Free The Blue Girl by Charles De Lint

go through everything.”
    “But why?”
    He shrugged. “We like to know what’s going on. The world’s not much of a story if you don’t know who the characters are.”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so I decided to ignore it.
    “So what happens now?” I asked.
    He cocked his head, reminding me of a bird—especially with those big eyes of his—that and the fact that he was looking up at me.
    “I’m not sure I understand the question,” he said. “What happens to me? You know—now that I know you exist.”
    “Oh that.” He shrugged. “You can do whatever you want. Tell your fellow students—”
    “Right, like that would go over so well.”
    “—or do nothing at all—though I’d hope that you might at least give me a friendly nod the next time we happen to run into each other.”
    “Well, sure. That’s if I ever, you know  ...”
    “Oh, you’ll see me again. Once you encounter one of us like this, you’ll never be blind again. Not unless you work at it.”
    With that, he swung back up into the support beams under the stands. I watched him go, scurrying like he was equal parts monkey and squirrel, until he was lost from sight. Then I put my head in my hands and stared at the ground again.
    I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. The only thing I knew for sure was that everything had changed.
    *    *    *
    So that’s how I got my first friends, like, ever.
    There were four or five of the little men living in the school. Tommery was the one I saw the most, or at least the one I talked to the most. The others were just around, like the way that Quinty was forever hanging around the girls’ bathrooms, which just gave me the creeps.
    Tommery said I shouldn’t let it bother me, that everybody has their quirks, and the thing that friends do is put up with each others’ quirks. He said they had to have something to amuse themselves with since people didn’t do what they were supposed to anymore, which was basically be respectful to the house spirits of a building—you know, leave them little cakes and saucers of milk, and thank them for their help in keeping the place tidy, though the thanking part you should only do verbally. Leave a gift other than food, and they’re out of the place like a shot; don’t ask me why.
    See, that’s what Tommery and Quinty and the others were—a kind of house spirit, like in that story about the elves and the shoemaker, which is weird when you think about it—to have little fairy people for friends—but a lot easier to take than having people laugh at you all the time or stuff your head into a toilet.
    And life did improve for me after I met them. I don’t mean that the kids at school started treating me any nicer, or that Mr. Crawford or Mr. Vanderspank stopped ragging on me in class. It just made a difference, having someone I could talk to and hang with—even if they were only a foot high.
    And they showed me all kinds of cool things, like hidden places in the school where no one can see you, but you can see them. Or secret passageways—invisible to the human eye, or at least the eye of most humans—that let you move quickly from one place to another. They called both of these things elf bolts.
    But what they didn’t tell me—well, they wouldn’t, would they?—was that something happens to house spirits when they’re left on their own too long. It turned out that Tommery and his gang probably really were like the fairies you see in the old storybooks—at least they were once.
    I read all about it in some picture book about the fairies in England.
    They start out handsome and pretty, but they can get kind of rough looking when they live in the wilds, away from men. Then you can have trouble telling them apart from the roots and leaves. And if they were originally house spirits, but abandoned by the people using the house—and for fairies, Redding High’s like some big house—they get to looking like Tommery does. And they can turn