Skyla’? What the hell kind of name is that? Might as well name her ‘
Cloudgirl
’ or ‘Treetop’.”
“Keep your voice down,” Fran said, whispering.
In the bedroom down the hallway, squeals and giggling echoed. He looked away from the door in disgust and Francine was smiling at him. God, that smile could melt glaciers.
“Do you hear how happy she is?” Fran said. “She makes friends so rarely. She’s so shy.”
She was no longer looking at him, but through the door, into the hallway, filled with joy. Fran was glowing. He kissed her, trying not to let her fever distract him from the moment.
*
The second time that something seemed to jam the wheels and gears in Harold’s world was when the friendship between Melissa and Skyla turned sour. It began when Melissa and the strange girl had asked if she could sleep over for a while. It seemed her mother was ill and that the poor waif had nowhere else to stay. She had little luggage—just a dusty old rucksack—and promised to remain completely out of the way. Harold agreed as long as she kept to herself and didn’t go around staring at the hinges of any more cabinets.
Francine’s cough had been growing worse over the last few weeks and Harold was spending most of his time in their room anyway. If someone could keep his daughter from thinking about what was really happening, that was one less thing for him to worry about.
He arrived home one day to find Melissa’s door open. Voices were coming from Fran’s room. Not only voices, but other sounds. Sounds he couldn’t understand.
He had expected to see Melissa, but instead it was only the Skyla girl, standing at the foot of Fran’s bed. Harry’s wife was finally asleep—a rare joy considering how much she had been coughing lately—and the girl was staring at her. She was looking at Francine in the same way she had looked at the cabinet, at the bottom of the pantry, at the space under the stove. Harry felt a shiver run down his spine.
“Where’s Melissa?” he asked.
“Missy had to stay after class,” the girl answered without looking away from Francine. He cringed at the nickname.
Her uniform was filthy and ripped. Sections of the clothing were hastily stitched together as if sewn by a madman. She continued to look through Francine with that same expression. Her mouth seemed to move soundlessly.
“Let’s go,” he said and reached for her arm.
It was when he touched her arm that he saw something shimmer near his wife. His head turned in that direction, but there was nothing. The blankets rose and sank imperceptibly with each rattling breath.
“I said let’s go—”
The girl turned and looked directly into his eyes—
through
his eyes, into and through them as if she were looking at something hovering over his shoulders, just behind his vision. He felt like his head was an empty window and she was a casual shopper, browsing the contents of his soul.
He yanked on her arm but she didn’t move.
“You have to realize,” she said, “that the world isn’t black and white just because you want it to be. Your life isn’t a means to an end.”
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. A sharp tingle ran up his arm and into the back of his skull. The girl continued to speak without blinking.
“She’ll be seeing the in-between people soon. You didn’t learn anything by following the rules, don’t you see?”
He yanked on her arm hard and she blinked as if waking from a trance. Her eyes rolled slowly and then focused on her arm.
“
Ow
!” she yelled, pulling away.