Characters
01
LILLA
Lilla, at least from the outside, looked—forgettable. Someone you wouldn’t notice even if she were standing right in front of you. Let’s just say she was remarkable at being forgotten—but I am getting ahead of myself.
Lilla was nearly twelve, and smart, and lonely and skinny and curious. Her dark hair often tangled because she forgot to brush it, and her eyes (currently a rainy grey) liked to change color with her clothes and her moods…
Lilla was a Reader.
Lilla read everything. Not just books, but coupon papers they throw on the doorstep, tracts handed out on the subway, flyers with tear-off tabs on the bulletin board at the market. Even a skywriter at Coney Island who spelled out NATHAN’S in ribbons of smoke.
She could read her way into any book. This world dissolved away, each page drew her in deeper, until there was almost nothing between her and that better book world. Just a breath—a cobweb—a soap bubble thick wall to brush away. After all, some books—the best books—don’t seem like just a story. They took her to a world that felt much more like home than where she lived now.
For more about Lilla, visit her Pinterest board.
02
CHARLIE
“I have questions, Clarence.” Oh, Clarence had done it now. Charlie had launched Operation: Total Pain. He saved it for special occasions. Now it was Clarence’s turn. “I want to make sure I do this right,” Charlie said. “So when I kiss a girl, Clarence, where do I put my nose? To the left? To the right? What if we crash into each other? Should I just kiss her more passionately, so she doesn’t notice?… How, precisely, do you use the tongue, Clarence?… What do the lady dwarves prefer?… So many possibilities—Clarence, what’s your go-to move?”
For more about Charlie, visit his Pinterest board.
03
SOPHIE
Sophie looked an awful lot like Charlie, just a little bigger. She had the same uncontrollable hair, though her dark curls were stating to grey, the same freckles across her nose. Sophie was small, like a porcelain doll, all pink cheeks, and softly rounded curves. She had fallen asleep in her glasses, and they had embossed a stripe across her left cheek.
She knows the power of stories, has seen many a hero forged merely by following the steps of another. But she has found no story to show her how to juggle mothering with unending chronic illness and pain. In stories, mothers are perfect, or absent altogether. The only images of illness she has found are impossible, infuriating; like Digory’s mother, beautiful and distant, lying in bed peacefully cared for, waiting, patient, for Aslan’s gift of a healing apple.
04
JAMIE
The hair on his head still shone red as a new penny, even if the boy he was once had long disappeared into his clumsy, gangly man’s body. Some of his patients didn’t understand the message hidden in plain sight on the sign on his door. James Malarkey, PhD. Community Friendly. And the small line drawing of the cat. But many clients knew the secret that his shingle whispered. They knew their Central Casting by-the-book psychologist with the standard issue beard and glasses took a special type of patient, that he too knew the pain of being trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. That, in fact, he ran two quite different practices out of the same office.
There were not many others like him in this World, who treated the specific sort of PTSD that came in the aftermath of fairy tales, who understood the adjustments of a life with not enough Nonsense, and the pain of displacement from the many Worlds of the Community. He knew what it was to be broken, and he had been fixed, leaving him with a debt he could never repay. That was why he did this for a living. Because somehow, despite everything, he had been saved and was therefore compelled to save others. He had earned a cat, for kindness, and must extend that kindness towards other lost children of Story.
For more about Jamie, visit his Pinterest board.
05
BOB
Usually Bob’s skin held a tawny glow. If you didn’t know, Bob could be anything—biracial, Greek, Italian, Middle Eastern, Latinex, or just deeply tanned. Strangers often assumed Bob to be part of their own ethnic group.
It took a minute for the glamour to dissolve, for Bob to turn from a solid, six-foot four-inch man into his much larger minotaur self.
Bob wasn’t small in any form. Without the glamour, Bob filled most of their king size bed. Bob’s horns were bobbed short, his hide the comforting brown of toast or peanut butter, but his size was astounding.
For more about Bob, visit his Pinterest board.
06
LUKE
Someone was shouting. It was a boy, a very tall boy she had never seen before. A boy who looked like he might have been kind of cute if he wasn’t shouting.
Lilla liked everything about this boy. His shiny black hair was closely cropped, except for the razor-cut shock that fell into his angry green eyes; his thinness made him seem all elbows and knees. She even liked his faded-out red t-shirt, with the name of a band she had never heard of and how it looked against his skin, the color of coffee with lots of milk.
She especially liked how he was yelling at Gus. No one yelled at Gus.
Where had Luke disappeared to? Last time she saw him he was drooling over the naiads. For a boy who had fought off magic, he was sure taken with it now.
The naiads would let Luke hang around when they were bored and sent him on elaborate errands which seemed designed to test his endurance and gullibility, but they obviously had no romantic interest in thirteen-year-old human boys.
For more about Luke, please visit his Pinterest board.
07
TICKEY-DING
“Hungry, hungry, hungry,” the voice said as they tried to locate it. “Why yes, I would like breakfast, so kind of you to ask.”
“I didn’t—” Charlie said.
The room looked the same as always, overstuffed cabbage rose sofas, overflowing bookcases, Charlie’s battered red Converse lowtops left where he stepped out of them on the Persian rug…
“Charlie—” Lilla said. “Why is your sneaker…vibrating?”
“Less with the talky talk and more with the eaty eat, please,” the voice said.
“Your sneaker is talking,” she said.
“My sneaker is not supposed to talk.” Charlie gingerly approached the errant Converse. A tiny head, bright cyan blue with a chartreuse crest, peeked over the top of the shoe.
“Yes, please—” the little creature said hopefully, Crayola-colored head rising on a skinny little neck. “The full English fry up for starters and I will take a look at your a la carte menu.”
It was no bigger than a cupcake, four pipe cleaner legs and a long neck and tail and two gauzy wings which, even fully unfurled, didn’t fit the full span of Charlie’s palm.
There were three sharp hiccups, followed by a resounding belch. Then the sound of an alarm coming from the newly swollen stomach of the tiny terror.
“You didn’t—” Charlie said.
“I told you I was hungry—”
“You ate the kitchen timer?”
“I was hungry. You were warned.”
For more about Tickey-Ding, please visit his Pinterest board.
08
GUS, aka SULLY
Now it was toast every morning, and maybe a rare Gus sighting as he wandered through grumbling, looking for coffee, fulfilling her Recommended Daily Allowance of Gus.
Instead of a mom and dad, Lilla had a Gus. His name wasn’t actually Gus. He was Charlie’s mom’s Great Uncle Sully, and the nickname came from the initials. Sullivan was his name, and no one knew if it was his first name or his last.
Gus never changed. He was small, maybe five foot four, with messy dark hair in his eyes that always needed cutting. He wore the same thing every day. Sneakers, whatever was this season’s hottest, hardest to find model. The rest never varied. Dark rinse Levis, long sleeved black t-shirts, and mismatched socks, the brighter the better.
For more about Sully, also known as Gus, please visit his Pinterest board.
09
XERXES
Charlie used to say Xerxes was a mad scientist, and the man looked like one, too tall to really be allowed, pale as flour and scarred within an inch of his life, his limping, shambling walk loud enough to wake the house when he paced the creaky old wood floors pre-dawn, thinking. If they lived in a story book, Xerxes would conduct bizarre experiments, sewing bits of things together in the hopes they might live. Instead, he was prone to appearing out of gloomy corners to startle her.
But Xerxes was gone. His enormous chair still sat at one end of the kitchen table, oversized like his gigantic shoes and what could only be custom made Victorian dandy clothes and his tentlike lab coats.
For more about Xerxes, please visit his Pinterest board.
10
TIGG
Everything around them stood arrested in mid-motion, except the tall, shambling wreck of a man beckoning to them. He had long, tangled blondish brown hair in a shaggy ponytail under his Brooklyn Dodgers cap and a five-day growth of beard. He wore plaid shorts and sneakers under a battered unbuttoned overcoat.
Out of his mismatched disguise, in boots, breeches and a linen shirt, Tigg looked like a guy on the covers of the books in the Pirates, Rogues, Bosoms and Petticoats section at Barnes and Noble.
If she hadn’t been trapped in the dark, sick to her stomach from fright, Lilla might have felt equally excited and embarrassed to be carried by such a strong, grownup—man. That was the only world for Tigg. A real, rogue, hero-style, swashbuckling adventurer.
For more about Tigg, please visit his Pinterest board.
11
SASS
This was the girl. She had to be.
Every inch of her was screaming, “Aren’t I adorable?” The skirts of that super pink dress were wide enough that if you threw some wheels on and added horses, it would make a nice carriage.
Like the dress, with its frilly lace and lacy frills wasn’t enough, the girl had golden curls. Not blonde, golden. No other word could capture those perfect corkscrews. Her cheeks were pink as her dress, her eyes just the right blue, a match to the cloudless sky above.
“I’m Sassandra. Sassandra Aurora Isabella Violetta Angelica Guinevere—”
“That can’t all be your name,” Lilla said. “Not really.”
“Oh, I add extra bits here and there,” the girl said. “When I need more. Like to impress an epically cute boy. You can call me Sass.”
For more about Sass, visit her Pinterest board.
12
MERRY
Only Merry could sit so stiffly straight, only Merry would have calculated this to the exact proper degree of formality, meeting in the best reception room but not the throne room, wearing her favorite fairywrought tiara with the fist sized emerald, but not a ceremonial crown. Exactly appropriate for meeting a Princess, but of a fallen, powerless house.
Merry had gone a bit over the top with the crimson velvet gown, given that it was an average Tuesday night, not a banquet, a ball, or any sort of state occasion. But the yards of skirt, all those rows of ruffles were Merry anytime, from a state dinner to a croquet match.
He was right to worry, Merry could have some plan to murder her in her bedchamber. But he didn’t know Merry like she did. He didn’t know how close she was to her cousin, or how much keeping her bedchamber neat and tidy meant to Merry.
Merry was hugging her again, like when they were girls. Merry giggled, stroking the soft pink velvet of Sophie’s dress. “This is so much better. You look so pretty.”
“The whole time I was lacing,” she said. “I remembered us getting dressed together—”
“I missed you. All those years. Thanks for coming back to visit so soon. And where did you dig up the man candy? Yum. That is one long, tall drink of knight.”
“Merry—” Now it really felt like they were girls again. Merry had always been boy crazy, though nowhere near as bad as Elspeth.
“What, you want it in Queen Speak?” Merry said. “We do truly declare that our royal cousin has bestowed upon us one yummy hunk of knighthood to decorate our castle—”
For more about Merry, visit her Pinterest board.
13
CLARENCE
And a cab drove up right on the sidewalk where they stood, a funny old fashioned Checker cab, all rounded surfaces and faded yellow paint, with a driver hanging out the window. A driver that looked a lot like—an awful lot like—he was short and heavy with a long white beard and fake fuzzy donkey ears on his head, and he sure looked like a dwarf.
Clarence was drinking vast quantities of peppercorn schnapps and banging through empty cabinets, trying to put together a meal. “What’s the point in keeping supplies in the safe houses if no one ever replaces them?” he said. “Is it so much to ask for a little peanut butter? And am I the only person in the entire Resistance who ever remembers to replace the toilet paper?”
For more about Clarence, please visit his Pinterest board