Christmas Carol & the Shimmering Elf Read online

  Grandmother winced. Carol, dear, that wasn’t nice. But she was trying not to laugh. Ray rubbed his nose and Ivan-I-Am-Not stared at me wide-eyed. “How did you do that?”

  “Elves can make portals. I’m part elf. Actually, I could jump through a portal right now and there’d be nothing you could do about it.” Ray lurched forward as if he might try to stop me. “But I won’t,” I said. “I’m hoping you can help us.”

  “Why should we help you?”

  “Because I can bring back Santa.”

  The boys looked at each other and seemed to speak without saying anything. “OK, we’ll hear you out,” Ray finally said.

  “Thank you.” I trust them, I said to Grandmother. She nodded and dove through the portal. Both boys jumped back when the elf materialized in front of them. Ivan-I-Am-Not shrieked and fled to the other side of the station. “It’s OK,” I said. “This is my grandmother. She’s called the Ancient One.”

  Ray studied my grandmother, almost as if he were looking at a sculpture in a museum. He started to touch her face and Grandmother swatted his hand away.

  “Ouch!” Ray yelled, and I stifled a giggle.

  “What’s the idea of kidnapping my granddaughter, young man?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips.

  “I-I-I,” Ray stuttered.

  “I-I-I, what?” she snapped.

  “We did it to protect her.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “If they found you first, that would be it. They’d either eliminate you or make you one of them.”

  “Who?”

  “The White Stripes,” Ray said, exasperated. “The ones who rule. Don’t you know anything?”

  “I told you I’m not from here,” I said.

  “Carol, dear, I have an idea if our new friend is willing. Remember how I told you my story through The Sharing?” she asked. “Well, elves can also draw out others’ stories. That would be a good way to learn about this young man and his world. It takes two of us, though. You’ll have to help.”

  “But I don’t know how.”

  “It’s not hard, that is, if our friend isn’t too scared to do it.” She flashed a devilish grin at me.

  Ray puffed out his chest like a cartoon rooster. “I’m not scared.”

  “Good,” Grandmother said. “No time to waste.” She grabbed his hand, then mine, and before I knew what was happening, a jolt of what felt like electricity coursed through us. My brain filled with a jumble of images: of Grandmother as a young elf, then an old elf, then the boy as a baby, as a toddler, then a teenager, pieces of their lives zipping around my brain. I heard Grandmother’s voice. Focus on his memories, Carol. Pull them toward you. I concentrated on the images of Ray, trying to make them my own. My head ached, sort of like when you eat ice cream too fast. But I could feel it working. There was a flash of light and just as I’d watched the history of my grandmother a year earlier, I watched Ray’s life unfold. I witnessed what could only be called a tragedy.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Supreme Leader

  I see a little boy with bright red hair and he’s on a playground in the falling snow. A hundred kids scurry and scream around him. But not the boy. He’s five, in kindergarten I somehow know, and he’s lying on his back watching the snow fall, feeling it land on his face, the flakes tickling the tip of his nose and making him feel like he has to sneeze. He wants to make a snow angel, as his mom told him they would after the first big snow, but there’s not enough on the ground yet.

  They haven’t been here long, in this little town on Long Island called Central Islip, but he likes his school and he likes his teacher, the pretty lady with blonde hair. He catches his parents staring at his red hair sometimes and looking puzzled, even worried. But his mother calls it “a gift from God, His way of showing you’re unique.” A few children tease him, but the teacher puts a stop to that. Most of the kids are nice and he’s made lots of friends who sometimes come to his house after school to play.

  The boy opens his mouth, wondering what snowflakes taste like, or if they have any taste at all. He remembers they’re made of water, though he’s still not quite sure how frozen water winds up in the sky. He sticks out his tongue and watches the flakes fall. The biggest flake ever, round as the $1 Glover coin he got for his birthday, floats right for him. He moves his head a bit and sticks his tongue out as far as it can go, and when the flake lands on the tip, the world explodes in white. He feels electrified, like that day his mom took him to the children’s museum and he touched the metal ball that shoots sparks and makes your hair stand on end. The snowflake doesn’t hurt exactly, but he leaps off the ground and screams at the shock of it. All the children stop and look, the playground falling silent.

  He notices the stares first, then his hat lying in the snow, the teacher rushing over to find out if he’s OK. When she sees him, she gasps, and her rosy cheeks turn as white as the falling snow. She grabs his hat, yanks it back over his head, and roughly leads him by the hand to the principal’s office. She makes a call and his mother arrives a few minutes later, out of breath, not even wearing her gray uniform, just the sweatshirt and jogging pants she always has on around the house. She and the teacher whisper and steal glances his way, and his mom grabs him by the hand and they hurry out the door. “Am I in trouble, Mommy?”

  “Shhh,” she says. “Not now. We need to call your father.”

  Once they are home, his father shows up and his parents huddle in the kitchen while he plays half-heartedly in the living room, terrified by the cloud of fear that seems to have settled on his house. The next thing he knows, his parents are stuffing clothes in suitcases and his mom is telling him to grab his favorite toy. “Only one.” So he chooses his Glover’s Raiders Commando Doll. His mom winces but tosses it into a suitcase. His dad is already loading the other suitcases into the minivan, along with food and water and soap and shampoo. His mom hurries him out the door and straps him into the car seat. She glances at his hair, then the house, and tears spill down her cheeks. “What’s happening, Mommy? Are we going on a trip?”

  “Yes, Papi. To see friends.”

  “Who?”

  “You’ll see when we get there.” She pulls a hat onto his head, down around the ears, even though the minivan is toasty and warm. His father is behind the wheel, the engine running, the windshield wipers slapping away the driving snow. “Hurry, Lidia.”

  His mother jumps in and slams the door. She looks in the side mirror and lets out a yelp. The boy turns to see a black car pulling in behind them, blocking the driveway. “How did they find out?” his mother asks.

  “The teacher,” his father says.

  “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “She would to protect herself. Can you blame her?” His father looks hard at his mother. “If I tell you to go, you go.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “You have to.” He glances at his son and whispers, “They’ll take him.” The boy’s mother nods. A man gets out of the black car. He’s wearing a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. The boy has never seen a man in a suit before, except on TV. The man approaches the driver’s side.

  “I love you, OK?” the father says, touching the boy’s cheek.

  “OK, Daddy.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Good.” He turns to his wife. “Remember, run.” Then he gets out of the van. His mother slides into the driver’s seat and watches her husband talk with the man in black. The chat appears friendly at first. He hears the man ask, muffled, “Where you heading?”

  “See some family,” the father answers.

  “School day, isn’t it?” the man asks, trying to look in the window of the van.

  His father steps to block his view. “How do you know we have a child? Why is it any of your business where we go? Who are you?”

  The man stares at the father and says coldly, “You know who I am.”

  There’s a long, tense silence.
Then the father yells, “Go!” and he tackles the man around the waist. The two of them land in the front yard in the deepening snow. The boy’s mother throws the van into reverse and jams her foot on the gas. The van slams into the idling black car blocking the driveway, sliding across the snowy road toward the Robinsons’ house. The boy screams. His mother tries to take off. But the black car, tilted from the impact, is stuck on the back of the van. His mother slams the steering wheel. She’s crying, her panic infecting the boy. He screams.

  His father and the man wrestle in the front yard. Then his dad lies still, and the man gets up, brushing snow from his black suit. He turns to look at them and smiles. It is the most awful smile the boy has ever seen. The man walks toward them. His mother mutters, “No, no, no, no.” She presses her foot on the gas and the van lurches. But the black car holds them back.

  The man yells, “Get out of the vehicle!” He’s no longer smiling.

  “No,” his mother screams. “You can’t have him.”

  “We won’t hurt him. He’s a White Stripe. He’s important.”

  The boy’s panic grows and grows. His mother screams again. “Never!” And her fury, like her panic, washes over the boy. He screams again with all his might. He feels as if he might explode. And then he does. Or it seems that way. The doors of the van blow open. The back hatch flies up. The black car skids across the street. The man, standing next to the van, is struck by the passenger door and is launched backward into the yard. He lands with a dull thud and hits his head on the snowy, frozen ground. He lies still. His mother flies forward but the force of the explosion pops the air bag, saving her from bouncing her face off the steering wheel. Her nose is bleeding, she appears woozy, but she shakes her head, trying to regain her senses. The man on the ground stirs. The boy’s mom looks back at her son with eyes wide. She jams her foot on the gas. The man pulls himself to his feet and watches them vanish. They never return to their home in Central Islip. The boy never sees his school or his friends or the pretty blonde teacher again. And the vision of his father, lying motionless in the deepening snow, is the last one he ever has of him.

  For the longest time, the boy’s mom shields him from whatever danger they face, through their years on the run, bouncing from friend to friend. She works as a hairdresser wherever she can, home-schooling him as best she’s able.

  “Why can’t I go to a real school?” he asks, and she always dodges the question with an “I’ll tell you when you’re old enough.” He wonders when that day will come, but he begins to figure things out for himself. His mom won’t let him go online unless she’s around and then mostly for the school lessons she’s pieced together from educational sites. She’s smart, he knows that, but she went no further than high school and a couple of years in beauty school. “We’ll study together,” she says. “There are a million ways to learn.”

  He doesn’t argue, and he loves to read and he aces the tests she devises. But what he truly wants to learn is why they live the way they do, why he has to spend most of his time in whatever tiny apartment they call home, escaping only to go to a park for early-morning exercise, or to eat at a restaurant on a special occasion. And he wonders why his mom dyes his hair black once a month, covering up the red hair and the white stripe.

  He wants to search those very words online—“red hair/white stripe”—if he could ever get time alone with the computer and figure out her password. Shortly after he turns eleven, he finally decides the time has come. She’s at her hairdressing job, not due home for two hours, so he pulls the laptop from the back of the closet where she thinks it’s safely hidden. He feels as though he might burst with the excitement of rebellion. He flips the computer on, and after a bunch of tries with password combinations, it occurs to him: his birthday and hers. On the fourth attempt, he is in.

  When the screen lights up with the Internet home page, he feels a thrill. And he feels guilt. This is the first time he has ever defied his mother on such a scale. Sure, he talks back once in a while or pouts when he doesn’t get his way. But this is different. This is something she’s made him promise to never do.

  “I know you have questions, mi’jo,” his mother says. “And I’ll answer them when the time is right.”

  “When will that be?” he asks. “I’m big now. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Soon,” she promises.

  But soon isn’t soon enough. He is sick of waiting, sick of feeling like the rest of the world is in on something he isn’t. He clicks on the glover.com search engine, recognizing the face of the world’s Supreme Leader at the top of the home page. He knows a little about him from the occasional newspaper he sneaks a peek at and a newscast or radio report he overhears, but the Supreme Leader is another subject that’s off-limits with his mother. “I do not want that name uttered in this house.”

  “Why?”

  “When you’re older, Ray.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Life’s not fair,” his mother says. “Listen to me, Ray. If anyone ever comes for us, just run. Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself.”

  “I won’t leave you, Mommy.”

  “Oh, mi’jo, you have to,” she says. “You’re special, don’t you know that? And bad people in this world covet special things. I would die if they got you.”

  “But who, Mommy?”

  “Never mind that. It’s for your own protection. I’ll explain some day.”

  But she never has. He suspects it has something to do with the Supreme Leader, and now that he has the password, he’ll research what he can find on him. But later. For the moment, he has more pressing matters. He types in his search terms. Hunting and pecking the keys. His mom can homeschool him, but she sure can’t teach him to type. “Red hair/white stripe,” he enters and hits return.

  What he finds makes the hairs on his arms stand on end. They call it “The Mark,” his white stripe, and it means he is indeed special, but not for the reasons his mother has given him. Nothing to do with showing his uniqueness, though apparently, he is one of only a few with The Mark, including the one who rules them all.

  He is surprised to see the image of the Supreme Leader pop up. What does he have to do with red hair with a white stripe? He clicks on a button that says, “The Supreme Leader welcomes you,” and is taken to another surprising image, a photograph of the Supreme Leader at the head of a large oval table surrounded by men and women, all of whom have red hair with a white stripe. A narrator’s voice comes through the speaker of his mother’s computer, so loudly that it startles him.

  “The White Stripe Council holds an exalted place in society, relied upon by our Supreme Leader to provide wisdom in dealing with this sometimes troubled world. No one knows where The Mark comes from, but its bearer offers abilities that only the Supreme Leader has been able to harness for the greater good. So if you have The Mark, do not fear. It is a great gift. Join us. Work by our side on the White Stripe Council. And if you know someone who has The Mark, give him the good news that he is special. And if he does not understand, contact us immediately and we will do all we can to bring this special person into the fold. The Supreme Leader wants you. The Supreme Leader needs you. The Supreme Leader loves you.”

  The boy sits back with a thud. His mind churns. So, he is special? It’s amazing to contemplate the idea that the Supreme Leader, the man who rules the entire world, could need his help. Probably only when he is older, naturally, but still. He suddenly feels important, instead of like a freak to be hidden away.

  Has his mother heard of the White Stripe Council? What does she know that he doesn’t? And how will he even ask her? To start raising questions will give away the fact that he’s defied her. He studies the button at the bottom of the page that reads, “If you know someone with The Mark, click to learn more.” He thinks about it, takes a deep breath, and clicks.

  Up comes a screen with another picture of the Supreme Leader, this time smiling, his arms open as if to welcome the boy. But before h
e can explore further, his computer dings. A white pop-up box with red borders appears. He watches as letter after letter materializes inside the box, as if someone is typing at that very moment.

  THEY ARE COMING.

  His stomach drops. He looks around. Maybe his mother has set this up to scare him. But no, she isn’t capable of something like that. The cursor under the message flashes and he realizes he can type a response.

  “Who?” he asks.

  GO TO PARK AT BLOCK’S END. 15 MINUTES. TOPS.

  “Who are you?” he types.

  NO TIME. ARE FRIENDS. WE’VE BEEN WATCHING. GO NOW OR DEARLY PAY.

  The box vanishes, and he sits alone in the tiny apartment, thinking, wondering if someone is playing a practical joke on him. But what if the mysterious message is right? Something about the web page nags at him, especially the part where it urges people to tell the government if they know someone with The Mark. That sounds an awful lot like turning someone in. What if the nosy old lady down the hall spotted his red and white hair and decided to let the government know? How would he like that? He looks at his watch. Five minutes have passed. He’s running out of time. He has ten minutes. Tops.

  He closes the page and flips off the computer, stashing it back in the closet. He puts on his uniform. He grabs his key and the hat his mother makes him wear on the rare occasions she allows him to leave the apartment. “Just in case,” she says, covering his close-cropped dyed hair. He grabs a bottle of water—it is August in New York, the pavement smoldering—and peeks out the door of the apartment, making sure the nosy old lady isn’t watching. The last thing he needs is her tattling to his mother. He isn’t supposed to go out by himself, though sometimes he sneaks to the corner store for a pack of gum.

  He edges down the hall to the top of the stairs. They live on the fourth floor, but he avoids the rickety elevator because who knows who might be standing there when the doors open. THEY might be waiting. Down the stairs he goes, two at a time. He pauses in the lobby, which is empty midafternoon, most of the building’s residents at work or in their apartments with their ACs cranked up. He continues to the entrance where he pauses again to assess the street. Washington Heights is a beehive of activity, filled with mostly Dominicans and other Latinos, along with a few young white people seeking affordable rents. His mother is Dominican so when she decided to leave Long Island to run from whatever they were running from, Washington Heights seemed as good a place as any. “It’s easy to get lost in a city of eight million,” she says. “We’d stick out like a sore brown thumb in the country.” Not knowing why they were running in the first place, he never argued. And he likes the city and its crazy energy, the pulsing merengue and bachata in the neighboring apartments, the bodegas where you can buy empanadas, the old Dominican ladies wheeling their carts filled with groceries—always with plantains and avocados and yucca.