Free The Blue Girl by Charles De Lint Page A

mean.
    Not that they were ever mean to me. Like I said, they treated me like a special project, constantly trying to make life a little better for me. So as far as I was concerned, that stuff about them going mean was all just words in some kids’ book.
    That is, until the day they thought it would be a lark to teach me how to fly.
    *    *    *
    “Come on, you’ll like it,” Oshtin said.
    “Yeah, Addy,” Sairs put in. They’d taken to calling me “Addy,” which—since I’d never had a nickname before that wasn’t abusive—pleased me no end. “Or are you scared?”
    “No, I’m not scared. It’s just  ...  I mean, flying  ...”
    It was one of those rare occasions when all the fairies were with me at the same time. We were in an elf bolt that looked out on the main hall of the school near the principal’s office, drinking herbal tea that Krew had made with water from a kettle that didn’t appear to need a power source, and munching on crackers Quinty had stolen from the cafeteria.
    “It would be like Peter Pan ,” Tommery said.
    “That’s the problem,” I told them. “I just don’t know that I believe enough.”
    Tommery laughed. “Don’t talk rubbish. You don’t have to believe for it to work. You just need our magic.”
    “But—”
    “You never believed in us, but you saw us all the same, didn’t you?”
    “I suppose  ...”
    We settled on a test run, a short flight down the stairs in the main hall. We couldn’t do it when anyone was around, of course, so I had to hide out until the school was empty except for the janitor. We waited until he was asleep on the cot he had stashed away in the basement, then tumbled out of the elf bolt and went up the stairs. I counted the risers as we ascended. Twenty-two.
    Once we’d reached the landing, I looked back down. It was higher than I had thought it would be, especially considering I went up and down it a dozen times or more a day. But that was on my own two feet. Right now it seemed way too high, and I got a touch of vertigo.
    “So ... what do I do?” I asked.
    The fairies clustered around me.
    “Nothing,” Tommery said. “Just relax.”
    Easy for him to say, I thought, looking down at the end of the stairs that still seemed way too far away at this moment.
    But then I felt the strangest sensation. The fairies stood by me, two to a side, with Tommery perched on the banister, directing the operation. The others laid their hands on my legs and then I was ... not flying, but floating. I could feel all the weight of my body disappear, or maybe it was just gravity losing its hold, but up I went, flanked by the fairies on either side of me.
    We hovered for a long moment above the landing, then Tommery cried, “Go!” and we swooped down the stairs. Right at the bottom, we came to a stop and slowly sank through the air until my feet were on the ground again.
    I had a moment of wobbliness when we touched down. My body had never seemed to weigh so much as it did at that moment.
    I looked back up the stairs, and Tommery came sliding down the banister.
    “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said, landing at my feet.
    “Are you kidding? It was great. It was totally amazing. When can we do it again?”
    “Right now, if you want.”
    “Oh, I do,” I told him. “And I want to go higher—like from the roof.”
    Tommery smiled. “What happened to your not believing enough?”
    “Who cares about believing? The magic works whether I believe in it or not, right?”
    “Just so,” Tommery said.
    *    *    *
    I led the way as we trooped up the stairs. We knew where the entrance to the rooftop access was—the fairies knew where everything was in the school, and by this time, so did I.
    The moon was up when we stepped out onto the roof. Tommery told me that he and the others came up here all the time to have picnics and spy on the world at large and just generally hang out. I’d never been up here myself, probably because I’d always had