Free Changeling by Delia Sherman

to the naughty children, penned up in a big brass cage at the back of the platform.
    The bogeymen were less terrifying.
    Carlyle pulled me around again, but not before I noticed that there was a space between the cage and the back wall.
    As you can see, Carlyle buzzed, they’re a pair of hooligans. Disgustingly dirty, of course, but that’s the least of it. This one (he shoved the mortal child forward) is driving her parents to the edge of madness. She is stubborn. She is disobedient. She is destructive. She is incredibly rude. She throws tantrums, and she never says she’s sorry. This one (he shoved me up beside her) is even worse. She broke the geas set on her by the Genius of Central Park and disrupted the Solstice Dance. And she’s not sorry either. Just look at that sullen pout. Have you ever seen a more hardened case?
    Three hundred pairs of yellow, poison-green, and scarlet eyes fixed themselves on me. I blinked hard and glared back. I wasn’t some stupid wild mortal who didn’t know what was what. I was the Central Park changeling, and I wasn’t going to cry.
    I came pretty close, though. What saved me was a small brown turtle. I felt something tickling my foot, and when I looked, there it was, clambering purposefully across my toes. There was a stir among the bogeymen. A hand appeared from nowhere and grabbed the turtle by its shell.
    â€œGotcha!” said the hand’s owner. “Bad Skipperdee, skittling off like that. Do you want to get squished flat?”
    It was Eloise. Her hair was like dried grass, and her belly hung out over the waistband of her pleated black skirt. Except for the red bow in her hair and the pink undies that showed whenever she bent over, she was paper white outlined in black, with sketched-in features. I’d never seen anything like her before, and I hoped I never did again.
    Eloise scrambled to her feet and skewered me with a beady black glare.
    â€œHere’s what I like,” she announced. “Playing with turtles.” She stuck Skipperdee’s nose against mine, so I was looking cross-eyed into its little turtley face. It opened and shut its mouth unhappily and retreated into its shell.
    â€œHere’s what I hate. Being bored. Being bored is not allowed. A lettuce leaf makes a nice hat.”
    She spun around and collapsed at the edge of the stage with her black-and-white legs sprawling and tossed Skipperdee from hand to hand. I knew how he must feel.
    See, Carlyle projected triumphantly, Eloise likes them .
    â€œEloise is bored out of her mind,” shouted a bogeyman in the back. “And so am I. One of them is rude? Don’t make me laugh, birdman. That’s wuss stuff. My kid would eat her for breakfast!”
    â€œYeah,” shouted another. “You got nothing, Carlyle. You hear me? Nothing.”
    On the contrary, Carlyle objected. I have a great deal. I have the girl who broke up the Solstice Dance single-handedly, and I have her exact twin, who may not be an actual juvenile delinquent, but is, I think you’ll agree, undeniably naughty. And what do you have, pray tell? A boy who tied his sister to a tree and forgot about her. I rest my case.
    Her exact twin?
    I turned and looked, really looked, at Carlyle’s surprise.
    She was staring at the nearest chandelier as if it was the only thing in the room. Her body was roundish and so was her face. Her eyes were hazel and her mouth kind of tucked in at the corners. Her hair sprang in wild brown corkscrews around her head. It looked uncombed and unkempt, and it would look that way no matter what. I know. I have the same hair. And the same face and eyes and mouth. If she’d been barefoot and wearing a spidersilk dress instead of sandals, a long blue skirt, and a jacket embroidered all over with flowers, even I couldn’t have told us apart.
    Carlyle’s surprise wasn’t a mortal child at all; she was a fairy changeling. My fairy