Don't Breathe A Word by Jennifer Mcmahon

Author:Jennifer Mcmahon [Mcmahon, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0061689378
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2011-04-30T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Lisa

June 12, Fifteen Years Ago

In all the stories, it’s the same. The girl is ordinary. The girl is dull. But she is kind, has a good heart. Maybe she’s got a wicked stepmother. Maybe her stepsisters are fat and ugly and have dresses much fancier than hers. Maybe her father’s taken her deep into the heart of the forest and left her there.

Lisa knew her own story started just like theirs: Once upon a time.

Once upon a time there was a girl who could talk to the animals. A girl who lived next to a village where all of the people had disappeared. All but her great-grandfather, a tiny squalling baby left behind, tears and snot running rivers down his pink piggy face. His blood was in her veins. The salt inside it lucky somehow.

And she was a lucky girl. She knew that now, more than ever. Because she’d been given a magical gift, something straight out of a fairy tale: a book written by the King of the Fairies himself.

“You put the book there yourself,” Sammy said.

“How can you say that?” Lisa demanded. “Just look at it! Look how old it is.”

“You told us you wouldn’t go back there on your own,” Evie said. “You promised!” Her voice crackled, and for the first time ever, Lisa thought Evie might swing out and hit her. She waited for it, bracing herself, but Evie stood still, her breathing getting louder and louder.

Lisa had found the book down in the cellar hole that morning: a gift wrapped in wide green leaves, bound with thin vines, a purple foxglove with a spotted throat on top.

The note she’d left the fairies was gone.

Lisa had opened the package and found a book inside with a worn and tattered green cover. The paper looked old, the cover stitched on with heavy black thread. She ran her fingers over the letters on the cover: The Book of Fairies. Above it, a strange symbol painted in gold—an upside-down number 4 with a circle at the bottom.

She opened the book, squinted in the early morning light to make out the words. Flipping through, she found sections called “Fairy History,” “Fairy Legends,” “Fairies and Humans.” At the end of the book there was a page that began, If you wish to cross over to the land of the fairies. . .

There was a recipe for fairy tea that involved steeping the flowers and leaves of foxglove, adding honey, and letting the mixture sit for several days.

Lisa had closed the book and climbed out of the cellar hole, heart pounding because she knew that now she had it: proof that the fairies existed.

“That’s easy to fake,” Sammy said. “Stain the paper, singe the edges. You’ve taken this fairy crap too far, Lisa.”

“So I went to the trouble of writing the book myself, making up page after page, carefully putting it all down in handwriting that looks nothing like my own? Right. Come on, Mr. Logic. Be logical, would ya?”

Sam shook his head.

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