Free Afternoon of the Elves by Janet Taylor Lisle Page A

mother said.
    â€œOf course,” Hillary replied.
    â€œSee that white mound crawling on its knees out there on what used to be our driveway?” her mother went on, gesturing out the window.
    Hillary nodded.
    â€œThat’s your father. He’s dropped the screwdriver.”
    However, this snowstorm, like many of its relatives, had no intention of being cast in the role of predictable, and shortly after ten o’clock it tapered off to a sprinkle, then stopped. The sky cleared. The air warmed. Sara-Kate’s house, which had been hidden all morning behind curtains of falling snow, came into view before Hillary’s anxious eyes. She’d been half afraid the place would vanish during the storm, whisking Sara-Kate from her grasp again.
    She was out the door tramping eagerly toward the Connollys’ yard before her father had finished plowing the front walk. But then, seeing that Sara-Kate was not yet there, she hung back by the hedge. After all that had happened, she felt shy about entering without an invitation. The snow rose over her knees in places and had changed the appearance of everything. It lay in an unblemished white blanket over the yard, concealing all but the trees and the largest bushes, and giving the open spaces a virtuous, barren look.
    The rusty washing machine had become a gentle rise and fall in this soft-rolling landscape. The piles of car parts, the tires, the glass, the rotten wood and tin cans were smoothed away. The house itself looked more respectable surrounded by such tidiness and dressed in snow garlands along its gutters and windowsills. And finally, as if these gifts of cleanliness and order were not enough, the sun came out suddenly from behind the last snow cloud and hurled a dazzling light upon it all.
    Hillary stepped back into the shade of the hedge and hooded her eyes with one hand. She was not impressed by the snow’s transforming powers. Where, she wondered, was the elf village? Had it suffocated under all this heavy beauty?
    While the yard shone with the brilliance of diamonds, Hillary’s thoughts plunged like moles under the snow to the dirty, junky places she knew and trusted. And she had just about figured out where the Ferris wheel stood, invisible though it was, and the approximate location of the little houses, when Sara-Kate emerged and issued the invitation she’d been waiting for.
    â€œWhy are you standing there staring like an idiot?” Sara-Kate yelled in a most irritating and un-elf-like voice. “Come on. Let’s get started!”
    These words set what was to be the disconcertingly ordinary tone of the morning, for not once did Sara-Kate reveal a flicker of elf-ness. Though Hillary longed for another sign, though she dropped hints about “elf magic” and finally asked Sara-Kate point blank if the Ferris wheel would spin again, the thin girl did not respond. She pretended to have forgotten everything about the night before. It was a great disappointment until Hillary reflected how “elf-like” even this behavior was. How could Sara-Kate be expected to cast her invisibleness aside all at once? Naturally she would find it safer to appear and disappear like her smaller relatives, to show only parts of herself until Hillary had proven trustworthy.
    â€œWhich I will,” Hillary murmured with determination. “I will.”
    After this, Hillary stopped looking for signs. And indeed, Sara-Kate continued to play her role so convincingly that the whole issue began to seem rather silly in the light of the day, so snowy and free from school. And there was so much to be done! The village had literally to be excavated, house by house, stone by stone, like the ruins of Pompeii. Everything was there somewhere, but where? And how were they to find it without stepping on it first?
    They divided the area into four sections and worked each section carefully and thoroughly in turn. Once a house was discovered, the gentlest