Devyn does. I go to hit it but Nick takes it instead.
“Sorry,” he murmurs.
I roll my eyes at the irony as he and Devyn take over the game again. I try to follow where the ball is going, but I can’t predict its direction, let alone make it go where I want it to. I can’t stop myself from adding softly, “You’re always acting so hero and you’re going to get hurt.”
Nick stops and looks at me. “You were in class. I had study hall,” he says gently.
“Still, the protocol is that you spot one, you call for backup,” Issie says. “Not to fight or anything, but that is the protocol. Wow, I love that word.”
Dev came up with that term. Not that it matters. What matters is that we’re rounding up any stray pixies that head into our area. We take them and put them in a large house that we’ve surrounded with iron. The house is in the woods and hidden by a glamour, which is like a magic spell that prevents people from seeing what’s really there. I am not really cool with trapping them like that, but I don’t know how else to do it. They were dangerous. They were killing boys until we stopped them. They had needs, and those needs were out of control because their king was out of control. Pixie society is kind of hierarchical like that. The king and most of his local people are still trapped there, but every once in a while another pixie comes from far away.
We don’t know why.
We just know we have to stop them too.
Pixie Tip
Pixies do not look like Tinker Bell. Although they occasionally wear tutus. Seriously—who doesn’t?
Instead of getting real lunch in the cafeteria, Devyn and I grab some bagels and head into the library to do some research. I wave to the librarian, whose name I can never remember, which is just so wrong of me because she is super nice, and then we set up our laptops on one of the polished wood tables. The wood is so light it’s almost yellow. Devyn clunks his head on it when he plugs his computer’s power cord into the outlet.
“Ouch.” He drops the cord.
I grab it. “Here, let me.”
Little sparks of electricity flutter out and Devyn says, “Thanks.”
“Not a problem.”
The library is half full of people. Nobody’s whispering, but yelling is against the rules. There is a bunch of girls around one girl’s computer, giggling. The computer clicks. They are taking photos, I think. Some guy with dark clothes is bent over his screen. Two other guys are typing frantically away on their screens but I don’t know what they’re working on or playing. Dev and I are here to do research for our pixie book. It isn’t easy. Most of the stuff on the Web is about Tinker Bell and this old indie rock group from Boston.
“Why are all my hits about cats and rock bands?” I ask.
“Be patient.”
I try another site and scan it. “Okay, patience has shown me that this site is about a woman who is trying to get a PhD and wants to retire to Scotland and has a thing for cartoony images of women working while wearing short skirts.”
Devyn’s eyes light up. “Let me see that. Maybe she actually is one.”
“I doubt it.”
“You don’t know.” He pokes his head out from around his screen and pulls apart a bagel.
In the last month we’ve checked out about twenty blogs that have to do with pixies. None of them have been actual pixies. Most of them have been people who really like fantasy novels, which is cool, but not what we need. “I am just tired of this. I want to do something. Be more proactive.”
He pauses before he sticks the bagel in his mouth. “Research is proactive.”
I snort. I can’t help it. “And so is patrolling.”
My phone vibrates. I smile. I can’t help that either.
“Nick?” Devyn asks. “It’s been how long since he’s seen you? Five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” I announce as I press the button that retrieves the message, “is a very long time.”
He actually rolls his eyes. “What’s it say, ‘I love you, baby’?”
“Shut up. It says, ‘Meet me by poetry.’ ” I bounce up, searching. “He’s in here.”
Devyn starts laughing. “You’re blowing me off, aren’t you?”
“Yep,” I say, trying to remember where the poetry books are. “You’re a better researcher than I am anyway.”
“Not true.”
I start walking toward the far back wall and then hustle back, lean over the desk, and whisper, “Look up pixie invasion. There’s far too many of them right now. It’s not normal.”
“Good idea.”
I fast-walk past the circulation desk, where the librarian is talking about source citation or something, and duck down one of the rows of Fiction Ca–Cz. Then I make a right. There are a lot of stacks in here. They reach the ceiling. Sometimes you have to use a step stool. It’s an amazing library for a high school actually, and I think—but I’m not sure—that poetry books are at the very end in the far left corner.
My phone vibrates again. I check the message: You coming?
I respond: Yes, impatient one.
The library smells like old and new books, coffee, and bagels. The light shafts in through some evenly spaced windows and it’s that perfect golden kind of light that makes everything seem like a big, happy glow. I step around the corner.
Nick smiles at me. He’s leaning against a big gray radiator. His thick black sweater rubs against the wall. For a second I want to be the wall. Okay, it’s longer than a second.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” I smile back. “I thought you were blowing off lunch to go out patrolling with Issie.”
“I lied.” He squats down and picks up a small black backpack that I don’t recognize. He pulls out a beach towel and starts laying it on the floor.
“Here, let me help.” I grab at a bright blue towel that has a wave design on it. Our fingers meet. We get a shock but neither of us twitches away.
“Static electricity,” he murmurs. His mouth moves when he says it. It moves slowly, like he’s kissing me. I lean forward. He holds up a finger. “One second. Sit on the towel, baby.”
“Bossy.” But I sit down anyway.
“You are just as bossy.”
“True,” I concede.
He laughs and pulls out a big Ziploc bag of something dark and round. Cookies!