Dear Diary… maybe happiness isn't for weirdos. — Super Aspen
As I write with my red pen, I twirl my blue pen between my toes. I have a green pen in my hair, and I don't do with yellow pens. I lean back in my chair and whirl the blu—
I dropped it.
God. Now I have to pick it up, and to do that I'll have to push my chair back and reach down because it just has to be under my desk and my back already aches and… it just started rolling. It spins over the wood ridges with little clicks, like it has somewhere better to be. How could it be happy anywhere other than with me?
I stand up with a hiss and catch myself straightening the notebook stack before I move. My chair legs kiss the wood instead of scraping—God is good—and I step around the stack of folded, beige blankets by the wall. Then I step past the wiped-down crate and the shoes I should've tucked to the wall. Well, whatever.
The pen keeps running from me. It doesn't know any better. It rolls over the worst part of the floor too, where the planks curve with the tree, and trees are stubborn. Don't make treehouses, they're a hassle. Anyways, the pen rolls right over the scrubbed wood where there's a gap in the floor that never goes away. The pen reaches that scar and wobbles at the edge.
I spin around and close my eyes, pointing at the pen like a misbehaving child. "Don't do it...!"
And it drops right into that hole. Ugh. "Bitchass pen."
I crouch down and peer through. Cool air threads up through the gap and the ground rests far beneath in greens and browns and wet black roots. Can't really see the pen from up here but I know it's there. On the forest floor just hiding from me. One dumb, blue line amidst everything alive. When I find it, I'm going to rip it in half.
I wonder if that'll upset the fairies. If they love blue so much, then I'll be hate-criming a holy artifact. Eh. I sigh through my nose and stand up properly. No way around it. I push the chair in first, because I'm not an animal. Then I nudge the journal until its bottom edge lines up with the crate seam, press the red cap on to click twice, and touch the green pen in my hair to make sure it's still there.
It is. It's loyal, in a room where not many things are.
The trapdoor at the far end of the tree house sticks at the corners where the wood swells. I lift it with both hands and set it down carefully beside the folded blankets. Below, the bark of the trunk presses close in some places. The ladder is more of a shoddy project of nailed planks than a ladder. I suck at making treehouses. Although I don't really remember how I made this one.
Must've been the fairies' work, though nobody will believe that. I climb down and the tree shifts a bit. Something blue gums faintly under one palm where I grab the wrong place. By the time my feet reach the lowest board, the air smells of cool bark and mud.
Yummy. Wet leaves keep giving under my slippers and there's always roots bulging through the ground. I shift a few of the leaves away, just praying and kicking until something works. Eventually, I catch a glint of blue under a patch of dead leaves. But the leaves aren't wet—they're coated in a thin layer of gray powder. Like ash. Is someone out here burning my leaves?
I crouch and pick it up with the edges of my fingertips, watching it dangle like a littl—something knocks. Somewhere in the trees.
My spine locks. It's not close, but not far either. A small wooden tap, hollow in the middle, like one knuckle against the inside of a tree. Except it came from somewhere in the branches.
My fingers stay pinched around the pen, but I forget to lift it. The blue tip swings once under my hand, very small and stupid, while every part of me waits for the trees to do it again.
There's nothing else. No chirps. No wind. I can barely hear my own breathing.
"R-Right," I whisper as I inch back to my tree steps. I make myself look up, chin first, like that counts as bravery. The branches knit together above me, black-green and still, like tree roots in the sky.
A bead of some aqua liquid swells from the dark between two branches. Not rain. Rain does not glow. This drops straight through the air without touching a single leaf.
It lands on the tip of the blue pen with a soft, wet click.
I run for the ladder.
I come up faster than I came down. The moment I make it into the treehouse, I slam the hatch into place. I drop to my knees and press one eye to the gap in the wood. The forest floor waits beneath me, too far down and too still, and the place where the pen was stares back emptier than the rest. A little smudge of gray ash in the green.
I look back at the pen in my hand. The blue at its tip is still wet. The Pine-Sol waits beside the crate like a weapon with a trigger, so I grab it and shoot the pen four times. Lemon-pine mist beads over the plastic, but the aqua won't die. It stays there, fat and shining on the tip, refusing to go back to how it was.
I throw it before I decide to. The pen hits the far corner, bounces once against the blanket stack, and lands blue-tip-up.
Bad. Bad bad bad. Now the corner has it too. I spray the air between us. Not at the pen. Between us. That counts as a wall. Then I spray the floor where it bounced, the blanket it almost touched, the crate because the crate saw it happen, and my fingers because they must not take on the blue.
The fairies must want me now.
I throw the crate over the pen upside down. Today, it will be a prison. The aqua glow leaks through one of the handle holes. The glow sits there, making one perfect blue square on the ceiling, and I know, with the calm of a person already dead, that the room has learned a new color.
★
The blue does not get to be in the middle. Middle is for normal people, and no one invited the fairies. I drag the blanket stack away from the corner with two fingers. The crate stays over the pen. The aqua square on the ceiling shifts when I move, sliding over the wood like it is looking for a better place to stand.
Fuck no. I put the red pen on the floor first. North. Probably north. Treehouse north, which is different from compass north and more important. Then the green pen goes across from it, still warm from my hair, and I whisper sorry because it has been loyal and does not deserve this. I do not have yellow. Yellow is the color of bad kitchens and fake butter and people asking if I am okay. I am not fucking okay, so she better stop asking.
I use the black marker instead. I draw the first spiral around the crate, careful not to let my wrist touch the floor. The line comes out shaky, which is illegal, so I thicken it until it looks intentional. The second spiral goes inside the first but not touching it. Touching is how problems travel. The third one goes around the handle hole where the blue leaks through.
The glow makes the black ink shine wet. It should not do that. I sit back on my heels and breathe through my mouth, because the room smells like Pine-Sol and old wood and whatever the blue is pretending not to be. My hands hover over my knees. I make them stop hovering. Hovering is suspicious.
"Okay," I tell the crate. "Terms."
The crate says nothing, because it is furniture and sane. The blue square on the ceiling pulses once. My phone buzzes against the folded blanket by my hip. I do not scream. Technically. Jamie's text is the only thing in my notifications.
-u in the tree? A second message appears before I can answer. -mum not home again btw
My thumb hovers over the keyboard too long. For a moment, I wonder if he's eaten something that counts as food, or just chewed pencils and called it lunch. Then the crate glows blue through the spiral, and my brain cuts Jamie down to one instruction.
-ye. stay inside.
It takes a few seconds until he responds. Goddamnit Jamie. -can i play on lappytop?
-ye. bye.
He replies at once. -yay. come back soon, or ill fart—
I set the phone face-down on the wood and exhale. Outside, a bird high in the trees gives a long soft rustle and stops.
"Term one," I say, and my voice comes out too small, so I say it again. "By my name, Aspen, I command that you stay in there."
The blue square holds still on the ceiling.
"Term two. You do not touch anything of mine. Not the blankets, journal, pens, slippers, my brother, or anything."
I grab the black marker tighter. The cap bites a little crescent into my palm. Good. Pain is proof that I am on my side.
"Term three. If this is not a trick, you have to say so. Out loud. In English. No riddles. No knocking."
The crate says nothing. I lean closer, but not too close.
"Term four." My mouth dries around it. "If I asked for this, you have to prove I meant it."
The glow pulses once through the handle hole. So I draw another spiral, smaller this time, around the place where my knee almost crossed the line. Corrective spiral. Emergency spiral. Shut-the-fuck-up-and-be-normal spiral. The marker squeaks over the wood, and every curve comes out uglier than the last, but I keep going until the shape closes. Closed means closed.
"Term five," I whisper. The aqua waits. "You'll stop taking my memories."
The glow dims. Not gone, just smaller. Like it heard me and looked away. My knees creak as I inch toward the crate. One hand stays on the black spiral. With the other, I hook two fingers under the crate's edge and lift it only a little.
The pen rolls out immediately. Not away from me. Not toward me. Sideways, over the wet shine of Pine-Sol and through the black spiral like it never learned what lines are for.
"No," I say. Not loudly. It keeps rolling. It reaches the gap in the floorboards, pauses with its blue tip hanging over the dark, and drops through.
No wobble. No drama. Just gone.
I stay there with the crate lifted in one hand. The prison is empty. The spiral is broken. The pen is below me again. I stare at the gap a bit longer, listening to my own ragged breathing.
From the gap, a thin light shines through. So faint it could've been mistaken for the evening glow—then it pulses, breathing once.
My feet work before I do. I find myself kneeling before it. The room loses everything else, going dark like the light has taken sides. Only the blankets, journal, pens, and my slippers. They all glow blue.
Like the blue pen down below. The blue seam in the wood. The blue ink in the journal. The spirals I drew days ago. The color is too small for the crack and too large for the room.
I hear the knock again. A small tap, hollow in the middle, like one knuckle against the inside of my skull. With it, a voice rises from the forest floor.
"Do you want to wake up?"
It sounds like Mother.